Facebook launched its feature called People You May Know (PYMK) in May of 2008. The purpose was to help users build their network of friends by letting them know who else was on Facebook. The results can be spooky, when you see someone there that you know, but haven't thought about in years. That comes about from Facebook's amazing data-mining power. After all, they take control of your address book, containing emails of not only friends and family, but anyone you've emailed -ever. And you can't opt out of PYMK. People who show up in your suggestions can include your spouse's secret lover, your favorite hooker's other clients, or the person who raped you years ago.   

In the summer of 2015, a psychiatrist was meeting with one of her patients, a 30-something snowboarder. He told her that he’d started getting some odd People You May Know suggestions on Facebook, people who were much older than him, many of them looking sick or infirm. He held up his phone and showed her his friend recommendations which included an older man using a walker. “Are these your patients?” he asked.

The psychiatrist was aghast because she recognized some of the people. She wasn’t friends with her patients on Facebook, and in fact barely used it, but Facebook had figured out that she was a link between this group of individuals, probably because they all had her contact information; based apparently on that alone, Facebook seemed to have decided they might want to be friends.

“It’s a massive privacy fail,” the psychiatrist told me at the time.

And now Facebook has access to much more data than email contacts and friends of friends. The company owns Instagram and WhatsApp, along with other smaller networks. And there's more.

In 2014, Facebook filed a patent application for making friend recommendations based on detecting that two smartphones were in the same place at the same time; it said you could compare the accelerometer and gyroscope readings of each phone, to tell whether the people were facing each other or walking together.

Read an unnerving article about Facebook's PYMK feature at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Jim Cooke/Gizmodo)

I Love Lucy was a groundbreaking TV show in many ways. It ran from 1951 to 1957, and is the oldest show in syndication because it was recorded on 35mm film and then broadcast, so good copies of 180 episodes are available all these years later. Let's learn some more about I Love Lucy.

1. CBS DIDN’T THINK AMERICANS WOULD BUY THAT LUCY WAS MARRIED TO A “FOREIGN” MAN.

When CBS approached Lucille Ball with the offer of turning her popular radio show My Favorite Husband into a television show, she was agreeable with one condition: that her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, would be cast in the role of her spouse (played on the radio by Richard Denning). The network balked—there was no way that American viewers would accept average housewife Liz Cooper (her character’s name on the radio series) being married to a “foreign” man with an indecipherable accent. Never mind the fact that Lucy and Desi had been married more than a decade; such a “mixed” marriage was unbelievable.

2. LUCY AND DESI HAD TO TAKE THEIR SHOW ON THE ROAD TO CONVINCE THE NETWORK BRASS.

Arnaz had a successful career touring the country with his rhumba band, which was one of the reasons Lucille wanted him to get cast as her TV husband—to keep him off the road and close to home. In an effort to show the network (and potential sponsors) that they could work together as a comedy team, they crafted a sort of vaudevillian skit that was inserted into the middle of performances by the Desi Arnaz Orchestra during a tour in the summer of 1950. The audiences roared over Lucille’s antics and her interaction with Desi as she interrupted his band’s concert confusedly, cello in hand, thinking she had an audition scheduled. The “Professor” skit not only convinced the network powers that be that the couple could, in fact, be convincing as husband and wife—it also was such a hit that it was incorporated into episode six of I Love Lucy’s first season.

We also get some trivia about our favorite episodes, like the grape-stomping, the chocolate-dipping, and Vitameatavegamin, in a trivia list about I Love Lucy at Mental Floss.  

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Okay, that explains that. Simon's Cat is having fun in a wheat field that's getting a little deep, when he sees something strange in the air. This video is part of a new series Simon Tofield calls "Sketches," short and not as polished as some of his cartoons, and he expects to have a new one ready more often this way. -via Tastefully Offensive

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You see some weird stuff on New York trains, but last Monday, some riders got to share a car with this guy relaxing on a leather couch. What's the deal? Turns out he's moving the couch to a different house the cheapest way possible.

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We don't know how he got it through the turnstiles, but here's how he got it into the car.

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Commenters at reddit say he probably took the couch through a wheelchair opening in the turnstiles. There are probably a dozen more videos of this stunt, including the turnstile phase. A good time was had by all. -via Laughing Squid

Social class in England during the Victorian era had much less to do with wealth than with your assigned station at birth -upward mobility was as rare as hen's teeth. Sophia Jarvis was a working class orphan who was sent to a workhouse and later an industrial school to learn the skills of a servant. Mrs. Mary Langton Thomas enjoyed a middle class life as the wife of a banker, although when he died she was left with nine children and a lower income. She could only afford one servant, Sophia Jarvis, from the industrial school. Jarvis did all the housework for the family of ten plus a lodger, for which she received the equivalent of £6 a week in modern money, a windowless attic room, and what food she was allowed to eat ...which became less and less over time. Mrs. Thomas accused Jarvis of theft, and punished her by withholding food, beating, and pouring water over her in the cold outdoors. Jarvis escaped to her former school, and later pressed charges against Thomas, which was quite unusual for the time. However, there was evidence backed up by the doctor who treated Jarvis after her escape.

