The No. 1 Mistake People Make With Canned Vegetables

Canned vegetables are inexpensive, convenient, and always ready if the refrigerator is bare. Most people keep a couple of varieties in their pantry for nights when dinner needs a vegetable and they don’t have fresh produce on hand. Because the vegetables are already cooked, getting them onto the table can be as simple as opening a can. The biggest mistake people make is not rinsing the vegetables from the can. A good rinse can help wash away the sodium that canned vegetables are known for, as well as washing away some of that distinctive metallic or tinny taste. For reduced-salt vegetables, you can still lower the sodium by rinsing, but the benefit may be smaller. Choosing a no-salt-added variety is a more reliable way to start with less sodium than simply rinsing a regular can. Of course, not every canned vegetable needs a rinse. You’ll want to keep the liquid when it’s an intended part of the food or recipe, like canned tomatoes and creamed corn, or when it’s meant to be part of the flavor, like with pickled vegetables. Simply put, if it’s packed in salty liquid and you don’t need or want that liquid, drain and rinse the vegetables.

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Cruise Ships Have Secret Jails Most Passengers Never See

Cruise ships are basically floating cities, and like cities, they’re home to restaurants, bars, medical facilities, entertainment venues, and even jails. Ship jails — called brigs — are typically hidden away on a lower level deck, so most passengers never see them. Unlike land-based prisons, brigs are small, basic holding rooms with minimal amenities, reinforced doors, and no windows. Not following the rules will land passengers there. When a ship is in the middle of the ocean, there are safety rules that passengers must adhere to. Minor rowdiness usually results in a warning, but physical violence, assault, theft, severe harassment, or major safety violations will land you in the brig. When it comes to following the rules, the captain is the ultimate authority. Passengers sent to the brig will be removed from the ship at the next port of call and handed over to local police or federal authorities such as the FBI, depending on the jurisdiction and offense. 

 

 

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What Kind of Animal is Gonzo?

In the 1981 film The Great Muppet Caper, the Muppets get shipped across the Atlantic in crates stenciled with the species inside. Kermit’s says FROG, Fozzie’s says BEAR, and Gonzo’s says WHATEVER. If you’re unfamiliar, Gonzo is the blue one with the long drooping nose. He’s covered in fuzz, has a feathery tuft on his head, three fingers on each hand, and a girlfriend named Camilla, who is a chicken — obviously. So what kind of animal is Gonzo? Nobody knows. Muppet writers have dodged that question for 50 years, so three biologists were asked to weigh in. Their answer is far weirder than “some kind of funny-looking bird.” Look closely enough at the anatomy and Gonzo stops being a bird at all. He ends up on a branch that split off tens of millions of years before the first modern feather, back to the dinosaurs, and none of the scientists could match his distinct nose to anything alive or extinct. When Gonzo began on The Muppets in 1970, the writers didn’t give him a species. What they gave him instead was a personality, built on the idea that he would do appalling things — and THAT he did. He caught cannonballs, ate tires, and recited poetry while things exploded around him. The 1999 film Muppets from Space has a scene set aboard Noah’s ark. While Noah records all the animal pairs aboard his ship, he asks Gonzo, “What are you, anyway?” Gonzo replies, “Oh, uh… Good question. Now, technically speaking, uh, let’s say, put me down as a ‘whatever.’” All that said, 50 years on, the answer to "What is Gonzo really?" is still "whatever."

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The World’s Ugliest Hawaiian Shirt Was Designed to Make You Invisible to AI Surveillance Cameras

The aptly named Digital Camouflage shirt may look like a hideous Hawaiian shirt, but its seemingly abstract pattern was created with a very specific purpose in mind – to prevent AI-powered CCTV cameras from recognizing the wearer as a person. AI systems are made of multiple layers and never learned what a human is – they learned what humans statistically look like in millions of training images. A person for the machine is just a bundle of visual statistics, and that’s exactly its weakness. The Digital Camouflage shirt was carefully designed to confuse AI systems, making it very hard for them to recognize the wearer as a human being. Ironically, the pattern was created using AI, through a process known as an “adversarial loop.” The machine’s blind spots aren’t intuitive to humans; you can't design against machine perception by eye, only the machine can tell you what it fails to see. The same class of AI that watches the square also taught the shirt how to hide. Although the colorful, almost hypnotic, pattern of the Digital Camouflage shirt makes the wearer stand out like a sore thumb to other humans, to the AI systems it registers as nothing at all, least of all a person. 

 

 

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