Looks like winter is coming after all. After a rather warm December, weather models of all kinds are predicting a massive snowstorm on the US East Coast this Friday. The map above shows “this week’s snowfall potential, based on storms under similar conditions.”

Since early Saturday, nearly every single run of every major model has shown the potential for a foot or two of snowfall on a track to hit somewhere between Northern Virginia and Boston. What’s amazing—perhaps even more so than the impressive potential snow totals—is that all the major weather models are already locked in so far in advance. Simply put: There’s definitely a big storm coming, it’s just the details that are still being worked out.

Predictably, meteorologist message boards have erupted in squeals of giddy joy, ogling the storm’s potential. One leading meteorologist on Twitter has already dubbed the storm a “blockbuster blizzard for the ages.” The person who literally wrote the textbook on major Northeast winter storms, Paul Kocin, wrote on Tuesday that this week’s storm is “textbook.” Another meteorologist called the storm’s predicted evolution “perfection.”

Yes, meteorologists are strange. They are celebrating the fact that models are converging to make predictions more accurate, and a big weather event, which is their bread and butter. The rest of us have to consider the potential misery of being stuck at home with bored kids and how “essential” we are to our workplaces. Read more about the expected event at Slate. BRB, going to get bread and toilet paper.

(Image credit: St. Louis University)

We all know that products marketed as “for women” are overpriced compared to the generic, or “men's” version. The pink color and the decent smell comes with a premium price. Maybe it’s a conspiracy to make us all hate the color pink. There is, of course, a remedy- always buy the men’s version. Marketing people know that there will still be plenty of women who pay the extra price for not smelling like you just stepped out of the men’s shower room. This is the latest from Pie Comic by John McNamee. 

The art of constructing a movie trailer has come a long way. This example shows how thoughtful editing and great music can make even the lousiest of flicks look like something you’d want to buy a ticket for. I present: the 1987 movie Masters of the Universe, with a trailer in the style of The Force Awakens.

(YouTube link)

The irony is that we didn’t even need a great trailer to be excited about The Force Awakens, yet its high quality assured us that the movie was in the hands of people who knew what they were doing. You can’t overstate the importance of editing, and moreover, a brilliant score. As a YouTube commenter said, “Wow, John Williams' music can really put lipstick on a pig.” -via Geeks Are Sexy

Chris from Lunarbaboon has a multi-panel comic at Webtoons in which he hears from the future. The news is not good, but don’t worry -the call from the future produces a workaround. One that we all might try when it becomes necessary. You can follow Lunarbaboon at Webtoons as well as his own site.

American beer has a reputation in other countries as being subpar compared to the "home team," so to speak. In America, the Irish have a reputation as serious beer drinkers, second only to Germany. So what do Irish people think when they try different American beers in a taste test?   

(YouTube link)

Okay, everyone has their favorites, and there well may be plenty of brands that are better than what these guys were offered. But they went with the most well-known, or at least the most advertised, beer brands: Budweiser, Miller, Brooklyn, Coors Light, and Samuel Adams. Your mileage may vary. -via Tastefully Offensive

The London Underground moves millions of passengers every day, and the numbers keep growing. Anything that can make the system more efficient is worth a look. But flouting convention on escalators makes those passengers see red. See, the convention in London (and most US cities) is that you stand still on the right side of an escalator, and leave the left side open for those who want to walk up or down. An official from Transport for London (TfL) went to Hong Kong and noticed that MTR passengers on escalators didn’t walk -they just stood shoulder to shoulder and rode the stairs. Calculations showed that this behavior led to more carrying capacity for the escalators as a whole, and increased safety. They arranged a trial at Holborn station, in which TfL employees asked passengers to stand on both sides of the escalators. Other commuters were outraged.  

We might be bad at dancing and expressing our feelings, but say this for the British: when we settle on a convention of public order, we bloody well stick to it. We wait in line. We leave the last biscuit. And when we take the escalator, we stand on the right. The left is reserved for people in a hurry. In Washington DC, those who block the way are known as “escalumps”; here, they can expect the public humiliation of a tutting sound just over their shoulder. “Passengers just don’t like having these things changed,” says Celia Harrison, a Transport for London (TfL) customer strategy analyst, and one of the key people responsible for this heretical deviation from the norm. “I’ve worked on stations for many years. So I was aware that whatever we did people weren’t going to be comfortable about having their routine disturbed.”

