Remember when you graduated and got your first full time job? You moved to your own apartment, in a new town with new people and new opportunities? Those were the days. I remember rescuing furniture from the dumpster, counting change to see if I could do laundry, volunteering for public appearances in the evenings because they might have food, and feeling free as a bird- living the dream. But I certainly wouldn't want to do it in this day and age.

This award-winning little ditty called Living the Dream from Ben Meinhardt illustrates the joyful accomplishments of a young man making his way in the world as a new adult. Don't let it get you down too much. -via The Awesomer

A woolly mammoth that was born 17,100 years ago in Alaska only got a name a few years ago. They call him Kik. For the first two years of his life, Kik stayed close to his mother near the Yukon River Basin. Then he roamed more widely, along the grasslands of Alaska and its land bridge to Asia. When he turned 16, he roamed even further, walking at least ten miles a day, eating grass and covering a 700-mile route, each way, for years. In his short life, Kik walked far enough to circle the earth twice! At around age 27, he slowed down from a lack of food, and starved to death at age 28 in the Kikiakrorak River valley. More than 17,000 years later, his tusks were recovered and studied.

How can we possibly know that much about one woolly mammoth? That's the real story. One of Kik's tusks fell into the hands of isotope scientist Matthew Wooller, who assembled a multinational team of scientists to study it. They used a machine called a Laser Ablation Multi-Collector Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer. It cost almost a million dollars and was so heavy they put it in the basement for safety. Read how they mapped Kik's whereabouts through his lifetime, which sheds new light on how woolly mammoths lived, at Smithsonian.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Mauricio Antón)

First let's learn the word "toponym," which means a place name. Sometimes a place name can reveal who named it, how old the name is, and its original meaning. Some original names for places are quite descriptive, and give a lot of information if you know the language. Others are named for people, often when a previously-named place was claimed by new colonizers. Coining or changing a place name is the most blatant form of marking one's territory, after all. In modern times, there's a worldwide effort to revert colonial names back to their more original form, like Mt. McKinley reverting to Denali. Dr. Erica Brozovsky looks into how places are named and why, plus a lot of interesting trivia like the longest and shortest place names, and a few wild stories about toponyms for the PBS series Otherwords. -via Laughing Squid

On October 16, the Nebraska Humane Society took in three small kittens. Two seemed healthy, but the third kitten, eventually named Thorn, was weak and lethargic and appeared to be suffering from "flea anemia." The tiny kitten needed a blood transfusion, but there was a problem. While cats have blood types, there is no feline universal donor type, and there wasn't time to test for a compatible donor. However, the shelter has a six-year-old husky named Bret Michaels who just had blood work done that morning, and was a donor candidate. Surprisingly, dogs can donate blood to cats. Bret Michaels was a very good boy while his blood was drawn and transfused into the kitten. Thorn appeared to feel better almost immediately after the first of several transfusions. Here is our husky hero.

The Facebook post about the transfusion went viral, and the rock star Bret Michaels heard about it. The singer for Poison has experience with huskies, and called to adopt the dog named after him. 

Bret Michaels (the man) is adopting Bret Michaels (the dog)! We can't wait to see how he thrives in his new home, we just hope it doesn't get too confusing when someone tells Bret Michaels to fetch!

Michaels posted pictures of his new dog at Facebook, and pledged to find a good home for the kitten Thorn, too. Michaels is calling his new dog Bret, Jr. and will soon welcome the hero husky into a home that already has two German shepherds.

(Images credit: Nebraska Humane Society)

The fastest Formula One cars can go from zero to 100 km/h (62 mph) in about two seconds. Some experimental cars can accelerate even faster. But how about an electric vehicle? The car called mythen by AMZ Racing (in conjunction with Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and ETH Zurich) is an EV that holds the world record for electric vehicle acceleration: 0-100 km/h in 0.956 seconds! And since it's electric, it makes barely any noise doing it. To achieve such a feat, mythen designers had to build a system to keep it on the ground where it can get traction, instead of flying off into the air. It sounds kind of scary, especially when Tom Scott is recruited into driving it himself.

When you see his reaction, you realize that the most likely real-world application of this technology will be to make it a theme park ride. It will be short and expensive and have very long lines. And everyone will say it was worth it.

