A couple of hundred years ago, doctors discovered a horrifying -and possibly fatal- medical disorder caused by "abuse of the genitals." They called it spermatorrhoea, which means involuntary ejaculation. France's preeminent physician of the time, Claude François Lallemand, wrote about the disorder in the 1830s.

During a period of fourteen years, I have collected more than one hundred and fifty cases in which involuntary seminal discharges were sufficiently serious to disorder the health of the patients considerably, and even sometimes, to cause death.

You know that today this would be called "nocturnal emission" or more colloquially "wet dream," which is correlated somewhat with masturbation, but neither is considered harmful. However, in the early 19th century, young men died of all kinds of unknown causes. If he was known to suffer from spermatorrhoea, it could easily be blamed for his death. But rather than studying the reason behind the, uh, event, doctors tried ways to keep it from happening, such as the invention detailed above. It delivered a small electric shock at the first hint of an erection, which woke the patient up and saved him from a wet dream. And it's not the most horrifying device invented to combat spermatorrhoea, which you can see and read about at Thomas Morris. -via Strange Company 

Nina Paley brings us a new episode in her grand project Seder-Masochism, in which Moses is confronted by a slew of ancient goddesses. They sing "You Gotta Believe" by the Pointer Sisters, from the 1976 movie Car Wash. Paley is into experimental methods of animation (as we've seen in other posts), and this one uses gifs animated from still pictures.     

(vimeo link)

The goddess gifs used are available here. You may recall Paley's other awesome musical sequences from the movie-in-progress, like Death Of The Firstborn Egyptians and This Land is Mine. The new one is quite a bit less gruesome. -via Laughing Squid

First we had Simon's Cat's Guide to Boxes, and then Simon's Cat's Guide to More Boxes. There's really no end to the ways a cat loves to play with a box, so Simon's Cat is back to play with more kinds of boxes!

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And yes, a suitcase is a box, if you're a cat. -via Tastefully Offensive

The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, was the home of Sarah Winchester, widow of rifle magnate William Winchester. She spent 30 years having the house built and expanded and rebuilt and remodeled until it was a sprawling jumble of strange architectural details that made no sense, like staircases that ended in a wall and closets that were only an inch deep. The house was turned into a tourist attraction after Winchester's death. But there were plenty of places that tourists didn't see, due to disrepair, safety concerns, or the fact that some rooms were never finished. Locking up some areas also made taking tourists through just plain easier -after all, the tour already went through 100 rooms. When new manager Walter Magnuson took over in 2015, he made it a point to unlock those rooms.    

He did eventually gain access to these hidden spaces, and what he found was both astounding and in keeping with the home’s reputation for eccentricity. Some rooms were missing floorboards, others had been closed off after sustaining severe damage in the 1906 earthquake, and still more were just full of broken tiles. There were entrancing finds, too. He saw jewel-like wallpaper that scattered sunlight into tiny orbs, rows of stained-glass windows mounted inexplicably at waist height, and secret balconies that offered a bird’s-eye view of the many-gabled roof. “It was just in a constant state of becoming,” says Magnuson, who came to Winchester from a senior position at Disneyland. “Some of these spaces, you have a lot of questions: What was this room’s purpose? Who stayed here? What was Sarah thinking?”

Two years of work ensued, and now those hidden spaces are open the public. Read about the restoration project at the Winchester Mystery House at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Spiel)

Redditor spacecatapult is a technology teacher at an elementary school. He/she posted this time-lapse of a project called Pixel Place. Each student places a "pixel," or a small piece of paper, on the board during every class. You can see that they started out with no direction at all, but as time passed, they started working as a team. Spacecatapult took a picture every day.  

I've branded this activity as "Pixel Place" because it allows students to make a physical connection with the term pixel. It's actually been very helpful when we talk about pixels in the context of coding and computers. It's also been great for all of the social reasons you are likely considering in your thesis already. At the start of the year, we mostly just had chaos. Students wanted to just make their mark somewhere. Students are seeing that they can do more and better things when they work together. They even leave sticky notes on the walls to communicate idea with students from other classes - this is truly a collaboration between 500 students. There is also a real sense of a "greater good". Sometimes kids are upset by random pixels or attempts at ruining something made by others. The larger group always seems to value making it look good though, so most vandalism is quickly undone. It's been pretty powerful, especially for something that students only spend about 30 seconds a week doing.

