The question for this episode of the What If? series (previously at Neatorama) was, if there were a lake on the moon, what would it be like to swim in it? Well, there is no lake on the moon, but someday there might possibly be a swimming pool. It would have to be sheltered from the elements, or lack of, just like astronauts have to wear helmets. Safely inside a secured moon base, a pool would be a lot of fun. See, physics works the same on the moon, but the gravity is different from that on earth, leading to the kind of fun Randall Munroe is famous for.  

Alas, real astronauts know better than to get their hopes up about a pool on the moon. The cost of transporting that much water would be, dare I say it, astronomical. Right now, we can't even manage to get our people back home from the ISS.

Air Force Colonel Harry Shoup was the operations officer at the North American Aerospace Defense Command in 1955. It was close to Christmas when Shoup received a call on the "red phone," a dedicated line that was to be used if the Soviets were to launch an attack on the US. Back then, Americans expected that to happen any minute. But it was a false alarm of a sort, actually a wrong number. When the news got around to the airmen, they made a joke out of it. But Shoup was a father as well as a straight-laced, by-the-book Air Force officer and knew how to handle children. That one call led to an entire series of events that would change the way we celebrate Christmas.

Shoup later became known as "the Santa Colonel." He died in 2009. Three of Shoup's four children got together to tell the folks at StoryCorps what happened that day in 1955, and what became of it as time went on.

It's not that unusual for artists to dip into the past when designing a gingerbread house, so artist and occasional baker Edward J. Cabral went back to the bloody days of the French Revolution. Behold his Christmas masterpiece: a gingerbread guillotine! Click to the right to see this bad boy from all angles. And it works, too! Well, the blade is probably not all that sharp, but it does move.

The entire gingerbread sculpture is edible, from the glittery rainbow candy platform to the peppermint "heads" in the receiving basket (minus the wrappers). You have to admire the ingenuity and skill that went into this gingerbread device, but at the same time, you have to wonder whether it's meant to be a warm Christmas greeting or a not-so-subtle warning. Miniature depictions of the guillotine were quite fashionable during the French Revolution, from haircuts to earrings, and it was always a warning to aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. Any way you see it, it's an incredible work of gingerbread- just don't lose your head over it. -via Everlasting Blort

The Parker Solar Probe took off from earth in 2018 and has been spending its time bouncing from Venus to the sun and back again, each time getting closer to the sun. On December 24th, it is expected to come within 3.8 million miles of the sun's surface. Nicki Rayl, NASA’s deputy director of heliophysics, calls that "literally touching the star" because the probe will be in the sun's upper atmosphere. And you didn't know the sun had an atmosphere.

The Parker probe is there just in time to catch the sun at the apex of its eleven-year activity cycle, when the magnetic poles move, sunspots appear, and geomagnetic storms flare out into the solar system. But that's what it was sent for, to collect valuable data about the sun from a vantage point never before possible. The probe will be close enough to experience temperatures of 1700 degrees. How will it survive? Read about the purpose of the Parker Solar Probe and the extreme design that allows it to handle temperatures of up to 2500 degrees, at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

Charlie Brown was always the perfect character to illustrate the feelings of confusion or inadequacy we all experience some time or another. In clips from the 1965 Christmas television special A Charlie Brown Christmas, that inadequacy includes not really getting the Christmas spirit like everyone else around you. That doesn't make him odd, because it happens to most of us, at least in some years. It makes him relatable.

Charlie Brown's depression is a small part of the show, and takes a back seat to his bad luck and Snoopy's World War I fantasies, but it means a lot to people who share those same feelings. Chetreo took the relevant clips and gave them some autotune and arranged them into a song, for those who feel alone in their lack of Christmas spirit. You are far from alone.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

It seems every nation has it shared television habits, especially around holidays. We were a little surprised a year ago to find that it's a tradition in Italy to watch the 1983 film Trading Places on Christmas Eve. In Germany and Scandinavia, it is a tradition to watch Dinner for One on New Year's Eve. But on Christmas Eve, most of the television sets in Sweden, and many more in Denmark, Finland, and Norway, will be tuned to an annual broadcast of Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul  (Donald Duck and His Friends Wish You a Merry Christmas). At least that's what it's called in Sweden. The show is 66 years old, and is an American television production.  

