Behold, an Imperial Star Destroyer made completely out of gingerbread and icing! This was made by the folks who have the Instagram account Star Wars Bakery, who I believe are in Sweden. The ship is not life-size, but it's really big for a Christmas baking project. It's on display at the EA Dice office in Stockholm, along with other gingerbread creations that cannot hold a candle to this piece of art.  -via reddit

(Image credit: Star Wars Bakery)

You've made a list of all the bad things about your job and decided to make the leap to some other company. Will things be better, or just more of the same? You can't know until you try, but you do know what's going on where you are now. Of coure, there's always the chance that the new job could be even worse. One thing we know from statistics is that hopping to a new job is more likely to bring you a better paycheck than asking for a raise where you are now. Maybe that will be enough to make you feel better about going from the frying pan into the fire. This comic is from CommitStrip.

Not sold in stores. Duhhhhhh.

Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.

How the music industry’s TV-driven direct marketing strategies revived vintage hits, salvaged floundering careers, and brought us Zamfir’s epic pan flute.

When I grew up, I listened to a lot of John Denver. Well, not really full songs, so much as the 10-second snippets of tunes that played during his commercials on late-night cable TV. “You fill up my senses like a night in the forest,” Denver sang to the masses, even though he was really only singing to Annie, his first wife. But those choruses and hooks had a way of bleeding together into one super-song. Just listen to the commercial. Don’t watch a fortysomething Denver miming his tunes, and ignore the spokesperson’s voiceover. Just focus on this work as if it’s a single song. It’s a killer hook-bomb, perhaps the most powerful musical concoction outside of Max Martin’s studio. It probably sold millions. Let's ponder the phenomenon of selling music on TV.

“It’s tricky all right. Sometimes we’ll have $2 million spent before we sell one record. You’ve got to know when to sell what for how much where for how long.”

— Mickey Elfenbein, a senior vice president of K-Tel, the marketing company that popularized the music-by-mail approach to selling albums in the 1960s and 1970s, discussing the challenges of finding the right musical product to sell. The company, founded by Canadian farm boy Philip Kives in the early 1960s, wasn’t really built to sell music, but stumbled into the business in 1965 as the firm was looking to diversify. The company, known for its hard-pitch sales approach, figured out that people really loved songs on the radio from a variety of labels, and it compiled those songs onto a single record. It was a hugely effective model. (Kives, widely considered a business genius, died last year.)

Four-year-old Bobby Dunbar disappeared while his family was camping at Swayze Lake in Louisiana in 1912. Hundreds of volunteers searched for him, and the alligators of the lake were even sliced open to see if Bobby was inside, but they found no trace of him. The Dunbars were wealthy people, and cast a wide net to find their son. A tip came in eight months later that Bobby was seen with a poor itinerant worker named William Cantwell Walters, so the Dunbars asked police to detain the man and traveled to Columbia, Mississippi to check the boy out themselves.

The Dunbars arrived by train and were greeted by a cluster of locals who wondered if the mystery of the missing Dunbar boy was about to unravel in their hometown. But accounts vary about precisely what happened next. In one version of the story, Percy was alleged to have cautioned his wife not to see Bobby right away, since the townsfolk seemed ill-at-ease and may have had intentions to beat, or even lynch, Walters, a suspected kidnapper, if he was proven to be at fault. Another description has Lessie racing to meet Bobby for the first time and being uncertain if it was her son; she felt his eyes were too small. For his part, Bobby shrunk away, insisting his name was Bruce.

The next day, Lessie was permitted to give the boy a bath. After examining his moles and other distinguishing features, she pronounced him to be her Bobby without a doubt. The child seemed to have had a change of heart, too, embracing her and calling her “mama.”

So alls well that ends well? Maybe not. Walters identified the child's mother, who seemed as unsure of the child's identity as Lessie Dunbar was. Bobby grew up as the Dunbar's son, but who was he, really? Read the whole story the Dunbar kidnapping at Mental Floss.

Before you go see the Rock in the sequel Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, maybe you should see the original 1995 movie Jumanji with Robin Williams. Or maybe you could save the time and just see the new Honest Trailer for it.  

