There's someone for everyone, and Satan finds his true love in this ad for Match.com. Not only is it grimly hilarious, it's full of easter eggs. Her profile pic is a murder hornet. The actress appears to have subtle fangs. They're from the same home town! Check out the end zone lettering in the empty stadium. The fine print on the treadmill sign. The asteroids. It's perfect. This ad was written and directed by Ryan Reynolds and features a newly-recorded version of Taylor Swift's 2008 hit "Love Story." -via Today
Natalie Sideserf of Sideserf Cake Studio is renowned for her realistic cake sculptures, some which you've seen here at Neatorama. The ultimate test of realism is to create a face that looks like someone's real face -in this case, her own! She also recorded the process, which you can see in this video. Cutting into a cake like this must be a bit unsettling, but that's a sacrifice I'd make for a piece of cake. -via reddit
A champagne chair is a dollhouse-sized chair made from the cap, cage, and/or cork from a champagne bottle. We can imagine it originated from partygoers who needed something to do with their hands while listening to drunk conversation, but it has become somewhat of an art form, and as happens to all human activities, it has been turned into a competition.
The year is the 17th for the annual DWR Champagne Chair Contest. Make a chair from the foil, label, cap, cage, and cork (anything but the glass) of up to two champagne bottles. There's a division for original design, and a division for recreating a chair from the gallery at Design Within Reach. Entries must be in by January 5, so if you plan correctly, you can use your New Year champagne. Prizes are substantial DWR gift cards, and there's a bonus:
For each entry, Herman Miller Cares is donating $50 to Artist Relief, a charitable initiative providing financial help to artists during the pandemic. The more entries, the more artists are helped.
The 1983 film A Christmas Story didn't make much of a splash when it was first released, but with television repeats over the years, it became a beloved classic for Gen X. Is it because the dysfunctional family makes the viewer feel better about their miserable childhoods by comparison? Or is it because the stories of a miserable childhood become funnier the more you tell them? As Screen Junkies shows us in this Honest Trailer, it's more likely the latter, as two kinds of memories collide to make A Christmas Story a holiday classic: Jean Shepherd's recollections of his childhood that grew into the semi-fictional sequences of the movie, and the shared cinema experience of a generation of movie fans.
In 2019, 4,000 cars were loaded into a cargo ship, but were not properly balanced. The ship capsized off the coast of Georgia, and the salvage operations have been going on ever since. Last month, they got to the big job- cutting the ship into sections and hauling them away. That involves some serious equipment.
The main player in the complex slicing operation is called the Versabar VB-10000 lift vessel, a gigantic yellow dual-barge crane used for the first time in 2010 and developed in response to hurricanes damaging oil platforms. The company that builds the enormous contraption says capacity of the tall twin-gantries is 7,500 tons, though each of the two trusses is structurally capable of handling over 5,000 — it’s apparently the buoyancy of the barges that limits capacity to 7,500. Speaking of the two barges, each has four 1,000 horsepower thrusters to keep the vessel precisely positioned overtop of the wreckage.
Santa Claus feels like society has progressed to the point where he's a has-been. No one wants to sit in his lap, people no longer welcome late night intruders, and they like to track their packages with apps. In this video, the jolly old elf confides his anxieties to his psychotherapist. This ad for the Norwegian Postal Service was produced by the agency Matias & Mathias. -via Laughing Squid
Saturn's moon Titan is bigger than Mercury, and so far as we know, it's the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has surface liquid. Near Titan's north pole, there's an entire system of lakes filled with liquid methane. These lakes show tributaries that hint of a weather system in which methane evaporates and then rains over the land. We know this because the Cassini probe scanned Titan with radar, which bounces off land but is absorbed by liquid. The rate of absorption indicates depth.
Kraken Mare (literally, Kraken Sea) is a huge lake near the north pole of Titan. Cassini pinged it with radar many times. On one such pass, the track of the radar went over land, then the main part of Kraken Mare, and then a bay called Moray Sinus (no, not the nose of the eel; sinus means bay, and the name comes from the Scottish firth). As the radar pulses pass through the liquid they get attenuated, fainter, before reflecting back up to Cassini. By measuring the attenuation the depth can be measured.
The scientists found that Moray Sinus has a depth of about 85 meters, which is impressive. But over the main body of Kraken Mare they got no reflected pulse at all. Local conditions can make it hard to know exactly how much radar is absorbed by the liquid (for example, if the surface is rough with waves, which is actually likely) but the lower limit for their measurements is 100 meters. If conditions were actually good, then it means the depth is at least 300 meters.
