Luna Park in Melbourne has a very old wooden roller coaster, the second oldest in the world that's still operating. This roller coaster has been in contunous operation since 1912! In case you are now wondering, the oldest is Leap the Dips in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Anyway, the Great Scenic Railway has an employee on every ride, because they have to operate the brakes. That may sound strange, but it can be reassuring to know that the brake operator has some skin in the game, so to speak. To be an railway operator, you have to have stamina, a hearty sense of equilibrium, and you must undergo training. Tom Scott went to Melbourne to talk to the folks who run the Great Scenic Railway, and to take a ride himself. He seems to be having fun, which is in great contrast to his earlier roller coaster rides. Tom even made a video about his efforts to overcome his fear of roller coasters, only about six months ago. Looks like he has come a long way.

We make jokes about Spam, but you can't argue with its success. As a cheap alternative to whole meat products, it's no worse than sausage, bologna, scrapple, or any of the many recipes people have concocted to avoid wasting meat when butchering a pig. Besides, it's delicious and has been adopted by many countries as part of their cuisine. And there's always something new in the history of Spam that will surprise you, like the drunken party thrown to come up with the product's name. Mental Floss takes us on a tour of the history of Spam, highlighting the weirder side of its ups and downs since it debuted in 1937.

There were a lot of dangerous toys in the mid-20th century that you won't find on store shelves today, but here's one we haven't posted about before. The Cox E-Z Flyer probably wouldn't kill you, but could injure you in a number of ways. This model airplane was marketed to children in the 1970s.

The idea was to hold onto a cord attached to the plane while it flew in circles around you. Right there you have the danger of tying yourself up, or wrecking the plane. But it also required a second person to start it, with little time to get out of the way when the plane took flight. And it ignited fuel by the heat of its own red-hot engine! That's just a brief overview, and far from including all the ways the flight could go wrong. Pilot and writer Mark Slavonia reminisces about owning the plane that every little boy wanted and the many horrible things that could happen at Why is this interesting? -via Nag on the Lake  

You've never seen a Rube Goldberg contraption like this one. It just keeps going and going, throughout the house, using some rather weird elements that I wouldn't want to test, much less rely on. For example, I have never met such a well-mannered and reliable robot vacuum. Maybe it was the expensive kind. And you'd think testing the world's slowest soap bar would wear it out- he must've bought dozens of them. Having Siri and Google Assistant talk to each other was a nice touch. There are a lot of moments that were just plain fun, like the shoes on the wheel. There are also things going on that don't affect the chain reaction, but are just plain fun.

Professional chain reaction guy Steve Price, aka Sprice Machines (previously at Neatorama) spent four months designing, building, and testing this masterpiece. Now that he has his ice cream (with sprinkles!) he's left with a house full of toys to put away and a really nice video. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Does your microwave invite chaos? Redditor Meowface_the_cat shared a picture of a mysterious button on their microwave that one might be frightened to try. The icon above the name is no help. Would pushing the "Chaos" button cause the fabric of time and space to unravel?

Well, no. This mode means the microwave will direct random pulses of microwaves, which has been found to aide in thawing frozen food. It's an idea based on chaos theory. Most appliance companies have found that it's better to label that button "thaw" or "defrost."



And that's how we got dino nuggets. But look closer. Another button says "Panacrunch." That's a term Pansonic uses for a mode in which the microwaves heat the pan under the food, therefore making it crispier. The instructions appear to be for a combination microwave/oven. (Now I am showing my age, because I still sometimes refer to a microwave as a "microwave oven.") You can also buy special crisper pans (also called browning dishes) to do the same, which use metal susceptors to convert microwaves to heat. This is the same technology that makes Hot Pockets so hot and makes your bag of popcorn pop. So much for not using metal in a microwave.  

These buttons made me go look at the buttons on my microwave that I never use. There are a lot of them, but nothing that isn't self-explanatory. If all else fails, you can refer to your microwave's instruction manual. Just kidding- you lost that years ago, didn't you? And this, ladies and gentlemen, concludes today's trip down the internet rabbit hole.

