If the weather clears up later I might mow the pool.

Not all homes in real estate listings are beautiful showrooms. If you look down into your honest price range, you can find some pretty sad fixer-uppers. But a real estate agent should put in a little work to show the good side of a not-so-great house. The Tumblr blog Terrible Real Estate Agent Photographs collects and displays the worst of the worst real estate pictures, with hilarious captions.

Attention to detail is very important. For example, here the agent has dragged the body outside before taking the photograph.

These photos can come about because the agent wants to be upfront about the awful condition of the listing. Or it could be that the agent and the seller just don't care.

Tfw you're halfway through a wash cycle and you decide it would be easier just to sell your house.

Nnow, some of the photos are very clean and well-lit, but show something so architecturally bizarre you have to wonder who came up the idea. Bored Panda has a ranked list of the 30 best photos from Terrible Real Estate Agent Photographs.  -via Nag on the Lake

Proper etiquette is essential for pleasant meals. Lady Fishbourne lays out the rules, which are all legit, but the dinner guests who illustrate them are another story.

This short animation features four guests of curious demeanour who commit unforgivable acts at the dining table. Food flies everywhere while the guests prop their feet up and talk with their mouths full. Thankfully, Lady Fishbourne’s eating etiquette instructions will show these dinner party misfits the error of their ways.

The National Film Board of Canada has preserved this delightful 1976 cartoon by Janet Perlman. -via Weird Universe

Last week, MIT Technology Review published an article called The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same. It was a report on a scientific paper that delved into the synchronization effect among those opposing the mainstream. The article used a manipulated version of the image you see above. A reader responded with an angry message, threatening to sue the magazine for "the slanderous, unnecessary use of my picture without permission." The editor-in-chief checked to see if they had used the image improperly, but no, they had obtained it legally through Getty Images. But he wanted to double check.  

So in the end our creative director ... wrote to Getty Images and said,"Look, we have an angry reader who doesn't like the way we used this photo. Could you check that you know that he signed a model release and the license is all in order?"

They have a team that deals with legal complaints and they went into their archive and checked the details and they came back to us and they said, "Actually the model in this photo does not have the same name as the person who wrote to you."

They wrote to him and ... said, "We don't think this is you." And he replied, "Oh, I guess you're right, it's not."

Now, in case the irony escapes you, the title of the original article contained the words "always end up looking the same." Read the story of the kerfuffle at CBC Radio.  -via Metafilter

There is a good reason that people take their shoes off before walking on carpets in private homes in many parts of the world. That doesn't happen in public places, so carpets get really dirty just from foot traffic. In a restaurant, you have spilled food and drink and servers tracking grease out from the kitchen. Mike Pailliotet is a professional cleaner with high-pressure steam equipment. Here he shows us what a difference a good cleaning makes in an unnamed diner's carpet. So why do restaurants ever have carpet? So the customers don't slip and fall on bare floors. That said, you have to wonder how long this particular restaurant let their carpets go between cleanings. -via Boing Boing

UFO sightings happened everywhere in the 1950s and '60s. They were at first thought to be alien spacecraft, but later on there was the possibility that the Soviet Union could have launched it, or even NASA, as each nation's space program proceeded. There were three notorious UFO crash landings reported in Ireland, in 1950, 1955, and 1962. The 1962 event occurred in Clonsharragh, County Wexford. The police were called, and they in turn called the army to investigate the evidence: a round ball sitting in a new 5-foot wide crater.

People came form a wide area to hear about the mysterious object, but they made no move to go near it even if they could – they were afraid in case it would blast them into eternity. What was it? Various opinions were put forward.

“It is a guided missile,” said one local. “It was probably fired from Cape Canaveral and meant to land in the harbour,” he added.

“I’d say ‘tis a sputnik,” said another, “or one of those yokes the Americans have for testing the upper atmosphere.”

“Whatever it is, ‘tis highly dangerous,” said another. “I wouldn’t like to near it anyhow.”

“It looks awful like a ball-cock to me,” said one of those who braved to go near it before the area was cordoned off.

Read the ultimate verdict on the mysterious object at Fortean Ireland. -via Strange Company 

Note: The image is a mockup of Sputnik 1, and not the actual UFO in question.

