A simple solution to a problem does not make an exciting movie. It's when the protagonist takes the long way around in series of challenges on a journey to triumph that we are hooked. It may be only after we sleep on it, or even much later that we realize the best solution to the movie conflict would have been much simpler. The most obvious example is when we realized that Frodo could have just rode on one of Gandalf's Eagles to Mt. Doom. You can see it in many films, like the 1993 film Free Willy.   

In Free Willy, a boy who has been separated from his parents befriends a killer whale that has been separated from his pod. Initially, the owner of the water park where Willy is held plan to make use of this bond to make money off of the titular whale, which falls through when he becomes irritated by the audience members and refuses to perform. As a result, the owner chooses to sabotage Willy’s tank so that he can collect the insurance payment from the whale’s death but is found out by the boy and his foster parents.

Instead of something reasonable such as calling either the police or the insurance company about the attempted insurance fraud, the boy and his parents decide to steal the whale, bring him to a marina, and then get him to escape into the sea. In real life, this would have been remarkably foolish, both because of the stress of the journey to such animals and because of the legal complications in which the whale rescuers would have gotten into because while they might have had a good cause, there was no doubt that they had broken the law as well.

Read four other examples of simple solutions in movies you may never have considered at Unreality.

This imposing ultramodern design does resemble the headquarters of an evil empire, but it's a fire station in Italy. Where I live, building anything against a rock face is just asking to be crushed by falling rock, and a glass building even more so, but this is a natural cliff instead of a carved mountain. The building is in Margreid, in the Alto Adige/Suedtirol region of northern Italy. The design is from the firm  Bergmeister Wolf.

The architects were approached in 2010 to build a fire station in a cliff of sheer rock. The reason such a challenging spot was chosen was to conserve the small amount of arable land in the area. “The building could have been placed on a normal lot,” explained the architects, “but the community decided to build the fire station into the rock, saving valuable land for use as agriculture.”

There are caverns behind the rock face, which were enlarged and reinforced with concrete for use by the fire department. You can explore the site via Google Street View. -via reddit

The Warner Brothers Studio Tour London held a Christmas dinner for serious Harry Potter fans right there on the movie set. Redditor DestinyBlues went, and had a magical time.

Dinner was served in the Great Hall at Hogwarts, which was followed by a ride on the Hogwarts Express. The participants also took the studio tour and saw the mini-sets, and the evening was concluded with a dance. Lots of people went in their Harry Potter cosplay Sunday best. See 37 pictures of the event at imgur. A good time was had by all. -via reddit

Christmas is the best time of the year for cats. Hey, if you look at it from the cat's point of view, you'll see the fascination. We bring nature's best combination scratching post/climbing tower inside the house, dangle cat toys from the branches, and string it with what brightly-colored lights. But then the humans pull out boxes, paper, and ribbons! Life couldn't get any better for a house cat. Cole and Marmalade (previously at Neatorama) love Christmas. As any cat would. 

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And as a bonus, here's a compilation of videos on cats and Christmas trees.

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A Japanese illustrator on Twitter who goes by Noho draws Star Wars characters in a lovely anime style. That means Star Wars characters from all eight movies so far. Some of those illustrations combine characters from different eras, like Anakin, Luke, and Rey shown here. And then there's the Star Wars-Pokemon combo drawings you're gonna love. See a selection of Noho's works at Dorkly.

There were so many things about the Star Wars prequels that rubbed people the wrong way: Jar-Jar Binks, midichlorians, and trying to shoehorn in familiar characters that had no business there, like C-3PO and Chewbacca. But it could have been worse- someone thought it was a good idea to try to fit Han Solo in as well. Cracked collected weird ideas for the Star Wars universe from early story drafts, proposed ideas, deleted scenes, spinoffs, and the expanded universe of novels. Would you have kept any of them?   

I once took a 16-hour nonstop flight from Chicago to Hong Kong, and was too excited to sleep during any of it. In economy. But there are longer commercial flights, and a new record-breaker is set to begin in 2018. Qantas has announced their new non-stop service between Perth and London, 8,989 miles, at 17.5 hours in the air. That may sound horrid in the abstract, but it beats taking multiple flights with layovers for those who need to go from one end of the earth to the other.

I guess it’s all better than the travel times of the 1930s. Back in 1938 a trip from London to Brisbane, Australia (the longest on offer at the time) took 11 days and had over two dozen scheduled stops.

Tickets will go on sale in April of 2017, but no price has been announced.

Crazy inventor Colin Furze (previously at Neatorama) built a Star Wars playhouse for his kid that is also a huge AT-ACT from Rogue One. This one is the building phase.

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And here's the finished product. Take a little tour, inside and out.

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His son loved it! On the scale of dads doing crazy and awesome things for their kids, this ranks way up there. -via Time Newsfeed

Graphic designer Emma Lawton was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at age 29. The trembling it caused made it impossible for her to draw, so she turned to inventor Haiyan Zhang for help.

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The special pen Zhang developed made all the difference in the world. It was well worth the effort to see Emma draw again. The device is even named after her.  -via Nag on the Lake

Can you find the Photoshop disaster in this picture? Stop reading now if you want to look for it.

This is a picture of the singing group Fifth Harmony that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. In the middle is Ally Brook, who has two right feet. It's not a glaring or obvious error, but it makes you wonder why in the world some photo editor needed to change her foot in the first place. This is just one of 19 images from 2016 that Buzzfeed rounded up as notable for their weird Photoshop errors and artifacts.

