The magazine Inverse reports that David Ancalle, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, is leading a team of researchers that is studying the sounds of excretion in precise, scientifically measured detail.

The Synthetic Human Acoustic Reproduction Testing (S.H.A.R.T.) machine, which is pictured above, simulates sounds of human excretion. Ancalle hopes that his team will be able to create an artificial intelligence that will use the S.H.A.R.T. to detect health problems by the sounds that people make while excreting urine and feces. The program that they have so far can correctly identify a particular excretory event 98% of the time.

Ancalle is especially interested in diarrhea. He envisions a future in which the sound of this experience would be recorded by a smart toilet and provide an early alert about a potential disease outbreak. The device pictured above a prototype for a sound detector that could be installed in bathrooms.

This is our future.

-via Dave Barry | Photos: Georgia Tech Research Institute

I recently watched The Grinch for the first time this holiday season and this caught my attention. As a student of history, it naturally piqued my interest. So I did some research and you won’t believe what I found out. /1 pic.twitter.com/xksowmJBa9

— Trevor Williams (@MeLlamoTrevor) November 22, 2022

This is going to blow your mind.

In a brief scene in the 2000 film How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch dresses Max the dog as a reindeer and explains to him his motivation as an actor. He does so while wearing a US Navy cap. This odd scene has long been described by fans as a reference to Rob Reiner's headgear in the documentary This Is Spinal Tap or to the mannerisms of Ron Howard, who directed the Grinch film--or both.

It's neither.

Trevor Williams researched the tragic life of the Grinch prior to his Christmas adventures. There's a huge clue in the scene: the name of the ship Whoville, which was a Gleaves-class destroyer that served in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

I had no idea that the Grinch was a very highly decorated war hero who decided, upon the end of his service, to move to the town for which his ship was named--a town that rejected him, despite his courage and sacrifice on their behalf.

You'll never look at the Grinch the same after reading this thread.

-via Debby Witt

The turducken, which is a chicken baked inside a duck, which is baked inside a turkey, is only one of many expressions of humanity’s desire to cook foods within other foods. The Inuit once prepared birds inside a walrus carcass. The Bedouin used to cook chickens and a sheep inside a roasted camel. The Americans, back in the before times, would cook five pies within one.

The need for foods within foods is transcultural. Jung might say that it is a call from our collective unconscious.

But that is not a scientific way to look at the phenomenon. Vi Hart, a mathematician, is a person of science and breaks down the possibilities of the turducken concept at great length. She prepares quail eggs inside hens inside ducks inside a turkey, but also considers the consequences of expanding the practice on a staggeringly complicated scale.

Content warning: math.

-via Nag on the Lake

VCHS TV reports that it all began in 1948 in the town of Dunbar, West Virginia. Two neighborhoods represented by two amateur football teams, the Riverside Rats and the Hillside Rams, wanted to prove which was the tougher of the two. On Thanksgiving Day, they squared off in a pads-free tackle game.

These days, the rivalry is more friendly and the event is far more than just a game. The Commode Bowl, as the game is called, is preceded by a parade with floats and vehicles decorated with toilets, toilet paper, and toilet plungers.

This year, the Rams prevailed and carried off the trophy after a final score of 28 to 6.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: WCHS

One of my Myth students calculated the minimum number of times Odysseus cheated on Penelope: 6,573

— Dr. Jeremy Swist 🤘🏛️🐈 (@MetalClassicist) November 17, 2022

In Homer's Illiad and Odyssey, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, spent 20 years away from home while on many adventures. His loving wife, Penelope, was suspected of infidelity but never gave in to her hundred suitors.

Let us set aside the revolting rumors about her alleged romp with Apollo that produced Pan. That is not canonical.

What is canonical, according to Homer, is that Odysseus was relentlessly pursuing other women to almost Wilt Chamberlain levels of promiscuity.

But precisely how many times did Odysseus cheat on Penelope during his two decades away from home? A student of classicist Dr. Jeremy Swist at Brandeis University crunched the numbers. His calculations concluded at 6,573.

I invented the Squatty Slides, The first platform sandals with a retractable base that helps put your legs in the optimal position for doing your business. pic.twitter.com/7Aa1QerPLi

— Unnecessary Inventions (@mattyxb) November 14, 2022

The premise behind the squatty potty is that the optimal position for defecation is with the knees raised. Just sitting on the conventional toilet with one’s thighs parallel to the ground is not enough, so a stool tilts them backward.

But people will look at you strangely if you carry around a potty stool just in case you need to relieve yourself while out of the home. That’s why Matty Benedetto of Unnecessary Inventions developed Squatty Slides. These slip-on shoes have telescoping bases that elevate the legs so that you’re already ready to deliver the goods even while away from your home squatty potty.

Yes, it's a bookcase. So it doesn't look that special. From the a cursory glance, it looks like the work product of an ordinary hobbyist. But redditor /u/themaestro152 of Marksville, Louisiana is a master of his craft. Watch the video and you'll see that the dividers in this bookcase slide.

The client who commissioned this custom piece wanted movable dividers, but on an all-wood project. Hidden in the undersides of the shelves are t-track slots that allow her to move the dividers where the wants to fit the organizational needs of her book collection. Careful routing, fitting, and a lot of paste wax resulted in this smooth motion.

