In case you missed it, there was a third Men in Black sequel released in 2019 that starred Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson instead Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Men in Black: International was supposed to be a summer blockbuster, but performed below expectations both at the box office and in critical reviews. Screen Junkies gives us this Honest Trailer to explain why.   

The first recorded use of lipstick was 5,000 years ago, which is about as far back as records of anything goes, so coloring one's lips may extend much further back in time. But history begins with records, otherwise it is prehistoric. Lipstick, lip gloss, and lip painting varied over the ages, sometimes used by men as well as women, sometimes it denoted one's status, and the ingredients varied wildly from era to era and place to place.   

In antiquity, it was the Middle East that certainly had a more liberal attitude towards lipstick, as evidenced by wall paintings that show women with brightly coloured lips. The ancient Greeks had a more complicated relationship with lip paint however, where it became increasingly entangled with societal status. Predominantly worn by sex workers of the period, it became a sort of symbol of the profession, signifying their status, to the point where if ever one of these women would be out in public at the wrong time of day, or without their designated lip paint, they could be chastised and punished for posing as “respectable ladies”. Alongside red dye and wine residue, they improvised with a surprising range ingredients including sheep sweat, human saliva and even crocodile excrement.

Ingredients improved over time, thank goodness. Read the history of lipstick at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Stephencdickson)

In this recent clip from the show Italia's Got Talent, Marula Eugster Rigolo uses 13 palm branches and a feather to show us all up. I mean, I can't even walk into the next room without dropping or spilling whatever I am carrying. The actual performance is only six minutes, beginning at about a minute into the video. -via TYWKIWDBI

In 2018, Colin O'Brady became the first person to walk across Antarctica by himself with no resupplies. He's now written a book about that trek, The Impossible First. In an excerpt, we learn about one of the times things didn't go as planned. It was that one time O'Brady varied his routine in setting up his tent, skipping the part about anchoring it to his sled. The wind gusted and pulled a stake out of the ice, and he could envision it blowing away completely.  

I had no backup tent. No rescue party could ever make it through a storm like this, with zero visibility and rugged, uneven terrain that would prevent a plane from landing. I’d grow sleepy, then increasingly irrational, and finally I’d just lie down, thinking that the ice was a nice place to rest. I’d die alone, in the cold, my body temperature falling.

It wasn’t the fear of death that really got to me—it was the realization that I’d never make it home. I’d never get back to Portland; never walk along the Willamette River holding hands with my wife, Jenna; never laugh around another campfire at the Oregon Coast with my parents and the rest of my family; never again smell the deep, peaceful aroma of a damp, bark-lined forest trail in the Cascade Mountains.

My hands were now everything. They gripped the edge of the tent as my airborne home yanked and jerked over my head. I knew everything depended on what happened in the next few seconds—on how long I could hold on and what I did or didn’t do.

We know he made it back to civilization in one piece, but that moment was still terrifying. Let's assume it was the last time he didn't anchor his tent to his sled. Read the book excerpt at Outside Online. -via Damn Interesting

Read more about O'Brady's adventures in our previous posts.

Artist Simon Weckert performed an experiment that highlights the way our world now works. He piled 99 smartphones into a wagon and pulled it down a street in Berlin. As you can see, it was a light traffic day, so much so that he could walk down the middle of the road. But Google's location tracking saw 99 phones in one place, and flagged Google Maps to alert users to a traffic jam there. Once that happened, there were even fewer cars on that street, as traffic app users went around the area. The stunt highlights how closely your phone and activities are being monitored. -via Laughing Squid

When a member of the US Senate dies in office, the state's governor usually appoints someone to fill the position. Quite a few times in our nation's history, that person has been the late senator's widow. The House of Representatives fills the slot by special election, in which a widow can run and often has their party's support. Not only is it a way to show respect for the late congressman, it is usually assumed that the widow has the same political positions. Beginning in 1922, widow succession has been an important method of getting women into congress. At least in the early days, becoming a political widow was the easiest way for a housewife, or any woman, to enter congress. But are these widows really qualified?   

