The character of Han Solo can be described in many ways: confident, cocky, cool, cynical, skilled, and of course, attractive. But is he smart? Some of the decisions he made throughout the original Star Wars trilogy were smart, while others were questionable or downright dumb. Many of Solo's victories come down to dumb luck, but he very humanly thinks he's responsible for them. From the first movie:

Yavin

Han wants no part of an attack on the Death Star and he’s taking his money and leaving before the Rebel base is destroyed.

Verdict: Smart

Assault on the Death Star

Han comes back in the nick of time to save his buddy Luke, giving Luke a clear shot on the Death Star. This is one of Han’s most heroic moments but it was also a little stupid. But here Han isn’t any more stupid than the entire Rebel Alliance.

Verdict: A little stupid but it worked out

So what's the overall verdict? It appears to me that falling in love affected Han's decision-making skills. Read the data that goes into the judgement of Han Solo's judgement at Uproxx. Strangely, nothing from The Force Awakens or Solo is included.

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In 1976, Rita Moreno had already won an Oscar, a Grammy, and a Tony. She won her first Emmy for a performance that year on The Muppet Show in which she sang "Fever" with Animal accompanying on the drums. She remembers the recording session in detail.

And when I watch myself—’cause I’m usually so critical—but when I watch myself, I just laugh at me. What I love about it is that my character’s trying so hard to be sexy and sultry. And this horrible creature in back of me is acting up. [Laughter] See? I can’t stop laughing. It tickles me to death.

Read Moreno's recollection of the sequence at The New Yorker. -via Metafilter

Facebook launched its feature called People You May Know (PYMK) in May of 2008. The purpose was to help users build their network of friends by letting them know who else was on Facebook. The results can be spooky, when you see someone there that you know, but haven't thought about in years. That comes about from Facebook's amazing data-mining power. After all, they take control of your address book, containing emails of not only friends and family, but anyone you've emailed -ever. And you can't opt out of PYMK. People who show up in your suggestions can include your spouse's secret lover, your favorite hooker's other clients, or the person who raped you years ago.   

In the summer of 2015, a psychiatrist was meeting with one of her patients, a 30-something snowboarder. He told her that he’d started getting some odd People You May Know suggestions on Facebook, people who were much older than him, many of them looking sick or infirm. He held up his phone and showed her his friend recommendations which included an older man using a walker. “Are these your patients?” he asked.

The psychiatrist was aghast because she recognized some of the people. She wasn’t friends with her patients on Facebook, and in fact barely used it, but Facebook had figured out that she was a link between this group of individuals, probably because they all had her contact information; based apparently on that alone, Facebook seemed to have decided they might want to be friends.

“It’s a massive privacy fail,” the psychiatrist told me at the time.

And now Facebook has access to much more data than email contacts and friends of friends. The company owns Instagram and WhatsApp, along with other smaller networks. And there's more.

In 2014, Facebook filed a patent application for making friend recommendations based on detecting that two smartphones were in the same place at the same time; it said you could compare the accelerometer and gyroscope readings of each phone, to tell whether the people were facing each other or walking together.

Read an unnerving article about Facebook's PYMK feature at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Jim Cooke/Gizmodo)

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It's human nature to want to help the people you love by fixing their problems, or at least helping alleviate the situation in some way. When someone is going through the grieving process, you can't fix the problem. You can't take away the pain, and most of the time, you can't even share it. Cheering someone up only puts a band-aid on the underlying hurt. But you can be there for them, and that's important. There's more from Megan Devine about grief and how to handle it here. -Thanks, Maika!

Jashim Salam of Bangladesh is the Grand Prize winner of the IPPA (iPhone Photography Awards) after submitting this picture showing Rohingya children at a refugee camp in Ukhiya, Bangladesh. The photo was shot on an iPhone 7, and other award winners were shot on iPhone 5, 6, and 7 plus, which just goes to show that the subject matters more than the camera. See three other top prize-winning photographs at the contest website, with links at the bottom to the winners in various subject categories such as architecture, flowers, animals, news events, and more.  -via kottke

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Demi Bagby jumped onto the sand at Pacific Beach in San Diego and impressed everyone around her. Doing a handspring is pretty impressive, but she just goes on and on and on...  Bagby is quite an athlete, as you can see at her Instagram feed. -via Digg

There are plenty of laws on the books that intend to regulate the private activities of consenting adults, and public activities, too. We're talking about sex. Looking through them, it becomes clear that few are actually enforced, and each of them must have an interesting story behind why they were enacted in the first place. Alex Dalbey looked through the statutes and selected the most absurd sex law still in effect in each state.

