Do you know anyone who might be considered a narcissist? The name came from Greek mythology, after Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. Since these folks often go through life without ever seeking help for the condition, it was hard for professionals to pinpoint a set of symptoms for a true diagnosis, but they've come up with this:

To qualify as a narcissist, an individual must have "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts," paraphrased from the fifth version of the DSM [PDF]:

— A grandiose sense of self-importance, exaggerating achievements and talents
— Fantasizes about unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
— Believes that he or she is “special” and should associate only with high-status people or institutions
— Requires excessive admiration
— Has a sense of entitlement, expects favorable treatment or automatic compliance
— Is interpersonally exploitative, taking advantage of others
— Lacks empathy, unwilling to recognize or identify others' feelings and needs

The 9 Megalomaniacal Facts About Narcissism goes into lot more detail about the condition; read them at mental_floss.

Grant Snider of Incidental Comics plays around with letters and language in his Valentine comic. Those letters are "i" and "u" which are the important ones in a relationship between two people. It's not at all easy for the rest of us to explain our feelings in words, or letters, so these alphabetical puns and illustrations might help you out.

A news crew trying to cover the snowstorm in Massachusetts were photobombed by a person dressed as a walking bushel of marijuana. This was apparently not the first time it happened that day to WWLP meteorologist Jennifer Pagliei. Her cameraman panned away to keep the video bomber out of the frame as much as possible.

(YouTube link)

From here, he just looks like some yeti trying to fit in. (via reddit)

The following article is from the new book Uncle John’s Uncanny Bathroom Reader.

Did you know that the first known primitive greenhouse was built almost 2,000 years ago? Here’s a little history that just might grow on you.

EARLY ROOTS

Ever since humans started cultivating crops—about 12,000 years ago—people have been trying to develop better ways to grow them. At some point, farmers in various places around the world figured out that growing plants indoors, or in some kind of protected space, had potential advantages. In regions that had cold winters, they could grow plants indoors for a much longer period than they could outdoors, and they could grow plants that normally grew in different climates and on different terrain.

We don’t know exactly when indoor gardening started, but we do know that advanced horticulture—the art and science of growing vegetables and ornamental flowers—was being practiced in many parts of the world thousands of years ago, and that it often involved the use of protected gardens. This included small vegetable and flower gardens outside of homes, protected from weather and wildlife by walls, and elaborate multilevel indoor (and outdoor) palace gardens—filled with hundreds of species of plants, often exotic varieties imported from conquered lands—such as the magnificent gardens built in Babylon and Egypt more than 4,000 years ago.

IT’S GETTING HOT IN HERE

The following article is from the new book Uncle John’s Uncanny Bathroom Reader.

Here’s a piece of Atomic Age history you’ve probably never heard of: the civilian Ground Observer Corps, thousands of volunteers who scanned the skies for incoming Soviet bombers that would have marked the opening battle of World War III.

SHOCK WAVE

In September 1949, a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane flying over the North Pacific from Japan to Alaska detected levels of radioactivity in the atmosphere at least 20 times above normal. Other planes in the Pacific reported similar observations in the days that followed; elevated radiation levels were soon being detected over the British Isles half a world away. It quickly became clear that there could be only one explanation for the spreading cloud of radioactivity: the Soviet Union had secretly detonated its first atomic bomb. The United States had known since the end of World War II that the Soviets would try to build their own nuclear weapon, but the best estimates were that it would take them eight to ten years to do it. They  had managed it in less than four.

The Soviet bomb was estimated to be as powerful as the one dropped on Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II. That bomb had killed more than 70,000 people. Making matters worse, the Soviets were also building long-range bombers that could reach the United States. America’s entry into World War II had been precipitated by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, as the Cold War heated up, it seemed possible that the next war might begin with an atomic sneak attack by the Russians. If their target was a major American city like Washington, D.C., or New York, the casualties would be in the millions.