-via Kevin O'Connor

In which Superman is gaslighted. For a moment, I thought we were going to go down another philosophical rabbit hole, and then the truth comes out. You didn't even realize that guy was wearing a really bad toupée and a fake 'stache until you'd finished reading. True, the crime rate had been going down for at least 40 years, but I don't think Superman will ever run out of evildoers to battle. This is the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The hover text and the red button punch line are worth a trip to the comic page.

From Mr Sunday Movies, who brought us The Last Jedi's final battle in 16-bit animation, here's the other fight scene from The Last Jedi. The animation was done by John Stratman and the music is by Kenny Mac. If you are still avoiding spoilers ...don't watch it.

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But then again, if you are still avoiding spoiers, you need to go see the movie already. There's not much time before the next Star Wars film comes out in May. Now if there were only a playable version of this, we would all surely die quickly.

Disney and Marvel Comics artist Brian Kesinger does Star Wars art in the adorable style of Calvin and Hobbes. A couple of years ago, we showed you his comical interpretations of The Force Awakens. Now he has more Calvin-esque observations from the movie The Last Jedi.  

Since today is Groundhog Day, we are reminded of that Bill Murray movie everywhere we turn. It's like this has happened before ...every February second since 1993. Our occasional sense of deja vu draws us to time travel movies like Groundhog Day that play the same scenes over and over again, with small differences that advance the story. Why do we love these movies? Because we all have regrets, and we'd all love to get a do-over, to get it right for once. When we screw up, a time loop gives us another chance.  

The wealth of time loop stories out there testifies to the resonance of the idea. It's a great high concept hook: time loops raise big questions of choice and fate from the get-go and they pull philosophical complexity out of the most banal scenes. A time loop can turn repeating events into puzzles with infinite solutions, or into set-ups with numerous punchlines. The idea of a time loop is so irresistible that we'll probably keep seeing it crop up again and again in pop culture with new twists for as long as we live.

And while Groundhog Day is the most familiar time loop movie, it is far from the only one. Explore plenty of other such films in the post at Digg.

Wednesday night, the security cameras outside radio station KIRO in Seattle caught a vandal trying to break the window on a truck. With a mop. They reported the incident to the police, and then got morning show host John Curley to narrate it in play-by-play fashion.

Last night we captured surveillance footage of a vandal trying to break in to one of our employee's vehicles in our parking lot. While the suspect is still at large, we took the liberty to have John Curley give his play-by-play of the incident.

Take a listen pic.twitter.com/FYQTiJsTDt

— KIRO Radio 97.3 FM (@KIRORadio) February 1, 2018

The guy will soon know that the entire internet has seen his shenanigans. -via Alexis Ohanian

Every once in a while, Hollywood will put its performers in the place of the audience -in a movie theater, watching from the seats. When I saw "scenes that take place inside movies theaters," I immediately thought of the Coen brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?  

Considering that this exchange followed Everett’s discovery that his wife divorced him while he was in jail and is now about to marry a man named Waldrip and declare that he is the new father of their girls you might think it’s allowable for Everett to vent just a little. And poor Delmar, he’s got to listen to every word of it, and the confusion on his face when he’s asked about having a woman is priceless.

Yeah there are other awesome film scenes that are set in movie theaters, but if you don't immediately recall them, you'll want to go see them at TVOM.

The Chicago Bears did not know they were going to win the 1986 Super Bowl when ten of the players got together to record a novelty song six weeks earlier. They didn't even know they'd be in the game. "The Super Bowl Shuffle" was a collaboration between wide receiver Willie Gault and Richard Meyer of Red Label Records. Other players wanted in on the fun, and besides, the song lyrics promised to "feed the needy." The song was an instant hit in Chicago, then went nationwide and ended up at #41 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Incredibly, the VHS copy of the video moved so many units it threatened to unseat Michael Jackson’s Thriller on sales charts. In February of 1986, the song was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group. (It lost to Prince & the Revolution's "Kiss.") Best of all, the Bears’s victory at Super Bowl XX was, at the time, the highest-rated in the game’s history. What started as a glorified joke had become a lucrative venture.