Even if you didn't know all that, causing chaos with your microwave is still not as traumatic as when your dishwasher calls you names. 

Most of us just melt when we see cute babies, cute kittens and puppies, and even cute adult animals. It's perfectly normal, and totally human. Oh yeah, also cute toys, animation, and advertising. It's just wired into us. In this TED-Ed lesson, we learn how that happened, how "cute" is defined, and why it affects us so much. It also appears that some species have even leveraged the human attraction to the traits we consider cute, and made themselves cuter for their own purposes. We even get an explanation for "cute aggression," that weird impulse to squeeze or bite something that strikes us as really cute. That's not universal. I always want to touch something I find cute, but squeezing or biting would never occur to me.

If you ever feel the need to see something really cute, check out the site Supa Fluffy. It will make you feel happier the rest of the day.

Hasbro has released its 2023 edition of the board game Clue. As you can see in the picture above, the characters have been modernized, and made sexier than ever. They are, left to right, Professor Plum, Mayor Green, Chef White, Solicitor Peacock, Miss Scarlett, and Colonel Mustard. The group has been ethnically and professionally diversified, which is long overdue. The character of Mrs. White was originally the elderly maid of the household in the class-conscious original version, and was permanently retired in 2016. Yet the name is back- now she's a super-hot tattooed young chef. All the suspects appear to be under 40, with the exception of Colonel Mustard, who now looks like a cross between the Most Interesting Man in the World and Santa Claus. The internet has noticed, and Twitter is full of people selecting their preference among the characters.

I guess there’s a new hot grandpa in town🔥

— Mr. Monopoly (@mrmonopoly) January 5, 2023

There's already a list of the characters ranked according to sexiness. Your opinion may vary. What we know already is that there will be several new Halloween costumes offered for 2023.

Mugumogu put three mirrors together and made a kaleidoscope for her three cats. How will they react? The unflappable Maru, as you probably could guess, registers absolutely no reaction in his expressionless face, and doesn't indicate with his body language that he finds anything out of the ordinary at all. He will go inside, however, to see whether it's like a box. Miri, the youngest cat, is quite curious and obviously puzzled. Hana is almost frightened, but her curiosity wins out. We get the pleasure of seeing these cats as multiples, and we don't have to feed them all. It might take you a little while to figure out where the cats are in relation to the mirrors when each sequence begins, but that's part of the fun.  -via Laughing Squid

Beans, beans, the musical fruit...

To clear up any confusion from the title of the post, the research was actually done by the Harvard Science of Cooking class, and the Harvard Fart Squad were the student volunteer subjects, whose contributions were vital. The question was: Which method of preparing beans results in the greatest reduction in flatulence? Food scientist and chef Dave Arnold of Serious Eats prepared pinto bean dip using 16 different common fart-reducing methods, plus one that would test his own hypothesis involving Beano, along with control samples, and mailed them to Harvard for testing. These samples were run through a mass spectrometer to analyze their chemistry and were ranked by the amount of fart-inducing oligosaccharides that remained. The analysis found that common fart-reducing methods were not all that great in reducing farts.

However, the Beano preparation method was the most promising, and that's where the Harvard Fart Squad came in. Bean dip was given to 45 students in a double-blind experiment, along with a questionnaire to record the effects. Read the entire story of the study, plus bean preparation recipes, at Serious Eats. -via Metafilter

It's been a while since we've seen a new video from Cyriak Harris (previously at Neatorama). Today, he unveiled a music video he designed for the band Light and their song "Betray." At the beginning, it appears to use rather bland stock footage from the mid-20th century. Cyriak says the source material is an educational film from the Prelinger archives about how to have a happy marriage. I believe it might be this one. But stay with it, as this video morphs into the wildly surreal and eventually scary animation we've come to expect from Cyriak's delightfully demented and kaleidoscopic imagination.  

