Glacier National Park in Montana has several webcams set up in important places. One is focused on a cottonwood tree that black bears use as a den, so that we can see them as they slowly emerge from winter hibernation. One webcam is focused on a large hole that bears occasionally stick their heads out of. Another webcam is further back, so you can see how far up the tree that hole is. The images refresh every minute or so. If you don't see a bear when you check it, the park's Twitter feed will have sightings.

Yawn! Do you ever struggle to get out of bed? This black bear has been sluggishly poking its head since March 23rd. You can watch it emerge from hibernation live on our new temporary webcam here: https://t.co/vrfiP1oa4v pic.twitter.com/40LnBfT6dC

— GlacierNationalPark (@GlacierNPS) March 29, 2018

-via Metafilter

Victorian era etiquette was rigorous, and the rules and rituals one had to follow after a death in the family were particularly strict, even though they were only enforced by social pressure. A widow was expected to grieve for two and a half years, with her activities, dress, and demeanor proscribed in every detail. That included wearing black crape, a stiff, heavily-dyed type of silk, with a veil to hide her tears. These requirements made some fabric and clothing manufacturers rich, but they weren't so great for the widows who had to wear the veils. They were hot, heavy, scratchy, restricted one's vision, and were full of toxic chemicals.    

By the 1880s, medical journals had begun a discussion about the health effects of heavy crape veils. The New York Medical Journal decried “the irritation to the respiratory tract caused by minute particles of poisonous crape,” while a syndicated column from the North-Western Lancet declared the mourning veil “a veritable instrument of torture” in hot weather, staining the face and filling the lungs with toxic particles. Doctors speaking of poisonous fabric were not being hyperbolic: Many of the substances used to color and treat crape were seriously toxic, and as the 19th century progressed, the dyes in use only became more dangerous.

Read about Victorian mourning veils and the dangers they posed at Racked. -via Digg

The Simpsons isn't a musical show per se, since not every episode features a musical number, but over the last three decades the show's creators have treated us to some great original songs that really get stuck in your head.

(YouTube Link)

Songs like "Baby on Board", "Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?" and "See My Vest" stick with you seemingly for the rest of your life, lying dormant in your brain until you hear a few verses sung or read about them on a list such as this.

(YouTube Link)

And let's face it- as far as earworms go I'd rather have "Baby on Board" bouncing around inside my head than some cheesy modern pop song created using the same algorithms that gave the Bieber-bot sentience.

(YouTube Link)

See the 7 Greatest Songs from 'The Simpsons' here

When you go for a job interview, you start out with the attitude that you need to impress the people at that company. Are you good enough to get this job? But then you realize that you are also finding out about the business and the people you'll be working with, and if you go to enough interviews, you'll run into at least one that's completely bonkers.

The good news is that, even if you are offered the job, you can always say no. Check out a list of reader-submitted horror stories about job interviews from their past at Cracked.

The Marshalls have an ordinary last name but they are far from an ordinary family, but it's not their big bug eyes, unusual fashion sense or lack of conversation that makes them strange- it's the dark secret they have locked away in the basement.

(YouTube Link)

The Marshalls is a stop motion animation short created by Adeena Grubb, with music by Daniel Beja, and what it lacks in depth of story it makes up for with some super creepy vibes!

The Fermi Paradox asks the question of why we haven't found extraterrestrial life, considering the billions of planets in the universe. There are plenty of possible reasons, but the idea is that the rest of the intelligent species of the galaxy just don't want to be around us is as good as any. Or maybe they just haven't gotten around to exterminating us yet. This comic is from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

My dog doesn't care much for TV unless there are noisy birds on the screen, but other dogs I've had would sit on the couch with me and watch TV like little humans, paying closer attention to the shows on the screen than I did.

Their canine channel surfing always made me wonder how much they were actually seeing of what was happening on the screen- were they actually watching shows or just following sound and movement?

Hank Green answered this age old question on this episode of SciShow, explaining how a dog's TV watching habits may vary by breed and discussing how a dog's eyes, which are more attuned to flickering yet see less colors, see TV differently than you and me.

(YouTube Link)

-Via Laughing Squid

Ottomatic Zen by Ilcalvelage

Otto figured out the secret to inner happiness long ago, but he's not sharing that secret with anyone because he's not actually aware that he's figured out the secret to inner happiness. In fact, Otto doesn't really know what he knows because he's too busy living in the now, which is probably a good thing for the kids from Springfield Elementary because if his mind starts to wander his bus might start wandering all over the road too!

Add some animated chill to your geeky wardrobe with this Ottomatic Zen t-shirt by Ilcalvelage, it's a high-larious way to show some love for your favorite bus driving buffoon!

Visit Ilcalvelage's Facebook fan page, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more toon-errific designs:

View more designs by Ilcalvelage | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!

The Name of the Year Tournament is a little late getting launched, so it can't called itself March Madness, but the excitement is there as it is every year. The full-size, readable 2018 bracket is here. The number one seeds are Salami Blessing, La Royce Lobster-Gaines, Dr. Narwhals Mating, and Makenlove Petit-Fard. Can those names of real people fend of the likes of Forbes Thor Kiddoo, Darthvader Williamson, Fabulous Flournoy, or Beau Titsworth? Voting will begin soon at the tournament's blog. -via Metafilter 

Imagine waking up with no recollection of who you are, where you are or how you got to be where you are in life...*shivers* that sounds like an absolute nightmare, especially considering you might have to live your life all over again...