A hundred years ago, steamships employed coal stokers to shovel coal into the boilers that kept the vessel going. It was hard, dirty, and dangerous work, but someone had do it. Arthur John Priest became possibly the most famous coal stoker on any steamship for his eventful career. He survived two ship collisions and four sinkings, including that of the Titanic! Of course, he was very lucky to have survived all that, but there comes a point when steamship crews start to look at such a person as a bad omen. But perhaps Priest was more like Adrian Carton de Wiart, and refused to give up his profession even as fate kept telling him to retire.

Priest was only 24 when he survived the sinking of the Titanic. He jumped into the water and was picked up by a lifeboat. Then came World War I, and Priest joined the British military. He was stoking coal on the HMS Alcantara when it was sunk by a German ship disguised as a Norwegian merchant ship. Priest then served on the hospital ship HMS Britannic, sunk by a German mine in the Mediterranean. He survived that sinking alongside two other Titanic survivors. Then in 1917, he was serving as a fireman on the hospital ship SS Donegal, which was attacked and sunk by a German U-boat. Read about the many adventures of the unsinkable Arthur John Priest at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company  

In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, we saw Space Station V, a rotating wheel in space that contained a luxury hotel for space travelers. The rotation provided enough force to simulate gravity and allow people to operate almost normally.

Digital artist Erik Wernquist imagined such a structure and designed the SSPO Esperanta, a sort of space cruise ship for interplanetary tourists. It has a radius of 450 meters and spins at one revolution per minute, generating artificial gravity at half that of earth. In the short film ONE REVOLUTION PER MINUTE, he shows us the views from the Esperanta, with available light moving all around every minute. It would be quite disorienting, but still beautiful. He admits that a spacecraft with this many windows is impractical, not to mention far beyond any earth budget, but it's an art film that explores those lights and shadows, so just consider it fictional. -via TYWKIWDBI 

Star Trek has grown into a beloved franchise with millions of fans, but when Gene Roddenberry's original series aired from 1966 to 1969, it had a notoriously small budget. This led to some very creative decisions, like inventing the transporter, because using a shuttle was both expensive and time-consuming. It also led to some really cheap-looking aliens, although with the dearth of science fiction on TV at the time, we didn't mind. This extreme parsimony was evident on the set, too. The futuristic interiors had chairs that were bought off the shelf at furniture stores, sometimes slightly altered, but recognizable. Later Star Trek series and movies with bigger budgets were able to get designer seats, but are often still recognized by trekkies who know furniture.

Four of those fans have built a database of commercially-available Star Trek chairs. Each of the 163 identified chairs are listed by category, with its movie or episode, history, and availability. For example, the chair shown above from "The Trouble with Tribbles" is the Chromcraft Sculpta Unicorn. The same design was later used in Star Trek: Discovery.  

Ex Astris Scientia is also asking for help in identifying more chairs. If you are inclined to buy seating based on the story you can tell about it, you'll want to take a look. Who knows, you might already have one of these designs in your home!  -via Everlasting Blort 

Zoos often purchase or exchange animals with each other in order to keep their populations stable, provide proper space for the creatures, and to promote genetic diversity in their progeny. In this case, the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro had to relocate their flock of 15 Chilean flamingos to make way for a demolition and construction project. They were shipped to the Greenville Zoo in South Carolina. In cardboard boxes. So you can consider the above an "unboxing video."

This is no aberration, but the optimum method for shipping flamingos, or "best practices." They are big birds that only weigh about four pounds each. Cardboard is safer for them and their delicate wings than a crate or a metal cage would be, and they had plenty of airflow. The birds were given a health check as they were unpacked, and appear to be settling in just fine in their new home. -via Fark

The Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon opens nationwide today. The film has received glowing reviews and is a shoe-in for Oscar nominations. It's a Scorsese crime movie, but also a love story, based on real events. But it could have been very different.

Native American representation in film has been abysmal since the beginning of film. Knowing that Killers of the Flower Moon would be widely seen, a group of Osage leaders invited Scorsese to meet with them and hear their views on how the movie should address their concerns regarding historical accuracy and perspective. They included James Roan Gray, great-grandson of Henry Roan, a victim of the Osage murders and the ex-husband of main character Mollie Burkhart. After the meeting, Scorsese rewrote the entire script to change the focus of the story. When he returned to Oklahoma after the pandemic lockdown, the Osage were ready to provide actors, language instructors, craftspeople, and consultants for the movie. Jim Gray talked to Smithsonian's Chris Klimek about his family history, the Osage influence on Killers of the Flower Moon, and other topics like the Trail of Tears and the Tulsa Race Massacre. You can read it or listen in podcast form at Smithsonian.  

