Glayvin! Prof. Frink's latest invention is his greatest ever! It's called the Frinkiac. You can search 3 million screencaps from The Simpsons for your favorite quotes. You can also add your own text to screencaps from the show. 

Sean Schulte, Paul Kehrer, and Allie Young invented the Frinkiac because they like to quote The Simpsons all the time, but can't always find appropriate screencaps. They described the project to Wired:

Frinkiac cuts every scene into 100 parts, takes the average color of each part, and compares its coloration to the most recently saved image. If they’re different enough, voila!, new screenshot, with minimal redundancy through the hundreds of hours of video being parsed.

-via Flavorwire

(Photo: Juan C. Levesque)

He's perhaps only an inch long. But in a year, he could be over 3 feet long! Juan C. Levesque, a graduate student and fisheries professional, says that the broadbill swordfish (Xiphias gladius) is called the "gladiator of the sea." In a 2014 article for the magazine Florida Sportsman, Levesque describes the life cycle of this fighting fish prized by fishermen:

On average, swordfish grow about 14 inches per year, but there are differences between the sexes. Female swordfish grow faster, live longer, and reach a larger size than male swordfish; almost every swordfish I weighed that was heavier than 200 pounds was a female. It has been reported that swordfish can top 14 feet and 1,400 pounds in weight, but these large fish are rare these days. In my 7 years collecting data on commercial fishing vessels, the largest swordfish I ever saw captured was around 500 pounds; it was caught near West Palm Beach, Florida.

-via Colossal

(Video Link)

The Turkish reporter is interviewing the man on the left while holding a microphone. For reasons that are unclear, he's holding a giant mushroom in his other hand. During their conversation, he gets the two confused and begins speaking into the mushroom--until the subject of the interview points out his error.

-via Laughing Squid

(Photo: Fat Man Photography)

Cosplayer Elizabeth Rage, whom we last saw putting a Slave Leia take on Belle from Beauty and the Beast, now takes that character into a different role in the Star Wars universe. Rage made and wore this Jedi knight outfit at the CosLosseum convention in San Diego.

Normally Jedi make their own lightsabers. But in this case, prop masters Dude Jay Cosplay and Jamison Bond built this light-up sword that looks like Lumière from the classic Disney film.

-via Fashionably Geek

(Photos: Weibo)

The Chinese New Year is upon us, which has led many people in China to try to travel home to be with their families. Terrible winter storms have made many people cancel their airline flights. Enough passangers cancelled their reservations for a flight from Wuhan Tianhe to Ghangzhou that, the People’s Daily reports, a woman named Zhang had the plane all to herself:

Monday's blizzard caused several flight delays in Wuhan, in central China's Hubei province. Flight CZ2833, from the city to Guangzhou, southeast China's Guangdong province was delayed for 10 hours. Most of the passengers had already changed to an earlier flight.

Zhang had a grand time on the 2-hour ride. She didn’t have to fight over armrests or listen to screaming babies. Instead, she switched seats often, chatted with the flight attendants, and shared a bag of oranges with the pilot.

When Zhang arrived at Guangzhou, she took a shuttle bus away from the airport. She was the only passenger on that vehicle as well.

-via Atlas Obscura

Casey Baseel of Rocket News 24 brings us excellent news: it’s no long necessary to mix your own green tea chocolate, then pour it in precisely measured lines over ruffled potato chips. It’s possible to buy whole bags of prepared green tea chocolate-covered ruffled potato chips, thus saving you from a good half hour of work every day.

Baseel taste-tested the results and said that they smell not just like green tea, but specifically like the Uji matcha variety of green tea grown in Kyoto. That’s good because we’re not crude savages who give no thought to keeping up appearances in respectable society. Baseel continues:

With the chocolate kept to moderate quantities, the first taste sensation is a salty one, like a normal potato chip. After that, though, there’s a mellowing sweetness, pleasant but in no way cloying. The layer of chocolate is just think enough to slightly soften the crispness but also provide some moisture.

(Photo: University of Reading)

The Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, UK has many artifacts from a much older, lost Britain. Among them is a 155-year old mousetrap. The appropriately-named Perpetual Mouse Trap by Colin Pullinger & Sons goes by the tagline “will last a lifetime.”

In fact, it will last several lifetimes. The Assistant Curator recently found a dead mouse in the unbaited trap. That’s quality equipment! You can see more photos of the trap here.

