Any time we see American cities from above, we are astonished at how much real estate is set aside for cars, both in streets and in parking lots. Sure, we have multi-story parking garages in places, but even they take up a lot of room because there has to be drivable roads to each floor and each space. Tokyo tackled that problem with mechanized and computerized garages that store many cars in much less space. Some of them are even underground, which means they take almost no real estate at all! Those kinds of garages cost an awful lot to install, and pay off in nebulous benefits over a long period of time, which means they are probably out of the question for the US. But when you add charging capabilities for electric vehicles, robotic garages sound like a complete winner.

In other news, Tom Scott is in Japan, so we are liable to see some really cool stuff in the next few weeks.

Smart phones are so smart that a two-year-old can learn to use one in no time at all. And they do. If you've had children in your home in the last 15 or so years, you probably have some pictures of yourself that you would never share, but you keep them because your child took them. One of the women in Kira Cook's online mother's group shared one to lighten the mood during the pandemic, and then others followed. It's heartening to know others have the same experience. The photos are not flattering, but they give us a glimpse into what real life looks like and how children see it. They don't care that mommy doesn't want to have her double chin or droopy morning eyes recorded; they love mommy and think a picture should be taken.

Sharing such pictures brings out the humanity we all share. Life is messy, and kids don't care. Read about how liberating it feels for mothers to know that they are far from alone in their less-than-photogenic moments at Romper. -via Kottke

How high did this Kia Soul jump? What caused this to happen? And is the driver alright? We don't know exactly how high, but one redditor noted "the brake lights of hope." This was caused by a runaway wheel. And the driver managed to walk away. Whew. Anoop Khatra caught the action on his dashcam Thursday when a truck lost a wheel that caused the havoc.

Witnessed and recorded the most INSANE car crash yesterday, you can see Autopilot also swerve and avoid the rouge tire for me $TSLA pic.twitter.com/csMh2nbRNX

— Anoop (@Anoop_Khatra) March 25, 2023

Notice how the tire came back a second time to get one last punch. The car was certainly engineered to handle this kind of accident. We can see the curtain airbags deployed.

The flip and land and roll distributed the impacts. Causes less injuries than one hard direct impact. But still a hell of an accident, that Kia handled it well.

— Space In My Brain (@SpaceInMiBrain) March 26, 2023

The accident occurred on the Ronald Reagan Freeway in Los Angeles. There were no passengers in the Kia, and no major injuries.  -via reddit

If you are of a certain age, you remember when people had to undergo a blood test in order to get a marriage license. In my elementary school, kids who "knew" told us that it was to uncover possible Rh factor incompatibility, which was a thing at the time. Today, young people tell each other that it was a genetic test to make sure the bride and groom were not related to each other, which is demonstrably wrong, because DNA tests just weren't available back then. Eventually we all learned on our own that it was a test for syphilis, a part of a nationwide battle against the disease launched by U.S. Surgeon General Thomas Parran Jr. in the 1930s.

States took up the challenge with tests for people getting married until the majority of states required them. Some states later tested for other diseases, but then gradually dropped the requirement until the last premarital blood test was dropped ...in 2019. Read about Parran's crusade and the results of these required tests at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Library of Congress)

pic.twitter.com/hKHQ3w4BS0

— ONT WTF (@OntWtf) March 24, 2023

Personal robots don't have to be super high tech to get the job done. Kael Schoerlin has a FPV RC car (a remote control car with a camera) with a transparent cargo bed and he's not afraid to use it. When he ran out of fish food, he sent the car to get it! The car doesn't have a speaker, but can communicate pretty well by opening its bed and tooting its horn. It also has a tiny "driver" wearing a cowboy hat that will nod its head by remote control. The employees at Petco were delighted to be visited by a toy buying food for a fish, and even more delighted when it responded to them in its own limited way.

The original video is at TikTok. The car also went to get a banana and negotiated a deal, delivered a donation to a food drive, and purchased candy.  -Thanks, WTM!

Some people call them "life hacks" today, but in bygone years they were "handy tips" or just "advice." Today they can rack up TikTok views, just like in the old days when they filled magazines that people bought, but the safety and efficacy can range from useful to downright dangerous. Sure, it might have once been a good idea to set your mattress outside in the sun to fight mold and vermin, and lard can heal chapped skin. You can distinguish butter from margarine by burning it, as illustrated above, but wouldn't it be easier to just taste it? However, some of these tips worked on the same principle as hitting your toe with a hammer to get rid of a headache.

