Last month we had a new video from Cyriak called Honk. The new animation from Jonti Picking/Mr. Weebl is also titled Honk, but it's completely different. In this video, a trucker is tootling along in his tractor without a trailer, and he's in a really good mood. That is not allowed, so he gets pulled over by a cop. Then things get really weird. You start the video thinking that the "honk" will come from the truck's air horn, but that isn't the case at all. In fact you will find it hard to detect any honks in this story at all, despite seeing several possible honkers. Spoiler: there are extraterrestrials, but they don't come in a form we normally expect. There is also a banjo. It's not deep or thought-provoking, but it is silly and fun. What else would you expect from the guy who gave us Badgers? -via Metafilter

The 20th century saw an amazing rise in technology and innovation. It had both the first airplane and the first moon landing. We went from short, silent movie sequences to 24-hour streaming information. The list goes on, and those innovations were powered by fossil fuels, which led to the trajectory of climate change we are dealing with now. How different would our world be if we had solar power during all that time?

You might be surprised to learn that a Canadian inventor named George Cove started a business to install household solar panels in 1905. Really. His company garnered a lot of publicity about the possibilities of solar power. Then in 1909, Cove was kidnapped. The details of the incident are sketchy, but the kidnappers told Cove the price of his freedom would be for him to give up on solar power. Cove refused, and was freed anyway, but he lost all interest in promoting his business and it faded away. It would be another 40 years before anyone seriously began research into solar energy again, and even longer before it was available again to the public. What would our world be like if that kidnapping hadn't happened? Read about George Cove and the history of solar power at the Conversation.  -via Kottke

(Image credit: Popular Electricity magazine April 1910)

Last year, the Spanish band Broken Peach gave us a Halloween edition of the song "Don't You Want Me," originally by The Human League. This year, their holiday special video is Blondie's "One Way or Another." Watch them perform as a squad of skeleton cheerleaders and give the lyrics their creepiest interpretation ever!

Broken Peach has released a Halloween video every year since 2015. You can find a list of them at the YouTube page, although you will have to click "more"in the description to see it. -via Metafilter

In the video game Assassin's Creed, the Order of Assassins battle the Knights Templar. The Knights Templar were real enough, but the Order of Assassins is fictional. However, they are based on tales of the medieval Nizari Ismailis, a breakaway sect of Shiite Muslims that flourished between the 11th and 13th centuries. They were so devout in their beliefs that they were willing to kill and to die to bring the Nizari to power, and keep them there. It got to the point where any political assassination in Egypt or Syria was ascribed to the Nizaris.

The popular image of the the Nizari Ismailis in the West began with the travelogues of Marco Polo, which may have come from Sunni sources, and other wild legends that had been filtered through retellings, often with political aims. The Crusaders had plenty to say about the assassins, but those tales were greatly exaggerated and embellished. Strangely, the fictionalized version of the sect used in the game Assassin's Creed is more in line with the historical Nizari than traditional Western accounts. Read about the real Nizari Ismailis at Smithsonian. 

Tom Scott is going off on the peculiarities of the English language again. We use a lot of contractions, but there are a lot of other possible contractions that we could use, but we don't because they are weird. Oh sure, there is a logical explanation, which is what this video is all about.

The example he leads with is "Is this introduction weird? Yes, it's." Then he goes on to explain why that's weird. It sure is, because anyone who wants to use a contraction in this case would have said, "Yes, 'tis." The contraction "'tis" is old fashioned, but that has been the contraction of "it is" for quite some time. He eventually gets around to that one. Still, there are linguistic reasons we don't have words like "there'dn't've" (there would not have) but we do have words like "gonna" (going to). Tom explains them as clitics with syntactic gaps and stress patterns. Try to keep up, this is complicated.    

