Quirky China: Father dislocates own jaw while yelling at daughter, app that tracks cat’s feelings and postcards to space
- A man became so frustrated with his daughter’s inability to learn during home tutoring session that he ended up dislocating his own jaw
- A developer from Shenzhen has built an app that can tell him how his cat is feeling while he is away from home
A man in central China became so angry while tutoring his daughter that his jaw became dislocated, a video on social media has revealed.
In the video taken by the man’s wife, he is seen wearing pyjamas with bandages wrapped around his head as he walked home from the hospital on Tuesday in Yueyang, Hunan province, after medical treatment. His wife could be heard laughing throughout the video.
The woman said her husband suddenly couldn’t close his mouth after becoming too emotional while trying to teach his daughter to recognise different banknotes, but the girl could not remember which notes were which.
“On the way to the hospital, he said it was so painful that he hoped to see the doctor as soon as possible,” the woman, whose name was not released, told news website The Paper. “But on the way home, he complained about the high medical cost, and said: ‘I can do many other things with this 150 yuan (US$23).’”
The story quickly became one of the most-searched news items online in China.
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“I totally understand his anger. Tutoring kids’ homework really hurts our health,” wrote one person on Baidu.
“My kid’s study often drives me mad. Once I felt my blood pressure rise dramatically and my face turned numb. At that moment I thought I had palsy,” a second person wrote.
‘Miaow’: Chinese programmer develops an app to translate his cat’s emotions
A Chinese computer developer has created an app that can recognise the emotional state of his pet cat, reported the Global Times.
Chinese social media has been abuzz with discussion about the app this month after the developer, surnamed Li, from Shenzhen in southern China posted a video about his creation online.
He said he created the app to observe his cat’s movements and emotional state while he was away from home.
“I am an ailurophile, and often miss my kitty at home while working at the office,” he said in the video posted on Weibo.
Li said he built the app using algorithms that tracked the cat’s movements at different times and the sounds it made such as miaowing.
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Many online were delighted with the idea of being able to track a pet’s emotional state.
“How sweet to know how your cat is feeling, when it is happy or wants something, but can’t always tell you,” said one commenter on Weibo.
But some were sceptical of the usefulness of the app as it was built around just one cat’s personality.
“How is this to be of use elsewhere if it is only his cat on which the app is built?” asked another Weibo user.
Animal apps have become increasingly popular in recent years.
Earlier this year Canadian company Sylvester.ai built and released an app called Tably that uses a smartphone’s camera to detect if a cat is in pain.
By measuring whisker movement, ear and head position and the wideness of the cat’s eyes the app can measure if the cat is distressed or in physical pain, its creators claimed.
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The “feline grimace scale” is a term for a system of measurement of a cat’s feelings that is effective according to a 2019 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Report.
China Post offers a service to send postcards to space
Imagine staring up at the heavens and knowing that the words you wrote on a postcard were orbiting overhead and, for a lucky few, could be read aloud by an astronaut working at the Chinese space station.
For 19 yuan (US$2.95), that dream can become a reality.
The project, launched in June by China Post and CASCI, lets regular people visit any post office in China, purchase space-themed cards and send them to the “space post office” aboard the Tiangong space station.
The project manager told The Paper that the goal was to help regular people feel connected with space and promote enthusiasm for space travel.
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The cards themselves do not go to space but rather are scanned into a database, and a chip containing the letters will be sent to the space station. A lucky few messages will be printed out, displayed on a space station broadcast, and read aloud by one of the astronauts.
All of the senders receive an electronic certificate that acknowledges their message had been delivered to space.
Interested people have to be patient, though, as the current batch of postcards are sold out.
The “space post office” was founded in 2011 and Yang Liwei, China’s first person to go to space, was the honorary chair.
The space postcards are not the first space-themed gimmick aimed at generating attention for the Chinese space programme.
The country’s infamous “space roses” sell out quickly whenever they go on sale. The roses are descendants of seeds that were sent to space in 2002.
