The Royal Meteorological Society and Accuweather joined forces to crown the 2020 Weather Photographer of the Year. The first place winner is Rudolf Sulgan for his photograph of a snowstorm in New York City titled "Blizzard." A photograph called “Baikal Treasure” by Alexey Trofimov was the people's choice winner, decided by votes from the public. It shows hummocks of snow and ice on Lake Baikal in Siberia.  



See the top ten photographs from the main competition, the Young Photographer division, and the public's choices at the competition website.  -via Nag on the Lake

‘We’re like athletes’: the secret lives of giant-vegetable growers https://t.co/ER3vkehrJo

— The Guardian (@guardian) October 20, 2020

Harvest season is when the giant vegetables come out. This year, due to the lockdown, more people than ever are dipping their toes into the sport of growing oversized vegetables. That led to a growing community of gardeners who display seemingly contradictory traits: Experienced growers are willing to help newbies and friendships and camaraderie grow among the gardeners, while they diligently compete with each other for local and world records -and the best photographs.

What motivates someone to grow vegetables so enormous they would destroy the suspension in an average family car? “When I first saw giant vegetables, I thought the people who grew them must be absolutely nuts,” says Gerald Short, 52, a record-company owner from Watlington in Oxfordshire. “What are they doing growing these huge things? But then something got stuck in the nerdy side of me.” Short has done quite the about-turn: this year, he grew a 706kg pumpkin, setting an Oxfordshire record. The pumpkin was so heavy that Short had to use a tractor to get it out of his allotment and hire a lorry to transport it. “I’m probably the biggest amateur grower on the allotment scene,” he says.

The appeal of growing these beasts is not hard to understand. Only the truly joyless would struggle to summon a smile at the sight of a marrow as big as a lawn mower or a cabbage as wide as a double bed. Giant-vegetable-growing is as life-affirmingly ridiculous as it is gloriously escapist. Plus, it is a technical challenge. “You can grow them bigger every year, so you’re always improving,” says Short. Fortey sees it more like a sport than a hobby. “We’re like athletes, absolutely,” he says. “We’re all aiming to get the world record. Usain Bolt runs the world’s fastest 100 metres and we’re aspiring to get the longest vegetables.”

Read about the people who spend their summers nursing their giant vegetables for glory and a sense of accomplishment at the Guardian. -via Metafilter

More than 520,000 families who are registered with BabyCenter gave birth and named their child so far this year. Although there are still ten weeks left before 2021, BabyCenter has released its statistics for the top baby names of 2020. It's possible that they included announced names for upcoming 2020 births. Sophia is the top name for girls, which is not surprising, since it was also the #1 name in the previous ten years. The number one name for boys was Liam for the second year. While both top ten lists didn't change much, 2020 saw some changes in the lower rankings.   

Baby names are always a mirror of the times. Changes in the 2020 list reflect a year of loss and political divisiveness. Kobe shot up 175% after Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, lost his life in a tragic helicopter accident alongside his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna (up 216%). On the social and political fronts, Kamala (up 104%) and Liberty (up 12%) rose in popularity, while Karen and Chad declined by 13% and 12% respectively.

See the top 100 names for both boys and girls ranked at BabyCenter. -via Buzzfeed

(Image credit: Victoria Borodinova)

Imagine swimming in a pool of pancake syrup! Would you be able to do it? Would it be slower than swimming in water? The guy from the Action Lab went out and bought a bunch of pancake syrup to find out, but instead of a pool with swimmers, he used tubs with mechanical toys. Still, there was a university experiment done with pools and human swimmers, but sadly, they used something twice the viscosity of water but much cheaper and less tasty. However, when he posed the question, I pictured swimming in something as viscous as honey or even molasses, and that's a whole other story, which he addresses toward the end of this video. -via Digg

In 1845, Sir John Franklin commanded two ships, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, on a mission to explore the Arctic and chart the Northwest Passage. They did not return and sent no messages. A year went by, then two, and by 1850, Franklin's wife Lady Jane Franklin was begging for a search party. Meanwhile, a family in Northern Ireland was channeling the ghost of their daughter who died at age three. They asked the ghost of Louisa Coppin, who they called Weesy, what happened to the Franklin expedition.

Weesy responded with flair, filling the room with an Arctic scene that showed two ships amid snowy mountains and narrow channels. When asked if Franklin himself was still alive, Weesy revealed “a round-faced Man [ascending] the Mast and [waving] his hat,” and she answered a query about his exact location with a series of abbreviations that included “P.RI” and “BS.”

The spectral illuminations were only visible to Weesy’s sister Anne, who copied them onto paper and showed her father upon his return from a trip. Coppin wasn’t wholly disbelieving, but he didn’t act on the information immediately. Then, in May 1850, after hearing that Lady Jane was preparing to send a ship to search for her husband, he wrote her a letter detailing Weesy’s appearance.

William Coppin, Weesy's father, shared the information with Lady Jane, who was directing and financing ships to look for the expedition. It wasn't until 1859 that the mystery of what happened to the Franklin expedition was completely solved -and the evidence was found in the place that Weesy's chart had predicted. However, the ghostly influence on the search was not published until a few years after Lady Jane's death, and some questions and discrepancies subsequently turned up. Read the story of the ghost who found Sir John Franklin at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Francis Watt)

Finally, Screen Junkies gives us an Honest Trailer for a movie I've seen! I enjoyed Jordan Peele's 2019 horror film Us because it is just plain scary on the surface, but also keeps the audience guessing all the way to the end. This Honest Trailer gives away more plot points than it should, but certainly not all of them. Yes, it uses devices that have been used before, and yes, it requires suspension of disbelief, but neither of those things negate the horror or the artfulness of Us.

Election Day in the United States is November third. Polling places will be set up in schools, government buildings, churches, laboratories, and laundromats. Wait, what? Freelance photographer Ryan Donnell has been documenting some pretty strange places that local governments have set up for voting. As long as a place is accessible to the disabled, and passes local requirements such as parking space, it can be used as a polling location. Donnell has found 61 such polling places that are interesting enough to photograph and share.

“[The Su Nueva Laundromat] is probably the most popular one because I think it's just the weirdest shot, you know, with the dryers and stuff like that,” Donnell says. “Again, it just shows this diversity and this wonderful multi-ethnicity aspect to American voting.” Su Nueva, a 10-minute walk from Lawn Lanes, is also located in West Lawn and is the official polling place for about 700 registered voters. Since he photographed the place in 2012, Donnell has noticed that now every election cycle, the spot will pop up in local coverage of Chicago polling places.

See seven other unusual polling places from Donnell's travels at Smithsonian.

One of the more active posts on AskReddit today poses the question "What is the fastest you have ever seen a new co-worker get fired?" It's filled with stories that will make you laugh, then question the whole of humanity.

Four or so hours. When I was 18 I got a job at a grocery store, along with three others. We all started training together. On the first day we were training in the evening, and one girl asked to go home, she said her head hurt. They said fine, she clocked out, went to grab a grocery cart and started filling it with beer and liquor. The store manager walked over, and asked her if she was having a party. She said yes. Didn't even try to come up with an excuse. Just, "yeah, I am, so I needed to leave early on my first day." basically. He fired her. -houseat261turnerlane

We imagine the party was to celebrate her new job, like the guy who missed the first three days of work because he parents treated him to an Orlando trip as a reward for finally getting a job -which he was immediately fired from. But there are many reasons someone got fired on their first day, not all of them funny.  

"You don't tell me what to do, you're a woman." To his trainer. Lasted until management came in that morning and heard about it.  -VerbableNouns

And some stories are gold because they are told so well.

Not sure if it counts as being fired, but a guy in our basic training threatened a drill sergeant with a bayonet. No idea what happened after he went to the hospital, but I didn't see him again. -shroom2021

You can read all the tales of a new job cut extremely short at reddit.

(Image credit: Flickr user m01229)

The internet has been arguing about the pronunciation of GIF (graphics interchange format) for years. Honestly, does it really matter? I have never had the word come up in conversation using voice, only in text. But the debate leads us to another, broader topic: who gets to decide how a word should be pronounced? The person who coined the word may have a strong opinion, but the word will be pronounced the way most people actually say it. And what causes people to pronounce a word a certain way? Tom Scott has some thoughts on the matter.

October is the time to indulge in the scariest of horror films, but which one is the scariest of them all? Yes, that's usually a matter of opinion, but BroadbandChoices did an experiment to see which films raised viewers heart rates the most. If you have a healthy heart and the ability to watch lots of horror, it sounds like it might have been fun.

Our team studied critic's lists and Reddit recommendations to curate 50 of the best horror filmsever made, before subjecting them to our test subjects.

Watching each movie in 5.1 surround sound, our panel of 50 people consumed over 120 hours of the best horror movies, each fitted with a heart rate monitor to measure which movies got their blood pumping the most to find the ultimate horror movie and crown the king of fright night.

By combining average heart rates and the highest spike, they ranked the top 35 scariest horror films, of which I've only seen six. See the results and ranking here.  -via Digg

The 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was so different from Raiders of the Lost Ark that it almost turned fans off the character, which made the return-to-form Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade look all the better. We understood Nazis, and the guys who fought them were the good guys. It's not so clear in The Temple of Doom. Mel magazine asked archaeologists from all over for their opinions on the character.  

Larry Coben, archaeologist and founder/executive director of the Sustainable Preservation Initiative: Indiana Jones isn’t really an archeologist except in name. He doesn’t excavate in any of the movies, he doesn’t do surveys — he’s a treasure hunter, and archaeologists aren’t treasure hunters. The only thing I think I can say is that a lot of archaeologists would like to punch Nazis too, but that’s really the only similarity.

That said, it’s a great adventure story and Indiana Jones is fun. It’s inspired people to get interested in archaeology — I would say that Indiana Jones has inspired a whole generation of people to be archaeologists. Archaeologists always say that it’s awful and it’s terrible and it is all those things. But I suspect there would be far less public interest in archaeology and far less funding for archaeology if not for the interest that he attracted. Saying that might get me in trouble with some of my colleagues, but I think it’s true.

