Amazon has introduced the new Echo Look. This is a new feature of the Echo and its personal assistant Alexa that looks at you and tells you when your fashion choices are acceptable. And it will sell you better clothing. What could possibly go wrong? For one thing, you might want to never take your clothes off in the same room with the device. And think about how much information Amazon can gather with a full-length picture of you in your home.

This might seem overly speculative or alarmist to some, but Amazon isn’t offering any reassurance that they won’t be doing more with data gathered from the Echo Look. When asked if the company would use machine learning to analyze users’ photos for any purpose other than fashion advice, a representative simply told The Verge that they “can’t speculate” on the topic. The rep did stress that users can delete videos and photos taken by the Look at any time, but until they do, it seems this content will be stored indefinitely on Amazon’s servers.

This non-denial means the Echo Look could potentially provide Amazon with the resource every AI company craves: data. And full-length photos of people taken regularly in the same location would be a particularly valuable dataset — even more so if you combine this information with everything else Amazon knows about its customers (their shopping habits, for one). But when asked whether the company would ever combine these two datasets, an Amazon rep only gave the same, canned answer: “Can’t speculate.”

Read more about the Amazon Echo Look at The Verge. -via Metafilter

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How do you get your money's worth at a buffet? The Food Network is here to tell us how we've been doing it wrong. See, buffet eating is a zero-sum game, and you have to have a proper strategy to win.

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On the other hand, you can decide that eating out is not a competition, but an experience that you pay to enjoy. If you enjoy the food and the experience, then you've won, no matter where you are. If your local buffet restaurant is full of diners trying to "beat the house," the experience will not be great and the food is probably sub-par. Maybe you should patronize a restaurant that gives you the good experience you are paying for.  -via Boing Boing

When you see a scary movie, you tell yourself, "It's only a movie, it's only a movie." but you're still frightened. There's nothing that will kill that mood like seeing the production reels with actors falling into giggles when they're supposed to be dying in some gruesome way. Production crews archive bloopers as a matter of course these days, but it may be years before the public sees them. Check out blooper reels from the horror movies The Descent, Scream, Scream 4, House of Wax, Halloween, Jennifer's Body, The Witch, Shaun of the Dead, and Silence of the Lambs at TVOM. You can assume that all blooper reels will contains some NSFW language.

Redditor shanekeith_ shared a letter his workplace received from a student somewhere far from Missouri. Even though he or she struggled to get three paragraphs, you can tell this kid is going places (although probably not Missouri, because he is only eleven). Honestly, if you were to received a letter from a stranger, wouldn't you rather see some humor and personality than a perfectly-composed business letter? Anyway, shanekeith_ works at Breakout KC, an escape room experience in Kansas City. He says they have plenty of cool stuff laying around, and will send the kid something that will blow his mind. If you can't read the letter, you can enlarge the image here.

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Volcanoes are cool, except when you're in danger of being killed by one. Well, maybe cool isn't the right word, because they're hot. John Green tells us all kinds of neat things about volcanoes in the latest episode of the mental_floss List Show.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were introduced on a New York street in March of 1945. Dean was born Dino Paul Crocetti in Steubenville, Ohio, on June 7, 1917. Jerry was born Jerome Levitch in Newark, New Jersey, on March 16, 1926.
 
They were introduced that fateful day by a mutual friend, an Italian singer named Sonny King. At the time, Dean was a semi-successful singer, performing around the East Coast in nightclubs and on his own radio show. Jerry was eking out a living doing a "record act," where he would mime to records by famous singers, all the while mugging outrageously.

According to one later interview, their initial reactions to each other reflected the fact that neither was very impressed. Jerry thought Dean was "conceited, snooty and stand-offish," Dean thought Jerry was "a young wise guy." Despite these initial opinions, the two soon became friends.

Staying in the same hotel, as well as being chronically out of work, Jerry would babysit Dean's kids for him. Soon, by pure coincidence, the two would sometimes be booked at the same clubs. Jerry and Dean would sometimes goof around onstage together, heckling each other, doing imitations and cracking jokes. The audiences ate it up, the boys had fun, but nothing more came of it.

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were friends and carried on epic literary and religious discussions. They also went to see Disney's first animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, together in 1938 or '39. They hated it. Tolkien was particularly repulsed by how Disney portrayed dwarves.