Many widows who went to Congress were already familiar with its working, having been party to their husbands’ world. “They had worked on their husbands’ campaigns and as a result, knew their district well,” explain Palmer and Simon. Many wives were deeply entwined with their husbands’ policy setting and political strategy. Before the powerful congressman Hale Boggs died, his wife, Lindy, “was his chief political adviser,” explains the House of Representatives archives. “She set up her husband’s district office in New Orleans, orchestrated his re–election campaigns, canvassed voters, arranged for her husband’s many social gatherings, and often acted as his political surrogate as demands on his time became greater the further he climbed in the House leadership.”

Some widows’ tenures in D.C. came to overshadow their husbands’ legacies. Perhaps most notable was Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a famous and formidable politician who spoke out against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s redbaiting. She originally went to Congress in 1940 to fill her husband Clyde’s seat and, after her election to the Senate in 1964, she made history as the first woman to serve in both chambers. She lost her last election in 1972, when she was in her mid-70s.

The tradition continues. While more women are entering congress on their own records, name recognition and legacy still helps. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings is in the running for the seat vacated by her late husband Elijah Cummings. Read the history of widow succession at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Library of Congress)

Janelle Shane studies artificial intelligence and posts the funniest results, as we've seen before. After several attempts at training algorithms to generate recipes, and even baking brownies full of horseradish (shown above), she has completely given up all hope.

I’ve seen neural net recipes that call for crushed sherry or 21 pounds of cabbage. One of my personal favorites is a recipe called “Small Sandwiches” that called for dozens of fussily chopped, minced, and diced ingredients - before chucking them in the food processor for 3 hours. Part of the problem has been neural nets with memory so terrible that halfway through the recipe they forget they’re making cake.

More recent neural nets like GPT-2, given better long-term memory and extensive training on a huge portion of the internet, can make recipes that are more likely to pass for the real thing. Use talktotransformer.com to prompt GPT-2 with “Black Forest Cake. Ingredients:” and the quantities and ingredients will be reasonable, even if the whole thing doesn’t quite work (generating a few examples in a row, I saw some Black Forest recipes that called for kneading the batter, and one that suggested pouring the batter into a toaster).

In her latest post, Shane passes along AI recipes for Crock Pot Cold Water, Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake (which contains chicken but no chocolate), and Completely Meat Circle. How could you possibly make these recipes worse? Shane proposes to next have a neural network study vintage American recipes, as in those abominations that rely heavily on Jell-O and condensed soup. You can submit your suggestions for that experiment. -via Metafilter

DoodleChaos (previously at Neatorama) designed a roller coaster around Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Not only does it work perfectly with the music, but it's a thrill just watching it.

This was a challenging project because the rides in Planet Coaster do not always run at the same speed. I found that the timing changed based on changes to my CPU load or graphics settings. In total, I spent over 90 hours making this video.

At four minutes, it's longer than a real-world roller coaster, and less nauseating, too!  -via Digg

The Masons and other secret societies saw a great rise in membership after World War I. That meant a rise in the number of hazing rituals for candidates, at least until the Masons banned hazing some time in the 1930s. DeMoulin Bros. & Co. was ready to supply amazing props and contraptions to aid in those rituals, including the punch bowl shown above, which had a second hidden tank to direct something drinkable to the spigot. The company supplied organizations with electric cages, guillotines, fake women, and mechanical goats. Many of the items were recommended to be used in conjunction with their electric carpet that supplied a shock. And then there is the intriguing human centipede for sale. See a collection of pages from the DeMoulin Bros. & Co. 1930 catalog at Dangerous Minds. Warning: one page contains a racist slur.

One of the first things that students learn about Ludwig von Beethoven is that he went deaf and continued composing, using his memory of what each note sounded like. However, Beethoven began to gradually lose his hearing almost thirty years before his death, and took steps to protect himself from further loss. He carried "conversation books," in which people could jot down their side of a chat, and he also used them for notes to himself. According to Kent State musicologist Theodore Albrecht, his entries indicate that he could still hear a little when his Ninth Symphony premiered in 1824, and for a couple of years afterward.

One account, dated 1823, tells of the composer visiting his favourite coffee house, where he was approached by a stranger seeking guidance on his own failing hearing. Beethoven scribbled down this advice: “Baths [and] country air could improve many things. Just do not use mechanical devices [ear trumpets] too early; by abstaining from using them, I have fairly preserved my left ear in this way.”