The work day will be four hours long pic.twitter.com/YFwCYnXJL0

— Paul Fairie (@paulisci) January 1, 2023

Paul Fairie the University of Calgary dug through newspaper archives to find out what people in 1923 thought the year 2023 would bring. While some are both inaccurate and strangely outlandish, we have to stop and think about what we would predict for the year 2123. Hey, your grandchildren might well be around to read your hilariously inaccurate predictions! When our ancestors looked forward to a four-hour work day, they were thinking about machines doing the work, but not about how people could make a living wage working fewer hours. Other predictions were that cancer would be cured, Canada would have a population of 100 million, and there would be no ugly people left.

Other predictions were somewhat accurate. The US has 331 million people now, although we are having problems getting adequate household water to arid lands, much less irrigation. Another prediction was that newspapers would go out of business because of radio. It's actually because of the internet. And someone predicted war would be fought from a distance, which conjures up visions of our long-range missiles and drones. You can read these predictions from 1923 at Twitter or at Threadreader, where you can see the whole clipping without having to click on it.  -via Boing Boing

Surely you've seen the 1995 movie Braveheart. It was an exciting war film, but pretty much bunk as far as a historical drama goes. Even the title Braveheart was a deviation from history, as that nickname belonged not to William Wallace (portrayed by Mel Gibson in a kilt), but to Robert the Bruce. Robert's life had its ups and downs, as he fought for Scottish independence, lost his best friend Wallace to a punishment worse than shown in the movie, crowned himself king, killed a rival in church, hid out in a cave watching spiders, and returned to battle England's King Edward II.

Angus Macfadyen played Robert the Bruce in Braveheart, but since Robert's story continues long after Wallace's, this video also uses pictures of Chris Pine, who played Robert in the 2018 movie Outlaw King. But the story of how Robert earned the nickname Braveheart only comes later in the video, and very late in Robert's story. -via Digg

The Portland district of the US Army Corps of Engineers, being a federal agency, decided against producing a calendar with their workers posing shirtless, like so many volunteer fire departments. Those are usually fundraisers anyway, and federal agencies don't do that. Instead, they give us something much better -a free downloadable cat calendar! But these aren't just any old cats, they are giant cats that interact with the dams and other infrastructure along the Columbia, Williamette, and Rogue Rivers in Oregon. Sometimes the interactions are benign, sometimes they are nefarious, but they are always very much as giant cats would act. 

Twelve months of pictures of cats and dams are already nice, but the captions are just silly enough to add value to an already-perfect project. Who says engineers have no sense of humor? You can download and/or print the 2023 calendar here. -via Metafilter

(Images credit: US Army Corps of Engineers/Public Domain)

At the conclusion of the investigation into the Whitechapel murders in 1888, the team from the London Metropolitan Police had a very unusual gift made for Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline. It was a walking cane topped with a head carved in the likeness of Jack the Ripper. The face was a composite of the descriptions from various witnesses in the case. Does it resemble anyone you know? I may have seen that face in a science fiction movie, but I can't place it exactly. I think the high-gloss varnish is throwing me off.

The cane has recently resurfaced after going missing for years. It was the property of the Bramshill Police Staff College, which closed in 2015. Last month it was discovered in the college's archives, along with other police memorabilia that had been on display. The carving is the only known composite of the Ripper's face. The cane is now displayed at the College of Policing. -via Boing Boing

The best supercuts are those that contain a wide-ranging variety of clips that have something unexpected in common, masterfully edited into a coherent theme with catchy music. Filmmaker Jon Lefkovitz has all that in his video Perfect Unison. It's a compilation of clips from film and TV of characters (they're not all people) moving in unison. You might think it would be dominated by choreographed dance numbers, and it has some, but most of these clips just illustrate two characters that are very much in tune with each other. They range from the silent film era to 2022's RRR. There's a list of the movies and TV shows used at the YouTube page. The music is "Second Song" by the group TV on the Radio. -via Laughing Squid