The Shweeb began as an innovation in mass transit. It is a monorail system in which people ride in pods slung below the rail and propel themselves by pedaling in a recumbent position. The folks at Google were so intrigued by the idea that in 2010 they granted the company a million dollars to develop the idea. One commenter speculated that the guys at Google thought it would be fun to use this to get around the campus. Tom Scott takes a ride in one and shows us how it's done. Would you be willing to commute to work in a Shweeb? To me, it looks scary, uncomfortable, tiring, and liable to induce motion sickness. Imagine having to take your grandma or a small child with you. So far, the Shweeb is only in operation at a theme park in New Zealand. Maybe it's fun and a good workout, but probably not something you'd want to deal with every day.

A "successful" movie could be one that has stood the test of time and became a classic. Or it could be one that won a lot of awards or got rave reviews. But those are hard to standardize, so let's just look at dollars. Even then, "successful" can mean different things. 

Ask anyone what the top movie of all time is, and they'll say Avatar, which has grossed almost three billion dollars worldwide. That figure is top of mind these days as we watch Avatar 2 soar up the chart and shovel in cash. But there's a flaw in that thinking that is obvious on the chart. Ticket prices are now higher than they've ever been. There were no billion-dollar-grossing movies before 1990, and only two films made a billion and a half before 2010 (both by James Cameron), but now plenty of them do. That's inflation. If you were to adjust those dollar amounts for inflation, you'd see a very different chart -and you can see that chart at Information is Beautiful.

But that is still defining "success" as box-office gross. What if we defined a movie's financial success as return on investment? How much a movie makes compared to its budget gives us a whole new chart that will surprise you with a completely new top tier of films. But it's not the last chart, nor the most astonishing chart. If you adjust a little by adding more films that didn't quite make the top 500 cut, you'll find some intriguing data on movies with a huge ROI. And that tells us not only what movie might be defined as the most successful ever, but what type of movie gives the best ROI. I'm not going to give it away, but if you've ever considered investing in a film production, you'll want to see the stats and charts at Information is Beautiful. -via Kottke

(Image credit: David McCandless, Tom Evans, Paul Barton - Information is Beautiful)

When you're camping in the woods with no facilities, you need to be very careful which leaves to use for toilet paper. If you move to a new home and the back yard is full of weeds, you can't just start pulling them up willy-nilly, or run a lawn mower over them while wearing shorts. You have to take a good look in case some of it is poison ivy. Poison ivy leaves and stems exude urushiol in their sap, which will cause an itchy and sometimes torturous allergic reaction in most people that lasts for days, but it doesn't affect other animals. How well can you identify poison ivy? Take the test at Bird and Moon. You'll be shown 55 pictures of plants, and you declare whether or not the picture contains poison ivy. I missed three by identifying benign plants as poison ivy, which is safer than missing the dangerous plant. My performance on this quiz comes from years of experience, not all of it good.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Rosemary Mosco)

Neal V. Loving was born in 1916 and grew up with a passion for aviation, but found that the US Army Air Corps did not accept Black enlistees for its pilot training program. So he learned aeronautics engineering and built his own plane when he was only 20 years old. When the US entered World War II, Loving founded a Black unit of the Civil Air Patrol and trained pilots himself. In 1944, a training flight ended in a crash, and Loving was injured so badly that he eventually lost both legs. In an excerpt from his autobiography, Loving’s Love: A Black American’s Experience in Aviation, Loving tells of his experience in recovering from the crash, coming to terms with losing his legs, learning to walk again, and how he eventually returned to the cockpit to fly again. He went on to have a long and storied career as an aviator.

Just yesterday I reminisced about the days when friends would get together to play Star Wars with discount store props and make fan films to share with us. And then I saw this. Sub-Radio is a successful band, but they were once a group of high school friends just having fun. This new video looks like a lot of fun, too. "Mr. Darkside" is a look at the Star Wars saga from the perspective of one Darth Vader, set to the tune of the 2003 hit "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers. The lyrics will hook you from the beginning as Vader witnesses a traumatic moment we have all referenced at one time or another. Some folks never got over discovering the implications in 1983.  -via Metafilter

In the Shakespeare play Hamlet, Ophelia is a tragic character who drowns herself after the death of her father and rejection by Hamlet. In 1851, John Everett Millais reproduced Ophelia's death in a painting that captured the horrific despair that drove her to suicide. For a model, he enlisted Elizabeth Siddal, who modeled for many artists of the time. Siddal was an artist herself, but achieved immortality through the works that depicted her. Although talented, she wasn't taken seriously as an artist because of her sex.

