It's December first; time to hang your Advent calendar and open up the first door! Neural network researcher Janelle Shane (previously at Neatorama) introduced an algorithm to the concept of an Advent calendar. This would be the old-fashioned kind before everyone expected chocolate, in which each of the 25 doors would open to a delightful picture. Shane instructed the neural network to follow a story involving a store called Shop of Strange Antiques that got an old Advent calendar with "atypical" images. The algorithm took that to heart. The image ideas were generated in text, then transferred to another algorithm to produce the pictures from the descriptions.   

Shane asked for "atypical," and that's exactly what she got. They are downright bizarre and therefore priceless. A pack of wolves playing poker. Santa Claus strumming a banjo on a trampoline. You get the idea. The Advent calendar has been posted at AI Weirdness in an interactive form in case you want to only open one image per day, or all of them today if you prefer. There were more than 25 images generated because Shane knew that some would have to be discarded, and yes, 20 more were unsuitable for small pixel images or otherwise unusable, but those are listed in a bonus post for your pleasure.

No Time to Die was the 25th film in the James Bond franchise, and the fifth Bond film starring Daniel Craig as secret agent 007. It's also his final Bond movie, which Screen Junkies agrees is enough, since Craig's Bond was just way too serious, emotional, and depressing. Too realistic, actually, even with the over-the-top gunfights, explosions, and violence. That said, No Time to Die had a respectable run, becoming the most lucrative American film so far in 2021. Yes, it's time for a new Bond, and maybe a return to a more lighthearted spy series. But please, not Chris Pratt.

Everyone's talking about the new omicron variant of the COVID-19 coronavirus. So far, we don't know all that much about it, but anecdotal evidence is that it may be less dangerous than the delta variant, even if it turns out to be more virulent. The word omicron has tripped up a lot of newscasters who've never heard the word pronounced before. Omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, and not really heard much in English. However, it sure sounds like a science fiction term, doesn't it?

Filmmaker Christopher Miller took a poster from the 1966 movie Cyborg 2087 and altered it to what we picture when we hear "the omicron variant." The title follows the phrasing of science fiction titles like The Andromeda Strain or The Philadelphia Experiment (or The Shawshank Redemption or The Pelican Brief, for that matter). The only thing that would make this more fitting would be to slot in Charlton Heston in the lead role.

It turns out there have been several movies with omicron in the title, in 1963, 1999, and 2013. We nerds really like the Greek alphabet. -via Boing Boing

YouTube has decided to put an age restriction on this video, so you'll need to go there to see it. 

"It's like any of these traditional regional things that it wouldn't be allowed if you were to ask anywhere else in the world to do it now, innit."

For more than 400 years, Bridgwater, Somerset, UK, has celebrated Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, with plenty of gunpowder. The Bridgwater Carnival is held every fifth of November, except it was canceled in 2020 and scaled back in 2021. In a normal year, there is a full carnival including an illuminated parade after sundown. This year they still managed to do the traditional "squibbing," which involves a phalanx of 150 or so people holding fireworks over their heads. Tom Scott got a chance to investigate how the squibbs are made and used, which is just a little bit safer than the traditional ones from hundreds of years ago. He also got to participate in the festivities a few weeks ago, and seems downright giddy at the pyromaniac pyrotechnical display. A good time was had by all.

We've posted quite a few stories of how invasive species can wreck an ecosystem, but those stories represent a small minority of what we call invasive species. The truth is that species move all the time. About 90% of them die out in an unsuitable new environment. Of the remaining 10%, nine will settle in and cause no harm (like kudzu in America). That leaves only 1% of invasive species to make headlines for the damage they cause (like feral cats in Australia). Also, we usually assume that non-native species were transported by humans, such as the plant lovers who bought kudzu from Japanese merchants and the ship crews that carried rodent-hunting cats to Australia.

But there's another kind of invasive species that moves more and more each year- they are climate refugees. As the planet warms up, plants, animals, and other organisms wander further into areas that are becoming more hospitable than their original homes. Is this going to cause problems for existing species in those areas? Maybe, but it may also be the only way those refugee species can continue to exist. Read about this emerging phenomenon and its implications at Vox.

The production of glass goes back somewhere around 3500 years. Or at least we once thought so. Producing glass in those days required skilled artisans, or at least we once thought. Glass products were so expensive that they were reserved for royalty, we once thought. Scientists can tell where a glass object was made from the materials used to make or color it, we once thought. All these ideas about the origins of glass have been thrown into the wind with recent discoveries.

