There’s a lot of conversation surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence, especially when it made big waves in 2022 by dipping its toes into generating artwork. Programmers and tech companies created various AI models that can give their users any artwork with just a simple set of words or prompts. 

This accessibility and how easy it can create artwork without spending hours slaving away with paper, pen, or any digital drawing software opened the doors to multiple “AI artists,” much to the dismay of traditional artists.

But why are they mad at this entire AI issue? Well, it’s because of one simple thing: original traditional artwork is being used so that these machines and models can generate artwork. 

Essentially, an AI is trained by feeding them (or inputting) various existing art pieces so, in turn, it can create its “own.” So it begs the question: who gets the credit? There’s a big open field that concerns ownership, copyright, and even the definition of art itself. 

My Modern Met takes a deep dive into the conversation about AI art and ownership. Check their full piece on the topic here.

Image credit: WW/Pexels

When opportunities arise, you need to nab them by the hand! 

This is what exactly Quinn Miller has done during the lockdown in March 2020. Before his venture into his current money-making business, Miller worked at an ad-tech startup in California. But when the 2020 lockdown happened, he struggled to succeed in work. 

He then turned to start a business with his savings. After reading on Twitter how people can make passive income via vending machines, his interest was piqued. Deciding to take the plunge, he bought and installed his first two machines in June and July for around $5,000 just as a side hustle. 

He quit his ad-tech job to focus his time and energy on his new business a few months after. Somehow, this risky move actually paid a lot. As in, he gets $30,000 per month and he only needs to work for six hours a week on vending machine operations. Talk about a good bargain! 

Quin Miller shares his five-step process on how to get your own vending machine business started here, for those who are interested!

Image credit: Erik Mclean

Have you ever wondered what those balls on power lines are for? Actually, have you seen those colorful spheres on electrical lines? If you have, then we’re here to tell you what they are and what they are for! 

These objects are called marker balls. They are mostly there for visibility and to indicate where power lines are so that low-flying aircraft can avoid them. These balls can be seen on cables on major highways, deep gorges, and valleys. 

Also, there’s an organization that dictates where these spheres should appear! The  Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) makes sure that these aerial marker balls will show up in the places we’ve mentioned earlier to avoid any accidents. 

These balls are made of plastic, a good electric insulator, which is perfect as it sits on power lines. They also come in orange, white, and yellow as the FAA found that they have the best visibility. What’s interesting about these markers is that they are actually bigger than they seem. These markers range from 20 to 36 inches, which is about the circumference of a basketball.

Image credit: Karolina/Pexels

Erwin Perzy wasn't out to make a Christmas decoration or a paperweight when he developed the snow globe around the turn of the 20th century. He was looking for a way to make the overhead light brighter in a surgical suite. But one of his attempts, magnifying light with a globe of water containing metal flakes, looked really pretty, like snow falling in his city of Vienna. From there, he turned the idea into an object containing small landscapes where snow fell when you shook the globe. After World War II, Perzy's son started making Christmas scenes inside the globes to appeal to Americans, and soon the Original Snow Globe Factory was the premiere provider of snow globes worldwide. The company is now headed by Erwin Perzy III, who stills makes snow globes by hand in Vienna.   

All that leaves the question about the most famous snow globe of all- the one that figured prominently in the movie Citizen Kane. There are no records of where the snow globe in the 1941 movie came from, but it has long been assumed that it was made by the Original Snow Globe Factory. Either way, Citizen Kane left its mark on the company. Read the story of the snow globe at Atlas Obscura.

Beginning in the late 18th century, it became the fashion among New Jersey residents those would could afford it to commission a painting of their pet cat in a style that highlighted their reputation for supernatural powers, and the "Jersey Witching Cat" tradition was born. Local artists hated the work. After all, cats are not usually cooperative in sitting for a portrait, and it also clashed with religious ideals. Later on, commissioned portraits were replaced by artists who painted collections of cats in colors that were common in the area, namely tuxedo cats, and sold those to New Jersey residents.

The trend died out around the Civil War, but then re-emerged with the rise of photography. Getting a cat to sit still for a photograph is hard enough, but doubly so in a witch's costume. These photos were sometimes blurred, making them look even more sinister, or else were the product of some photo manipulation which seemed like witchcraft in itself. Many of these witching cat images are collected at the Germantown College Archives in New Germantown, New Jersey. Historian and artist Kazys Varneli has been working with artificial intelligence algorithms to generate more of these witching cat images. A post about the artworks at his website has both originals from the Germantown archives and AI-generated images of witching cats. See if you can tell the difference. (Hint: check out the attribution captions, or lack thereof.) -via Metafilter

The old joke goes that the only reason why people actually watch hockey is for the fights. So why not cut out the boring passing and scoring and focus on just the fights? 

