Stormtroopers need to do their Christmas shopping, too! Or do they? Whatever they’re doing, a couple of Stormtroopers appear to have fun checking out the merchandise in a department store.
Everything is fun and techno and carefree until the boss shows up! -via Tastefully Offensive
Jeff Wysaski created a mockup Black Friday circular and posted it at some poor Target store. The items offered are obviously fake if you take a minute to think about them: a tent with an angry possum in it? A free falcon with a $75 order? You have to look closely to catch all the jokes.
But then there are these “exclusive Star Wars toys.” Who wouldn’t want a C-3P Fro? Or an Episode VII hot dog blaster? Personally, I want the Luke Skymopper. See several more pages of these at Obvious Plant.
Ask Americans what they’re eating on Thanksgiving, and the overwhelming majority (82% here) will say turkey, usually with dressing and gravy. Sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie are pretty universal, too. But there are regional differences in what people select to put on the table, especially in side dishes. FiveThirtyEight held an online poll, crunched the numbers, and came up with a map showing which side dish is disproportionally popular in various regions of the U.S. These aren’t the only dishes that show regional variance.
Going deeper, the Southeast is the definitive home of canned cranberry sauce; respondents from the region are 50 percent more likely to pick that over the homemade variety. The Middle Atlantic states disproportionately have cauliflower as a side — 17 percent in the region versus 9 percent nationwide — while Texas and central Southern states see cornbread as far more necessary than the rest of the country, with 40 percent of respondents from those regions having it at dinner, compared with only 28 percent of the nation.
It makes sense to me, because Thanksgiving is all about food tradition. Cornbread was once a staple of every meal in the South, whereas fresh cranberries were hard to find down here before modern food transport methods were in place. So we eat what our grandparents ate 50 years ago, more so on Thanksgiving than other days. That said, I only serve macaroni and cheese at Thanksgiving when there are little children around. Read more about the various regional Thanksgiving side dishes at FiveThirtyEight. -via Marilyn Terrell
What’s not to love about snow? It’s deep, and cool, and slippery! It can be hard or it can float on air. You can jump on top of it or dig underneath it. And best of all, the kids are playing in it! The drawbacks are that it’s cold and hard to drive in, but if you’re a dog, you have a fur coat and nowhere to drive anyway. -via Tastefully Offensive
The following is an article from the magazine The Annals of Improbable Research.
Doug Zongker
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
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The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
Research looking at looking alike
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners? Yes.
“Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners?” M.M. Roy and Nicholas J.S. Christenfeld, Psychological Science, vol. 15, no. 5, May 2004, pp. 361-3. (Thanks to Richard Wassersug and numerous others for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, who are at the University of California, San Diego, report that:
Forty-five dogs and their owners were photographed separately, and judges were shown one owner, that owner’s dog, and one other dog, with the task of picking out the true match.… The results suggest that when people pick a pet, they seek one that, at some level, resembles them, and when they get a purebred, they get what they want.
Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners? Maybe Not.
“Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners? A Reanalysis of Roy and Christenfeld (2004),” D.W. Levine, Psychological Science, vol. 16, 2005, pp. 83–84. The author, at the University of South Carolina, reports:
Roy and Christenfeld’s (2004) recent article claimed that student judges were able to match purebred dogs with their owners. The analyses reported fail to support this claim, however, because they rely on statistical assumptions that cannot be met with the experimental design.... the analyses and results presented here demonstrate that it is premature to conclude “dogs resemble their owners.”
Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners? Yes.
Cooking is always a science lesson, whether you let your kids know it or not. And it can often be a history lesson, too. Sometimes you can throw geography in there, or genealogy if you play your cards right. But most of all, it’s a way to combine family time, learning time, and best of all, eating time into one glorious celebration. If he learns nothing else, Moishe will be able to make his own pancakes one day. This comic is from Lunarbaboon.
The internet is like everything else: you invent something new, and soon others will exploit it for nefarious ends. And I’m not just talking about cable internet providers. Both existing organized crime syndicates and new players wasted no time in figuring out ways to exploit the world wide web to steal money, scam the unaware, and attack enemies. And that’s just the beginning. There’s a lot of everyday global trade in contraband, especially drugs.
While most of us might turn to Amazon or eBay as our go-to for ordering just about anything, there’s an entirely darker layer to the internet, where organized crime has moved the sale of all manner of contraband – especially drugs. It started in 2011 with Silk Road, named for the famous trading route of the Han Dynasty. Silk Road is surprisingly similar to eBay – except in what you can buy there.
According to Pursuit Magazine and journalist Kevin Goodman, who infiltrated the cybercrime network, once users got past layers and layers on encryption, they found what was essentially Etsy for narcotics. After creating a user name and password and supplying payment information, buyers could place orders for an astounding array of illegal products. The site held the payment until the buyer confirmed they’d received the product, and, just like other, more well-traveled marketplaces, buyers could rate sellers and provide feedback.
Silk Road reportedly banned the sale of some illegal activities – murder-for-hire, stolen credit card numbers, child porn and weapons. But using bitcoin as the currency of choice, Silk Road quickly became the place to go for practically any drug under the sun. In October of 2013, Forbes reported that the FBI had taken down Silk Road and seized around $4 million in bitcoins.
