Accessories sized for 11-inch fashion dolls will also work for 12-inch action figures. Redditor adultish- scored a used beachfront mansion made for Barbie dolls for $20 and converted it into a superhero headquarters for her son! While the superheroes don't need a kitchen or bathroom (at least not for adventures), they do need a roomy garage. And sure, that couch is too small for Hulk, but life-size couches are too small for life-size Hulk as well. See the before and after images here.

Earth and Sun is a neat interactive tutorial on what makes a day for people on Earth. In specific, it explains the Earth's rotation, revolution, speed, axial tilt, solstices and equinoxes, and more that you haven't thought all that much about.

The duration between two solar noons is known as a solar day which lasts the familiar 24 hours. However, that’s not completely accurate. If you look closely at the simulation of the sidereal and solar day you’ll notice that we didn’t account for two important factors – eccentricity of the orbit and the axial tilt of the Earth. In fact, 24 hours is the duration of a mean solar day. The actual duration of each individual day varies, but before we witness that variation we have to discuss the most important consequence of the axial tilt.

In the visual shown here, you can drag the Earth around on any axis, but you can't change where the sun is, so depending on what time you do it, you'll see where daylight and dark falls. That's just one of the many ways you can visualize what's happening on Earth at the site. -via Metafilter

The Court of Historical Review and Appeals was an unofficial court in San Francisco that tried cold cases, often very cold cases that were thought to have been settled decades ago. It was a publicity stunt concocted by San Francisco publicist Bernard Averbuch in 1975. The first case it heard was that of police chief chief George W. Wittman, who was relieved of duty after being charged with accepting bribes to allow gambling to flourish in Chinatown -in 1905.

Averbuch had heard of Wittman when city archivist Gladys Hansen discovered police personnel records dating back to 1853. He saw injustice in Wittman’s firing, noted briefly in the ledger in red ink, and enlisted the help of his friend Harry Low, a Superior Court judge, to stage a rehearing. Local TV cameras turned out for the much belated trial. With the benefit of hindsight, Wittman’s “defense team,” a collection of civil servants, including Hansen, told a twisted tale of turn-of-the-century yellow journalism, mayoral corruption, racism and greed that had been hidden from the public at the time. Wittman, they argued, had been a pawn in a scheme to paint Chinatown as an unseemly and dangerous place, part of a bigger effort to move the Chinese immigrants off of their valuable land. With a bang of his gavel, Judge Low rewrote history, ruling that Wittman’s firing was unjust.

The "re-trial" was so popular that the Court of Historical Review and Appeals continued, examining many other historical cases for possible injustice over the next 25 years. The findings were not binding, but drew a lot of national press. Read about some of the other cases heard by the court at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Shaylyn Esposito)

Pteryx Videos brings us a masterfully-edited mashup of 2019. While the clips are mostly from movies, you'll also see some TV, news, and internet videos. It's altogether enjoyable. One song of the soundtrack contains lyrics that may be NSFW.

You've seen, and probably worn, those New Year's Eve party eyeglass frames that have the number of the coming year on them. They were everywhere in 2000, as we celebrated the new millennium. But you might not know that the idea goes back thirty years ...and you almost certainly don't know the guys who came up with them.

Thirty years ago, in a small Seattle apartment, two friends smoked some weed, knocked back a few beers and talked the night away. That was tradition for Richard Sclafani and Peter Cicero, two best friends working middling jobs to supplement their music careers. But on this particular Friday night in January 1990, Sclafani and Cicero’s doodling would change New Year’s Eve celebrations forever.

“We were always coming up with ideas — they’d just pop into our head and we’d scribble them down — but we’d never do anything about them,” Sclafani tells me. “We’d somehow gotten onto drawing novelty glasses and had ideas sketched out. Pete drew the number 2000 and put a couple of eyeballs inside the zeros. I took one look at it and had this vision of the year 2000 in Times Square, and all the people wearing these glasses. It was really a vision.”

Sclafani and Cicero registered a patent, and started borrowing money to make the idea work. And it did, better than they ever expected, right up until the knockoffs started arriving. Read about the real history behind those New Year glasses at Mel magazine. -via Digg

Two young guys hack into a drone delivery service by changing recipients' orders. What could possibly go wrong? Um, everything. However, like Alive in Joberg or Kenobi, this sequence leaves us wanting more, and we hope the story can be expanded on at some point.  

Colin Levy wrote and directed the Hollywood-quality short Skywatch using a combination of hard work, crowdfunding, modern technology, and serendipity. In a behind-the-scenes video, Levy explained how he got Jude Law to appear in his film.

