A fan theory has been going around lately that Breaking Bad is actually a prequel to The Walking Dead. People have noticed some crossover themes in the shows, which isn't all that surprising, since they are produced by and for the same channel. But what if Heisenberg's drugs somehow caused the zombie apocalypse? Netflix explains this theory.   

(YouTube link)

Someone connected the dots that led from one show to the other. You know, the dots that really aren't there. Robert Kirkman wrote the comic book The Walking Dead, while Vince Gilligan came up with the idea for Breaking Bad during the writer's strike a few years back. Kirkman has stated that he will never explain what caused the zombie apocalypse in The Walking Dead. Therefore, it's up to the fans to figure it out. This idea is as good as any! -via Laughing Squid

(vimeo link)

Life is full of little disappointments. Here's a bunch of them, compiled by Parallel Studio of Paris. Some of the individual clips are at Instagram.  -via reddit

CGI has made some great strides in the past few years! The short called Piper, which accompanied Finding Dory in theaters, is a work of art from Pixar.

Piper is a baby sandpiper learning to take care of himself. His mother is so proud. And he's just so cute you can't help but love him. Then after you've watched the story, you realize that the water was so realistic, you didn't even think about it being computer-generated! -via Geeks Are Sexy

Set your clocks back an hour Saturday night before you go to bed. If you are a night owl, set them back at 2AM Sunday, because that's the end of Daylight Saving Time in the United Sates this year. This one is the "good" time change. If you are on a schedule, this gives you an extra hour of sleep, the one that you lost back in the spring. If you can't sleep longer than you normally do, then you'll be up early and rarin' to go for a few days before you get used to it.

(YouTube link)

WhatsUpMoms sees the upside to this time change when it comes to getting kids to fall asleep in the evening and up for school on time. If you can keep the effect for yourself until Tuesday, then you can be at the polls early to vote. -via Boing Boing

A group of 150 volunteers have built a 23-foot tall likeness of Godzilla out of straw! It has LED eyes that light up, too. The giant statue is fashioned from rice reeds, which would lead one to think it's a harvest icon. An art project, for sure. Is it an offering to the Toho Studios monster that it should spare Japan any destruction this year? Or maybe destruction is the whole purpose. After all, Gävle, Sweden, put itself on the international stage by building a straw goat every year that gets torched. And this Godzilla is not only extremely flammable, it's set out in a field where such destruction would not hurt homes or businesses. Stay tuned. You can see more pictures of the straw Godzilla and its construction at Unreality.

(YouTube link)

After 108 years, seven games, ten innings, and a rain delay, the Cubs have finally won the World Series. The video above was the crowd at Wrigley Field, but the game was in Cleveland. Here's how it ended.

Congratulations to the @Cubs on their first #WorldSeries victory in 108 years. In other news, #UGA plays Sat nite. pic.twitter.com/oE4KHwKjWy

— UGA Football Live (@UGAfootballLive) November 3, 2016

See a longer clip of the on-field celebration here. Notice how quickly Anthony Rizzo secured the ball in his pocket, lest that valuable piece of history be lost.

Despite so long coming, the 2016 win was predicted in a 1993 yearbook and on the TV show Parks & Recreation.

Two years ago, in a season that took place in the summer of 2017: pic.twitter.com/p8jaYZNwcT

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) November 3, 2016

It's easy to identify a longtime Cubs fan today. They can't stop smiling and all their fingernails are gone. They went to the game ready for the outcome.

Just not tonight, please. #WorldSeries #Champs pic.twitter.com/KTBoRhC59g

— MLB GIFS (@MLBGIFs) November 3, 2016

Some more than others.

It really did, @Cubs. #WorldSeries pic.twitter.com/O6h7hQG28F

— The Players' Tribune (@PlayersTribune) November 3, 2016

Congratulations to the 2016 Chicago Cubs, winner of the World Series!

108 years, erased. pic.twitter.com/PyGg76vkXN

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) November 3, 2016

There doesn't seem to be anything unusual about the heights of the presidents and first ladies in the picture above, taken in 1991. Or is there? Laura Beck went down the internet rabbit hole and came back with a cautionary tale about the believability of internet sources. She recalled former first lady Barbara Bush as an "imposing figure," and then asked Siri how tall she is. Siri responded that Barbara Bush is four feet tall. What? Siri cited her source as Wikipedia, but the entry for Bush does not mention her height. Neither do many other resources that you would expect. That set off a flurry of research with no consensus.

Beck also looked into the possibility that Bush's height was misrepresented to us in photographs, with a few funny responses. The only other internet source that claimed to know said that Barbara Bush is six feet tall. One can assume the truth is somewhere between the two extremes, but the moral of the story is never take information at face value. Read the whole saga of Barbara Bush's height at Jezebel. -via Digg

#rhdnl #redweefs recordpoging #roodharigendag #redheadday

A photo posted by Melanie E. Rijkers (@mery71) on Sep 1, 2013 at 3:37am PDT

There are advantages and disadvantages to being born ginger. Red hair comes from a recessive gene, which is why it's rare. Both genetic parents have to contribute a red-haired gene for the color to express itself. That same gene gives the offspring a few other things that make him or her different from people with black, brown, or blond hair. For example, did you know that redheads normally don't get gray hair?

The pigment in red hair stays around much longer than other colours, and instead of going grey, the reddish colour simply fades to a silver-white.

A woman I know did exactly that, and I came close to asking where she got her color done. Read the rest of the things that make redheads different at Buzzfeed.

For the fifth time, we get to take a dancing travelogue with Matt Harding. He started compiling clips of himself doing his "funny little dance" in different countries years ago. Eventually he got corporate sponsorship for his trips. This time it was crowdfunded, and you might notice that Matt now has a wife, two children, and occasional facial hair.

