If you're going to a party tonight, you'll want to keep your eyes out for all the possible squares you can cover in this holiday edition of Bingo from Jennifer Lewis at Flavorwire. There are four different cards you can print out and share with your friends. The first one to get too drunk to keep up loses! Link -via Nag on the Lake
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My 15-year-old daughter is hosting an informal New Year's Eve party tonight, and she has the house festooned with paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling already. Frenetic math artist Vi Hart has some wonderfully weird techniques that will ensure more snowflakes will be joining them. -via Holy Kaw!
At some point, rock concert posters became works of art, and the ultimate souvenir of a memorable experience. Artists took even more pains with concerts that occurred on New Year's Eve. Collectors Weekly has a collection of New Year's Eve concert poster art spanning from 1966 to 2012 that may bring back some fine memories for you! Link
A recently-discovered book at the U.S. Geological Survey Library in Reston, Virginia is supposedly a 1922 catalog of the Russian crown jewels, which once belonged to the Romanov family and fell into the hands of revolutionaries when the last the czar was toppled in 1917. When compared to the official inventory of the jewels published in 1925, it became apparent that four items in the earlier book are missing from the 1925 volume. One, a sapphire brooch, was traced to a London auction in 1927, but the fate of the other three items is a mystery. Read more about the discrepancies at NPR. Link
A new Harris Interactive survey finds that 87% of parents with children aged 6-17 would like to make New Year resolutions for them. Here are the top requests:
1. Clean up their room more often (47%)
2. Be more engaged in school (33%)
3. Have healthier eating habits (33%)
4. Get more physical activity (33%)
5. Play fewer video games (29%)
Are you surprised? I didn't think so. Read more about the survey at PR Newswire. Link -via Digg
(Image source: NeatoBambino)
In the 1820s, many Europeans saw the value of investing in the exploration and exploitation of the New World. Governments were being organized up and down the map, and natural resources were there for the taking. People wanted to emigrate, too, and start all over in a rich and exotic place. In this atmosphere, Scotsman Gregor MacGregor stepped in and offered in investment opportunity in a nation he owned, an attractive Latin American coastal plot called Poyais.
MacGregor claimed that Poyais covered 8m acres (an area larger than Wales). It was rich in natural resources but in need of development. That would require both cash and manpower. Through an elaborate publicity campaign, he succeeded in persuading people not only to invest their savings in the bonds of a non-existent government, but also to emigrate to a fictional country. How on earth did he manage it?
The investors lost money, but many of those who emigrated to Poyais lost their lives. Read the story of MacGregor's outrageous con at The Economist. Link -via Metafilter
These folks would have been having a helluva time if they weren't busy posing for pictures! These pictures of parties of the past should get you into the mood to ring in 2013 in style. See lots more at Flavorwire. Link
(Image credit: Ralph Morris Collection)
Even if curiosity doesn't kill the cat, it can get them into some awkward positions. -via Tastefully Offensive
Lynx the kitten knows the only way to accomplish something new and difficult is to keep trying over and over ..until you get it right! -via Say OMG
After two days of constant snowfall, Montreal starts to dig out. Snow must be removed, not just set aside, so it is scooped up and trucked out. There's a whole line of trucks waiting to be filled! You who live in snowy climates may think this is old hat, but it's fascinating to those of us who live in more temperate zones. -via reddit
Man's best friend, indeed! In 2012, dogs made the news -or at the least went viral in the 'net- by doing tricks, saving lives, or just by making us happy. Take a look back at some of the better dog stories from the past year. Shown here are the K-9 Parish Comfort dogs who visited the residents of Newtown, Connecticut. Even though there are six of them, they make up only one of the nine stories. Link
(Image credit: K9 Comfort)
Outtakes, bloopers, and shenanigans from season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation. After 24 years, you should be able to handle seeing those familiar crew members break character without destroying your enjoyment of the series. If not… don't watch, because the actors just constantly lose it. -via Digg
If you're still off work for the holidays and need to kill some time, the web toy Touch Effects may just eat up more of your day than you thought possible! Once you get tired of just dragging the colors around, you can adjust the parameters for an even stranger effect. Link -via mental_floss
Pixar artist Everett Downing set himself a challenge: to create 365 superheroes, a new one every day for a year. It didn't quite work as he planned, but three years later, he has illustrated 285 new characters! Downing expects to finish the collection in 2013. Wired Design talked to Downing about the project.
The origin story is a critical part of any hero's development. Downing is no different. "I got into a rut, I wasn't drawing enough and a friend told me I was over-thinking things," says Downing. "I just needed to do something I was really into that wouldn't require too much thinking. I started thinking about designing superheroes and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. I threw the gauntlet down and decided to draw a super every day."
Characters range from standard comic book heroes like Kid Korona to puns like Metro Gnome to goofy ideas like The Stylist. Link | Artist's site
The majority of the world's people become lactose-intolerant as they mature into adulthood. The exceptions are mostly people of European ancestry, who continue to drink milk all their lives. Why? It's a case of genetic mutation, in which an adult continues to produce lactase, the enzyme that digests the milk sugar lactose. But why did the mutation become so prevalent in the population so quickly (about 20,000 years)? Evolutionary geneticist Mark Thomas says there had to be something about drinking milk in Europe that led to increased chances of survival or higher fertility. Here are a couple of possibilities:
First, the farmers that settled there came from the Fertile Crescent, and they brought crops native to that region, like wheat and barley. But with Northern Europe's shorter growing season, these crops were more likely to fail, causing famine.
Additionally, the colder Northern European climate lent itself to natural refrigeration. "If you're a farmer in Southern Europe, and you milk a cow in the morning and you leave the milk out, it will be yogurt by noon. But if you do the same thing in Germany, it'll still be milk," says Thomas. A healthy lactose-intolerant person who drank that still-fresh milk would get a bad case of diarrhea. "But if you're malnourished, then you'll die," Thomas says.
In times of famine, milk drinking probably increased. And the very people who shouldn't have been consuming high-lactose dairy products — the hungry and malnourished — would be the ones more likely to drink fresh milk. So, with milk's deadly effects for the lactose intolerant, individuals with the lactase mutation would have been more likely to survive and pass on that gene.
Read more about lactose-tolerance at NPR. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Benson Kua)
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