The latest theoretical question for the What If? series from Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama) is "What's the longest possible sunset you can experience while driving, assuming you are obeying the speed limit and driving on paved roads?" While theoretically intriguing, my first thought was that's the last thing you want to do. It's bad enough driving a few blocks with the sun in your eyes! But once we get past the practicalities, it's a valid question. 

First, we get a definition of "sunset," the length of which can vary depending on where you are. Sunset in Antarctica can take days. However, at the equator, the earth is spinning at about a thousand miles per hour, and you can't drive fast enough to make a perceptible difference. Still, the video finds a place where you might make it happen. And unlike other What If? videos, we don't all die. -via Damn Interesting 

In 1998 in the Australian Outback, 36 miles from the tiny town of Marree, an almost two-mile long drawing of a man appeared in the dessert. The satellite image on the left was taken on May 27, 1998, and the image on the right was taken on June 12th. Sometime in between, a figure of an Aboriginal hunter was plowed into the ground. No one noticed it until July, when a set of faxes were sent to Marree, and a local pilot went out to take a look. 

Who drew the Marree Man? It wasn't the local Aboriginals, who own the land. They were angry that someone had plowed through their ancestral land and damaged the protected native plants. A local man who had a tractor and was said to have access to the then-new technology of GPS was suspected. An American flag was found on the ground at the work, throwing suspicion on American defense workers about three hours away. An Australian artist said he did it, but his story wasn't that credible. Tour operators were suspected, because they would have profited from the art. More clues were unearthed when a hotel owner began to restore the Marree Man in 2015, after erosion had blurred the lines. Although there are plenty of suspects, we may never know exactly who carved the geoglyph into the Outback. 

(Image credit: USGS/NASA) 

It's the season for horror films, and Screen Junkies fans has demanded a retrospective of The Thing. John Carpenter's movie The Thing was not a hit when it was first released in 1982, and barely made back its budget. It was depressing, horrifying, and gross. But what really did it in was the other movies we were seeing at the time- and its R rating. Critics panned it, one saying that it was "bereft, despairing, and nihilistic," which turned out to be appealing for later audiences who watched it on home video. And those special effects! More than 40 years later, The Thing is considered a horror classic, with amazing special effects and psychological themes to give it that added terror. 

Screen Junkies finds plenty to skewer about The Thing, but it does what it set out to do. The movie requires a particular type of viewer to appreciate it. Sometimes you just need to watch a movie that's depressing, horrifying, and gross to forget your problems.  

Redditor gomets167 always dresses up in a Tom Hanks role for Halloween. This year, he's Walt Disney from the 2013 movie Saving Mr. Banks. Compare his Halloween getup (alongside P.L. Travers) with the lead image at the movie site. Pretty good portrayal, huh? The kicker is that he's been doing Tom Hanks roles for Halloween for 14 years now! He says he's going to keep doing this until Hanks himself notices, but I doubt he would stop even then. After all, Hanks has been in more than a hundred movies plus a few TV roles. Continue reading to see his previous costumes.

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones are the Map Men (previously at Neatorama), ready to explain geography to us and entertain us at the same time. This one is about Netherlands, which jutted out into the sea and resembled Swiss cheese for most of its history. The area of its land rose and fell with the whims of the ocean, and settling there was a problem when you could expect floods at any time. So the Dutch engineered dikes and dams to hold back the sea and create fertile farmland below sea level. It wasn't done all at once, but bit by bit over time. The biggest project was launched in the early 20th century. 

There's an epiphany that comes early in the video when I learned, for the first time, that Dutch windmills aren't there to grind grain. They aren't actually windmills at all, but pumps to control the water level! Along the way, we get plenty of jokes about Netherlands. There' a 90-second skippable ad at 4:25. The last 90 seconds is promotional, too. -via Laughing Squid 

The TV series Columbo ran from 1971 to 2003, which is a long time. But it didn't air every week; instead, it was a part of a rotating lineup of series under the title The NBC Mystery Movie (later The ABC Mystery Movie). You could catch an episode every three weeks or every three months or so. That's very different from the way people consume old TV series today, by binge-watching. That's what Rob Beschizza did recently, and he noticed quite a few things in the Columbo formula that slipped by the original audience who didn't know any better or didn't care.

Lieutenant Frank Columbo (if that is his real name) was beloved by audiences because he was a disheveled public servant who didn't put on airs yet always got his man. But the way he did it is anathema to professional police procedures. He worked alone, manipulated suspects, and never informed them of their Miranda rights, at least until after he conned them into confessing. Beschizza lays out nine points to prove that Columbo was clever, but quite underhanded in his investigations at Boing Boing. 

In the early 12th century, two children, a boy and a girl, appeared in the village of Woolpit in England. According to the scant documentation we have, they spoke a strange language that wasn't English and they had green skin. Strangely, they weren't burned at the stake, and the villagers seem to have accepted them. They just assumed the children were fairies, a perfectly logical explanation. When the girl learned enough English, she told a story that made no sense at all. But as we look back at the incident now, there are (at least) three possibilities.

1. They were aliens from outer space. 

2. They suffered from a rare but real medical condition that made them look green.

3. In the many years between the incident and the surviving written accounts, the story could have changed a lot, growing like legends do. 

Weird History looks at the possible explanations for the green children of Woolpit. 

This adorable face belongs to a tanuki, often called a raccoon dog outside of Japan. Despite the name, it is neither a raccoon nor a dog. Well, it is a canid, but not closely related to wolves or domestic dogs. It's more like a distant cousin of the fox. Native to Japan, tanukis have some adaptations that you wouldn't expect from a canine, like the ability to climb trees, and hibernate in cold climates while not hibernating in milder areas. They live in underground burrows and are monogamous. 

