Do you want to get fit, but worry about being vulnerable to close-quarters melee attack during your exercises? Then sword yoga is for you! The New York Post reports that performing yoga routines while holding swords is becoming a popular activity in some studios in The City. It's a synthesis of vinyasa yoga, tai chi, and kung fu.

Sabrina Stoberg founded WeaponUp, a sword yoga fitness firm. Her background in Shaolin kung fu provided her with a foundation for this vigorous yoga practice that demands strength, balance, and flexibility. It also encourages women who participate to feel strong and develop what Stoberg calls "main character energy."

-via Jarvis Best | Photo: Sabrina Stoberg

In 1892, Arthur Hotchkiss patented what he called the "elevated railway." Hotchkiss and other innovators imaged rail travel for individuals by pedal-powered machines that rolled over specially-built rail networks.

My Modern Met introduces us to Amanda Meyer, an art student in Madrid who works with fashion, fabrics, paint, and tattoos. She spent 40 hours and 100 meters of thread to compose this mini dress that is literally made of leaves. The preservation process leaves the leaves looking like leather and somewhat sturdier than untreated leaves. Although the dress is delicate, it is wearable.

"Datalore" is the thirteen the episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this episode, we learn more about Data's origins and are introduced to his brother (of sorts)--the villainous Lore who lacked his successor's moral character.

Dallas-based artist artist Heather Lynn creates in a variety of media, often drawing inspiration from the Symbolist and Art Nouveau movements, as well as images from high fantasy.

In this tattoo, she shows Data and Lore as they appeared in one particular moment of the episode, attending to the details of Lore's gesture and Data's first season uniform. Lynn's organization of the image is drawn from Art Nouveau playing cards.

We all want to save money on food, not just when prices spike above our budget, but always. We watch sale pries and clip coupons. But we should learn basic strategies for buying everything. Lauren Torres calls them "12 Cosmic Truths." They range from the basic awareness of reading labels and spotting a bargain to philosophical guides to shopping, cooking, and eating. 

One that stood out to me is #6: "Taste cheap food often." You may have hated the generic or store brands that you ate when you were a kid, and considered it a luxury to get the famous brand. However, over many years, the big brands tend to take advantage of scale and reduce the quality of their ingredients or the amount of food you get. At the same time, off-brands have been working hard to earn your purchase. Check out the cheaper brands you rejected long ago, and you may be surprised at how tasty they've become.

Some of these "cosmic truths" are things you've heard before, but this list goes deeper into explaining the mechanisms behind them. Read all about the philosophy and process of grocery shopping at Bitches Get Riches. -via Metafilter 

The Pan-American Highway is a road that goes from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in the Arctic Circle, to Ushuaia, Argentina, known as the most southern city in the world. It was going to be a railroad, but then cars were invented and that made construction easier. The United States has the most miles of the highway, but we had to cheat a bit to actually claim that. Yet a hundred years after the project was initiated, the highway is still not complete. The real problem is the Darién Gap, in southern Panama and western Colombia. So the highway gap is right where the two American continents meet.  

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones are the Map Men (previously at Neatorama). They make jokes aplenty while explaining how the Pan-American highway was conceived and what stopped its completion. There's a sponsor message from 4:43 to 6:10, and everything after 11:06 is promotional. -via Damn Interesting 

One of the funnier quirks of Star Trek is that all alien sentient life forms look just like humans, just with funny bumps on their faces or pointy ears. Better special effects gave us different aliens, but most still ended up with a head, eyes, mouths, and limbs. The new movie Project Hail Mary explores a different kind of alien life- things that don't resemble anything we've ever encountered before. And that's what we should really be looking for. 

What if life on other planets isn't dependent on liquid water? What of the building blocks of life elsewhere were based on, say, silicon instead of carbon? The search for life elsewhere has been based on detecting signals that indicate planets are like earth, but that might not be necessary. The search for signals of an advanced technology may be looking for the wrong patterns, or may be a completely useless framework. Alien life may be different in more ways than we can even imagine, and a lot of that depends on how you define "life." The Conversation poses five ways we may have been thinking about alien life all wrong, with links to further information on each idea. 

What do you do with a blind husky? In Dani's case, she was sent for euthanasia when she was just a puppy, possibly by a breeder who couldn't sell her. Dani was born without eyes. She was rescued from her fate by an organization that takes in special needs dogs, and then was adopted. Her new family had plenty of pets, but still had the time and patience that Dani needed. 

Huskies are bred for the outdoors, and even a blind dog wants to run and play. Dani gets that chance with a long lead that keeps her in sight but still lets her go full speed ahead in a safe area. She also loves to play ball, and is used to losing it every now and then. She has no trouble getting around in familiar places, and not much trouble in unfamiliar places. That's a good dog. See more of Dani and her occasionally pink tail at Instagram. 

The Kunlun Mountains form the northern boundary of Tibet. If you stand on summit of them and look northwest, you should be able to see Pik Dankova, the tallest mountain in the Tian Shan range of Kyrgyzstan 329 miles away--provided that the weather is clear.