For example, a mixture of menthol, cocaine, and boric acid could be snorted to fight congestion. Whether it worked or not, boric acid is poisonous. So is leaving mercury out to fight bedbugs. A pinch of borax might make your expired milk last a little longer, but it is also poisonous.

These old-timey tips sometimes came with a hilarious bit of honesty. One columnist suggested that you use roast peas, grains, or bread crusts if you run out of coffee beans. She added, "None of these are very good." Read all 25 handy tips from way back when at Mental Floss.

(Image source: New York Public Library)

I heard my niece is entering the research phase of her PhD course, and had to make jokes about the poor grad students who spend all day counting people in public bathrooms or sifting tons of dirt looking for bone fragments just to be listed as et al in the final publication. However, Crystal Owens of MIT's mechanical engineering department got approval for a study of the physics of an Oreo cookie.

Owens aimed to discover if there is any way to twist open an Oreo and achieve creme sticking to both wafers. You are shaking your head no. At least now it's been scientifically proven. Owens and her team used a rheometer, a device that twists cookies open, to test different twisting speeds and different cookie flavors. This involved gluing the cookies to the rheometer's discs, which takes some of the magic out of the experiment. They tested more than 1,000 cookies, both by machine and with hand techniques. The results showed that 80% of the time, the cookies ended up with all the creme on one wafer, no matter how slowly the cookie was twisted or what method was used.

The researchers suggested that Oreo might turn the wafers over so that the printed side could grab the creme. That's not going to happen, because that's branding. It is evident that the creme is more cohesive than adhesive. If you want to eat an Oreo and have a consistent ratio of creme-to-wafer, you can always bite them like you would another kind of cookie. -via reddit

(Image credit: Jacek Halicki)

When archaeologists discovered the oldest winery yet -8,000 years old- in Georgia (the country, not the state), linguists weren't the least bit surprised. They had already traced the modern word "wine" back to the region and the era by reverse-engineering it, since it occurs in various forms in so many other languages, in a way that might remind you of prehistoric genetic research. Linguists are a clever bunch. But they believe mead, or honey wine, is even older for the same reasons. Some of our terms for alcoholic beverages are indeed ancient, while the origins of others are just a matter of deciphering the historical record. When our anicent ancestors invented language, and later figured out how to write things down, they wrote a lot about alcohol. Humans have always cherished their booze. PBS's Otherwords gives us a quick lesson in how alcoholic drinks got their names. I'll drink to that! -via Laughing Squid

A few years ago, I posted a link to an article about Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first Black woman to become a medical doctor in the US. The post links to an article on a now-defunct site that displayed a picture of a woman who is not Dr. Crumpler.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler was a groundbreaking figure with an amazing story that's been posted in many places. She received her medical degree from the New England Female Medical College in 1864 and dedicated her career to the care of Black women and children who were denied medical treatment from white physicians. But there are no existing photographs of Dr. Crumpler.

The many photos purporting to be Dr. Crumpler attached to biographies, quotes, and memes are of other women, many who deserve to be lauded in their own right. The photo above is of Dr. Georgia E. Lee Patton Washington, who was born in 1864 and became the first Black woman to be a licensed doctor (and surgeon) in Tennessee. Fake History Hunter collected quite a few images attached to Dr. Crumpler and identifies who they really are. I'm sure you are disappointed that something on the internet turned out not to be true. -via Strange Company

Witness protection is crucial for certain legal cases, when testifying against someone might endanger your life. So we have the federal Witness Security Program to make sure that doesn't happen, and that witnesses don't have to risk their lives to tell the truth. WITSEC has never lost a witness who complied with their rules. It's a lot more serious than what we saw in My Blue Heaven. Half as Interesting goes through how the process works. Going into witness protection is a pretty drastic life change, although for certain people, it's a great opportunity to start over. Although I doubt they would ever put anyone up in Aspen, Colorado, because that town is tiny, very expensive, full of rich and famous part-time residents, and requires altitude acclimation. And we find out that a My Blue Heaven situation actually happened at least once, in Orange County, California. The last minute of this video is an ad. -via Digg

It's been said that you can tell that a photographic image was generated by artificial intelligence if the number of fingers or teeth are wrong. The industry is well aware of that, and recent updates have dramatically improved how many fingers humans have in such images. But they still have a way to go in understanding humans overall.