The other archaeologists agreed that Indiana Jones isn't at all like a real archeologist, and The Temple of Doom had even more problems than the other films (the fourth one is mostly ignored). Read what they have to say, especially archaeologists who know India and explain the many things the movie got wrong.

Peru is famous for its Nazca Lines, the giant geoglyphs drawn on the ground, some only visible from high above. A new image has been discovered, that of a cat relaxing on the side of a hill, that has been dated to between 200 to 100 BCE. The hill is actually an observation point for the Nazca Lines, so how did they just now discover it?

The drawing, which was laid down nearly 2,000 years ago, was badly faded, which explains why it eluded detection for so long. The feline figure “was barely visible” and “about to disappear” on account of its location on a fairly steep slope and due to the effects of natural erosion, the Ministry of Culture said. Recent restoration work brought the cat into full view.

The geoglyph shows the cat in profile, with its head turned toward the viewer. The feline figure stretches 121 feet long (37 meters), and the lines of the drawing measure between 12 to 16 inches (30 to 40 cm) thick. They were made by removing the top layer of rocks and exposing the bright bedrock beneath.

Now, that's a cat doodle! Read about the "new" Peruvian cat at Gizmodo.

We read stories about how humans have upset the balance of nature for our own ends, from hunting some species to extinction to fighting invasive species with other invasive species. Often it takes way too long to realize the harm, and sometimes it's too late. When America set up national parks in wilderness areas, the unintended consequences of so many tourists visiting bear territory were tragic. In 1967, two girls were killed by grizzly bears in Glacier National Park. What would we do about that? Biologist Gairdner Moment had an idea, which he wrote about in a 1969 essay called “Bears: The Need for a New Sanity in Wildlife Conservation.” His solution was to kill all the grizzly bears.  

At the parks, he was horrified to see that so many naive tourists were victims of popular bear propaganda, like Smokey Bear (“he looks the very embodiment of sturdy dependability”). Rather than focus on re-educating park goers or discouraging practices that attract the bears, Moment argued that humans are not morally obligated to protect the grizzly bear—or any other animal. As he confidently stated, “any zoologist could draw up a list of animal(s) […] we would be better off without: the common rat, the fire ant, certain species of sharks, the tse-tse fly.”

Moment’s alarmist statements quickly gained press and popularity, and were republished in mass-market periodicals. He would go on to publish several more essays defending this argument.

While other scientists objected, the parks took measures that made the bears more dangerous. Read about Dr. Moment and his war against grizzlies at Jstor Daily.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Jean-Pierre Lavoie)

Tobe Hooper's 1974 slasher film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a classic of the genre. And it's a good thing, considering what the cast and crew went through to get it filmed. Shot in the summer of 1973 in remote Texas locations, they put up with 120 degree heat, the smell of rotting flesh (cheaper than having props made), and performing stunts they were not used to. Marilyn Burns, who played Sally, was particularly affected.

    “She (Burns) had a few accidents on the set. After running through the thicket, she had to go to a plastic surgeon to have thorns removed from her breasts.”
 
So, as it pertains to Burns’ famous screaming in TCM, in this particular instance (and others in the thicket), Burns’ screams are all too real, and the blood on her shirt is largely her own. Talk about taking one for the team.

But that was just the beginning. Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, had never used a chainsaw before, What could possibly go wrong? Read about the filming of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at Dangerous Minds.

(Image credit: The NeatoShop)

In 1726, an illiterate working-class British woman named Mary Toft became famous overnight by giving birth to rabbits. They were dead and often dismembered rabbits, and she also produced parts of other animals. The bizarre events were enshrined in pamphlets, science reports, satirical writing, and tons of gossip.  

A local apothecary and obstetrician, John Howard, was the first person outside her immediate circle to examine Toft. He said he felt something ‘leaping’ in her womb. Under his supervision in Guildford, she went on to deliver a large number of dead rabbits, nine in a single day. Howard wrote excitedly about the case to England’s highest-ranking doctors and scientists, and King George I sent two men to investigate: Nathanael St André, Swiss surgeon-anatomist to the royal family, and Samuel Molyneux, secretary to the Prince of Wales. They arrived in Guildford at an opportune moment, just as Toft was about to give birth to a 15th rabbit. Howard had helpfully pickled the others and put them on display in his study. Whether he was entirely persuaded that Toft was gestating rabbits or whether he colluded with her in a deception is unclear. One London doctor thought they were in it together, but since that doctor was himself accused of collaborating with Toft he may simply have been trying to clear his own name. It’s possible that fewer people were genuinely taken in by Toft than were determined to see how far the ruse could be taken, and in particular how many of their opponents or competitors might be gulled.

Educated people were not fooled, and the hoax was revealed fairly soon, but the legend lived on. Toft was required to submit to examination bordering on sexual assault, and treated as if she were too stupid to have participated in her own hoax. The real question was "why," since neither she nor the physicians involved made money from the incident. Read an account of Mary Toft and her monstrous offspring and a look into the motivations behind them at the London Review of Books. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)