Mark Frauenfelder found this puzzle in the book My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles. 

Imagine that you have three boxes, one containing two black marbles, one containing two white marbles, and the third, one black marble and one white marble. The boxes were labeled for their contents – BB, BW, WW – but someone switched the labels so that every box is now incorrectly labeled. You are allowed to take one marble at a time out of any box, without looking inside, and by this process of sampling you are to determine the contents of all three boxes. What is the smallest number of drawings needed to do this?

Don't look in the comments if you are still working on it, because I believe someone will post the correct answer soon. -via Boing Boing

This is a parody of the MasterClass videos, so I was all ready to fall in love with the art of loading a dishwasher. But alas, this is just the promo for such a class. Still, it's funny, and the outtakes at the end are the best. -via Digg

One of the biggest hurdles to building the structures necessary for a moon base is the cost of sending the materials. It would be much better to use materials already at hand. The moon has plenty of rock and dust, and it might be possible to convert them into building materials using human urine.

“Thanks to future lunar inhabitants, the 1.5 liters (3.2 pints) of liquid waste a person generates each day could become a promising by-product for space exploration,” the ESA says in a statement.

Urea, the most abundant component in human urine after water, can break down hydrogen bonds and reduce the viscosities of fluid mixtures, per the Associated Press. Researchers mixed water, urea and lunar regolith—a powdery soil found on the moon’s surface—together and 3-D printed geopolymer cylinders of the mixture, Jake Parks reports for Astronomy. When urea was used in the mixture, the results were malleable and easy to shape.

Maybe that's what all those children's stories mean when they tell us the answers were always inside ourselves. Read about the lunar building material of the future at Smithsonian.

Honestly, you can do this in every language, but you have to know the language. It's akin to "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo," which takes way too much bandwidth to parse. Meanwhile, your uncle mows your tuna. -via Everlasting Blort

If you've ever wondered how they come up with so many names for pharmaceuticals, this quiz is a clue that maybe they got them from Middle-Earth. I did quite poorly on the quiz, since I know little about either subject. Maybe you, a LOTR fan, will fare better distinguishing between Antidepressants and Tolkien Characters. -via Boing Boing

What do the Slow Mo Guys do during quarantine? Gavin Free grew a beard. Then he looked around at what was at hand to film in slow-motion with his ultra-high-speed camera, and saw his cat Smee. And so we learn that while cats might not be as graceful in slow motion as they would lead us to believe, they are pretty interesting to watch.

Warning, this video features time travel.

-via Digg

Justin McElroy says, "in the history of disney animated movies there have been exactly 18 types of songs, and i'm going to tell you about each of them". And then he does, with examples from the 252 songs (excluding those under 30 seconds long) from Disney's animated films. There would be more if you included live-action films like Mary Poppins, and they could also be categorized in the same way. Categories include "I'm the Villain," "I want," "Montage," and "Cheer up, Kid!" McElroy summarized his research with the table of elements you see above. The table is organized by type and color-coded by era. See it full-size here.  -via Metafilter

We have released 21-second newsreel clip featuring the last known images of the extinct Thylacine, filmed in 1935, has been digitised in 4K and released.

Be sure to check out the footage of this beautiful marsupial. #NFSAOpenOnline #TasmanianTigerhttps://t.co/s3JSAnmFck pic.twitter.com/FSRYXCTTMy

— NFSA -National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (@NFSAonline) May 19, 2020

In 2007, we posted some video of the last known Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, taken in 1933. The species went extinct when Benjamin died in 1935. Now we have a newly-released clip of Benjamin taken in 1935, just months before his death.

Fewer than a dozen source films, amounting to little more than three minutes of silent, black-and-white footage, of the elusive thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) are known to survive.

All derive from thylacines held in captivity and photographed in only two locations – Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart and London Zoo. Now, unseen publicly for 85 years, a further precious 21 seconds is being released by the NFSA.

Located within a forgotten travelogue, Tasmania the Wonderland (1935), these recently digitised 4K images represent the preservation of the last-known surviving moving images of Australia’s most famous extinct predator:   

Read more about the film and see the footage in a larger format at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.   -via reddit

If you've ever watched Bruce Lee swing his nunchaku, or nunchucks, in a movie, you you have to admit it looks awesome ...in the hands of Bruce Lee. You and I are more likely to hurt ourselves trying to imitate those moves. Once you've tried swinging those things, you have to wonder how effective the weapon would be in real life compared to say, a stick. Would it be worth all that training? Were they ever used in combat? To answer that question, we have to look at the history of nunchucks.

To begin with, going back to the earliest known references to this particular staple of certain martial arts, it turns out nobody is quite sure who invented it, not because its origins are thousands of years back or anything like that- but simply because up until the likes of Bruce Lee, it wasn’t really a terribly popular weapon of choice, and its history isn’t well documented as a result of its relative obscurity.

So who do people think invented it? It turns out even if you consult educational tombs of knowledge concerning use of nunchucks, as we did, you’ll find about as many stories as there are books covering the sticks with a little extra in the middle.

