20/ pic.twitter.com/sFxrwpUOI3

— 0xDesigner (@0xDesigner) April 2, 2023

The subreddit /r/ProgrammerHumor shares the joys, frustrations, and irreverent jokes from the world of computer programming. In 2017, the members held an informal contest to develop the worst possible volume control from the perspective of user experience (UX). These include selections that are necessarily random, difficult to manipulate, or deceptively labeled.

Twitter user 0xDesigner rounded up the best in a thread. Many of them include uses of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", which should, of course, always be played on full blast. That's hard to do when the slider bounces around the higher you raise the volume.

When Furbys became the "it" toy 25 years ago, they creeped us out. These little toys spoke a language you couldn't understand, but over time they learned to communicate in the language they heard and said some pretty personal things to you or your child. All these years later, technology has given us open source coding, artificial intelligence, warfare drones, and robots that can shoot guns. But Furbys can still creep us out. Especially when they've been skinned.

i hooked up chatgpt to a furby and I think this may be the start of something bad for humanity pic.twitter.com/jximZe2qeG

— jessica card (@jessicard) April 2, 2023

That little robot had to think about it a minute, but then went ahead and told us exactly what we did not want to hear. In the Twitter thread, Jessica Card told us how she hooked up this nightmare.

hardware:

i’m not a hardware wiz so @kenkeiter really mentored me on this!

skinned the furby, isolated the DC motor wires, soldered on male extension to plug into breadboard. hooked up an h bridge on the breadboard to the pi. control motor via python and run it when it speaks

— jessica card (@jessicard) April 3, 2023

Just because you can do it, doesn't mean that you should. Card also referenced Roko's basilisk, which is another dimension of terrifying. Have we already sealed our fate? -Thanks, Brother Bill!

While preparing for post-apocalyptic travel across the barren wastelands of what was once your hometown, you'll need a bike that won't become useless after the first flat tire. YouTuber user The Q has a solution: making functional tires out of tennis balls.

Note that there's a lot of prep work that you'll want to do before the downfall of the civilization and regular electrical power. The Q made small rings of PVC pipe and used them to mount the balls on the rim of the wheels. Attaching the rings required the construction of a custom jig that drove balls inside the rings without rupturing them.

The finished product looks like a rough ride, but functional--at least enough to keep you ahead of the cannibals that have been following you on foot for several days.

-via Hack A Day

Every one of the 50 states has a flag, but you probably only know your own state's design. Yeah, Mississippi's flag redesign was featured here, and Utah's new design has been in the news, and New Mexico's flag is often ranked the best, but otherwise, they all seem to run together. You get the idea that they were all done in a hurry by someone with no design experience. Then you rarely saw your state flag because it's ugly, and no one was bothered by it and never thought about making it better. CGP Grey lays out some vexillology rules and standards, and then gives each state's flag a grade. Most of them fail, and deservedly so. A few are good for a laugh.

In the discussion at reddit, the biggest disagreement is with Grey's opinion of purple and the grade that Colorado got. The friend who sent me this video vastly underestimated its length, because he found it so interesting. -Thanks, Bicycle Bill!

There is a point to discovering what kind of cosmetics people use back in the day as we can catch a glimpse of what their manufacturing process would look like, as well as the materials they used to create these products. Scientists were able to recreate a perfume that is close to what Cleopatra, the Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, wore.

The process used to determine the scent the pharaoh of Egypt used in her prime was paleobotany, the study of ancient plants via fossils found in rocks. Additionally, they turned to recipes recorded in Egyptian texts and inscriptions on temple walls. The results of their work were published in Near Eastern Archaeology back in September 2021 attempted to identify and recreate the scent, which they called “Eau de Cleopatra.” 

They were able to recreate a scent that had a spicy base note of freshly ground myrrh and cinnamon, which added a hint of sweetness. “It has remained potent for nearly two years, a quality associated with Egyptian perfumes already in Theophrastus’s time,” the researchers wrote.

