If you had a real working time machine, the temptation to use it as much as you could would be overwhelming, even when it doesn't make sense. Would you get stuck on trying to make everything perfect, just for the excuse to go back and forth? Doc's become a little obsessed, to the point where you might want to take his keys away and make him remain in one timeline for a while. Why make the 1985 Marty always save the day when you could just ask 2015 Marty to do the same? Or maybe even take care of the problem yourself. Maybe this is why Doc eventually decided to stay in the 19th century in the third film. No, right, that was for love. Studio C did a good job of recreating the characters of Back to the Future 2 in order to explore the absurdities of what that kind of power can do to someone.

Prolific science fiction author Harlan Ellison wrote two episodes of the TV series The Outer Limits, "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Head." They both ran during the show's second season in 1964. In 1984, Ellison heard that James Cameron was working on a film that seemed quite similar to the plot of "Soldier," which you can watch in full. Hemdale Productions wouldn't let him see the script. When he saw The Terminator, Ellison was ready to sue.

The lawsuit never came about, because Hemdale Productions settled the case, for money, screen credit in subsequent releases of the film, and a gag order. To this day, people argue over whether The Terminator was at all plagiarized and if so, how much. Read what Ellison had to say about the case at the time and the reaction from James Cameron at Den of Geek. You've probably already seen The Terminator, and it's up to you to watch The Outer Limits episode if you want to form your own opinion.  

There's no doubt that Mario is king of the video game universe. His many adventures take him to strange places, the latest of which is the Overlook Hotel from the 1980 Stanley Kubrick movie The Shining. This isn't just another castle; it's the setting for weird and creepy hallucinations brought on by isolation. The tricycle is there, as are the twins, the blood flood, and room 237's bathroom. How many other callbacks from The Shining can you spot? There are a lot crammed into this 90-second video, so you'll have to watch this CGI mashup from Mark Cannataro Films more than once to catch all the references. Other characters from the Mario universe take on familiar and frightening roles roles from the horror film, some of them infinitely appropriate; others absurdly contrary. All in all, it's an absurd mashup that is sure to give you a smile. -via Geeks Are Sexy

This is the time of year we think about overindulging on rich and elaborate foods. We also open our doors to family and friends to celebrate winter holidays. That's why you've always wanted to impress them with a delicious home made cheese cake. There are plenty of classic recipes on the internet that involve cream cheese, sugar, eggs, and flavoring, but the process is rather delicate. If you've tried before and had a less-then-perfect result, The Takeout will troubleshoot for you with the 12 most common mistakes in baking cheesecake. If you've never made a cheesecake before, so many possible mistakes may intimidate you. Relax, I've made cheesecake a few times and it's not as difficult as you might be led to believe. Even when it isn't perfect, it's still cheesecake, and that's a wonderful thing.

But if you have perfected the art of baking a cheesecake, you might want to take it up a notch and make Japanese cheesecake, which is the light and airy soufflé version. The Takeout has you covered with instructions for that, too. Now you'll be ready to really impress your holiday guests.   

(Image credit: Alice Wiegand)

Science experiments are not considered completely valid unless they can be replicated. Replicating an experiment is pretty much impossible unless you've been steeped in the various factors of scientific theory. And even if you are thoroughly trained in those factors, it's easy to lose track when you're doing a casual experiment at home. That goes double when your aim is to debunk something that you find obviously wrong.

Sage the Bad Naturalist jumped into such a debunking experiment with both feet, and then got entangled in them. She spent an entire year trying to replicate a dubious TikTok, which turned into an embarrassing adventure in how not to do science. But negative results are still results, and the goal of science is always to learn something. She bravely admits all the things she did wrong, because scientists have to have humility to be accepted. What's funniest is how many things went wrong, and how they all piled up to the end. What she ended up with is an amusing and rather charming video on the dangers of throwing your heart (and time) into debunking something you saw on the internet. -via Metafilter

Car manufacturers have made great strides in automobile safety in the last few decades. When I was a child, my family drove everywhere in a Volkswagen Beetle or a Microbus that didn't have seatbelts. Nor did they have crumple zones, antilock brakes, or airbags. Riding in the bed of a pickup truck was a regular experience. Fifty years later, my oldest child wanted to get a classic Beetle, but was dissuaded when my brother called them "death traps." Now she has children, and purchased an SUV the size of a tank to keep the kids safe.

