The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. This toddler is learning to be just like the adults she sees around her. When a new parent sees things like this, it really drives home the importance of setting an example. Well, to be honest, that revelation comes after your initial reaction, which is to grab another phone and record the fun for viral posterity. -via reddit
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Jane McDevitt and Neal Whittington have an Instagram account devoted to matchbox covers of the Eastern Bloc, the communist Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. They are quite varied.
The scenes depicted on these labels vary massively in content, making their Instagram account very addictive to scroll through, “Images of power and revolution, industry and national pride were celebrated, but also featured are public service information such as health and hygiene, money saving, alcohol abuse and road safety” says Jane. However no matter the subject matter or artist in question, the matchboxes consistently match as a set, “The designers and illustrators embraced mid-century bold contemporary design and bright colours.”
Check out the rest of the Matchbloc collection at Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort
During World War I, rations were doled out carefully, but food in California was being consumed voraciously by ground squirrels. School children were urged to aid the war effort and wage a war of their own by killing squirrels during a 1918 promotion called "Squirrel Week." Above is a pamphlet distributed to schools that contained information on the programmed instructions for using strychnine. There were even cash incentives for the kids who killed the most squirrels.
Children were asked to verify their kills by bringing in squirrel tails to their schools. Some impatient exterminators delivered their trophies directly to Commissioner Hecke even before Squirrel Week kicked off, causing a “pronounced odor” in his office. He requested that children not send him any more tails, and instructed his county commissioners to bury all tails after tallying them.
By the time Squirrel Week ended on May 4, children across the state had turned in 104,509 tails, though this was thought to represent a fraction of the total casualties. Even after the contest ended, the Commission of Horticulture reported that kids’ enthusiasm for killing squirrels continued for “an indefinite period.” During an anti-squirrel campaign in Lassen County later in the year, one girl brought in 3,780 tails; a boy brought in 3,770.
Read about the kids who killed ground squirrels for America at Atlas Obscura.
Tardigrades, also known as water bears, are microscopic animals that are pretty much indestructible. They can survive almost any hardship condition, including dehydration. When they lack water, they go dormant, for years if necessary, then rehydrate and begin their lives again. There are at least a thousand species of tardigrades, which make up their own phylum and aren't closely related to anything outside it. The picture above was taken with a scanning electron microscope, but tardigrades can be seen under much less magnification. This video shows a tardigrade living in a wet slide mount that acts like a tiny aquarium.
You can have one (or more) of your very own, because they exist pretty much everywhere. The Stanford Tardigrade Project has detailed instructions for finding tardigrades and making microscope slides. They use a Foldscope, but if you have any kind of microscope, you should be able to see your tardigrade pet. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Goldstein lab - tardigrades)
The illegal drug trade is extremely lucrative because of the risk markup. A large enough bust can also affect the overall price, at least locally, because it can affect the supply, but not the demand. The estimated worth of seized drugs is just an estimation, and may be exaggerated, but this list of the biggest American drug seizures by estimated worth are big enough to impress upon us how huge the trade is.
In June 2016, The Miami-Dade police made the largest cash seizure in history. According to police, the discovery was something out of the movie, Scarface. The investigators found $20 million in cash stuffed into 5-gallon paint buckets. The buckets were hidden behind a false wall that led to a secret room of the suspect’s home. According to police, a confidential informant told them that the suspect was involved in an indoor marijuana growing operation. When the police searched the suspect’s home, the found the cash hidden in the buckets.
And that's just a marijuana growing operation! Read about much bigger import seizures, going back almost 30 years, at Money Inc.
Star Wars and Christmas have had a happy connection ever since the first child asked Santa for a lightsaber in 1977, but even more so now that the annual Star Wars movies are apparently all going to drop in December.
Show your geeky side with Star Wars Christmas decorations that will surprise and impress your guests, and spark wonderfully nerdy conversations. Etsy vendors have plenty of unique handmade Star Wars crafts, like this one-of-a-kind Chewbacca door wreath from Buttered Burlap. See a list of the best handmade Star Wars Christmas decorations at Rue the Day. They'll make great gifts, too!
Varvar ner efter kalaset med en riktig guldrulle. Den här borde jag vunnit Guldbaggen för. #blackjack pic.twitter.com/X8IKw7EmaQ
— Gävlebocken (@Gavlebocken) November 27, 2016
Every year since 1966, the people of Gävle, Sweden, have erected a giant straw goat to celebrate Christmas. This year was special, as it was the 50th anniversary edition of the goat. However, in many of those years, the goat became a victim of arson.
The goat is traditionally constructed in late November or early December, and from that point on, it’s just a waiting game to see when vandals will strike. Various protections have been put in place and tried out over the years including adding a perimeter fence, covering the goat in coating of flame retardant, employing security cameras, and having the goat personally guarded by volunteers. But no matter how the city tries to preserve the goat, it usually manages to get set on fire.
The completed 13-meter-tall goat was unveiled on Sunday afternoon. By 11 that night, it was in flames. The perpetrators struck while two security guards were in the restroom and a third was on the opposite side of the goat.
Oh no, such a short amount of time with you my friends. But I shall rise from the ashes and see you next year again!
— Gävlebocken (@Gavlebocken) November 27, 2016
The Gävle goat didn't even make it an entire day. A movement is underway to get the goat rebuilt before Christmas.
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
by S. Drew, Improbable Research staff
The finger pillory is a simple device for restraining the finger—and thus the body—of someone who has been fingered as being a miscreant.
The drawing and description shown here (below) are from the book The Archeological Album; or Museum of National Antiquities, edited by Thomas Wright, illustrated by F.W. Fairholt, London, Chapman and Hall, 1845.