It's possible we will never know who invented glass, or where. The very nature of ancient glass shows that it deteriorates in humid conditions over thousands of years, so there may have been samples from its origins that simply no longer exist. Global trade in ancient times indicates that not only was glass imported, but also the raw materials once used to identify its origin. Therefore, glass found in one country, thought to be made in a second country, could have been partially made in a third country with imported ingredients from somewhere else. Partially made glass was shipped in ingots, as in the image shown above, to be remelted and fashioned by artisans into its final form elsewhere. You see how global trade in ancient times makes the story rather murky.

Throw in the fact that archaeologists once ignored evidence of glass when plundering artifacts, and modern archaeologists and material scientists have their work cut out for them. Yet modern technology that can analyze tiny samples of glass without damaging an artifact is helping scientists to learn amazing things about the ancient glass industry. Read about that line of research and what we've discovered at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Flickr user Panegyrics of Granovetter)

Merriam-Webster’s choice for the annual Word of the Year sums up what the English-speaking world has been talking about pretty well most of the time. Last year, they selected "pandemic." For 2021, the word everyone is using and wants to know more about is "vaccine."

"Vaccine" not only encompasses what was happening in the worlds of science and medicine, it also dominated the world of politics. It also affected the lives of millions of everyday people. Online dictionary lookups for the word "vaccine" increased 601% over 2020, and 1048% over 2019. The rate of lookups has remained high since its peak in August. The word was so hot that Merriam-Webster revised and expanded its definition.      

Besides the Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster names ten other words that define the language of the year 2021. They are: insurrection, perseverance, woke, nomad, infrastructure, cicada, Murraya, cisgender, guardian, and meta. Find out what they mean and why people wanted to look them up in 2021 at the dictionary's website.

PS: the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary selected "vax" as their Word of the Year. Great minds think alike.

(Image credit: Spencerbdavis)

Richard Gere & John Travolta pic.twitter.com/IDONfT667V

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) November 22, 2021

Some people think that all corgis, or all German shepherds, look alike. People who have dogs know that's not true- every animal has a unique look and unique facial expressions. However, sometimes they share those unique looks with people you may recognize. Joaquim Campa collected quite a few pictures of dogs that you may have never seen before, but you'll recognize them right off.

Clint Eastwood & William H. Macy pic.twitter.com/eQDEseEeAq

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) November 22, 2021

Those eyes! Those cheekbones! You ought to be a star! There are a lot more of these, and even when Campa ended his thread, plenty of other people came in to post dogs (and cats) who look like celebrities.

Vladimir Putin & Richard Branson pic.twitter.com/jsCUY9t6hp

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) November 22, 2021

You can see the pictures from Campa's thread all together at Threadreader, but you'll also want to check out the original Twitter thread to see the extra contributions in the replies. -via Everlasting Blort

In the town of Watford, UK, city managers decided they didn't want large trucks passing through the downtown area, so they installed width restrictors. This is a set of bollards that are only seven feet wide (2.1 meters), and if your vehicle is wider, it cannot pass through. The bollards are 29 inches high, so the side mirrors on most passenger cars can pass above them. But one particular width restrictor, on Woodmere Avenue, is notorious for the number of cars, even rather small cars, that crash into the bollards. Here's a compilation of such incidents.



What causes such mayhem? Is it bad design or clueless drivers? It appears to be both. Many of these drivers look to be approaching too fast or else not paying attention. But the restrictor itself is kind of wonky. The Google Street View image at the top show us that the curb on the left acts as a ramp  that leads right to the first bollard. This is exactly the kind of non-symmetrical ramp stunt drivers use to flip cars for movies. You can see it even better in this image. Remember, in the UK, the driver is on the right side of the car.

Woodmere Avenue Crashes is a YouTube channel dedicated to the Woodmere Avenue restrictor mishaps. There's also a public Facebook group about the restrictor. You'd think after all that, the city traffic engineers would want to do something about it. -via Jalopnik

When the Japanese captured Singapore during World War II, quite a few women and children from Britain and its allies were sent to POW camps. Their husbands and fathers were sent to separate camps, and no communication was allowed between them. However, the women came up with a scheme to let their men know they were alive. They volunteered to make quilts for the Red Cross to use in the camp's hospital, where there were plenty of wounded men. They embroidered quilt pieces with designs that sent clandestine messages to their loved ones, and most importantly, they each embroidered their names on the squares. The names were enough to announce that they were still alive, and the designs were something that would mean nothing at all to a casual observer, but would to a husband, whether he saw it himself or even just heard about it from a hospitalized inmate.

For example, one embroiderer whose husband was imprisoned in the camp depicted a V, presumably for victory, and two smiling rabbits. “She had two daughters, so we think that the message was intended to let her husband know that her two daughters were well and with her.”

Other squares contain chirpy, patriotic emblems like Scottish thistles and Welsh dragons, and subtle references to King George VI. But most importantly, “every square has a name or initial: that was the main objective, just to get their name on the quilt”.

