The earliest version of Cookie Monster appeared on a snack commercial in 1966. Jim Henson brought him to Sesame Street just a few years later, where he has remained ever since. He is among the most successful Muppet characters of all time whose appeal has lasted for generations.

This is, I think, because Cookie Monster speaks to the primal nihilistic urge of modern man to consume and be consumed by the universe. The real Cookie Monster is always inside of us, seeking to satisfy a hunger from which we can never escape but nonetheless are destined to seek.

This leads us to the inevitable question: what are those cookies that Cookie Monster devours so ravenously, as though they were the children of Cronus?

Sopan Deb writes in the New York Times (sorry, it's a paywalled article) about his quest for an answer to this question. They are made of pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts, instant coffee, and water. The chocolate chips are made of colored glue.

Muppet wrangler Lara MacLean, who has worked for the Jim Henson Company since 1992, bakes them at home. She prepares the cookies so that they crumble in Cookie Monster's mouth at just the right consistency, letting him feel every crumb of defeat fall from his mouth to the amusement of his young audience.

Cookie Monster's muppeteer, David Rudman, comments, "The more crumbs, the funnier it is."

-via Super Punch | Photo: Smithsonian Institution

The video is just a few seconds long, but it contains multitudes. The little girl wants to pet the dog, but she can't because that's a bear! Her confusion may be funny, but I would have scooped the child up and had her in the door before she got the phrase out. Would it make you feel any better to know that the joke isn't real? The audio is from an earlier, unrelated TikTok video. That might make it less funny, but it's still dangerous to have a small child that close to a bear. Let's assume that the little girl was not eaten by the juvenile bear, and that she has learned to avoid such encounters in the future. The lesson is, don't believe everything you see on the internet, but there's nothing wrong in enjoying the funny fakes. Therefore, let the musical remixes commence!



The newest is from pianist Brandon Ethridge. -via Boing Boing

Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system and that's one of the reasons why we haven't been able to send a lander that could last long enough to probe much of the planet. Due to the dense atmosphere on Venus' surface, much of the sun's heat gets trapped and the temperatures could go up as high as 464 degrees Celsius (867 degrees Fahrenheit).

One lander, Venera 12, successfully lasted about 110 minutes and several of its predecessors and successors were able to take a few photos and audio from Venus. The last lander on Venus was Venera 14 which landed on March 5, 1982. No other landers have been sent since, however, space agencies have been planning to do further studies on Venus' atmosphere with Roscosmos intending to revisit the surface.

Despite similarities to Earth in size, composition, and density, Venus' surface temperature caused by its atmosphere have made it uninhabitable. -via The Daily Grail

(Image credit: ESA/Don P. Mitchell/Venera 13)

Any surgical operation these days can be bearable because of the availability of modern anesthetics which numb us from the pain of the procedure. Depending on the dosage, we can just sleep through the whole thing, hopefully without waking up in the middle of it. Surgery today is leagues better than in ancient Rome, and it's not just because there were no anesthetics back then.

Perhaps the most horrifying thing in getting surgery in ancient Rome was the surgeons themselves. Generally, to become a surgeon in ancient Rome, one undergoes an apprenticeship, gaining practical training and experience as they observe the masters at their work. However, since there were no regulatory bodies that certify whether a person was good enough to be a surgeon, practically anybody can claim to be one, despite having absolutely no knowledge of anatomy or physiology.

This led to procedures which often resulted in fatalities. Just from the photo above we can see how these procedures had gone. It supposedly depicts the birth of Julius Caesar who Suetonius has said to have been born through a C-section. Perhaps, that's why it's called a Caesarean. This and other disturbing facts about ancient Roman surgery at Strange Ago.

(Image credit: Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)

Being seated for a long period of time can be very exhausting and painful. People who have worked at a desk job know the agony of sitting for extended periods of time. Not only does it hurt the bottom, but it also causes neck, shoulder, and back pain, which explains the popularity of ergonomic chairs these days or standing desks, which allow people to work on their computers while standing up.

If we were to hold a competition to see who can outlast the others on a sitting position, no doubt the Japanese will be one of the major contenders to win as sitting has been part of the culture for centuries. In fact, it is one of the etiquette rules taught to them from an early age, and in particular the seiza.

Seiza is a traditional Japanese sitting style wherein the legs are folded underneath the thighs while seated upright. It is used as a means of showing respect to elders or people of higher position.

Since the Edo period, the Japanese have been sitting this way on the floor, and many aspects of their culture from architecture to interior design have been developed around this culture of sitting. Only in the past century has the Japanese culture begun to adopt chairs for sitting, but it took them a while to get used to it.

Now, many designers are incorporating both traditional concepts and newer ergonomic ideas to craft chairs suitable for individuals. Some of them like Kageyu Noro and Hidemasa Yatabe advocate for chairs customized to a person's body. In so doing, not only does one improve posture but also helps relieve them from the stresses of everyday life.