A cat owner will tell you that cats are perfect because they love their cats. You would expect that. But when an evolutionary biologist says it, it has a different meaning. Anjali Goswami explains that cats as a whole have perfected who they are and what they do so well that they don't need to diversify or evolve. The only real diversity in cat species is size. A lion isn't much different from a house cat or an ocelot underneath the skin. Other types of animals diversify, like bears, which range from completely herbivorous (giant pandas) to completely carnivorous (polar bears) and everything in between. Meanwhile cats hunt whatever prey animal is becoming too abundant according to their size, from deer to mice. And they do it well. 

Cats challenge standard biases in evolutionary biology. People have said to me, “What about bats? What about rodents? These groups have so many species doing all kinds of things.” And I’m like, “Yeah, because they suck.” They haven’t figured out how to do anything well, so they keep trying different things.

Goswami has plenty more to say about how cats have perfected the art of being cats at Scientific American. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Shagil Kannur)

Show me your talent pic.twitter.com/dZ8hVfn17m

— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) October 14, 2023

Why you should have a cat is a delightful Twitter account (or X, if that's what you call it) that you should all be following. Yesterday, they posted a challenge. It seems pretty easy, since all you have to do is pretty much connect the lines, but even that simple step was beyond some people.

I did my best

— Theebz (@theTheebz) October 14, 2023

Un chatfesse!!

— Clement Dos (@ClementDos91280) October 15, 2023

WOW fabulous

— MALAK (@MlI_lIM) October 14, 2023

Although some attempts were better than others.

🏆

— peridotbeach (@peridotbeach) October 15, 2023

Others found a workaround, which is okay, too, I guess.

you won

— Kalley (Cali) (@shutupkalley) October 14, 2023

It’s a Picture of a Cat.

— Joseph Jaurequi (@JosephJaurequi3) October 14, 2023

Some are genuinely good, or clever, while others are genuinely stupid. See all the submissions, and you might be inspired to contribute your own under this Tweet.

The case of Jennifer Carol Wilbanks, the "runaway bride" made national headlines in 2005. But you might have been too young to appreciate the story at the time, or you didn't keep up with it past reading the headlines, and besides all that, it took a long time for all the details to come out. It has nothing to do with the 1999 movie Runaway Bride, which was earlier. Wilbanks got cold feet before her wedding to John Mason, but instead of calling off the wedding, she faked a story about being kidnapped. Maybe she didn't realize that the entire nation would be mobilized into saving her. As the story played out, people who knew her were divided in their opinions, while the rest of the country went on with their lives. But what ultimately happened? For one thing, they didn't get married, at least not to each other, but there were repercussions all around. Weird History has the whole story for us.  -via Digg

How would you feel if an idea that captured your imagination and became a rock in the base of your personal philosophy turned out to have originated as a bad example? Or worse, a sarcastic joke? These things happen. We've seen it in the past few years, as people gather in places like 4chan and compete to see who can make the most people believe the most outrageous conspiracy theories. But an idea doesn't have to be all that outrageous for people to make it a long-lasting thing. Take the idea of "meritocracy." It has the same Greek suffix as democracy, theocracy, etc. so we can tell the word means political power based on merit, or ability and talent instead of wealth or social class. Sounds like a good idea, right? But the word was coined by sociologist Michael Dunlop, who wrote a dystopian book about a meritocracy in 1958 in which students were tested and assigned their life's role by their score. It was meant to be a nightmare.

Read about the satirical origins of meritocracy, along with Daylight Saving Time, Schrödinger’s cat, Hitler’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and the Trolley Problem, which was proposed in 1967 in an argument about abortion, of all things, at Cracked.

(Image credit: McGeddon)

I had no idea where YouTuber Brick Bending was going with this stack of LEGO bricks, or what was illegal about it. In the world of LEGO artists, "illegal" doesn't have anything to do with copyright. A building technique is "illegal" if it puts stress on the pieces, which would wear them out before their time. This happens when there are incomplete connections, bending, or insufficient support. In this build, he insists there is no stress on the bricks, just incomplete connections when the project is done. No, I'm not going to tell you what he is ultimately making, because the process is as interesting as the ultimate goal, but I will tell you to keep an eye out for some cool frame rate synchronization after it's completed.  

