QWOP, arguably the most difficult video game ever, was foisted upon us by Bennett Foddy in 2008. The point of the game is to control a sprinter with four keys that move his thigh and calf muscles. A few seconds in, and you're reduced to trying to control your laughter. Most of us gave up pretty early and decided the value in the game was purely comedy. However, in the years since, some gamers took QWOP as a challenge, and became fairly good at getting the runner through a 100-meter dash. The QWOP record as of now is 48 seconds! Could an algorithm trained to play QWOP do any better? Wesley Liao trained one to find out. While his AI learned to make the QWOP runner perform better than I ever will, it could not outdo the best human gamers. Read more on the experiment at Gizmodo.

THREAD: Lots of us learned classical music from watching old cartoons, so I’m going to identify the pieces that frequently popped up.

One of the most recognizable is Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2,” performed by those great piano virtuosos Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry. pic.twitter.com/SmyKbMpw3e

— Vincent Alexander (@NonsenseIsland) March 1, 2021

How much of your knowledge of classical music came from old cartoons? I thought so. Many of us cannot listen to "Ride of the Valkyries" without hearing "kill the wabbit" in our heads. Vincent Alexander shows us just how many of those classic compositions were used by Warner Bros. and Disney in their animated shorts. With videos! He identifies the original title and composer, and gives further examples of their use in cartoons.

“Dance of the Comedians” by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (from the comic opera THE BARTERED BRIDE) was used as an unofficial musical theme for the Road Runner cartoons. The propulsive energy of the piece matches well with Wile E. Coyote’s various failures. pic.twitter.com/5iHF49P2El

— Vincent Alexander (@NonsenseIsland) March 1, 2021

There are so many examples that you will run across some pieces that you never knew were by classical composers of the past. Or in other words, you know the songs but didn't know who wrote them. Now you can. There are 40, count 'em, 40 videos in the Twitter thread, and at Threadreader. -via Metafilter

By the time bedtime rolls around, parents are exhausted. However, their children do everything in their power to extend the day, which leads to more stress for the entire family. A study involving 59 British experts from a range of disciplines found that there are six key parts of achieving a successful bedtime routine for children between two and eight years old. They are:  

Brushing teeth before bed.

Time consistency for going to bed.

Book reading before bed.

Avoiding food/drinks before bed.

Avoiding use of electronic devices before bed.

Calming activities with the child before bed, including bath, shower and talking.

However, you don’t have to have all six to be successful -if you’re lucky. And from experience, I can tell you that even when you have all six factors consistently, you still won’t have a smooth experience every night. Read more about this research at The Guardian. -via Digg

(Image credit: Ldorfman)

Women around the world suffer from two problems that we don’t think about much in the US. In many parts of the world, menstruation is seen as gross, unclean, or at least something that no one talks about. The other problem is that sanitary pads, tampons, and other supplies are outrageously expensive for too many women. In an article about periods, Messy Nessy Chic looks at how these two things collide in India, leaving women’s health and freedom at risk. It begins with a look at the 2018 Bollywood rom-com Pad Man, about an unlikely but eventually respected superhero.

It’s an unlikely love story about a young husband who will do anything for the comfort and happiness of his new bride, but finds himself unaware of the unhygienic and discriminatory practices she is subjected to when menstruating. In a part of the world where the topic of menstruation was discouraged in households and social circles; considered ‘unclean’; he risks being ridiculed and ostracised to generate awareness for women’s health in rural India.

The movie was inspired by the true story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, who indeed fought cultural taboos to bring affordable menstrual products to rural areas of India. He was also the subject of two documentaries and an earlier feature film. Arunachalam tells his own story in a 2012 Ted talk. You can find Pad Man on Netflix and other movie sources.

In 2004, the sandwich chain Quiznos enlisted Joel Veitch’s Spongmonkeys for their TV advertisements. What happened then illustrates the great divide at the time between those who were connected with internet culture and those who were not. Before the rise of social media, that was a large chasm. Vetch was a British animator popular among internet insiders for presenting oddball videos. He didn’t even know what Quiznos was when he agreed to the ad campaign using his bizarre characters.   