Jordan Watson (previously at Neatorama) tries his hand at making a BBC-style nature documentary about his baby daughter Nala. Nala is released into the wild, but is tracked with the help of a GPS-enabled tag and a drone. That doesn't go quite as planned. -via Nag on the Lake

The physician Hippocrates gave us the Hippocratic oath, but his actual medical knowledge was sorely lacking. Well, that was 2500 years ago. But the medical texts he and his followers left behind were very influential in the their day, and they had plenty to say about women's bodies and childbirth, including advice on how to bear a child of the preferred sex.   

As this system of medicine developed, Greek women had the option of skipping shrines and heading straight to a Hippocratic doctor. In the Hippocratic world, women were naturally weak, damp, and cold, while men were strong, dry, and hot. Doctors believed that conception resulted from a fight between “strong” male seed and “weak” female seed, with the winner determining the child’s sex. Hippocratic doctors advised parents hoping for boys to consume hot, dry, and strong foods, such as red wine sprinkled with black cumin. To conceive a girl, Hippocratic doctors prescribed wet, cool, feminine foods, such as lettuce and white wine.

Further advice on conceiving a boy or a girl involved more drastic measures. Read about them at Atlas Obscura.

Snails are a lot like other animals, but we miss it because they are so slow. We also miss it because we don't often observe snails. The person who recorded this has two pet snails named Randolph and Mortimer, even though they are sisters. Go figure. He/she gave them a baby carrot, and started recording when Randolph started playing with the carrot. The snails ate the carrot over the course of a week, but they also played with it a lot. This is a compressed time-lapse video of a long, slow play session. -via Boing Boing

Many people who collect Star Wars merchandise do it out of love for the franchise, but some rise to the level of museum curators or dealers in rare antiquities. The hobbyists and professionals have formed a community around Star Wars toys and memorabilia, and great friendships have been forged over action figures. Zach Tann is a serious collector who knew who was who in the community. In 2017, he was offered the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to buy a toy that was so rare it was never released for public sale.   

Among the promised figures in the January 1979 Kenner catalog was a new Star Wars character, a bounty hunter named Boba Fett. In a time when most action figures were little more than a torso and five twistable appendages, Boba Fett would come with a spring-loaded backpack that could fire a plastic missile.

But before the item could be released, a child choked on a similar missile, this one from a Mattel Battlestar Galactica toy. With that, the dream of Fett's projectile backpack was over, and Kenner scrapped the in-progress design and replaced it with a safer one. But this redesign came so late in the design process that several prototypes of the original Fett figure had already been made. Instead of throwing them out, many Kenner employees held on to them.

The prototypes could fetch many thousands of dollars. Tann paid the asking price, but before he received his Rocket Fett, Tann got news that it might be stolen. And what about the other items he'd purchased from the same dealer? What about all the other stuff this guy had sold to other collectors? Once the ball started rolling, the crimes and possible crimes would rock the entire Star Wars collector community. Read what happened at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg

(Image credit: Kenner)

Michael McCurdy has been keeping up with the police reports in the town of Port Townsend and Jefferson County, Washington. He got local people to read them (with varying levels of drama) and added his own animation. We get a glimpse into small town life, where things can get interesting every once in a while. -via Metafilter 

Think twice before you catch those beads https://t.co/gMqi7d7aBl pic.twitter.com/UA2WSdfKP9

— Bloomberg (@business) March 7, 2019

New Orleans has a big clean up problem every year after Mardi Gras. Tons of cheap plastic beaded necklaces are thrown to crowds from parade floats. While tourists may take them home, a huge amount ends up on the streets, in the drains, and all over town.   

The population of New Orleans swells to three times its normal size this time every year, when more than 1 million tourists converge for Fat Tuesday. The festivities bring in an estimated $165 million to the city, as well as serious trash, which is why several dozen construction machines stand ready to clean up before the party even gets started.

Some 45 million pounds of plastics make their way to New Orleans every year for Mardi Gras, more than half of which consists of beaded necklaces. In January 2018 the city said it had pulled 93,000 pounds of beads from just five blocks of storm drains and more than 7 million pounds of debris overall, the Times-Picayune reported.