It’s unclear however if this recreation was the same thing. According to Hyperallergic’s Elaine Velie, some Egyptian descriptions for perfumes contained unclear depictions of ingredients used in making the concoction. 

Image credit: Sean Coughlin/Institute of Philosophy/Czech Academy of Sciences

Insane. 

A new cosmic photo taken by the James Webb Space Telescope showed an instance of our space being warped and bent. The image features a cluster of galaxies looking like something heavy almost made them move closer together. In the huge photo, we can compare it to one section of the bed changing to accommodate a weight of a heavier object resting on that area. 

Well, our comparison seems to match the reasoning as to why these galaxies, which are around 6.3 billion light-years away, look distorted and magnified. This was due to gravitational lensing, a phenomenon described by the European Space Agency as something that happens “when a massive celestial object such as a galaxy cluster causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime for light to be visibly bent around it, as if by a gargantuan lens.”

Read more about this cluster of galaxies here.

Image credit: ESA / Web // NASA / CSA / J. Rigby

Not really. You can, however, delete the history listed on your computer if you’re worried about somebody seeing some websites or queries you deem embarrassing, like a medical question or some NSFW content. 

You can delete your browser’s search history by clearing the data of your browser. Some applications offer the “delete history” or “clear data” button as well. However, that only guarantees deletion from your device. On the off chance that a police department is searching through your phone or computer, then something will turn up (we hope that you are not in this situation, though). 

Traces of your searches can be seen elsewhere, according to Eric Santanen, an associate professor at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. “For example, if you are logged into a Google account and perform a web search, Google will retain a list of all searches you have performed,” he shared. “Other search engines tend to retain similar sets of data for analysis and sale to other organizations.”

Read more about the topic here!

Image credit: Anete Lusina

The Colôrobètch is a bogey that personifies the bise or icy wind. Known from Namur, Belgium, it nips unprotected children with its red beak until their skin becomes red, cracked, and bleeding.

A Book of Creatures is a project by an artist named Emile. She draws legends, myths, and cryptids from all over the world and tells us their stories. As drawn, they're both whimsically cute and terrifying. You have to wonder at the imaginations that brought these animals to existence.  

Usilosimapundu is a colossal creature from Zulu folklore. He literally carries ecosystems on his back, and his head is an enormous boulder. A swallowing monster, he is a personification of landslides.

The Marool is the anglerfish or monkfish in Shetland folklore. It has many eyes and sings wildly with joy when a ship capsizes.

You can see the full collection of legendary creatures at A Book of Creatures at Instagram. Bored Panda has a roundup of 40 of them plus an interview with the artist.

You don't have to be young to have the wrong idea about the 1980s. Some of us who lived through them only found out the real story later, or else got our timelines mixed up. At the time, it was just the way the world was: stranger danger, mullets, and the ozone layer. Those thing can even be related. The ozone layer was being destroyed by chlorofluorocarbons in aerosol sprays, right? And it took a lot of hair spray to get those big hairdos to fluff up just right, right? So it was vanity that destroyed the atmosphere, right? Wrong. While most of the publicity over the ozone layer was in the 1980s, scientists were way ahead of us, and CFCs were already banned in most aerosol cans in the 1970s. So you can blame the Aquanet, but you can't blame the big hairstyles of the '80s. And that's just one thing that makes sense to us now, but just wasn't so. Read the busting of seven misconceptions about the '80s at Mental Floss. You can also listen to it in video form.

In the 1950s, the CIA launched Project MKUltra, in which they experimented with LSD as a possible truth serum, mind control drug, or biological weapon. The head of the project was biochemist Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who has been compared to "Q" from the James Bond movies as well as a mad scientist. The project began with volunteers, but then moved to unwitting subjects, with nefarious results that you can read about in a previous Neatorama post.

Later in the program, Gottlieb wanted to see how the combination of LSD and sex would affect possible subjects, specifically if they would be more easily interrogated and would release private information. To do this, MKUltra set up apartments and hired sex workers to lure subjects in. They were given LSD without their knowledge. After sex, the women would question the men while CIA agents watched through two-way mirrors and listened through planted microphones. Houses were set up for this in New York City and in San Francisco for Operation Midnight Climax. Hundreds of people were subjects of this experiment, and may not have ever realized anything was amiss afterward. Read about Operation Midnight Climax at Messy Nessy Chic. No nudes, but some images might be considered NSFW.

This is Dr. Ronald Weiss of Ottawa. Over the course of his career, he's performed vasectomies on at least 58,789 men including, according to the Toronto Star, celebrities, politicians, and entire hockey teams. He's a pioneer of a no-scalpel method and has a famously low complication rate, which has drawn to him patients as far away as Los Angeles and Japan.

In a 2016 interview for Ottawa magazine, Dr. Weiss shares his origin story. He had been a family physician who did minor operations in his office suite in the early 90s. Word got around that he could snip men quickly and painlessly. Eventually, it became his specialty and he would perform 14 each working day. This is why his wife calls him "the vasectomy machine."

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Vasectomy.Ca

A few years ago, redditor /u/flashtone experienced a hailstorm that damaged his car. It appears that the plastic coating held even when the glass did not, thus keeping the ice from completely penetrating the barrier and damaging the interior.

Some redditors are making off-color jokes about other protective coatings preventing other types of fluids from leaking. Others are pointing out that the car now has, as a feature, a decorative chandelier or mirrored disco ball.

-via Massimo

pic.twitter.com/hZr5NvnUzI

— Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) March 30, 2023

Mushrooms come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Pedro Pascal, the star of The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, has the stylish wardrobe of a man who gets his picture taken a lot. So who wore it better- one of nature's brilliant fungi, or the fun guy?

pic.twitter.com/wfoCQs9AEO

— Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) March 30, 2023

A Twitter thread from Amanda @Pandamoanimum has a dozen of these comparisons. You can enjoy the pretty colors, or just enjoy looking at Pedro Pascal. -via Everlasting Blort

The Royal Navy vessel HMS Bounty set sail from Tahiti to Jamaica in 1789 on the last leg of an arduous mission to import breadfruit to feed enslaved people in the Caribbean. The ship was commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh, a name that has become a metaphor for cruel authoritarianism. Three weeks out, Bligh's second in command, Fletcher Christian, led a mutiny and put Bligh to sea along with 18 loyalists in a small boat. The crew took the Bounty back to Tahiti and then to uninhabited Pitcairn Island to hide out. Bligh and his men rowed all the way to Timor, and eventually made it back to England.

That's what you would know about the mutiny from the movies, made in 1916, 1933, 1935, 1962, and 1984. But what ultimately happened to the people involved? The Bounty's crew fell into several groups: Those who sailed off with Bligh, those who followed Christian to Pitcairn, those who wanted to sail with Bligh but there was no room on the boat, and a group from various factions who decided to remain in Tahiti. Some from each group died or disappeared, and some on Tahiti were arrested for mutiny -and some of them died in a shipwreck. Bligh had a complicated career after the Bounty incident, including another mutiny, this one landlocked, so it was more of a coup. Christian and his men, plus a group of kidnapped Tahitians, disappeared for 35 years. But their descendants were eventually found, having created a strange culture of their own that continues today. Read the multiple complicated outcomes of the Bounty mutiny at Today I Found Out.

International borders can be weird. If you are in Detroit and go south, you end up in Canada (see the comments under this post). Rivers are like that. Near the mouth of the Rio Grande River, the water flow meanders widely, and in 1906 a private irrigation company simplified one of those meanders by cutting a channel across it to shorten the river, essentially changing the US/Mexico border and leaving the American residents of the village of Rio Rico in flux. When that was discovered, the government was like, no big deal, and made the irrigation company pay Rio Rico's residents some money. They were still US citizens, but over the years the oxbow lake left by the re-channeled river dried up and eventually no one knew where the boundaries were. The village made the most of their status during Prohibition, but the anomaly was rediscoverd in the 1960s, which led to further chaos. It's quite a story. -via Damn Interesting