Every city must balance the time and effort of a snow-removal system with the odds of ever having to use it. Montréal gets an average of 82 inches (208 cm) of snow every year. In a city of four million people, that means a lot of street plowing. But Montréal isn't like other cities that plow the streets and push the snow up in big banks on the sidewalk and across driveways to linger for months. Here, snow removal is serious business.

In Montreal, a blizzard is a call to action. With a budget of nearly $180 million and a staff of over 3,000 workers, the city is poised and prepared to manage and remove it all. Once snow begins accumulating, a multiphase operation begins to unfold across the city’s 19 boroughs. Between roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks, the city clears over 10,000 km - roughly the distance between Montreal and Beijing.

Montreal doesn’t just push snow to the curb with plows - instead, snow is picked up by a fleet of trucks and transported up to one of 28 snow dump sites across the city. Throughout a typical winter, roughly 300,000 truckloads of snow are transported - a volume of about 12 million cubic meters.

The city even has a complex system for dealing with the snow it gathers up- it is treated as wastewater to avoid polluting the water supply with salt and road grime. And there's another system for removing parked cars from the streets before plowing. Read a surprisingly interesting writeup on how a city that prioritizes snow removal has perfected its protocols at The Prepared. -via Metafilter

I got a 1947 recipe for "Spice Cookies" (that turned out to be gingersnaps) from a screenshot on reddit. It called for a half cup of spry, which confounded me until I searched around and found that Spry was once a popular brand of shortening. If anyone in my family had written that recipe down, it would have said Crisco. But that's not the only danger in using vintage recipes. An inordinate number of grandmas jotted down recipes for people who know how to cook, and don't bother mentioning you need to refrigerate cookie dough because everyone knows that!

If you're using a recipe from a hundred years ago, you may see confusing fractions without a slash. If you see "1-2 cup of water," you should know that is very different from "1-2 cups of water." You might also see the terms gill, saleratus, slow oven, or butter the size of an egg. These are translated for you, along with other tips on how to read obsolete directions in heirloom recipes at Newpapers.com. Now imagine a hundred years from now that someone found a recipe you jotted down, and they cannot figure out why you wrote "click here." -via Strange Company 

"Why'd you even tell me that? I don't wanna know that kind of stuff."

Network cameras can zoom in from the stands and see football players talking on the field as clearly as if we were right in front of them, but we can't hear what they are saying from that distance. So we may as well make something up, something that has nothing at all to do with football. No one is better at that than the folks at Bad Lip Reading, who have been watching NFL games very closely for about ten years now. Those amazing long-distance shots with assumed conversation are interspersed here with a takeoff on Key & Peele's classic East/West College Bowl sketches. Now that football is gone for at least a few months, this nonsense can remind us not to take professional sports too seriously. -via Digg

See more Bad Lip Reading NFL collections from previous years.

The title of this post is the caption beneath the Instagram picture of two boys who look very much alike. Are they twins? Sort of. Mirriam-Webster defines "quaternary" as "of, relating to, or consisting of four units or members." Which brings us to an explanation of these's babies' relationship.

Identical twins Brittany and Briana met identical twins Josh and Jeremy at a twin festival in 2017. A year later, Brittany married Josh and Briana married Jeremy in a double wedding ceremony. Now they are all named Salyers. The sisters became pregnant a couple of months apart. Jett Salyers was born to Brittany and Josh in January of 2021. Jax Salyers was born to Briana and Jeremy in April of 2021. The two boys were produced by different couples, but each couple has DNA identical to the other couple.



So the two boys are listed as cousins on the family tree. Double cousins, to be precise. But since their parent are identical twins on both sides, any genetic analysis would identify the boys as siblings. Their closeness in age, and the fact that they all live in the same house, would lead any future classmates who see them to consider them as twins. Read more about the four Salyers twins and their sons at the New York Post. -via Boing Boing

How towns are founded depends on when and where they started. Many communities in the US were just neighborhoods, and when enough people were clustered there to need a post office, the USPS named the post office, which became the town name. Then city limits, governance, and services grew up around the community as needed. But today, the process is way more formalized. It's almost impossible to start a new town outside the US, and within the US, it depends greatly on which state laws govern the land. Half as Interesting explains how those laws vary.

But why in the world would you want to start a town? Towns are still subject to state and federal laws, and if you want to establish city services (utilities, policing, schools, etc.), you have to tax people and raise money to get those projects off the ground. It's much easier to just join an already-established town nearby instead of starting from scratch, as they can just expand their existing services instead. This video is not as long as you'd think, because the last two minutes are an ad.