Sophia, brought up since infancy in the care of the parish authorities of St George the Martyr, cut a sorry figure.  She had been accused of stealing forty stamps, two sacks of potatoes, cake, a 2lb lump of sugar, port and sherry—although her mistress admitted that she had not been able to smell alcohol on the girl.  Strangely, there was no suggestion that any of the Thomas children, or the lodger, might possibly have helped themselves.  After Mr Cockerel’s visit she was beaten almost daily with a stick, a rolling pin or a fishing rod, and had not been allowed to leave the house unless accompanying one of the children to church.

Not only had Sophia been physically abused, but Mrs Thomas had only given her a month’s pay in all the time she had worked there.  The rest of the money was kept to pay for the clothes she needed for her job.

The description of her physical state is distressing.  Dr Broad, the medical attendant to the Industrial School, described her emaciated condition, her sunken face and swollen fingers, her nails black with dried blood, her bruised back and elbows.  When he saw her on 20th December, her right eye had been black, and she had a wound on her head.  This was backed up by Thomas Evans, the police doctor.

Mrs. Thomas had the backing of prominent character witnesses, while Jarvis was a nobody. Who would the jury believe? Read the story of Sophia Jarvis and her quest for justice at London Overlooked.       
 -via Strange Company

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You loved Gary Larson's comic The Far Side, like we all did, where we learned about Thagomizers, Anatidaephobia, and that tramp Jane Goodall. But do you actually know anything about Larsen, the man? His life outside of The Far Side has been pretty interesting. He plays the banjo, and almost had a career in jazz (go figure). He keeps exotic animals. And there's more, all in this video from Today I Found Out.

Full-color x-ray images sound too cool to be real, although seeing one can also give you the creeps. This is an ankle. The white is bone, the red is muscles, and the yellow is the cushioning under your heel. That's a real, live person's insides you're seeing! You can also see this ankle from all angles, and even in slices. The new technology from New Zealand company MARS Bioimaging is based on a scanning method developed at CERN.   

The MARS scanner uses a family of chips called Medipix, originally developed to track particles at the Large Hadron Collider. Medipix works like your camera — when the electronic shutter is open, each individual particle is detected and counted, creating high-res, accurate, noise-free images.

When used with the Butlers' MARS scanner and its software, the chips help to produce highly accurate, striking, three-dimensional color renderings of the human body that distinguish materials like metal, bone, soft tissue, and fat with different tones.

The x-rays are expected to go into clinical trials in the next few months. Read more about it and see videos at Mashable.

(Image credit: MARS Bioimaging)

In June of 1892, Ponciano Caraballo found his 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter dead, their throats slit, at their home in Argentina. His wife's throat was also slit, but she survived to tell the tale. Or two.

Francisca, who had been married to Ponciano for four years, told the police that she and her children had been attacked by their neighbour, agricultural labourer Ramón Velázquez. He had tried to seduce her and when she’d refused, he had threatened to kill them all. She later changed her testimony and stated that Velázquez had been attempting to take her children away from her, on behalf of her husband, from whom she was estranged. Whatever the reason for the attack, Ramón Velázquez was arrested on suspicion of murder.

As was customary at the time, the police used torture to elicit a confession from the accused. Velázquez was subjected to several brutal beatings, and forced to spend a night locked in with the children’s bodies. It is also alleged that a police officer dressed up as a ghost one night to scare the prisoner into confessing. Despite the violent and intimidating interrogations, Velázquez refused to confess and professed his innocence throughout. Unsure of what to do next, the local police requested help from the force in the provincial capital, La Plata, and Inspector Eduardo Álvarez was sent to Neocochea to investigate.

As you can probably guess from that setup, and having read or watched a few murder mysteries in your time, the eyewitness account is suspicious and Velázquez was innocent. Read how investigators from La Plata, Argentina, solved the crime at Victorian Supersleuth. -via Strange Company

You see this baby squid looking back at you, and it hasn't even hatched yet! Redditor rockyroo529 says his nephew found a seashell with squid eggs inside. There were about 16 eggs with developing squid, and evidence that some eggs had already hatched.

They took few pictures and then put the shell back into the water so the little ones can go about their squid business.

