For an adventurer or a seafarer, maps inform them about the way or different paths which could lead to their destination. Maps have been a means for direction, but there is a subtle assertion behind the method cartographers draw out their maps.

For example, there are ancient East Asian maps which depict China at the center of the world. Buddhist missionaries who traveled to China later would show them intricate maps called the Jambudvipa which paved the way for Buddhism to become accepted and integrated into Chinese culture.

Due to the detailed geographical information and the sophistication of Buddhist thought, the Chinese became aware that there was a civilization that was on a par if not more technologically advanced and philosophically developed. From these examples, we can see how worldviews seep into a cartographer's perspective on how maps must be drawn.

Nowadays, with satellite and GPS technology, it's much easier for anyone to access accurate geographical information. Still, there are cases such as China's claim over territories in the waters of Southeast Asia in which they argue that they have ancient documents proving dominion over those lands.

Whatever the case may be, maps are sources of information, and in this information era, whoever possesses authority over the sources of information has the power.

(Image credit: Zhu Xiling/Wikimedia Commons)

The 2023 Miss Universe competition was held last night in San Salvador, El Salvador. The winner was Miss Nicaragua, Sheynnis Palacios. In case you missed the broadcast, we know what you really want to see is the parade of national costumes, which is always pretty entertaining, although not entertaining enough to sit through the entire show. There was the usual mix of colorful evening gowns, traditional culture costumes, and Las Vegas showgirl-style constructions.

At first I thought that Miss Denmark must be mislabeled, but no, this is Nikoline Uhrenholt Hansen, wearing a costume titled "The Nordic Ocean Dragon," which looks suspiciously South American.  

Miss Myanmar, Amara Bo, dressed as a money tree.

Miss Netherlands, Rikkie Kollé, walked in as a literal tulip. But this face-hiding costume was designed to change, and she soon "blossomed" into her final form.

See a video of the transformation here. One of noticeable trends this year was a written statement on a sign affixed to costumes, sometimes only seen from the backside, which featured into several costumes. The costume competition winner was Sheynnis Palacios of Nicaragua, who went on to win the Miss Universe title. See all the contestants in their national costumes, the good, the bad, and the over-the-top at Buzzfeed.

European history is a frighteningly big subject, especially for Americans, because it's documented so far back. There were so many cultures always at war with and conquering each other that nations and borders were constantly changing. A kingdom could be just a few hundred people and still have a royal family that ended up in the history books, so that the timeline is a long string of of wars, marriages, and murders that eventually just seem to blend together. But when you look closely, there are episodes that stand out because they are just so bizarre. Weird History does us a favor and highlights just the most outstandingly weird incidents in battle. You don't have to know exactly who these rulers were, or how they fit into the timeline to get a kick out of the odd things that make history worth knowing.

Enjoy your upcoming Thanksgiving Day feast. Load up your plate with plenty of seconds and thirds. But, the next day, plumbers across the United States will deal with the consequences of your satiety. UPI reports that the Roto-Rooter plumbing company refers to the Friday after Thanksgiving as "Brown Friday." Plumbers usually receive 50% more service calls that day compared to the average Friday.

Yes, toilets are put to the test on that day. But so are sinks and garbage disposals, as they strain to process more content, and dining visitors push down traditional Thanksgiving foods, such as poultry skins and potato peels, that are more likely to cause clogs. Roto-Rooter advises wiping down greasy pots before washing them and not shoving clog-inducing foods through garbage disposals.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Rick

In the 21st century, the term "dude" is just another word for "guy" or "man." I first became aware of the word "dude" in Western movies, when it referred to a newcomer unfamiliar with or incapable of Wild West ways, also called a city slicker. That definition fits in well with the history of the word, which goes back further than you might think. The first appearance of "dude" in print happened in 1883, when it appeared in a poem. But we know that people were saying something long before it ever got to print. The etymology of the word between its origin and the first evidence in print is the subject of some speculation.

One theory that makes sense, but it still surprising, is that "dude" derived from the earlier term "Yankee Doodle Dandy!" It works in the context of the earliest definition of "dude." But the meaning behind the word changed through the 20th century. Read the history of the slang term that went from an insult to a descriptor to a worse insult to a compliment to neutral everyday use at The Art of Manliness. -Thanks WTM!

There was a time when I refused to get any Christmas decorations out before Thanksgiving. But then I settled on a tradition of getting the outdoor lights up just before Thanksgiving in order to impress my family members who traveled to feast with us. The tree goes up whenever a kid or two is here to haul it up from the basement for me, if they are willing to decorate it. This year, I noticed some houses with outdoor decorations on November first. That started during the pandemic, and it seemed like a welcome bit of cheer to folks who couldn't actually visit.

