Steve Gourley was skiing down Davis Gulch in Utah with his GoPro helmet camera on Sunday when he was caught in an avalanche. The hard slab avalanche was unintentionally triggered by another skier, and Gourley was carried along 650 vertical feet, but was not completely buried. He was wearing a backpack with emergency equipment and helmet, but no airbag. He describes his moves in a comment at YouTube.

I was able to get close to the crown and behind a lot of the mass. My main efforts were to try to stay upright and facing downhill. I ended up in a whitewater survival position which was difficult to maintain. Everyone thinks you can swim but the characteristics of the snow do not really allow for that. When you try to push off or pull on it, there may be no purchase. When you reset to try again, you can create negative gains and start to roll. I want to say the extra surface area with my poles helped to stabilize and stay on top.

We're glad he made it back okay. Despite the lighthearted music, this was a scary episode. -via Digg

Update: The video has been pulled, but you can still see it at TMZ.

(Image credit: Lietmotiv)

Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?

— Elmo (@elmo) January 29, 2024

Sesame Street's sweet young Muppet Elmo began the week on Monday asking an innocuous question. Little did he know that he opened the floodgates of despair. That Tweet got 140 million views as it went viral, and now has 12,000 comments from people sharing how they are really doing. Many of them were tragic, illuminating the mental health crisis that permeates modern life.

Been there on Nov 1, 2023

— Amanda (@redcardinalva) January 31, 2024

So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life.

— Digested Brain (@digestedbrain) January 30, 2024

😭😭😭😭😭 this not a place for children Mo

— Elij Warner (@ElijWarner824) January 31, 2024

Please remember that Elmo is 5. That's a lot to put on a kid.

— 🔥 Hearts On Gwynn 🔥 (@magnaniNupae) January 30, 2024

Elmo each day the abyss we stare into grows a unique horror. one that was previously unfathomable in nature. our inevitable doom which once accelerated in years, or months, now accelerates in hours, even minutes.

however I did have a good grapefruit earlier, thank you for asking https://t.co/svATFv7ek8

— Hanif Abdurraqib (@NifMuhammad) January 29, 2024

Can you imagine the effect that must have on a happy little Muppet? The team behind the Muppets' accounts (they all have their own Twitter feeds) posted a followup, but for Elmo's sake, the other Sesame Street characters lent their support.

Me here to talk it out whenever you want. Me will also supply cookies. 💙🍪 #EmotionalWellBeing https://t.co/LLF7MzmouY

— Cookie Monster (@MeCookieMonster) January 30, 2024

See some representative Tweets and those by other Muppets at Buzzfeed, or read the whole Twitter thread if you dare. -via Metafilter

There have always been visionaries who predicted technological breakthroughs a long time before they became reality. But is this really so surprising? Visionaries predict things that we want, and engineers spend decades making it happen because it's what we want. Still, if we can put ourselves into the past when those predictions were made, they may well sound ridiculous to us. Tesla's idea of achieving instant global communication by sending signals and even power through the air was thoroughly laughable in its time, but then came radio, then TV, then satellites, and now wifi. We've come a long way from stringing wires along telephone poles.

But that's just technology. There are some other predictions in here that seem quite uncanny, besides Nostradamus that is, whose writings were so poetic you could read anything into them. Some are projected trends, like miniaturing digital laser discs. But how did those guys know that Mars has two moons? We might find a perfectly reasonable explanation at some point.

Everybody knows Peanuts, about Charlie Brown and the gang. It was written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz from 1950 until his death in 2000. From then on, it continued in reruns. There have been 17,897 strips published of Peanuts, which makes it arguably one of the most, if not the most, popular and influential comic strip of all time.

One thing that people may not know, however, is the story of how Charles M. Schulz decided to add Franklin, a black character, into the cast. Franklin appeared first on the July 31, 1968 strip, shown above, and has been featured ever since until his last appearance on November 5, 1999, a few months before Schulz's death.