An item in the October 25, 1851 issue of Notes and Queries describes a finger pillory in the Church of Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Thomas Lawrence, the author of that note (see Figure 2), says:
Its use is stated to have been for the punishment of persons guilty of malpractices during divine service; truly, a mischievous urchin, or a lout of a farm servant, dragged off to the stocks, must have been a scene extremely edifying to the congregation, particularly if the offenders were obstreperous, and had no inclination whatever to be in a fix.
_____________________
This article is republished with permission from the September-October 2007 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift! Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
Research about some of the risk that comes from osculation
compiled by Ernest Ersatz, Improbable Research staff
Kissing can be a dangerous enterprise. These studies attempt to clarify some of the dangers.
Pleasure Not Untainted (1)
“Food Allergies and Kissing,” Rosemary Hallett, Lori Haapanen, and Suzanne Teuber, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 346, no. 23, June 6, 2002, pp. 1833-1834. The authors, at the University of California, Davis, report:
[T]here are rare reports of transmission of allergens through kissing. We were recently surprised by the number of people in our data base of subjects with food allergies who spontaneously reported such reactions....
Reactions began rapidly after the kiss in all interviewed subjects (all in less than one minute). All 17 reported localized itching and swelling or urticaria in the area kissed. Four subjects reported the development of wheezing with at least one episode of kissing. Patient 5 was kissed on the cheek by his mother right after she tasted pea soup on the stove and a large wheal immediately developed at the exact site of the kiss, followed in minutes by flushing, urticaria, angioedema, and severe wheezing, requiring the administration of epinephrine in the emergency department.
Stuntman Damien Walters (previously at Neatorama) acts out a variety of famous movie stunts while running on a giant treadmill. The movie sets are projected on the room around him. It's pretty cool!
You might recognize the movies these are from. I saw Steamboat Bill, Jr., Raiders of the Lost Ark, and North by Northwest. Can you name the others for me? -via Tastefully Offensive
Gary Larson entertained us with his surreal sense of humor in the newspaper comic The Far Side from 1980 to 1995. Although the last comic ran over twenty years ago, Larson's loony ideas have become part of the real world in many ways. The Far Side gave us useful new English words, like Anatidaephobia and Thagomizer.
Stegosaurus is world-famous for its lime-sized brain and the quartet of nasty-looking spikes on its tail. A 1982 "Far Side" strip decided to have a little fun with the latter attribute. In that cartoon, we find an early human anachronistically lecturing his fellow cavemen about dinosaur-related hazards. Pointing at the rear end of a Stegosaurus diagram, he says “Now this end is called the thagomizer … after the late Thag Simmons.” Without meaning to, Larson’s strip plugged a gap in the scientific lexicon. Previously, nobody had ever given a name to the unique arrangement of tail spikes found on Stegosaurus and its relatives. But today, many paleontologists use the word “thagomizer” when describing this apparatus, even in scientific journals.
Read more wonderful stories about The Far Side at mental_floss.
Just because a movie is animated doesn't mean it is for children. Animated films aimed at adults may be difficult to find at your local theatre if you live outside a city, but you can get them on home video. If you like a good action film, animation offers special effects that aren't often seen in live-action movies. Take, for instance, Ninja Scroll from 1993.
It revolves around a ninja named Jubei who is coerced into killing his entire clan of warriors. Jubei succeeds in slaying his fellow warriors, and he ends up as an assassin for hire. After some time, a demonic clan of ninja called ‘devils’ sets out on a mission to take over the Japanese government, and they do not hesitate to annihilate entire villages in the most horrific ways. Jubei has to save the government and the people, and the fights are incredibly detailed and violent.
So if you'd like to find something new and different to watch -without the kids- you'll want to check out a list of very violent animated films at Unreality.
The good news is that I cut that tree down with my new chainsaw in no time flat. The bad news is that it fell on the neighbor's car.
In this case, two billboards are better than one. Once you get someone to pay attention to your advertising billboard among the hundreds of others around it, the battle is won. So these two businesses were consolidated by a poor tree. This was spotted in Nixa, Missouri. -via reddit
We are now concentrating on sending people to Mars because we've already been to the moon, and Mars is pretty close compared to the other planets (and more pleasant than Venus). But Saturn's largest moon offers a much better environment for human colonization. Sure, there are drawbacks, but those could be worked around. Let's look at the good things about Titan.
It’s cold on Titan, at -180°C (-291°F), but thanks to its thick atmosphere, residents wouldn’t need pressure suits—just warm clothing and respirators. Housing could be made of plastic produced from the unlimited resources harvested on the surface, and could consist of domes inflated by warm oxygen and nitrogen. The ease of construction would allow huge indoor spaces.
Titanians (as we call them) wouldn’t have to spend all their time inside. The recreational opportunities on Titan are unique. For example, you could fly. The weak gravity—similar to the Moon’s—combined with the thick atmosphere would allow individuals to aviate with wings on their backs. If the wings fall off, no worry, landing will be easy. Terminal velocity on Titan is a tenth that found on the Earth.
But the biggest asset would be the tons of gas available for fuel. Yeah, it rains methane there. Read about Titan and its potential at Scientific American. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Idaho)
As we slide into the Christmas season, there are tons of Christmas movies, TV specials, and marathons coming to a television near you. With so many channels to keep up with, it helps that Den of Geek has published a running list of holiday programming for us. Keep this one bookmarked for the next month or so, because they'll be updating it as new information comes in. But meanwhile, you can mark your calendar with your favorites.
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