(Stock Market, The Ride t-shirt now on sale at the NeatoShop)

Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University. You may remember him for his quirky final exam. Dr. Cowen tries to apply economic thinking to areas that you might not consider. For example, he argues that Christmas day should always fall on a Wednesday:

I say the goal is to minimize non-convexities, which in this context means avoiding the possibility of no mail or UPS deliveries for two days running.  That makes Saturday and Monday especially bad days to have Christmas.

When Christmas is on Wednesday, as it was this year, on that Wednesday you still can be reading the books which arrived on Tuesday and then a new lot comes on Thursday.  The public libraries also close for only one day, not two or three in a row.

Christmas on Wednesday also means that the roads are deserted for all the other weekdays, since many people end up leaving town for the entire week.  Then you can visit all those ethnic restaurants you wanted to get to in Gaithersburg or Mount Vernon without hassle.

And if you are taking a vacation abroad, and trying to use a limited number of vacation days, you certainly don’t want Christmas to fall on either a Saturday or a Sunday, which in essence wastes a granted day off.

Ben Walsh, a blogger for Reuters, has a different take. He looked at economic data and concluded that retail sales do best when Christmas falls on a Saturday. So the holiday should always be on a weekend:

Obviously, one conclusion you can draw from this chart is that having Christmas fall in the midst of a full-blown financial crisis is bad for sales. But to address Cowen’s point, over the last decade the average retail sales bump from a weekend Christmas (23.5%) has been higher than a Tuesday or Wednesday Christmas (18.75%).

Americans have spent a total of $84 billion more over the last two Saturday and two Sunday Christmases than the last two Tuesday and two Wednesday Christmases. And Saturday seems the best option of all, with the highest average percentage bump in sales (24.5%).

Get ready to thrash with this custom electric guitar by Vladislav, a maker of fine My Little Pony crafts. It's decorated with the colors of Princess Twilight Sparkle. It's made of alder, mahogany and rosewood. The star-shaped controls, which imitate Twilight's cutie mark, are a nice touch.

Now put her on stage with Vinyl Scratch as backup.

(Image: NOAA)

Even before there was a United States, the American people were innovators in military technology. David Bushnell, a Connecticut supporter of the rebellion against British rule, designed and built the roughly spherical ship Turtle in 1775. It was the first submarine in naval history to see combat.

(Image: Library of Congress)

Bushnell’s ship was a technological wonder of its time. It was the first submarine to use water as ballast. The pilot could control water flow into the bilges with a foot pedal and then make finer adjustments to the depth level with a vertical screw. A forward-mounted screw pulled the submarine through the water. 

The pilot had enough air to keep breathing for half an hour. But he also had a snorkel that gave him access to fresh air when surfaced. It closed automatically when the vessel submerged.

The Turtle was equipped with a time bomb which could be detonated underwater—again, an invention that Bushnell devised. His plan was that the pilot of the submarine would drive a screw into the wooden hull of an enemy ship. The bomb would be attached to the screw. The pilot could then escape before the bomb detonated.

(Photo: US Navy)

After Bushnell completed the Turtle in the fall of 1775, he planned to use it to break the British blockade of Boston. But the British abandoned Boston in March of 1776, so Bushnell decided to put his invention to work against Royal Navy vessels in New York harbor. General George Washington took a keen interest in the project and assigned Sgt. Ezra Lee to pilot the Turtle.

On the night of Sept. 6, 1776, an American ship towed the Turtle out into the harbor. Lee submerged the Turtle and proceeded to HMS Eagle, the British flagship. Lee tried to attach the bomb, but it would not connect to the hull of the Eagle. Eventually, he cut it loose. The bomb floated away and detonated in a huge but harmless explosion.

Bushnell tried two other times to use the Turtle, but these were also unsuccessful. On October 6, the British sank the American ship carrying the Turtle and the submarine never saw action again. The project was a failure, but it inspired the imaginations of military leaders. Reflecting on the project in 1785, Washington wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson that “I then thought, and still think, that it was an effort of genius.”

Bonus item: the first submarine to sink another vessel in combat was the Hunley, a submarine of the Confederate Navy.

This cool illustration from a 1921 issue of Scientific American uses a human head to demonstrate how map projections distort the sizes and shapes of landmasses. The upper left drawing shows a globe, which is why the head looks normal.