The period of the late 60s was quite turbulent in US history, as the Civil Rights movement had been underway, and 1968 was, of course, the year when a titan of the movement had been assassinated, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In light of such events, an avid fan of the Peanuts comic strip, Mrs. Harriet Glickman, wrote to Schulz in April 1968, asking him to consider introducing a black child in the Peanuts cast. What followed was a series of letters between Schulz, Glickman, and later on, one of Glickman's black friends, Kenneth C. Kelly, who urged Schulz to pursue the endeavor.

After the correspondence, Schulz was able to persuade his editors to the inclusion of Franklin. It wasn't without some resistance as Schulz had wanted to show Franklin inviting Charlie Brown and his friends to his house, as well as depicting Franklin going to the same school as his friends, which at the time was unheard of in the South.

And just to show how classy and courageous Schulz was, when the president of United Features which published the Peanuts comic strip, called him to change those scenes, he simply replied that they either print them as he drew them or he quits. And the rest is history.

(Image credit: Flashbak)

Published in 1981, Codex Seraphinianus is described as an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, and what it would feel like to experience such a world as you go through the pages.

Its author, Luigi Serafini, is a surrealist artist who spent two and a half years drawing the images and then later, coming up with the language to go with them. Needless to say, he intentionally made the language untranslatable, to further drive the point that the book is trying to make. In his own words, he wants to induce the experience of reading something without exactly knowing how to read it or what you're reading.

It sort of hearkens to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland wherein everything seems, to an outsider, so strange and bizarre. The lyrics from the original Willy Wonka film captures the spirit of Serafini's book, it's a world of pure imagination.

But inasmuch as the images in the book are so otherworldly, there's also a sense of familiarity as it doesn't exactly invent things that are new from the perspective of reality. It's just a hodgepodge of different things, like a thought experiment visualized.

The appeal is definitely in that dynamic between the surreal and the real. Couple that with an indecipherable conlang, and you have a tome that's sure to whet the appetites of curious minds.

And I think, that is at the heart of the matter. Codex Seraphinianus wants to stir our imaginations and draw creativity at the forefront. I think it wants us to feel that excitement when you see something for the first time, and have the nagging feeling of wanting to understand it, like an itch that you just have to scratch. Just like Wonderland or the Chocolate Factory, it wants to ignite that sense of wonder in us once again.

(Video credit: Great Big Story/Youtube)

Here's a brief overview of what's inside Codex Seraphinianus.

(Video credit: Curious Archive/Youtube)

It's a question children ask as often as they ask why the sky is blue. Why is pee yellow? Any answer outside of "I don't know" was most likely more entertaining than the truth, which scientists have revealed to us. A previously unknown enzyme called bilirubin reductase is behind it. Bilirubin reductase is not yellow, but it factors into the process.

Our bodies are always producing new red blood cells and eliminating old ones. Old red blood cells release an orange pigment called bilirubin as they die. Several species of gut microbes in our bodies use the enzyme bilirubin reductase to break down the bilirubin into urobilinogen, which turns yellow as it degrades. Biochemists who've been studying the question for more than a century (not the same scientists) knew about bilirubin and urobilinogen, but the step in between them is the discovery that makes it all work. Those microbes producing bilirubin reductase are doing us a great favor, because too much bilirubin causes jaundice. You can read up on the experiments that revealed the new enzyme at Ars Technica.

But what if your urine isn't yellow? You might need to see a doctor.

(Image credit: Turbotorque)

The tschäggättä are villagers who roam the narrow streets of the valley, clanging bells and making mischief dressed as Sasquatch-like creatures. https://t.co/WqyozsgJti

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) January 30, 2024

Name a holiday celebrated anywhere, and there will be some kind of legendary monster associated with it. Carnival is the season of gluttony before the Christian fasting time of Lent leading up to Easter. In most places, Carnival involves parties, parades, masquerade balls, eating, drinking, and various debaucheries that will be forbidden beginning on Ash Wednesday. In Switzerland's Lötschental Valley, they have the added festivity of monsters roaming the streets.

