Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a huge success when it came out in 1937 and remains popular to this day. Snow White's place among the pantheon of Disney princesses is firm. But she was not the first of them.

3 years before Snow White premiered, Disney produced an animated short that retold the Greek myth of Persephone. The main character from the 1934 film The Goddess of Spring was the first realistic but idealized depiction of a beautiful young woman. Erin Blakemore writes for Smithsonian magazine:

Alyssa Carnahan, open studio coordinator at the Walt Disney Family Museum, writes that the project was a chance for Disney’s animators to work on bringing a human character to life. The studio had focused primarily on wacky animals, though early silent shorts featured a real-life girl with long curls named Alice. As they worked on Persephone’s princess-like look and action, animators also developed standards like the model sheet, which allows cel animators to keep character attributes consistent throughout the film.

A look at Persephone shows plenty of similarities to Snow White, from her habit of holding her skirt and twirling, to her proclivity for adorable animals and diminutive people. Persephone might be a goddess, but she’s also the daughter of Zeus and thus a princess, as well—one who exhibits the same characteristics of curiosity, peril and redemption that her later sisters will mirror.

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Here's the complete film.

-via Jonah Goldberg

(Hiding in the Dark t-shirt on sale at the NeatoShop)

Randy Olson is a postdoctoral fellow in informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. Waldo can't hide from him because Olson uses his advanced mathematical knowledge to predict where Waldo will be. 

Waldo may think that he's being random, but he's not. Olson compiled and sorted the data about Waldo's past behavior to predict his most likely hiding spots. He reached a few conclusions:

• Waldo almost never appears in the top left corner. That’s because there was always some postcard from Waldo in the top left corner describing the setting and some interesting facts about it.
• Waldo is rarely located on the edges. Slate’s Ben Blatt hypothesized that this was done on purpose because the edges are “locations that might be construed as too obvious” and are “where children and adults alike might begin their search.”
• Waldo is never located on the very bottom of the right page. I was unsure about the reason for this at first, but Chris Metzger offered a probable explanation: Whenever you flip to the next page in a book, the bottom of the right page is the first thing you see. Thus, the bottom of the right page would be one of the worst places to hide Waldo because that’s the most-viewed part of the book.

Olson then calculated the ideal search path:

Now go get him!

-via Jonah Goldberg

Lugging camping gear around to music festivals can be a chore, especially if you don't want to invest in serious equipment and just want to go to an occasional festival. That's why Dutch designers developed the KarTent. It's a cardboard tent with a door and windows. It's easy to assemble and completely recyclable. The KarTent is made to withstand 3 days of constant rain. Individuals could bring their own KarTents to festivals or organizers could sell them on-site. 

The company is working on a larger design for this year. Instead of holding only 2 people, this one could accommodate 4.

-via Contemporist

(Photo: Aram Bartholl)

It looks like a rock in the middle of a park. And it is a rock. But it's more than that. Artist Aram Bartholl hollowed out a portion of the rock and placed a Wi-Fi router inside. It's powered with a thermoelectric generator. So if you want a Wi-Fi signal, you have to start a fire at the base of the rock.

Bartholl calls this sculpture Keepalive. It's at the Springhornhof, a sculpture museum/park in Germany. Visitors can make appointments to use the rock. After starting the router, they'll be able to download a library of survival guides in PDF format. In an interview with Hyperallergenic, Bartholl explained that his sculpture explores the need to trace technological skills back to the most primal of tasks--starting a fire:

“It’s not about easy access,” Bartholl told Hyperallergic. “It has a whole dystopian idea to it, like, will we need something like this in the future? Or somebody finding this in a hundred years — is it still working and they figure something out and they make a fire, or is there going to be a moment where we’re going to need to make fire again to get access to the data?”

-via Amusing Planet

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If a wild duck were to see this domesticated cousin, he might think, "Humans regard us as kings to be paraded on litters." This duck doesn't need to dirty his webbed feet by walking anywhere. His humans will give him transport befitting his station.

-via Geekologie

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A crab with a knife is safe. A crab without a knife is dinner.

That's the clear lesson in this video. The crab escaped from a restaurant in Brazil. I hope the man let him go. That crab has spirit and deserves to live.

