Quick, can you name ten truly great science fiction films? You probably could, and the movies you just thought of would no doubt rank pretty high on everyone else's list. But if you were to consider all science fiction movies, including those outside of your lifetime and foreign films, too, would it be so easy to rank them? Have you even seen 150 science fiction movies? It's a pretty broad category, which includes space travel, time travel, speculative fiction, and futuristic technology. The list includes blockbusters, B-movies, kid's movies, silent films, comedies, and animation. Sure, you'll want to argue about the rankings, and that's what gets lists like these a lot of clicks, but it would be better to read about the movies you haven't seen, because you might enjoy them very much. Check out Rolling Stone's list of the 150 greatest science fiction movies of all time. -via Digg

(Illustration by Matthew Cooley)

You've got your new calendar ready; it's time to slot in reminders of the important things, like the meteor howers and eclipses you won't want to miss when they happen in 2024. The Quadrantid meteor shower is going on now, and will peak on Wednesday night and in the wee hours of Thursday morning. This is an annual meteor shower, but this year the shooting stars should be more visible than last year, since the moon won't be outshining it.  

The US will see a total solar eclipse in April and a partial lunar eclipse in September. Then in October, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will make its nearest pass by earth. Then there are the meteor showers: Orionid, Geminid, Perseid, Eta Aquarid, and Lyrids. Don't skip the early ones, because you never know when you'll be disappointed by cloud cover. Read about all these events and how to see them at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio - Michala Garrison, Ernie Wright, Ian Jones, Laurence Schuler)

At the Virtua Voorhees Hospital near Camden, New Jersey, baby Ezra Humphrey was born at 11:48 PM on New Year's Eve. His twin brother, Ezekiel Humphrey was born at 12:28 AM on New Year's Day. That's just forty minutes apart or, as a rough estimate, an entire year.

CBS News reports that the timing coincidences keep piling up. Their mother, Eve, was born in December. Their father, Billy, was born on New Year's Eve. The twins have an older brother named Hezekiah, who turns three on January 3. So the whole family has clustered their birthdays at the same time of the year.

-via Massimo

Among the more peculiar stories of the Titanic disaster is that of Charles Joughin, who was the chief baker on the ship. He left his wife and two children back in Liverpool to sail on the Titanic's doomed maiden voyage. As a crew member, he spent the more than two hours of the Titanic's sinking evacuating passengers and loading them onto lifeboats. Afterward he threw deck chairs into the water to serve as flotation. But every chance he got during the frantic work, he would slip below deck and drink as much whiskey as he could.

When the ship took its final plunge, Joughin was on the edge of the deck, at its topmost part, and slid into the water smoothly, reportedly without getting his hair wet. He spent two hours treading water as those around him succumbed to shock and drowned. Joughin finally reached a lifeboat, but since it was full, all he could do is hold on and stay above the water as best he could until the Carpathian arrived. Joughin is in the history books as the last survivor to leave the Titanic, but how did he survive so long in the frigid waters? Speculation is that his blood-alcohol level was the key. Read the story of Joughin's Titanic survival at McGill.   -Thanks, WTM!

Tom Scott has been doing a weekly video every Monday for ten years now. He's taken us to many places and showed us amazing things we would never learn about otherwise. Tom announced months ago that he was going to stop doing that in 2024, and now the time has come. See, when you make your hobby into a job, then you no longer have a hobby. Ask me how I know. When you achieve your dream job, what can you then dream about? In Tom's ten year anniversary and farewell video, he explains how he's going to do less and be happier. What projects will he come up with for us to follow? Time will tell. There are a lot of links at the YouTube page that give us a hint he will be quite busy even without a weekly video.

The second half of this video is a montage of the wild things he got to do in those ten years, with a surprise stunt woven through it. I guess he finally found the excuse to do it.

The 70s was a weird time to be alive, I tell you. You had to be there to get the zeitgeist that mixed humor, despair, and, above all else, exhaustion with believing in anything that we had been told.

The science fiction of the era extrapolated where the young people of that era would be in old age. So there were a lot of post-apocalyptic and dystopian visions. The 1974 film Zardoz was set in the year 2023. The 1975 film A Boy and His Dog was set in 2024. So that's where we are now.