This flip is obviously not impossible, because world class Australian skater Jackson Pilz did it before your very eyes, but it is a trick that skaters call "the Impossible." Physics Girl collaborated with Rodney Mullen, who is credited with creating the Impossible, to explain the physics of the trick. The Impossible flip is shown at five minutes in, but the background leading up to it is interesting, too.   

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When humans first crossed Beringia and populated the Americas many thousands of years ago, they brought along their dogs. These pooches were domesticated, descended from Siberian dogs and not American wolves. Then, as Europeans began exploring and conquering North and South America, the PCDs (pre-contact dogs) died out, as did the vast majority of their human owners. A new study compared DNA of modern domestic dogs to the remains of American dogs that died as long as 10,000 years ago.  

“Although greater degrees of PCD ancestry may remain in American dogs that have not yet been sampled, our results suggest that European dogs almost completely replaced native American dog lineages,” according to the study. “This near disappearance of PCDs likely resulted from the arrival of Europeans, which led to shifts in cultural preferences and the persecution of indigenous dogs. Introduced European dogs may also have brought infectious diseases to which PCDs were susceptible.”

That said, these indigenous dogs did secure one genetic legacy—a sexually transmitted venereal tumor. Originating from American dogs that lived around 8,000 years ago, the cancer was passed on to the European dogs, who still carry it to this day.

That legacy would seem almost like karma, if it weren't about man's best friend. Read more about the research into ancient American dogs at Motherboard.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Del Baston/Center for American Archeology)

John Atkinson at Wrong Hands hands out the BS with his latest comic. The level of plausibility for the five weird "facts" is about equivalent, meaning any of them could be true if you remove the punch line. Atkinson says he will reveal which one is true sometime today, maybe in the comic post or in the comments below it. Wanna take a guess ahead of time?  -via Nag on the Lake

Once a song is mixed and any master tapes of individual performance are discarded, there's no un-mixing the music, right? Not so fast. A new artificial intelligence project from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) can extract and isolate individual instruments from a blended recording, or even a recording of a band playing together.

The system, which is “self-supervised,” doesn’t require any human annotations on what the instruments are or what they sound like.

Trained on over 60 hours of videos, the “PixelPlayer” system can view a never-before-seen musical performance, identify specific instruments at pixel level, and extract the sounds that are associated with those instruments.

For example, it can take a video of a tuba and a trumpet playing the “Super Mario Brothers” theme song, and separate out the soundwaves associated with each instrument.

This technology will be a boon to recording studios, remixers, and anyone who wants to learn, say, the trumpet part from an orchestra performance. I can see it being used in schools to help music students, which would be great if done in private, but humiliating in front of one's classmates. What's the worst that could happen? Someone will record a middle school band recital, isolate the worst player, and upload it to social media for laughs. Read about the program and its potential uses at MIT News. -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: MIT CSAIL)

Paula Godwin took her dogs out for an early morning walk last Friday in Arizona. Along the way, she came close to stepping on a rattlesnake! But her 6-month-old puppy Todd jumped in the way, and was himself bitten by the snake. Quick medical intervention saved Todd, but the golden retriever's nose was swollen and itchy for days. Godwin's Facebook posts indicate that her hero dog is healing up nicely. See a video gallery of Todd here. That's a good dog. -via Laughing Squid

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It's a plot from a Cold War B-movie: nuclear fallout produces dangerous mutant animals that cannot be controlled because of the radioactivity of their environment. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine suffered a meltdown in 1986, leaving the surrounding area so radioactive that an exclusion zone was designated for 30 kilometers in each direction of the plant. A few residents refused to leave, but thousands of people moved away. Scientists consider the zone too dangerous to live in, although it is open to tourism and a few people work there on a strict time limit. With so few people, nature has taken over.  

Numerous investigations into the effects of Chernobyl's radioactive fallout on its surroundings have returned conflicting results. While some studies have found that local wildlife suffered, others have discovered evidence that wildlife has prospered, likely because the exclusion zone — devoid of people — has "become a de facto nature reserve," study lead author Michael Byrne, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Missouri at Columbia, told Live Science.

Gray wolves have especially flourished in the exclusion zone, "with their population density within the zone estimated at up to seven times greater than in surrounding reserves," Byrne said. Given this high population density, the researchers expected that some wolves born within the zone would disperse into the surrounding landscapes, "since one area can hold only so many large predators," Byrne said.

Now, for the first time, "we have tracked a young wolf that has definitely left the exclusion zone," Byrne said.

Of 14 wolves fitted with trackers, one juvenile was found to have left the exclusion zone. But no one knows where it is now, because the tracker has malfunctioned. Nor do we know how many others may have wandered outside the zone. The Invasion of the Mutant Wolves may be coming to a theater near you as soon as someone writes the script. Read more about the wolves of Chernobyl at LiveScience.  -via Fark

(Image credit: Eric Kilby)