South Dakota

It is illegal to use a covered wagon in any way for the purposes of prostitution.

Tennessee

In Skullbone, a woman may not “pleasure a man” who is operating a motor vehicle.

While most of the laws listed are prudish, some are surprisingly liberal.

Louisiana

Streaking is totally legal, as long as it isn’t done with “lascivious intent.”

Read them all at The Daily Dot. Or almost all; Kentucky is not included. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

(Image credit: John Fowler)

The new webcomic Law And Sausages is a collaboration between political science professor Greg Weiner, his brother Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and artist Dennis Silver. It is a lesson in civics in webcomic form, in which Dr. Weiner explains how government works, while using Zach as a (usually bad) example. The title comes from the old adage, "If you love the law and you love sausage, you don't want to see either one being made." The small excerpts here are from the first lesson, about the separation of powers.

The goal of Laws and Sausages is to be a comic about politics, without the politics. We aim to give American readers of all political persuasions the intellectual tools with which to understand their government’s history, philosophy, and mechanics. We aim to be the civics education you either never got or chose to ignore.

You can start at the beginning and read it all by hitting the next page button, and then bookmark the main page to keep up with new lessons, which are posted every two weeks. You can also isolate individual lessons here. -via Metafilter

Virtuoso violinist Niccolò Paganini packed concerts with fans who believed his talent came from the devil in the 19th century. Charlie Daniels told us about how the devil went down to Georgia. But those examples were only two in a long line of stories depicting the devil as a fiddle player.

The image of Satan as a fiddler took off during the Baroque period, beginning around 1600. When Thomas Balthazar played in England in 1655, a music professor at Oxford reportedly stooped down to inspect the German virtuoso’s feet to make sure they weren’t cloven hooves. Later, “Devil’s Trill Sonata,” which dates from 1740, was said to have been composed by Giuseppe Tartini after he woke from a fevered dream in which the Devil played him a solo “so singularly beautiful and executed with such superior taste and precision, that it surpassed all he has ever heard or conceived in his life,” wrote 18th-century French astronomer and music enthusiast Jérôme Lalande.   

Read about the origins and progression of the concept of the devil as a violinist at Ozy. 

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Instant noodles are a miracle. When you're really broke, they are the cheapest meal you can eat in a hurry, with almost no kitchen equipment necessary. And if you aren't broke, you can dress them up with a variety of other foods. And kids love them. Personally, I avoid ramen because of the association of being way too broke for way too long, but I can understand how others look at these noodles more nostalgically. But where did they come from? Momofuku Ando set out to develop an inexpensive food that could be easily stored. Great Big Story tells us how he did it. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

The fairly new Twitter account @Movie_goofs exposes plot holes in movies we know and love from the perspective of someone who just. Doesn't. Get it. Not only are the misunderstandings funny, but the responses from people who want to set him straight are priceless as well.

Seriously?! It was the one moment where it became clear that it was a movie about time travel -that last scene was a warning. And apparently no one paid heed.

— Sally Lansdale (@wislanscraft) August 1, 2018

 
The account is run by a computer programmer named Sean, who explained to The Daily Dot how he was inspired by IMDb critics who didn't understand the movie, and how his Twitter account attracts other people who don't get the joke -meaning they think that @Movie_goofs is serious. He never breaks character when responding to them, but only offers more "plot holes." However, there are plenty of followers who run with the joke.

It was a common name back then. For all intents and purposes, of the equivalent of Jim.

— Bigshotprof (@thebigshotprof) July 31, 2018

This is one Twitter feed that you'll want to check in on regularly.  

I Love Lucy was a groundbreaking TV show in many ways. It ran from 1951 to 1957, and is the oldest show in syndication because it was recorded on 35mm film and then broadcast, so good copies of 180 episodes are available all these years later. Let's learn some more about I Love Lucy.