These creatures are called tschäggättä. Villagers dress in fur with padding to make them look taller and wooden masks carved with scary human faces. They ring cowbells and make mischief that once included fights, theft, and assaults, but now involve mainly harmless teasing to folks who come out to see them. We have evidence of the tschäggättä going back more than 200 years, but the tradition could be much older. How did it start? No one, not even those who participate every year, knows. Read what we do know about the tschäggättä of the Lötschental Valley at Smithsonian.

From an individual point of view, time moves in a line from your past to the present and then into the future. All we experience is the present, but we remember the past, and anticipate the future -although we cannot know it until it is the present. But the theory of relativity states that time moves differently for beings moving through space at different speeds, so is their "present" different from ours? And how would different "presents" work? The idea of multiple presents warps the idea of an unknowable future that can be affected by the choices we make in the present. If that's too mind-blowing, maybe we should look at time in a different way to make it mesh with our lived experience. Then there's always the possibility that we are wrong, but how would we ever know? Some scientists have even weirder ideas about how time works. Kurzgesagt takes us through these ideas in ten minutes with a video full of more or less obscure cultural references you may not catch the first time around; the rest of this video is an ad. -via Digg

Fonts hanging out pic.twitter.com/rXUzNNlQp7

— Elle Cordova (@ellerhymes) January 23, 2024

Elle Cordova is a professional musician turned comedian with a flair for intellectual humor. In a recent series of videos, she personifies different fonts. Or are they typefaces? It's hard to tell.Anyway, she perfectly embodies the personality nuances of these fonts.

Redditor 9oRo recently posted a photo of a rejection letter that Disney had sent a woman named Mary V. Ford who apparently applied to them in 1938 for a position related to preparing the cartoons (possibly sketching or drawing) or some other creative work associated with it.

Quite blatantly, the Disney representative who signed the letter told Ford that women were not considered for such positions, as they were only reserved for young men. Furthermore, it stated that the only work available for women were coloring and tracing, for which the representative bluntly advised against applying as there were few openings.

DetectiveAnitaKlew astutely pointed out in the comments that the letter was signed by a woman. While elgringo22 funnily adds how they even added a picture next to her signature.

Comments that followed tried to look at the brighter side of the situation, saying that at the very least, a rejection letter was sent, instead of having no udpate or response at all like what some companies do today. - via Messy Nessy Chic

(Image credit: 9oRo/Reddit)

I don't often go to coffee shops, especially independent ones which usually have that artisanal feel to them, but whenever I did, it always felt the same as with all the rest that I've gone to before. Almost all coffee shops these days follow the trend of the "millennial aesthetic" or some variation of it. And one can't blame them, since that's what it takes to keep their businesses afloat with consumer preferences leaning toward that kind of "experience" or the "Instagrammability" of the cafe.

In this piece, Kyle Chayka dives deep into the tyranny of the algorithm, and how it has shaped, not just coffee shops, but also co-working spaces, startup offices, and every other physical space out there. It breeds homogeneity and monotony. In a diverse world, that does seem odd. But it shouldn't come as a surprise with the rise of the millennial cohort, whose digital savvy brought such aesthetics to the forefront.

Still, what strikes me as the most crucial in this analysis is the irony of the disproportionality of benefits that platforms such as Instagram or Yelp offer businesses. Although they are great tools to use for promotions and advertising, in the long run, they make it harder for businesses to maintain engagement without being taxed by the platforms themselves.

In the end, the biggest winners are still just the big corporations who have monopoly over these spaces and means to reach millions. Even we, the consumers, are at their mercy as our information, likes, dislikes, shares, and follows become commodified. In an age when individuality and uniqueness are celebrated, it does get to the point when the sameness of it all becomes mundane. - via Messy Nessy Chic

(Image credit: Jonas Jacobsson/Unsplash)

We know that the earth is in constant motion, not just rotating on its axis or revolving around the sun, but also from within its crust and mantle. The tectonic plates have been shifting around and that has caused many geographical changes to occur.