Kyler Bourgeous has hiked, biked, and run through every trail in Antelope Island State Park in Utah over his life, but 2019 was the most eventful year in his outdoor activities. In June, he ran the Frary Peak Trail and encountered a group of bison.

I was almost to the three-mile marker on the trail, where it crests this ridge—that’s when I ran into them. As soon as I saw them, I said, “Oops” out loud. Then I started walking away slowly, trying to get some distance between us. But I only made it a few steps when the bison decided to charge. I ran when I saw it coming.

It closed the gap quickly, because their top speed [up to 35 miles per hour] is so high. Right before it got me, I turned sideways into it. So I have this flashback now, where I see the bison right before it hits me, which has been a problem because the incident has caused some PTSD.

I turned into it with my right side, which ended up working as well as it could have because I didn’t suffer any permanent injuries. It hit me with both of its horns. I got one in my hip, which took out a pretty big chunk of flesh, and the other one in my arm, which took out a smaller lump. It also fractured a rib, putting a small hole in my lung, which started collapsing.

The impact sent me flying through the air. I rotated and hit the ground. The bison trampled me after that. I remember this whirlwind of hooves and getting smashed under it, which ripped my ear and scalp and bruised my back.

One might think that such an experience would discourage Bourgeous from frequenting the park, but no. Once he got out of the hospital, he was back to hiking the trails. He began dating Kayleigh Davis, who accompanied him on an outing to the park on September. This time, it was Davis who was gored. What the odds? Bourgeous and Davis tell their stories at Outside Online. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Jack Dykinga)

YouTuber AtinPiano performs a mashup that you would have never considered on your own, but the truth is that the Imperial March from Star Wars blends gracefully with "Carol of the Bells." Bonus points for wearing stormtrooper armor while playing it. The visuals are interesting, too!   

Thomas H. "Boston" Corbett went down in the history books as the man who avenged President Abraham Lincoln by shooting and killing his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. However, Corbett led quite an eventful life, mainly because he was seriously mentally ill. He was a hatter, a profession known for psychosis induced by inhaling mercury fumes (hence the phrase "mad as a hatter"). Corbett was also a soldier, a street preacher, a self-inflicted eunuch, and an asylum escapee. But let's refresh our knowledge of the incident in which Boston Corbett's military unit was dispatched to find Booth after he murdered Lincoln and fled Washington.

They located Booth, then set the barn he was in on fire to force him out. Precisely what happened next is unclear, but Corbett's unit was under strict orders to take Booth alive so he could be questioned. Corbett, upon seeing Booth through a slat in the wall, instead shot him very dead. Corbett claimed self-defense in response to Booth raising his gun, to which some witnesses called BS, while a couple argued that it might not have even been Corbett who fired. Whatever happened, Corbett took credit, and was stuck with everything that followed.

Corbett was unrepentant about disobeying orders, claiming that God had directed him -- which if nothing else, certainly one-upped Booth's claim that he had been an instrument of God's justice. There was talk of a court martial, but that was abandoned when the media and the public began celebrating Corbett as an American hero. So Corbett was thanked by the government, given a portion of the reward money (the modern equivalent of about $27,000), discharged (this time honorably), and sent on his way. Like many people, he then had to figure out what to do after the biggest moment of his life. And like with many people, it didn't go well.

Yes, there's a lot more to Corbett's story, and of course the part that took hold as you read this was "self-inflicted eunuch." Read about that and the other adventures of Boston Corbett at Cracked.

Nice house, huh? According top the real estate listing, the home at 2475 Glendower Place in Los Feliz, California, has five bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a ballroom on the third floor. But this house comes with a history and has been vacant for 60 years, since the murder in 1959.

The property was sold in a probate action a year later to Emily and Julian Enriquez, but the couple never moved in.7Instead, they used the expansive estate as a glorified storage facility, periodically dropping off their stuff over the decades. The Enriquezes also never moved any of the Perelson furnishings out. They supposedly even kept the Perelson’s Christmas tree and unopened presents. The property became a twisted time capsule that attracted urban legends and lookie-loos.

