Should you get a large pizza or two medium pizzas? Primer magazine has the math to show that one 18-inch large pizza has more pizza in it than two 12-inch medium pizzas.

Area of two 12” pizzas:

12/2 = 6   6×6=36   36xπ = 113.1 in² x 2 = 226.2 in²

Area of one 18” pizza:

18/2=9   9×9=81   81xπ = 254.5 in²

The numbers don’t lie.

The commenters at the Boing Boing blurb brought up a lot of points that might move you in the other direction.

1. There are few pizza parlors that actually serve an 18-inch pizza anymore. They are more likely 14 inches in diameter.
2. On the other hand, sometimes the pricing matters more than total pizza area.
3. An 18-inch pizza won't fit in a home oven, or many restaurant ovens.
4. We eat too much pizza, and should be eating less.
5. If the crust is stuffed, that's more important than total area.
6. If you get two medium pizzas, you don't have to share your anchovy pizza with someone who prefers a pineapple topping.

The numbers don't lie, but there are words that can make those numbers meaningless.

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A post shared by Taku Inoue (@inouetable) on Oct 17, 2019 at 8:44am PDT

Japanese artist Taku Inoue just recreated the most painful moments of Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse from the popular cartoon series Tom and Jerry, like Tom being flattened after sliding underneath a door, and Jerry getting molded into the shape of a cheese slice.

Check them out!

(Image Credit: Taku Inoue/ Instagram)

Joshua Phillips was riding aboard a boat on Puget Sound off the coast of Washington, when he stumbled upon a unique spectacle — a pair of sea lions resting on a boat which nearly sank it.

Evidently, while out for a swim, the massive marine mammals decided to rest their flippers awhile by borrowing somebody's (comparatively tiny) vessel to lie on top of. The boat, as you'll see, wasn't exactly designed to handle such gigantic passengers.

It is unclear who owns the vessel, and it isn’t known how long the duo hung out on the boat, but I guess it’s pretty obvious that they had fun hanging out.

(Image Credit: Facebook/ Joshua Phillips/ The Dodo)

It is the new year once again, and that also means that it’s time for resolutions. But many resolutions are broken before the day is out, according to psychologists. So what’s the point of having one?

The answer is, there still is a point, and it is a good thing to have a New Year’s resolution. We just have to pick our resolutions carefully.

QDT provides us four secrets to keep our resolutions for this year. Check them out over at the site.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

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RexSpecs comin’ in clutch. #rexspecs #doggles #doggoggles #winterdogs

A post shared by @ theycolliememaple on Dec 6, 2019 at 12:32pm PST

This is Maple, a border collie who loves all things outdoors, particularly snow. But she wouldn’t be able to enjoy the snow if her eyes will be harmed. So, her human figured out a way to protect her eyes: she bought her a pair of goggles.

The goggles did exactly what they were intended to do and protected Maple’s eyes during harsh winter storms, but they did something else as well — they allowed her to keep her eyes open underneath the fallen snow.

And there she goes, having the time of her life.

(Image Credit: theycolliememaple/ Instagram)

The fires in Australia continue to burn, driving animals from their homes, scorching the landscape, and covering major cities in smoke. Not only are the fires widespread, but powerful enough to create "pyrocumulonimbus" clouds, a thoroughly scary-sounding term.

Intense fires generate smoke, obviously. But their heat can also create a localized updraft powerful enough to create its own changes in the atmosphere above. As the heat and smoke rise, the cloud plume can cool off, generating a large, puffy cloud full of potential rain. The plume can also scatter embers and hot ash over a wider area.

Eventually, water droplets in the cloud condense, generating a downburst of rain — maybe. But the "front" between the calm air outside the fire zone and a pyrocumulonimbus storm cloud is so sharp that it also generates lightning — and that can start new fires.

Read more about the way fires can generate a snowball effect and make things much worse at Insider. -via Digg  

(Image credit: Bureau of Meteorology, Victoria)

World-renowned escape artist Harry Houdini was also famous for his hobby- unmasking fraudulent spiritualists and mediums. During a stay in Montana in 1920, he was approached about a local medium suspected of chicanery. Houdini attended a seance with the medium under an assumed name, and observed the methods that could be used to fake a spiritual presence. He found how a collaborator could enter the room under cover of darkness through a window. But that wasn't what made this seance so exciting.

When he returned to the seance, he found a scene of complete chaos. He learned that in his absence, the grocer had taken out a flashlight he had hidden in his pocket and shined it on the humanlike “phosphorescent glow.” Someone immediately knocked the flashlight from his hand, but it was too late. The “manifestation” had been recognized. A young woman threw her arms around the ghost, kissing him frantically and screaming “Marion, Marion! It’s you!” The panicked medium began hitting the girl with a blackjack while the “ghost” endeavored to break the girl’s hold, pleading, “Frances, let go of me; you’re smothering me, Frances.”

The show was definitely over.

“Frances” had attended the seance in a sincere effort to contact the departed. When the guests were asked to concentrate on a deceased loved one, she thought of her fiance, who had died less than a year before. The glowing figure emerged from the cabinet. When the grocer illuminated the “ghost,” Frances recognized it. It was her fiance, the man who was dead and gone, presumably forever. It was hard to say what gave the poor girl the bigger shock: when she thought she was seeing her beloved’s ghost, or when she realized he was quite alive, if not exactly well.

The explanation for Frances' lover's "return" was rather complicated, and hinged on some extraordinary coincidences. The defrauding of the Montana medium had little -actually nothing- to do with Houdini's presence, but because of Houdini's attendance, we now have the entire story to read at Strange Company.

