Watch an exceedingly pleasant time-lapse video of a guy building an entire log cabin by hand. Canadian outdoorsman Shawn James shows how he did it, then explains more.

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I'm glad he got the exterior done before winter set in! From the YouTube page:

At the beginning of the video, I show a winter drone photo of the cabin in the snow in December. Then I flashback to the first balsam fir tree I cut down with a saw and axe near the cabin. I drag the trees into place and clear the cabin site. All summer, I cut the notches in the logs as I built the cabin up, offsite. Once I was finished notching the logs with a log scribe, saw, axe, adze and wood carving gouge, I loaded up the entire cabin of logs and moved them to my land near Algonquin Park, Ontario Canada.

Once on site, I spent a month reassembling the cabin on a foundation of sand and gravel. Once the log walls were up, I again used hand tools to shape every log, board and timber to erect the gable ends, the wood roof, the porch, the outhouse and a seemingly endless number of woodworking projects.

For the roof, I used an ancient primitive technology to waterproof and preserve the wood - shou sugi ban, a fire hardening wood preservation technique unique to Japan and other areas in northern climates.

Because the cabin is offgrid, I have used handtools for most of the build and without power, I have no options on site regardless. The tiny house will continue to be operated with power, not even renewable energy for now, so I'm heating the cabin with a woodstove fire place, which I also cook on.

The cabin is made of cedar fence posts, twelve feet long and the cabin measures 10 feet x 20 feet inside with a one hundred square foot sleeping loft on the second floor. The floor is made of two inch thick pine planks, torched to help repel water and to give them a rustic barn board appearance.

If you are really interested in the details, James has plenty of other videos about the cabin at his website. -via Digg

There's always an answer to your health questions. Not necessarily the right answer, but an answer anyway. Some are from tried-and-true adages handed down from generation to generation, while others are from experts with diplomas. Then there's WebMD, a modern phenomenon that will convince you that you have cancer or some horrible condition you've never heard of. There's always one of those conditions that will match your symptoms, even if you probably just have a cold. This comic is from Alarmingly Bad. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Your friendly local weather forecaster has a unique job. They are scientists and TV personalities at the same time. They get criticized for being wrong about the weather, but also about being boring or even how they style their hair. And then you have to learn how to interact with a map that's not even there. It ain't easy.

5. THERE’S NO SCRIPT.

Your local TV weather forecaster is ad-libbing from start to finish. “Our scripts are the graphics we create,” says Jacob Wycoff, a meteorologist with Western Mass News. “Generally speaking we’re using the graphics to talk through our stories, but everything we say is ad-libbed. Sometimes you can fumble the words you want to say, and sometimes you may miss a beat, but I think what that allows you to do is have a little off-the-cuff moment, which I think the viewers enjoy.”

6. MOM’S THE AUDIENCE.

Part of a meteorologist’s job is to break down very complicated scientific terminology and phenomena into something the general public can not only stomach, but crave. “The trick is … to approach the weather as if you're telling a story: Who are the main actors? Where is the conflict? What happens next?” explains Bob Henson, a Weather Underground meteorologist. “Along the way, you have the opportunity to do a bit of teaching. Weathercasters are often the only scientists that a member of the public will encounter on a regular basis on TV.”

Wycoff’s method for keeping it simple is to pretend like he’s having a conversation with his mom. “I’d pretend like I was giving her the forecast,” he says. “If my mom could understand it, I felt confident the general audience could as well. Part of that is also not using completely science-y terms that go over your audience’s head.”

Read more about how these professionals bring us the weather forecast at Mental Floss. 

(Image credit: NOAA)

This little ferret wants the dresser drawer open, and will not give up until it is! You have to wonder what's in there. Maybe it's ferret treats, but it could be something as simple as underwear to play with or a place to curl up and sleep.

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Persistence pays off! Yeah, she fell at the end, but the drawer is open enough, and she can get back up there whenever she wants. -via Laughing Squid

The 1991 film Hangin' with the Homeboys follows a group of four guys through one night out on the town. Their various adventures, while comedic, show them that they really didn't know each other as well as they thought. The revelations strain their friendships and force each character to examine his own character and priorities. The movie was deeper than its lighthearted marketing would lead you to believe. Let's learn some more about Hangin’ With the Homeboys.

7.  The film was shot in a dangerous neighborhood.

It was filmed in a part of the South Bronx that wasn’t all that safe. They had to hire extras to make sure that no one messed with the actors or the set.

6. The script was written in three days.

The director was originally going to play the part of Vinny but had to bring someone else in so as to keep the film moving.

There's more trivia about Hangin’ With the Homeboys at TVOM.

Your social media posts form an archive of what you did, what you said, or at least the things you considered important enough to share. What happens when you lose control of that body of information? In this video, a guy dies, and his friends look through his Facebook posts to get an overview of what his life was about.