You may call it Christmas creep, but psychologists say there's nothing wrong with putting up Christmas decorations early. In fact, it's a sign of a happy person. Read what psychological studies say about people who put up Christmas decorations as soon as Halloween is over at Mental Floss.  

(Image credit: LoMit)

Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys (previously at Neatorama), teamed up with the Brett and Scott from the YouTube channel How Ridiculous (previously at Neatorama) to bring us a thoroughly disturbing demonstration of wanton destruction. For some reason, they met up in Montana for this stunt. Well, they needed a lot of room. They procured an anatomically-correct model head, made of fake bones and ballistic gel, complete with green blood, and then shot a bowling ball at it with a cannon. The bowling ball is traveling at almost 400 miles per hour, so you know that head is going to be obliterated. Yep, they blew it up real good, as we can see in the slow motion playback. But look! They have more heads, so they get to blow more of them away. I'm glad they chose their heads to be equipped with green blood instead of red. -via Digg  

Hampshire villagers bring street’s apostrophe catastrophe to a full stop.

St Mary’s Terrace in Twyford has regained its lost punctuation after a row that even drew in local author Jane Austen. https://t.co/YWljN0rv4c

— Mom de plume 🇺🇦🕷 #FBPE (@NargisWalker) November 17, 2023

In recent years, there's a tendency for government officials to drop apostrophes from place names, and the residents of Twyford, Hampshire, UK, are having none of it. A year ago, the Winchester City Council posted a new sign for St. Mary's Terrace that said simply St Marys Terrace, with no punctuation at all. The new sign rubbed retired teacher Oliver Gray the wrong way. It was not so much the loss of the full stop after "St,"* but the lost of the apostrophe after "Mary." The apostrophe indicates a possessive, while the lack of one indicates a plural, and in this case, "Mary" is singular. Villagers brought their consternation over the lost apostrophe to the attention of the city council.

Officials argued that place names should not have punctuation, to make deliveries and emergency response easier. While that may be true for computerized services, it is humans who are reading the sign. The controversy over the sign led to a year-long battle in Twyford, but the sign has now been replaced. Read the arguments on both sides at the Guardian. The article has delicious examples of apostrophe misuse from the Apostrophe Protection Society. -via Metafilter

*In the lively discussion at Metafilter, we learn that in British journalism, a period in an abbreviation is only used if the omitted letters are on the back end, so that "St" means saint and "St." means street.

Bugs Bunny has been around for over 80 years and the character design for Bugs Bunny has undergone many changes throughout that span of time. The preliminary version of Bugs Bunny had first appeared in the short animation titled Porky's Hare Hunt released on April 30, 1938. A couple of years later, on July 27, 1940, the official version of Bugs Bunny appeared in the short animated comedy, A Wild Hare. The first version featured a plain rabbit, somewhat unrecognizable from the Bugs Bunny that we know. It evolved into the gray rabbit with a fluffy tail and gloves that we all know and love.

In the video above, Dave Lee from the Youtube series Dave Lee Down Under, goes through the evolution of Bugs Bunny's character design. In the process of creating the character, some may point out that there seem to be similarities between Bugs and the Hare from Disney's The Tortoise and the Hare. But Bob Givens, who was himself a former Disney animator and the one who made Bugs Bunny's first official design, insisted that it wasn't a ripoff. -from Open Culture

(Video credit: Dave Lee Down Under/Youtube)

My parents don't understand why I don't eat certain foods. I particularly don't like okra and the bitter melon, partly because of the taste, but mostly because of their texture. According to Rhonda Miller, who has been researching mouthfeel at the Texas A&M AgriLife research facility, the way we eat our food and how we manipulate food in our mouths can be a key determining factor to what kind of food we like.

There are a few types of eaters based on texture or mouthfeel. There are the chewers and crunchers who use their molars to chew the food, and then there are the suckers and smooshers who use their tongue and palate to swirl food in their mouths. There are further nuances between each type. Although chewers and crunchers use their molars, chewers are less vigorous and eat slowly, while crunches are the loud eaters. Smooshers relish their food with their tongue and the roof of their mouth, while suckers suck the flavor of the food before chewing.

Miller has been doing research on beef products and how these eating behaviors affect what kind of beef each eater would thoroughly enjoy. In her study, she found what kind of burgers each of them enjoy. Read more about it on Futurity.

(Image credit: Sander Dalhuisen/Unsplash)

Sarah Gundle had met her friend Becca in university and they clicked. Through all of her life moments, Becca had been her voice of reason, and the person who encouraged her to take risks and live her life to the fullest. So, it came as a shock to her and to Becca's friends and family when one day, she was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. It seemed awfully like something from a movie, but for Sarah, it was real and unnerving.

