A wetsuit is a diving suit that isn't waterproof, but it still keeps you warm. The small amount of water that gets in is warmed with body heat and is also insulated from the cold outside the suit. This guy went swimming in a pool in a wetsuit -don't ask me why- and it appears that the water got into the suit a whole lot easier than it's getting out. Maybe he borrowed a suit that's too big for him.  

(YouTube link)

Look! He's turned himself into a water slinky! That has to be frustrating. And heavy, too. But he made us laugh, so that's worth something. -via Digg 

So far, 89 movies have won an Academy Award for Best Picture, meaning the members of the Academy voted it the best picture of that year. But if you rank them against each other, only one comes in first place and one in last place, and half of them fall below the median. Of course, this is all based on opinion, so your rankings will vary. The rankings are based on a variety of factors, like how well the film had stood the test of time, especially compared to other films nominated in the same year. You'll be reminded of also-rans that are better than most winners, including some classics that weren't even nominated. While you might want to skip through the list to find the movies you're familiar with, that still leaves a lot of reading in this list at Buzzfeed. We find out what movie will be the 90th winner this Sunday night.

(Image credit: Justine Zwiebel/BuzzFeed)

When I was young, there was some question about defining Baby Boomers. For a while, the cutoff was 1960, which would include me, but not my brother. Later on, he was welcomed into the fold when the U.S. Census declared 1964 as the cutoff. My daughters, born in 1997 and 1998, assumed they were Millennials, until someone said the cutoff was 1998, which would put them in two different generations even though they are only a year apart. Now it seems that they are both a part of Generation Z, Post-Millennials, or whatever they eventually decide to call them. The Pew Research center has declared these parameters.

The Silent Generation: Born 1928-1945 (73-90 years old)
    Baby Boomers: Born 1946-1964 (54-72 years old)
    Generation X: Born 1965-1980 (38-53 years old)
    Millennials: Born 1981-1996 (22-37 years old)
    Post-Millennials: Born 1997-Present (0-21 years old)

Will that change anything? Who knows! It won't change anything about your life, except possibly your label. Read more about how the change came about at Mental Floss.

The picture above is an advertisement for the college bookstore at John Tarleton College in Stephenville, Texas. The year was 1967. They had quite a supply of cigars and pipes for Joe College, seen here in his white socks. Local businesses bought ads in the high school's or college's yearbooks and supplied pictures, usually with their employees and everyday customers, but relatives who were students that year were always included. Here's an ad in Biola University's 1973 yearbook.

You can't get much more '70s than that! Well, maybe if it were in color, we could see how the plaids did not actually coordinate with anything. See a gallery of yearbook ads from the 1960s and '70s at Flashbak. -via Everlasting Blort

Yes, you can make a polka out of the songs of the Broadway musical Hamilton. All you need is an accordion and Weird Al Yankovic! Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has been a fan of Yankovic since childhood, and they've collaborated before.

2) We truly believed our screams made Yoda happen.
It was, at that point, the best moment of my life.
Today was a VERY close second. pic.twitter.com/aUq9QKDXU2

— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) September 25, 2016

And now, Yankovic gives us a medley of quite a few of the songs from the show, as part of Miranda's Hamildrops project. There's no video (yet), but you can listen to it.

 

(YouTube link)

-via Metafilter

The rite of cremation is growing among Americans. Now, about half of all deaths involve cremation instead of burial. There are quite a few reasons for this: it's less expensive, it saves land for other uses, and most importantly, it has become more socially acceptable. However, the actual process of cremation remains out of sight to the public, and even to the family members of the deceased. Caren Chesler took a tour of a crematorium and talked with the professionals that carry out the process.

The bodies arrive in caskets, occasionally made of wood but more commonly cardboard. They remain in these containers during the entire stay. There are health reasons for this, such as protecting the technicians from infectious diseases. There are moral reasons—“the family would want them in something,” Koslovski says. There are logistical reasons, too. “It would be extremely difficult to load a set of human remains without a casket. Just think of a body, and trying to put it into a cremation unit.”