And so Siddal did her best as a model because she needed the money, even if that meant spending four months in a bathtub. However, what she had to endure as the model for Millais' painting of Ophelia caused her to fall gravely ill, and indirectly led to her death in 1862. The painting is now on display at the Tate Gallery in London. When you see it, the melancholy you feel will not be only for the fictional character Ophelia, but also for Elizabeth Siddal, who gave her all for art. -via Strange Company

You know the story of how Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse in 1928 because Universal held the rights to his character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. We told that story here not long ago. Walt was going to name the mouse Mortimer, but his wife didn't like it, so the character became Mickey Mouse. And the rest is history.

But several years before Mickey Mouse, there was Micky Mouse. Launched by the Performo Toy Company in 1925, Micky soon became the company's most popular toy, and was patented in 1926. Disney's cartoon Mickey Mouse gained popularity astonishingly fast, too, and soon the character was offered in a toy version. Somewhere along the way, Performo's Micky started wearing red shorts. You can imagine the tensions that set off. So, did Walt Disney steal Performo's design? It's hard to say, because there were other cartoon mice in existence before either Micky or Mickey. Read about the beloved mouse characters of the 1920s at Messy Nessy Chic.

We are well aware that rabbits can be bloodthirsty savages when it comes to heads of states, like the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog and the rabbit that attacked the US president in 1979. Another such incident reportedly happened in 1807 when Napoleon Bonaparte, then the Emperor of France, went to war with a horde of a thousand rabbits.

It was supposed to be a hunt, organized by the Prince of Neuchâtel, Alexandre Berthier, on a plot of land Berthier owned in Paris. To make sure the hunt was a success, Berthier arranged for around a thousand rabbits to be brought to the hunt on that day. But when the rabbits were released, they didn't scatter to avoid the party of men shooting at them. Instead, they charged! The men went into battle mode to protect Napoleon and rebuffed the rabbits, but after a while, the rabbits regrouped and charged again. This time, they swarmed onto the emperor himself!

While Napoleon escaped with his life, as well as the rest of the hunting party, they lost the battle. The red-faced Berthier was the subject of an investigation over the incident, which yielded a perfectly logical explanation for the rabbits' behavior. Read the whole story plus the aftermath at Just History Posts. It's a pretty good story, and there's a chance that it might even be true. -via Strange Company 

Kylo Ren chases a fighter from the Resistance into the woods to finish him off- with plastic darts. If the characters in Star Wars fought each other with Nerf guns, there wouldn't be nearly as many deaths. Not that it matters; they all come back sooner or later anyway. But I had no idea that Nerf made lightsabers. They do. Although in this encounter, it's hard to tell which is the business end.

This video from Nukazooka is a throwback to the days when friends got together to cosplay and have lightsaber battles with the excuse that they were making a Star Wars fan film. No budget was necessary, and we had Sweded Star Wars scenes hitting the internet every day. It was fun. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A long, winding journey to find out why companies treat their chicken broth recipes like state secrets https://t.co/A96nskCVgi

— Eater (@Eater) January 29, 2023

When people talk about trying to avoid ultra-processed foods, I tell them to check the ingredients and buy products with the shortest list. That turns out to be not all that helpful. Noah Galuten wondered why cans of chicken broth from the grocery store taste so different from his mother's homemade broth. Canned broth has no gelatin, very little fat and protein, and comes close to the legal limit of 135 parts water to one part chicken. Galuten found the main listed ingredient in chicken broth is "chicken broth," which tells us nothing. How is it made on an industrial scale? He found that canned broth is made from water and chicken broth concentrate, but when he tried to find out where that concentrate came from, he found himself going down a rabbit hole filled with brick walls.

My quest to find the answer started simply enough, and in a state of what was, in retrospect, blissful ignorance. I had no intimation of what was to come: the billion-dollar multinational flavor and fragrance companies, the “spray-dried” broth, the “clean label protein solutions,” the “kitchen-like ingredients,” and the corporate dream of a “fully sustainable chicken stream.” A whole new world, at once surreal, banal, and depressingly inevitable, was hidden in the watery depths of store-bought chicken stock, just waiting for me to jump in.

Galutin found nothing illegal going on, but he brings us a thought-provoking story of how chicken broth is processed for our convenience and food manufacturers' profits. What's even more depressing is that broth is just one product in a world of processed foods we eat every day. -via Damn Interesting

If you've been following Neatorama for years, you can go ahead and guess that this list will contain Post-it Notes, microwave cooking, penicillin, and Viagra. But this video covers 13 different accidental discoveries, and Viagra is not among them (but you can read that story here). I might argue with the inclusion of Nutella, which doesn't seem to have been an accident at all, but it's still an interesting story. They all are! History classes in school have a hard time covering just the important foundational stories they need to go over, so the history of everyday products rarely gets a mention, no matter how good the story is. That's what the Weird History channel is for.  -via Digg

Last month, we linked to a ranking of Nicolas Cage's best nine movies over at Pop Culturista to celebrate the actor's birthday. While any such list is an invitation to argue because it's so subjective, that list mainly suffers from being short. Cage has done more than 100 movies, so why not rank the top 100? The Cage Gauge does just that. Note at the top of the page that the list comes in three links. This list includes feature films, direct-to-video movies, animation, documentaries, and at least one TV pilot.

