Robots are gradually replacing we organic humanoids, leaving fewer and fewer roles for the fleshy ones to complete and serve a purpose--aside from biomass fuel, of course. But that's hardly a satisfactory existence for most humans.

New Scientist brings us the latest warning in the looming robopocalypse. Human engineers intentionally built a robot paired with an advanced artificial intelligence that uses a large language model to help the robot interpret text instructions. When robot receives the instructions, it physically demonstrates them in remarkably realistic forms.

It can basically perform charades, which means that this party can immediately replace you as a source of entertainment at the party tonight.

-via Born in Space

Steam buns fluffing up
byu/VariousBasket125 inoddlysatisfying

Mima, a woman in China, began making steamed buns during the COVID-19 lockdown in her country. Her site is in Chinese, but Google Translate helps us in English. She uses vegetable and fruit juices and powders, as well as food coloring in pens and squid ink powder to create astonishingly realistic buns resembling animals (especially seafood), fruits, everyday objects, and characters.

I'm especially impressed with how her durian fruit replica splits like a real durian to reveal the pulp inside. On her site, you can view individual process videos. The lips are amazing since they are anatomically correct not only on the outside of the mouth, but the inside as well.

-via Laughing Squid

At the Virtua Voorhees Hospital near Camden, New Jersey, baby Ezra Humphrey was born at 11:48 PM on New Year's Eve. His twin brother, Ezekiel Humphrey was born at 12:28 AM on New Year's Day. That's just forty minutes apart or, as a rough estimate, an entire year.

CBS News reports that the timing coincidences keep piling up. Their mother, Eve, was born in December. Their father, Billy, was born on New Year's Eve. The twins have an older brother named Hezekiah, who turns three on January 3. So the whole family has clustered their birthdays at the same time of the year.

-via Massimo

The 70s was a weird time to be alive, I tell you. You had to be there to get the zeitgeist that mixed humor, despair, and, above all else, exhaustion with believing in anything that we had been told.

The science fiction of the era extrapolated where the young people of that era would be in old age. So there were a lot of post-apocalyptic and dystopian visions. The 1974 film Zardoz was set in the year 2023. The 1975 film A Boy and His Dog was set in 2024. So that's where we are now.

The movie comes from a culture in which thermonuclear destruction is not simply warned against, but accepted as inevitable. It is obsessed with sex, but also skeptical of finding happiness through it. Hence it depicts a young man and his telepathic dog--twisted versions of idealized Americana--roaming the wastelands in search of food and sex.

Enjoy 2024.

-via Weird Universe

The use of tamed elephants in human warfare dates back to at least the Sixth Century BC in what is now India and were used by the Chinese as late as the Fifteenth Century AD in what is now Vietnam. In the ancient Mediterranean, various peoples made use of war elephants until the Roman Republic developed effective tactics for dealing with these living tanks that were terrifying, but logistically demanding upon armies using them.

Hellenistic (Greeks from Alexander the Great until the Roman conquest) empires used war elephants. In a recent article published in The Classical Quarterly, Silvannen Gerrard of the University of Manchester assesses evidence that the Greek handlers of war elephants got them intoxicated prior to combat.

In addition to textual evidence from the Maccabean Revolt, she considers the staggering amount of alcohol that scientists say would be necessary to get a full grown elephant drunk. Would it be practical for an army on the move to carry that much wine for this purpose? Furthermore, how do elephants behave while drunk? An army with drunk elephants in its midst may experience negative outcomes.

After also evaluating evidence from Indian sources, Gerrard concludes that although the Hellenistic armies attacking the Maccabeans may have used drunk elephants, this was unlikely to be the standard practice at the time.

Image: Heinrich Leutemann

-via Theo Nash

The tiny Principality of Liechtenstein is, on a per capita basis, a very wealthy nation. But with a population of only 39,000 people, there are certain features common among larger nations that it lacks, such as airports, an army, a currency, and even embassies in foreign lands. It also lacks a film industry centered within the nation, producing movies by and for Liechtenstein and employing primarily its own citizens.

Nonetheless, there is one feature-length film that can be considered a truly Liechtensteiner film in that it was shot within that nation and tells a story that takes place there. The 1958 film Kinder der Berge tells the story of a Liechtensteiner woodcarver who experiences a miracle attributed to a statue of the Virgin Mary that he carves.

The actors were primarily German and Swiss, with the main character portrayed by the acclaimed Swiss actor Maximilian Schell. But a prince and princess of this alpine monarchy also make appearances to give this film a definite Liechtensteiner flavor.

I've embedded a clip from the film.

I AM DYING pic.twitter.com/TkX2O25H8i

— Fr. Ryan Hilderbrand (@FrHilderbrand) December 29, 2023

Dreams have long inspired the creative energies of people. Salvador Dali found much of his inspiration in unconsciousness, such as Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Waking. Richard Adams, the author of the novel Shardik, developed much of his story in dreams. David Burge, the inventor of the fart joke, experiences empoweringly lucid dreams.