The results of the trial were as expected: the carrying capacity of the escalators was increased, producing more efficiency for the system. But the backlash was so severe that officials admit that even if and when the system is introduce to other locations, they will have to reserve at least one escalator for those who prefer to walk. People just don't like change. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user Ben Leto)

We’ve all heard of sadists, but few of us knew there were so many of them until we go online to interact with others. I’m talking about trolls, who don’t have to hide their psychopathic tendencies as they would in real life, because online they can be as anonymous as they want.

(YouTube link)

AsapSCIENCE tells us about some recent research into internet trolls. Many of them care so little about what we think of them that they even self-identified for the study. The upshot of it all is still "don’t feed the trolls." That said, the YouTube comments for this one are hilarious. 

Comic artist David Yoder has a strenuous project for 2016. He is watching a movie every day, and then reviewing each of them in a 6-panel comic. That’s 366 movies this year, and 366 comics. They aren’t all new movies seen in a theater, but many of the older movies will be familiar to you. They range from blockbusters to documentaries to kids’ films, and you can follow along at Yoder's Comics Tumblr. -via The A.V. Club

In the late1950s and early ‘60s, the drug Thalidomide was prescribed to combat morning sickness (among other things) except in the US, where the FDA didn’t trust the safety repots. That mistrust was arranged, as many women who took the drug miscarried, or gave birth to children with a variety of birth defects. After a few years, Thalidomide was recalled and the very name became synonymous with the tragic consequences of inadequate drug testing. But outside of the headlines, a strange thing happened: medicine began to find new uses for the discredited drug.

In 1964, Israeli doctor Jacob Sheskin had patients with harsh leprosy symptoms involving painful lesions. While looking for any possible drug available, he came upon thalidomide in his office’s apothecary. He gave it to the patient, and it worked almost immediately: the lesions practically disappeared overnight.

Doctors began using it for other illnesses that seemed biochemically related, and found another astonishing effect: it elongated the lives of people with bone and blood cancers. In 1999, Dr. Bart Barlogie of the University of Arizona studied 84 patients who took the drug: a third of the patients improved while two went completely into remission. More studies about how this worked followed in 2010, by which time thalidomide was once again seen as a drug with much potential.

More research pinpointed the mechanism that Thalidomide uses to target cancer cells, and it is used more widely for a variety of cancers. Read about this new direction in cancer treatment at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: Stephencdickson)

The Eagles have announced on their website that founding member Glen Frey died today. He had been ill for some time, suffering from complications of rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis and pneumonia, according to the statement. Frey, along with Don Henley, Randy Meisner, and Bernie Leadon, formed a backup band for Linda Ronstadt in 1971 that became The Eagles. The band sold over 150 million records, and their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) was the best-selling album of the 20th century in the U.S. CNN has more.

Frey saw solo success with the 1982 release "No Fun Aloud." He hit the top 40 with "The Heat Is On," "You Belong to the City," "True Love," and "Soul Searchin.'"

He also tried his hand at acting with a guest spot on "Miami Vice" and a small role in the 1996 film "Jerry Maguire," among other credits.

Don Henley released a statement that read, in part,

“We are all in a state of shock, disbelief and profound sorrow. We brought our two-year ‘History of the Eagles Tour’ to a triumphant close at the end of July and now he is gone. I’m not sure I believe in fate, but I know that crossing paths with Glenn Lewis Frey in 1970 changed my life forever, and it eventually had an impact on the lives of millions of other people all over the planet. It will be very strange going forward in a world without him in it. But, I will be grateful, every day, that he was in my life.

Glenn Frey was 67.

(Image credit: Steve Alexander)

Scholastic pulled a children’s book called A Birthday Cake For George Washington from its catalog. It was released on January 5 and immediately drew backlash from book critics and in Amazon reviews. The book shows George Washington’s slave chef Hercules and his daughter Delia joyfully preparing a cake for Washington’s 65th birthday. Adult reviewers understandably object to the portrayal of slavery as joyful, particularly as it is introduced to young children. You can read about the book at Buzzfeed.

