’Tis the season to fold and cut paper snowflakes- but they don’t have to look like just any old snowflakes. Thew physics magazine Symmetry has patterns for cutting out snowflakes in the images of Nobel Prize-winning physicists Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Erwin Schrödinger (with a cat). Just download their templates, along with handy instructions.
Practice makes perfect, but remember, no two snowflakes are supposed to be alike anyway.
The latest in the People Are Awesome series has clips from videos uploaded in 2014. These people are doing awesome things, dangerous things, things that made me cringe. I’m a Mom, after all. Don’t try this at home. Well, try watching the video. No one gets hurt in it, although there were probably lots of injuries getting to point of perfection. -via Tastefully Offensive
Who opened the first roadside Christmas tree stand? Where did that Christmas pickle thing come from? Who was the real-life inspiration for the character of the Grinch? In this week’s mental_floss List Show, John Green gets to the bottom of how some of our Christmas traditions began. I was surprised to find that mistletoe isn’t even a native plant in America! But nothing compares to the very last bit of trivia -how our artificial Christmas trees got their particular form.
This short film is about a man who builds boats by hand in the small town of Kjerringøy, Norway, north of the Arctic Circle where you don’t see the sun in winter. Ulf Mikalsen lives a particularly simple yet awesome life, sailing the fjords amidst breathtaking scenery, living happily among family and friends, and singing songs. And for a 62-year-old man, he looks pretty good skinny dipping.
The final episode of The Colbert Report will air Thursday on Comedy Central. Stephen Colbert will resurface in 2015 as he replaces the retiring David Letterman at CBS, but The Colbert Report will be no more. As a goodbye gift, Colbert is raffling off his set for charity. First prize is his desk, and second prize is his fireplace and leather chair. Proceeds will go to support The Yellow Ribbon Fund (for injured veterans) and DonorsChoose.org (for classrooms). You can enter for the next few hours at Omaze. -via Stephen Colbert
Before you go see the final film of the Hobbit trilogy, The Battle of the Five Armies, take a look back at the previous film with Screen Junkies. Here’s their Honest Trailer take on the second movie of Peter Jackson’s opus, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. After watching this video, you might even think twice about fighting the theater lines for the opening of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies today. After all, it will probably be available in multiple showings over the next few weeks. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
by Earle E. Spamer, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is at least the third in Earle Spamer’s series of deep explorations of the Grand Canyon.]
There are more than 400 physiographic “Grand Canyons” in the world. How can this be!? After all, the chasm in Arizona is The Grand Canyon. How did the many “other” Grand Canyons come about? Are any of them, in fact, provably grand?
Just as puzzling are hundreds of differing ideas of what can be compared to the Grand Canyon. Few of them have anything to do either with canyons or grandness. What in the world can (a) be like the Grand Canyon, and also, by being so described, can (b) displace the concept of the real thing?
There is a profound misinformational abyss. The real Grand Canyon may not be what (or where) we think it is.
Service With a Simile In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt, greatest-grinned of U.S. Presidents, visited the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, in Arizona. There he saw grandness for what it’s worth, and he charged a cheering crowd to maintain the Grand Canyon “as it is . . . for your children’s children.” Now those grandchildren have aged -- like the canyon, whittled away by time. And the Grand Canyon still is not protected from the natural forces that wear it away.
Heroic schemes have been proposed (mostly be me) to rescue the Grand Canyon, or at least to do something to slow the erosion that is destroying this magnificent hole -- for example, to aluminum-coat its walls,1 or fill the chasm with styrofoam packaging piffles.2 The piffle-packing procedure was openly considered in 1990s, documented both in this journal (The Annals of Improbable Research) and in Nature Notes, Grand Canyon National Park’s activities and public outreach newsletter, with artistic renderings of the project. Yet, thus far, no suitably grandiose-scale preservation programs have been successfully implemented.
For generations people have believed that there is one -- only one -- Grand Canyon. With bare notice, though, the name was seized by unimaginative etymological pirates. First, it reappeared as the “Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River,” in Wyoming. Later, it scattered to locales around the globe, ranging from the “Grand Canyon of Alabama” to the “Grand Canyon of Zambia.”
Now there are more than 400 “Grand Canyons” in the world. Some even claim the status of “grander,” while others are likened to “little” versions of the original, real thing. No effective means exist to distinguish contenders from pretenders. The situation is even more deeply muddy than I have just described.
You know the songs of Christmas; you’ve sung them every year since you were a kid. But did you know where they came from and how old they are? The Christmas carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” was sung for 100 years before it got the tune we are familiar with. “Deck the Halls” was a New Year drinking song that received cleaned-up lyrics. And that legend about “Silent Night”? Not a true story. One origin story that tickled me was who wrote “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” It was an elementary school music teacher.
In 1944, grade school teacher Donald Yetter Gardner and his wife Doris sat down with a group of second-graders in Smithtown, New York, to help them compose a song for Christmas. While there are different versions of the origin, they all involve a bunch of children saying, "All I want for Christmas is…" It's not so much that any students wished for those absent front teeth, but more that Gardner was charmed by their requests hindered by toothless lisping.