Similarly, three months ago, Sarah F1330 developed an entirely new genre of music in a dream that she had. She imagines long car horn blasts taking leadership of musical tracks. She dubs this revolution "Love Honk." Enjoy its majesty.

YouTuber The Paint Explainer uses MS Paint to create simple illustrations to help explain complex concepts, such as logical fallacies. In this video, he quickly and succinctly explains 76 formal and informal fallacies, some of which I've never heard of before.

Within this category is the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which imagines a sharpshooter firing at a wall and then drawing targets about the bullet holes. This is a failure of inductive reasoning in which a person searches for data to support assumptions while ignoring contrary data.

This is a great list and I'm especially glad that The Paint Explainer includes the Fallacy Fallacy, in which someone concludes that if an argument contains a fallacy, it must be incorrect. This is what I've seen people with a partial education in rational thinking do in order to shut down discussion.

-via Laughing Squid

Query: how long could Miss Cellania and I do this at the Neatorama corporate campus before we were caught?

A lot would depend upon the facilities themselves. For these two men (of course) in Nara, Japan, their workplace in waste management offered opportunities. A grease pit built into the floor could be covered over and the spacious interior (2 meters by 4) offered an ideal place to slack off. According to the Japanese-language news source Asashi, the men recieved a two month suspension from employment for their misuse of city facilities and equipment.

-via Spoon & Tamago, which comments "God forbid men have a hobby."

"After the game he will be devoured, he will die, and he will be his own last meal" @PopTartsBowl pic.twitter.com/sMLBUM3jxW

— Gifdsports (@gifdsports) December 29, 2023

Within the human heart is a dark barbarism that lies just beneath the façade that is civilization. This is exemplified by the popularity of football, which George Will summarized as "violence punctuated by committee meetings." Football fans share a bond with the ecstatic spectators attending gladiatorial bouts in ancient times, who openly craved blood and suffering.

So yesterday's game between Kansas State University and North Carolina State University was not a revolutionary development. Yes, the prize was an innovation: an enormous, living Pop-Tart, who gleefully sacrificed itself to the victors. The nihilistic impulse to destroy and be destroyed joins we humans with Pop-Tarts.

pic.twitter.com/ZHZMuMzHTB

— no context college football (@nocontextcfb) December 29, 2023

CBS News reports that Kanas State prevailed in the contest. The players then ritualistically baptized their coach, Chris Klieman, in Gatorade, symbolizing the sugary blood of the Pop-Tart which energizes the living. Then the players feasted upon the sacrifice. The Pop-Tart continued to smile throughout as it joyfully embraced its purpose for existence.

-via Super Punch

Fifteen demonstrators in Tokyo marched through the streets yesterday, shouting slogans and waving banners in their protest of the celebration of Christmas in Japan. This was not a nationalist objection to a holiday of foriegn origin, but an annual tradition of the Revolutionary Alliance of Unpopular People.

Sora News 24 explains that in Japan, which has only a very small Christian population in modern times, Christmas is a romantic holiday for couples. This irritates himote--lonely people, mostly men, who are unable to find dates. They banded together to form an organization to crush Christmas love and have marched each Christmas Day since 2007.

Photo: @kakuhidou1

Claire Lamman is a graduate student in astronomy at Harvard University. So, in a short, she's a genius. But she's also humble enough to describe herself as a "procrastibaker" -- someone who bakes in order to avoid assigned work. Lamman's portfolio of culinary work is astonishing.

Each Christmas, Lamman composes a gingerbread masterpiece of an astronomical survey instrument, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and an assortment of her favorite space probes. This year, Lamman made the above model of the Very Large Array, a radio telescope consisting of 28 dishes in the Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico.

I'm impressed with how smooth the domes turned out.

Harry Hill of New York City is a writer, podcaster and "vibe curator" who is in a Christmas mood. Since Thanksgiving, Hill, his father, and his brother have labored over this set of giant Christmas lights. The construction required 20 plastic bottles, spay paint, glue, and a generator. The plug, you can see, is just decorative.

They illuminate very well, creating just the right ambiance, as well as entertaining people as he drives them around town.

My dogs were enthusiastic about opening presents this morning. The smarter one seemed to actually understand that some of the objects beneath the Tree Inside the House That Must Not Be Peed Upon were to become her property.

The cat has been through enough Christmases to know that it's worthwhile hanging out with the humans and dogs on this day--at least long enough to receive the obligatory offering to the feline overlord. The boxes are a plus, too, as the cat in Jimmy Craig's They Can Talk comic for today demonstrates. Perhaps both received what they asked for from Santa Claus.

Chefs Perfect, an Instagram account that highlights the masterpieces of the modern culinary arts, showcases a recent work by Sicilian pastry wizard Guiseppe Lombardo. In this Instagram post, we see a time lapse video of Lombardo's sorcery at work, weaving together dough so that after it is shaped, cut, baked, and decorated, it presents a perfect Christmas treat.

When Lombardo slices open one, we see a blood-red filling inside, just like a real Christmas tree. Yummy!

-via Nag on the Lake