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The couple in Maryland who made the fire-breathing snowman have their own dragon busy at work melting snow. Wouldn't you love to have neighbors like this? -via Gizmodo

Someone mentioned that John Coker's homemade rockets looked like crayons, so he ran with the idea. His crayon rockets were launched all together from a crayon box! Well, OK, half of them worked. See how he made them in this account of the adventure. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York are cooking up a recipe that may reach seven trillion degrees Celsius at its peak! It's called the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, or PHENIX. The heat is produced by slamming particles of gold together at close to the speed of light. The result is a glop of subatomic particles they call plasma.

Particle physicists, cosmologists, and even string theorists are all trying to understand why quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons (which in turn build atoms), behave this way at such high temperatures. Why doesn't the mixture turn into a gas, like water turns to steam at 100 degrees Celsius? How hot would it have to be to vaporize? And if the universe was filled with this liquid goop shortly after the Big Bang, how did it eventually turn into stars, planets, and people?

"We get giant discussions and even some vociferous arguments," says Jacak. "The big question for us is what is going on inside [this substance] and how does it work. On the experimental side we're trying to measure its properties, and one of the first properties you could measure is its temperature."

The subatomic substance only exists for a tiny fraction of a second at a time,so it must be done over and over again. Link -via Digg

Photographer Cédric Delsaux (previously at Neatorama) began the project Dark Lens with the intent of photographing suburban decay in Dubai, but the addition of Star Wars characters made it something special. Link to pictures. Link to article (en Français). -via Dark Roasted Blend

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Too Late to Apologize: A Declaration by T.J. and the Revo is a parody of the song Apologize by Timbaland featuring OneRepublic. A perfect video for President's Day. Link -via reddit

The Mathias quadruplets of Lexington, North South Carolina captured our hearts by laughing in unison in a clip featured on America's Funniest Home Videos. Grace, Emily, Mary Claire, and Anna will turn ten years old on February 16th, and they are still laughing. The four girls are identical quads, which are very rare, and have been featured on many TV shows as well as three appearances on AFHV, and they've been in commercials as well. http://www.thestate.com/local/story/1153648.html -via Arbroath

(right image credit: Renee Ittner-McManus)

Giving chocolates, roses, and diamonds are only the current customary gifts for Valentines Day. At other times and places, the holiday entailed very different activities for finding or expressing romantic love. Or some other feeling. Some customs were downright superstitious.

In the 1700s, rural Englishwomen would pin five bay leaves to their pillows—four on the corners, one in the middle—on the evening before Valentine’s Day. By doing so, it was said, they would see their future husbands in their dreams. A variation of this tradition called for women to sprinkle bay leaves with rosewater and lay them across their pillows.

Link -via Nag on the Lake

Missed connections, looking for marriage, let's meet, in addition to rooms for rent, cars for sale, and job openings. Sounds like Craiglist, but these kinds of ads have been around in newspapers as long as there have been news papers. The New York Times has some examples from the 19th century.

If the young lady wearing the pink dress, spotted fur cape and muff, had light hair, light complexion and blue eyes, who was in company with a lady dressed in black, that I passed about 5 o’clock on Friday evening in South Seventh Street, between First and Second, Williamsburg, L.I., will address a line to Waldo, Williamsburg Post Office, she will make the acquaintance of a fine young man.

Jan. 19, 1862

I only wish we knew how successful these ads were. Link -via Nag on the Lake

(image credit: Flickr user "T"eresa)

This picture shows one of four methods for storing and organizing cats documented at The Daily Tail. http://www.thedailytail.com/pictures/how-to-store-organize-cats/ -via Everlasting Blort

Is the art of the love letter dead, or just dying? If more people knew about the great love letters of the past, maybe a few would take the trouble to put pen to paper and create something that the recipient will keep as a treasure. President Woodrow Wilson wrote beautiful love letters to his wife Ellen Louise Axeson, and after her death wrote to Edith Bolling Galt, who married him in 1915.

While wooing Edith, Wilson penned a series of love letters, some signed “Tiger” (Wilson was a Princeton alum, but this was before the university took on the tiger as its mascot.) In one, Wilson wrote, “You are more wonderful and lovely in my eyes than you ever were before; and my pride and joy and gratitude that you should love me with such a perfect love are beyond all expression, except in some great poem which I cannot write.” In another, he pines, “Please go to ride with us this evening, precious little girl, so that I can whisper something in your ear—something of my happiness and love, and accept this, in the meantime, as a piece out of my very heart, which is all yours but cannot be sent as I wish to send it by letter.”

You'll find more examples of great love letters at mental_floss. Link

The Disney folks have stated that Donald Duck was "born" on June 9, 1934, which is the day his first cartoon came out. But when is his real birthday? Bob Bishop did some detective work to uncover the actual date. A series of clues led him to determine that Donald Duck was born on March 13th, 1914. Link -via the Presurfer

Previously: Donald Duck's Family Tree

"Crash Blossoms" are ambiguous headlines that can be quite funny. They result from the space-saving technique of leaving out articles, conjunctions, and sometimes even verbs.

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.

My favorite example from the article is “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Link

Crash Blossoms is a blog that collects these headlines for your amusement. Link -via Metafilter

Create a romance novel cover with your picture on it with Romance Novel Yourself. Check out the presentation of my book, then make your own from one of several different covers! Link -via the Generator Blog

This game uses only one button on your mouse. It's up to you to figure out what to do with it to pass through each level. Some levels can get frustrating, but luckily you can die many times without losing the level you're on. Link -via b3ta

Paul Appleton was piloting a helicopter and taking pictures during the Super Bowl in Miami last week when a bird crashed through the windshhield. The turkey vulture landed in Appleton's lap -and stayed there.

"I lost sight of him for a second and then I heard a boom and all of a sudden I have a turkey vulture sitting on my lap up against my chest and on my forearm," Appleton recalled. "I don't know the exact size or weight of it, but it was a pretty big bird."

Appleton decided it would not be safe to push the big bird out, so the buzzard rode for twenty miles sitting in the pilot's lap. When the helicopter landed, the bird flew out, stumbled around for a while, then flew off for good. The incident was captured on video. Link -via Arbroath