🐦 It's a chilling scene that lasted just a few seconds: a grainy security video camera footage showed how hundreds of birds fell out of the sky and smacked onto a neighborhood street in the city of Cuauhtémoc in northern Mexico. While most of the birds seemed to be able to fly away, scores of dead birds were left on the ground. But what caused the birds to plummet from the sky like that?

🙀 In the 1960s, the CIA trained cats to spy on the Soviets and, needless to say, it went just as well as trying to herd cats.

⚡ Our first glimpse of Natalie Portman as the Mighty Thor (from the upcoming Marvel movie Thor: Love and Thunder) comes from ... an action figure.

🎬 It's got everything: Jack Black as a runaway astronaut and Owen Wilson as a talking motorcycle. Ron Wilson plays the villain (as himself). Oh, and the rest of NASA are the bad guys, too. Here's the best TV pilot that never got picked up but became a cult favorite: Heat Vision and Jack, as directed by Ben Stiller.

🦌 Stuck in your car because of a traffic jam? That's bad but how about being stuck in your automobile because a moose calf is eating snow off the car's hood? It's Internet gold.

🏂 Dad attached a microphone to his young daughter to get a glimpse into her thought process while she zooms down on her snowboard, and we all can learn from how this four-year-old thinks. "I won't fall. Maybe I will. That's okay, 'cause we all fall." Life lessons!

🤣 Who's cuter than Timothée Chalamet? Elmo, that's who. Here's the Sesame Street muppet replacing him as the protagonist in Dune during the intense Gom Jabbar scene. F is for Fear!

🪑 Weebles wobble but they don't fall down. The Virén Chair, on the other hand, falls down, but it always gets back up.

⚗️ Scientists are usually long-winded, but not clinical psychologist Dennis Upper. He wrote the shortest scientific paper ever published.

Featured art: Cute Cat Love St. Patrick's Day by indie artist S Cube Design

See also: St Patrick's Day T-Shirts

The idea that the Bermuda Triangle is a supernaturally dangerous area for ships and aircraft began in the 1950s. It has been reported that the area between Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico had an anomalous number of shipwrecks or disappearances without any explanation that could be gleaned from the evidence. There are plenty of natural reasons for the area's reputation offered- the triangle has an inordinate amount of boat traffic, it has unique and dangerous weather, and some stories are inaccurate in their details, their location, or in their mysteriousness. Some are pretty well documented, though, like the 1921 case of the Carroll A. Deering.

Maybe this vessel was doomed from the start. The captain got sick and had to abandon ship at a port in Delaware. This was apparently considered a bad omen. After delivering its cargo to Rio, the ship started to turn home and stopped in Barbados for supplies. Afterward, it was sighted near North Carolina, and observers noted that the crew was acting strange; the ship wasn't seen again until its wreckage washed up off the coast of Cape Hatteras. The ship's log, navigation equipment, the crew's personal belongings, and lifeboats were gone.

Read more stories of unexplained transportation tragedies in the Bermuda Triangle in a list at Mental Floss.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

A permanent immersive exhibition space will be launched in New York in the summer. French production company Culturespaces will be setting up shows every ten to 12 months in the landmark Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in downtown Manhattan. The first show will be dedicated to Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klim in “Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion.” The company’s first venture in North America will also be New York’s first-ever permanent immersive experience venue. 

Image credit: Culturespaces Eric Spiller

This is amazing! A giant mural that covers an entire neighborhood was inaugurated in Peru. Located in a residential area in San Cristobal hill, the artwork was inspired by “Chakanas,” a Peruvian mythological symbol that represents a connection between different worlds and pre-Inca motifs. 

The artists involved in the massive project, called “Project Rainbow”, spent nine months painting more than 1,000 houses to complete the artwork. 

Image screenshots via Euronews

A team of researchers used supercomputers to simulate a black hole to find more details about this cosmic phenomenon. The experts found out the cause behind the flares these holes emit. The flares, which are intense bursts of light have plagued scientists for a long time. Dr. Bart Ripperda from the Flatiron Institute and Princeton University and his colleagues learned that the flares formed when magnetic fields broke apart then rejoined back together. Learn more about the discovery here.