This is one of several neat cartographic demonstrations rounded up by Joe Hanson, a biologist and TV star. You can find the rest here.

Nick Chipman, the mad food scientist at DudeFoods, found a way to make eating a fast food meal more efficient. Why eat a burger and fries as separate food items? You can combine them.

They key ingredient is an edible adhesive called Dab-N-Hold. I don't have any, so I'll just use wood glue as a substitute. Nick baked frozen French fries, applied the adhesive, then cut out a circle by tracing along the outside of a glass. He reports that it tastes like a regular hamburger with "a slight hint of lemons."

(Video Link)

You can eat an entire apple--including the core--if you eat it the right way. Foodbeast's research team showed us how last year. Now they're back with a demonstration of how to eat a chicken wing. You've got a pile of those hot, spicy, greasy things. They're wrapped in bone, fat and cartilage. How will you get them down your gullet with as little work as possible?

I generally avoid chicken wings because they're not worth the hassle. But maybe this method demonstrated by Brandi Milloy is just the right trick.

(New Orleans moonlight tower, c. 1882)

Before the United States became widely electrified, it was not practical to build individual street lights in many cities. That’s why some cities built “moonlight towers,” which were enormous carbon arc lamps rising hundreds of feet into the air and projecting light as far as 1,500 feet away.

(Detroit moonlight tower, c. 1900-1910).

They were called moonlight towers because their enormous lights served to replace the light of an obscured moon. They were useful, but ultimately not as practical as the street lights which replaced them. These provided more consistent illumination than moonlight towers, which could not illuminate any area blocked by a building. Changing the carbon rods could also be difficult.

(Photo of Austin via Chris Eason)

Austin, Texas, though, still retains and lights 17 of the original 31 moonlight towers that it began erecting in 1895.

(Image: Columbia Pictures)

In 1990, Helen Ackley put her lovely old home in Nyack, New York up for sale. Patrice and Jeffrey Stambovsky bought it. Then they learned something disturbing about the house: it was haunted.

The Stambovskys did not discover this fact by witnessing ghosts themselves. Rather, they learned that the house had a strong local reputation as haunted. In their assessment, this lowered the value of their home. Ms. Ackley should have disclosed this important piece of information, therefore they sued her.

In Stambovsky vs. Ackley, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York ruled that “as a matter of law, the house is haunted.” Ms. Ackley had failed to fulfill a legal requirement to inform the Stambovkys that the house was known to be haunted.

The ruling goes on to describe the problem that Ms. Ackley had created for the Stambovskys:

From the perspective of a person in the position of plaintiff herein, a very practical problem arises with respect to the discovery of a paranormal phenomenon: "Who you gonna' call?" as a title song to the movie "Ghostbusters" asks. Applying the strict rule of caveat emptor to a contract involving a house possessed by poltergeists conjures up visions of a psychic or medium routinely accompanying the structural engineer and Terminix man on an inspection of every home subject to a contract of sale. It portends that the prudent attorney will establish an escrow account lest the subject of the transaction come back to haunt him and his client — or pray that his malpractice insurance coverage extends to supernatural disasters. In the interest of avoiding such untenable consequences, the notion that a haunting is a condition which can and should be ascertained upon reasonable inspection of the premises is a hobgoblin which should be exorcised from the body of legal precedent and laid quietly to rest.

-via Yester

According to pseudoscience, today is Blue Monday: the most depressing day of the year. That's because many people are returning to work after a long Christmas vacation. Do you need an emotional pick up? Certainly sugar-filled foods would help, but let's find another way.

Cartoonist Kelly Angel, whose work we've previously featured, made these Snapchat images and sent them to her roommate. You can find more here. Remember to be the cat that you want to see in the world.

(Video Link)

Ewoks are little teddy bears, right? People think of these creatures from Return of the Jedi as adorable, furry little friends. Shoot, we even sell Ewok plushes in the NeatoShop!

But remember that before they joined forces with the Rebel Alliance, the Ewoks were about to eat Luke, Han and Leia. You may think of an Ewok as a friend, but he thinks of you as food. You think of him as tender-hearted, but he thinks of you as tenderized.

This video by Brotherhood Workshop shows a scene deleted from Return of the Jedi. It gives the film a darker ending.