The newer a car is, the safer it will be, but when does that become overkill? We know large SUVs are safer for the occupants, yet more dangerous for others around them. We also know that accidents can happen anywhere, but deadly accidents are more likely at high speeds on highways than a short trip to school. And we know that children learn situational awareness and how to test their limits and manage their fears by being in slightly unsafe situations, such as old-fashioned playgrounds. Today, we have young adults who are terrified at the idea of learning to drive.

Jason Torchinsky at Autopian asked reader's opinions on letting their child ride in a classic car such as the original Volkswagen Beetle, and got plenty of replies about how much automotive safety is enough, from farm kids who drove tractors at a young age to ultimate safety advocates. The best comment: "Being unsafe in a car was how I got kids in the first place."

Breanna Teel is a high school science teacher who keeps things like fish and eels in her classroom. She did not foresee becoming a rabbit rescuer. A student brought a rabbit to school not knowing she was pregnant. While there, the rabbit gave birth to two bright pink baby bunnies, but didn't feed them, so Teel went into overdrive to save the newborns. She would have done so under any other circumstances, but when your students are following along, you go the extra mile to set a good example. I can imagine that no one in the classroom has ever seen newborn rabbits. I certainly haven't.

Teel's efforts paid off when the babies began to grow and flourish. They appear to be some odd breed of show rabbits that resemble large powder puffs with wiggly noses. Are they tribbles? At any rate, they've become a permanent part of the classroom into which they were born.    

You've certainly heard of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but have you heard of the Nutty Narrows Bridge? Futility Closet introduces us to this bridge that was built in 1963 in Longview, Washington.

Workers in an office building near the R. A. Long Park noticed a number of squirrels that were killed crossing the street from the park to an area with abundant nut trees. They proposed that the city build a bridge for them. Two local architects and an engineer designed the bridge, and it was built by contractor Amos Peters. He built the bridge with recycled aluminum piping and a recycled fire hose, for a total cost of a thousand dollars. The bridge is 60 feet long and 22 feet high over the street. A city councilwoman named it the Nutty Narrows Bridge. The bridge has since been removed and repaired several times, and the location has been changed slightly a couple of times. The squirrels love it and use it regularly. The tourist attraction is known as "the world's narrowest bridge," and inspired the city to launch their annual Squirrel Fest in 2011. The bridge was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. -via Nag on the Lake  

(Image credit: SounderBruce)

November 9 is the 96th birthday of Harrison Ruffin Tyler, a retired chemical engineer and a historical preservationist who lives in Virginia. His claim to fame is that he is the grandson of U.S. President John Tyler, our tenth president who served in office from 1841 to 1845. That's like, 180 years ago. How is that possible?

President Tyler fathered 15 children. The thirteenth was Lyon Gardiner Tyler, born in 1853, when the former president was 63 years old. Lyon Gardiner Tyler had six children, the fifth being Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who was born in 1928 when his father was 75 years old. Therefore, a president who was born 234 years ago has a living grandchild today. 

Harrison Ruffin Tyler is also a descendant of Pocahontas and several other prominent figures from both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Happy Birthday, Mr. Tyler. -via Boing Boing

(Portrait of President Tyler from Wikimedia Commons)

(Image credit: catcurio)

There exists a delightful subreddit called Council of Cats. This is where you'll find groups of cats having important discussions of matters both urgent and mundane. I have four cats, and I find it difficult to get all of them in one picture if they aren't asleep, so seeing many cats getting along is really nice. You can often guess what they are discussing at their council meeting, or they might be enjoying some group activity like birdwatching or annoying their human. They often get together to make demands on your time, or in other words, they gang up to get what they want.  

(Image source: reddit)

But there are also pictures that show cats just like each other's company. Bored Panda has collected 50 of the most amusing photographs from Council of Cats to give us a taste of a cat colony's strength in numbers, presented in a ranked list for your amusement.