On the other hand, waking up to discover you're a lamp wouldn't be so bad, unless the people who own you have a cat in the house...*shivers* (Comic via Channelate)

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

For some reason, we had to learn the difference between Roman columns in elementdary school. It may have been so that the school could check off "architecture" in our curriculum, but the lesson was disconnected to anything else in world history, so it didn't mean much. The real reason that columns were so important is that they held the building up, which would be important if we ever bothered to learn more about architecture. But now that we're older and know more, we get the fascinating tale of why Corinthian columns were made in the same pattern for thousands of years, from the Greeks and Romans all the way up to today.

(YouTube link)

The legend is a good tale, but the history we know for real is quite interesting, too. -via Laughing Squid 

The newest Steven Spielberg movie, Ready Player One, opens nationwide today. In honor of the occasion, we can indulge in some a Spielberg's greatest past work. A set piece is "a scene or sequence of scenes whose execution requires serious logistical planning and considerable expenditure of money." They can often stand alone without the rest of the film, but they cannot be taken out of a film without damaging the whole. For example:

7. Melting Nazis, Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)

More than a decade before Spielberg The Grownup Filmmaker plunged audiences into the full horror of the Holocaust, Spielberg The Ageless Adolescent tackled history’s darkest chapter from a more boyish, innocently rousing vantage. Raiders Of The Lost Ark is all about sticking it to Hitler—a kind of fantasy score-settling that culminates in the film’s karmic, cathartic Grand Guignol climax. Tied to a nearby post, Ford’s Dr. Jones and Marion Crane (Karen Allen) avert their eyes as the Nazi bad guys pry open the titular artifact and get some supernatural comeuppance. The ethereal effects look primitive by today’s standards, but there’s a timeless (and, sadly, rather timely) thrill to watching these Third Reich scoundrels go from solid to liquid for their sins. It was neither the first nor the last time Spielberg would push the limits of the PG rating; everyone tends to attribute the introduction of PG-13 to the heart-ripping violence in his second Indiana Jones movie. But with Raiders, Spielberg traumatized all ages for a greater good. Remember, the next best thing to clocking a real Nazi is melting off the face of a fake one.

The AV Club looks at 25 such set pieces, arranged in chronological order, maybe because it would be too hard to rank them. Oh yeah, the videos are there, too. Scrolling through them is like watching all your favorite movies again.

(Image credit: Jimmy Hasse)

Disney Dan has a series of videos he's made over the past several years that trace the evolution of costumed Disney characters. Mickey Mouse was making public appearances decades before Disneyland opened, and he is the first character to get a deep dive into the costume. You'll learn some stories you haven't heard before, like how the first Mickey and Minnie at Disneyland were borrowed from the Ice Capades because Walt didn't have any cast members or costumes.  

(YouTube link)

My kids were excited to meet Mickey in 2002 at Walt Disney World. If we'd waited a couple of years, he could have spoken to them, but by then my daughters would have been older and not as thrilled. Disney Dan has 14 videos in the series so far, covering Donald Duck, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, Dumbo, and more. Eventually, he'll get around to doing costume videos on the Disney Princesses. -via Metafilter

Robbie Barrat is testing the limits of machine learning. He gave a neural network lessons in art, and asked it to paint landscapes (digitally, of course). More recently, he turned his attention to classical nudes. He fed thousands of nude portraits into a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to see what would result.

Generative adversarial networks are defined as a class of artificial intelligence algorithms used in unsupervised machine learning, which uses two different neural networks, one called the "generator" and one the "discriminator."

"The generator tries to come up with paintings that fool the discriminator, and the discriminator tries to learn how to tell the difference between real paintings from the dataset and fake paintings the generator feeds it," Barrat told me. "They both get better and better at their jobs over time, so the longer the GAN is trained, the more realistic the outputs will be."

Sometimes, Barrat explained, the GAN will fall into what's called a "local minima," which means the generator and discriminator have found a way to keep trying to fool each other without actually getting better at the task at hand.

Here are some AI generated nude portraits I've been working on

Usually the machine just paints people as blobs of flesh with tendrils and limbs randomly growing out - I think it's really surreal. I wonder if that's how machines see us... pic.twitter.com/tYgzCHGfse

— Robbie Barrat (@DrBeef_) March 27, 2018

The two neural networks may be quite pleased with themselves, but their nudes are so abstract that they'll never flag a moderator. The one in the middle right of this Tweet looks like Olaf from Frozen. However, people have asked if they could buy a print. Read about the algorithmically-generated art at CNET and see more digital paintings in Barrat's Twitter feed.  -via Boing Boing

The laws of physics forbid an item from being bigger on the inside, so in order to find things that are larger inside than out we must forego standard science and head into the realm of science fiction.

There we can find amazing objects with interior spaces roomy enough for Time Lords, Grouches and families of wizards to chill in, the perfect places for a daydream.  (Illustration by Hello With Cheese)

-Via Geeks Are Sexy