Months later, Veitch was back in the U.K., working as an animator on a late-night TV show, and not really thinking much about the ads when they first began airing in the U.S. His email blew up immediately. “Nobody around me had a clue what was happening, it was all in another country for a brand they’d never heard of,” he says. Still, the reaction resulted in his website crashing when over a quarter of a million people went to check out his work.

Unfortunately, the backlash was just as swift. Within the first week of the campaign, Quiznos corporate received more than 30,000 calls complaining about the Spongmonkeys. Per a 2004 article from the Denver Business Times, an Alabama Quiznos franchisee even put up signs in his windows saying he wasn’t responsible for the ads, as they were turning away customers and making children cry.

Quiznos wanted to be noticed. The ads delivered, but not in a way that led to people buying more sandwiches. Read how the Quiznos Spongmonkeys came about at Mel magazine.

You've read plenty about COVID-19 and what it did to New York City in early 2020. We've also posted quite a bit about the 1918 influenza pandemic and the Black Death. But disease epidemics strike somewhere in every era. New York was the scene of a yellow fever outbreak in 1795 and again in 1798. Alexander Anderson was a 20-year-old medical student from Manhattan who was drafted into the fight against the fever in its first wave, and came to be the first doctor at Bellevue Hospital. Anderson kept a diary of his work, when around 700 New York City residents died. His diary continued into the second wave, when he was a certified physician and a family man.  

Anderson abandoned that record-keeping on September 4 when a friend arrived at Bellevue to tell him that his wife was sick with the fever; on the following day, his father came to the hospital to say that Sandy’s brother John had fallen ill as well.

For a few days Anderson tried to care for everyone—his wife in Bushwick and the rest of his relations downtown, plus dozens of Bellevue patients. Then, on September 8: “A heavy blow!—I saw my Brother this morning and entertain’d hopes of his recovery. In the afternoon I found him dead!” Yet he could not rest to grieve. “I left my poor parents struggling with their fate and return’d to Belle-vue.” Before setting aside the diary that day, he paused to sketch a small coffin next to the entry.

His father died on September 12. Anderson sketched another coffin next to the entry. In Bushwick, he found his wife in a shocking condition: “The sight of my wife ghastly and emaciated, constantly coughing & spitting struck me with horror.” She died on September 13; he drew another coffin. His mother, the final member of his immediate family, took ill on the 16th and died on the 21st; another coffin. “I never shall look upon her like again,” he wrote.

Get a glimpse of the yellow fever epidemic that caused Anderson to give up medicine for good at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Alexander Anderson Papers/New-York Historical Society Library)

They say the animals of Australia all want to kill us, but even when they don't they can be pretty creepy. It's not so bad when they are cartoons. In a backyard in Tasmania, there are plenty of creatures who have plenty to do in the middle of the night. Throat Notes actually has a plot, involving a possum, a star, and a hapless frog. This trippy animation is from Felix Colgrave, who we've featured before.  -via The Awesomer

Conveyor belt sushi restaurants have been around since 1958, but the concept goes back much further. In 1923, John Moses Baitinger of Minnesota received a patent for a restaurant system that brought food to diners on a sort-of conveyor belt. This would allow the proprietor to do away with servers completely. We assume the diner paid for an all-you-can-eat experience, since they didn’t order, but instead grabbed food off tiny railroad cars that passed by them. Baitinger took his setup to the Minnesota State Fair, where he reportedly made quite a profit.  

Baitinger's Eater was, in many ways, a perfect expression of the mentality of the automation-mad 1920s, obsessed with speed, technology, and efficiency. There were minor drawbacks to the system, however. Diners seated near the end of the line sometimes found that the only cargo left for the eating was boiled cabbage.

Talk about disappointment! That cabbage would be cold, too, by the time you decided to settle for it. Read more about Baitinger’s Automatic Eater at Weird Universe.

The British Museum planned an exhibit called Arctic culture and climate, but was unable to open due to the pandemic. You can take a video tour instead. Part of the exhibit looks at the dogs of the Arctic, which have been more than companions to the people who live there. One fascinating thing that sticks out is how dog sledding varies according to the route. We are used to seeing teams of sled dogs in a double line, taking up little room as they maneuver through the woods, such as in the Iditarod. This style is typical of the Khanty people of Siberia.