-via Geekosystem

Would you like to have a marriage filled with rancor? Then maybe you should get a wedding ring shaped like one. These are 2 of several ring designs by J.A.P., a Japanese design firm. Others show Darth Vader, Chewbacca, Ackbar, Boba Fett, Jabba the Hutt and more. Personally, I'd go for the C-3PO ring because that guy knows how to express love in more than 6 million forms of communication.

-via Landa Calrissian

(Time Traveler T-Shirt now on sale at the NeatoShop)

In 2009, physicist Stephen Hawking held a party for time travelers. He announced it 3 years later to ensure that only people with the ability to travel back in time could attend. No one showed up.

Robert Nemiroff, a physicist at Michigan Technological University, and graduate student Teresa Wilson also looked for evidence of time travelers at work in the world. They recently published a paper on the results of their search. To find time travelers, they looked for evidence of online content that only people who could travel backward in time would be able to create:

They looked for signs of foreknowledge about specific events on the Internet, or in Twitter tweets. The two events they chose were the discovery of Comet ISON in September 2012, and the selection of Pope Francis in March 2013. Looking for the evidence was trickier than it might sound: For example, search engines such as Google and Bing can misinterpret time stamps for Web pages, and it's also possible to back-date blog entries or Facebook posts.

The researchers found Twitter searches to be the most reliable tools, because tweets can't be back-dated. "No clearly prescient content involving 'Comet ISON,' '#cometison,' 'Pope Francis' or "#popefrancis' was found from any Twitter tweet — ever," they reported.

They also issued a request for time travelers to send tweets using either the hashtag "#ICanChangeThePast2" or "#ICannotChangeThePast2" by the end of August 2013. The trick was that the request was issued in September. No such tweets were found that predated the deadline. (Some have been received since, however, including this one from Thursday: "Your future laws forbid me from giving you any proof of our technologies. But be sure that we're watching you. #ICanChangeThePast2")

Dr. Nemiroff and Ms. Wilson are trying to get their paper published in a scholarly journal. So far, they have not been successful:

Nemiroff told NBC News that the time-travel paper was submitted to three journals, but was rejected by all three. "At this point, I don't know if it will ever appear in a refereed journal," he said. If there are any time travelers out there who can let him know, he'd appreciate hearing about it. And while you're at it, he'd also appreciate receiving "a large sum of money in negotiable currency."

-via Marginal Revolution

(Photo: Jim Barcus/Kansas City Star)

How long a scarf could you knit while running a full marathon? For David Babcock, it's 12 feet, 1 and 3/4 inches long. He set this record in October in Kansas City, breaking the previous record of 6 feet, 9 inches set by Susie Hewer in London last April. The task took Mr. Babcock 5 hours, 48 minutes and 27 seconds.

Mr. Babcock, who is a graphic design professor at the University of Central Missouri, used to knit and run as separate activities. But in order to avoid monotony, he combined them. Here's how he does it:

It took experimentation. The yarn, which he keeps in a pack on his waist, had to be acrylic; natural fibers pick up sweat. Babcock devised a technique for tying the lengthening scarves around his waist and cinching them to a carabiner.

Except for one fall early in his knitting-while-running career, when he didn’t notice a pothole, Babcock hasn’t had any mishaps running with needles.

“I have a very smooth gait,” he said.

-via Play with Your Yarn

By altering images from NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team, Tahar Abroudjameur created this stunning image of swirling stars and nebulae. He calls it The Universe Is in Us.

As an experiment, Cracked writer Alli Reed composed a fictitious but truly awful online dating profile. Her goal was to to create a persona that was truly despicable and that no one would ever consider dating:

In making this profile, I made sure my creation touched on every major facet of being truly horrible: mean, spoiled, lazy, racist, manipulative, and willfully ignorant, and I threw in a little gold digging just for funzies. I maintain that there is not a human on this planet who would read this profile and think, "Yes, I'd like to spend any amount of the fleeting time I'm given on my journey around the sun getting to know this person." 

As you can see, she put a lot of thought into how truly offensive she could be. Her persona, aaroncarterfan, is despicable. She openly brags of engaging in paternity fraud and harassing homeless people.

But within a day, she received 150 responses from interested men. In their online conversations, she did her best to convey the impression that aaroncarterfan would be the worst possible girlfriend. She was unsuccessful. You can read them here.