This is the combat sport of ice fighting. It's a lot like mixed martial arts bouts, but takes place on ice rinks by combatants wearing full hockey gear, including skates.

Ice Wars International, which is the athletic league that organizes these fights, has been conducting events this year to growing crowds of spectators. Cowboy State Daily reports that beach bout consists of two one-minute rounds. Most of that limited time is spent in sheer, brutal combat.

Embedded above is a recent ice fight in Canada. The action starts at the 3:20 mark.

-via Dave Barry

Whether glass breaking or a speeding bullet is faster may seem like a silly question, because it's kind of like comparing apples to oranges. They are both fast, like the others are both fruit, but that's about it. How would you measure these things? And how much force does each require to match up with the other? Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys (previously at Neatorama), set up the experiment for our entertainment. What they plan to do is measure the speed at which a .45 caliber bullet fired from a gun compares to the speed a crack in a glass pane will travel in their first six feet. That required the use of their super slow motion cameras, and that's the entire rationale for performing this stunt. You might be surprised by the result, which you'll see in the first three minutes. The rest of the video is Gav and Dan having fun breaking the rest of the glass they bought. -via Digg

Most folks had never heard of a dire wolf until they were featured in the TV series Game of Thrones, in which they looked suspiciously like modern dogs. But there really was a dire wolf in prehistoric North America, an extinct canid species that left skeletons behind at the La Brea tar pits. It was a formidable predator that hunted and ate prehistoric horses and camels, even though it wasn't any bigger than modern wolves. Scientists assumed the dire wolf was an ancestor to the gray wolf.

It was only recently that dire wolf DNA has been sequenced, and the results are surprising. The dire wolf is not an ancestor to the gray wolf. In fact, its closest relative is the African jackal! The most recent common ancestor of dire wolves and gray wolves existed 5.7 million years ago. The resemblance between the two species is a coincidence, or rather an example of convergent evolution. Read more about the real dire wolf at Discover magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Charles R. Knight)

Warning: if by any chance you haven't seen the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz or read the 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this post and the linked article contains spoilers.

When the producers of The Wizard of Oz adapted the story for the big screen, they changed a lot of details and plot points to make them manageable for the production crew, or make them look better in color. The complex and sometimes overly scary story had to be simplified to fit into a feature film format and allow time for the songs. The one big change that was totally unnecessary and confounds today's filmmakers was the decision to make it all a dream. They supposedly did this to make the fantasy more believable to audiences. But that also cut off the possibility of the more modern practice of making sequel after sequel, which would have been easy considering L. Frank Baum had written a slew of books about Oz.

There were many changes made between the book and the film, ten of which you can read about at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: MGM)

The German Nazi Party is best known for the Holocaust and for causing World War II. Those are such enormous things, other Third Reich programs often fly under the radar. While they were busy killing Jewish people and other racial "undesirables," they were also trying to raise the birth rate of pure Aryan children. It was a multi-pronged effort.

German women who bore lots of children would be honored with swastikas in various precious metals, up to a diamond-encrusted swastika earned by one woman who bore 16 babies. These patriotic mothers were also showered with accommodations that made their lives easier. Free maternal care was offered to pregnant women regardless of marital status to dissuade them from having abortions. And young women were recruited to procreate with anonymous SS officers and give their resulting infants to the state. Of course, to take advantage of any of these programs, the parents involved would have to prove that they were of pure Aryan racial stock, going back several generations.

But the worst was the Nazi plan to just take children from territories they occupied. The children were kidnapped before their racial "purity" was determined, and those who didn't pass were not sent back home. Those who did pass the racial test were given to German families, and only a few were ever reunited with their parents after the war. Read about the horrific Lebensborn program and the children affected at Today I Found Out. 