Dolph C. Volker studied the heart rate of sleeping cheetahs by sleeping with them. This takes a certain kind of dedication to science that most of us don't have. He says he couldn't sleep because Faith was having dreams. If it were me, I wouldn't get any sleep because my bedmate was an apex predator known for its lightning speed and ability to eat animals much larger than me.  

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This video only covers the first night, as Volker slept with Faith. You can see more of the ten-night experiment at his YouTube channel. Because nothing is more relaxing than watching a man sleeping with cats. -via reddit

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

Ordinarily, when someone describes another person as “artificial,” they’re referring to a real person who only seems fake. But occasionally the expression applies to a fake “person” who seems real, like Apple’s Siri. Did you think she was the first artificial person? Think again.

ELIZA

What It Was: One of the earliest “chatterbots,” a computer program that mimics conversation between two people

How It Worked: Created in 1966 by an MIT computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA was designed to imitate a psychotherapist interviewing a patient. An interview began when the human user typed a statement into the computer. ELIZA then searched the statement for any keywords for which it had preprogrammed responses. If the statement contained the word “father,” for example, ELIZA would reply with, “Tell me more about your family.” If the statement contained no keywords, ELIZA responded with a general statement such as “Please go on” or “Why do you say that just now?” to keep the conversation going. The program also fed the user’s statements back to them in the form of questions. If a user typed, “My boyfriend made me come here,” ELIZA responded with, “Your boyfriend made you come here?”

Weizenbaum made ELIZA simulate a psychotherapist to take advantage of the therapeutic technique of repeating the patient’s own statements back to them. It’s a form of conversation in which simple repetition of one person’s speech plays a central role. Doing so saved Weizenbaum the trouble of having to program ELIZA with any real world knowledge. It could turn “I had an argument with my wife” into “You had an argument with your wife?” mechanically, without ELIZA having to know what an argument was or what a wife was.

Impact: Even when Weizenbaum explained the trick of how the program worked, he was startled by how quickly users came to believe -falsely- that ELIZA understood what they were saying and was putting thought and even emotion into her replies. “I had not realized…that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” he said. He was so disturbed by the phenomenon that he wrote a book, Computer Power and Human Reason, in which he discusses the limits of artificial intelligence and warns against ever giving computers the power to make important decisions affecting the lives of human beings.

PARRY

The WAG Brigade is a group of certified therapy dogs that the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals take to the San Francisco airport to greet passengers. They provide comfort, entertainment, and smiles to weary and stressed travelers. Most of the dogs also have duties at hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities that could use a friendly, people-oriented pet. The newest member of the WAG Brigade is different. She's a pig, named LiLou, who is a certified Animal Assisted Therapist (AAT)  and loves to interact with people. LiLou also has an extensive repertoire of tricks she performs for appreciative audiences.

According to the SFSPCA, "At a minimum, AAT pets must be solicitous and fully comfortable with handling. In other words, pets must be interested in and eager to approach people and accept handling, regardless of the person’s age, gender, race, size, mobility equipment usage, and apparel." LiLou nailed her training and is now dispatched to the airport once a month.

Read more about LiLou at SFGate. And see more of her at Instagram.

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You may have to turn your volume up to hear this video properly. Researchers at the University of Toronto are using a project called neural karaoke to teach computer programs to write songs. PhD candidate Hang Chu fed the program tons of existing tunes to study, then dance, then lyrics.

For the final step of the latest work, the program trained on a collection of pictures and their captions to learn how specific words can be linked to visual patterns and objects. When fed a fresh image, the program can compile some relevant lyrics and sing them using phonemes, or units of sound, linked to the words in its vocabulary. The system builds on previous work that could take a picture and generate lyrics in the style of Taylor Swift. Should the program choose words that it cannot say, it replaces them with an “oooh” sound.

The result might be called impressive for a machine, but if a human wrote this, you would suspect possible drug abuse or maybe brain damage. -via the A.V. Club

Once you classify something as top secret, people find a way to fill in the void of information with speculation, which can turn into conspiracy theory, and might become legend. The U.S. military's Area 51 in Nevada is legendary for its secret research on captured UFOs and the aliens they contain. The legend grew because the government wouldn't explain the classified aviation research going on there. The acreage was set aside for the development of the U2 spy plane in the 1950s.  

U-2 testing began in July 1955, and immediately reports came flooding in about unidentified flying object sightings. If you read the details in a 1992 CIA report that was declassified with redactions in 1998 (and subsequently released nearly in full in 2013), it's easy to see why.

Many of these sightings were observed by commercial airline pilots who had never seen an aircraft fly at such high altitudes as the U-2. Whereas today's airliners can soar as high as 45,000 feet, in the mid-1950s airlines flew at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet. Known military aircraft could get to 40,000 feet, and some believed manned flight couldn't go any higher than that. The U-2, flying at altitudes in excess of 60,000 feet, would've looked completely alien.

Naturally, Air Force officials knew the majority of these unexplained sightings were U-2 tests, but they were not allowed to reveal these details to the public. So, "natural phenomena" or "high-altitude weather research" became go-to explanations for UFO sightings, including in 1960 when Gary Powers' U-2 was shot down over Russia.  

These obviously lame excuses fed speculation about extraterrestrials. As the years went by, more astounding aviation breakthroughs were achieved at Area 51, but the geniuses behind them got no credit because of the secrecy. Meanwhile, the legend has become a moneymaker for businesses surrounding the forbidden zone. Read the history of Area 51 at Popular Mechanics. -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: X51)