(Image credit: Roméo A./Unsplash)

The title of the book is Otaku Yogo Jiten Daigenkai, or The Dictionary of Otaku Terms, and it started out as a university project by Yoshiko Koide's students. It came about as she had observed how her students normally would say nothing during class, but when she met them outside, they were brimming with excitement to talk about their interests.

So, she had her 2022 class compile the words that they used within their fandoms into a dictionary, and the students self-published their work and sold it at the college festival.

Due to the success of the project, Koide had her 2023 class do the same. Then, Sanseido, the Japanese publishing company known for their textbooks and dictionaries approached them to publish the two volumes of otaku terms into a book, which had just been launched a week ago.

When Sanseido released sample pages of the book, the internet unleashed a firestorm. Dedicated fans from different fandoms lambasted the work, first, accusing it of gatekeeping, then, nitpicking the different terms included in the dictionary, and even threatening the women who had compiled the words. Because of this negative reaction, the publisher removed the names of the contributors from the book, leaving only Koide credited, and revised entries to reflect the sentiments of the slighted fans.

What started out as a fun project became a horrendous affair. The fact that Sanseido picked up the project and decided to publish it added such weight to the work, that people took offense and felt as though their identity had been attacked. It just goes to show how strongly fans feel for the things they love and how protective they are of them.

(Image credit: CDJapan)

Making friends with people outside our age group can feel a bit weird or awkward, but building any kind of friendship with anyone almost always starts out that way. All it takes is for someone to have the courage to approach the other, find shared interests or other things in common, and make the effort to build on that budding bond.

For Devin Welsh, a 25-year-old college student, he made an unlikely friend in Victoria Huggins Peurifoy, who's 71 and attends the same literary arts program called Writers Room. Despite their age gap, it was their passion for writing that helped them to connect, and now they work together on projects for the Philadelphia writing community.

Eunice Lin Nichols, who heads an organization that brings people of different generations together, urges people to develop intergenerational friendships as the life experiences of someone older can provide perspective and insight to younger people. On the other hand, younger people can help older people see the world from fresh eyes and be able to adapt to the changing times.

As with any kind of friendship, openness and communication as well as a degree of empathy are key to understanding one another despite the differences two people may have. Here are a few other ways on how we can build intergenerational friendships and cultivate them.

And it does enrich our lives. Nichols shares how she connected with a group of older African American women who helped her through her pregnancy as well as to make their neighborhood and community better. And Peurifoy too found the joy of being able to make friends with younger people as she had recently been a 70-something student until she graduated from college in June this year.

(Image credit: Hillary Peralta/Unsplash)

In a previous article, we looked at a study wherein researchers looked at how AI and children fared when tasked to solve some basic problems to measure their creativity and innovation. The result of that study showed how AI can be lacking in recognizing simple answers to basic questions, something the children had excelled at. Granted, the researchers admitted the difficulty of comparing and measuring human cognitive ability against an AI, but the study did show what some weaknesses in AI models might be.

This time around, in the saga of AI vs. Humans, a couple of researchers wanted to challenge humans with a game titled "How (not) to get hit by a self-driving car". The object of the game is simple. People must traverse a short crossing without being identified by the AI as a pedestrian. The goal of the study is to help AI models familiarize itself with various scenarios a self-driving car might encounter on the street. In so doing, it can help self-driving cars become safer.

As a prize for winning the game, players have the option of having their footage deleted or retained. Of course, it doesn't mean that employing tactics to avoid detection by a self-driving car implies that you will get hit, as self-driving cars use different algorithms. The researchers hope to bring their study to different parts of the world to gather as much data from various scenarios to help the algorithm learn.

(Video credit: Watershed/Youtube)

Here's another video of the game from Science Gallery London.

Perhaps you've heard the story of how the Teddy bear came about. The bear was inspired by a 1902 incident in which President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a young bear that had been trapped for the occasion, which was illustrated in cartoon form for the newspapers. Candy store owner Morris Michtom asked his wife Rose to make a toy bear and they named it Teddy, after Roosevelt, and they sold like hotcakes.    

But there was some objections to the popularity of Teddy bears as a children's toy. Apparently stuffed toy animals weren't all that popular before the Teddy bear debuted, and some social commentators thought they would spell the end of American life as we knew it. Why? If little girls started playing with plush animals instead of baby dolls, they might reject babies and never have children! Luckily, we figured out that toys are more than just career-training aids. Read about the Teddy bear's rise to fame and the backlash it engendered at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Smithsonian Museum of Natural History)

Moody's Analytics is a financial analysis firm. Axios reports that a recent paper published by this company finds that the presence of a Cheesecake Factory restaurant at a shopping mall is a positive indicator of that mall's financial well-being.