Dan Leveille has been experimenting with the March 16th update to the AI program Midjourney. While the people generated are more realistic than ever, Leveille noticed it has a real problem understanding spaghetti and how people in the real world eat it. It's as if spaghetti were specifically invented to make a mess. You can see more images at Geeks Are Sexy.

But let's consider how neural networks learn. They are given boatloads of publicly-available images from the internet. Considering that the 'net is a repository of the world's knowledge, that makes sense. But what kind of spaghetti-eating photographs do everyday people post on social media? The times it makes a mess. There is little entertainment value in posting a picture of someone eating spaghetti in a normal manner, and we don't really want to share pictures of ourselves eating. But we love to make other people laugh. Midjourney was most likely inundated with thousands of images of toddlers and drunk people trying to manage a plate of spaghetti with hilarious results. So this is what you get.  

Scientists nominated them, a jury narrowed them down to five finalists, and then the public voted. The overwhelming favorite was Concholepas concholepas, also known as the Chilean abalone, locally called locos. The Chilean abalone has been crowned the International Mollusc of the Year for 2023. This abalone, found in Chile and Peru, is a murex snail that develops a spectacular seashell. It is culturally significant, but is now endangered because it is also delicious.  

As the International Mollusc of the Year, the Chilean abalone has won an important prize. Its genome will be sequenced as an aid to studying these sea creatures and how they adapt to polluted ocean conditions. This will be particularly useful, as the abalone's haemocyanin (an alternative to hemoglobin that makes the abalone's blood change colors depending on oxygen level) contains properties that appear to fight cancer in humans.

Read more about the Chilean abalone, plus the four other finalists in the International Mollusc of the Year contest. They include a giant deep-sea oyster, a leopard slug, and two lovely nudibranchs. -via Metafilter

The gravestone of George Spencer Millet tells a sad tale. The boy worked at the New York Metropolitan Life Building in Manhattan. On February 15, 1909, he mentioned to his co-workers that it was his 15th birthday. The young ladies in the office said they would give him kisses for his birthday. That wouldn't be proper during work hours, so they waited until the office closed at 4:30. Then at least six women descended on young Millet in a frenzy.

The problem was that Millet had an ink eraser in his pocket, a sharp instrument resembling a knife. As he was knocked down by the women set on kissing him, the ink eraser pierced his heart, and he died soon after. One of the women was arrested, but charges were dropped after the exact cause of death was determined. Read the story of the boy who was kissed to death at Amusing Planet.

Jean-Yves Blondeau invented the roller suit, consisting of body protection and 32 wheels distributed over the body, as a design student. He introduced it to the world in 1995, and custom-builds them for skating enthusiasts ever since. As you might guess, they are very expensive. You may have seen these suits in movies, variety shows, or the occasional public relations stunt. Now you can not only learn the story behind the suit, but watch the Rollerman show it off. Yes, even at age 52, Blondeau takes the suit out buggyrollin. Make sure you watch at least until the night time version is shown, and the new self-propelled version. I would say something like "don't try this at home," but I don't know anyone who could afford to, much less be able to survive it. -via Nag on the Lake

In 1923, Viennese author Felix Salten published his novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods. It was a coming-of-age story about a young deer. Walt Disney later obtained the rights to it and produced the 1942 animated movie Bambi. That movie is now a children's classic, although is often remembered as traumatic for the offscreen death of Bambi's mother at the hands of a hunter. That trauma doesn't hold a candle to the original novel.

Bambi, a Life in the Woods was not a children's book at all. The novel did not depict forest creatures as particularly cute. The main plot follows Bambi as he grows up and learns to live in fear of man, the biggest danger for deer. His relatives and friends are, one by one, shot and killed by hunters. Even Bambi suffers a gunshot wound. It was well understood in Austria that Salten's novel was an allegory for the pogroms against Jews in pre-Nazi Europe. In 1935, the Nazis banned Salten's novel and its sequel Bambi's Children, and included it in public book burnings. Original editions are therefore quite rare.

So how did Bambi go from a terrifying allegory to a cute young Disney character? That's part of the story of Bambi's first hundred years, as told at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting