Electric trams don't make a lot of noise, but they are still pretty big and fairly easy to see if you look. And you're supposed to look to make sure the next lane is clear before you move to it! It's a wonder how these folks ever got driver's licenses.

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From the tram operators' reactions, or lack thereof, you get the idea that they encounter this sort of thing every day. After all, they stayed on their tracks and can't really do anything about drivers who insist on being hit. The only real reactions are when a pedestrian walks into the path of an oncoming tram. -via reddit

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

(Image credit: Astronautilus)

Research About the Only-Partially-Burnt Remnants of Smoked Cigarettes
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Cigarette Butt Odor in the Headspace
“Odor Analysis of Cigarette Butts by a Headspace Technique,” Katsuya Fukuhara, Takeshi Sakaki, Hirohiko Sakuma, and Shiro Sugawara, Agricultural and Biological Chemistry, vol. 49, no. 7, 1985, pp. 2177-2179. The authors, at the Central Research Institute of Japan Tobacco Inc., report:

The odor of cigarette butts is rather more unpleasant than that of the cigarette smoke. A study of the odor of cigar butts has been done [“Preliminary Study of Cigar Butt Headspace Vapors,” R.L. Peck, S.F. Osman, and J.L. Barson, Tobacco Science, vol. 13, 1969, pp. 38- 39], but no reports on the odor of cigarette butts have been found. In this paper... Unblended cigarette samples, namely flue-cured, Burley and Turkish, were smoked under standard conditions. Five mm lengths of the charred side of butts were cut off leaving 25 mm pieces. Two butts were placed in a vessel... and helium gas (20 ml/min) was passed through it for five minutes. The headspace volatiles of the butts... were analysed by gas chromatography according to a method previously reported.

Introducing Cigarette Butts Into Bricks

Baker Island is an uninhabited US territory in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You need special permits to even visit the atoll, which has an area of less than a square mile. But it is geographically unique. Baker Island and nearby Howland Island are the only pieces of land in the UTC-12:00 time zone, just east of westernmost part of the International Date Line. That means it is the last place on earth! The last to see a new day on the clock, that is. That unique feature makes Baker Island the coveted destination for some ham radio operators who will visit in the summer of 2018.

Amateur or “ham” radio had its heyday in the early 20th century, when interested hobbyists began putting together their own wireless communication systems and taking to the airwaves to beam messages to their friends. “We were the original Facebook,” says Don Greenbaum, one of the leaders of the Baker Island team, who has been involved with the ham radio community for about 50 years.

“There are millions of hams out there still,” he continues, courtesy of enthusiasts who build radio towers in their backyards and call up their peers overseas. Some compete to see how many contacts they can make in a given weekend. Others plan involved trips, known as DX-peditions, centered around communicating from ever-more remote places. (“DX” is radio shorthand for “distant.”) Small groups of people make these trips, and tons of others take the opportunity to call them up, crossing another location off of their wireless bucket list.

Read more about Baker Island and the planned expedition at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Joann94024)

Director Ridley Scott had the movie All the Money in the World ready to go. Then in late October, Kevin Spacey, who played J. Paul Getty in the film, became persona non grata under numerous accusations of sexual assault against minors. What to do? If the movie missed its release date, it wouldn't be eligible for the Oscars. And a miniseries on FX was planning to tell the same story on TV soon. Scott called in the lead actors and 88-year-old Christopher Plummer to reshoot all of Spacey's scenes Thanksgiving week, and then a kamikaze editing session remade the movie in time for its December theatrical release (although it was moved three days to avoid competing with some other big films' opening dates). Vulture talked to Scott about the gambit.    

You’re known as a fast filmmaker. But I would imagine that for these reshoots, you had to work even faster.
Oh, yeah. Easy. The Martian I did in 72 days. Normally, that would be 100.

How do you do it?
You plan, you know exactly what it will look like, and I think it helps me enormously that I still do something as basic as storyboard my own stuff. It forces me, on paper, to make decisions. My boards are now insured for $6 million! I literally draw “wide shot,” “medium cross,” “long shot,” in detail. I’ll get a great frame, snap my fingers, and move on to the next one. You’re filming on paper before you even begin, so when I walk on set, I know exactly what I’m going to do. That gives me a confidence with the actors, and the actors smell it.