(Image credot: Riksarkivet (National Archives of Norway))

New original Damn Interesting article/episode by @erikanesvold: In 1933, British WWI vet Maurice Wilson hatched an unorthodox plan to reach the still-untouched summit of Everest https://t.co/qnc7BShczf pic.twitter.com/WP8ALPKxdi

— Damn Interesting (@DamnInteresting) December 14, 2022

As far as we know, no human ever reached the peak of Mount Everest until 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary scaled the summit and returned alive. The 1924 British Mount Everest expedition was the most notable attempt, when three teams of two men each attempted the last leg up. Two of the teams returned unsuccessfully, and two men died in the attempt. Maurice Wilson read of the expedition, and thought that it couldn't be that difficult; it's just a mountain. Years later, he was inspired to do something important, a grand gesture of faith, if you will. He remembered Everest and decided he would climb to the summit. The fact that he wasn't a mountain climber did not deter him.

But how would he get to Nepal? Wilson's plan was to fly. He bought a small biplane and got his pilot's license. His plan was to fly to the base of Mount Everest and then climb to the summit. He didn't think he'd really need oxygen bottles, and didn't even know what a crampon was. He never considered altitude acclimation. He didn't have proper maps or flight clearances to even get to the area. And his plane only held enough fuel to travel 740 miles between stops. In 1933, he took off on his big adventure. As you might have guessed by now, it didn't go according to plan. But Wilson managed to get to Everest anyway. Read the story of Maurice Wilson's Everest expedition at Damn Interesting. Or listen to it in podcast form.

Shiloh is an Australian shepherd and Abu is a border collie. They are both very good dogs. Or at least very patient as they get wrapped for Christmas. You can see in their eyes that they consider this a very stupid game, but they love their human so they endure it quite stoically. Why do humans put dogs through such nonsense? As far as dogs know, most of what we do is nonsense and they deal with it because they are good dogs. They don't know whether this Christmas wrapping has a bigger meaning for us or not, but it makes about as much sense to them as when humans go off to work or use a porcelain fixture to do their business. Or bring a tree in the house and put lights on it.

Both Shiloh and Abu were rescued from a neglectful owner, and were adopted by their foster mom in Nebraska. Despite the Christmas wrap, she is not parting with either of them. -via Laughing Squid

In the mid-19th century, the Windham family occupied Felbrigg Hall in the county of Norfolk in the UK. The heir to the family fortune was William Frederick Windham, an eccentric who never fit into his family's high society lifestyle. He was kicked out of Eton and spent his time riding trains and impersonating police. What could the family do about this dissolute young man? Only a couple of weeks after his father died and he inherited the family's assets, he decided he wanted to marry Agnes Willoughby.

Willoughby was personally repelled by this unkempt, socially inept boor, and she never hesitated to say so in his presence.  However, she had no compunction about selling herself when the price was right, and she knew that in this dotty train-fancier she had hit the jackpot.  She agreed to marry him—in return for fifteen hundred pounds a year and nearly twenty thousand pounds’ worth of jewelry.  The happy couple wed on August 30, 1861.  Three weeks later, the new Mrs. Windham ran off to Ireland to join her lover, the famed opera singer Antonio Giuglini, leaving her husband with a pile of bills she had rung up that amounted to nineteen thousand pounds.

Windham and Willoughby's relationship grew even more complicated after that, and involved a famous court case to determine if Windham was a lunatic, which is the focus of Wikipedia's entry on him. But Strange Company goes into more detail about Windham's love life and how it affected his finances. It is a tale both tragic and entertaining.

Christmas is a time when family and friends gather together to share the joy of the season. Or at least that's what we would like to happen. But every year, Mom gets stressed out trying to make everything perfect, Grandma lets you know what's wrong with everything, and every family has that one guy who knows everything and is determined to explain it to you. You know who these folks are because the same stuff happens every year. It's a good thing we love them. Trey Kennedy acts out all the people you don't see often, but they are always the same when you meet up with them at your Christmas family gathering.

Well, brains are certain computers, in the most basic sense of the word. They are responsible for making decisions and running programs and commands, so to speak, that will allow our bodies to move or react in a certain way. 

Our brains are capable of making decisions up to 10 seconds before we are consciously aware of them. So that part of our body is one busy bee. In fact, even experts are still puzzled by a lot of things about the central area of the nervous system. One of them is the issue of consciousness. Known to neuroscientists as the "hard problem of consciousness," which refers to the question of why it exists or what exactly it is. 

Some researchers try to answer this problem by comparing the brain to quantum mechanics. It is still not a popular idea in the field, as neuroscientists and physicists believe that our consciousness happens via classical physics, not at the small, quantum scale. Also, it’s because testing this quantum theory out requires measuring human brain activity at such small levels. Read more about brains and quantum entanglement here! 

Image credit: MART PRODUCTIONS