1. CBS DIDN’T THINK AMERICANS WOULD BUY THAT LUCY WAS MARRIED TO A “FOREIGN” MAN.

When CBS approached Lucille Ball with the offer of turning her popular radio show My Favorite Husband into a television show, she was agreeable with one condition: that her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, would be cast in the role of her spouse (played on the radio by Richard Denning). The network balked—there was no way that American viewers would accept average housewife Liz Cooper (her character’s name on the radio series) being married to a “foreign” man with an indecipherable accent. Never mind the fact that Lucy and Desi had been married more than a decade; such a “mixed” marriage was unbelievable.

2. LUCY AND DESI HAD TO TAKE THEIR SHOW ON THE ROAD TO CONVINCE THE NETWORK BRASS.

Arnaz had a successful career touring the country with his rhumba band, which was one of the reasons Lucille wanted him to get cast as her TV husband—to keep him off the road and close to home. In an effort to show the network (and potential sponsors) that they could work together as a comedy team, they crafted a sort of vaudevillian skit that was inserted into the middle of performances by the Desi Arnaz Orchestra during a tour in the summer of 1950. The audiences roared over Lucille’s antics and her interaction with Desi as she interrupted his band’s concert confusedly, cello in hand, thinking she had an audition scheduled. The “Professor” skit not only convinced the network powers that be that the couple could, in fact, be convincing as husband and wife—it also was such a hit that it was incorporated into episode six of I Love Lucy’s first season.

We also get some trivia about our favorite episodes, like the grape-stomping, the chocolate-dipping, and Vitameatavegamin, in a trivia list about I Love Lucy at Mental Floss.  

The evolution of a food preservation makes one wonder about the failures that came along with experimentation. How many people had to die before we figured out the perfect way to cure a ham? And so it was with canned foods, which were invented in France in the early 19th century, but weren't common in the US until after the Civil War. People didn't quite trust the process, with good reason. However, it turns out that humans have evolved to deal with spoiled food, for the most part.    

Most canned food spoilage is fairly obvious—either the can itself becomes deformed or its contents are visibly spoiled—and relatively harmless, perhaps leading to digestive upset or mild illness. But there was one rare kind of bacteria that was far from harmless: Clostridium botulinum.

This bacteria produces botulinum, the deadliest toxin known to humankind, which can’t be detected by sight, smell, or taste. Botulism doesn’t itself cause cans to be externally deformed, neither dented nor bulging, but those external signs often suggest an insufficient canning process, which can breed both botulism and other kinds of bacteria that have more visible effects. Botulism is also anaerobic, meaning it thrives in oxygen-free environments, precisely like that of canned food. Though it was rare, botulism terrified canners.

Dead consumers tend to dampen the market, so canners not only welcomed regulation by the government, they were quite strict about self-regulation, too. As the industry developed, they worked hard to avoid botulism outbreaks like the one that killed 18 people in 1919. Read about that, along with the history of canned food, at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Serge Ouachée)

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Okay, that explains that. Simon's Cat is having fun in a wheat field that's getting a little deep, when he sees something strange in the air. This video is part of a new series Simon Tofield calls "Sketches," short and not as polished as some of his cartoons, and he expects to have a new one ready more often this way. -via Tastefully Offensive

Lucy the Elephant was built in 1882 in what is now Margate, New Jersey. James V. Lafferty had a six-story elephant constructed as a public relations stunt to draw attention, and it sure did. Lafferty probably had no idea his elephant would outlive him and everyone who was there at the beginning.

The idea was to catch folks’ interest with it, and then lure them inside to show off his South Atlantic City properties from the look-out. Once she was completed in 1882, everyone from presidents, to celebs and the Average Joe came to gawk at the “Elephant Bazaar”. The building was composed of about a million pieces of wood, and 12,000 square feet of tin for the exterior.

She towered over present day Margate, New Jersey, at a height of 65ft. The elephant’s eyes contained telescopes and acted as an observatory for visitors. Its manager claimed to see, from the elephant’s back, Yellowstone Park, Rio de Janeiro, and Paris.

Lucy, as a building, has been used for a quite a few different purposes over the years. She was looking her age when a restoration project was launched to save the elephant in 1969. She got a face lift and a new, permanent home. See pictures spanning almost a century of Lucy's life, including her ride down the street at Messy Nessy Chic.