Socializing is difficult. It takes time, effort, and patience to go through multitudes of people and try to strike up a conversation with them. It’s more difficult to find someone that you can have a good bond with, or be a friend. Being an adult means that you might pour most of your time into work, education, or family. Sometimes, it’s hard to allot time to try and broaden your social circle. Also, sometimes we’d rather be alone than with others, to take a break from our daily grind.  Quartz has some tips on how to make friends, even with the stress of adulting: 

Turning someone into a friend clearly requires a personal investment that can come at the expense of other things, like hobbies, work, or even other relationships. Within the first six weeks of meeting someone as an adult, you’re lucky if you see that person more than once or twice, never mind the 80 to 100 hours that science says it takes to turn them into a friend.

In part, that’s why the most effective way of making new friends, says Kumashiro, is to gravitate towards people who share the same interests as you.

“Join a club of some kind,” echoes Dunbar. He pegs choir as ideal—“singing produces this instant sense of belonging; it’s absolute magic”—but says any club will do. “Hiking, jogging, kayaking, church groups, bridge clubs, you name it—as long as there’s opportunity for people to circulate, and therefore talk to and get to know the other members of the group, that works.” Dunbar calls this the “ice-breaker effect.”

This is a space in which technology and social media can actually help. There is a thriving global market for friend-making apps, like Squad, Hey! VINA, or GayBFF, and websites like Meetup also offer opportunities to meet people who are interested in the same things as you.

image via wikimedia commons

No, this isn’t about how you can evade a murderer. Dr. Tom Frieden shares how we can avoid heart disease, the number one cause of death in America. Cardiovascular disease is the major source of health care costs in the US. In addition, it also causes disability and related economic loss. CNN has the details: 

All of us need to know and control our blood pressure -- the lower the better, down to 120/80. For many of us -- including me -- that means medicine every day for the rest of our lives. People who have had a heart attack or stroke should take a statin. Others at risk are recommended to do so, although there are differing views of the potential population-wide benefit of cholesterol-lowering drugs.

No one should smoke cigarettes or inhale other people's smoke.

We need to walk more -- up stairs, outside, to and from work or school, basically anywhere we enjoy walking or can comfortably walk.

We need to find healthy food we like -- vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes, fish -- and eat more of it. And we should consume less salt, and when we do use salt, use low-sodium salt and low-sodium soy sauce (except for people on a potassium-restricted diet).

image via wikimedia commons

If you’re looking for other ways to peel your hard boiled eggs, the guys at Good Mythical Morning have got you covered. Watch as they try out four different ways of peeling an egg, from rolling to tapping an egg with a spoon. These methods aren’t a guaranteed success when you try them, but at least you know other ways to peel an egg, right? 

We stopped after just one moon and got our magma vents snipped. But Jupiter kept going and going. Soon, she had 79 kids!

That's just too much stress and work. If you have too many moons, eventually you start losing a few.

-via Pleated Jeans | Image: Safely Endangered Comic

A viral video for the children's song "Baby Shark" by Pinkfong has made a ton of money for the company SmartStudy, especially when you combine the revenues from the various versions of the video, a TV series, and all the merchandising associated with it. But who wrote the song? While making some efforts to enforce copyright, SmartStudy claims the song itself is in the public domain because it originated in the early 1900s. Today I Found Out combed the records, and pinpointed the origin of the song closer to 1975.  

So next time you’re sitting in your car in traffic going to your dead-end job that you loath, just remember, there is a company out there who has literally made at minimum tens of millions of dollars already off a song they plucked from, allegedly, the public domain, modifying it only slightly from an existing version, claimed the copyright on that version based on those tiny modifications, did a few minutes of recording, presumably a day or two of video editing, uploaded it on the interwebs, and now will be cashing checks for it for the rest of their lives, as well as their kid’s lives and beyond.

While the actual person who wrote "Baby Shark" is still mystery, its origin story may be surprising to you. You can read what's been uncovered at Today I Found Out.

In his Moschino show in Milan, designer Jeremy Scott raised some important issues through fashion. From the show’s elaborative set pieces of antique mirrors and chandeliers, to elaborative and over the top (frankly, ridiculous) clothes made to resemble pastry, Scott created these dresses not to wear, but to make a point. The New York Times has more details: 

Backstage before the show, as models milled around poking fake fingernails tinted spun sugar sweet at their phones, Mr. Scott (nursing a broken elbow in a pink sling) was talking strikes in Chile, the gilets jaunes in France, socialism in the United States, “how stretched and tenuous the idea of democracy has become” and how that led, inescapably, to thoughts of the world before the French Revolution and Marie Antoinette, the woman who has become a symbol of all that decadence and blind frivolity.