The Cage Gauge is an ongoing project by Luke Buckmaster. Every time a new Nicolas Cage movie comes out, the list is adjusted, and the bottom movie may fall off the top 100. So when Renfield opens on April 14, Left Behind will probably disappear from the list. We don't know what movie disappeared yesterday.

A new Nicolas Cage movie - The Old Way - means an update to THE CAGE GAUGE: the only world's only comprehensive, up-to-date ranked list of every Cage movie. From yours truly https://t.co/mMKolLwPsf

— Dr Luke Buckmaster (@lukebuckmaster) February 1, 2023

Buckmaster explains how he ranks the movies here. For example, Fast Times at Ridgemont High wasn't left off the list because it was bad, but rather because Cage's role was so small. With the exception of a couple of agreed-upon masterpieces, the ranking is very different from the one we posted for Cage's birthday. -via Metafilter

Felix Colgrave (previously at Neatorama) brings us a surreal and rather colorful animated video with a delightful retro vibe. This cartoon starts out following a shipment of discarded toy parts to the bottom of the ocean. You assume it's some kind of an allegory for microplastic pollution. But they start to take on a life of their own, and self-assemble into weirder and weirder creatures. You then realize this is an experimental animation, and you may as well enjoy it for what it is. Colgrave tells us this is an "exploration of ocean plastic, avatars and adaptive bottom feeders. The musical!" It was inspired by a collection of toy parts belonging to his two-year-old son that he calls donks. Thrown together, they make some pretty interesting toys.

At the end of the credits, he acknowledges the Wurundjeri and the Boonwurrung people who once ruled the part of Australia where Colgrave lives. -via reddit

Groundhog Day, February 2, is supposedly the day that a groundhog will peek outside of its burrow to see if winter is over yet. They say that if the groundhog sees its shadow, it will be frightened and run back to the burrow, and we'll have six more weeks of winter. If it doesn't see its shadow and stays out, that means spring is on its way... in about six weeks. You see, February second is halfway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. The date is akin to Imbolc, the pagan holiday celebrated for just that reason. Imbolc is February first this year. February second is also Candlemas, a Christian feast day marking 40 days after Christmas.

Falling as it does in the middle of our calendar winter, there's no mystery as to why people wanted some sign of spring returning, but why a groundhog? It wasn't always so. Old Celtic poetry speaks of a snake coming out of its hole. In other parts of Europe, a bear, hedgehog, or badger, all being animals that hibernate, were traditionally used as weather forecasters. When Europeans immigrated to America, they found that the groundhog was the most common hibernating animal around, so Groundhog Day it became.  

For a long time, the holiday was just a piece of folklore, and anyone who looked for a groundhog considered it a local event, or just a tale to pass along to children. But Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, keeps a groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil who has been very publicly predicting weather every year since 1887! Phil is ceremoniously awakened every February second to give his opinion on the coming spring to crowds of thousands who make the pilgrimage to the town's Groundhog Day festival. Punxsutawney Phil is the most famous groundhog, but other towns have their own "official" groundhogs as well. Phil is not expected to predict weather conditions outside of Pennsylvania. Even so, his record of accuracy is only around 39%. You can't really blame him. He's just a rodent and he is a little groggy after sleeping for a couple of months. As in the early days of the tradition, an early spring is an exercise in wishful thinking.  

For the past 30 years, Groundhog Day also means the movie. In Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, visits Punxsutawney for the Groundhog Day festival and becomes stuck in a time loop. He is forced to repeat February second over and over until he gets it right. Many dictionaries now have two definitions for Groundhog Day. The first is the holiday, and the second is a metaphor for being stuck in an endless time loop where every day is the same, inspired by the movie. Watching the film has become a tradition for February the 2nd. For years, some movie channels would show the movie over and over all day long, but in the age of streaming, you can watch it as many or as few times as you like. To celebrate the movie's 30th anniversary, a remastered version of Groundhog Day is being re-released to select theaters this month.

Have a happy Groundhog Day!

(Image credit: Cephas)

If you ever wondered what Lady Gaga would sound like performing in Texas neary 100 years ago, then you are probably pretty unique in your fantasies. Dustin Ballard, better known as YouTuber There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) wondered exactly this, and we know how crazy he is. Ballard remixed her song "Poker Face" with fiddle and steel guitar into a 1940s-style Western swing tune. Whether it sounds good to you depends on your taste in music, but you can't argue with a video featuring vintage poker games from movies where everyone is cheating. The editing is superb. -via Laughing Squid