It's the 1958 special Christmas episode of the series Walt Disney Presents called "From All of Us to All of You." This particular episode only ran occasionally afterward in the US and had not been on broadcast television since 1980. But in some countries it's become a beloved tradition to spend the afternoon of Christmas Eve with the family, watching that show. If you want to see what the fuss is all about, you can what that episode on YouTube. It's a compilation of clips from Disney's classic animated features, some cartoon shorts, and a greeting from Walt Disney. In the annual European broadcasts, a preview of an upcoming Disney project is usually included. Only a small part of the show is Christmas-related, but it's a big part of the holidays in Sweden! -via Boing Boing

A digital production company in London named Sennep made a new thing called Audibaubles, described as "sonic seasonal decorations." These are video snippets that look like Christmas ornaments in motion, although they are based on sound, specifically movie clips. The audio from each clip is rendered as a symmetrical waveform in the colors of Christmas tree ornaments. The puzzle part is when you try to guess the movie these sound clips came from. If you are distracted by the shimmering ornament, watch (and listen) again. Maybe even turn the sound on.



If you know what movie it is, you know. There are four Audibaubles in all, and if there's one (or more) that stumps you, the answer key can be found at vimeo. -via Moss and Fog

It's fun to look up what was "in" the year you were born, but in this list, the real fun is looking up what the hot gifts for kids were in the years you were, say, five to ten years old. Did you get the gift you wanted most? Did it end up on this list? It starts in 1955, when Silly Putty was all the rage, and it fit easily into a Christmas stocking. It was quickly eclipsed by Play-Doh, which came in colors and tasted better. As you go through the list, the toys will became less familiar in the years you were a teenager or young adult, and then the memories will be of the toys you bought for your children. Or at least what they asked for. The list ends at 1995, so it should cover most of us.

Some of these gifts were a bit head-scratching, both then and now. Pet Rocks were hot in 1975, but I can't imagine any child being excited about one. It was more for adults who were hard to buy for, or who were into the latest trend, even if it was a joke. However, the entry for 1957 is "water balloons," which are just balloons that you put water in. Did any child ever write Santa Claus asking for them? Maybe there was no historically hot toy that year. See the entire list at History Collection. -via Nag on the Lake

Have you ever been in a cave, admiring the stalactites, and thought they resembled a pipe organ? You're not the only one. In fact, Luray Caverns in Virginia has an instrument that can play those stalactites like an organ! The Great Stalacpipe Organ, technically a lithophone, is an electronic device that taps the stalactites with rubber mallets to produce musical notes. This otgan is the largest musical instrument in the world. The device brings the notes together, but it doesn't change the actual note- those comes from the striking of the stones themselves. They were cataloged and tuned more than 60 years ago, but considering the way stalactites are formed, they made have to be re-tuned in a few thousands years.  

Veritasium takes us on a tour of the history of Luray Caverns and the musical instrument it contains. There's a one-minute ad at 4:38.  -via The Awesomer

We know who invented basketball, but did you ever think about why? People often say gym teacher James Naismith developed the game to be a safer alternative to football. That was one factor in the game design, but the real reason for basketball was to have a physical game that could be played indoors when it was too cold for football or baseball. The first basketball game was played on this date, December 21st, in 1891 at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, using a soccer ball and two peach baskets.  

How Naismith developed the game is pretty interesting. He studied existing games and their pros and cons. Games involving a small ball often required more equipment, like a racquet, so that was out. Throwing the ball vertically was judged to lead to a game that was less rough than most. But there were a lot of kinks to be worked out. The initial rules had no dribbling, and no running at all. What kind of physical workout was that? And games were slow because each goal had to be retrieved from the basket using a ladder. Read about the early days of basketball 133 years ago at Smithsonian.   

(Image credit: D. Gordon E. Robertson)

When the I-75 shooting happened in my neck of the woods a couple of months ago, authorities sent thermal imaging drones over the Daniel Boone Forest to find the suspect. What they found were thousands upon thousands of deer, but no shooter, because he was already dead. But sometimes such search stories have a happy ending.

