If you ever get into the comments at reddit, you know how they can start to resemble a free-for-all sometimes. To have some fun with the drama, South African software engineer Micah Price built an application that sniffs out controversial exchanges and sets them into the world of the video game Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. The exchanges caught so far appear to be drama for drama's sake, for the amusement of the entire forum.

Even better, everybody can join in the fun — all you need to do to trigger the bot is add "!objectionbot" or "!objection-bot" to a Reddit comment on certain supported subreddits (you can view the full list of those here). The bot then scans the thread, finds the top commenters, and turns their discussion into a YouTube video that's then automatically linked to in the thread (the "objection!" graphic happens when a comment has a negative score, or if the bot's neural network detects the tone of the comment to be negative).

Price said the whole thing took him about three days to put together. "I wasn't sure if it would be popular so didn't want to spent much longer on it," he said. "I used Python and a bunch of computer vision and machine learning libraries. It's uber buggy at the moment, though."

If you don't want to trigger the bot yourself, just keep your eye out on reddit for u/objection-bot to respond with "Here's the video!" See them linked here. Read more about the sudden rise of objection-bot at Mashable.  -via Gizmodo

Contraptions that keep a baby from falling as he practices walking go way back. The picture above titled "The Holy Family at Work" portrays Jesus in a baby walker while his parents do their chores, painted around the year 1440. It doesn't look all that much different from baby walkers used today, which allow a child to roam upright. However, models from the 16th century are more constrained, and kept the baby to a track that only allowed a few steps- perhaps to keep them from walking into a hearth or staircase. See those baby walkers at Early Modern Medicine. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Clèves Master)

Biologists at Yellowstone National Park set up camera traps to monitor cougars in 2014. You can imagine that these cameras saw a lot of different types of wildlife, but last month, a wolverine was seen running past the camera- the first time the park has captured one on video in more than a decade.

Wolverines are in many ways ghosts of the forests. They prefer cold climates, are solitary, and require large amounts of space to roam in search of prey. There as few as 300 left in the Lower 48, so the odds of seeing one are incredibly low.

Read more about the elusive wolverine at Earther.

How do you define a “picky eater?” We all develop dietary habits in childhood that persist through our lives, and what’s “picky” depends on who is using the term. Many men who habitually eat the same processed foods they were fed in childhood don’t think of themselves as picky eaters until they have a girlfriend who is horrified by their diet.  

The proclivity to eat like a boy is only magnified when there’s a partner around to bear witness. For example, when Ally met her boyfriend Brad, he didn’t eat vegetables at all, only steak, pasta, burgers, nuggets and pizza bagels. “He’s 28 now, and he still eats like a 7-year-old,” Ally tells me. “He works at Family Guy, so he’s surrounded by other adult children and a kitchen fully stocked with gummy bears and Capri Sun. What adult man regularly drinks chocolate milk with his meals?”

Ally chalks it up to Brad’s mom babying him and bowing to his every dietary whim when he was a child. “She’d cook three different meals if he and his brothers demanded it,” she explains. “So Brad was an incredibly picky eater after 20-some-odd years of being nutritionally catered to by his (very lovely) mother.”

The reasons men fall into the nutritional abyss vary, but they mostly boil down to the fact that continuing on a pleasant path is much easier than changing it. Read what’s behind the diets of men who eat like boys at Mel magazine. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Fritz Saalfeld)

If you’ve ever been to the United States Capitol Building, you might have noticed some tiny doors near the floor. Or maybe you didn’t, because they are easy to miss. They look as if someone wanted to make things classy for mice, or even fairies. But they once had an important purpose, as the Architect of the Capitol explains. -via Digg

Hungarian explorer László Almásy explored the Sahara desert in Egypt and Libya, trying to find a legendary oasis called Zerzura. In 1933, he found a cave in Egypt's Gilf Kebir mountains that had paintings of people on the walls. The figures are estimated to be 8,000 years old. They appear to be swimming, but that was impossible in the Sahara Desert!

László Almásy, in his book The Unknown Sahara, postulates that the swimming scenes are real depictions of life at the time of painting, suggesting that there had been a climatic change from temperate to desert. At that time it was a radical new theory that sounded so dubious that his publisher felt compelled to add several footnotes in the book to make it clear that they did not share this opinion.