Image credit: B. Ripperda et al., AJL, 2022

Ashley Montagu once said, “The idea is to die young as late as possible.” Rocketman Robert Maddox built a go-kart with a triple valveless pulsejet engine. He named this vehicle the Beast. Then he took it for a ride out in the desert, at speeds up to 90 miles per hour. Okay, what about this video is the scariest? Would it be the red-hot jet engines or the propane tank between Maddox and the engines? How about the fact that he's driving with one hand, so he can record himself with the other? Or could it be the absence of goggles, where one insect could blind him? Well, maybe there aren't too many bugs in the desert in February. Despite all this, it's great to see the sheer joy of a wild man in his 70s getting his speed fix on. If you like this go-kart (and have the bucks), he will build one for you. -via Jalopnik

A webcomic led me down an internet rabbit hole, to an article about the world's deadliest disease: malaria. The mosquito-borne disease is estimated to have killed half the people who ever lived, although that flies under the radar for most of us because 1. It's been around for thousands of years, and 2. Most of the fatalities are in young children. I learned about malaria's role in the rise of sickle-cell anemia, a far-from-perfect evolutionary adaptation to malaria. Malaria had a role in establishing slavery in colonial America. And in 1943, it was the agent of biological warfare. The Pontine Marshes outside of Rome were a historical hotbed of malaria until 1922, when the new prime minister Benito Mussolini ordered a plan to drain the marshes.  

That reduced Italian malarial fatalities by 99.8 per cent between 1932 and 1939, and inspired the occupying Germans to carry out the only known example of biological warfare in 20th-century Europe: in late 1943, the Nazis seized supplies of the anti-malarial medicine quinine, reversed the draining pumps and opened the dikes. Anopheles mosquitoes returned, Allied (and German) soldiers became sick, and Italian civilians began dying. Malarial deaths spiked from 33 in 1939 to 55,000 in 1944.

I had to know more about that, so I went to Wikipedia.

The Battle of Anzio left the marsh in state of devastation; nearly everything Mussolini had accomplished was reversed. The cities were in ruins, the houses blown up, the marshes full of brackish water, the channels filled in, the plain depopulated, the mosquitos flourishing, and malaria on the rise. The major structures for water control survived, and in a few years, the Agro Pontino was restored. In 1947, the province of Littoria, created by Mussolini, was renamed to Latina. The last of the malaria was conquered in the 1950s, with the aid of DDT.

Today, the land is managed by the drainage system without DDT. There are towns, farms, and tourist attractions as well as lakes and canals.

#lesEnquêtesANFR 🕵️‍♂️
« Les dents, le brouilleur et au lit ! », c’est la nouvelle enquête de l'@anfr sur un brouillage qui affectait les services de téléphonie et d’internet dans toutes les bandes de fréquences mobiles, mais uniquement la nuit 🌙… https://t.co/Jqpg5YKjBp pic.twitter.com/RLmOV7iMG5

— ANFR (@anfr) February 10, 2022

What do you do when your children stay on social media all night long? You could take their devices, but that's a fight, and there are always more devices. You could try parental controls, but they are often limited and/or confusing, and children find their way around them. And many places have multiple sources for internet- wifi, the neighbor's wifi, the phone company, etc. To boot his teenagers offline, one man went for the nuclear option.

A mobile phone company in Messanges, France, was getting daily complaints about an outage between midnight and 3 AM. They enlisted the National Frequency Agency to investigate, which sent out a mobile lab truck out to investigate and found the problem was coming from one house. A father was using a multi-band wave jammer to interrupt his children's internet use at midnight so they would go to sleep. He was unaware that he had disrupted all telecommunications in an area that covered two towns!

The use of wave jammers is illegal in France (and the US). The agency put a notice on their website that the range of such devices often far exceeds their claims. The man who used the jammer could get a fine of €30,000 and six months in jail. He will also have to pay the agency €450 for the investigation. Jail time is unlikely in this case, but be warned: trying this can come back to bite you. -via Gizmodo 

Since we all know the plot to the 1979 movie Alien, we don't need to waste a whole lot of time with buildup, exposition, or reveal, so this Sweded version from Folks Films gives us just the action parts. The genius in this one-minute version is the use of everyday objects to recreate the terror. A baseball mitt. A stapler. A mess of noodles. Cantaloupe. And lots of ketchup. You will have to watch it two or three times to catch them all. But nothing is more clever than blowing up the Nostromo by putting silverware in a microwave. That even gives you a proper countdown! Ripley and Jonesy are fine, and most likely are making plans for a sequel. -via reddit

The Associated Press reports that Zurich, Switzerland, is opening a new jail and wants to make sure that everything is in order before the grand opening. So it's recruiting volunteers who would be willing to stay locked up for three days in March, living in cells and eating jail food just like real inmates. Participants will get to experience the regular prisoner intake process experience as the new staff trains to supervise real inmates.

Bear in mind that it is a simulation and not an actual jail experience. So attacking the biggest inmate in the yard on your first day is probably unnecessary.

Photo: Pixabay