Years later, in a 1964 letter to a Miss J.L. Curry at Stanford University, likely spurred on by the controversy surrounding Disney’s treatment of Mary Poppins, Tolkien further laid bare his true feelings on Disney’s work. He described Disney’s talent as “hopelessly corrupted,” writing, “Though in most of the ‘pictures’ proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea…” He goes on to call Disney a “cheat,” noting that while he too had a profit motive behind his work, he wouldn’t stoop to working with Disney.

Read the particulars of Tolkien's and Lewis' criticism of Disney at Atlas Obscura. 

If a Unicorn Frappuccino doesn't turn you on, maybe you'd prefer some Goth ice cream from Little Damage Ice Cream Shop in Los Angeles. It's charcoal-almond flavored soft serve ice cream with the black provided by activated charcoal. The cone is black, too. People at Instagram seem to love it, but whether that's because of the flavor or the look isn't quite clear. Go to SomeEcards to see more pictures of the ice cream and what it does to your teeth. -via Boing Boing

@SssnakeySci is a snake biologist. A friend sent her this picture and swears there's a copperhead in it. Can you find it? I looked for a while and then gave up. Snakes are sneaky; he's probably underneath the leaves. But no. Once you give up, see the answer outlined here. Now, I looked at the answer, and then still had trouble finding it in the original photo! Like my mother used to tell me when I didn't see something in plain sight, "If it were a snake, it would have bit you." -via Geeks Are Sexy

Roger Horton is back with another Honest Ad from Cracked. The truth about credit cards is that they work well if you use them perfectly. But the credit companies make bank on the fact that people do not use them optimally. Human nature doesn't work that way.

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Are there really credit cards that charge 25% interest? I thought mine was usurious at $17%, since my mortgage is 2.5%. Sure, if you have the discipline to never use a credit card for something you wouldn't buy anyway, you'll be okay and rack up a good credit score. And then you'll have credit for emergencies. But it's so easy to get yourself into a debt spiral otherwise. And no one is perfect. 

In order to promote the Star Wars Force for Change charity sweepstakes, John Boyega did surprise photobombs at Star Wars Celebration earlier this month. Avid fans posing for pictures with a couple of stormtroopers and BB-8 were first shocked and then delighted to find Finn in their finished photo.

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Star Wars Force for Change benefits the UNICEF and the Starlight Foundation. You can enter the drawing at Omaze.

The 1979 movie Alien broke new ground in science fiction and horror. The slow reveal of the xenomorph and the slow reveal of who the real hero of the story was combined to make a darn good story -if you saw it in a theater. But if you saw it much later, after both became well-known, it was still a thrill. The production was not simple at all. There was a lot of technical stuff that didn't go as smoothly as planned, and weird things going on off-camera.

Read lots more trivia about the production of Alien at TVOM.

Between December 1884 and December 1885, Austin, Texas, had eight axe murders. Six women, an 11-year-old girl, and a man who was with another victim were all killed in horrific ways, and several were also raped. Only the first three were domestic workers, but the unknown perpetrator was dubbed the "Servant Girl Annihilator." The murders did not stop because the killer was caught; they just stopped.

Though around 400 men were arrested in 1885 under suspicion of being the Annihilator, none were ever successfully tried. The list included Walter Spencer (the boyfriend of the first victim—acquitted after a two-day trial), “two suspicious-looking white brothers found with blood on their clothes,” Eula’s husband Jimmy Phillips, and Susan’s husband Moses Hancock. Phillips, the prosecutors claimed, was a copycat killer before the term existed, using the murders of Austin’s black working class as an excuse to kill his unfaithful and beautiful wife. Initially sentenced to seven years, Phillips’s conviction was overturned within six months; Hancock’s trial resulted in a hung jury. The Annihilator was still out there, but what was he—or they—doing?

As time passed, suspicion fell on men who left Austin at the time the murders stopped. More than one of those went to England, and coincidentally or not, that's when the Jack the Ripper murders began. Read what we know -and don't know- about the Servant Girl Annihilator and his victims at mental_floss.

I never saw The Social Network, since I already knew the outline of the Facebook story, and thought it had to be boring. Now I don't need to, since Screen Junkies has an Honest Trailer for the 2010 film.

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Well, maybe it wasn't as boring as I had imagined, since apparently it was fictionalized a lot to add drama. But I can see that the movie is so poorly-lit that I probably wouldn't have been able to see it anyway.

The May 2017 issue of National Geographic features an in-depth look at What Makes a Genius. Author Claudia Kalb and photographer Paolo Woods bring us examples of genius, from Leonardo da Vinci to jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, with an overview of the scientific research into what makes those kinds of people different from the rest of us. Continue reading to see a preview.