Max Read found himself pulling up familiar old movies to watch while he was at home with a new baby during lockdown. He got to thinking about what they had in common and why he liked a particular kind of movie so much, and so did his contemporaries, Gen X men who are now raising kids and populating the internet. He dubbed these movies Dad Thrillers.

If you're anywhere near me in age, you know the kind of movies I'm talking about: Movies set on submarines; movies set on aircraft carriers; movies where lawyers are good guys; movies where guys secure the perimeter and/or the package; movies where a guy has to yell to make himself heard over a helicopter; movies where guys with guns break the door into a room decorated with cut-out newspaper headlines. Movies starring guys like Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Costner, and Wesley Snipes and directed by guys like Martin Campbell, Wolfgang Petersen, Philip Noyce, and John McTiernan. Movies where men are men, Bravo Teams are Bravo Teams, and women are sexy but humorless ball-busters who are nonetheless ultimately susceptible to the roguish charm of state security-apparatus functionaries. Movies that dads like.

He not only identified and named these movies, Read analyzed them and gives us a guide to recognizing them, with several graphs and charts that you will relate to. See them in his recent newsletter. If this is your kind of movie, you'll find plenty of titles that you'll want to watch, even if you've seen them more than once before.  -via Boing Boing

Legit medieval unit of measurement: the ass-load. pic.twitter.com/hytzNQiEIp

— Dr. Renée Trilling (@ReneeTrilling) November 16, 2021

Dr. Renée Trilling is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her teaching and research emphases are in medieval English literature, so it is no coincidence that she discovered this passage in Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500-1500, a scholarly anthology published in 2017. Her photo is from p. 119 of Dr. Lucy Donkin's contribution titled "Earth from Elsewhere: Burial in Terra Sancta beyond the Holy Land."

Donkin's passage here relates to the movement of dirt from the grave of Saint Peter by Saint Lolan, an 11th Century Scottish bishop. That's a long haul from Rome, but four well-built asses were up to the charge. 

-via Rebecca B

In Shakepeare's Twelfth Night, the insuffrable Malvolio reads from a letter stating that "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon 'em." Let us count this woman among the second category, for she must have labored for many years to achieve such facial athleticism. Let us hope that she is able to display her skills to even more demanding music, such as "Flight of the Bumblebee."

This video comes courtesy of the mysterious blogger Born in Space, who comments that everyone has a secret talent. What is yours? I share this woman's ability, although I need fishing hooks and line to do it properly.

One email changed this woman’s life. Not in the sense of money, or some grand opportunity to obtain power and fame. Kama Einhorn was emailed by a guy in Florida about her being his half-sister. When she looked at the guy’s profile picture, he looked like her long-lost twin-- except she didn’t have a twin. 

They initially thought that Einhorn’s father had an affair with her new brother’s mother. However, after speaking to family members, it turns out there was no affair at all. The two individuals had been conceived from donor sperm. The donor had been a resident at Yale New Haven Hospital, where scientists were pioneering intrauterine insemination. Read the full story here. 

Image credit: Brian Rea via The New York Times 

This man was purposely hidden from sight. Archaeologists discovered a skeleton of a young man with stab wounds. This body led them to a 1300-year-old Chinese murder mystery in a tomb raiders' shaft. Experts believe that the murder took place between 640 and 680 AD. In addition, the man, who was estimated to be around 25-years-old, was probably alive when he was thrown into the shaft and left to die. Tragic.

"The victim was dumped in this shaft to purposely kept from sight," the team wrote. "The strategy of hiding victims’ bodies in existing tombs or graveyards as a means of disposal, akin to 'hiding a leaf in the forest,' has been practiced since antiquity."

Image credit: Qian Wang

Well, people who live in Silicon Valley are smart people, so this development shouldn’t really be unexpected. Matt Krisiloff, owner of  Conception wanted to help biology labs in deciphering the recipe needed to copy how an embryo develops in order to copy it and transmute any cell into an egg.“I was interested in the idea of ‘When can same-sex couples have children together?’” Krisiloff told Technology Review. “I thought that this was the promising technology for doing this.”