(YouTube link)

The plot is incomprehensible, and the whole premise is based on a board game that doesn't exist, but hey, it's got Robin Williams, so it was a hit. This Honest Trailer doesn't made Jumanji any clearer, but maybe it was never meant to be understood. So go ahead and see the new film, if you're into that sort of thing.  

A woman shared a picture of the yarn she just bought. It wasn't so much the subject matter of the picture that piqued other people's interest, but the baby in the background.

ma’am is your baby unwell pic.twitter.com/2k1WRjYg5m

— heavy sweater (@someofmybest) December 19, 2017

It's not a baby at all, but a "werepup," a doll that's a species hybrid made to look  like an infant werewolf. This one was made by Asia Charity Eriksen, and you can buy one of her werepups. Does a werewolf baby doll seem too creepy? You can get other dolls of human-animal hybrids or human-fictional animal hybrids, linked at Metafilter.

Will we ever learn? The most popular passwords are just as easy to hack as they ever were. A list at Gizmodo includes such gems as 123456, password, login, welcome, qwerty, iloveyou, and even monkey, which left after the publicity it got a few years ago and has now returned. Check out the full list and why it's important to use a better password here.

Have you ever seen a raccoon without his fur coat? Would you be able to identify this animal if you didn't already know it was a raccoon? Notice the different coloration of only the skin that shows through thin fur on a normal trash panda. We don't know the story of this particular hairless raccoon, but there are several conditions that will cause fur to fall out, or not grow at all on a mammal. He's gone from a furry masked bandit to a scared-looking dumpy blob. I bet he's cold. At least one other raccoon appears to accept him as he is. -via reddit

Theme Park University got the opportunity to ride through Space Mountain at Walt Disney World without the special effects. All the lights are on! You get to see how closely the tracks are wound up. Try to coordinate in your memory where things happen.  

(YouTube link)

This makes clear how much the darkness and light effects add to the ride. One commenter said,

Im laughing at all the trash cans and ladders everywhere as if this is just some warehouse

If you've never been on the Space Mountain roller coaster, there's a comparison video showing what the ride normally looks like at Laughing Squid.

You may have heard about the null hypothesis, but what does it mean? It means that you need to begin an experiment with the idea that nothing will happen, like, there will be no changes in what you're studying when you change the variables. Tom Scott explains while following an experiment. And there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for what you see in the screenshot above.  

(YouTube link)

The experiment here has to do with reading brain waves in zero gravity. Remember, when you do an experiment and nothing happens, it's not a "failure." You've learned that something doesn't make a difference. Yet that lesson isn't sexy enough to get publicity or encourage further funding, which in itself is a variable that affects scientific research.  

Movies about inspirational teachers are common, but in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, that teacher was Robin Williams. And it takes someone very different to make studying poetry in prep school inspirational. William's character John Keating ecourages his students to think (and act) outside of the box, which draws the ire of school administration. Dead Poets Society was both critically acclaimed and a box office hit. Maybe you'd like to learn more about the making of Dead Poets Society.

6.  The director gave the actors materials from the time period so that they knew how to alter their mannerisms.

Try to recall that this film was based in the 1950’s when the term “teenager” was first being used on a wider scope. It helped to understand just how such adolescents would act back in this time.

5. The film was based partly on the writer’s own experience in prep school.

This could be why it seems fairly accurate and doesn’t stray too much from the true experience of being in a prep school.

See more trivia behind Dead Poets Society at TVOM. 

Of the nearly 70,000 elevators in New York City, there remain a few that are manually operated, left over from the early days when riding an elevator was a unique experience, complete with operators who will take you to the height you desire. Some are as opulent as they day they were unveiled, adorned with colorful art and piloted by operators who wear white gloves. Others are utilitarian, just a cage through which you can see floors flying past. And some have been remodeled to resemble modern elevators, although they still require an operator.   

Collectively they form a hidden museum of obsolete technology and anachronistic employment, a network of cabinets of wonder staffed round the clock. No one knows how many there are, exactly. The city Department of Buildings offered a list of more than 600, but spot checks indicated that most had gone push-button long ago. On the other hand, officials at Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, to which most doormen and elevator operators belong, said they knew of only one or two.

A non-exhaustive field survey this fall turned up 53 buildings with manual passenger elevators. There are undoubtedly dozens more, but probably not hundreds.