Since that time, scientists have uncovered more evidence that the Sahara was once rather humid, and had forests and lakes that would have been fine for swimming. The cave is now known as the Cave of Swimmers, which you can read about at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Roland Unger)

The gayageum is a Korean zither. Luna Lee  (previously at Neatorama) is a master of the instrument, which you'll hear as she plays Chicago's classic hit "25 or 6 to 4." It really kicks in after about a minute. -via Laughing Squid

One of the things we marvel about journalism of a century ago is how the smallest bit of news could be so newsworthy. Of course, today we have the internet for those small stories. The story of Betty was reprinted in newspapers across the country. She was a train station cat, kept to hunt mice at the Lackawanna Terminal at Hoboken, New Jersey. Betty led the usual life of a cat until January of 1933, when she boarded a train bound for Dover, leaving two kittens behind. Railroad employees up and down the line were alarmed when they realized what happened, and sprang into action to return Betty to her home station.

The press had a lot of fun with Betty’s story. One newspaper suggested the much-married cat galivanted off to Buffalo to visit a boyfriend, who had sent her a cat-o-gram. Thinking she was an employee of the railroad and thus entitled to ride the rails for free, she put on her fur coat and boarded the train.

Another newspaper said that perhaps Betty ran away because she had been wed too many times. She was tired of caring for kittens year after year, and was in search of an adventure all on her own.

Station-master Byrnes came up with his own reason for Betty’s antics. He surmised that the cat was upset that she didn’t get her usual turkey meal on Sunday morning, because the restaurant at the Lackawanna terminal was closed. She may have decided to jump on the train in search of an open eating establishment.

Whatever her motive was, that evening the one-time hobo cat received a turkey dinner fit for a railroad magnate.

Read what happened when Betty got the urge to travel at the Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

The modern disposable hypodermic needle is a marvel- safe, clean, and almost painless compared to the reusable instruments many of us remember from years past. But how did this method of introducing drugs into our bodies start? Earlier physicians would wound the skin, as in variolation, but the first use  of a needle-like instrument was in 1844, when Dr. Francis Rynd injected morphine acetate into the face of a woman who was most likely suffering from the painful nerve condition called trigeminal neuralgia.  

The most interesting thing about this section of the report, however, is the ‘instrument made for the purpose’ of injecting the drug. Dr Rynd did not include a description or illustration of this instrument – probably a mistake, as it was his opportunity to publicise his invention. We do know what it looked like, however, from an article he subsequently published in 1861:

This is not a hypodermic syringe but a novel type of trochar: an instrument with a sharp tip and a cannula through which fluids can be introduced (or evacuated). It had a sharp needle to puncture the skin, but no plunger to propel fluids into the body; instead, the drug was dropped into the cannula, using ‘an ordinary writing-pen’, and then left to infiltrate the tissues by gravity alone.

The injection did deliver relief to the patient. Read about the case, and also the first injection using a syringe with a plunger a few years later, at Thomas Morris' blog. -via Strange Company

Lion dance is a form of traditional dance and performance in Chinese culture where dancers mimic a lion's movements in a lion costume. This is what their moves look like without the lion https://t.co/tIwpwmUib8 [source of the gif: https://t.co/aMLeaPdWxc] pic.twitter.com/ndeg4351Jb

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 14, 2021

The Lunar New Year begins on Friday, February 12 this year. The Lion Dance is a traditional part of the festivities in China. If you've ever wondered what the dancers look like underneath the lion costume, watch these two guys. Their dance looks pretty straightforward until... Well, just watch and you'll see something truly amazing. -via Nag on the Lake

You might only know dire wolves from the TV series Game of Thrones, but they were real dogs that grew up to six feet long in order to hunt the megafauna of North America tens of thousands of years ago. Quite a few of their remains were preserved in the La Brea tar pits. Dire wolves were identified as a species in the 1850s, but now DNA analysis tells us more about them. For example, they weren't really wolves.