Read the rest of the interview here. -via Digg

Fake news on Facebook drew the attention of the world in 2017. You might think that fake Facebook stories were all about politics, but no. As you can see from the picture, the stories that drew the most "engagement" (shares, reactions, and comments) on Facebook are sensational and salacious stories of everyday people committing crimes that would take longer to debunk. There was a lot of headlines among the top fake stories that included the words "penis" and "vagina," because the publishers know what they are doing. Their business is translating social media engagement into money. After crime, politics was the second-biggest category of fake news, followed by medicine. Facebook launched a fact-check project in 2017. While it identified a lot of hoax stories, the debunking of such stories didn't get the same attention from Facebook users.

Additional analysis reveals a massive Facebook engagement gap between the top fake news stories and their corresponding fact checks. Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and ABC News were the initial US participants in Facebook’s fact-checking program, and together they produced at least one fact check for 31 of the 50 top stories in the data. Their debunkings generated a total of 127,543 engagements on Facebook — just .5% of the engagements generated by the hoaxes.

That's akin to newspapers, in that an erroneous front page headline would be corrected in small print on page ten the next day. People remember the headline, not the correction. Now imagine if the front page of your newspaper were written by advertisers instead of journalists. Read more about fake news on Facebook at Buzzfeed.

The 1990 film La Femme Nikita is about a woman, played by Anne Parillaud, who breaks bad in so many ways. She's a juvenile delinquent, junkie, thief, murderer, inmate, spy, and assassin. Hoo boy! The French-Italian film was remade under different names in Hollywood and Hong Kong, and it spawned two TV series so far. If you recall La Femme Nikita, you may want to learn more about what went on behind the cameras.

8. Parillaud was pulled over by police for unloading and loading a gun for practice.

This happened when she was caught in plain sight by police unloading and loading her practice guns. They thought the weapons were real.

7.  The Mercedes driven by Victor belongs to the Australian embassy.

If you look at the plates in the film the identification is pretty clear.

There's more trivia about La Femme Nikita at TVOM.

She has spoken. And thus it will ever be, because when Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Besides, it's a holiday and it's cold outside. The chores can wait until next weekend. Since everyone has to go back to school or work tomorrow -or maybe another day this week- let's take some time to relax and enjoy doing nothing with our loved ones today. This comic is from Lunarbaboon. Happy New Year!

Tom has been gone for ten months. My guess is that he was away at school. When he finally returned home, the two family dogs got a bit excited to see him. You know the phrase "love you to death"? That's what this looks like, as they knock him down completely, and almost suffocate him with affection.

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Even afterward, the two dogs keep pouncing on him in tender places. Tom's father can't stop laughing long enough to frame the event correctly. Poor Tom -at least the dogs are happy! -via Digg

The winners have been announced for the 2017 Nature Photographer of the Year competition. The winner is Jayaprakash Joghee Bojan, who took this photograph of an orangutan in Borneo. The caption says,

A male orangutan peers from behind a tree while crossing a river in Borneo, Indonesia. Rampant palm oil cultivation threatens this critically endangered ape, forcing the normally arboreal species to resort to unusual behavior—such as wading through crocodile-infested rivers—in order to survive.

Look at the expression on his face -no wonder they named this species "man of the forest." Bojan's picture also won the wildlife category. You can see the other category winners: landscapes, aerials, and underwater, plus the weekly winners in a gallery at NatGeo. See a lioness stare down a pack of hyenas, a sneezing iguana, and a Scandinavian bird snatching a fish from the water. -via Metafilter

The following is an article from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy.

Remember back on January 1, 2000, when a computer programming error turned the world into a backwoods wasteland of financial ruin?

WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE…EVENTUALLY!

In 1958 a computer programmer named Bob Bemer noticed a potentially catastrophic problem: The punch cards that were currently in use for programming only allotted two digits to represent the year, so it showed up as “58” rather than “1958.” Bemer was concerned that in the year 2000, as the numbers rolled over from “99” to “00,” computers either wouldn’t know how to handle double zeros, or they’d interpret it as the year 1900…and erase all of the data because it “hadn’t happened yet.” Even after Bemer lobbied his fellow programmers, IBM, and the U.S. government, none of them seemed too concerned about it. Surely by the year 2000, they figured, computers would be so advanced that the two-digit system would be replaced, wouldn’t it?

Residents of St. Petersburg, Russia, are dealing with snow, which is not unusual for the city, but the snow that feel on Tuesday was strangely blue. Parents were apprehensive about letting children play in it because they would be tempted to taste it. Blue snow fell a couple of years ago in Chelyabinsk, in the eastern part of Russia, but that phenomenon was traced back to some blue Easter egg dye that a factory had spilled and then forget to report. Samples of the St.Petersburg snow were taken to laboratories for analysis.