In medieval bestiaries, we are liable to see real but exotic animals illustrated alongside fantastical creatures like unicorns and centaurs. The real beasts are often depicted inaccurately, which we often attribute to the fact that the artist had never seen a real specimen, but worked from descriptions from those who had. However, there were many depictions of elephants that showed the same inaccuracy: a trunk shaped like a trumpet. Could those artists possibly be copying the ideas of earlier artists? Where was the first depiction of an elephant with a trumpet nose?   

One of the mysteries of the bestiary form is what the first one looked like. The tradition is usually traced back to the Physiologus, a book that no longer exists. It’s thought that it was written around the 2nd century A.D., in Alexandria, by a scholar working in Greek, and much of what’s known about it is derived from later translations into Latin. It would have contained the descriptions of a selection of animals, perhaps 50 or so, and relied on the standard works of natural history of the time, including Aristotle’s History of Animals and Pliny’s Natural History.

The thing about that book is that the animals weren't just described- they were used as allegories for "the ways of God, of Man and of the Devil.” The story it told of elephants was about sex. While the trunk shape is never fully explained, the search for the answer is quite interesting, as you'll find at Atlas Obscura.

Roses are nice, but they're really only there for looks. On the other hand, you can eat donuts on a stick! Or burgers on a stick! Or chicken nuggets on a stick! All the junk food on a stick! With a Valentines Day gift like this, we could eat ourselves sick. -via Buzzfeed

Gav and Dan, the Slow-Mo Guys, are always looking for something to film with their high-speed cameras. Something that people will find interesting, but more important, things that will look good in a video. Explosions? Yeah! Pretty colors? Yeah! So they gathered bags of paint powder and vehicle airbag devices and headed out to a quarry, far from anyone who would be bothered.

(YouTube link)

They do it three times! That must've cost a fortune in airbags. The result is not as educational as some of the other videos they'd done, but it sure is pretty! -via Laughing Squid

See more from the Slow Mo Guys.

If you've ever considered joining in an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game), consider the story of these two people. They met playing World of Warcraft in 2010. She was a tank in Canada, he was a healer in the U.S. And they got married exactly seven years later, on January 29, after she got a visa to live in the U.S. It turns out that their story is not exactly unique. Redditor unffligh told us,

LOL I did the opposite. I met my husband playing WoW in 2004. After several visits back and forth I moved from Minnesota to Canada to be with him.

And chaosintejas had a similar story.

This is awesome! I also married an American I met in WoW (I'm Canadian) - in 2006, but we both stopped playing and we moved our friendship to social media. We've always liked each other 'more than friends' but Texas and Vancouver were pretty far, separate countries, and honestly we did both have on-again-off-again relationships (not to mention school) so it seemed unrealistic. In March 2013, we had both found ourselves single, so I visited him in Texas for a week and we shortly after decided to get married! We visited back and forth a handful of times and then I immigrated to the US September 2013 and we were married December 2013. Just passed Anniversary 3 :)

Really liked the UCSIS Interview where the US is trying to determine if our relationship is real and the minute I said World of Warcraft the guy just laughed. Thx budddayyy.

DollaBillMurray says it happens all the time.

I know two couples that met on WoW and one from LoL. All three were Canadian guys that met and subsequently imported American girls.

And it's not just WoW that brings Americans and Canadians together.

Met my husband in 1999 on a game called Meridian 59. He was from Canada, and I was a transplanted Alaskan. We met in person in 2001, just before September 11 when he flew out to Anchorage. He never left because he was afraid that the travel restrictions that would be coming after that would keep us apart. We married 4 months later, he became a U.S. citizen, and now serves in the Army. We recently celebrated our 15 year anniversary, and we still play video games together and have side by side pc's in our den. There are certainly some happy endings in video game nerd land.

So if you want to improve U.S./Canadian relations, or just want to meet someone, you might consider playing WoW online. It's amazing how many married couples in the reddit thread met playing games.