The movie comes from a culture in which thermonuclear destruction is not simply warned against, but accepted as inevitable. It is obsessed with sex, but also skeptical of finding happiness through it. Hence it depicts a young man and his telepathic dog--twisted versions of idealized Americana--roaming the wastelands in search of food and sex.

Enjoy 2024.

-via Weird Universe

#Sgtpepper2023 v3 pic.twitter.com/eZbe70Z6nB

— christhebarker (@christhebarker) January 1, 2024

As he does every year, British artist Chris Barker (@christhebarker) compiled images of the well-known people who died in 2023 into a composition that evokes the iconic cover for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. There sure are a lot of familiar faces in this one. To put names to those familiar faces, he also posted a graphic key and a master list so you can look them up. Once again, he went through multiple versions as more names were added. The objects in the foreground are symbolic of other deaths in 2023, such as the Ken doll for Bill Cunningham, who was the first to give Ken a voice. However, some like the Caramac bar and Lilt drink are products that went away. Those objects are included in the key as well.

Barker has done these compilations every year since 2016. You can see them in a previous post.

If you're determined to change your life, January first is probably a good day to do it, right? There are myriad reasons that New Year's Day is possibly the worst day to initiate big changes. We do it because we've bought into the idea that a new year is new, and will somehow be different from the previous year. But the date is just an agreed-upon starting point for a new calendar. Then we added all this holiday merriment to that date for no real reason other than we like to party. You see where this is going? It's become a cliche that whatever New Year's resolution you make, it will fail hard and fast when that calendar goes into effect. Maybe it would be better to just set a goal for the new year, and assign random dates for smaller goals that will add up to a major change over the year. That being said, Ryan George (previously at Neatorama) gets the point about New Year's resolutions across in a much shorter and funnier fashion.

Long before Joseph Pujol took Europe by storm with a his all-fart stage performance, Roland the Farter made an even better living in 12th-century England. In some ways you could call him a court jester, because he performed for the amusement of the king, but Roland was a specialist. He could fart on command, and apparently did it very well. It's not clear which king Roland served, believed to be Henry II, or possibly Henry I, or maybe even Richard the Lionheart. Whichever king it was, Roland was paid well, with the grant of an estate of around 100 acres called Hemingstone Manor in Suffolk. This grant came with one stipulation: Roland was to perform once every year at the king's Christmas feast, and that performance was to include one jump, one whistle, and one fart.

We also don't know how long Roland worked for his king before such a deal was struck, but it was a sweet pension for so little work. The estate didn't even revert back to the crown upon Roland's death, but rather it passed to Roland's son. Read about Roland the Farter at Historic Mysteries. -via Strange Company

The use of tamed elephants in human warfare dates back to at least the Sixth Century BC in what is now India and were used by the Chinese as late as the Fifteenth Century AD in what is now Vietnam. In the ancient Mediterranean, various peoples made use of war elephants until the Roman Republic developed effective tactics for dealing with these living tanks that were terrifying, but logistically demanding upon armies using them.

Hellenistic (Greeks from Alexander the Great until the Roman conquest) empires used war elephants. In a recent article published in The Classical Quarterly, Silvannen Gerrard of the University of Manchester assesses evidence that the Greek handlers of war elephants got them intoxicated prior to combat.

In addition to textual evidence from the Maccabean Revolt, she considers the staggering amount of alcohol that scientists say would be necessary to get a full grown elephant drunk. Would it be practical for an army on the move to carry that much wine for this purpose? Furthermore, how do elephants behave while drunk? An army with drunk elephants in its midst may experience negative outcomes.

After also evaluating evidence from Indian sources, Gerrard concludes that although the Hellenistic armies attacking the Maccabeans may have used drunk elephants, this was unlikely to be the standard practice at the time.

Image: Heinrich Leutemann

-via Theo Nash

The tiny Principality of Liechtenstein is, on a per capita basis, a very wealthy nation. But with a population of only 39,000 people, there are certain features common among larger nations that it lacks, such as airports, an army, a currency, and even embassies in foreign lands. It also lacks a film industry centered within the nation, producing movies by and for Liechtenstein and employing primarily its own citizens.

Nonetheless, there is one feature-length film that can be considered a truly Liechtensteiner film in that it was shot within that nation and tells a story that takes place there. The 1958 film Kinder der Berge tells the story of a Liechtensteiner woodcarver who experiences a miracle attributed to a statue of the Virgin Mary that he carves.

The actors were primarily German and Swiss, with the main character portrayed by the acclaimed Swiss actor Maximilian Schell. But a prince and princess of this alpine monarchy also make appearances to give this film a definite Liechtensteiner flavor.

I've embedded a clip from the film.

Dancing like no one is watching
byu/UrbanCyclerPT innextfuckinglevel

You've heard the saying "dance like no one is watching." In this case, it's more like "give it everything you've got because everyone is watching!" At a children's recital in November, it didn't matter that you went to see your child, all eyes were on this youngster from Mpumalanga, South Africa. We know that because multiple videos from different angles were posted to the internet immediately. He's a born performer, without a shred of self-consciousness! The song is "Lyfie" by South African singer Bernice West.

Since then, the young man who now goes by the stage name of Klein Kwagga has become quite famous in his home country, and viral worldwide. Bernice West reached out to him, and they've since performed together at the Rugby Sevens in Cape Town. Virality has not affected his exuberance for dance. You can follow Klein Kwagga's further adventures at TikTok.

-via Digg

Cave paintings dated back to 25,000 or so years ago have been found in many French and Spanish caves. A common motif among these paintings are handprints and silhouettes of hands, and a concerning number of them have missing fingers or parts of fingers. One might assume that these hands fell prey to injury, frostbite, or infection, but a new science paper posits that these fingers may have been ritually removed as a religious practice.

Archaeologist Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver says finger removal has been a part of some cultures all around the world for thousands of years. Self-mutilation as a sacrifice to appease a deity takes many forms, and would explain the inordinate number of missing digits among cave painters. This theory has received some pushback, as missing fingers would certainly limit a prehistoric person's ability to manage a harsh environment. Read about the missing fingers and the idea of their deliberate removal at The Guardian.  -via Strange Company

We see plenty of lists of the best movies of 2023, and we are drawn to those because we will want to check out those we haven't seen. On the other end of the spectrum, there are movies we want to avoid seeing at all costs, even by accident. The ten movies of 2023 that came in with the worst scores on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes include exactly one I had even heard of. They are: 

Freelance 7%
Life Upside Down 5%
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 3%
Confidential Informant 0%
Dead Man‘s Hand  0%
The Donor Party 0%
Johnny & Clyde 0%
Mercy 0%
Righteous Thieves 0%
Shrapnel 0%

That's honestly a lot of 0% movies for one year. You can read a description of each of these films and why they are awful at The Mary Sue and see the trailer for each at Mental Floss. If you've seen any of them, we'd love to hear your opinion.

It is particularly tragic when a great many people die from something as simple as a nutritional deficiency because the cause was unknown. Scurvy is the most familiar of these stories, because many sailors died before James Lind discovered that citrus fruit prevents scurvy, even before vitamin C was known. But it's not the only such tale.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many thousands of people in Switzerland, the majority in some places, suffered from goitre (often spelled goiter) and no one knew why. Even worse was the high incidence of birth defects. There was an inordinate percentage of babies born deaf, and even more that suffered from what they called cretinism, featuring severe brain damage as well as other physical abnormalities. Doctors and scientists flocked to Switzerland to study the phenomena, and came up with dozens of theories, but no solution. Over time, the leading theories became a pathogen in the environment or a genetic defect.

We now know that goitre is caused by a deficiency of iodine, which is necessary for thyroid function. In 1914, Swiss physician Heinrich Hunziker identified iodine deficiency as the root of the scourge, but he was shot down by the medical establishment. Everyone knew that iodine was poison! Read a fascinating account of the experiments that proved the theory, and the difficulty of introducing iodine to the Swiss Alps through resistance by medical experts, government officials, and a skeptical public, at the London Review of Books. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Wespi/Eggenberger collection, Institute for the History of Medicine, Univ. of Bern)