"Won't someone think of the children?" Apparently, when some people think of children, it's to protect them from the real world, even at an age when we should be preparing them for it. When a child has developed the skills to read general circulation books, there's really no controlling what they will read, and many parents are just glad they are reading at all. But time and again, people try to limit what students are exposed to in school libraries and reading lists. Books by Judy Blume have been a particular target over the years.

2. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

There's something about books depicting the real young adult experience that upsets people—which perhaps explains why so many Judy Blume books get challenged or banned. In the ‘90s, five Blume books were on the most frequently banned list: Forever, Blubber, Deenie, Tiger Eyes, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Published in the 1970s, Are You There God explores the challenges of growing into yourself as a young girl, and it's often challenged, mainly because it talks about puberty and teenage sexuality. In 1982, the Fond du Lac school district in Wisconsin challenged the novel for being “sexually offensive and amoral.” In fact, Blume even wrote about how she donated three copies to her children’s school, but “the male principal decided that the book was inappropriate because of the discussion of menstruation”—you know, something every teenage girl deals with. (Although it's arguably better than when Forever was banned for depicting “disobedience to parents.”)

The reasons for banning other books are even weirder, from the word "sweat" to a possible connection to other books by a completely different author. Read the stories of eleven of those books at Mental Floss.

What happens when the software Cyriak Harris uses to animate his disturbing ideas decides to crash? Well, he's not going to let that stop him! In this video, Cyriak uses meatspace tools to construct his own animation machine, complete with his signature style of movement and general weirdness.

Sometimes you see an opportunity to make a statement or a visual pun and you just can't help yourself, right? Well, we don't condone vandalism, but sometimes we can appreciate it. Even so, most of these images gleaned from the subreddit Mildly Vandalized are harmless. Some could even be called "street art" or "enhancements." Some just correct spelling or grammar on a sign that asking for it, and others are just captions added with a Post-it Note or something.    



See 37 such public "enhancements" that will make you smile at Buzzfeed.

A Canadian friend of mine learned Polish from her parents. She traveled to Ukraine and was surprised to find she could understand people speaking Russian. Another friend from New York said he could understand people in the Netherlands easier than he could people in Tennessee. And my daughter spent years learning French, but then picked up Spanish in about a month. Languages flow into each other, but sometimes they grow apart. So what really defines a language as distinct from a dialect? And how different must a dialect be before it is considered another language? The answer may surprise you, but when you think about it, you won't be surprised.

We know the outlines of the story of television. In the early 20th century, great minds across the globe, like Scotsman John Logie Baird, German Paul Nipkow, and American Philo T. Farnsworth were trying to combine motion pictures and radio broadcasts, with varying success. Which technology was best had to be decided before anyone would invest in a vast infrastructure of broadcasting networks, content, and receivers, and then selling to idea to the public. These competing systems were put on hold for World War II, and then Farnsworth's electronic television system emerged victorious. But let's back up to 1939, when a British boy's magazine printed an article about "television." The British were proponents of John Logie Baird's mechanical television system, and the history the medium was still short. When no one had a receiver, they turned to "television theaters."

Northern holiday crowds at Blackpool and Morecambe in July, 1934, were the first to test the pleasures of real television theatres in which reproductions of events happening up to 20 miles away were projected on the screen. A slight last-minute hitch prevented Morecambe's Television Theatre opening on the day planned, so for a short while the Blackpool venture, located inconspicuously near the Central Pier, stood unchallenged as the only place in Britain where the public could enter a darkened room and see a televised moving picture on the screen.

The inventor of the apparatus used at Morecambe was Mr. F. Cockcroft Taylor.

Actors and actresses who were willing to permit themselves to be televised in 1934, had, in the studio, to make-up like cannibals in full war paint. First they had to paint their faces dead white, then thick blue lines were put down the sides of their noses to bring that part of the face out properly. Their eyelids had to be painted mauve, their lips blue, and their eyebrows were made enormously big and heavy, like George Robey's. The rest of their faces were left dead white.

By 1939, things had improved somewhat. Read a contemporary account of early television in Britain at Malcolm's Musings: Strange but True. -via Strange Company

See also: TV's Father: Philo T. Farnsworth and Nazi TV.

The Ig Nobel prizes for 2021 were awarded in a virtual ceremony Thursday night by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. The awards honor and highlight research that may look ridiculous on the surface, but almost always has some underlying purpose in advancing the field of science. In other words, "Research that makes people laugh and then think." We can't all get grants to develop life-saving drugs, after all. The winners this year range from checking out how orgasms may clear one's sinuses to an analysis of movie theater smells to correlating a nation's level of corruption with the obesity of its politicians. Researchers from the US won two awards (but also collaborated on others): one on controlling cockroaches on submarines and the other on whether humans developed beards to avoid being punched in the face. Continue reading for the full list of winners and their research papers.