Just how lucrative would quickly become an issue for Illinois’s attorney general.

Gault and Meyer had succeeded in orchestrating an unlikely hit, but they did fumble one detail: No one had checked in with the head office of the Chicago Bears to see if “The Super Bowl Shuffle” had their official blessing.

Complicating matters, no one had determined how much of the profits would go to food charities, or how. Read how "The Super Bowl Shuffle" came about and mess that resulted at Mental Floss.

(Image source: vimeo)

The more we learn about other parts of our galaxy, the more we are intrigued with the possibility of finding life on other planets. In reality, that life would be nothing like our science fiction stories. That's exciting, but the odds are that contact would not be good for us.   

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Aliens could be harmful to us, whether they are what we'd consider "intelligent" or not. And intelligent aliens would almost certainly be our doom. Where do we fit in with alien life? It's all up in the air, so to speak. The latest video from Kurzgesagt explains some of the possibilities of what we might find ...someday. -via Boing Boing

The following article is from the book Uncle John’s Uncanny Bathroom Reader.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jenn Durfey)

Losing baby teeth is one of the earliest and most anticipated rites of passage for a young child. In our part of the world, it often involves a visit from the tooth fairy. But just how old is the tradition, and what came before it? This visit from the trivia fairy will reveal all.

TOOTH OR CONSEQUENCES

“Shed tooth rituals,” as anthropologists and folklorists call the traditions that accompany the loss of baby teeth, have varied widely from one place to another and from one time to another. Every human culture has such rituals, and many have a feature in common: whatever is done with the baby tooth is done in the belief that it will protect the child from harm or ensure that a strong, healthy permanent tooth grows in to replace the old tooth.

For centuries in Europe, it was common practice to “plant” baby teeth in the ground as if they were seeds. Doing so was thought to encourage the growth of the new tooth. Planting the tooth also kept it from falling into the hands of a witch, who could use it to cast spells on the child who lost it. (If there was any question as to whether the tooth had already been bewitched, throwing it into a fire destroyed the tooth and broke the spell.)

THE FIRST TOOTH FAIRY

One of the more crucial components -and often the most overlooked by spectators- is the ice and snow under the performing athletes. The Games cannot rely on the weather providing the required conditions for skiing, skating, and sledding. And the quality of the ice and snow is important for the fastest races and the most intricate stunts. Bumps on a bobsled run? They'll not only ruin an Olympic race, they're also dangerous. Tracy Seitz of Whistler Sliding Centre in Canada explains the intricacies of Olympic ice.

The quality and purity of ice is so important that a special position—the Ice Master—has been created to ensure its viability. Forget sculptors who make intricate ice sculptures; Ice Masters shape ice into some of the most impressive structures on earth. At least a year in advance of the Games themselves, they spray hundreds of paper-thin coats of this ultrapure water on a concrete course or rink, which is chilled by an embedded refrigeration system for rapid freezing. It takes around five days of non-stop work to lay the frozen track for a bobsled run, says Seitz.

This process prevents the formation of frost layers, which form when humid air freezes over the icy surface. Frost layers can trap air bubbles in the ice, which can work their way out as tiny pockmarks. “We don’t think of it [ice] as fluid, but it is very much so fluid, and it’s moving all the time,” says Seitz. “Those layers of air in the ice will create weaknesses that can break out and create inconsistencies in the ice surface.” For a bobsled, one tiny pockmark can cause a sled to bounce, perpetuating the problem. “One bump creates two bumps creates three bumps, and on and on and on,” he says.

The ice for indoor rinks is built to different standards for speed skating, figure skating, curling, and hockey. And the snow under skiers and snowboarders is engineered for speed as well, with the added difficulty of dealing with the vagaries of actual weather. Read about the different kinds of snow and ice and how they are created for the Olympics at Smithsonian.