This is the farthest line of sight on the planet Earth.

Google Maps Mania directs our attention to All the Views, a fascinating interactive tool that allows you to calculate the farthest line of sight from any location on Earth.

It's an interactive tool that is fun to explore. I learned that the farthest line of sight in Texas is Guadalupe Peak which has a line of sight of 140 miles to the southeast.

-via Nag on the Lake

In December of 2007, a newspaper photographer in Lewiston, Idaho, saw a sign painter adding a Christmas message to a storefront window. It was a nice seasonal scene, so he took a picture for the Lewiston Tribune. Other journalists that day reported on a wallet theft that was caught on a security camera. A still image showing the perpetrator ended up on front page, just below the sign painter. The two men looked alike, and they were wearing the same colorful jacket. And the sign painter's name was in the upper caption. 

Who noticed the similarities in the two front page pictures? Pretty much everyone. It didn't actually fly over the heads of the newspaper copy editors, either, but it went to print before they could update the story. See the paper and read the story of the guy who made the front page twice at Now I Know. -via kottke, where you'll see a larger, readable image. 

(Unrelated image credit: Michael Slaten) 

When plastics were developed, they were considered life-changing. A material that is cheap, strong, lightweight, furable, and can be shaped in any way? Sure, let's go for that! But as terrifyingly long lasting as plastic is, it does degrade. That's why bottled water has an expiration date- because the plastic in the bottle wears out. As it degrades, plastic sheds microscopic pieces that get into our environment, our food, and our bodies. And out bodies haven't yet developed an efficient way to get rid of it. 

So what does accumulating plastic in our bodies do to us? We don't know much about it yet, but we're seeing evidence that it can lead to obesity and infertility, two of the major health trends in the modern world. We can't do a lot about the microplastics we already have in our bodies, but there are a few things we can do the lessen the amount we ingest. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Dr. William P. Key was a formerly-enslaved self-taught veterinarian in Tennessee who made his living by selling his patent medicine Keystone Liniment. He was particularly talented with horses and always advocated for a gentle touch and humane treatment of animals. In 1889, one of his mares gave birth to a foal that was a “miserable looking specimen.” Key took the foal into his home and named him Jim Key. As Jim grew into a magnificent adult, Key taught him a vast repertoire of tricks.

"Beautiful Jim Key" was exhibited across the country for years, where he wrote his name, properly exchanged money, and spelled out audience member's names by selecting letters from a rack. He could also solve math equations by picking numbers. Jim was one of the biggest draws at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. All that time, Dr. Key used Jim to spread the message of kindness to animals and how training was most effective when using gentleness and patience. Read about the show biz career of Beautiful Jim Key. -via Strange Company 

CC is a wobbly cat, meaning she has cerebellar hypoplasia. But you don't even notice that when you see her- what you notice is that she's a heckin' chonker. CC weighed 23 pounds when she came into the care of The Big House Cats in Ontario, a rescue shelter for very overweight cats. CC was so fat she couldn't climb into her litter box, and she could barely take a few steps before she had to sit down.

Restricted food and lots of love got her started. Then they added exercise, and found that CC really wanted to play, but she was just too big to do it. As she lost weight, she became more playful. So far, she's lost six pounds! At around five minutes, you get to see before and after pictures that show how far she has come. Her goal is to lose five more pounds. See more of the Big House Cats at Instagram

The adage that counting sheep will help you sleep has given us a lot of jokes, but not a lot of sleep. The idea is very old. In the book Disciplina Clericalis, a collection of fables from the early 12th century, a king summons his storyteller, who is sleepy and doesn't want to tell stories. He tells a tale of a shepherd with 2,000 sheep, and to get them home they must cross a river. The only available boat will only hold two sheep, so they must make 1,000 trips. The first two sheep were loaded into the boat when the storyteller fell asleep. The king woke him, but the storyteller insisted that each sheep must be taken across the river. I'm not sure where the story goes after that; the only copy of the book I could find was a 1519 translation that didn't have that particular story. 

The gist of it is that this story hints that falling asleep due to counting sheep was already an established concept understood by many before the story was written. Cervantes later made it funnier in Don Quixote. But does counting sheep in your mind actually help you fall asleep? The research is mixed, but you can see an overview of it at Purple Motes. -via Boing Boing 

(Image credit: amenclinicsphotos ac via Wikimedia Commons) 

There are people in this world who can afford to spend millions of dollars on a wedding. That's the perfect way to show the world how filthy rich you are, because there's going to be a lot of pictures testifying to how much you spent on a one-day party. And what good is money if you can't conspicuously consume it? Ryan George was obviously inspired to make this video by Jeff Bezos' and Lauren Sánchez' wedding last year, which reportedly cost $50 million. That wedding made all the papers for its outrageous flaunting of wealth, while Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie Scott quietly spends her days writing large checks to charities. 

But that's not the only over-the-top wedding designed to flaunt a family's wealth highlighted in this video. Some are more expensive than others, and some are just weird. He also takes a special look at ridiculous wedding cakes, which probably won't even make you hungry.