A recurrent theme in the most commonly touted origin stories, however, is that its invention was spurred owing to a lack of other weapons, and thus it was an improvised weapon created from and altogether more innocuous item meant for other purposes before someone realized if you swung it- hey- you could really hurt someone (or yourself).

Read some of the various origin stories and what we really know about the history of nunchucks, which all seems to come down to something like "a weapon you can use if there's nothing else available" at Today I Found Out.

Fanta, now a subsidiary of Coca-Cola, sells more softs drinks in Thailand than it does in either the US or China. Sure, people love to drink it, but some of that sweet red soda pop is for the gods. Strawberry-flavored Fanta is left as an offering at shrines, or spirit houses, throughout the country. Kalyanee Rudrakanchana, a Thai spiritual consultant, explains more.  

The spirits she has communed with have yet to ask for red Fanta. Yet “offering sweet, red water at a shrine is something that is uniquely Thai,” Rudrakanchana explains. “Nobody knows why it has to be strawberry Fanta, but it probably has to do with its bright red color.” After all, she notes, “Thais are a very visual people. They probably think it looks pretty in front of the shrine or spirit house.”

Or more likely, it just seems natural to make an offering of something that the giver believes is tasty and satisfying. Read how Fanta became a common offering at shrines throughout Thailand at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: Per Meistrup)

Music videos that were remastered into 4K definition might look great, or right look really crappy. The difference is in the original material. Tom Scott explains what happens when you take a song meant for MTV and try to make it into a cinema-quality feature. Something about a silk purse and a sow's ear comes to mind. Tom Scott explains in more detail.

The title of "the Real McCoy" has been attributed to several people, implying a genuineness that Kid McCoy never seemed to find. Norman Selby took the name Kid McCoy when he became a champion boxer, winning 99 of his 105 official bouts in the late 19th century, although he boxed quite a bit under assumed names, and was accused of at least a couple of fixed fights. But that was just the beginning of his many careers, both before and after one of his ten marriages ended in death, for which he stood trial for murder.

“It had been a daffy world for McCoy,” said Variety in its obit. “He had been a convict, social lion, saloon porter, hero of a short story classic, dishwasher, owner of a New York jewelry store and night club, a bankrupt, film actor, auto racer, confidante of Maurice Maeterlinck and, in recent years, a Ford employee.” It was paradigmatic of his life, and of the fate of Real McCoys this century, that during his second trial, being shuttled from court to county jail, Selby should meet a fan, throw one arm around him, and shake hands warmly, although Charlie Chaplin was in the halls of justice not to wish the Kid luck but to sue an impersonator who had stolen his costume and character.

The Kid was many different characters, but which one was the real McCoy? Read about the astonishing life of Norman Selby at The MIT Press Reader. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Famous Players-Lasky Corporation)

In a minute-and-a-half, this animated story encompasses the themes of love, commitment, aging, fear of the unknown, and the simple pleasures of life. One Twitter user said,

Why does this commercial have a better plot than half of the shows y’all be watching?

The company that uses it has a slew of other heart-tugging stories, which you'll find linked at Metafilter. Along the way, you might even find out what they're trying to sell you.

Bubble milk tea. Durian. Scallion pancake. Crab roe.

Sixth Tone reviews the good, the bad, and the ugly of Shanghai’s unconventional ice cream flavors.https://t.co/56wApbFotG

— Sixth Tone (@SixthTone) May 15, 2020

Ice cream makers know the value of shock, and that's why they come out with new flavors that no one in their right mind would ever associate with ice cream. Whether they last past the "I dare you to try it" phase is all up to the consumers. Strangely, some become classics. Sixth Tone introduces us to Shanghai's new ice cream flavors: bubble milk tea, durian, scallion pancakes, calamari, and crab roe. They ate them (and pass along reviews) so that you won't have to. -via Nag on the Lake

One of the challenges of parenting is to introduce your children to the more unsavory aspects of the world in an age-appropriate way. Disagreement over how to do that fuels moral panics on a regular basis, and things that were commonplace in children's entertainment in the past are considered taboo today. Disney movies are no exception- you may watch a film designed for children and be surprised at what is presented.

To see how kid-friendly Disney films really are in the eyes of the public, the online marketplace OnBuy.com gathered data from 1371 people. The themes in Dumbo (1941) raised the most eyebrows, with 31 percent of respondents deeming it inappropriate and 26 percent saying they wouldn't show it to their kids. It was followed by Peter Pan (1953), which earned the inappropriate label from nearly 20 percent of people and got an inappropriate-for-kids designation from 24 percent of parents. Both movies feature racist caricatures and substance abuse (tobacco in Peter Pan, and booze-fueled, psychedelic hallucinations in Dumbo).

You can read the results of the survey here. The list isn't all extremely old movies- Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid are there, too. You have to wonder why Song of the South isn't the number one inappropriate film, but then you remember that few people born in the last 50 years have actually seen it. Read more about the survey at Mental Floss.