Automotive safety gear is rarely designed to protect your genitals from the impact of a crash that could reduce them to a pulpy, useless mass of bloody tissue. So we should be grateful that the designers at Hyundai are looking after our interests. But its newly patented crotch-level airbag isn't designed specifically to protect our nether regions.

Carbuzz explains that a common problem in car crashes is that people wear their seat belts too high. They're supposed to rest low upon our hips so that the impact of a crash is absorbed by the pelvis. If the belt is too high, a human body in motion tends to slip down or "submarine", driving the seat belt into the belly.

This new airbag deploys at crotch-level to prevent this downward motion, keeping the seat belt at pelvic level.

-via Dave Barry

The Turbo-Encabulator is a classic engineering joke that dates back to at least 1944. It's a long, deadpan description of a fictitious piece of new technology. It is, from an engineering perspective, complete gibberish.

In 1977, Bud Haggart, an actor from many industrial training films, produced a now-famous video version of this script, supposedly describing a turbo-encabulator developed by Crysler. At the 1:54 mark of the video, actor Mike Kraft takes over the description of this imaginary machine.

A decade later, Kraft reprised Haggart's role in a sketch created for Rockwell Automation. But this veteran actor wasn't done yet. A few months ago, Kraft created the above video describing even further advances in encabulation with the HyperEncabulator, which was invented by SANS, a professional organization for cybersecurity professionals.

Let us be grateful for the march of progress.

-via David Burge

In his latest video, Tom Scott visits this unique ferry design in Denmark. The Udbyhøj Cable Ferry across Randers Fjord is a cable ferry in the sense that motors pull the ship along undersea guide cables back and forth between its destinations. But it's also a cable ferry in that it's powered by an electrical power cable that gradually unrolls on a drum mounted on the side of the ship.

The ship carries 70,000 people per year with an average of 88 trips per day. Occasionally, it must stop to slacken the guide cables and allow deep-keeled traffic to pass--as all cable ferries must. But the electrical cable just rolls up on the ship.

YouTube maker Scott Prints created this gag for his car. No, it doesn't actually eject the passenger, but it is a wired button that does activate something.

Specifically, it's wired to a garage door opener. The device lodges into a cubby in his car. This video shows his step-by-step process for designing and building the gadget.

Scott Prints hopes that his next passenger asks about it. He already has a few lines prepared:

• "It came with the car. I've never actually pushed it." (while reaching for the button)
• "It's for my other job."
• "We'll get for that. But first, who did you vote for?"
• "Eh, don't worry about it. Also, don't push it."

He asks that viewers suggest their own lines to feed to unwary passengers.

-via Hack a Day

Hans Talhoffer was a Fifteenth Century German martial artist who was a master swordsman. He earned his living by, in part, teaching fencing. He was a well-educated gentleman who could write well and produced several written works about armed combat. His book Fechtbuch includes illustrated instructions about how a man and a woman could fight a formal duel and be evenly matched.

Dr. Kenneth L. Hodges of the University of Oklahoma provides images from this text along with translations. Talhoffer advocates sinking the man into a pit, giving the woman a mobility advantage to use over the man's greater physical strength:

Here is how a man and woman should fight each other, and this is how they begin.

Here the woman stands free and wishes to strike; she has in the cloth a stone that weighs four or five pounds.

He stands in a hole up to his waist, and his club is as long as her sling.

-------------------------------

I'd like to note that this story has circulated the internet for the past few months as procedures for "divorce by combat" in Medieval Europe. Various blog posts and website articles attribute the claim to Prof. Hodges, but did not link to anything he actually wrote. This made me suspicious. Like a recent story about a Medieval duel between a man and a dog, this story, which seemed too good to be true, did not survive some brief fact-checking.

-via Super Punch

Our feel-good news story of the day comes from Bellevue, Washington, where a criminal faced accidental justice. Idaho News reports that a 17-year old shoplifter who prosecutors say is a member of a gang of shoplifters tried to run out of a Louis Vuitton accessories store with $18,000 worth of purses that were on display.

He was in such a rush that he didn't bother trying to open the glass door that stood athwart him and freedom. After smashing head-first into the door, he fell to the ground unconscious. A security guard on site detained him until police arrived.

-via Dave Barry

My son playing dead to try to attract vultures pic.twitter.com/OACKQh3BBX

— The Birdist (@TheBirdist) October 22, 2022

Nicholas Lund, a birdwatcher and science writer in Portland, Maine, is passing along his life lessons to his son. In this video, the boy lies still on the ground in the hope of attracting circling vultures to approach him.

The child is not doing anything novel. Lying down on the ground to attract carrion feeders is apparently a shared practice for ornithologists when they are children.

BBC News reports that there are about twenty wild wolves living in Hoge Veluwe National Park in the Netherlands. They have no fear of humans and one was recently recorded strolling next to a human family in the park. Park officials suspect that some people have been feeding them, which encourages them to seek out humans.

Since wolves are dangerous to humans, park officials would like to make them afraid of our species and avoid contact with us. So they plan to equip rangers with paintball guns to shoot at the wolves. The paintballs will teach the wolves that humans should be avoided, as well as mark which wolves have been shot.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Retron