"The Absent Advisor: How One Professor's Endless Trekking Overseas Destroyed Marshall College's Archaeology Department" https://t.co/45DuqMUR96

— Michael 🌨️ Albani, ABD (@MJJAlbani) December 12, 2020

Amid the news that 78-year-old Harrison Ford has signed up for a fifth Indiana Jones movie, it occurs to us that it's about time for Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. to retire from the fictional Marshall College. His colleagues, fellow archaeologists, and movie fans got together on Twitter to propose chapters for a book honoring his work. It's a long thread, considering Jones' varied adventures and issues in the field of archaeology. Proposed entries include:

"Guerrilla tactics and Archaeology, Weapons and combat training for the field archaeologist."

"Collection Management Strategies in the Era of Warehouse 13: A Post-Colonial Analysis"

"That Belongs In A Museum, But Which One?: The Art of Repatriation."

“The importance of stylish fedora wear while fighting Nazis.”

"Why does it have to be Herpetology?"

Is this a name of a book?

— Caleb Scott Awe (@Caleb59841684) December 13, 2020

Read the still-growing Twitter thread, and add your own ideas for the potentially huge volume. -via Metafilter

Peoria artist Joshua Hawkins was commissioned to paint a mural in Peoria, Illinois. The work had to be completed over Thanksgiving weekend, and he would be well paid. The requested art was of Sesame Street's Cookie Monster, holding a cookie with the caption "Peace, Land, and Cookies" in Russian. So Hawkins did the work, on a building owned by Nate Comte.

Nate Comte, the owner of a commercial building at 1301 NE Adams in Peoria, Illinois, was none too pleased to show up there shortly after Thanksgiving to find a giant Cookie Monster mural on the side of the place, stretching about 30 feet long and 16 feet high. He called up local artist Joshua Hawkins, who had, with the help of some friends, painted the mural over the holiday weekend.

“Are you the one that painted my f*ckin’ building?” he demanded to know, in Hawkins’s recollection. (Comte had gotten the artist’s number from business cards he handed out to passersby during the project.)

Hawkins was shocked. As far as he knew, it was Comte who had commissioned the mural in the first place.

The mystery man who had hired Hawkins had said he was Comte, and Hawkins had been paid in full. The real Comte was so mad that he quickly painted over the mural, so it only existed for about a week. However, art lovers of Peoria and elsewhere have turned the now-white wall into a shrine, mourning the loss of Cookie Monster. There was also backlash against Comte. Comte now plans to commission a local artist to paint a different mural on the wall. We still don't know who paid for the first mural. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Joshua Hawkins)

Winter is always fun from r/funny

Earlier this week, Kiev had an ice storm which left a coating on everything, including roads, sidewalks, and ramps. Security cameras caught people trying to negotiate the perils of ice-covered bricks, particularly one woman who put in an inordinate amount of effort before giving in. In our next foreign aid package, we need to include salt and YakTrax. Click on the image above to start the video. -via reddit

Like Da Vinci before him, Sir Isaac Newton was a polymath with plenty of claims to fame. He explained gravity. He developed calculus. He invented the cat flap. But Newton's not-so-public interests are just as fascinating. He studied alchemy and theology, as evidenced in his voluminous unpublished papers. Three pages of Newton's notes about his research of Egyptian pyramids are up for auction by Sotheby’s.

Newton studied the pyramids in the 1680s, during a period of self-imposed scholarly exile at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, away from his base at Cambridge University, following criticism of his work by his rival Robert Hooke of the Royal Society.

Newton was trying to uncover the unit of measurement used by those constructing the pyramids. He thought it was likely that the ancient Egyptians had been able to measure the Earth and that, by unlocking the cubit of the Great Pyramid, he too would be able to measure the circumference of the Earth.

He hoped that would lead him to other ancient measures, allowing him to uncover the architecture and dimensions of the Temple of Solomon – the setting of the apocalypse – and interpret the Bible’s hidden meanings.

Read about Newton's obsession with Egyptian pyramids at the Guardian. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Ricardo Liberato)

The Zodiac Killer, who murdered at least five people in 1968 and 1969 and claims to have killed many more, sent taunting letters to California newspapers. One of the messages consisted of a series of letters and symbols in a code that no one could decipher. Many tried, and we even posted about a guy who claimed to have solved it in 2011. Now a team of codebreakers operating in three different countries say they have finally deciphered the letter known as cipher Z340. 