Fashion is often dismissed as escapism. But sometimes the fantasy and frills are used to dress up a less palatable idea. A skirtful of irony helps the medicine go down.

It’s a complicated proposition using a runway show of expensive party clothes as a treatise on wealth disparity and the obliviousness of the ruling class. After all, the people who buy them are exactly the people being taken to task. As the show notes read, “the confectionery cocktail dresses stand as a sly comment on the denseness of certain people in power.” Mr. Scott elides the issue by turning it into a joke. The question is: at whose expense?

image via The New York Times

Brisbane, Australia, has a shelter for pet rats. Really. Rachie's Retirement Home takes in rats, cares for them, and hopes to find new homes for the rodents. Each week, the sanctuary features the best and worst rat of the week, detailing the reasons for the designations. 



See all the rats of the week in a ranked gallery at Bored Panda. Through them you will learn the quirks of different rats and get a taste of the shenanigans that go on at a rat retirement home.

Disappearing People is a browser plugin that can make you vanish in your webcam stream. The plugin is created by Google web engineer Jason Mayes. Mayes shared that the plugin attempts to learn over time the background of a video, which enables the user to remove themself from the screen display. Vice has the details: 

Disappearing People works by pulling the frames from a webcam, copying them, then scanning the copy for human features. If it sees something it identifies as human, it covers it up with a block of footage of the empty room it pulled from previous frames. Then it serves the humanless stream back to your browser.

It’s not perfect. When playing with it, I’d often see the bricked outline of my body moving across my room. It didn’t remove me from the picture so much as cover me over with glitchy looking copies of my room. But it happens in real time, and that’s still impressive.

image credit: via Vice

The impression that the everyday people (anyone outside of fashion historians) have about Victorian garb is that everyone dressed alike, in multiple layers of drab clothing that covered their whole bodies. What we see from back then is early portraiture, in black and white, in which people dressed to the nines. The clothes they wore every day became worn out and haven't survived to go on exhibit today, and fashion fads rose and fell too fast to be well known. The truth is, fashionistas of the Victorian age were just as colorful as they were in paintings of earlier days and Instagram shots of later days. For example:

Hot pink: In 1860, two new aniline dyes were developed for clothing: magenta and solferino (like fuchsia). Magenta was so popular that it was referred to as “the queen of colours” and was used to dye dresses, underwear, petticoats, ribbons, bonnets, and stockings. That’s right—the most popular color of the 1860s was neon pink. Black and white photography doesn’t really do it justice.   

Goth accessories: In 1875, dog collars, chokers, and chains were some of the most popular jewelry trends. Bats, crucifixes, and insects were common motifs for accessories throughout the decade, and daggers that opened into fans were a must-have. Although it’s difficult to find written references to fishnet or fishnet clothing prior to about 1900, here’s an actual photo of Johanna von Klinkosch wearing fishnet sleeves in the 1870s. Madonna, who?

Women also wore men's clothing, tattoos, and pierced nipples. Read more of the fabulous and fleeting styles of the Victorian era at Dirty Sexy History.

When I saw the title question, I figured it was because bicycles greatly outnumber cars in Amsterdam and most towns in the Netherlands. But there's a lot more to it than that, due to the culture of cycling.  -via Digg

Back when medical schools were new and people had yet to donate their remains for anatomy class, "resurrectionists," or grave robbers, sold bodies to the schools. In England a group called the London Burkers (John Bishop, Thomas Williams, Michael Shields, and James May) supplied colleges with corpses. It eventually occurred to the Burkers that digging up graves was a lot of work, and it would be easier to procure fresh corpses by just murdering people.   

Some of the bodies sold by Bishop and Williams were not stolen corpses but rather people they had murdered. The two men operated similar to two other murderers out of Edinburgh named William Burke and William Hare, who ended up in Madame Tussaud‘s Chamber of Horrors because of their horrible crimes. Like them, Bishop and Williams lured victims to their dwelling, drugged, and killed them.

The site of the horrific murders by Bishop and Williams was in the East end, north east of St. Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch in an area known as Nova Scotia Gardens. The area had previously been a clay field where clay was extracted to make bricks. However, once the clay was exhausted, it was converted into a “leystall” waste area that held human excrement. Cottages had been built on the lower grounds of the clay pits, but they were not very desirable because they were prone to flooding. Yet, despite their undesirability, Williams and Bishop rented No. 2 and No. 3 respectively from Sarah Trueby.

