Mama always told us that is a secret is no longer secret when you tell even one person. Here are seven cases where it seems to have worked out just fine -so far. The reasons that the secret must remain a secret vary, but the reason two people must know it are understandable: if one dies, the other will retain the secret information, and if one reveals the secret, the other will know who is to blame. Pictured is Carly Simon, who knows who she wrote the song “You’re So Vain” about. The other person who knows will probably surprise you. It’s not the person the song is about! Link

Nite Kongtahworn created this pixeled artwork using Benjamin Moore paint samples. Squint your eyes if you don’t immediately recognize the famous face. Link -via Buzzfeed

Personally, I can’t imagine signing a lease that would allow a landlord to conduct a surprise apartment inspection when the tenant is out. That’s what happened in this scenario from David Thorne, the writer who brought us the picture of a spider and the coffee cup cleaning chart.

Thankyou for the surprise inspection and invitation to participate in the next. I appreciate you underlining the text at the bottom of the page which I would otherwise have surely mistaken for part of the natural pattern in the paper. I was going to clean the apartment but had so many things on my 'to do' list that I decided to treat them all equally and draw pictures of sharks instead. I have attached one for your honest appraisal.

I have read through your list of chores and intend to rectify the situation by wrapping my entire body in eighteen rolls of super absorbent Thick'n'thirsty® paper towels, hosing down the apartment, then rolling around on the floor and rubbing myself up and down walls. I will cover the more stubborn marks with Liquid Paper. I will also get back to you in regards to the premises being inspected in another two weeks, my agreement to do so will depend on availability and not wanting to.

The string of correspondence between David and Peter the manager gets more surreal from this point. Link -via reddit

While we were waiting for Zubbles, I completely missed the development of black light bubbles! Tekno Bubbles are the creation of Byron and Melody Swetland. They glow blue or gold under ultraviolet light, available in one ounce or gallon sizes. You don’t even have to blow bubbles to enjoy this -you can paint the bubble mixture on a surface to make glowing decorations! Link -via Random Good Stuff

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The People’s Republic of China was founded on October 1st, 1949. To celebrate the 60th anniversary, a three-hour parade was held in Beijing. This video by Dan Chung shows the highlights in both time-lapse and slow motion. -via reddit

Among the scientists, inventors, engineers, and leaders who left their mark on the world are some who were mentally ill or even downright insane. The ten men in the list showed signs of paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, crippling introversion, and other disorders. For example, you know Samuel Morse as the inventor of the telegraph and Morse Code, but there was more to him.

He was a little paranoid. He was determined that the Blacks, Jews, Catholics and the entire nation of Austria were working to destroy the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants of America. He wrote several books on the subject in which he talked about how the immigrants and lesser races were oppressing all the white people, how the Jews and Catholics were working together to kill Protestants, and how all of these groups met on a regular basis in the basement of an orphanage in Ireland. Oh, and Austria's in there too somewhere.

Link -via Unique Daily

The 2016 Olympic summer games will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The 2012 games will be in London, England. Since the first modern Olympics in 1896, 22 cities have hosted the summer games, some more than once. Can you name all those cities in five minutes? That’s the challenge of this Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. Good luck -I could only name 16. Link

The 19th annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded Thursday night at Sander’s Theater on the Harvard campus. The awards are given to “honor achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think.” A few of the winners:

PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means "Driving License".

See the entire list of winners at Improbable Research. Link

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so you’ll see a lot of items produced in pink. Some product tie-ins will make you scratch your head and smile trying to figure out how they might have anything to do with breast cancer. Most likely, the people in charge of these companies are committed to the cause and this is the best way they can show it. Still, how can you see a pink cement mixer and not do a double take? http://whipitoutcomedy.com/2009/09/30/15-strangest-breast-cancer-awareness-products/ -via Gorilla Mask

Fifteen years ago, Berkeley scientist Tim White and a team of researchers from Ethiopia and America found bones of a hominid older than the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy (A. afarensis). The team collected 110 bones, enough to reconstruct the skeletons of what was unveiled today as Ardipithecus ramidus. These bones date from 4.4 million years ago! Carl Zimmer points out several ways that this prehistoric species tells us new things about the development of humans. For example, in some animal species (including apes), male canine teeth are much bigger than the female version. These are the species in which competition for females often turns violent.

White and his colleagues found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.

There have been a couple of hominid bones found that are even older than Ardipithecus, but none with enough fossils to even begin reconstructing a skeleton. Link -via Metafilter

Make your own fractals with just a mouseover on these magic dots. Other interactive toys on the same site are just as fascinating, or should I say, addicting. Link -via Gorilla Mask

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Stephen Fry gives Mark Carwardine a hard time after the parrot attempts to mate with the zoologist. From the BBC series Last Chance to See. -via Arbroath

Today is the 38th anniversary of the opening of Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. In honor of the occasion, Disney created a stop-motion video using the tilt-shift effect.

“A Day at the Magic Kingdom Park” is a never-before-seen look at the park in miniature scale. The video is created from a series of photos snapped inside the Magic Kingdom Park. And the trick is tilt-shift photography.

This really does remind me of my last trip to Disney World -because of how crowded it is! Link -via Boing Boing

Artist Amy Rawson (previously at Neatorama) has created a cute-as-can-be needle felted zombie bunny for Halloween. Or at least, it's cute on the side its eyeball isn’t falling out of! See more pictures at eBay. Link

120 little people live in a village near Kunming, China. The village was set up to protect the dwarves from discrimination. You can’t live there if you are over 4 feet 3 inches tall.

Now the group has turned itself into a tourist attraction by building mushroom houses and living and dressing like fairy tale characters.

"As small people we are used to being pushed around and exploited by big people. But here there aren't any big people and everything we do is for us," said spokesman Fu Tien.

You have to wonder if there are exceptions to the community rules for normal sized children of the current residents when they pass the height limit. Link