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China FAQ, Part 2

Good Is
By Good IsApr 04, 2008
Good Is
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Seven cities bigger than New York (that you haven't heard of), Chinese phrases, and more.
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At the annual European Gull Scream Championship, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

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At Belgium's annual seagull screeching competition, the birds are the squawk of the town

Beachgoers know the seagull as either feathered friend or foe, swooping in for a French fry or potato chip, an old piece of bread. But they’re actually quite smart, and they’re just trying to live. In an effort to teach people more about the beach-loving birds and maybe even inspire greater affection, Claude Willaert, who works in Belgian coastal education and comedy, created the European Gull Screeching Championship in 2020. Held in De Panne, a Belgian beach town, the competition started as a local event, but has since expanded to include 70 people from 14 different countries. It recently celebrated its fifth anniversary.

Seagulls can be a polarizing group, but scientists say they shouldn’t bear so much of our ire. "They're very charismatic creatures and definitely get a bad rap for sometimes aggressive behaviour in the breeding season," scientist Emma Caulfield told the BBC in 2024. "But they are part of our natural world and they're just taking advantage of the hand that's been dealt them." The hand in question is having to fend for themselves when their environments keep shrinking as humans occupy more and more space in their natural habitats. What we see as sneaky snack stealing is actually a mode of survival. As Gull Screeching Championship juror and Flanders Marine Institute representative Jen Seys told the CBC, “their sounds, their calls and their acrobatic behaviour, it's just part of the sea coast. So you need to balance that. We need some more sympathy for the seagulls." So for Willaert, the competition became a way to teach people to embrace the seagull in a new way, to “make sea gulls sexy again,” as he told the Times.

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Chester, a Siamese cat like the one pictured above, became the author of several respected physics papers.

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How a Siamese cat became a lauded physicist and author of  scientific papers.

It was 1975 and Michigan State University professor and physicist Jack Hetherington finished a scientific paper only to have a colleague realize he had used the “royal we” throughout. Hoping to submit the work to a scientific journal, he knew the paper would get rejected if he kept it like this. Revising would not have been as easy as pressing a few buttons, like it would be today–if he wanted to fix it, he’d instead have to go back and rewrite the entire paper. Instead, however, he made a decision that also created one of the most beloved scientists of the last 50 years. He stated that the co-author of his paper was one F.D.C. Willard, a pseudonym he created for his Siamese cat, Chester.

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Photo credit: Canva

City tries a return-and-reuse cup policy for fast food chains. The results were overwhelming.

One of the major environmental issues throughout the world is the ever-growing landfills, but the city of Petaluma in California are poised to do their part. As a means to cut down on waste, officials partnered with local restaurants and fast food chains to implement a new system in 2024. Instead of using disposable drink cups, the city would provide reusable beverage cups to the businesses to give to the customers and the customers would put their used cups in special bins that are spread throughout the city. The cups would be collected from the bins, washed, and given back to the businesses again.

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The blackout in Madrid, April 2025.

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Social media flooded with photos of people thriving during massive power blackout in Spain

“I Survived the Great Spanish Blackout of 2025: AMA.”

What a text to wake up to on a Monday morning at 7:30, East Coast time, from my friend Shannon to our group chat. Shannon had been dog sitting in Andalusia with her boyfriend and his mother. By then it would have been 1:30 p.m. where she was in Spain. As the blackout happened, Shannon and her party were in an underground hammam in Granada, a Turkish bath about two hours from the house. “All the emergency lights came on and the spa music stopped. We still got our massages,” she wrote. “We thought it was just the spa that lost power because of course we didn’t have phones.” Once they realized it wasn’t only the spa, she was quite scared, she said, but the feeling turned to disorientation as she understood what was happening.

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John Stamos improvised his own drum part to a famous nu-metal song.

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You most likely know John Stamos from the absurdly cheesy ABC sitcom Full House as Uncle Jesse: the Elvis-obsessed, leather-jacket-wearing rocker who serves as a personality foil to Bob Saget’s strait-laced Danny Tanner. What you might not know is that Stamos is a musician in real life, most famously drumming with The Beach Boys at numerous shows since 1985. (He also joined that band to record a new version of their 1970 song "Forever" for the 1992 LP Summer in Paradise.) He recently stretched out even further for a video on the drum-centric YouTube channel Drumeo, presenting a colorful take on Papa Roach’s 2000 nu-metal staple "Last Resort."

The viral clip is part of a series where drummers link up with the Drumeo team, find songs they've never heard before, listen back to them with the drums removed, and create their own parts in real time. They’re given the freedom to approach the material however they want—some choose to carefully craft beats through repetition and writing out charts, while others improvise with little to no preparation. Stamos essentially chooses the latter route.

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People are hilariously putting Ford emblems on their Tesla Cybertrucks

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The case of Tesla is an interesting one. While some might immediately think of Elon Musk when the brand is mentioned, it was actually founded in 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. According to an article from The Street, the idea was to "develop and produce an entirely electric car after observing the favorable reaction test markets had to General Motors' (GM) previous electric car experiment, the EV1."

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Scientists previously discovered a specific type of water mass called “Equatorial waters” in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Given the similarities in the Atlantic Ocean, they wondered if a similar water mass might exist there. In the fall of 2023, they discovered a large water blob in the Atlantic, which they named “Atlantic Equatorial Water.” Their detailed study was published in Geophysical Research Letters in a paper titled “Is There an Equatorial Water Mass in the Atlantic Ocean?”

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