The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.

A look back at twisting approaches to treating mental ailments
by Nan Swift, Improbable Research staff

Medical professionals, some of them, have tried using centrifugal force to treat and possibly cure their mental patients. Here are glances at a few of those attempts.

Halloran’s Spinning Swing

“Hallaran’s Circulating Swing,” Caoimhghín S. Breathnach, History of Psychiatry, vol. 21, no. 1, 2010, pp. 79–84. The author, at University College Dublin, explains:

William Saunders Hallaran (c.1765–1825) was physician superintendent at the County and City of Cork Lunatic Asylum for 40 years, where he distinguished between mental insanity and organic (systemic) delirium. In treatment he used emetics and purgatives, digitalis and opium, the shower bath and exercise, and argued that patients should be saved from “unavoidable sloth” by mental as well as manual occupation. However, it is as an exponent of the circulating swing, proposed by Erasmus Darwin and used by Joseph Cox, that he is remembered. His best results were achieved, as he recorded in An Enquiry [into… the Number of Insane {and} the Cure of Insanity] in 1810, by inducing sleep in mania of recent onset, but perhaps his most enduring observation was that some of his patients enjoyed the rotatory experience, and he had enough sense to allow the use of the swing as a mode of amusement.

Ninteenth Century Patient-Spinning

Detail from Victor Harsch’s treatise on old German methods of using centrifugal force to treat mental patients.

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Two years after a simple picture made her a smash internet meme, Grumpy Cat is a bona fide movie star. Well, she’s the subject of an upcoming Lifetime movie, Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever. Now, how can you star in a movie when your only talent is frowning? Grumpy Cat doesn’t actually do anything! Well, there are obviously some workarounds. She communicates telepathically with the voice of Aubrey Plaza. It appears that they also used both stunt cats and puppets for action scenes. Kids will probably love it. -via Viral Viral Videos

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The results are in, and the winner of the 7th annual Dance Your PhD competition is Uma Nagendra of the University of Georgia.

Nagendra's own home city of New Orleans, Louisiana, was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As the human residents put their lives back together, she became curious about how the natural world recovers from disasters. After she became a biology Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia in 2011, she realized that she could answer this question herself by gathering data out in the field. But destructive events like Hurricane Katrina are rare on the timescale of a Ph.D. So Nagendra focused on a natural disaster that occurs far more frequently and does more localized damage: tornadoes.

Negendra is not only a scientist -she’s also a circus aerialist, so she recruited her circus friends to perform with her in the video that explains her dissertation. You might say she had a leg up in that department. Nagendra was the overall winner and the winner of the Biology category. Continue reading to see the winners in the Physics, Chemustry, and Social Sciences categories.

Star Trek’s tribbles became an internet meme back in 2007 when image macros were produced using LOLcat language over scenes from the Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." See those LOLtrek images compiled into one gif that tells the entire story in about a minute.

You have to read fast, and frankly, you might miss a frame or two from laughing, but it loops around again soon enough. -via Boing Boing

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Second grader Charlie Hale got to do a guest weather segment Friday morning at WGN in Chicago, and he was quite happy to be there. He’s not at all shy, and does an awesome job as he “gets down to business”! -via Uproxx

The following article is republished from Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader.

Next time you feel yourself coming down with a cold, thank your lucky stars for 21st-century medicine.

MONDAY

On the morning of February 2, 1685, King Charles II of England was preparing to shave when he suddenly cried out in pain, fell to the floor, and started having fits. Six royal physicians rushed in and administered emergency “aid.”

* They let (drained) 16 ounces of blood.

* They applied heated cups to the skin, which formed large round blisters, in order to “stimulate the system.”

* They let 8 more ounces of blood.

* They induced vomiting to purify his stomach, gave an enema to purify his bowels, and made him swallow a purgative to clean out his intestines.

* Then they force-fed him syrup of blackthorn and rock salt.

* They shaved his hair and put blistering plasters on his scalp. The king regained consciousness. The treatment seemed to be working, so they kept at it.

* They gave him another enema.

The original script for the 1990 movie Pretty Woman was called 3000, which is the price the hooker was paid for a week’s services (remember, this was 25 years ago). It was going to be a low-budget film, but then Julia Roberts fell in love with the script.  