Another style of hitching dogs is used by Inuit in eastern Canada and Greenland. The so-called ‘fan hitch’ spreads out dogs and runs in a line like this model from Hudson’s Bay, Canada shows. This style of hitching sled dogs is preferred as it is safer to have a wide spread of dogs when travelling across sea ice. The dogs also have more room to maneuver across rough patches of ice.

Read more about how dogs have made life in the Arctic possible for humans at the British Museum blog. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: The British Museum)

David Friedman of Ironic Sans has always enjoyed stereograms, which you might know as Magic Eye images. They were quite the fad in the 1990s, but existed long before that and are still being generated today. Friedman gives us the history of stereograms and plenty of examples of experimental computer-generated stereograms that you've probably never seen. The above stereogram was created by Scott Pakin. Friedman describes it:

All that stuff is neat and clever. But there’s one Scott Pakin stereogram in particular that really brings a smile to my face because it plays not just with depth perception, but with how our brains perceive color, and it feels more like magic than any other stereogram I’ve ever seen.

You'll see examples of stereograms in history, advertising, video, and art in Friedman's newsletter devoted to the subject. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Scott Pakin)

The stormtroopers of the Star Wars universe were designed to be a multitude of anonymous minions of the villains, a show of power, an ever-present device for instilling fear. Their design was supposed to evoke a cross between Nazis and robots. But there's more to it, as you'll see in this costume breakdown from Behind the Seams that turns out to be a look at all things that stormtroopers mean to us. -via The Daily Dot

We've seen these cats before, when they learned to ring a bell for treats, and when they were enlisted to do a domino fall. Now they've combined their skills (as well as their patience and cuteness) to show us trick shots with ping pong balls and dominos all together. Now, I'm not saying that there's no visual trickery in this video; I'm just saying that it's entertaining either way. -via reddit 

If you are American and have nothing else in the refrigerator, you probably have mustard and ketchup. Even if you don't use them often, it's nice to have them available. But how did they originate? Mustard began as mustard seed, used as a medicine and a spice.

The paste-like form of mustard showed up roughly 2500 years ago. The Greeks and Romans blended ground-up mustard seeds with unfermented grape juice, or must, to make a smooth mixture. The first version of this concoction wasn’t necessarily food—it may have been used more for its medicinal properties, and not completely without reason: Mustard seeds are rich in compounds called glucosinolates, and when these particles get broken down, they produce isothiocyanates, powerful antioxidants that fight inflammation and give mustard its nose-tingling kick.

The Greeks and Romans applied mustard’s medicinal properties to almost every ailment imaginable—Hippocrates even praised its ability to soothe aches and pains. Many of mustard’s historical uses don’t hold up to modern science—for instance, it’s not a cure for epilepsy, as the Romans once believed—but it’s still used as a holistic treatment for arthritis, back pain, and even sore throats.

The whole idea of mustard as medicine reminds one of "mustard plaster," a term that confused me in childhood because that use had already died out by then. Read how both mustard and ketchup were developed and turned into modern condiments at Mental Floss. A video is included if you'd rather watch than read. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Anita Hart)

In the early 20th century, prizefighting was even more uncivilized than it is now. While fights between Black boxers and white boxers drew crowds, heavyweight title fights were segregated. There was the "World Heavyweight Champion," who was by default white, and a separate "World Colored Heavyweight Champion." But Jack Johnson worked for years to get the chance to fight heavyweight champion Tommy Burns, and defeated him in 1908. Former champ Jim Jeffries was brought out of retirement to win the title back.

Their fight, hyped as the “Battle of the Century,” took place in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910, in front of 20,000 mostly-white spectators and nine motion picture cameras. Throughout the nation, many thousands more listened to live telegram bulletins of each round. Johnson beat Jeffries easily, and, as a result, racist mob violence broke out across the country, and Black Americans celebrating Johnson’s win were attacked, and some were killed.

The fight was filmed, the film was banned, and therefore became the movie everyone wanted to see for years afterward. Vox has the story. -via Damn Interesting

She's upset that these guys were following her and trying to get her attention. They just wanted to alert her of the gas hose she's dragging. Real or staged? Yeah, getting this embarrassment on video seems too good to be true, but it's also behavior that doesn't seem too out of the ordinary to have happened somewhere. It reminds me of the movie Trains, Planes, and Automobiles, when a car tried to flag down our heroes going the wrong way on the highway. -via Digg