Three quilts are known to have survived Changi prison. Two are on permanent display in Australia, and the third, only recently discovered, is going on display as the British Red Cross opens a new museum in London this week. Read more about the quilts at The Guardian.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: British Red Cross Museum & Archives)

Movie fans have gone around and around for decades about whether to classify the 1988 film Die Hard as a Christmas movie. In the last couple of years, that seems to have settled down, and the general consensus is that yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Just not the same way that It's a Wonderful Life or Home Alone is.

Now Den of Geek lays out the case that the 1987 film Lethal Weapon is also a Christmas movie, even more so than Die Hard. Neither film was released anywhere near Christmas, but they are both set during the holiday. The reason Die Hard was set during a Christmas party was because producer Joel Silver insisted on it, as he had for the previous year's Lethal Weapon. His reasoning was sound: any movie with Christmas decorations and Christmas music would be replayed in December, bringing in years of residuals.

Yet there is more than a temporal setting to Lethal Weapon that makes it a Christmas movie. Amid the car chases, gun battles, and general carnage, there is a subplot that takes Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) from a suicidal wreck to a happy man with a friends, somewhat like It's a Wonderful Life. Read what makes Lethal Weapon a Christmas movie at Den of Geek.

We make fun of the Jell-O salad fad of the 20th century because 1. we think of Jell-O as a sweet treat or dessert, and 2. we can't imagine people actually liking something that's so processed and artificial. But cooks who jumped on Jell-O when it was first produced didn't see it that way. It was an affordable way to recreate the earlier, labor intensive aspic dishes that most people had never experienced. And it was natural, up to a point. Aspic, and their vegan alternatives pectin and agar, are natural products even if they were hard to get and weren't used that much before Jell-O came along.

Then after World War II, we got refrigerators and housewives, which led to ridiculously creative Jell-O recipes. Jell-O helped out by developing celery and tomato flavored gelatin. But the madness finally came to an end. You still see Jell-O salads at potlucks occasionally, but they rarely contain eggs, shrimp, or canned veggies anymore. -via Mental Floss

Colonel Henry Ludington was an American commander in the Revolutionary War based in Connecticut. There were around 400 men under his command. On April 26, 1777, Colonel Ludington received a message that the British were attacking the town of Danbury. Time to rally the troops! But since it was April, almost all of them were scattered across Connecticut and an area that is now part of New York, planting their crops. How could he possibly notify them in time?

The Colonel turned to his oldest child, Sybil, who was 16 years old. Sybil Ludington agreed to ride off and find as many soldiers as she could, in the manner that Paul Revere did a couple of years earlier. Sybil, however, had no assistants and no time to prepare as Revere did. By the time she returned, some of the Continental troops were already reporting for duty. However, Sybil was a young woman with no military status, and her feat went unrecognized for so long that we don't even know how true it is. Read about Sybil Ludington at Cracked.

(Image credit: Charlibear7)

Brothers Jim and Will Pattiz run the site More Than Just Parks, dedicated to sharing information on America's National Parks. They've tackled the task of ranking all the parks in a list that may or may not be useful to you on your future travels.  

Each of the 63 designated National Parks (National Monuments, Recreation Areas, Forests, etc. were not ranked) were rated in five equally-weighted factors: accessibility, recreation, crowds, amenities, and scenery. It's sad that a park's very attractiveness can lead to a low score due to crowds, but too many tourists can lead to dissatisfaction with the experience. In deciding whether to visit, you'll need to weigh these factors for your own purposes. If a lack of accessibility and amenities don't bother you, you could see the most glorious scenery there is, without crowds, despite a low score on this list.   

The top National Park on the list is Olympic National Park in Washington state, with a score of 48 out of 50.

My state's only National Park, Mammoth Cave, ranked abysmally. It got docked for lack of recreational activities, which is true, and for lack of scenery. Seriously, scenery? What can you expect, it's a cave! Bring lights. The park that came in dead last earned that score because it shouldn't even be a National Park. See the full list of rankings, with an explanation for each score and often a video. -via Kottke

You probably know a few things about Josephine Baker. She was an American entertainer who moved to Paris in the 1920s as a teenager and became a sensation for her singing, her cross-eyed comedy, and her dancing, particularly her notorious erotic dance in a skirt made of bananas. During World War II, Baker was a spy for the French Resistance, using her fame to bypass the scrutiny everyday French citizens had to endure. And later on, she adopted a dozen children from all over the world. Those things you know already.

But there was a lot to Baker's life in between those milestones. For instance, she got the name Baker when she married at age 15. That was her second marriage! During the war, Hermann Goering personally tried to murder her, and nearly succeeded before she made a daring escape. Read these stories and quite a bit more about Josephine Baker's astonishing life at Messy Nessy Chic.