While raccoon dogs do not make good pets, tanukis have learned to live in urban areas like raccoons. They are popular figures in Japanese art and folklore, going back hundreds of years. Tanukis are portrayed as mischievous sprites that can shapeshift, a reputation that probably reflects their shy and nocturnal nature. Read about the tanuki and see plenty of pictures at The Ark in Space.

(Image credit: Cloudtail the Snow Leopard) 

Everyone loves the 1929 cartoon The Skeleton Dance, because few things are funnier than grinning skeletons dancing as if they were alive. We see such things every Halloween, but if you were to put yourself into 1929, the vision of skeletons dancing to music was merely an idea evoked by artworks and silent film. Composer Carl Stalling had pondered the idea of skeletons dancing in time to a soundtrack for years, and presented the idea to Walt Disney. But a cartoon with no story was something that hadn't been done before. Stalling's idea was to have the music driving the animation instead of just filling in the background. Animator Ub Iwerks threw his heart into the idea, and The Skeleton Dance became the very first in a new series called Silly Symphonies. West of Neverland tells us how the short came about. 

You can see the full cartoon The Skeleton Dance in a previous post. 

Visit the little US Post Office in the town of Hoolehua on the Hawaiian island of Molokai and you can mail an entire coconut as is. The US Postal Service informs us that the practice began in 1991 when the then-postmaster came up with the idea as a way to visitors and residents to share with friends around the world an unusual bit of Molokai culture.

The program is called Post-A-Nut. Every year, this post office sends out about 3,000 coconuts, including 700 to addresses outside of the United States. The post office provides the coconuts and decorating materials for free. The customers do have to pay for postage, though, which results in the coconuts becoming covered with stamps.

-via The Takeout

Those who grew up with digital cameras and later smartphones have no clue how much was involved in getting a simple photograph in earlier times. You could go to a photography studio, but that was expensive and time-consuming. Cameras were expensive, too, but you also had to pay for film, and then pay to have the film developed, which took several days. You only shot a scene once because there were limited frames on that roll of film, and you didn't know if the picture was any good until you got the prints back. 

So it was no wonder that when Anatol Josepho introduced the first practical automated photo booth in New York in 1925, people flocked to use it. For a coin or two, you got to see yourself in a series of permanent photographs in just a few minutes! No photographer, camera, film, or developer needed- that was all automated. Of course, you took your chances on the quality of those photos, but they captured a moment in time that you could always look back on and remember. A new exhibition at The Photographers Gallery in London explores the history and impact of the photo booth. Read an interview with several experts on the subject and see images from the exhibit at It's Nice That. -via Nag on the Lake 

The actual title of this video is "Why Do Pringles Come In A Can?" I thought everyone knew why, but then again, a lot of people weren't around when Pringles first became a thing. A long time ago, I lived in a town with a Pringles factory, and knew people who actually made them. See, potato chips are made by slicing a potato very thin and then frying or baking the slices until they are crisp. That's not how Pringles are made at all. I had assumed they were made from mashed potatoes, but that's not the full story, either. 

Pringles are the only potato chips, er, crisps, that come in a can because real potato chips won't fit in a can. But the can has an advantage in that Pringles can be shipped anywhere and arrive intact. I was in Hong Kong once trying my best to find something to eat that wasn't seafood, and Pringles was the only thing I recognized. I couldn't read the label, but I knew what was in that can. -via the Awesomer 

In 2003, when Chilean television aired the original trilogy of Star Wars films, an inventive broadcast team digitally added commercials into the story so that characters appeared to reach for iced bottles of Cerveza Cristal brand beer at appropriate moments. A collection of these commercials went viral about a year and a half ago.

They inspired imitators within the Trekkie community, notably YouTuber VitaZed. You can find all five of them on his channel. My favorite is a pivotal scene above from Star Trek: First Contact in which Zefram Cochran hesitates during the launch of humanity's first warp-capable vessel.

-via Holodeck Four

Nikon Small World has announced the winners of their 51st photomicrography competition. First Place goes to the photo above of a rice weevil perching on a grain of rice. It was taken by Zhang You of China at 5X magnification using image stacking. I was also impressed with the Third Place winner.



These are grains of pollen caught in the web of a garden spider, by John-Oliver Dum of Medienbunker Produktion in Germany. This is at 20X magnification with image stacking. Notice how tiny the dew drops are! You can browse the ranked top twenty images in this gallery, plus the honorable mentions and images of distinction. Click on a photo to bring up its information.  

By the way, there is a difference between photomicrography and microphotography. Wikipedia explains that photomicrography is the art of photographing very small things through a microscope, and microphotography is the art of shrinking photographs down to microscopic size. Google's AI thinks they are the same thing.  

Millions of years ago, North America was the first and only home of camels. The fossil record is full of them, around 100 species of camel that are now extinct. They ranged from tiny little herbivores that stood two feet tall to species that resembled deer to the giant Camelops that stood seven feet tall at the shoulder. When continents shifted and land bridges arose, these North American camels spread to the Old World and became the dromedary and Bactrian camels we have today. They migrated south and evolved into llamas, vicunas, and alpacas. Then camels in North America died out, the last ones disappearing around 13,000 years ago. 

In the 20th century, American camel fossils took a backseat to horse fossils, which also flourished and then went extinct in America. Indeed, many camel skulls were misidentified as horses. But paleontologists are now focusing on the astonishing diversity of extinct American camels. Read what they've found at Smithsonian.   

(Image credit: Jonathan Chen)