When an artist renders three-dimensional objects in two dimensions, they normally give it perspective, so that it appears realistic to the eye. However, since the two-dimensional medium (a computer screen or a canvas) has no depth, you can mess around with the perspective part and really have fun. M.C. Escher was a master at such shenanigans. His use of confusing perspective inspired Macedonian artist Fleta Selmani to create the font she calls Impossible Type. Letters are three-dimensional, but their perspective defies reality.

The font is not difficult to read, as our brains perceive basic shapes in total at the speed we read, but if you stop and look closely at the letters, they are mind-bending. You can purchase and download Impossible Type (upper case, numbers, and punctuation) here.

-via Kottke

Benjamin was the last thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, in captivity and as far as we know, the last thylacine in existence. He died in 1936, and the species has been considered extinct since then. Now all that's left are some lifeless anatomical specimens and a few photos and film footage. We posted this video of Benjamin before, although it was quite a few years ago. But through the miracle of technology, it's been brought to life in color. The National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) of Australia commissioned a restoration of the film with added color.

The NFSA created a 4K scan of the original 33-mm negative of a 77-second video, shot by naturalist David Fleay in 1933. This was then sent to Composite Films in Paris, where Samuel François-Steininger and his team recreated the creature’s color in painstaking detail.

Unfortunately, no true color photos or video of the thylacine exist, so the team studied specimens preserved in museum collections, consulted sketches, paintings, scientific drawings and written descriptions from the time, as well as more recent 3D renderings.

“Because of the resolution and quality of the picture, there were a lot of details – the fur was dense and a lot of hair had to be detailed and animated,” says François-Steininger. “From a technological point of view, we did everything digitally – combining digital restoration, rotoscoping and 2D animation, lighting, AI algorithms for the movement and the noise, compositing and digital grading. More than 200 hours of work were needed to achieve this result.”

To be honest, the realistic depiction of the thylacine only underscores how sad it is that they are extinct. -via Damn Interesting

Can you guess the metro area with the highest number of college degrees per capita in the United States? My first guess was Raleigh-Durham, but I was wrong. Not very wrong, however, because this list divides the metro areas differently, and both Durham-Chapel Hill and Raleigh-Cary did pretty well. As the joke goes, North Carolina's biggest exports are tobacco and college graduates, even though some of them stick around to contribute to the work of the Research Triangle. The most educated metro area is Ann Arbor, Michigan, where you'll find the University of Michigan. WalletHub compiled the statistics to come up with the educational rankings of the 150 biggest metro areas of the US. They crunched 11 metrics, including degree attainment, quality of local schools, and equity in race, gender, and economic status. The top 20 metro areas are:

1. Ann Arbor, MI
2. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
3. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV
4. San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA
5. Madison, WI
6. Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH
7. Durham-Chapel Hill, NC
8. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA
9. Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown, TX
10. Provo-Orem, UT
11. Raleigh-Cary, NC
12. Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT
13. Colorado Springs, CO
14. Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO
15. Trenton-Princeton, NJ
16. Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA
17. Portland-South Portland, ME
18. Tallahassee, FL
19. Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI
20. San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA

See the rankings of all 150 metro areas and top rankings in various categories, plus methodology and additional statistics at WalletHub. 

-via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Kit)

Here's another clever yet dreadful mashup from the YouTuber known as There I Ruined It. He combined the classic Queen "Another One Bites the Dust" and laid it over the instrumentation of "Tequila" by The Champs. Since the song was necessary for the Pee-wee Herman dance, that's who stars in the video. -via reddit

Just look at this photograph of the Amazon River! It looks like gold flowing through a darkened forest. It is not enhanced; the sunlight reflecting off the water among the darkened trees are due to the angle. This photo from taken from the International Space Station, by German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst in 2018. You can see how the river is much longer than the distance it travels through, as thousands of years of flowing water has formed meanders and even oxbow lakes where the meander has collapsed on itself over time. The Amazon is unique because of its size and the lack of engineering along its banks. A river that has dams, cities, and levees does not curl itself into nearly as many meanders. -via reddit

(Image credit: Flickr user Alexander Gerst)

As we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it's natural to take a look at what has changed in the years since. Those horrific moments when we all watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapse live on TV were particularly scarring. You have to wonder how safe such tall buildings really are, because those towers were a model of safe architecture in their day. It might be reassuring to know that we've come a long way in both design and materials since the World Trade Center was designed in the 1960s, and especially in the past twenty years since they fell. -via Digg

You don't have to be Indiana Jones to hunt treasure. If you're lucky enough, you don't even have to hunt for it! A crew of construction workers were renovating a mansion in France a couple of years ago and found a metal box embedded in a wall. It was full of gold coins- rather old ones, it seemed. That was on a Friday. The next Monday, the workers found another stash of coins, this time in a bag buried in a wall. François Mion and his wife, who purchased the mansion in 2012, were suddenly glad they decided to renovate and join the three buildings on the property.