After sequencing five genomes from dire wolf fossils between 50,000 and 13,000 years old, the researchers found that the animals belonged to a much older lineage of dogs. Dire wolves, it now appeared, had evolved in the Americas and had no close kinship with the gray wolves from Eurasia; the last time gray wolves and dire wolves shared a common ancestor was about 5.7 million years ago. The strong resemblance between the two, the researchers say, is a case of convergent evolution, whereby different species develop similar adaptations—or even appearances—thanks to a similar way of life. Sometimes such convergence is only rough, such as both birds and bats evolving wings despite their differing anatomy. In the case of dire and gray wolves, lives of chasing large herbivores to catch some meat on the hoof resulted in two different canid lineages independently producing wolflike forms.

The DNA study is causing scientists to rethink how and why dire wolves went extinct, and how they should be classified. Read more about dire wolves at Scientific American. -via Metafilter

After last year's Mardi Gras celebrations led to a huge number of COVID cases, the parades are cancelled for this year. But New Orleans is bringing the parade flavor back anyway, by decorating houses as if they were traditional Mardi Gras parade floats! A project called "Hire a Mardi was Artist" is putting artists, float builders, and craftspeople to work transforming homes into colorful art installations. The money raised through donations pays for the work, and also helps struggling musicians and others who are impacted by the Mardi Gras cancellations. -via Boing Boing

Abraham Lincoln's campaign against slavery was revealed in speeches he made between 1854 and his inauguration in 1861. During this time, he had retired from Congress to practice law, but was pulled back into politics by his opposition to Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas' drive to open up new territories as legal slave states. In those years, Lincoln developed possible plans for nationwide abolition.

Lincoln acknowledged how hard it would be to abolish slavery. “If all earthly power were given me,” he said, “I should not know what to do.” He imagined four possible scenarios, only the last of which he thought had any hope of success. “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia.” He referred to the African nation as the “native land” of southern slaves, as if they were an alien presence in the United States despite having been here for generations. Yet however desirable colonization might be, Lincoln went on, “a moment’s reflection” revealed its impracticality. “If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days.” So Lincoln’s first scenario—colonization to Liberia—was whisked aside as impractical. “What then?” he asked.

You can read of Lincoln's other three scenarios for abolishing slavery, none of which involved a bloody war between the states, at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting

The Powerball jackpot now stands at $550 million, and the Mega Millions jackpot is up to $750 million. You can increase your odds of winning ever-so-slightly by buying a ticket. But how much is that $2 investment really worth, and how can we increase the odds of claiming those jackpots for ourselves without having to share with some other winner?

We propose and analyze a practical scheme to increase the likelihood of single winners, or equivalently to minimize the probability of sharing. Paradoxically, this manages to increase the expected value of a lottery ticket without costing the central authorities any additional contributions to the payoff pool. Given that larger potential winnings attract more players, we anticipate that implementation of our scheme would generate increased interest in these games, and enlarge the ostensible benefits for or from the governments running them.

Further, we demonstrate that the number of Powerball tickets bought increases quadratically with pool size, which implies that tickets become increasingly less valuable after the pool passes a critical threshold. This analysis makes it possible to determine the range of pool sizes where tickets have positive expected value. In particular, it establishes that Powerball tickets bought (under the current sales model) with pool sizes between $775.2 million and $1.6656 billion have positive expected value.

What this extremely complex mathematical analysis misses is that the "value" of a lottery ticket lies more in the pleasant fantasy it creates for the buyer than in the actual outcome. And if you win, how horrible is it to have to share a windfall that you'll never be able to spend in your lifetime anyway? In any case, the recommendations are mostly for the system that sells the tickets, in generating numbers that will be less likely to produce duplicates, although there are some tips for buying tickets. Read the calculations at Chance magazine. -via Metafilter

You knew it was coming sooner or later- a game about the year 2020. Now that we've gotten through and made it to 2021, you can relive the previous year with a side-scrolling game that leads you through the major events of 2020, starting with the Australian wildfires. Use your arrows to run and leap, save the baby koalas, and... I don't know what happens after that, because I keep getting killed in the fire. The caption teases that you'll encounter a pandemic, a stock market crash, an election, and more, so if you get that far, let us know how you fare. -via Boing Boing