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME
THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW
WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME
I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER
BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER
BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME
WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE
SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH
I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS
LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH

The FBI has accepted their decryption. The video above explains how they did it. You can read more at the San Francisco Chronicle, or if that's blocked by a paywall, at Zodiac Killer Facts. -via Metafilter

As you clean the cobwebs from the corners, you can take comfort in the fact that the ISS has spiders, too. Those are experimental spiders, deliberately taken aboard to see how space conditions affect web-building. In fact, spiders have flown into space for more than ten years, but now it appears there is a breakthrough in our understanding of the way orb spiders build webs in microgravity. From the research paper: 

Under natural conditions, Trichonephila spiders build asymmetric webs with the hub near the upper edge of the web, and they always orient themselves downwards when sitting on the hub whilst waiting for prey. As these asymmetries are considered to be linked to gravity, we expected the spiders experiencing no gravity to build symmetric webs and to show a random orientation when sitting on the hub. We found that most, but not all, webs built in zero gravity were indeed quite symmetric. Closer analysis revealed that webs built when the lights were on were more asymmetric (with the hub near the lights) than webs built when the lights were off. In addition, spiders showed a random orientation when the lights were off but faced away from the lights when they were on. We conclude that in the absence of gravity, the direction of light can serve as an orientation guide for spiders during web building and when waiting for prey on the hub.

It appears that in the absence of sufficient gravity, the spiders saw the light source as a substitute for "up." Read a short version of the study's findings, plus a look at previous experiments with spiders in space at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Richard Fuller)

Capture the Atlas has 25 winners in its Northern Lights Photographer of the Year competition. If that seems generous, the photo above, titled “The Hunt’s Reward” by Ben Maze is an image of the Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights, taken in Tasmania.

Captured in this image is a trifecta of astronomical phenomena that made for some of the best astrophotography conditions one can witness in Australia, namely, the setting Milky Way galactic core, zodiacal light, and of course, the elusive Aurora Australis. On top of this, a sparkling display of oceanic bioluminescence adorned the crashing waves, adding the cherry on top to what was already a breathtaking experience.

The photo below, “Turbulunce,” was captured by John Weatherby in Iceland.   

The forecast on this night was for a solar storm, and it did not disappoint. After the first sign of green in the sky, the group decided to book it out to the Sólheimasandur plane wreck. It was a group effort, but we managed to light the plane from the inside with two colored LED lights that a participant brought. Hearing the group’s screams in the dark from seeing a KP6 aurora for the very first time was something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

That's only two of the 25 fantastical images you can see and read about in the winner's gallery at Capture the Atlas. -via Kottke

Engineer and madman Colin Furze (previously) had plenty of spare time during lockdown, and so he built a huge trebuchet. This video is about testing it and adjusting the aim. Watch him chuck a washing machine at about five minutes in! And a clothes dryer at 7:30. They also sling a bicycle and a heater, which don't get much distance, but display a lot of destruction, if you're into that sort of thing. -via Digg

A mummified body buried near the Rio Grande between 1000 and 1400 years ago reveals not only a diagnosis, but his end-of-life care. A microscopic-level study of his digestive tract revealed the cause of death. The man suffered from Chagas disease, a parasite-born condition that led to a fatal case of constipation. With no cure available, his people went to great lengths to care for him.

For the last two to three months of his life in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of modern-day Texas, the man starved. The final meals he did consume seemed to consist entirely of a food that his people rarely relied on for sustenance: grasshoppers. First, though, his family or community took care to pluck the extraneous bits.

"They were taking off the legs," said Karl Reinhard, professor in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. "So they were giving him mostly the fluid-rich body—the squishable part of the grasshopper. In addition to being high in protein, it was pretty high in moisture. So it would have been easier for him to eat in the early stages of his megacolon experience."

Reinhard studied two other cases of hospice care in North America from hundreds of years ago, revealing how community members would do the very best they could to feed an ailing loved one. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Ryan Wood)

pic.twitter.com/e3N00xCr5i

— Patty Jenkins (@PattyJenks) December 10, 2020

Disney announced a few details about the next Star Wars movie during a livestream Thursday. The movie is already titled Star Wars: Rogue Squadron. It will be directed by Patty Jenkins, who gave us the 2017 movie Wonder Woman. Jenkins posted the above video about the same time as the announcement.