Why they still exist in such relative profusion, when the city is down to its last few seltzer men and its final full-time typewriter repair shop, when replacement parts are no longer made and must be machined by hand, is a question with many answers. But sentiment plays a large part.

There are also architectural reasons for keeping 100-year-old elevators in some buildings. The people who make a living operating these elevators have quite a few stories to tell. Read about the remaining manual elevators of New York City at the New York Times.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user caren litherland)

Children are wonderful. Parents have a blast seeing the world through their eyes, and they rejoice at all the new things they learn. Every milestone is a triumph, until that time comes when their milestones no longer involve their parents at all. It's normal, and it's painful, but trying to fight against it won't make you a winner. Your children are learning to gradually separate themselves from you. This instinct to become their own person makes itself evident in several ways, none of which you can do anything about.

A couple of years ago, millions of young parents had the mortifying experience of taking their kids to see a brand-new Star Wars movie, only to see said kid trying to surreptitiously watch YouTube prank videos on their phone the whole time. "Don't you get it? This isn't just a cool sci-fi movie, this is the film series that raised me! It's special!"

Then, suddenly, those new parents had a flashback to all of the lame, boring stuff their parents dragged them to or made them watch. And no amount of reminding kids of what it's supposed to mean to them is going to change the fact that even though it's a sacred family tradition that the family cuts down a Christmas tree every year, they're still tired, cold, and doing the same old thing they did last year. "I know for a fact that there are easier ways to do this!"

Read more about the futility of trying to be cool when you are the very person your child is turning away from at Cracked. Don't take it personally. If you weren't the most important part of their young lives, you wouldn't be going through this.

(Image credit: Flickr user Shaine Mata)

Once upon a time, we did things ourselves. Then we made software and told it what to do. Now we have software with algorithms, that learn what to do on their own. They still need input, but what they learn from their input is much more than what we've programmed into them. Before we even realized it, these machine programs know more than we do.   

(YouTube link)

CGP Grey makes sense of all this for those of us who don't program computers, much less design software or build artificial intelligence algorithms. Still, making machine smarter and smarter brings up more questions than it answers. First off, is that really a wise thing to do? -via Metafilter

In May of 2016, four mountain climbers from India went up Mount Everest with four local guides (sherpas). When the group ran into trouble near the summit, the sherpas left. Only one of the climbers from West Bengal, woman named Sunita Hazra, made it back alive while the three men lay frozen on the world's highest mountain. A team of hired sherpas found and recovered the body of Subhas Paul just before the mountain was closed for monsoon season. That left the remains of Goutam Ghosh and Paresh Nath to stay on Everest as other frozen bodies do, some dating back as far as 1924. The Indian climbers were not rich. They had saved up for ten years to climb Mount Everest, and ended up cutting corners, which may've contributed to their deaths. An expedition retrieve Ghosh and Nath would be much more expensive than their original expedition.   

There were three major reasons the Ghosh family desperately wanted Goutam’s body returned. The first was emotional. The idea that he lay near the summit of Everest, alone, exposed to the elements, left to serve as a tragic tourist marker for future climbers, was nearly too much to bear. And they wanted answers about what happened. Maybe his body could provide those answers. Maybe that video camera around his neck, if it was still there and still worked, held clues. Maybe there were memory cards from his camera in his pockets or backpack. Maybe a message for the family. Something.

The second was religious. Hindus believe the body is merely a temporary vessel for the soul. Once the soul is severed from the body through cremation, it is reincarnated in another body. Like most in West Bengal and across India, the Ghoshes were devoutly Hindu. To them, closure required a cremation, and all the ceremonies that came with it.

The third reason, as important as the others, was financial. Legally, in India, Ghosh was considered a missing person. Only when a body was produced, or seven years had passed, would the Indian government issue a death certificate, which the Ghosh family needed to gain access to his modest bank accounts and to receive financial death benefits like life insurance and the pension he had earned as a police officer.

Indian government officials said they would consider funding a recovery expedition, but only if they had proof that Ghosh's or Nath's remains had been located. Gosh's family pressed on, without adequate funds, to bring his body home. Nath's widow couldn't even begin to raise the necessary funds. Recovery would require many sherpas at the height of the climbing season. Read the story of what happened to the expedition and how the last bodies were brought home a year later at the New York Times. -via Kottke 

(Image credit: Sunita Hazra)