After the 2019 find, Mion alerted the local authorities and later sent the treasures away to be studied and verified. Archaeologists determined that the coins were minted during the reigns of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, monarchs who ruled France from 1610 to 1643 and 1643 to 1715, respectively. The most recently minted coins were likely created during a series of money reforms that Louis XIV enacted to finance several costly wars. During his 72-year-long reign, Louis XIV also oversaw massive expansions to the Palace of Versailles.

Beginning in 2016, all treasures discovered in France automatically became property of the state. However, since the mansion owners purchased the property in 2012, they have the rights to sell their finds, reports France 3. Per French law, the proceeds from the sale will be split in half, with half going to the married couple who owns the property and half to be split evenly among the three discoverers.

You have to wonder how close the Mion family came to putting off renovations for a few years. The coins will go up for auction on September 29, and are expected to bring more than €250,000. Read the entire story at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Ivoire Auction House)

The 1995 teen comedy Clueless was a big hit and is now considered one of the best teen movies of all time. What? From the comments at YouTube, it's apparent that Clueless is cherished as a work of art by the Millennials who watched it as teens. However, if all you know about the film is what is in this Honest Trailer, that can be mystifying.

Dave Kloc got his start in poster art by making 310 posters for the stand-up comedy television series The Meltdown that aired from 2010 to 2016. Now, art posters for a television show are not really a thing, and neither are posters for standup comedy night, but when Kloc went to a show, he was assigned the job.

“A friend of mine named Jordan Vogt-Roberts invited me to a comedy show in the back of a comic-book store,” Kloc tells me over the phone. “It turned out to be the first ‘Meltdown’ show. It wasn’t like a typical comedy club, a two-drink-minimum kind of place,” Kloc says of the 175-seat NerdMelt Showroom behind Meltdown Comics on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. “It had a very different vibe. I went up to one of the hosts, Jonah Ray, and said, ‘This feels like an old punk show. You should do some posters.’ He said, ‘Do you do posters?’ I didn’t, but I knew how. So I said ‘Yeah,’ he said ‘Great,’ and after I figured out where to get paper and stuff like that, I did roughly a poster a week for more than six years.”

That takes chutzpah. Sow how did Kloc end up as a renowned artist of posters for concerts? While Kloc had never designed posters before The Meltdown, he did have some art training back in Michigan where he grew up. He interests were art, hockey, and music. Kloc, a bass player, quit his band, moved to Los Angeles in 2008, and became a tour manager for other musicians.  

While the work was steady, it was not 52-weeks-a-year steady, which meant Kloc would find himself at loose ends between tours for weeks at a time. “One time after I got off the road,” he says, “I went to a concert at a little gallery called Nomad’s, which also turned out to be a screenprinting shop. It was the coolest place.” Kloc made a deal with the owner, Damon Robinson, to tidy up around the shop and generally help out in exchange for learning how to screenprint. “He taught me the ins and outs of screenprinting,” Kloc says of Robinson, “and I helped him print a lot of gig posters.”

Kloc’s experience with Robinson was the reason he found himself saying “yes” to Jonah Ray at that first “Meltdown” show when Ray asked Kloc if he made posters. In turn, Kloc’s experience as the poster guy for “Meltdown” eventually allowed him to make a few gig posters of his own.

“I still had all the contacts I’d made from years of touring, I still talked to those guys,” Kloc says. “As I got better at making posters, it became reasonable for me to ask if they needed one for an upcoming tour.”

They did. In fact, by the time of Kloc’s last “Meltdown” poster in October of 2016, he was already pivoting to a second career as a gig-poster artist, printing his work from a windowless janitor’s closet in an apartment building near downtown L.A. “It was just a piece of wood clamped to a table,” Kloc says of his makeshift press. “It would be 90 degrees outside, which in L.A. is not uncommon, and 110 in the closet. Between screens, I’d stand outside with my shirt off to cool down, questioning every decision I’d ever made in my life before going back inside to face the heat and humidity. If I needed 30 good posters, I had to print 50. It was awful, but I printed posters there for years.”

Read about Kloc's art and see plenty of gorgeous posters at Collectors Weekly.