When Emily Enriquez passed in 1994, her son, Rudy, inherited the home. Like his parents, he never moved in and did not maintain the mansion.7 In 2009, he told the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t know that I want to live there or even stay there.”7

For more than fifty years the Enriquez family allowed the “Murder Mansion” to decay, rarely even making repairs. The lawn turned brown, weeds swallowed the terraced gardens, the driveway asphalt remained cracked, and broken windows were not fixed.7 Neighbors eventually took it upon themselves to help maintain the ramshackle house, going so far as to paint the street-level garage and clean the front yard.7 The city eventually intervened, requiring Rudy to make repairs on the rundown property.7

What makes a $3 million property in Los Angeles so cursed that no one wanted to live there? Read what happened to the Perelson family, the last residents of the "Murder Mansion," at Strange Remains. -via Strange Company

(Image source: Realtor.com)

Remember the Digit robot who delivers packages to your door? Agility Robotics has developed a newer version of the same robot that will work as a team with other robots. Watch two of them hand off and stack boxes together. The payoff comes at the end, when they celebrate a job well done with a little happy dance. -via Laughing Squid

Everyone likes to think that they are exceptional. The opposite of being exceptional is to be mediocre, that is, somewhere in the more common range of whatever it is you are measuring. Mediocre might sound bad, but the word stripped of its reputation as an insult implies commonality with others. The same applies to entire planets, or even galaxies.

In the scientific context, exceptional means something very different than it does in the everyday language of, say, football commentary or restaurant reviews. To be exceptional is to be unique and solitary. To be mediocre is to be one of many, to be a part of a community. If Earth is exceptional, then we might be profoundly alone. There might not be any other intelligent beings like ourselves in the universe. Perhaps no other habitable planets like ours. Perhaps no other planets at all, beyond the neighboring worlds of our own solar system.

If Earth is mediocre, the logic runs the other way. We might live in a galaxy teeming with planets, many of them potentially habitable, some of them actually harboring life. In the mediocre case, we bipedal little humans might not be the only sentient creatures peering out into the depths of space, wondering if anyone else is peering back.

Our understanding of those concepts goes way back, fueling arguments between theologians, philosophers, and scientists. Why we still argue, the increasing knowledge we have of worlds that were once beyond our perception is leading us towards regarding earth as mediocre. And that may be a good thing. Read more on this at Nautilus. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI)

We've addressed this question before, looking back at comic book superheroes such as Matter-Eater Lad, Bouncing Boy, and Dogwelder. They never got a big-budget feature film. The Mary Sue looks at the superheroes who have made the big time, meaning being in movies or TV series. There are an awful lot of them now, between the MCU and DC movies, plus TV and streaming services. And trying to make all the superheroes different from each other means some some get super powers that aren't all that useful, like the ability communicate with animals.

I’m not saying that this isn’t something that wouldn’t be really cool in real life. I personally want to know for sure if my dog knows he’s a good boy. But for superheroism? Eh, not so useful.

I guess it depends on the animals and if you can actually control the animals you talk to. Imagine a hero that could talk to cats, but the cats, being cats, don’t care and just let the world end. Again, talking to squirrels would be cool – but can that stop a bank robbery? Even Aquaman knew that talking to fish isn’t useful.

Read about other superheroes whose powers are lamer the more you examine them.

Dorothy Arnold was an educated woman from a high-society family in New York City. She had aspirations of becoming a writer, which her parents discouraged. And one day in 1910, she went shopping and never came home.

As evening approached, Francis and Mary began to worry. They feared their daughter was up to some kind of scandalous business, but eventually broke down, called on her friends, and asked them for clues to her whereabouts. No one knew. Alerting their circle of friends meant inviting high society’s gossip mongers to speculate about a missing heiress. For the Arnolds, the fear of embarrassment and public scandal may have played a part in the decisions they took next. Denial, while just as tragic, goes down a little easier. When a friend named Elsa returned their call quite late at night to check in on Dorothy’s whereabouts, the Arnolds assured her that their daughter was home at last. Could she come to the phone? Not tonight, they said. She was under the weather after a day of shopping.

For the next two weeks, the Arnolds kept things under wraps, refusing to tell the police of their missing daughter. Their refusal to seek professional help during the first days of her disappearance spiralled the case out of control.

The Arnolds' reluctance to besmirch their family reputation caused delays in the investigation of her disappearance that possibly sunk the case forever. When Dorothy's disappearance was finally made public, it caused a huge scandal. Was Dorothy murdered? Did she die from an illegal abortion? Did she commit suicide? Or did she just run away? Read about the disappearance of Dorothy Arnold at Messy Nessy Chic.

For a decade now, Barry Petchetsky has been compiling a year-end roundup of foreign objects that doctors have removed from people. After the exodus of writers from Deadspin, that list is now at Vice. The case studies are presented in simple lists categorized by orifice, with an annoying lack of details. Some are disturbing, gross, and scary, so be warned before you check out the list here. -via Metafilter

(Unrelated image credit: Staff Sgt. James Wilt)