In the Cianjur District of the West Java Province in Indonesia, there stands an oddly-shaped mountain with a megalithic stone complex called Gunung Padang on top that has captured the imagination of archaeologists. But now it appears that the entire mountain may actually be manmade! The fact that the mountain's surface was preserved better than the other eroded mountains in the area caused earthquake geologist Danny Hilman Natawidjaja to take a closer look, starting in 2011.

Natawidjaja and his team studied the mountain for years, and have announced that it is a pyramid, constructed over an old lava volcano that was sculpted into shape, then covered with sand, rocks, and megalithic stones (like those pictured above) all placed by hand. The team estimates that the construction began about 25,000 years ago, long before any other manmade pyramid, although the date is somewhat controversial. Read about this discovery at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Tiket2 via Flickr)

In the tradition of Deep Blue Sea and Birdemic, except intentional, comes GCI Gator. Yes, it's a real full-length film, from Charles Band's Full Moon Features, the studio that gave us Puppet Master, but also The Dead Hate the Living! and Gingerdead Man. Bad CGI Gator is exactly what it says in the title. The premise is that a group of college students on spring break throw their laptops into the lake to declare their vacation from school. The electronics shock a real alligator into becoming a computer generated monster that comes after them for revenge. The joke is that the gator changes color, floats in the air, and changes size. That's what bad CGI does. Outside of the alligator, the production values are good, and the cast, while as homogenized as any horror cast, does pretty well with what they have to work with. For a one-joke monster movie, it looks like it could be fun. Bad CGI Gator will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video and FullMoonfeatures.com beginning November 24th. -via Digg

A "gravity hole" sounds a lot like a black hole, but that's not what it is. It turns out that gravity is not the same all over the earth, meaning you could weigh more or less in different parts of the world. However, weight is just a number on a scale, and you wouldn't look any different. Water, on the other hand, is very much affected by gravity. There's a spot in the Indian Ocean where the gravity has much less force, and the water level is up to 106 meters (348 feet) lower than in the rest of the earth! See, water flows in the direction of gravity, and the area outside of this gravity hole has more, so the water flows away. That's a lot of water, since this area, officially known as the Indian Ocean Geoid Low (IOGL), covers an area of three million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles)!     

The cause of variations in gravity is the composition and density of the earth, in this case the earth below the ocean. The IOGL was discovered in 1948, but it is only recently that scientists have discovered the reason for it. Its origin goes back 120 million years, when the tectonic plate carrying India crashed into Asia and raised the Himalayas. Read that story at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura   

(Image credit: ESA – GOCE High Level Processing Facility)

Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Seinfeld character Elaine Benes showed us how to dance in 1996, but her horribly awkward dancing became a meme decades later. The dance was first seen in the Seinfeld episode "Little Kicks," and Elaine was quite proud of the dance she invented. Since then it's become the subject of a meme, tributes, and even dance contests. It's appealing because for one thing, it illustrates the character so well, but more importantly it gave all of us an example of someone who actually dances worse than we do.    

Now The Bell Bros. have liberated dancing Elaine from Seinfeld entirely and have her dancing in pop culture's most iconic dance scenes from West Side Story to The Office to Dirty Dancing (a list of the scenes are posted in a comment at YouTube). What's weird is how well her bizarre dance moves fit in, whether the dancers around her are competent or not. -via Boing Boing

When the family gathers for a traditional holiday feast and everything is delicious, everyone gets along, and we all go home happy, it's just another Thanksgiving. But when the turkey catches fire and your drunk aunt tries hitting on the responding firemen, that's the Thanksgiving you will always remember. Or the time grandma accidentally got so drunk that she was taken to the emergency room. No one will forget that year a cousin left a stolen vehicle in the yard for the police to retrieve. Or the time a child threw up, and it luckily got grandma out of her seat just in time to avoid the ceiling falling on her. Those are the stories that will be told at every family gathering for generations to come.

Thanks to the internet, such stories escaped the family and were posted to reddit for everyone to enjoy. Cracked collected 29 of the most bizarre Thanksgiving family disasters they could find for us to first enjoy, and then give thanks that they didn't happen to us.  