It’s a rare treat when anyone shows up in the neighborhood Christmas caroling anymore. A choir came to our shut-in neighbor’s house last year and the whole street turned out to listen. Now, Improv Everywhere knows that nothing succeeds like excess, so when they went Christmas caroling, they took not only a four-part chorale, but a full choir, an orchestra, and a chorus line of Santas and snowmen!
What if no one was home? What if the family doesn’t celebrate Christmas? There were just too many variables to be able to go up to a random house, especially when you’re going to all the trouble to transport a 39-person cast to New Jersey.
So we came up with a solution: we rented a house and then invited families into the home under the guise of getting a family photo taken. We reached out to our NYC-area email list looking for families in the Bergen County, NJ area who were up for a surprise. In all we surprised five families over the course of the evening. The moms acted as our accomplice– they were the only ones in the family who knew that something was going to happen, but they didn’t know what. They kept the secret from their husband and kids. Once the families arrived for the photo, a producer told them to wait their turn in the living room and to please answer the door if the doorbell rings as we were expecting more families soon.
The Humane Society of Silicon Valley posted an ad for a chihuahua who needs a home. They don’t pull any punches about Eddie the Terrible. They lay out three big reasons Eddie might not be the dog you want. Here’s one.
2) Want your kids to grow up with a full complement of fingers and toes? Not the dog for you.
Some dogs love kids. We have a bunch of child-lovin' dogs. Eddie the Terrible, however, is not one of them. Honestly he's a little whiffy with some adults, too. Not in an eat-them sort of way but in 'this makes me very nervous' sort of way. Eddie's never actually bitten anyone but we're not saying it could never happen.
In a home environment Eddie is lovely. He's housebroken, loyal, fun and friendly. He lives to play fetch. But socially? He stinks. We're in Silicon Valley - if we started throwing out the socially awkward no one would ever have another piece of new technology again. We know somewhere out this little guy has a match.
All this honesty might not be such a bad thing. Eddie needs a local home with no children or other pets and a human who has time for him. I would bet that the Humane Society is busy sifting through applications for hm already. Read Eddie’s full story at the Society’s blog. -via HuffPo Green
There are 563 people in Shishmaref, Alaska, just 30 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The 3-mile long island the village sits on is eroding as increasing numbers of storms are collapsing the northern beach. Fourteen houses were moved in 1997, and others have collapsed with the shoreline since then. Elders remember using wide beaches for a playground; those beaches are no longer there.
The island has dealt with erosion issues since at least the 1950s. But now climate change is exacerbating the problem considerably. Average temperatures are increasing faster in Alaska than they are in the rest of the United States, warming 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 50 years. The higher temperatures are causing the subsurface layer of permanently frozen soil typically found in the Arctic to thaw in some areas. This weaker permafrost is more vulnerable to storms and tidal activity, fueling the loss of Shishmaref's shores.
Warmer temperatures have also shortened the amount of time the Chukchi Sea stays frozen each year, leaving the coastline exposed to fall and early winter storms. Now, during storms, the sand will "just melt with the water," said Luci Eningowuk, 65. From 2004 to 2008 Eningowuk served as chair of the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition, the group charged with developing and executing a plan for moving the town. "The waves would come and take a whole lot of the land."
The residents voted in 2002 to relocate the village, but that hasn’t happened. It costs money to find a proper location, build infrastructure, and move the population. Government funding is hard to get -and hard to keep, especially since Shishmaref is far from the only community in danger along the Alaskan coastline. And after twelve years, the village needs repairs, but is it worth it when it will have to move sooner or later? Proponents of moving say it’s better to go now, in order to secure a location and keep the community intact. Otherwise, when the island is destroyed, the residents will become scattered refugees.Read about the island village of Shishmaref and its uncertain future at HuffPo. -via Digg
Zapatou (Luc Bergeron) is back with another mesmerizing compilation of the crazy, scary, and amazing things that people (and animals) do, culled from 233 viral videos of 2014. It’s not only the action that amazing, it’s also the new way we get to see them, as this collection is heavy on POV and mounted cameras, so we are extremely close to the action and can even put our feet in someone else’s shoes. Take that as a warning that some these clips may induce vertigo. You’ll recognize a lot of them. Zapatou has a list of the source videos here. -via Time
Your Christmas card from Tastefully Offensive is a compilation of the funniest clips of cats in their annual battle against that most tempting toy/hiding place/enemy, the Christmas tree. It was edited together by Robert Jones and Christian Baker, and appropriately set to the music of “The Russian Dance” from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. A list of the videos used can be found at the YouTube page. -Thanks, Robert!
Daniel Kim’s annual year-end mashup is here! Pop Danthology 2014 blends the top songs of the year into a smooth dance mix. You’ll find an alphabetical listing of the songs used and the lyrics at his website. Whatever you think of the state of pop music, you have to admit it takes a real artist to mash it up this well.
Sara Mandel takes care of a flock of Magellanic penguins at the Aquarium of the Pacific. She had bought the iPad app Game for Cats and since her cat liked it, she thought she’d offer it to the penguins. It involves chasing a tadpole, and penguins chase fish, so it was a natural for them. Will wonders never cease? -via mental_floss
