Erstwhile Neatorama author WTM went on a road trip, a pilgrimage you might call it, to the home of fantasy author Robert E. Howard. If you don't recognize the name, you will recognize his creations.

In a nutshell, Robert E. Howard was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the ‘pulp’ magazine writers/authors of the 1920’s and 1930’s. ‘Pulp’ magazines were so-called because they were printed on cheap pulp paper, paper that was not intended to last for any length of time. That, plus wartime paper drives of the 1940’s, are the main reasons why original Weird Tales and other of the famous pulp magazines such as Doc Savage Magazine are today so rare and valuable.

Robert created far more characters, and more diverse characters, in multiple genres, than any of the other pulp writers, and his most famous character creation is Conan the Cimmerian, or, for the pop culturists among us, Conan the Barbarian.

Take a trip, not only to a different place, but a different time to see where Howard came up with his fantasy worlds at Miss Cellania.

(Image credit: ©WTM)

Have you ever been in a meeting in which most of the time was consumed by very simple problems that weren’t worth talking about, while the more serious problems were discussed less? I’ve had my own share of that experience, too.

This is called the bike shed effect, which is also known as the Law of Triviality, which states that “the amount of discussion is inversely proportional to the complexity of the topic.”

Put into plain English, this means that the simpler an issue, the more debate it attracts.

Why are simpler issues harder to solve over more complex ones? Psychology Today provides us with five reasons and also advice on how to handle these simple problems.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Chinese tech giant Baidu, which is China’s closest equivalent to Google, just dethroned both Microsoft and Google in an ongoing competition in AI earlier this month. The competition was the General Language Understanding Evaluation, or GLUE for short.

GLUE is a widely accepted benchmark for how well an AI system understands human language. It consists of nine different tests for things like picking out the names of people and organizations in a sentence and figuring out what a pronoun like “it” refers to when there are multiple potential antecedents. A language model that scores highly on GLUE, therefore, can handle diverse reading comprehension tasks. Out of a full score of 100, the average person scores around 87 points.

Baidu has now become the first team to surpass 90 points through the use of their model, ERNIE (which stands for “Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration”).

How does the model work? Find out over at Technology Review.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Wildfires are out of control in Australia, the Amazon forest is still burning, and California wildfires return every year. We send professionals to battle these blazes, but there are fires that no one fights, because it's a futile task. When ignition meets a vast reserve of fuel, you can get a fire that can't be extinguished. There are ten places on earth that have been burning for decades and longer, up to 6,000 years, and we have no idea how much longer they will continue. Some of these places you can even visit! Each of the ten have a history, so you may want to bookmark the list. Or maybe you'll be so fascinated you'll want to read them all at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: flydime)

The 1999 film Galaxy Quest had a lot going for it: comedy, action, science fiction, and a stellar cast. We know from the recent Honest Trailer that it's not just you who thinks it's an excellent movie. So why wasn't it a big hit? The movie opened in seventh place over the Christmas holiday twenty years ago. Producer Mark Johnson and star Sigourney Weaver explain how the studio pulled the film out from under them.  

“DreamWorks didn’t know what to make of the film,” Johnson says. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say they didn’t believe in it, but it wasn’t what they felt like they ordered.” For Weaver, she’d had a similar feeling for much longer.

“To me, they didn’t seem particularly interested in what we were doing, which gave us more freedom during the shoot,” Weaver says. “But at the last minute DreamWorks decided it needed a movie to go up against Stuart Little, the mouse movie. So, they chose this one and started making cuts to the film.”

Weaver notes that along with an F-bomb she shot, several of Rickman’s scenes were cut because they were a little kinky for a family audience.

“That all had to go so they could make it a kids movie, which is such a shame,” Weaver says. “I would buy Galaxy Quest with the cut scenes added back just to see Alan doing some of those scenes. This was a very sophisticated picture, and they could have had a wider audience with the more adult-take on the Star Trek of it.”

Now that Galaxy Quest is 20 years old, Hollywood Reporter tells the story of how the movie came about and tracks down what went wrong with its marketing, straight from those who were there. -via Metafilter

This time of year, we become a bit obsessed with daylight, days, and calendars. The new year is just a manmade concept, an arbitrary place to start a new calendar, while the revolution of the earth around the sun is a concrete amount of time we can measure. However, when the days, weeks, months, and years don't line up with each other for a variety of reasons, people tend to "fix" the calendar to be more useful. That leads us to the different calendars used for different purposes. One of them is based on weeks for financial uses, and it has also been appropriated for computer coding, which leads to some weird anomalies. Tom Scott explains. Keep in mind this video was posted on December 30.  