The city is tackling the problem from all angles. Drain guards are installed. Biodegradable beads, or at least beads with less toxic ingredients have been developed, but they are still expensive. There are recycling drives. Read about the problem of Mardi Gras beads and what can be done about it at Bloomberg.

If you've ever been to a hospital, you know how frustrating it is when professionals walk in the room, do something to you, and then walk out without introducing themselves. Then someone else comes in and asks, "Has the doctor been here yet?" and you really can't say. Now imagine how confusing it is in an operating room with a team of specialists and medical technicians that are all dressed alike, with masks on. That started to change when Australian anesthetist Dr. Rob Hackett put on a surgical cap with his name and position on it. He got some pushback on the idea at first, but it started to spread. Hackett promotes the idea through his PatientSafe Network.   

Now, medical professionals are showing their support and involvement in the movement by tweeting selfies with their own caps, just like Dr. Hackett’s. Under the hashtag #TheatreCapChallenge, they argue that having their names on them can save vital seconds in life and death situations. The move, they say, can reduce delays and misidentification that occur when clinicians can’t recognize or can’t remember the names of their colleagues in the operating theatre.

“I went to a cardiac arrest in a theatre where there were about 20 people in the room,” Dr. Rob Hackett said. “I struggled to even ask to be passed some gloves because the person I was pointing to thought I was pointing to the person behind them.”

“It’s so much easier to coordinate when you know everyone’s names. It’s great for camaraderie and it’s great for patients as well.”

I'll say. If medical folks did this where I live, I could skip past "Who are you?" and "Are you a doctor?" and go straight to the important stuff: "If you aren't in my network, I can't pay you." Read more about the #TheatreCapChallenge and the PatientSafe program at Bored Panda.

Who would imagine that you could take photographs of shockwaves? NASA, that's who. Ten years of research and development went into the picture you see here, which is a colored composite image of pair of supersonic planes flying under strict parameters in order to achieve the pictures, taken from an accompanying plane.   

The images feature a pair of T-38s from the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, flying in formation at supersonic speeds. The T-38s are flying approximately 30 feet away from each other, with the trailing aircraft flying about 10 feet lower than the leading T-38. With exceptional clarity, the flow of the shock waves from both aircraft is seen, and for the first time, the interaction of the shocks can be seen in flight.

“We’re looking at a supersonic flow, which is why we’re getting these shockwaves,” said Neal Smith, a research engineer with AerospaceComputing Inc. at NASA Ames’ fluid mechanics laboratory.

“What’s interesting is, if you look at the rear T-38, you see these shocks kind of interact in a curve,” he said. “This is because the trailing T-38 is flying in the wake of the leading aircraft, so the shocks are going to be shaped differently. This data is really going to help us advance our understanding of how these shocks interact.”

The data will be used to develop supersonic flight that creates no sonic boom, which has restricted such flights in US airspace. There are probably plenty of other uses that they aren't yet talking about. Read about the new technology at NASA.   -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: NASA)

Are you left brained, or right-brained? Does it really matter? While the different personality types associated with the different brain hemispheres was a big deal for quite a few years, further research shows that the two sides of our head work together on most things. -via Laughing Squid

Some jellyfish have only one orifice for the gut, which it uses for both ingesting food and expelling waste. The comb jellies, however, have a tube all the way through, like higher animals. However, the warty comb jelly (Mnemiopsis leidyi) has a different plan. Its digestive system goes in only one direction, but it stops at the end. That is, until the animal needs to poop. The anus forms only then, and when it's done its business, it closes up again. Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, discovered the jelly's transient anus.  

“It is not visible when the animal is not pooping,” says Tamm. “There’s no trace under the microscope. It’s invisible to me.”

His observations show there is no permanent connection between the gut and the rear of the body. Instead, as waste accumulates, part of the gut starts to balloon out until it touches the outer layer, or epidermis.

The gut then fuses with the epidermis, forming an anal opening. Once excretion is complete, the process is reversed and the anus vanishes.

Because both the gut and epidermis are just a single cell layer thick, this can happen relatively easily and quickly. The animals defecate at regular intervals: once an hour in the 5-centimetre-long adults, and once every 10 minutes or so in the larvae.

Read more about the warty comb jelly and its unique toilet habits at New Scientist. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Bastique)