Wanna play a game? CGP Grey (previously at Neatorama) presents an online version of Rock, Paper, Scissors in which you play against him. The premise is that statistically speaking, if a million people play, then someone somewhere is going to win all the rounds. It will happen, because the video is only a day old and is already three-quarters of the way to a million views. Grey has six million subscribers. Be aware that a draw means you lose. Of course, has has no way to know if you're being honest about your score, but that's honestly beside the point.

When you get into the game and see how it's constructed, you will be more impressed with the work he put into it than with your own success. It's an idea Grey has contemplated for years and just got around to doing. From the comments, a lot of people had fun playing this straight, but once they are eliminated, they go back and cheat just to see where the game goes, and had even more fun doing that. It's a real internet rabbit hole no matter how far you take it. And you'll learn a few things about statistics and probability along the way.

In the 18th century, a criminal could be hanged for any number of crimes, and from that fact sprung a gruesome type of good luck charm- the hand of an executed criminal. It was important that the hand taken was the one that actually committed the crime, and detailed instructions for preparing the hand were published in 1722. The hand had to be carefully dried with salt and nitre, and then exposed to the sun until fully dessicated. The resulting "hand of glory" could be used to cure illness when placed on the affected body part, such as a goiter.

If the hand had previously belonged to a murderer, it had special powers, but only in conjunction with fat taken from the same murderer. Since we can assume that this would be difficult to procure, an authentic hand of glory was a rarity. When a murderer's hand of glory was used as a candleholder, burning a candle made from the human fat, the holder had the power to put people to sleep, making a household burglary or other crime a simple affair.  

Hands used in such a manner have been documented in drawings in historical writing, but only one hand has been found and identified. It has been in the possession of the Whitby Museum since 1935. Read about the hand of glory and see a picture of the only one to still exist at Angel Buckley's blog. -via Strange Company

In the Douglas Adams story The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer named Deep Thought is programmed to determine the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. The computer works on this problem for 7.5 million years and finally spits out the answer: 42. But after all that time, no one could remember the question.

However, in the 45 years since Adams told us about the amazing computer feat, we may have figured out the question. The problem is that there are several, five in fact, fundamental questions about the universe in which the answer is indeed 42. Two are mathematical, two are astronomical, and one has to do with physics. Which one was Deep Thought deep in thought about? We may never know, but we have some good contenders. Each of the five questions are explained in detail at Big Think. -via Real Clear Science

(Image credit: Ben Gibson/Big Think)

It wasn't easy being a beekeeper in the medieval Europe, but the honey that bees produced was exceptionally expensive and worth the effort. Instead of beehives with removable frames, bees were kept in woven baskets called skeps. Harvesting the honey meant scooping everything out of the skep, which destroyed the colony. So skeps were small, which encouraged the bees to swarm, looking for a new home when their numbers outgrew the skep. When that happened, beekeepers had to be ready to gather them up and lodge them in a new skep. That process involved throwing dust on the bees, banging metal objects together (called tanging), and reciting magical incantations. These were called swarm charms.

That's a lot of work to reproduce a hive, but it worked more often than not. Beekeepers were loathe to experiment to determine what part of that process actually did the job, as they didn't want to risk failure. Modern beekeepers say it was probably the dust, although things are much easier now that we've learned to identify and relocate queen bees. Read about swarm charms and the difficult medieval practice of beekeeping at Atlas Obscura.

The Sydney Opera House was officially opened on October 20, 1973. Every step to getting the building completed was fraught with controversy. Danish architect Jørn Utzon's design was rescued from the rejection bin and eventually became his greatest work, leading to a Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2003. Yet fights with Sydney authorities led him to quit the project before it was completed. The initial reaction from the public was mixed, with some calling it breathtakingly beautiful while others dubbed it ridiculous and referred to it as a dish rack. In the years since, it has become a beloved landmark and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Sydney Opera House hosts more than 1500 performances for more than a million people every year.   

To celebrate the Sydney Opera House's 50th anniversary, they posted a music video with a song written and performed by Tim Minchin called "Play It Safe." The video features a long list of those who have performed at the opera house (listed at the YouTube page). The lyrics belie the venue's actual mission to bravely stretch the limits of creativity by taking risks and to expand the very idea of art and performance. -via Metafilter