Non-experts noted two things: the chemicals most likely to cause a blue stain are cobalt or methylene blue, also known as methylthioninium chloride, a substance used to treat methemoglobinemia, a blood condition that usually caused – ironically — by exposure to a drug or chemical. It’s ironic in this case because the locals also noticed that the blue snow coincided with the demolition of the nearby Chemist-Pharmaceutical Plant No. 1.

All together now: “Ah-ha!”

Read about the blue snow in St. Petersburg at Mysterious Universe. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Dmitry)

The New Year holiday is an elaborate party to celebrate the hanging of a new calendar. But different traditions have grown around the celebration in different countries. For example, in Brazil you should dress all in white for luck. With one exception.

While some of us don our most shimmery dresses for the New Year's party—or our comfiest pajamas to celebrate with a low-key night in—Brazilians take a much simpler, minimalistic approach to ringing in the New Year: The dress code is for all-white attire, but the color of your underwear is thought to determine your arena of luck in the new year. Want to find love? Pick the pink panties. Financial security may be attained by wearing yellow undergarments, and green is for good health.

Not mentioned is the fact that if you get really drunk and fall into the ocean or spill beer on your white clothing, everyone will instantly know what color underwear you're wearing. Read about nine other New Year traditions from around the world at Mental Floss.

None of the traditions in the list hold a candle (so to speak) to the Netherlands' explosive New Year tradition of turning milk cans into cannons.

(Image credit: Flickr user nick v)

(Image credit: Ches)

Russian graffiti artist Evgeny Ches discovered other artists doing a new urban art form called "cellograffiti," in which the subject is painted on industrial-strength cellophane stretched between two poles or columns. Part of the art is transparent, and the finished product doesn't affect anyone's walls. Ches took the idea a step further -into the woods!

I started to do Cellograffiti in the nature. First I did fonts compositions and then I began to do experiments with animals. The mix of natural colors with its pure beauty and graffiti works looks amazing! (And of course I remove cellophane after few days into the trash) Creating art on cellophane is a very interesting innovation which allows you to paint in the most unique places and generate picturesque photos. (Ches)

@cellograffiti

A post shared by Evgeny Ches (@ches_ches) on Feb 6, 2015 at 12:07am PST

These paintings are of creatures who would be at home in the setting, but aren't normally seen in a Russian forest, like 6-foot squirrels, chimpanzees, and dinosaurs.

Squrell

A post shared by Evgeny Ches (@ches_ches) on Aug 7, 2014 at 10:50am PDT

See more of Ches' work at Facebook and Instagram.  -via Buzzfeed

New Year's Eve is the one occasion where you might feel an obligation to party. Everyone else is celebrating, and it may be the only opportunity to let your hair down for a long time. It doesn't always turn out how you expect it to. That's the point of this video from College Humor.   

(YouTube link)

In fact, New Year's Eve rarely turns out to be the happy celebration it's portrayed to be in movies, your friends' stories, or even in your fuzzy memories. There's nothing more traditional than starting out a new year with profound disappointment, loneliness, and regret. Look at it this way: if you spend New Year's Eve watching TV or even going to bed early, it won't make a bit of difference in what's going to happen in 2018. -via Tastefully Offensive

A few years ago, a group of 12 Star Wars fans held a serious discussion on Twitter about the socioeconomic conditions on Tattooine. It is the home planet of both Anakin and Luke Skywalker, full of sand and sentient species of all manner. Obi-Wan Kenobi was an outsider who was presented to the audience as a wise sage who knew all about the planet, but maybe his opinions were colored by his experiences.

TIM CARMODY
Obi-Wan only goes to Mos Eisley once every three months to get drunk and he basically becomes like Byron.

JACOB HARRIS
so he clings to things like lightsabers and ancient Jedi religion…

“I’m just saying you can’t trust a man what plays in a cantina band. Not you, Figrin D’ith. You’re one of the good ones!”

I also imagine Tosche Station as some sort of affluent suburban mall where Luke just goes to loiter when bored.

TIM CARMODY
That’s totally true about dudes in cantina bands though

JACOB HARRIS
you don’t get to be Max Rebo overnight. Playing in the cantina is like their version of the Beatles in Hamburg, Tim.

A wretched hive of scum and vaillainy, indeed. Much of the discussion is about prejudicial treatment of the sand people, excuse me, Tusken people, by the dominant human species.

JACOB HARRIS
all I’m saying is that I don’t blame the Tusken People for steering clear of the racist, violent and armed old man

DAN SINKER
“he’s making those noises again, honey bring the kids inside.”

The original Twitter thread played out over time, and has since deteriorated from a readable form. Tim Carmody extricated the conversation and has archived The People’s History of Tattooine at Kottke for your reading pleasure.