Some people were just born for war. Adrian Carton de Wiart was one of those who couldn't stay away from battle, no matter how many times fate told him to go home and retire. Wiart signed up for the British Army in 1899 for the Boer War when he was still underage, by lying about his identity. He retired in 1947 in his sixties. Wiart survived a plane crash and a stint in a POW camp in Italy (from which he escaped). He recovered from gunshot wounds in most of the wars he fought, in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear, although he was left with only one eye in Somaliland, and lost two fingers, then later his hand and part of his arm in World War I.

Yet each time Wiart was wounded, he convinced his superiors to put him back into action. Oh yeah, after retiring, he broke his back and recovered from that, too. Read the thrilling and confounding story of Adrian Carton de Wiart, the most battle-scarred soldier, at Amusing Planet.  

(Image credit: Cecil Beaton)

The 1950s and '60s were the peak of the Cold War, and they were also the peak of the suburban housewife phenomena. A family that had their own backyard fallout shelter in the suburbs was a step ahead of the Communists, and were assured they could stay underground for two weeks and return to the world unscathed. Therefore, these shelters were stocked with a supply of emergency food, mostly canned goods, that would sustain a family during a nuclear disaster.

But the responsibility of caring for the family would "naturally" fall to the woman of the house, as in everyday life. The women's magazines of the period had plenty of tips and recipes for making creative meals out of fallout shelter supplies. These magazines didn't expect women to ponder the implications of nuclear annihilation, but instead gave them instructions on the more mundane details they dealt with in everyday life, from making something appetizing out of deviled ham to giving birth in a fallout shelter. Read about the advice housewives received for keeping up appearance during nuclear war at Atlas Obscura. Yes, there's a recipe included.

Do you want to drive a scientist completely insane? Then give him/her a Nobel Prize! It's not a sure thing, and most Nobel Laureates are just fine, but a surprising number of scientists who won a Nobel have gone on to going off the deep end, or at least some weird places, in the years afterward. This phenomena even has a name, although it's tongue-in-cheek: Nobel Disease.

Sometimes a Nobel Laureate is considered a genius, and is drawn into discussions of subjects outside their field, where they may not be so knowledgable. In that position, it's easy to say dumb things that get a lot of publicity. Sometimes a Nobel Laureate becomes stuck in the position of being considered the world's best in their research, which makes continuing the same work difficult. They may feel they now have to either do something better or nothing at all. That's a particular problem for someone who wins a Nobel with decades left in their career, something like "peaking too early" syndrome.

An article on Nobel Disease at Big Think has examples from history, but it doesn't mean to imply anything about this year's winners, since it was written before they were announced. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Adam Baker)

In the US, and most places, you can buy land, but you can't buy air. What about water? Different nations treat water, water purity, and water rights, differently, but Australia is, so far, the only country that ever monetized their fresh water through private companies. In other words, it's up for sale through the free market. What could possibly go wrong? What happened was that water shifted from a shared public resource to an investment. When big finance is involved, it matters less that everyone has the water they need, and more that a profit can be made.

Well, that was bad enough, but Australian farmers who were doing without water learned a clever workaround that the investors couldn't monetize. And that just caused more problems. It's a really complicated subject, but Half as Interesting explains the mess better than anyone else can. This videois only 5:30 long; the rest is an ad.  -via Digg

The beautifully animated short film Chasse Galerite is a 17th-century folk tale of a talented hunter trying to win a fair maiden's hand in marriage. It's a charming and fantastical story involving flying geese, a peach pit, and a literal version of treebeard. The award-winning video by Brian Hawkins was made with water color on cut paper.

You'll have to read the subtitles, because the narration is in Missouri French Creole, a variation of French that few speak anymore. The audio was recorded almost a half-century ago by Pierre Aloysius Boyer, a French Missouri storyteller who was born in 1910. Since Chasse Galerite cannot be embedded, watch it at Vimeo.  -via Metafilter