Roberts described the original script as "a really dark and depressing, horrible, terrible story about two horrible people and my character was this drug addict, a bad-tempered, foulmouthed, ill-humored, poorly educated hooker who had this weeklong experience with a foulmouthed, ill-tempered, bad-humored, very wealthy, handsome but horrible man and it was just a grisly, ugly story about these two people."  

Which may be realistic, but it wouldn’t do once Disney’s Touchstone Pictures acquired the project. The script went through six rewrites by several writers before it became the Cinderella story we know, in which the two protagonists lived “happily ever after.” The movie was a big hit, and transformed Julia Roberts from an actress to a movie star. Read the story of the making of Pretty Woman at TCM. -via Uproxx

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You know from Galileo’s experiment that falling objects will fall at the same speed, no matter their weight. The experiment falls apart when you use feathers, however, because they waft down rather than fall, because of air resistance. But what if you took the air out of the equation?

The  world’s largest vacuum chamber is in Cleveland, Ohio. Physicist Brian Cox visited to show us what a falling feather looks like in an environment without any air, so therefore no air resistance. The clip is from the BBC Two show Human Universe. -via Metafilter 

It seems like you're never going to get people to agree on the value of the Oxford comma, but then again, it's not the most important argument in punctuation use. Jorge Cham at PhD Comics explains punctuation in a modern way that anyone with college experience -yours or someone else’s- can understand. It’s all in the example you give. -Thanks, Ken!

November first is Ewok Appreciation Day, a holiday that started only last year, as far as I can tell. We were introduced to the Ewoks in 1983 in the movie Return of the Jedi. To many fans, it was obvious that the characters were designed with merchandising in mind, so there was an “Ewok backlash.” That was later eclipsed by hatred of Jar Jar Binks from the prequels. But now enough time has passed since Return of the Jedi that there is significant number of Star Wars fans who loved the Ewoks as children.

David Mizejewski is one of those fans, and the first Ewok Appreciation Day inspired him to construct an elaborate Ewok diorama using his childhood toys! He also bought new ones, and the result is a little slice of Endor, unveiled today. The above picture doesn’t do it justice, because there are a lot of tiny scenes, with multiple levels, fire, living plants, and alien invaders.  

See an entire gallery of closeups and read the story of Mizejewski’s project at Boing Boing.   

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It’s true that beautiful music can sometimes bring tears to your eyes. In this video, the Danish National Chamber Orchestra plays Tango Jalousie, which is nice. But then they stop and eat a hot pepper, either  a Trinidad Scorpion Moruga Blend, a Carolina Reaper, or a Ghost pepper. The rest of it is a test of their dedication to their art. Maybe I should add that this isn’t the entire orchestra -just the volunteers. This stunt is brought to you by Chili Klaus, (previously at Neatorama) who serves as the conductor as well as the instigator. -via Viral Viral Videos

Jude Redfield is a meteorologist at WDRB in Louisville, Kentucky. His forecast this morning was a bit spooky because he just wasn’t all there! For Halloween, he went by the name “Bones” Redfield.

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If you see a black box above, click on it to begin the video. -via reddit

(Image credit: Jude Redfield)

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Carving a Jack-o-Lantern isn’t rocket science -unless you make it so! NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a pumpkin carving competition every year in which their best scientists and engineers do things to pumpkins that you’d never think of. They rigged their vegetables with screens, wi-fi, servo motors, motion sensors, LEDs, and all kinds of neat effects. It just goes to show that they all have a bit of mad scientist inside them! -via Digg   

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A little girl visits the land of the dead and finds that Dia de los Muertos is a fun festival to celebrate the dead, which makes her feel a little closer to her departed mother. This wordless animation was produced by Ashley Graham, Kate Reynolds, and Lindsey St. Pierre of the Ringling College of Art and Design. It won the 2013 Student Academy Award. -via Laughing Squid

The anticipation is much greater than the actual event. It is so true! I’ve been writing about Halloween for a month now, and when the day comes, I overslept and don’t even have time to find my witch hat before the first trick-or-treaters arrive! This timeline is from Doghouse Dairies. Now, where did I file those Thanksgiving jokes?