There’s a catch to that statement, however. Moderation can help you achieve your goals given you can precisely define moderation.

It is said that to eat, work, or play moderately is the healthiest way to live. It is a proven and tested advice.

In fact, humans have been contemplating this concept for much of history. One of the phrases carved into the Ancient Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi was meden agan, or: "nothing in excess.” Aristotle believed that every virtue falls in the middle of two extremes—excess and deficiency, something he called "the doctrine of the mean." Confucian texts refer to zhongyong— zhong translating to "bent neither one way or another," and yong to "unchanging": Consistent moderation.

Maybe the reason why about 80 percent of people give up on their resolutions by February is because we don’t follow this principle. We try to eradicate habits altogether, and start doing something new intensely right away.

"I strongly believe this is the case, because people go from 0 to 200 miles per hour in setting their goals," said Marco Palma, the director of a human behavior laboratory at Texas A&M University.

If that’s the case, then maybe it’s time we tried another way of making resolutions — this time through moderation.

This would involve identifying the things in your life you want to change, and instead of quitting them entirely, intentionally continue to do them—but at a lower frequency.

A moderation challenge would seek to make a resolution that falls somewhere in the middle of the two extreme ends of the spectrum for a certain behavior. Easy right? Actually, no. What makes moderation such difficult advice to follow is that it's vague.

And so we need to be precise in what we mean when we say “moderation.”

More details about this over at Vice.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

You have a brand-new, clean calendar to hang on the wall for 2020. What are you going to write on it? First, you'll want to mark the celestial events of the year that you don't want to miss. Depending on where you are, or where you are willing to travel, you can take in two spectacular solar eclipses (one during a solstice) and four lunar eclipses in 2020. But what's a "real solstice appulse"?

Here’s something that’s not happened since the year 2000, and won’t happen again until 2040. On December 21, 2020—the exact date of the solstice—Saturn and Jupiter will appear incredibly close together (just 0.06º apart) right after sunset. Astronomer’s call this an “appulse”or a “great conjunction.” It will all be a matter of perspective; Jupiter and Saturn will actually be 733 million miles from each other, as well as being 887 million miles and 1620 million miles from Earth, respectively. However, from Earth, the giant gas planets will appear almost as one.

The schedule for stargazing in 2020 is at Forbes.

Composed of nearly 10 million square miles of prairies, mountain ranges, forests, taigas, deserts, and rimmed by almost 40,000 miles of convoluted coastline, is North America. It is a huge and lively place, with more detail beyond what most can imagine. You might think that drawing the land would be a crazy idea. Yet, this crazy idea was made into reality by a man named Anton Thomas.

For four years and nine months, the Melbourne-based artist drew North America by hand, using a pen and about 24 colored pencils. The final product, which was completed in February 2019, has a span of twenty feet. 

It is said that the map has reshaped Thomas’s life.

Learn more details about this story over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Anton Thomas/ Atlas Obscura)

David Roberts hates small talk. But it’s not because he’s disgusted with it; it’s because he’s a total failure at making small talk. This is how he experiences small talk:

Say I find myself interacting with a sales clerk, meeting someone at a party or conference, bumping into a neighbor on the street, any situation that calls for chitchat. The minute the interaction begins, something inside me — I'd call it a "thought," but it's deeper than that, physical almost — wants to get out of it. My fight-or-flight instincts kick in. It's like the somatic equivalent of white noise, louder and louder the longer the interaction goes on. It doesn't take long before it's deafening and I break it off, often in less-than-smooth ways.

The problem of Roberts' inability to navigate through small talk, according to him, is not people in general, nor is it social situations in general. The problem is one-on-one small talk.

Why are small talks a big deal in communication?

Find out the answer over at Vox.

(Image Credit: g_grilli30/ Pixabay)

Before, we saw the Internet as something separate from reality. It was, in the past, considered an entirely different place. But then, it quickly became a necessary part of nearly every human being.

“As more people began to register their existence digitally, a past time turned into an imperative: you have to register digitally to exist,” journalist Jia Tolentino writes in her essay “The I in Internet.” With that, she said, came the commodification of self, which keeps us endlessly tethered to the web, either as a means of self-promotion or as a way of feeding the human compulsion to connect.

What does this kind of development mean? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Find out more about this over at Fast Company.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

This is a LEGO recreation of the “Wind God and Thunder God”, a famous 18th century painting by Rinpa artist Ogata Korin. The said recreation can be seen at the LEGO store located at Narita Airport (4th Floor, Terminal 1). It was recreated by professional LEGO builder Jumpei Mitsui.

The attention to detail is staggering and we’re not quite sure how the artist achieved the wavy lines using blocks but we’re looking forward to checking this out on our next stop at Narita Airport.

Amazing!

(Image Credit: Jumpei Mitsui/ Spoon & Tamago)

How many movies have you seen in the past ten years? Louis Plamondon, better known as Sleepy Skunk, does an annual end-of-the-year mashup of movie trailer clips. Here he looks back at the best films of the last ten years, wrapping up the 2010s as we head into a new decade. Ten years of movies? That includes 12 Disney live-action remakes, five Star Wars films, five of the nine Fast and Furious movies, and about two dozen Marvel superhero movies. But there were a lot of other notable films, too. Luckily, Sleepy Skunk labeled them right in the video, so we can keep up. -Thanks, Louis!  

The car culture blog Jalopnik brings to our attention The Cup. That is, at least, how it is known by NASCAR fans. It was given away to fans at tracks in 2009. You can drink your beer while keeping both eyes on the race. It would also be useful at children's school concerts or Miss Cellania's private fight club for the same reason.

Photo: I Want to Believe in NASCAR