But you know as soon as one method of illegal trade goes down, others spring up in its place. There will always be people who consider the profit to be worth the risk, no matter what the collateral damage is. Learn about ransomware, information theft, money laundering, and other cybercrimes at Urban Ghosts.
You know how photographers can take a scenic view or a cityscape and make it look like a miniature by using the tilt-shift effect? What if you did that to a picture of something really, really big, like a galaxy or nebula, or even a supernova? Berlin artist St. Tesla did just that, and the results are adorable. Things that are bigger than we can even imagine end up looking like something microscopic. See more of these images at St. Tesla’s Behance page. -via Metafilter
While Americans are usually introduced to figgy pudding by way of the song “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” few ever actually consume it, much less make one. You might be surprised to find that it’s not even what we know as pudding.
It’s really not pudding, at least by American standards. The cake—which contains figs and is topped with brandy—has been an English Christmas dessert since the mid-1600s. Around that time, it was banned by English Puritans because of the large amount of alcohol content. Some believe that a Medieval custom dictated that pudding could only be made on the 25th Sunday after Trinity Sunday and that it was originally comprised of 13 ingredients to represent Christ and his 12 apostles.
Now you know. You might be more familiar with holiday dishes like sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green bean casserole, gingerbread, latkes, etc. but you might not know where they came from or why we eat them during the winter holidays. Find out by reading The Origins of 15 Holiday Foods and Drinks at mental_floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Meal Makeover Moms)
Fire tornados, a pretty but frightening phenomena, happen in nature when wind conditions are right and fire is present. You can produce one yourself, although I wouldn't recommend it. Now the Slow Mo Guys (previously at Neatorama) show us what is happening down to the finest detail. And it is beautiful.
Do I have to add that you should not try this at home? It’s been done, and if anything goes wrong, you could suffer injury, loss of life and/or property, and lawsuits. -via Tastefully Offensive
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader.
What happens when the fans of a hugely popular novel and every book publisher in the world demand a sequel that the author doesn’t want to write? The author’s family waits 50 years, then hires someone to follow up Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.
NEVER GO HUNGRY AGAIN
Gone With the Wind, published in 1936, is one of the most successful and enduring books of all time. It won author Margaret Mitchell a Pulitzer Prize, has sold more than 30 million copies (and it’s still in print), and was adapted into a film in 1939 that became the most commercially successful movie ever. While the novel ends ambiguously (Rhett Butler up and leaves poor Scarlett O’Hara, and she doesn’t quite know what to do next), Mitchell felt her 1,037-page novel told a complete story, and despite major interest from her publisher and the public, she had no interest in writing a follow-up. Mitchell died in 1949 at age 49, having never published another novel.
MADE IN CAROLINA
In 1987, shortly after the novel’s 50th anniversary, Mitchell’s estate announced that it was commissioning a sequel to Gone With the Wind. Why? The book’s copyright was about to expire. Once the novel fell into the public domain, anyone could write a sequel, and the Mitchell estate would lose control of the characters. Not only that, they feared a slew of bad, unauthorized sequels flooding the market that could devalue the original work.
The family and its attorneys interviewed 12 writers before selecting Alexandra Ripley, a Southern author best known for romantic historical novels set in the South (like Gone With the Wind), such as Charleston, On Leaving Charleston, and New Orleans Legacy. Mitchell’s family gave Ripley free rein to write whatever kind of follow-up she wanted… provided she follow an extensive set of guidelines (primarily “no raw sex”) and have the first two chapters completed by April 1988. “My hand just won’t write ‘fiddle-dee-dee,’” Ripley said about the style guidelines. “But I figure I’ll have to give them at least three and throw in ‘God’s nightgown!’ ‘Great balls of fire!’ and ‘As God is my witness!’”
The crew of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower put together their own version of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer. The Navy’s creative use of what they had available will make you laugh and then make you go “Whooooa!”
At the end, you’ll see the title, and maybe think it says The IKEA Wakens. No, it’s The Ike Awakens. That’s the short name of the aircraft carrier. It's an easy mistake to make. -via Uproxx
German designer Milan Vuckovic (previously at Neatorama) compiled terrorist attacks over the past 15 years, between December of 2000 and November of 2015. This visualization follows a timeline at the bottom showing where attacks took place and roughly the number of people killed. Every death is a tragedy, but for accuracy and simplicity, the attacks plotted were limited to those in which twenty or more people died.
While the 9/11 attacks produced the highest number of casualties, you can’t help but notice that some areas of the world endure these incidents constantly. And they have since long before the beginning of this century. It’s a sad sequence, beautifully presented. -Thanks, Milan!
Tony Zhou’s video series Every Frame a Painting (previously at Neatorama) is always a fascinating, in-depth look at entertainment at its finest. In this episode, he deconstructs the techniques of a master of visual comedy: Buster Keaton.
There was so much thought, planning, and detail (as well as improvisation) that went into every frame of Keaton’s comedies, but it all came together to make us laugh, even without sound on film. Of course, understanding how it’s done in no way detracts from the pleasure of the movies. -via Metafilter