The caskets go into the crematorium’s walk-in cooler, which is lined with shelves of them. One casket has a label on it from Delta Airlines that says, “Human Remains," and under it, "Delta Cares." Bodies typically remain a day or two in the cooler, because most states require a 24-hour waiting period between when someone dies and cremation can occur. When something is so final, you want to take a pause.

Read all about cremation, and learn the steps that these professionals go through to carry out their jobs at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg  

(Image credit: Caren Chesler)

Look at this beautiful planet! This video was compiled from data relayed by the Himawari satellite during October of 2017. The satellite is in a geostationary orbit, meaning it stays above the western Pacific all the time as it orbits at the same rate that the earth rotates. Meanwhile, day turns to night and again to day, and weather systems move along the earth's surface.  

(YouTube link)

The original resolution of the video was 5500 x 5500, but at YouTube, it's 8K, which is still pretty good. Because of the cloud cover, it's hard to see any land masses besides Australia. However, you can distinguish Japan by the way it lights up at night. Scott Manley posted this as a sample, a part of a longer explanation of how the images were captured.

The Advanced Baseline Imager is the state of the art in meteorological imaging and it's been flying for a couple of years on the Himawari 8 and more recently on GOES-16. Today GOES-S is scheduled to launch to ultimately replace GOES-West so I thought it would be interesting to explain how the specialized camera works and to show off some pretty pictures it's taken.

(YouTube link) 

-via Metafilter

When the snow conditions are just right, the classic way to build a snowman is to roll up a ball of snow, and then another, like the video game Katamari Damacy. YouTuber ImDranzR caught his border collie doing just that a couple of weeks ago.  

(YouTube link)

Don't even know how he got it started, nobody but him and my other dog been in the back garden

Border collies are smart. I bet he saw someone do this on TV. But he's not really thinking of a snowman; he's just excited to have a big ball to play with! I sure wish we'd caught the beginning of this adventure. -via Tastefully Offensive

(Image credit: Luc Melanson)

In the past, making the bed was sort of a nightmare.

I'd like to dedicate this column to the washer-dryer in my building’s basement. You are a magnificent machine, and I’m sorry for taking you for granted. I bow before the genius of your elegant spin-rinse-drain cycle. You earn those quarters, my friend. I’d also like to give a big shout-out to your pals, the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher.

No doubt, modern housework is as pleasant as sitting through your niece’s recorder recital. But compared to housework of the past, we are living the domestic dream. For centuries, chores were unimaginably sweaty, painful, smelly, time-consuming affairs.

Let’s start with laundry. Washing a shirt in Victorian England involved at least eight painstaking steps. In his book At Home, Bill Bryson explains that you had to soak the laundry in smelly lye for several hours, pound it, scrub it, boil it, rinse it, wring it out, haul it outside, and bleach it.

This is a truly weird idea. Mehdi, also known as DrMachakil (previously at Neatorama) found movie scenes and songs that contained the exact same line, and mashed them together. The result... uh, it's weird, too, but it sometimes works strangely well. When it doesn't, well, its still strange. 

(YouTube link)

I hope he does a follow up with more of these when he finds them. -via Laughing Squid

Richard Appiah Akoto is an information and communication technology teacher at a junior high school in Sekyedomase, Ghana. He is teaching students how to use Microsoft Word without a computer. To be precise, he is prepping the students for the national high school admission exams they will soon take. But the rural school does not have computers to practice on. Akoto has his own laptop, but it doesn't use the same features the students will be expected to know.

That written exam relies on students’ ability to remember what is in the syllabus, which has not been updated since its introduction. Last year, only one of his students managed to get an A.

“Definitely those in Accra [Ghana’s capital] will pass the exam because you cannot compare someone who is in front of a computer, who knows what he is doing with the mouse to someone who has not had a feel of a computer mouse before”, says Akoto.