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Your communications on the web can be as banal or as importannt as you wish them to be. After watching this, you might want to think about the digital legacy you leave behind when your time comes. -via Tastefully Offensive

While we're on the subject, you might want to write down your passwords and leave instructions for what to do with your online presence after you die. You can keep it with the list of bank accounts and where the keys are that you wrote up to make things easier for your survivors.

You might be a little confused. I had to check the tags of this comic from the Awkward Yeti to know what the last guy is. He's the gallbladder, one of those abdominal organs that you really don't understand, like the spleen and the pancreas. The gallbladder stores bile and releases it into the digestive system a little at a time. It can be removed if it causes trouble. So what's he doing? Causing trouble, by producing gallstones. Nothing to be proud of at all. One gets the idea that he may feature prominently in an upcoming arc of the comic, and there's no doubt he'll cause trouble. 

Rella Rivera says her daughters Ryley and Rylyn are excited to go to Costco because their favorite clerk is Maui, the character in the movie Moana. Hey, even a demigod has to make a living!

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Will Va’ana of Kapolei, Hawaii, is glad to play along. He's been Maui for parties and at Aulani Disney resort. You're welcome! -via reddit

These aren't really lies that your parents told you, necessarily, but contributions from readers who will never forget the tall tales told by their parents. Some are Dad jokes, the kind of nonsense that Calvin's dad would pass off as wisdom. Some are terrifying.

And some are downright sweet. This fairy tale was crated to help a child deal with his anxiety.

Read all 28 of these lies at Cracked.

Dani Ochoa posted this video to the Star Wars subreddit. You'll need to turn your volume up to hear her write out an algebraic equation and recreate the rhythm of the Cantina Theme from the original Star Wars film.

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In case you didn't catch how accurate that is, there's also a video with the song played over it. And here's the followup, The Imperial March.

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Maybe it's my age creeping up on me; I passed on this one when I first heard it, but now it's starting to go seriously viral. More interesting was the discussion on the equation itself, which seemed to be something really special, until it was debunked by a crowd of math nerds. -via Metafilter

Giant ground sloths called lestodons once roamed the grassy plains of South America. They've been extinct for thousands of years, but they thrived for millions. The 15-foot-long, 3-ton animals could eat almost anything a tree can grow, including whole avocados, pits and all.  

Giant sloths, along with megafauna like gomphotheres and glyptodons, feasted on whole avocados and spread their seeds over South America. These enormous creatures’ digestive systems could process large seeds, and avocados benefited. When pooped out, far from their parent trees, the seeds could sprout and grow without competition for water and sunlight. It was a good deal all around, and it likely resulted in avocados as we know them: fatty and large-pitted, all the better to attract huge sloths.

While many other fruit plants died out due to changes in conditions, avocados were everywhere, and survived in pockets of perfect climate. Read more about the megafauna that gave us guacamole at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Kamraman)

Barcelona artist Javier de Riba paints beautiful geometric tile designs on floors of abandoned and/or condemned buildings. The work of his series Floors takes meticulous planning and template design. His "interventions" bring both beauty and attention to public spaces that would otherwise be forgotten.

See more pictures of de Riba's painted tile floors in this gallery. Each entry has some history about the building, often a video of the process, and the design in a smaller size that can be purchased as a print.

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-via Cliff Pickover

The 1971 film The French Connection was a violent thriller about cops busting an international drug ring, based on a true story. The film is notable for its chase scene, which was more "real" than the filmmakers ever planned. The French Connection won five Academy Awards (including Best Actor for Gene Hackman as Detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle) and became a classic, setting a new standard for crime films. The filmmakers took a lot of risks to get The French Connection made.

8. The proper permits weren’t obtained for the car chase through the city.

They had a lot of help from police officers both on and off duty to do crowd control for some areas but in others the near-misses were all too real.

7. The movie didn’t have a huge budget.

This explains the weird camera angles and the shaky quality of the shot at times since they would have a guy being pushed around in a wheelchair holding a camera.

There's more trivia about The French Connection at TVOM.

An article at The Journal of Economic History traces the rise of the Mafia to the production of lemons and oranges in Sicily. While citrus fruits were always popular, their importance was boosted exponentially when they were revealed to be both a preventative and a cure for scurvy, which was a plague among long-distance sailors.

In this article, we argue that the mafia arose as a response to an exogenous shock in the demand for oranges and lemons, following Lind's discovery in the late eighteenth century that citrus fruits cured scurvy. More specifically, we claim that mafia appeared in locations where producers made high profits from citrus production for overseas export. Operating in an environment with a weak rule of law, the mafia protected citrus production from predation and acted as intermediaries between producers and exporters. Using original data from a parliamentary inquiry in 1881–1886 on Sicilian towns, the Damiani Inquiry, we show that mafia presence is strongly related to the production of oranges and lemons. The results hold when different data sources and several controls are employed.

Is this why there are so many oranges in The Godfather? You can read the entire paper here. -via Metafilter