And for years after Becca's death, Sarah had been sending one-way text messages to her friend's phone number, until one day, five years later, she received a reply for the first time. The message read, "I'm sorry, who is this?". It was surprising because Sarah knew that nobody could have been using her friend's old phone number. She read that if it hasn't been used for 90 days, it would be unusable. But there it was, somebody had sent her a reply from her friend's old phone number.

A short conversation between them followed, with Sarah explaining that the number used to belong to her friend who died five years ago. The person on the other end offered their condolences. But the last five words Sarah received shook her to her core. It read, "But please, don't text again." To read the rest of her story, check it out on Huff Post.

(Image credit: Kamran Abdullayev/Unsplash)

The stigma behind mental health issues and talking about them has slowly crumbled, and people are more open to talk about their feelings and struggles with their peers and coworkers. Indeed, in workplaces where a healthy number of millennials and Gen Zs abound, the language of therapy has seeped into the daily dictionary of employees.

Certainly, having a workplace where people are aware and care about others' mental health as well as their own is a good thing. Then, it will be much easier to cope with the stress that work might entail. People will be more understanding and helpful to address and resolve issues that workers might be going through.

There is a caveat however, in that the growing usage of therapy-speak in the workplace must also be coupled with the proper actions. There might be instances that top management may be using these words without showing any genuine concern as they carry on with existing practices that make employees overworked but underpaid. Or, the language may also be misused and miscontextualized.

So, although it has good points, there are things to watch out for as well, which Amanda Montell points out in her article on Harper's Bazaar.

(Image credit: Jason Goodman/Unsplash)

When textspeak or chat lingo started gaining prominence, there must have been people, mostly our not so tech-savvy parents or grandparents, who were confused by the acronyms and abbreviations that suddenly popped up in their online conversations with family. Nowadays, acronyms like LOL, LMAO, and ROFL are more commonplace, and people generally know what they mean, but there are still a lot of Google searches being made about other acronyms and initialisms.

Letter Solver did a study on which acronyms were the most searched. They categorized these acronyms and initialisms into five different areas: gaming, tech, business, dating, and US states. Yes, your state's abbreviation can be confusing. Just ask people what the abbreviations for Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Maine, and Michigan are, and, unless you have specifically searched about them before (as I have), it can get really puzzling.

One thing to note about the study is that there are certain initialisms which might have two or more different meanings, so the number of searches for some initialisms may have been conflated. By the way, the difference between an acronym and an initialism is that an acronym is pronounced like a word (like SCUBA) and initialisms have the individual letters spelled out when you say them (like CEO). Mental Floss explains 25 of the most confusing abbreviations but if you want to check the full list of abbreviations, check out Letter Solver's study.

(Image credit: Grammarly)

Physics may have given us a piece of the puzzle as to how the Great Sphinx of Giza had been carved by ancient humans. A study suggests that nature had something to do with it. Leif Ristroph, along with fellow researchers from New York University, have observed how wind and other forces naturally eroded clay and other land formations to create what is called a "yardang". These yardangs are elongated protruberances, from which the people of ancient Egypt might have been inspired to form the Great Sphinx.

Ristroph and his team wanted to test out a controversial hypothesis by the Egyptian geologist Farouk El-Baz on how the Great Sphinx as well as the pyramids were constructed. El-Baz had asserted that the head of the Great Sphinx had been carved out naturally as a yardang and ancient Egyptians merely added details of its features. Afterward, they just dug out a ditch around the head to form the body. El-Baz also suggested that these formations were possible because the ancient Egyptians were aware of the phenomenon whereby the wind erodes the sand and clay to form conical structures which could survive for ages.

Conducting experiments in a lab, Ristroph and his team were able to approximate how the phenomenon occurred and might lend credence to El-Baz's theory. Despite not fully recreating the natural conditions that could have brought the Great Sphinx and the pyramids about, Ristroph and his team were confident that the results of their experiments may provide a possible explanation behind the phenomenon.

(Image credit: The Cleveland Museum of Art/Unsplash)

Ruling the galaxy with an iron fist can be stressful. When things get a little rough, Darth Vader takes some personal time for a video consultation with his therapist Master Garian. Vader repeats a series of positive affirmations that we know he has no intention of fulfilling. It only take five minutes before the session is interrupted, but Vader puts an end to that. Throughout this video, I was expecting Vader to slow down his breathing to a point where he just dies, but that doesn't happen. Master Garian's soothing voice may or may not have done Vader any good, but I feel quite relaxed. You can thank Auralnauts for this odd but calming interlude.