Clayton Homes has an ad on a newspaper website offering a premium when you buy a new home -a can of beans! Link -via J-Walk Blog

(YouTube link)

Can you catch the Gingerbread Man? This video is a "choose your own adventure" series, with important decisions to be made at key points. The best episode was in the basement. Sure, it's viral advertising, but that doesn't interfere with the adventure.

A study of the data from 5,000 individuals who participated in the Framingham Heart Study leads researchers to believe that loneliness spreads through social networks like a virus. The tendency to be a loner may be less of a character trait and more of a "state such as hunger".

They found loneliness is catchy with three degrees of separation. So a person's loneliness depended not just on his friend's loneliness but also on his friend's friend and his friend's friend's friend. Participants were 52 percent more likely to be lonely if a person to whom they were directly connected (one degree of separation) was lonely. For two degrees of separation, the number drops to 25 percent and 15 percent for three degrees.

The number of family members had no effect on loneliness scores.

Over time, lonely individuals become lonelier and transmit such feelings to others before severing ties. "People with few friends are more likely to become lonelier over time, which then makes it less likely that they will attract or try to form new social ties," they write. Such friendless individuals ended up on the outskirts of their social networks.

Link -via Digg

(image credit: Flickr user ~Oryctes~)

This company will make a tiny branding iron with your name on it! The product is a metal part that will replace the head of a disposable cigarette lighter. Fire up the lighter, and your branding iron will be hot in no time. Yes, it sounds dangerous, that's why the description says "for decorative purposes only." What could possibly go wrong? Link -via Bits and Pieces

>
Deviant Art member =Sugarcoatidli3z crocheted this awesome Pikachu convertible ski mask because the weather was turning cold and she liked Pikachu. Now she's made the pattern available to anyone who wants it! Link -via Everlasting Blort

We first told you about Santa Claus' blog three years ago. Since then, Santa has been steadily updating his site with stories of Christmases past and present. In a three-part series, he kicks off this Christmas season by telling the entire story of how he and his gift-giving enterprise came to be.

Blitzen knew about my family fortune. And more importantly he knew about my desire to share my good fortune with the less-fortunate. He knew about how I followed my father's tradition of anonymously leaving small bags of gold coins on doorsteps on Christmas Eve. He knew that I had expanded the tradition to secretly pay-off debts of those that had suffered misfortune and to leave some of my hand-crafted toys with their children. I had shared with him how I wished I could extend my reach beyond the Drobak & Oslo areas to help the many others across Scandinavia. And that is why that following Christmas season, on the verge of winter, he told me about the elves.

Check the sidebar for Santa's other projects and interests, including his favorite charities. Links to part one, part two, and part three.

You may love Sesame Street, but how well do you know the Sesame Street characters? In Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you are challenged to match the Muppet with a picture of the person who provides its voice. There is no option to select Jim Henson or Frank Oz, so this is more difficult than it would have been years ago. I scored 63%, which barely beat the current average of 59%. Link

(YouTube link)

Otters enjoy sledding and skiing, and they don't even need expensive equipment to do it! -via Unique Daily

Points for you if you already understand this physics-based bumper sticker. The effect is called blue shift. From Wikipedia:

Blue shift is the shortening of a transmitted signal's wavelength, and/or an increase in its frequency, due to the Doppler Effect, which indicates that the object is moving toward the observer. The name comes from the fact that the shorter-wavelength end of the optical spectrum is the blue (or violet) end, hence, when visible light is compacted in wavelength, it is shifted towards the "blue" end of the spectrum. Since the longer-wavelength end of the visible electromagnetic spectrum is red, the opposite effect, of a lengthening of a signal's wavelength, is referred to as redshifting.

While the terms "redshifting" and "blueshifting" imply significantly redder or bluer light, only the most distant galaxies and those moving at speeds far above average emit light that arrives with perceptible red or blue tinges. For the most part, shifting is not a visible phenomenon.[1]

Link

As a British soldier in World War II, Denis Avey was captured by the Germans and sent to a prison camp, which was connected to the Auschwitz camp. While most inmates were concerned with getting out, Avey was trying to get in to the death camp to find out about the conditions. He made friends with Auschwitz prisoner Ernst Lobethall and swapped uniforms with him for overnight visits to each other's camps. Lobethall got needed rest and food in the POW camp, and Avey gathered information from the death camp.

Mr Lobethall told him he had a sister Susana who had escaped to England as a child, on the eve of war. Back in his own camp, Mr Avey contacted her via a coded letter to his mother.

He arranged for cigarettes, chocolate and a letter from Susana to be sent to him and smuggled them to his friend. Cigarettes were more valuable than gold in the camp and he hoped he would be able to trade them for favours to ease his plight - and he was right.

Mr Lobethall traded two packs of Players cigarettes in return for getting his shoes resoled. It helped save his life when thousands perished or were murdered on the notorious death marches out of the camps in winter in 1945.

Avey never spoke of his Auschwitz experience after the war, and didn't know what became of Lobethall until recently. Lobethall moved to the US and lived a long life.

But before he died Mr Lobethall recorded his survival story on video for the Shoah Foundation, which video the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. In it he spoke of his friendship with a British soldier in Auschwitz who he simply called "Ginger". It was Denis.

The BBC brought the 91-year-old Avey and Lobethall's sister Susana Timms together to watch Lobethall's testimony and captured their meeting on video. Link -via Arbroath

This periodic table of cupcakes is for a chemistry nerd's birthday party. Each cake is labeled with an element and color-coded by its state of matter. I hear hydrogen and helium are very light and fluffy. Looks like someone already ate ununseptium. Link -via reddit

(YouTube link)

Hey, it's a holiday weekend, so take 17 seconds to enjoy playing with a baby kitten. -via Arbroath

(YouTube link)

Kenyan contortionist Lazarus Gitu appears on a German television show. Gitu performs with Circus Mama Africa as The Snake Man. -via Bits and Pieces

Lorrie at Clueless in Carolina recently found a newspaper in her mother's home announcing the news that World War II had ended. Besides news, it contained sponsored ads celebrating VJ Day.

You could almost feel the joy and relief wafting off of the page. Holding the newspaper made me feel happy, as if the happiness of the people who printed, delivered and received the paper was somehow still preserved. Okay, I'm a weirdo! But I wish I could put it in your hands and see if you felt the same way.

See scans of several ads and features from the Charlotte Observer, August 15th, 1945. Link

Oregon journalist Paul Linnman was 23 years old in 1970 when KATU in Portland flew him to Florence to cover the removal of a beached whale. Officials had decided to get rid of the carcass by blowing it up with dynamite. Almost 40 years later, Linnmann looks back at that fateful day.

"We're hearing this noise around us and we realize it is pieces of whale blubber hitting the ground around us (from) 1,000 yards away. A piece of blubber the size of a fingernail could kill you if it hit you in the right part of the head, so we ran away from the blast scene, down the dune and toward the parking lot. Then we heard a second explosion ahead of us, and we just kept going until we saw what it was: A car had been hit by this coffee-table-size piece of blubber and had its windows flattened all the way down to the seats."

The video taken that day is now the fifth most-viewed internet video of all time. Linnman said not a day goes by that someone doesn't mention the story to him. Link -via Buzzfeed

Previously at Neatorama: The Infamous Exploding Whale.