Greetings, dear readers!
2018 marked the 10th anniversary of World Culture Pictorial online journal, and we rang in 2019 with a site relaunch with more mobile-friendly and other features for your viewing enjoyment.
The archives from 2008 to 2018 can be found at the original site http://www.worldculturepictorial.com/blog/archive whereas all new entries will be posted
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Indian wildlife officials are mourning the death of a pregnant wild elephant in Kerala, India, who reportedly died after being fed a firecracker-filled pineapple by an unknown assailant.
“Her jaw was broken and she was unable to eat after she chewed the pineapple and it exploded in her mouth,” says chief wildlife warden Surendra Kumar. The outraged official tells
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George R. R. Martin, Jodi Picoult and other famous writers join Authors Guild in class action lawsuit against OpenAI
New York (CNN) — A group of famous fiction writers joined the Authors Guild in filing a class action suit against OpenAI on Wednesday, alleging the company’s technology is illegally using their copyrighted work.
The complaint claims that OpenAI, the company behind
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Stabbed Napa County homeowner pulls out knife, stabs assailant, sheriff says
When a 61-year-old man was stabbed in the back on his Napa County property Saturday morning, he pulled the knife out of his back and stabbed the 33-year-old assailant, officials said. Both the homeowner and attacker are recovering from non-life-threatening stab wounds.
The
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The number of beds available to tourists on Venice’s main island has surpassed the number of year-round residents for the first time, as a Unesco decision on the city’s future on the world heritage site list looms. There are now 49,693 tourist beds across hotels and rented holiday homes, compared with 49,304 inhabitants.
Once
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At sea, objects in the distance may appear to be floating above the horizon. A Fata Morgana is a complex, rapidly changing form of a superior mirage, an optical phenomenon that is created when light bends as it passes through a layer of air that is warmer than the layer below it, according to SKYbrary. Made up of several inverted and upright images stacked on top of each other, Fata Morganas appear as
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San Francisco’s first tech boom wasn’t about silicon, but steel. Steel cable that triggered a revolution in urban transportation. Scotsman Andrew S. Hallidie, an experienced maker of wire rope (steel cable), employed his expertise to invent the cable car on Clay Street in San Francisco, with the first run on August 2, 1873. Hallidie said he wanted to surmount hills in the City too steep for horse-drawn streetcars.
Not only
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In a decision steeped in controversy, Japan started releasing radioactive water from its Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday.
In South Korea, protests and panic sales of sea salt have continued for months, while Hong Kong and Macau have issued their own bans on Japanese seafood from ten regions. China and
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The Self-Driving Cars Wearing a Cone of Shame
There’s a brilliant campaign to stop San Francisco’s autonomous vehicles in their tracks. Self-driving cars have met their match in the form of the humble traffic cone: a viral video of disabling autonomous Cruise and Waymo vehicles by placing bright orange traffic cones on their hoods.
The cones
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Al Young, joint chief creative officer, St Luke’s “…getting rid of the perfect little bird icon, which is instantly recognizable and charismatic, in favor of X is not going to be a successful solution for Twitter, in my opinion. X is ubiquitous and it is shorthand for danger. No one wants to put Xs in their search bars unless they are actively looking
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For over a decade, the Twitter bird logo has been inseparable from the social media platform. But with the service’s X rebrand, Musk is saying goodbye to ‘all the birds.’
Early Monday morning, Twitter began replacing its blue bird logo with a fan-made “𝕏” logo. The same X also appears on Twitter’s homepage, as a profile picture for its official @twitter
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Tony Bennett, legendary singer and master of the American songbook, dies at 96 “I’ve never worked a day in my life,” Tony Bennett told USA TODAY in 2011, “because I love what I do.” The great singer cited that bit of Confucian wisdom often. In a career spanning more than six decades, Bennett conveyed that joy and
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An Australian sailor who survived two months in the Pacific Ocean by eating raw fish and drinking rainwater is “stable and very well”, a doctor says. Sydney resident Tim Shaddock, 51, and his dog Bella left Mexico for French Polynesia in April, but their boat was damaged by a storm several weeks later.
Mr Shaddock embarked on his more than 6,000km-long (3,728-mile) voyage from Mexico’s city
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A star is born: On its one-year anniversary, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope published an image capturing the formation of 50 young stars in vivid detail, including some that indicate the development of future planetary systems.
The new Webb image features the closest star-forming region to us, at roughly
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In a Monday tweet, Elon Musk wrote “humankind,” followed by the 1,800-year-old classical Chinese poem The Quatrain of Seven Steps.
Here is the poem translated into English by Moss Roberts:
Beans a simmer on a beanstalk flame
From inside the pot expressed their ire:
“Alive we sprouted on a single root—
What’s your rush to cook us on the fire?”
The verses were