You've probably hear stories about dogs or other animals that died after eating a toad, and maybe you've heard about animals that learned to lick toads to enjoy the hallucinogenic effects. It's possible that the story of the frog prince came about after someone kissed a frog and started hallucinating. Toads and frogs in the bufonidae family carry strange toxins in their skin.

These chemicals, called bufotoxins, probably evolved to deter predators but they may offer a variety of other uses, including as medicine. Bufo gargarizans, an Asian species of toad, produces a substance that could even prove useful in the treatment of certain cancers. According to one 2011 study, the toad produces a substance that effects "significant antitumor activity, including inhibition of cell proliferation, induction of cell differentiation, induction of apoptosis, disruption of the cell cycle, inhibition of cancer angiogenesis, reversal of multi-drug resistance, and regulation of the immune response."

Other bufotoxins have been used to treat diseases among horses and cattle. Bufotoxins have been individually studied in the past but there was no single compendium of research on them. Roberto Ibáñez, a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, has co-authored a paper in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology that brings together everything currently known to science about bufotoxins. He helped to identify 47 species of frogs and toads which are used in traditional medicines and then narrowed in on the 15 species that are members of the bufonidae family.

But don't you know it, this research is going on while many of these frogs and toads are seriously declining. Read about the current state of frog and toad research at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Brian Gratwicke)

Here's what happens when everyone is carrying a camera with them all the time. And then they share their photos on an internet forum. Redditor 0thethethe0 went to the Bruce Springsteen concert in Sydney last week and got the selfie of a lifetime. Redditor kritof was there, too and managed to snap an image at the same time.



But do we have a picture of him taking that picture? Probably not, as he took another without zoom to show us where he was sitting, plus arrows to indicate where the other photos were taken.



One thing you might notice is how many phones were out across the audience. So much for the "no camera" rule printed on the tickets. A good time was had by all, even in the cheap seats. -via reddit

Looks like Simon may have a dinner date for Valentines Day! Or at least he's been shopping, preparing for one. Simon's Cat is curious about all this stuff. Of course.

(YouTube link)

We don't ever get as far as the date in this cartoon, but it does end with a familiar internet joke.

Any human activity will eventually be made into a competition, and so it is with the common childhood activity of swinging. Remember when you were a kid on the playground and dreamed of swinging so high that you swung completely over the top in a circle? That's what kiiking is. In the nation of Estonia, where "kiik" means swing, tall swings have always been a fun activity for adults and children alike, but the fairly recent sport of kiiking takes it to the extreme. In order to swing entirely over the bar, and new kind of swing was developed with a swivel at the top.

It became clear that the taller the swing got, the more difficult it would be to complete a circuit over the spindle, which meant that there could be competitive accomplishments, and thus, a new sport was born. “We, who are kiikers so to say, like to say that “kiiking” starts when your legs are higher than your head, before that it is just swinging,” says Laansalu.   

There is no international competition so far, but Estonia has a league, the Estonian Kiiking Union (Eesti Kiikingi Liit). Even though the sport is in its infancy, it's just a few YouTube videos away from being the next big thing. Read about the sport of kiiking and its history -and see a video- at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: Eesti Kiikingi Liit)

It must be a pain to be Brain. He's aware of the constant manipulation by those who would profit from your consumption, but that awareness leaves you with no fun at all (or at least that's what they want you to think). And poor Heart. He would be clueless without Brain, but maybe he'd be happier in his ignorance. The real story is how this dichotomy works every day within us. Well, maybe not all of us, because some people don't use their brains and some others don't use their hearts. This comic is from The Awkward Yeti. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A Hobart, Tasmania, resident gave a thief a good talking-to via a neighborhood sign after he was ripped off …of one boot. And a backpack. I think he was darn lucky to get the boot back, but then tries to negotiate for the return of the backpack, too. Although to be fair, he did offer some beer. A commenter from Tasmania said this was all a true story; that it was a pretty famous incident in Tasmania. See the image somewhat larger here. -via reddit