Hercules was a real person, and his real story is fascinating. He is today the most famous slave of the Washingtons, not only for his reputation as a chef, but for the fact that he successfully escaped. President Washington resided in Philadelphia during his presidency, which was the nation’s capital from 1790 to 1800. Washington brought Hercules to the city to cook for the family. But Pennsylvania passed a law in 1780, An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, which placed various restrictions on the practice. One part stated that any slave brought into Pennsylvania who held residency there for six months would become free. Washington got around that by sending his house slaves back to Mt. Vernon before their six months was up -and bringing them back again after some time, resetting the clock. That’s why Hercules was sent back to do regular labor at the farm in Virginia. The slave rotation scheme was technically illegal, but no one called the president out on it.    

When George Washington was celebrating his 65th birthday on February 22, 1797, the president was in Philadelphia, and Hercules was at Mt. Vernon in Virginia -and that’s the day he left, never to be seen again, at least by the Washingtons. While Hercules was legally freed after Washington’s death in accordance with his will, there is no evidence that he ever knew about that. Hercules’ wife and children were owned by Martha Washington, and they were never freed. You can read more about Hercules at the Mt. Vernon website with further details at Wikipedia.

Italian animator Antonio Toscano put together a montage of the biggest movies of 2015 in stop-motion LEGO animation! Are we going to stand around all day, or are we going to fight?

(YouTube link)

See scenes from Fury Road, The Force Awakens, Age of Ultron, Furious 7, The Martian, Jurassic World, Mockingjay Part 2, and a bunch of other movies I haven’t seen. Audio clips from the films are used for delivering iconic lines. May contain spoilers; I don’t know. -via Tastefully Offensive 

Franklin and Penelope Shields worked the land in Texas with their seven sons. P.T. Barnum’s agents heard about the sons, who were called "giants," and went to investigate. In the late 1870s, Barnum hired the four of the men to tour in his Barnum & Bailey sideshow as "The Texas Giants."

We know everything in Texas is bigger. That includes the exaggerations. The Shields Brothers were plenty tall: Shade Shields was 6 feet 8 inches tall, Guss Shields was 6 feet 9, Frank Shields was 6 feet 10.5, and Jack Shields was 6 feet 11. However, Barnum billed them all as being over seven feet tall. Family members later said they wore lifts in their shoes during showtime. The brothers toured for over ten years. When the others quit touring, Shade continued with his wife Annie O'Brien (who was 6’ 7") as the "Tallest Married Couple" until the turn of the century.

There were originally nine sons, one of whom died as a teenager, the other died in the Civil War. Frank Shields’ grandson, Marcus Ross Freiberger, was 6’ 10” tall and played on the US Olympic basketball team when they won the 1952 gold medal in Helsinki. -via reddit

A few years ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences changed the way that films were nominated for Oscars, and the way they win. The system they use now is particularly convoluted. This video gives a short overview of how the winner of the Best Picture award is chosen, but the formula for the nominations is explained at Vox. Good luck understanding it. The upshot is that there are fewer and fewer surprises in both the Oscar nominees and the winners.

(YouTube link)

If you are connected with one of the 305 films that came out in 2015 that were eligible for the process, the precise way that 6,291 Academy members fill out their nominations ballot can spell out how your career in Hollywood progresses. And when you think about exactly how many movies each member actually saw, how likely they are to bother voting, and how much influence their friends in the business have, it all becomes quite a stressful experience. -via Daily of the Day 

When science fiction writers -or any kind of writers, for that matter- have an unfamiliar product that flourishes in a bleak, dysfunctional, hopeless society, they go way out of their way to make sure it doesn’t have the same name as an existing product. That’s for good reason. No company wants their brand associated with bad times. But after the work of fiction becomes famous? Surprisingly, name recognition often trumps evil connotation. There have been quite a few new products that adopted a brand name from dystopian fiction. The most famous example is

Soylent

The 1973 dystopian movie Soylent Green follows a detective of the future who stumbles upon the secret to how the government is solving the world’s food crisis. Oddly enough, there’s now a food substitute product named Soylent that’s become a cult hit in the brogrammer crowd. If I need to tell you what Soylent Green is made of in the film (and why it’s so odd to name a food product after it), maybe consider renting the movie tonight. I wouldn’t want to spoil a 40-year old movie for you.

Think about what products might be there before you read the list at PaleoFuture. I was hoping to see Ice-nine. Although it couldn’t be the exact same thing as in Cat’s Cradle, it would be a cool name for a soft drink. -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Matt Novak)