Rogue Squadron is a known entity in Star Wars lore, referred to in comic books and video games, but the plot of the upcoming film is not yet known. It has been said that the story will take place after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, which gives it a blank slate for what happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is scheduled to premiere in 2023. -via Boing Boing

Christmas becomes gloriously weird in the song "Apocalypse Christmas" by the RiffTones. Josh Flowers made a video for the song using clips from various B-movies featured on RiffTrax. From those movies, he managed to find an illustrative scene for every line about the very worst of Christmas. -via Metafilter

What could be more festive than a hot toddy infused with honey, spices, and citrus fruits? That's what boilo is, but unless you're from Pennsylvania, you've probably never heard of it.  

While boilo’s range is firmly in coal country, its origins lie over the Atlantic. Lithuanian immigrants coming to work in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal mines brought their krupnikas honey liqueur with them. Krupnikas does share some similarities with its coal-country cousin, such as its spice-and-honey flavoring and the fact that it’s often whipped up at home for special occasions. But stateside, boilo-makers often use the drink as a canvas for creativity. Additions from mint to cranberries are fair game, though purists often butt heads over what constitutes authentic boilo.

You have to be careful making boilo, since it is cooked (hence the name) and the main ingredient is 101-proof Four Queens whiskey. Be sure to keep those two things separate in both time and space. Find the recipe for boilo, which requires an entire bottle of whiskey and only yields a little over three pints, at Atlas Obscura. Be careful warming up any leftovers.

Google Trends has released the top search terms for 2020, and made this video to illustrate the overarching topics of what people searched for. It's a short but good look at the year, centered around the word "why," but then you see the actual lists of top searches in the US, and here are the top five that start with "why."

1 Why were chainsaws invented

2 Why is there a coin shortage

3 Why was George Floyd arrested

4 Why is Nevada taking so long

5 Why is TikTok getting banned

Welp. The chainsaw thing happened back in January, when a story went viral explaining that the chainsaw was invented to help with childbirth. The story's virality lasted all year, finally reaching TikTok late in the year. But the trend list has plenty of other stuff that makes more sense. The global list is more consistent, with really big news at the top of every topic.  -via The Mary Sue

In the wee hours of Christmas 1964, more than 30 people experienced weird sounds and apparent mayhem on their rooftops in the village of Warminster, England, and at the nearby military base. You might be tempted to blame it on Santa Claus, but the phenomenon became known as the Warminster "Thing."   

Strange things continued to happen in Warminster, a town just over 15 miles from Stonehenge, in the new year. In February 1965, an entire flock of pigeons suddenly died. The following month, three families heard loud noises coming from above their houses, their roofs and windows shaking with the force. And in June, the Warminster residents began to see unidentified objects flying through the sky.

Residents who witnessed the UFOs gave wildly differing descriptions. News of the "Thing" drew notoriety to Warminster for years, but no plausible explanation has ever been found. Read about The Warminster "Thing" at Mental Floss. 

(Image credit: Pete Linforth from Pixabay)

I have a large red cat, and I see cats on the internet all the time who look just like him, so I know how common they are. Redditor teoman_asyn got a lesson on how common they are as he got into a strange situation.

My cat went missing for 2 days, so I put an advert on Facebook. Literally 5 mins after my cat comes to the door. 30 mins later, my neighbour comes and drops off what he thought was my cat. Now I have two identical cats.

You may consider two identical cats a bonus, but the cats aren't all that happy. The picture sparked quite a few puns, but also some imaginative speculation.

1. The original cat goes away for only two days and when he gets home, he finds that his human has already bought an identical replacement. Imagine what that can do to a cat's ego.

2. This is what happens when Schrodinger's cat participates in the double slit experiment.

3. The owner of the new cat will place a missing cat notice on Facebook, and will suddenly have three cats.

4. It's possible teoman_asyn always had two cats, but they were never in the same room.

5. It's also possible that neither one of these is the original cat, and there may be even more big red cats show up before the original cat comes home.

6. Of course, teoman_asyn now plans to advertise a "found cat." He'll have to be pretty careful not to return the wrong cat to the rightful owner.