He added: “When possible, [conversing] through writing is better; the hearing will be spared.” In another account, from 1824, a musician visits Beethoven and tells him: “You can already conduct the overture entirely alone … Conducting the whole concert would strain your hearing too much; therefore, I would advise you not to do so.”

Read what else Albrecht learned from Beethoven's notes at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

Ruth Coker Burks was helping a friend undergoing cancer treatment in 1984 when she became intrigued by another patient. The nurses drew straws to see who would have to go into the patient's room. And no one else did. He had AIDS.

Whether because of curiosity or — as she believes today — some higher power moving her, Burks eventually disregarded the warnings on the red door and snuck into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, wasted to less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died.

“I walked out and [the nurses] said, ‘You didn’t go in that room, did you?’ ” Burks recalled. “I said, ‘Well, yeah. He wants his mother.’ They laughed. They said, ‘Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming. Nobody’s been here, and nobody’s coming.’ ”

Unwilling to take no for an answer, Burks wrangled a number for the young man’s mother out of one of the nurses, then called. She was only able to speak for a moment before the woman on the line hung up on her.

Burks sat with the patient for 13 hours until he died. Over the next decade, she would care for hundreds of patients dying from AIDS whose families wouldn't even visit. If their families wouldn't accept their remains, Burks buried them herself in her family cemetery. And she helped change attitudes about those suffering from the disease. Read the story of Ruth Coker Burks at the Arkansas Times. -via Nag on the Lake

Yes, the calendar is just a system for counting days, which has nothing much to do with the natural world, but it's a system we've used for a long time. That gives us an excuse to celebrate the way the numbers line up on certain dates. Today is special because it's Groundhog Day, Super Bowl Sunday, and also a pure palindrome when you write the numbers out, no matter which side of the pond you are on. There are other strange and rare things about this date which standupmaths will explain. However you decide to celebrate it, have a great day! -via Metafilter

Doctors warn parents not to sleep with their babies because of the risk of death by accidental suffocation. Still, mothers who've carried those infants inside them want to be nearby, which is only natural. Surely, modern technology can find a way to do that safely. One idea is the device shown above by BellyBelly. Years later, it is not widely used outside of the Netherlands.

The truth is that parents in the United States want to sleep with their children, and many, in fact, already do. Between 1993 and 2015, surveys show that co-sleeping spiked from 6% to 24%, despite doctors’ warnings. There are also many bedside sleeping devices on the market for home use that allow you to attach a bassinet to the side of your bed so you can sleep close to your child, though the American Academy of Pediatrics declines to comment on their safety. On its website, the AAP says it “cannot make a recommendation for or against the use of bedside sleepers or in-bed sleepers until more studies are done.”

Some doctors are pushing back on the AAP’s recommendations. They argue that the risks of infants dying because of co-sleeping are actually very low. Many of the studies about SIDS were conducted in the early 2000s and found that it often happens when parents sleep in the same bed as their children. But when you take a closer look at the data, the cases of sleep-related infant deaths mostly fell under a few categories: They involve parents who drink or do drugs, they involve premature babies or parents who smoke, and they involve babies sleeping on sofas with their parents and then getting trapped in the cushions.

Read about the struggle over co-sleeping at Fast Company. -via Digg

This looks for all the world like a TV prank, but it's real. In fact, it's a better take on the car that can communicate with a traffic signal. The Mumbai Police Department came up with a solution for one kind of noise pollution, using technology and old-fashioned psychology. But will installing this scheme at a few select intersections spread better behavior at the other 100,000 intersections in the city? -via Digg

This poor crocodile has been wandering around Indonesia with a tire around its neck for around four years now, and no one can figure out how to remove it. The situation pointedly illustrates the problems caused by dumping garbage into the sea. Authorities are concerned that the tire could strangle the crocodile as it grows larger.

Antara reported that the crocodile may be a Siamese crocodile, a species native to southeast Asia that's critically endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Fewer than 1,000 of the crocodiles are thought to be left in the wild.

Indonesian officials have now offered a reward to free the unnamed crocodile from its plight, according to Antara.

"A reward will be given to anyone who can release the hapless reptile," Central Sulawesi Natural Resources Conservation Office chief Hasmuni Hasmar said. Details of the reward were not given.

While all ideas are welcome, the person who would approach the croc to actually do the deed would probably want more details on what the reward would be before risking life and limb. Read more on the story at Insider.  -via Mental Floss