The video above from ArcGIS gives us a short timelapse of how the supercontinent, pangea, broke apart and drifted such that the seven continents arrived at their current locations that we know today. The video starts from 200 million years ago and moves at a pace of 5 million year increments at the rate of 2.5 million years per second.

Not only that, Open Culture also explores what the future of earth's geography will be as well with the help of a video from Christopher Scotese titled Future Plate Tectonics: Pangea Proxima.

In it, Scotese postulates that in 250 million years, the seven continents will once again merge together to form Pangea Proxima.

The supercontinent is formed in multiple stages which starts with the merging of Africa, Europe, and Asia in 25 to 50 million years; which then proceeds with the movement of Australia and Oceania to merge with Southeast Asia from the 50- to 100-million-year mark; and from the 150- to 200-million-year mark, the Americas and the Africa-Eurasia-Australian mega-continent will drift toward each other until they eventually become Pangea Proxima with parts of the former Indian Ocean at the center.

Beyond this, another study suggested something somewhat similar to Scotese's Pangea Proxima, but with a different name, Pangea Ultima, and a more tragic end for mammals as the extreme temperatures would make 92% of earth's surface uninhabitable.

(Video credit: ArcGIS/Youtube; Christopher Scotese/Youtube)

British novelist Wilkie Collins met Charles Dickens when they were both doing amateur theater. They became good friends, which was sometimes a drawback when critics pointed out that Collins' novels weren't as good as Dickens. Collins' may not have been as gifted as his friend, but he left a lasting legacy in his works. Collins wrote melodramatic stories in what were called "sensation novels" at the time, that were written to play to the emotions and stir a physical reaction in the reader. Many of them used supernatural elements to elicit a response, but Collins never did. His horrors were real and based on the laws of the time.

See, Collins had a law degree, even though he never practiced law. But he understood the laws of the day, and his novels incorporated them into "the worst that could happen" scenarios for women. Married women had no rights at all, even to their own property. They were at the mercy of their husbands, who, in Collins' stories, could control their autonomy and their very lives. He also explored the themes of poverty, adultery, abuse, inheritance, illegitimacy, divorce, power, and murder. His years of writing coincided with a push for reform in women's rights (which his sensation novels no doubt contributed to), and each story was carefully vetted for contemporary legal accuracy in consultation with Collins' own lawyer. Read about Collins, his works, and the changing laws involving women's rights in Victorian England at Smithsonian.

Could there be a more perfect or hilarious crossover than the Muppets doing Mad Max: Fury Road? There isn't a movie (yet), but the idea is looking pretty good in a series of 20 images by redditor InkSlinger1983 using the artificial intelligence program Midjourney. He's been working on this for some time- this is version 6.

AI still isn't all that great at recreating images of humans, which honestly is a good thing, but putting Muppets into the vehicles works because they come with their own permanent expressions that lend a certain levity to the two-hour chase scene we know as Fury Road. Muppets fit into the roles of the War Boys, the Doof Warrior, Immortan Joe, and the other drivers. InkSlinger1983 tells us he tried, but couldn't recreate Mad Max or Furiosa because Midjourney kept wanting to render them as humans.

   

See all 20 images in a slideshow at reddit, or in a one-page gallery at Geeks Are Sexy.

Some pretty high-profile crimes have been solved by examining how the perpetrators, or accused innocents, use language. The way a person uses words, grammar, and puctuation creates a personal style and vocabulary that's somewhat like a fingerprint. Linguists know how individual these styles can be, and forensic linguists detect these patterns as clues to uncovering the truth in crimes.

When I listened to this video, I was deeply impressed by what forensic linguists can do, but I could also see how we all can learn these skills with time and effort. I'm no linguist, but having dealt with the written word for so long (and the spoken word before that), I know my own writing habits and try to correct for their overuse, not always successfully. I also recognize the styles and habits of writers whose words I proofread and edit. Avid readers recognize the style of their favorite author even when the byline is different. And everyone knows when someone close to them is drunk when they are texting. Language is something we all learn as children, but the way we use it eventually gains its own personal stamp.