Since the Facebook post with these pictures has gone viral, several individuals and organizations have stepped forward to offer computers -including Microsoft. Read Akoto's story at Quartz Africa. -via Geeks Are Sexy

In the past 24 hours, we've featured two comics that question the nature of reality and the universe. The humor comes from our confusion about those subjects. On the serious side, Kurzgesagt released a video today that takes a science-based look at reality. As in string theory.

(YouTube link)

Yeah, quantum physics and string theory are scary words to hear, but this video gives a simple overview that makes it seem easy to understand. I said "seem," because you can go much deeper and leave confused. In a nutshell, the answer to "What is the true nature of reality?" is a resounding "We don't know!" At least it's in beautiful Day-Glo colors. -via reddit

We've featured the minimalist posters of Dutch artist Chungkong before, but it's been a while. His latest project is a series of posters for movies that have been nominated for this year's Academy Awards. Check out how little he needs to illustrate the ideas behind The Post, The Boss Baby, Dunkirk, Phantom Thread, Darkest Hour, Loving Vincent, The Shape of Water, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. You can see all eight posters in the series, plus Chungkong's earlier movie posters, at his website. If you have a favorite, you might want to buy one!

You know what they say about headlines that pose a question -that the answer is always no. In this case, the findings are too complex for a mere yes or no, and the research itself is raising more questions. Some anthropologists believe that human sacrifice helped to establish and maintain the power of authority figures over the lower classes from whom sacrifices were chosen. Anyone who threatened that authority could be targeted as well. Societies that are structurally unequal are easier to rule and to hold together. To check that theory, scientists created databases that combine the many societies that practiced human sacrifice. One, called Pulotu, has information on 100 traditional Austronesian cultures. Another, called Seshat, contains data from 400 societies over 10,000 years. The idea that societies that practiced human sacrifice grew and became more complex appears to hold up -but only to a certain point.

The results coming out of Seshat—which have yet to be published—suggest that social control may not be the whole story, however. No society in Pulotu comprises more than a million people, while Seshat includes “mega-empires” whose subjects numbered in the tens of millions. Seshat’s founders therefore argue that it tracks social complexity closer to modern levels, and they find that, beyond around 100,000 people, human sacrifice becomes a destabilizing force. “Our suggestion is that this particularly pernicious form of inequality isn’t sustainable as societies get more complex,” says Whitehouse. “It disappears once they pass certain thresholds, because they cannot survive with that level of injustice.”

Rather than being an essential stepping stone to greater complexity, the Seshat team argues, at these thresholds human sacrifice became a parasitic practice—an attempt, often by military heroes who had transformed themselves into “god-kings,” to seize and maintain power, to the detriment of social cohesion. That’s because, whereas human sacrifice might have terrorized the members of a smaller, simpler society into obeying their self-styled leader, it could no longer do so in a large and ethnically diverse one. There, it was easier to disobey the ruler, or desert, and evade punishment—and the temptation to do so only grew stronger as societies grew larger.

So what held a society together when they grew past human sacrifice? Military might is one facet being studied, while religion is another. Read what scientists are saying about the subject at The Atlantic. -via Digg

If you're lucky, you have fond memories of the wonderful dishes your grandmother used to cook. If you're even luckier, she wrote out those recipes so you could make them on your own. These traditional family recipes get handed down to a generations who believe they have something special that no one else could replicate. A restaurant owner gave his grandmother's secret potato salad recipe to his chefs to recreate, and they laughed because they knew that recipe came from the label of Hellman's mayonnaise. That happens more often than you think. Atlas Obscura's food section, Gastro Obscura, asked readers to send in stories of secret family recipes.

In response to our call, 174 readers wrote in with stories of plagiarized family recipes. Hailing from New York to Nicaragua, from Auckland, New Zealand, to Baghpat, India, they prove that this is a global phenomenon. The majority of readers described devastating discoveries: They found supposedly secret recipes in the pages of famous cookbooks, and heard confessions from parents whose legendary dessert recipes came from the side of Karo Syrup bottles.

You can read some of the funnier stories at Gastro Obscura. There are some recipes you might want to try, too.

(Image credit: Paul Boston)