Williams and Bishop’s murders were discovered after they delivered the corpse of a 14-year-old boy from Lincolnshire (later determined to be Charles or Carlo Ferrari) to King’s College. The men had previously tried to sell it at Guy’s Hospital, but negotiations broke down when they wanted too much and the men then took the body to King’s College where they made a deal.

Medical colleges preferred fresh corpses for their studies, but this one was a bit too fresh. While school officials looked the other way when accepting remains stolen from graves, they did not condone murder. Read about the Burkers' trial and the revelations of their string of murders at Geri Walton's blog. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Wellcome Collection)

Isabella Dalla Ragione is an archaeobotanist. That means that she researches the history of plants, many of which have changed over time with human cultivation. For example, Albrecht Durer's 1525 painting Madonna and Child with Pear actually shows an old form of the apple. Atlas Obscura describes how her research methods led to this conclusion:

“You can find so many texts detailing the symbolic meaning of pears in this painting,” Dalla Ragione says. However, the distinctive shape of the top of the fruit in Durer’s painting made Dalla Ragione realize that it was actually a “mouth of the ox” apple, an ancient variety that Dalla Ragione had found years ago in an abandoned field near Perugia and now grows on her farmstead.

Ragione tries to restore these old varieties through careful cultivation:

Once she finds a long-lost tree, Dalla Ragione plants three samples in her farmstead and puts them up for adoption via Archeologia Arborea’s website. “If you adopt a tree, it means your contribution will be used for its preservation,” she says. “Some adoptive parents come from as far as the U.S. or Australia.”

She personally takes care of her 600 plants year-round. Between September and October, she picks up most of her pears and apples and preserves them inside an abandoned chapel next to her farmstead. Standing against the chapel’s frescoes, these baskets of fruit symbolize Archeologia Arborea’s mission statement: that plants are an essential element of cultural heritage.

Image: Web Gallery of Art

The would-be thief experienced a major failure in the victim selection process when he chose to hold up the wrong Raising Cane's chicken restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky. Officers Chase and Nicole McKeown from the nearby city of Elizabeth town were there on a date.

NPR describes how they responded when the robber walked up to the cashier and pulled out a gun:

"I saw her hands go up like this and I'm like, 'Is he doing what I think he's doing?' " Nicole McKeown said at a news conference Tuesday, describing how she and her husband watched the scene play out. "And he's like, 'Yeah.' "

From there, the couple reacted quickly, drawing their weapons and circling the center tables to converge on the would-be robber.

"There was literally no question. We just looked at each other: 'Is this what's going on? Let's go,' " said Chase McKeown. He said their police instincts took over, adding, "We just did what we felt like we had to do."

The McKeowns chased the suspect down and captured him.

-via Dave Barry

Mayonnaise is usually a viscous liquid--well, unless you forget about it in the back of the refrigerator for a couple of years.

But you don't have to wait that long in order to eat it as a solid. Andrew Liszewski of Gizmodo informs us that in Japan, mayonnaise sometimes comes in slices akin to cheese shingles. You can drape a mayo slice onto a sandwich, noodles, or ice cream.

Photo: ITmedia

Kazuhiro Sekino is the 39-year-old pastor at the Tokyo Lutheran Church, located within walking distance of Kabukicho, Japan’s most notorious red-light district. Sekino is not your typical pastor. With his leather jacket and long hair, Sekino delivers his sermons while grooving on his electric bass. The electric bass is his helpful tool in spreading the good word, as The Japan Times details: 

Sekino’s method of delivering God’s message may be unconventional, but he believes it’s a useful tool in reaching more people in a nation where Buddhists far outnumber Christians. According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, there were approximately 1.91 million Christians in Japan as of 2016. That’s compared to 87.7 million who considered themselves Buddhists and 84.7 million who affiliated themselves with Shinto.

The casual and unorthodox approach in teaching the Gospel may also be one reason why strangers feel compelled to visit his church.

“People who are struggling or suffering from sickness seem to have a special sensor or a sixth sense that guides them toward me,” says Sekino, who, in October, published “Kami no Shukufuku o Anata ni: Kabukicho no Ura kara Goddoburesu!” (“God Bless You: God bless from the back streets of Kabukicho”) a book about the interesting personalities that found their way to his church. He describes a Filipino hostess who asked Sekino to host a funeral for her dead colleague, an African asylum seeker who came begging for money and a lonely drunk who wandered in during the Christmas season and left a jar of “one-cup” sake as a gift.

image via The Japan Times