A golden retriever named Chibs went missing for more than two weeks. His family in Coventry, Rhode Island, frantically searched for him, and enlisted the help of a drone service. Four K Videos not only has drones, but thermal imaging capability as well. Watch as a thermal imaging drone leads the search party to Chibs, who was hiding in the forest after being hit by a car. He had been gone for 16 days by then, and was cold and frightened, but is now back in the arms of his loving family. This is only the last part of the search; you can see a 17-minute extended video of the thermal footage at Laughing Squid.

Dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel (yes, that Nobel) in 1866 and was quickly adopted in the American West for railroad construction and for mining. Besides being a powerful explosive, it must be delicious as well, considering the many stories of animals eating sticks of dynamite. One particular cow in Birdseye, Wyoming, was used to roaming free and wandered into the vicinity of two prospectors conducting an assessment. They had 19 sticks of dynamite left, and discovered that the cow had eaten every one of them! One man threw a rock at the cow, which immediately exploded. The miners had to pay for the cow, minus the cost of the dynamite she ate.

The local paper thought the account was believable, and printed the story. But that wasn't the only tale of animals eating dynamite with disastrous results in the West. There were more than a hundred such newspaper stories, involving mostly cows and goats. And those were only the ones that exploded and made a good story! Of course, they probably aren't all true. Dynamite needs a blasting cap to initiate an explosion, and those are kept separate until time of use. However, cows and goats will eat those, too. Explosions can also occur if there is enough static electricity present, which would have to be massive to detonate livestock. Read up on several stories of cows and goats eating dynamite to no good end at Cowboy State Daily.  -Thanks, WTM!

As the year comes to a close, we'll see many lists of the best things of 2024. Movie fans always look forward to Sleepy Skunk's annual look back at the movies that grabbed us over the last twelve months. Louis Plamondon, better known as Sleepy Skunk, used clips from movie trailers to weave together a narrative of the stories we watched in 2024.

The first segment has bizarre and funny clips, whether they were typical of the film or not, gradually sliding into some violence and horror. The middle section has dramatic, emotional, and inspirational moments. Then it seamlessly segues into epic scenes for a big finish. The video as a whole will touch you even if you haven't seen these films. If you have, get ready to be emotionally wrung out as it takes you back to the theater experience. Contains NSFW language. -via Geeks Are Sexy

See also: Sleepy Skunk's year-end compilations from previous years.

Every year since 2014, the Stanley family (redditor kakalacky_guy) has been composing unique family Christmas cards that show the chaos of life with three kids, sometimes with dangerous or even supernatural elements. The kids have grown quite a bit! However, Dad is still wearing the same sweater for the 11th year now. If you've been following along, you'll recall that their dog Nala was present in every picture, and after she died they incorporated her into the 2023 Christmas card by placing her framed photo in the play structure.  

This year, they have a new dog! He's the main Christmas gift, but no one is paying him any attention at all. The boys are fighting over an Xbox, little sister is recording a video with her new halo light, Dad is busy assembling something, and Mom is spiking her coffee. You'll see on the TV roasting over the fireplace that it's not yet 5AM, and all the gifts are already unwrapped. It's not quite as kinetic as some previous year's cards, as you can imagine these parents must be really tired by now. See the full collection of Christmas cards at reddit, where you can click to enlarge. You can see the earlier years in a larger format here.

Sometimes it only takes one person to start something big. There was no ballet in Nigeria until Daniel Ajala watched an American movie. He was inspired to learn ballet, but without any teachers, he did it on his own by watching YouTube videos.

In America, successful ballet dancers start very young, have their choice of dance schools, and get opportunities to perform in front of audiences. In Nigeria, the public is rather unfamiliar with the art, and many think it's downright scandalous. But hard work, passion, and dedication win out over lack of resources. Ajala opened his own ballet school in Lagos, Leap of Dance Academy, which charges no tuition. His students are going to places all over the world. Meet a few of them in the award-winning documentary Then Comes The Body by Jacob Krupnick. Another student named Anthony Madu who went viral in 2020 is attending school in the UK and is the subject of a full-length documentary on Disney+.  -via kottke