Shopping malls, once dominant features of American suburban life, have declined with the pandemic lockdowns and the rise of online shopping. But, Moody's finds, 93% of malls with a Cheesecake Factory are current on their loan payments contrasted with 72% of malls that don't. This is likely because a Cheesecake Factory restaurant is a destination experience that draws people to a mall.

-via Megan McArdle | Photo: Mike Kalasnik

YouTuber Walking Bass Piano Man is a master of the jazz piano, as demonstrated by numerous jazz renditions of popular songs, including the works of Bon Jovi, Ben E. King, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

In this video, they take the iconic opening theme to Sesame Street and play it over and over again, incrementally jazzing it up. Starting at level 1, it's not that different from what you'd see on television. But by the time that Walking Bass Piano Man gets to level 8, it's a jumping melody that flies across the keyboard faster than it seems two hands can manage.

-via Laughing Squid

Way before electricity, city officials saw the benefit to lighting up the street so that people could find their way around. When electricity was in its infancy, some towns took the easy way- instead of replacing hundreds of gas lamps, why not just built one tower, or several for bigger cities, and make them very tall? Electricity produced enough light for people to get around, even from a very tall tower. As far as the electrical mechanism goes, they were primitive, but they worked. Eventually, cheaper, safer, and more efficient electric streetlights were developed, and these "moonlight towers" were replaced. Except in Austin, Texas. Austin decided to keep the towers as part of the city's personality, although they have been restored and rebuilt. The city still has 29 of their original 31 towers. Tom Scott gives us a rundown on the towers, how they worked, and what they look like today. 

The UK Biobank study is a long-running study of 467,354 people in the United Kingdom who have been documenting their eating habits, among other data, since 2006. A new study took data from that large population and studied those who changed their eating habits at different ages, particularly those who switched from processed foods to a healthier, more natural diet.

The results showed that people who switched from unhealthy eating habits to healthier regimens added up to ten years to their lives. Those who had average diets to begin with showed gains as well, although they were lesser because those people were healthier to begin with. The age at which one began eating a healthy diet made a difference, but even people who began eating better in their seventies showed longevity gains of four to five years.

The healthy diet is described as one without sugary drinks and processed meats, and "rich in whole grains, nuts, fruits, vegetables, and moderate amounts of fish." Read more about this study and the results at ScienceAlert. -via Real Clear Science 

(Image: www.Pixel.la Free Stock Photos) 

To many Americans, and later, to the rest of the world, the death of President John F. Kennedy was a big blow to the nation's morale. People had high hopes for the young president, and many expressed their support more than just at the polls. So, it came as a surprise when he was suddenly shot right in front of the public.

The American people had to cope with the grief somehow, and Weir Lundstedt's mother, Carolyn, did so by writing a letter to her children about what had just happened that day. He had discovered the sealed envelope containing the letter in 2008, but hadn't opened it until recently.

The letter expressed his mother's grief over the situation. It's a short letter, only four paragraphs long, but Weir felt what his mother must have been going through while she was writing the letter, as he read it, with tears in his eyes, for the first time, in front of WMUR 9's camera crew.

The letter reads:

"Friday, Nov. 22, 1963.

Dear Weir,

As you are sleeping now in your crib upstairs, you are too young to realize that a great tragedy has taken place in our United States of America.

The President of these United States, John F. Kennedy, has been assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

You will one day read about this in your history book. Know that he has been, we feel, a good, honest, and devoted young president. He has been energetic and tireless in his quest for lasting world peace.

What a pity that one of his own people should take it upon himself to destroy this vital man.

Lovingly, your mom and dad"

(Image credit: Weir Lundstedt/WMUR, public domain)

Your local vet probably won't tell you to stop getting pugs and bulldogs, but deep inside, they really want to urge dog lovers to think about buying these pure breeds. The reason is that the features people love about them so much - their cute faces, squished noses, and double-curled tails - are all genetic defects.

Having these anatomical features actually causes them pain and suffering such as difficulty breathing and eating which could lead to more serious conditions like overheating or cardiovascular stress. The British Veterinary Association has issued several statements expressing their concern over the popularity of these breeds, and they urged people to reconsider a different breed or a crossbreed instead.

Although there's some debate on whether mixed breeds are healthier than pure breeds, data from a study has shown that out of 24 genetic disorders, there is a higher incidence of 10 genetic disorders in pure breeds than in mixed breeds with only one disorder being higher in mixed breeds. The rest are equally distributed.

In fact, some of the more famous pets online actually had health problems. Lil Bub and Grumpy Cat both had genetic mutations that caused them to look funny, but in reality, they were going through some painful conditions. Lil Bub had osteoporosis and died of a bone infection, while Grumpy Cat had dwarfism and died from urinary tract infection.

(Image credit: Mink Mingle/Unsplash)