Conception is the largest commercial establishment that specializes in vitro gametogenesis, which refers to turning adult cells into gametes—sperm or egg cells. The company is trying to make replacement eggs for women. Learn more about Krisiloff and his company’s pursuits here. 

Image credit: NICOLáS ORTEGA

It was a buy one get one for free kind of deal! 

Jane Pearson and her husband were surprised to find a cat in the house they planned to buy. Thinking that the current homeowners would take the animal with them once the transactions were finalized, they didn’t pay attention to the cat lounging on the home’s screened porch. However, the Pearsons were informed that the cat would be a permanent fixture in the house. 

The previous owners of the home took care of the kitten, Hidey. The wife kept her well-fed, loved, and cared for until the woman developed Alzheimer’s disease and could no longer take care of Hidey. Eight weeks after the woman died, the husband sold the house to Pearsons. “As we talked, it became apparent that she was just the wife’s cat, and the man missed his wife so much,” said Jane. Learn how the Pearsons ended up taking care of the cat here! 

Image credit: janerypetbeds

Quantum mechanics is complicated. It’s a fundamental theory in physics that tries to explain or understand the environment around us in terms of atoms and subatomic particles. For people who would just like to know this concept on a surface level, or a general level, the technical jargon and other scientific computations and concepts involved in quantum mechanics can be quite a headache! Rajasekaran Rajagopalan writes to Big Think’s Ask Ethan asking for an understandable explanation on how the physics theory works. Check the full piece here. 

Image credit: Anton Maksimov juvnsky

移動してないけど人の脳は矢印に逆らえないのデース pic.twitter.com/wCx22ZhO2I

— じゃがりきん (@jagarikin) November 4, 2021

Japanese digital artist @jagarikin serves up the trippiest optical illusions on a regular basis. If you look closely at the circles above, you'll see that the black and white patterns move consistantly, and the circles themselves never move. But your eyes, or rather your brain, makes the circles go in the direction the arrow is pointing. Let's see that same illusion in a more colorful format.

なんと動いてません#ド直球に言いますがフォローしてください pic.twitter.com/qthgo7k2UN

— じゃがりきん (@jagarikin) April 21, 2021

Are the circles moving? Yes, the colors in them are going around and around. But the circles themselves aren't traveling relative to the background, that's just your brain at work once again. We've certainly embraced the symbolic meaning of an arrow, haven't we? But wait, what if that's not it at all?

The incredible thing with this is that if you look at the image from an angle at a bit of a distance, there is no "movement", the movement only happens when you look at it straight on.

— Jeremy Fisk #FBPE (@FiskJeremy) November 14, 2021

Well, hooda thunket, the arrows have nothing to do with it. So what makes these circles appear to move? ScienceAlert clues us in. If you look closely, you'll see a very thin border on the outside and inside of each circle. It's this border that changes in contrast with the background and the rest of the circle, and therefore changes your perception. The border movement is not consistant, but is coordinated with the appearance of the arrows. Whoa! They go on to explain how this trick works on our brains. Still, understanding it doesn't make the effect go away. -via Damn Interesting

🐍 This has got to be one of the weirdest murders ever: a man in India was convicted of the murder of his wife, with the murder weapon being a deadly cobra.

👻 Do you need to prove that a house is not haunted? Who you gonna call?

🦠 Neat: cryo-electron tomography lets scientists look at teeny tiny stuff inside of cells.

🍰 Family gatherings are almost always improved with cakes, and I think these Thanksgiving cakes gone wrong are no exceptions. If anything else, the sheer wrongness of these cakes will bring the family closer together.

🛵 If you need to escape an office meeting quickly, there's no better way than to unfold the eBike you've got stowed under the desk and ride away in style.

🐊 Gators don't make good house pets, so when they need to be rescued, they end up in a place like this shelter for rescued alligators.