-via Tastefully Offensive

UPDATE 2/24/16: The Washington Post reports that this video is a hoax. (via Gizmodo)

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It's over 5 feet long on each edge and weighs about 224 pounds!

Tony Fisher, a puzzle collector and enthusiast, could have built it larger. But he wanted to be able to fit it inside the doors of his house, as well as light enough for one person to solve it. It's completely functional, just like the standard Rubik's Cube. But because it has 20,000 times the volume of the original puzzle, maneuvering its pieces requires some effort.

-via Laughing Squid

Today, the web is laughing at a set of extra credit questions attributed to an unknown statistics professor.* This one at the top is my favorite. Almost certainly some anxious student is going to jump on his desk and yell "Oh Captain! My Captain!" -- a reference to the Robin Williams film Dead Poets Society.

All aboard the school wheelbarrow! It's time for all little orangutans to go preschool.

International Animal Rescue operates an orangutan orphanage in Indonesia. It rescues orangutans that have been kept illegally as pets or have lost their mothers in the wild. On the 163-acre forested facility, young orangutans socialize with each other and learn essential skills that they'll need when they're grown up.

Without their mothers, orangutans don't learn what's safe to eat, how to climb trees, and how to survive in the wild. Human caretakers do their best to prepare their students for independent life.

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-via Tastefully Offensive

A photo posted by Andrea De La Ossa (@radicandrea) on Jan 3, 2016 at 2:56pm PST

Andrea De La Ossa is a remarkably skilled makeup artist who can make you look both pretty and horrifying. She's got a knack for using concealing makeup to create negative space on a subject. When photographed on a black background, the results are startling.

I'm a librarian and I married another librarian. Other good possibilities for me were truck drivers, paralegals, and middle school teachers.

That's what this chart by Bloomberg Business indicates. Adam Pearce and Dorothy Gambrell analyzed US Census data from the 2014 American Community Survey. They examined who married whom by profession and gender. You can find the interactive chart here. It's fun to play to with! 

Of all professions, elementary school teachers were the most likely to marry within their profession. Software developers, dentists, musicians, and air traffic controllers also tend to keep their loving in-house.

-via Flowing Data

Sunday is Valentine's Day. It will be time to present affectionate gestures to your fellow humans. This is difficult, but not impossible. You can learn how before V-Day by carefully studying this video tutorial by Emily Larlham of Dogmatics, a dog training company in San Diego. Four of her dogs show you the ropes.

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-via Tastefully Offensive

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Burger King is preparing to unveil its new line of hotdogs. To ensure that its staff is ready, the company produced this video on the hotdog production process. Rap star Snoop Dogg introduces employees to the new product in this advertisement masquerading as an internal training video.

And for Burger King employees who speak Spanish as their primary language, the company called in Charo, Spanish-American comedian. You can watch her video here. Even if you don't speak Spanglish, it's a hoot!

-via Brand Eating

(Image: EPFL)

In the Star Wars expanded universe, there are (or were, until Disney eliminated it) over 20,000 characters on 294 planets. What is the species distribution? Researchers at the prestigious research institution École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) decided to find out. They determined that there are 7,563 characters of consequence. 80% of them are human. Professor Vandergheynst elaborates:

“Fans will be surprised to learn, for example, that we came up with over 20,000 characters,” said Kirell Benzi, a PhD student and the project lead. Among them, 7,500 play an important role. There are also 1,367 Jedi and 724 Sith. All the characters are spread among 640 different communities on 294 planets. And an analysis of the 10 largest communities reveals an aberration: nearly 80% of the galaxy’s population is human.

In addition to counting the number of characters and identifying their tribe of origin, the program also situates them in the timeline of the story. A very long timeline, since the saga covers 36,000 years, broken down into six main periods: before the Republic, the Old Republic, the Empire, the Rebellion, the New Republic, and the Jedi Order.

You can see many more charts of their analysis here.

-via Geek Tyrant

Lorenzo Wood made this amazing cake inspired by Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. The very lucky Alexander got a cake that actually lights up! Wood placed strings of Arduino-controlled LEDs on the cake before he iced it. The cake is mounted on a foam board and the wiring is fed through it to the controller on bottom. You can see more photos here.

-via That's Nerdalicious!