For reference, the average depth of Lake Superior is around 150 meters. While impressed the otherworldliness of a moon with liquid methane lakes, I am also intrigued by the naming of such lakes, and wish I could've been a fly on the wall when those were proposed. Read more about Kraken Mare and the other lakes of Titan at Bad Astronomy.
A group of friends in Ventura, California, decided to participate in No Shave November together back in 2013, and they ended it with a themed photoshoot to show off their facial hair. And they did the next year, and every year after.
If you watch this video and are on the edge of your seat waiting for the glass to break, I can tell you it isn't going to -at least not when we can see it. It really is glass. Glass artist Matt Eskuche makes a lot of beautiful glass objects, but the most astonishing is the "impossible goblet." The incredibly thin stem shows off just how much play borosilicate glass can have!
While your first thought may be "When is it going to break?" the second thought is "How can you ever wash this glass?" I can relate. -via Boing Boing
The publishers of the Merriam-Webster dictionary have announced that their Word of the Year for 2020 is "pandemic." The word of the year is often determined by how many people look up the word in the online dictionary compared to previous years, which reveals what is significant about the year. They noticed the first big spike for "pandemic" on February 3rd, although lookups had increased earlier in 2020.
On March 11th, the World Health Organization officially declared “that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic,” and this is the day that pandemic saw the single largest spike in dictionary traffic in 2020, showing an increase of 115,806% over lookups on that day in 2019. What is most striking about this word is that it has remained high in our lookups ever since, staying near the top of our word list for the past ten months—even as searches for other related terms, such as coronavirus and COVID-19, have waned.
Every once in a while, you hear that a ridiculous percentage of internet users are merely algorithms. We design tests to exclude bots from making new accounts, leaving comments, or even consuming content. The bots are then taught to pass the tests. So more complicated tests are designed. It has come to the point that a human not only has be human to pass these tests, but superhuman! Comedian Stevie Martin illustrates how we all feel competing against algorithms that have more patience, faster reflexes, and better eyesight than we do. In this version, the tests are not only difficult, but judgmental as well. -via reddit
A 36-year-old elephant named Kavaan was the only Asian elephant in Pakistan until this past weekend. At only a year old, he was given to Pakistan as a gift from Sri Lanka. Kavaan hasn't always been alone, but since his mate died in 2012, he's been the sole elephant at the Marghazar Zoo. Now, after years of work and planning (most notably by Cher), Kavaan boarded a plane bound for a 25,000-acre sanctuary in Cambodia.
And I use the word “boarded” liberally here. It took hours for a team of experts to cajole Kaavan into a custom-built metal crate for the journey, and that was with the help of months of training, some light sedatives (for an elephant, at least), and sturdy chains. His crate was then loaded onto a truck and driven to Islamabad airport on Sunday, where a Russian cargo plane will take him to the 25,000-acre wildlife sanctuary, per the Guardian.
Cher was in Pakistan to see him off, and also in Cambodia to welcome Kavaan after his journey, which went smoothly once the elephant was loaded. Officials hope Kavaan will breed with the Cambodian elephants, bringing some needed genetic diversity to their group.
The Broomway is the notorious footpath to Foulness Island in Britain. It's narrow, unmarked, surrounded by sea, sticky mud, and quicksand, and sinks under the tide twice a day. Oh yeah, and there may be explosives. So of course, Tom Scott had to walk it to show us what we are missing.
You know the movie It's a Wonderful Life well, but there's always more to learn. A bit of movie trivia will make watching it again this Christmas even more interesting. Some of the trivia is about the production or references that you might not know 74 years later, like the Zuzu Gingersnaps. Others are about its legacy and longevity.
Jake Haendel came close to dying in 2017. He was diagnosed with toxic progressive leukoencephalopathy, caused by the use of adulterated heroin. Haendel did not die, but spent a year unable to move or communicate, while still being painfully aware of bodily sensations, the passage of time, and what was going on around him.
To outside observers, Jake exhibited no signs of awareness or cognition. “Is he in there?” his wife and father would ask the doctors. No one knew for sure. An electroencephalogram (EEG) of his brain showed disrupted patterns of neural activity, indicating severe cerebral dysfunction. “Jake was pretty much like a houseplant,” his father told me.
They had no way of knowing Jake was conscious. In medical terms, he was “locked in”: his senses were intact, but he had no way of communicating.
“I could do nothing except listen and I could only see the direct area in front of me, based on how the staff would position me in bed,” Jake later wrote. The disease had attacked the cables carrying information through his brain and into his muscles, but had spared the areas that enable conscious processing, so he was fully alert to the horror of his situation. He struggled to make sense of this new reality, unable to communicate, and terrified at the prospect of this isolation being permanent.