🎄 A bar in Texas sensibly banned Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas" until December 1. Thankfully, you can listen to that song simply by going to practically any store in the mall by now. But if you do go to the mall, be kind to the workers there, because they've been listening to aural torture Christmas music all day long.

❤️ Lastly, you may like your local grocery store, but not like this couple! They love the Berkeley Bowl Grocery Store so much that they took their engagement photos there. Romance on aisle 9!

More neat posts over at our new sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus, Supa Fluffy and Pop Culturista.

Image: Ganesh SahSudi/Wikipedia

Toot? Yes, but more than that. You might think you pass gas a lot, maybe even an abnormal amount, but an average person farts 10 to 20 times a day, and can produce up to 1,500 milliliters of gas. That's normal, even if it's embarassing. But if you notice changes in your flatulence, and not just in the sense that you start paying more attention, then the gas you pass can tell you what's going on in your body. Fart a lot more than you used to? You could be pregnant, or maybe you're just getting older. You might be starting to become lactose intolerant, which can happen at any age. Or it could be a sign of several different maladies. There are other possibilities as well. Discover magazine goes over what to look for, when to see a doctor, and tips on how to stop farting so much.

(Image credit: Towsonu2003~commonswiki) 

Yeah, I know, we had an Honest Trailer for Dune less than two months ago. But that was for the 1984 movie. If you're a fan, you have probably already seen the 2021 version in theaters. So has Screen Junkies, and they are here to give us their honest opinion. Spoiler alert: the story is just as complicated as it ever was, but they helpfully explain the basic setup, which is itself rather complex. There are other spoilers, I guess, but nothing that would diminish your enjoyment of the film. Yes, there are comparisons to Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and other space, fantasy, and time travel adventures. And a very large cast to introduce. 

Since the beginning of railroad travel, there have been people hitching a ride on freight trains. This lifestyle reached a peak during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when thousands of unemployed men traveled around the country looking for work. We called them hobos. You may have read about the graffiti they left for each other at railroad stops, cryptic symbols that conveyed information such as how welcoming a town was, whether work was available, and who was likely to give a man a meal.

The truth is, however, that men who spent decades riding the rails are unfamiliar with such a code. People who tell of the hobo code know because they read it somewhere, probably in a newspaper, in which pictures of the code were known to be staged. The one hobo who actually wrote about it was most likely trolling. It's true that hobos left graffiti, but it was for a completely different reason, which you can read about at Atlas Obscura.

For some time now, we've been referring to the history of cinema as a century, but that's not quite accurate anymore. It's more than a century and a quarter at this point. This restored and colorized sequence was filmed in 1896. It features Pope Leo XIII, the first pope to ever appear in a motion picture (and who was also noted for his preferred wine). Leo was born in 1810, during the reigns of Napoleon and King George III, and was 86 years old when the film was shot. It is thought that this makes him the earliest-born person to ever appear in a motion picture. If anyone was born before 1810 and can be seen in moving pictures, I'd like to see them. Meanwhile, enjoy a blessing from the pope, 125 years after the fact.

What makes a good song good? It may sound like a silly question, since everyone has their own tastes, but there are some songs that become worldwide hits, and some songs that stick around decades after their time. They must have something in common.

Scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark looked at Spotify to see what people listen to throughout the day. They found that the type of music preferred varies over a 24-hour cycle, and certain types of music tend to please people in different blocks of the day. These blocks were divided into morning, afternoon, evening, night, and late night/early morning (in radio, those are called dayparts). They found that slower songs are preferred in the morning, faster tunes in the afternoon, and dance music in the evening.

So what song has the features that would make it popular in all parts of the day? "Every Breath You Take" by the Police. The 1983 hit is not extreme in any of the audio features studied, and many consider it bland, but it works in any part of the day. Whether that makes it "good" is a different question altogether. Most musicians would rather produce a song that people love part of the day than a song that is acceptible around the clock.

The original paper did not mention lyrics or a song's subject matter in the audio features studied. The audio features were divided and ranked by artificial intelligence. Read more about the research at NPR.  -via Damn Interesting