-via Atlas Obscura

(Photo: @muzintansaki)

Isana Yamada is a graduate student in design at the Tokyo University for the Arts. For his graduation project, Rocket News 24 reports, he composed sculptures of 6 whales that float through space, containing within their bodies detailed dioramas of the ocean waters and floor. They're mesmerizingly beautiful.

The six whales represent the six realms in Buddhist cosmology: the Heavenly Realm, the Asura, the Animal Realm, Hell, the Ghost Realm, and the Human Realm.

(Photo: Yamada Isana)

Ice skaters on Båven, a lake south of Stockholm, Sweden, spotted wild boars on an island in the middle of the frozen lake. They were trapped there, unable to gain traction on the ice and probably running out of food on the little island. So the skaters gently pushed the boars across with poles, like they were sweeping curling stones across the ice.

(Video Link)

-via Huffington Post

(Photo: US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Can you talk as fast an auctioneer at work? Then perhaps you’re from Oregon. According to a study conducted by Marchex, a mobile advertising analytics firm, people from Oregon talk faster than anyone else. The Atlantic reports that the company examined phone calls and measured “rate of speech, density of speech, hold times, and silences” to rank all 50 states. Here are the top 10:

1. Oregon
2. Minnesota
3. Massachusetts
4. Kansas
5. Iowa
6. Vermont
7. Alaska
8. South Dakota
9. New Hampshire
10. Nebraska

And here are the slowest talking states:

40. Illinois
41. Ohio
42. Arkansas
43. Georgia
44. Texas
45. New Mexico
46. North Carolina
47. Alabama
48. South Carolina
49. Louisiana
50. Mississippi

Do any of these surprise you?

-via Althouse

What's it like to be a twin? The New Yorker went to Twin Days, an annual convention of twins in the appropriately named Ohio town of Twinsburg. There, one half of a twin set described how their mother tended to group them together, no matter what:

You know, if I want mustard on my sandwich, my mom assumed she did, or vice versa . . . but if she got in trouble at school, then I always got in trouble.

These 11-year old brothers are best friends. But that doesn't mean they want to be together all of the time:

My mom is like, "Why do you want to go to someone else's house, you have a brother." I'm like, "Once you get to know everything about someone . . . ."

". . . it's still fun to play with them, but sometimes you just need someone else."

The hotpot rests at the center of the table, surrounded by ingredients. It's time to cook and eat them together. 

Yes, you could eat while using your phone. But where's the fun in that? Put it away. Don't phub your dinner companions.

You don't have a choice with this hotpot table made by IKEA Taiwan. The hotpot turns on only once someone has put down a phone. The heat turns up incrementally with every phone added.

(Video Link)

You want to send a quick text or Instagram the experience? Don't. You'll ruin the food for everyone else. Talk to the people with you instead.

-via OhGizmo!

Behold paradise on Earth.

Flickr member andolent shares the story of this retreat that he built by himself and lived in for 8 years:

I lived here for about eight years, and owned it for about fifteen years after I built it in 1976 with local fieldstone and oak logs I cut, peeled and notched on the site, working alone with hand tools. It had no plumbing, I carried water from a nearby spring, and I heated it in winter with about half a cord of wood a week which I cut and burned in the open fireplace. Eventually I moved into Asheville and had to sell it, but it was a large part of my life, and I miss it more with each passing year.

I don't blame him.

-via American Digest

In The Lion, The Witch, And the Wardrobe, Lucy Pevensie steps through the magic wardrobe to discover the secret world of Narnia. She finds a single lamp-post standing in the snow-covered forest, lighting the way for travelers.

Redditor Gen4200 and his girlfriend own a nice slice of forest that reminds them of Narnia, which is among her favorite stories. So at night, he secretly hauled a lamp-post out into the woods, fixed it into the ground, and provided electrical power with discreetly hidden solar cells. When she discovers it, she'll be ready to go on many adventures.

You can see more photos of the project here.

The men behind Flite Test like to fly remote control airplanes. But more than that, they love to build bizarre designs to see if they will actually fly. In the past, they’ve built airworthy models of the helicarrier from The Avengers and a Super Star Destroyer from Star Wars.

For their latest project, Josh and Peter built a large RC plane with a circular wing. They took their plane to the Flite Fest convention in Malvern, Ohio and invited kids to fly their own smaller planes through the circle.

They did so, having a lot of fun—even as they repeatedly collided with the circular wing plane. Eventually, Josh and Peter’s plane collapsed and crashed.

(Video Link)

-via Technabob