How many crimes did Walter White commit? All of them! The Cinema Cop went through all five seasons of Breaking Bad and counted the crimes and their probable sentences. You can guess there would be many counts of manufacturing methamphetamine and distributing illegal drugs, but there are plenty of other illegal acts along the way. Once you've thrown your hat into the drug manufacturing business, there will be a lot more crimes required to cover your tracks. The tally at the top is the cumulative price if these crimes were all prosecuted, which they wouldn't be because that's expensive and useless once you get to a few essentially life sentences. Besides, White was dying of cancer the whole time. 

If you don't really care about the ridiculous tally of sentences and fines, this video serves as a supercut of just the illegal stuff from Breaking Bad, and it's worth watching just for that. -via Laughing Squid

Leeches were used for hundreds of years in treating patients will all kinds of conditions, from cancer to mental illness. It was an offshoot of bloodletting for curing what ails ya. Today we tend to look at leeches as medical treatment in the same way we see bloodletting- they didn't have anything better back then. But the more we learn about leeches, the more useful they become.

Leeches live by drinking blood, so they've developed some specific chemicals to enable their diet. Leech saliva contains an anticoagulant called hirodine, plus other anti-inflammatory agents, antibiotics, and pain relievers. All these things help a leech stay attached to their host and digest their blood. Using these chemicals straight from a medicinal leech can target a specific area on the patient, such as a finger after it's been severed and reattached, without having to flood the whole body with medicine.

The reintroduction of leeches as a medical treatment has a problem, though, in that medicinal leeches (Hirudo medicinalis) are a threatened species. Read about the usefulness of medicinal leeches and the efforts to breed them for the purpose at the Conversation. -via Geeks Are Sexy

(Image credit: GlebK)

Around fifty years ago, a skeleton was unearthed from a 2nd century Belgian cemetery. It was stored since the 1970s somewhere that archaeologists could study it, and only recently was this skeleton subjected to carbon dating and DNA analysis. Dr. Barbara Veselka of the Free University of Brussels noticed that the femur was too big for the pelvis, and the vertebrae didn't all match. What was going on here?

Advanced tests recently discovered that the skeleton buried all those years ago was made up of seven different unrelated individuals who died between 4212 to 4445 years ago -except for the skull, which belonged to a woman who died only 1800 years ago! However, the skeleton was found buried in a common manor for the recently dead in that area. While the discovery is important, the question is why? We can almost imagine a retiring teacher taking home various bones from anatomy class and assembling them, and after his death the unidentified skeleton was found and buried with all possible dignity. But that's only the first scenario that comes to mind. The skull was fairly contemporary; could the family have tried to assemble a body for the burial after the woman's original body was destroyed? Could there be more such "Frankenstein" skeletons in the area? Could the burial have been a long-haul prank? Or did someone really try to reconstruct a human body from random parts? Read about the unusual discovery at Daily Grail. -via Strange Company  

(Image credit: Paumen, Wargnies and Demory/Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles)

The things you know about ancient Rome from the movies involve the elite, the movers and shakers, and certainly didn't apply to everyone. And those movies also tend to incorporate modern values and customs, so they don't necessarily reflect the accepted values of the time. Sex in ancient Rome was unconstrained by the monotheistic religions, which either didn't exist yet or were relatively obscure to the Romans. But there were rules, mainly in place to maintain social status, because status was everything. Those with social status followed those rules, unless you were royalty, for which all the rules went out the window. After all, what can indicate status better than being above the rules? If you were poor, working class, from a conquered nation or ethnicity, a woman, or a slave, you were sure to get the short end of the stick, so to speak. Weird History explains the rules for sex in ancient Rome and who broke them the most.

Artist Li Jiayue of China's Sichuan province paints optical illusions, like the sidewalk chalk artists who create 3D worlds on pavement, but on columns, poles, and trees (and sometimes buildings). His artworks are painted onto wrap-around canvas or onto the columns themselves, and he sometimes combines those techniques to enhance the illusion. Like the sidewalk art, Li's illusions can only be seen from one angle, but they create the mind-bending illusion that the column is bisected, with an open space between the parts. The background is painstakingly recreated to cause the viewer to see right through it, except for the interesting parts that float in the space between.

Li Jiayue's works have gone viral on Chinese social media, and are starting to leak out to the rest of the world. See a collection of his illusion artworks at Design YouTrust. -via Moss and Fog