"Linguistic determinism" is the idea that the words you use to communicate have a profound effect on how you think. An example is the Newspeak language of George Orwell's novel 1984. Another example might be your mother threatening to wash your mouth out with soap. But is there any truth to it? Further research shows that what we think and how we feel is fairly innate, no matter what language we speak or culture we originate from. It appears that the inability to express ourselves has more to do with the limits of our language than with the malleability of our thoughts. We have more control over the language than the language has control over us.  "Language relativism" is a whole other subject, and Tom Scott tries to explain the difference to us. It's a deep and complicated subject, but we don't have to understand all the intricacies of it to understand what researchers are finding out.   

It seems like only a few years ago we learned that modern humans carry around genes we inherited from our ancestors interbreeding with Neanderthals. Now there is evidence that we also have genes that originated with another extinct human species, the Denisovans. Actual fossil evidence of Denisovans is scant, but we have enough genetic material to trace back some of our modern human genes to them.

Denisovans evolved to survive in the mountains of Asia, and certain genes made them more adaptable to those conditions. One genetic variant allowed them to thrive in high altitudes, and that variant now only survives in Tibetans. But another genetic adaptation is now found in all populations outside of Africa. A gene called SLC30A9 regulates how zinc moves within a cell, which can have many effects. A mutation in that gene among Denisovans may have helped them adapt to cold climates. But it also appears to have left the rest of us predisposed to depression and other mental health problems. Read more about this research at Neoscope. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Vincent van Gogh)

We've celebrated the phenomena of pareidolia here at Neatorama for years, so much so that I can spell the word with no problem, which cannot be said for more common words like "license." Still, today is the first time I have ever heard it pronounced. Pareidolia refers to our tendency to see familiar shapes in random objects, like ducks in a cloud formation or the Virgin Mary in a bowl of cereal, and is not limited to faces. But faces are the most common thing we see in random objects because faces are important to us. Seeing a person's facial expression tells us a lot about that person's state of mind and attitude toward us. Recognizing the shape of a leaf is not nearly as important to our survival as distinguishing friend from foe. But facial recognition is a broad subject, and Weird History touches on several aspects of it, as they step away from history for this video to talk about faces in weird places and how our brains interpret them.

The earliest photograph still in existence was taken in 1826 or 1827 by Joseph Niépce in France. Although an astonishing breakthrough, the technique was complicated and not all that useful. Things changed when Niépce's associate Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype process, introduced in 1839. After that, the race was on to take pictures of anything and everything. However, the subjects, circumstances, and dates of many of those early photographs are not documented as well as we'd like 184 years later. That's why there is so much ambiguity in identifying the earliest-born person ever photographed.

The earliest existing portrait ever taken is usually attributed to Robert Cornelius, who managed a selfie in 1839 thanks to the long exposure time required. But that title might come down to how you define "portrait." Another contender is Dorothy Catherine Draper, who sat for a portrait taken by her brother in 1839 or 1840. The picture above is lauded as the earliest portrait, the earliest photograph of a woman, or the earliest portrait of a woman. The word "existing" should be appended to those titles, because the photographer, John William Draper, took test pictures of his assistant the day before, but neither her name nor image was preserved. We know about Dorothy Draper, though, and you can read her story and what she went through to get this portrait made at Vintage Everyday.  -via Nag on the Lake   

We've seen a lot of domino falls, marble runs, and chain reactions on the internet. I always have to wonder what happens when a complicated run just stops for no discernible reason. Do you start all over or edit the video? One way to keep things going is to enlist the help of cats. But these aren't just any cats, they are the trained cats of Cat Navi Desk (previously at Neatorama), although you may glean from the video that some are better trained than others. In this domino/marble run/Rube Goldberg contraption, they are ready to help whenever the chain goes awry. This is an expanded and improved version of the domino run they did a few years ago. I'm not convinced that this is one smooth run, but it doesn't really matter because it's so darn entertaining. -via Geeks Are Sexy   

An 18-year old woman died of leukemia in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, in the early 1980s. Then her 16-year-old brother contracted the disease and also died. The heartbroken family wondered if the apartment building they lived in might have had something to do with both their children's illnesses. After all, they had only moved in a year before their daughter became sick. They were the first family to move into new building number 7, which was luxurious by Soviet standards. Officials told them it was just the luck of genetics. Then the mother died, also of leukemia. The remaining family members moved out, and another family took that apartment.