The way that temperature records have been constantly breaking over the last few years, the question of the hottest place on earth may all depend on what day it is. However, many of those records are averages for areas or periods of time. Most folks agree that Death Valley, California, is the hottest location you can visit. In July of 2013, the air temperature there registered 134 degrees, and it stays fairly hot most of the time.   

Here’s how Death Valley reaches these sweltering temperatures: Hot air in Death Valley rises and trapped by the surrounding mountain ranges. It cools and falls back into the valley, where it is compressed and heated by air pressure found at such low elevations. Death Valley may have the hottest recorded air temperature on Earth, but there are other hot spots on Earth.

Read about some of those other spots at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg

(Image credit: Finetooth)

Hoàng Tiến Quyết, an artist from Vietnam, makes origami figures that seem to pop out of the limits of mere sheets of paper. He uses a technique called "wet folding", which involves moistening the paper just the right amount in order to give flexibility to it.

Using only light and sound, clumps of harmful proteins which interfere with brain functions were partially cleared in mice brain.

Research led by MIT earlier this year found strobe lights and a low pitched buzz can be used to recreate brain waves lost in the disease, which in turn remove plaque and improve cognitive function in mice engineered to display Alzheimer's-like behaviour.

It's a little like using light and sound to trigger their own brain waves to help fight the disease.

It’s too soon to be excited, however, as the method has not yet been clinically trialed in humans. Brain waves also work differently in humans and mice.

These early findings could hint affordable and drug-free treatments of common forms of dementia, should it be replicated.

More details about this topic over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Gabrielle Drummond/ ScienceAlert)

Each day, a Spanish desert ant travels multiple times from its nest to someplace else to search for food. When it does find a small snack like a seed or crumb, it brings the food home with its jaws.

Finding larger food, such as a dead cricket or a piece of popcorn, is a different case, however. Oftentimes, an ant has to drag it and walk to its nest backwards. But how does it know which way to go if it has to walk backwards?

Check out the full article over at Science Magazine for answers.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Cleave through space and time whilst cutting onions and tomatoes with this colorful Cosmos Kitchen Knives by Chef’s Vision. The set includes different types of knives (with each having a different design) for all your cutting needs. It only costs about $50 over at Amazon.

Slicing and dicing just got fun and colorful!

(Image Credit: Chef’s Vision/ Amazon/ Technabob)

Riccardo Bonci has an impressive organ and he knows how to play it. He's fond of using his organ to cover the theme music to favorite old cartoons, including Inspector Gadget and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

On his YouTube channel, Bonci also covers many 70s-era anime themes, only a few of which I recognize (sorry, Alex hired me for my good looks, not my knowledge). These include Captain Harlock and Mazinger Z, the latter of which I remember vividly in its American version as Tranzor Z.

-via Geekologie

A cockatiel named Peanut just wants to help out. Watch him bob his head as his human stirs his morning coffee. When he stops, Peanut stops, too. Just trying to be helpful. -via Laughing Squid

What's the most annoying trend from 2019 that you recall? Think carefully, eating Tide Pods was completely over sometime in 2018. Still, there are plenty of things that were all over the internet in 2019 that we can do without going into the new year. So let's say goodbye to them. Even if they began several years ago, we've had enough by now.

Oh, there are more than you think. See 28 things that we need to leave behind at Cracked.

First off, what follows is something we don't have to worry about. Our sun will someday go supernova, but it will have to grow an awful lot first, and that will take billions of years. There are many other ways to wipe out humanity that will take less time. So the scenario for experiencing a supernova explosion is a thought experiment, but a fascinating one.

As far as raw explosive power goes, no other cataclysm in the Universe is both as common and as destructive as a core-collapse supernova. In one brief event lasting only seconds, a runaway reaction causes a star to give off as much energy as our Sun will emit over its entire 10-12 billion year lifetime. While many supernovae have been observed both historically and since the invention of the telescope, humanity has never witnessed one up close.

Recently, the nearby red supergiant star, Betelgeuse, has started exhibiting interesting signs of dimming, leading some to suspect that it might be on the verge of going supernova. While our Sun isn't massive enough to experience that same fate, it's a fun and macabre thought experiment to imagine what would happen if it did. Yes, we'd all die in short order, but not from either the blast wave or from radiation. Instead, the neutrinos would get us first.

What follows is a detailed explanation of the carnage, which we would never see coming. Get the story at Forbes, but reassure yourself that it won't happen in your lifetime. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Judy Schmidt)