(YouTube link)

Matt had some home videos of himself dancing in different countries in 2005, but his first viral compilation with a sponsor was in 2006. He improved upon that one by getting others to dance with him in 2008. Harding incorporated the dances of other nations in his 2012 video. The music accompanying the 2016 video is "The Myna Bird Song" sung by Anthony Briscoe of Down North, with the Saakumu Dance Troupe of the Dagara Music Center in Ghana. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Luc Melanson)

Democracy is a privilege—but it’s also kind of a pain in the butt. It involves long lines, an avalanche of fliers, and the lingering smell of baked ziti in public school cafeterias (or maybe the ziti is only at my polling station?).

But be thankful. In centuries past, voting wasn’t just a metaphorical pain. It was a literal one. Consider the common 19th-century custom called “cooping”: Party thugs would kidnap a voter, get him drunk, then make him vote multiple times, often disguising him in different clothes and wigs.

It sounds like fun and games, but it was anything but. If the voter didn’t comply, he was beaten or killed. Though the evidence is far from certain, some think Edgar Allan Poe was killed in a cooping incident. (He was found in a state of delirium on Election Day in 1849, wearing an un-Poe-like straw hat. He died soon after.)

Fe - Iron Atomic # 26 Iron composes much of the earth's crust and has played such an important part in our lives. From raw building material to helping carry oxygen through out our bodies #fe #iron #element #illustration #watercolor #vector #transitionmetal #metal #blood #anemia #myelementals #design #periodictableofelements #periodictable #characterdesign

A photo posted by MyElementals (@myelementals) on Oct 28, 2016 at 3:23pm PDT

Sebastian Arguello of SOGA Design Collective has an ongoing project called myelementals, in which he illustrates elements as cute little anthropomorphic figures. Above is iron, of course.

Iron composes much of the earth's crust and has played such an important part in our lives. From raw building material to helping carry oxygen through out our bodies

And this little guy is phosphorus.

P - Phosphorus Atomic # 20 Phosphorus is a very nasty little sucker. It's so easy to spark his temper that they put a little bit on a tip of a thin stick to help you light the BBQ. #phosphorus #p #periodictableofelements #watercolor #vector #science #spark #matches #nonmetal #chemistry #characterdesign #myelementals

A photo posted by MyElementals (@myelementals) on Oct 27, 2016 at 6:01pm PDT

Phosphorus is a very nasty little sucker. It's so easy to spark his temper that they put a little bit on a tip of a thin stick to help you light the BBQ.

There are twelve elementals so far at Instagram, plus a video on H20. There's also a three-video animated story of what inspired the project, which shows us how Instagram is becoming a blogging platform. See even more designs at Arguello's work gallery. -via Laughing Squid

(YouTube link)

Scientists have conducted a lot of amazing studies and experiments with animals, many of which you've read about here at Neatorama. But there are quite a few here that we've not heard of. Bears using computers to order food? Left-handed kangaroos? Bison that vote? Learn about all these in the latest episode of the mental_floss List Show.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

[Ed. note: With less than a week to go before a presidential election, maybe we could use a reminder that United States presidents are people, too, and often far from perfect -or even presidential.]

Zachary Taylor would spit tobacco juice on the White House rugs if a spitoon wasn't in spitting distance.

Teddy Roosevelt owned and could walk on stilts.

Herbert Hoover did not like to set his eyes on the White House servants- ever. Whenever he or the First Lady appeared anywhere where a servant was present, he or she would run into a closet and remain there until the coast was clear. Groundskeepers had to hide behind bushes. These people lived with the fear of being fired if Hoover caught a glimpse of one of them.

A student protester once gave Richard Nixon the finger. Nixon gave one back to him.

Andrew Jackson had a bullet painfully lodged next to his heart from 1806 until his death in 1845. He had been shot in the chest during a duel with Charles Dickinson, who had insulted Jackson's wife. Jackson sometimes coughed up blood and, to alleviate the pain from the bullet, he would on occasion slit open his own veins with a pocketknife and "bleed" himself.

John Adams didn't like his white servants "playing cards with Negroes."

After his presidency, Harry and Bess Truman moved in with her mother. His mother-in-law, who believed -and stated frequently- that Harry had never amounted to anything, also lived in the White House when he was president.

We've shown you floor plans from TV shows before, but most of those were classic series. Now we have some floor plans of the character's homes in wildly popular shows from the last decade or so, from Homes.com. Shown here is the home from Gilmore Girls, but for the life of me I can't find a toilet on the first floor, despite the fact that there is a bedroom there. Does Rory walk through her mother's bedroom upstairs every time she needs to go? The Albuquerque home of the Whites from Breaking Bad is in the collection, but where does Walt Jr. use the bathroom? There's no first floor bathroom for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, either, although there is a public toilet on the second floor. Check out the floor plans of eight television shows at Unreality.  

A marksman shoots a Magnum .44 into a block of ballistic gel. In a slow-motion replay, you can see the aftereffects, in which the block has a case of gas, then suffers an attack of fiery indigestion, and then farts, through its newly-created "digestive canal." There's a perfectly normal explanation for this.  

Slow motion video capture is a natural companion to just about anything that you’d need ballistic gel for, and good thing — because the video captured what appears to be a diesel effect! The block is hit with a bullet, and as the bullet rapidly expands and dumps its energy into the gel, a cavity expands rapidly. During this process, some of the (oil-based) material in the cavity has been vaporized. After the expanded bullet exits (to the right of the gif above but easier to see in the video below), the cavity in the block begins to collapse. The resulting pressure increase appears to ignite the vaporized material, which explodes with a flash followed by some exhaust.

Read more about the effect and see the original video at Hackaday. -via reddit