In 1987, the second family in the same apartment had two sons develop leukemia, and one died. That adds up to five cases of leukemia in one unit! It had to be something about the building itself. It took another two years for Soviet officials to open an investigation. Find out what they learned at Amusing Planet.   

(Image credit: Artemka)

When was the last time you thought about Steak-umm? Let's see what the company has been up to. While they still sell frozen sandwich meat, for the last couple of years they've also been on a campaign to educate the public on media literacy, and to fight against misinformation, disinformation, and outright fraud. Their Deepsteaks ad warns that artificial intelligence and deepfake technology can manipulate anyone against their will, to the point of making dedicated vegans say they love steak. This is the ultimate in identity theft, when someone with a computer can put you in a video saying things and doing things you would never do.

The focus group in the video by ad agency Tombras isn't made up of actors, but real vegans, and while parts of this video are deepfaked, their responses to the shenanigans are real. They didn't have to be called back in, because creating the deepfakes of the vegans only took about 20 minutes. It left them feeling eerily violated. The point is that this kind of manipulation isn't limited to celebrities and politicians, but could happen to anyone. -via Boing Boing  

The 1940 film The Great Dictator was Charlie Chaplin's 78th movie and his first full talkie. As such, it was bound to be different from his tightly-edited slapstick silent films. The movie was shocking to audiences for many reasons, and early criticism of the film was cutting. Devout Chaplin fans had a hard time seeing him intersperse the slapstick with serious acting and all that talking. Many were upset that Chaplin injected political references of any kind into a comedy. Some were disappointed that he was obviously making fun of Adolf Hitler, and others labeled the final speech as downright communist. Remember, this was in 1940, when America was leaning toward isolationism, and had a small but active Nazi party. And some moviegoers were just put off by its length- 125 minutes, which was unheard of for movies at the time.

But Chaplin had something to say, and the power and creativity to say it. The Great Dictator was ultimately a hit, and became a classic. Read of those early critiques and Chaplin's thinking behind making the movie the way he did at Lithub. -via Damn Interesting

Read more about the making of The Great Dictator in a Neatorama feature article.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

This guy tries to tell us he doesn't know anything about music, but don't let that fool you. This is El Estepario Siberiano, also known as The Groovefather, a professional percussionist. He built himself a tubulum, which is a musical instrument made of PVC pipes of different lengths. It might remind you of a pipe organ, but you play it by whacking the ends of the pipes. Blue Man Group plays one in their stage shows. Anyway, enjoy his performance of AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" played on pipes with spatulas. This video contains NSFW language. -via Born in Space

The British Empire had a way of killing two birds with one stone. Instead of building penitentiaries, they sent shiploads of convicted criminals to far-flung colonies, first America and then Australia, thus relieving Britain of their unwelcome presence and providing cheap labor for their colonies. They also reused large ships that were no longer capable of long voyages as prisons. These were called prison hulks, and convicts could be held on them for up to seven years awaiting transport. This became a particular problem between 1776, when transports to America stopped, and the first prison transport to Australia in 1787. Serious overcrowding continued long after as convicts were gradually sent elsewhere.

In 1801, London police magistrate Aaron Graham was charged with reporting on conditions in the prison hulks. He found that private contractors had been running them, with deplorable results. There were no standards for the treatment of prisoners, even for the amount of food they were given. The death rate was high, the hospitalization rate was higher, and the staff turned over often due to inadequate pay. Graham instituted reforms, including a government takeover of the ships' management, and posted daily food rations. The prisoners were to be given oatmeal and barley for breakfast and supper, and bread, meat, cheese, and beer for midday dinner. That sounds like a recipe for scurvy and other deficiencies, but it was a lot better than they had before the reform, and these were men who worked loading and unloading ships all day. Read about the conditions aboard prison hulks at the British National Archives. -via Strange Company