For new couples who are planning to start their own family or are looking to expand, one of their main priorities would be to find a house, a permanent settlement where they can raise their children, situated in a nice neighborhood.

In recent times, however, people have found it difficult to look for affordable houses, even if they had the financial capacity to buy one. Especially in the years that followed the global recession of 2008, statistics have shown that many buyers had been shut out in the new home market, between 2009 and 2015.

During this time, despite the struggles in the economy, surveys have shown how there was a marked rise in the size and quality of houses being built. According to research done by the National Association of Home Builders, the median size of a single family home in the US peaked at 2,467 square feet, or just about 230 square meters, in 2015. After that, the size declined and settled at around 2,261 square feet, or about 210 square meters in 2020.

To put that into perspective, 210 square meters is about half the size of a FIBA basketball court, or a little bigger than a standard tennis court, or perhaps, in even more familiar terms, it's about half the size of the end zone in American football. That being said, the largest single family homes do not belong to the US, no. A couple other countries surpass the US when it comes to that distinction.

According to an analysis conducted by The Perfect Rug, the five nations with the biggest houses in the world, arranged in ascending order, are: Malta, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia.

For a summary of the statistics, Malta's average home size is 1,722 square feet, about 160 square meters, with a household size of about 2.85 people. Canada averages at 1,948 square feet, about 180 square meters, and a household size of about 2.45 people. The US is at 2,164 square feet on average, with a household size of about 2.49 people.

New Zealand, on the other hand, is not that much larger than the US, averaging at 2,174 square feet with a household size of 2.67 people. While Australia takes first place with 2,303 square feet and has an average household size of 2.5 people.

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Sports fans from different countries have always managed to throw shade on their rivals, even when those rivals change every day, or even by the hour. In 2024, the trash talk managed to turn to other nations' cuisines. The first volley thrown was when an Albanian fan enraged Italians at the UEFA European Championship tournament by taking a handful of spaghetti and breaking it in half. Sure, that stung, but it beats using ethnic slurs or insulting their rivals' mothers. The insult caught on, and soon countries all over Europe were boasting how their national dishes beat another nations' foods, with signs in the stands and on social media. Belgium crowed that its beef stew (stoofvlees) is better than whatever dish its rivals were eating, and Czechia bragging that their svickova is better than kebab when playing against Turkey.

Then came the Olympics. When Hong Kong beat Italy in fencing, Pizza Huts in Hong Kong and Macau celebrated by promoting pineapple pizza, which Italians consider a grave offense. While the sports rivalries are real, the insults are mostly in good fun, because all those foods are wonderful. And insulting someone else's food actually goes way back in history, and it's not always limited to sports. Read about the international food fight of 2024 at Atlas Obscura.

Sportswear has often been advertised as improving one's performance, but MO/GO pants has the technology to make it so. MO/GO (short for mountain goat) has a brace along the outside of the leg with an external motorized knee joint, and interior cuffs to hold it in place. They won't walk for you, but will provide a 40% boost to save your joints and muscles the usual wear and tear of mountain hiking. The pants are a collaboration between the clothing company Arc’teryx and a tech startup called Skip.  

MO/GO pants are $4,500 to purchase, and will be available to rent in some mountainous areas of Arizona, Colorado, and British Columbia. But MO/GO isn't just for hiking. They can be a real assist for people with joint problems and mobility issues. And they don't look like the exoskeletons we've seen in movies. Check out the specifics of MO/GO robotic pants at Moss and Fog. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Skip)

Venice is a lovely city in Italy that uses canals instead of roads, which draws tourists from all over the world. At one time it was a trading powerhouse and the center of international finance. But how did this unique city come about? The first inhabitants were refugees fleeing from barbarian attacks on the mainland, who ended up on a group of clay islands out in a lagoon. Why they stayed out there tells us something about the safety of the dark ages.

The residents of Venice figured out how to make those 126 muddy islands stable enough to build a city upon, how to connect the islands with each other, and how to furnish it with fresh water as the population grew. Then there's the sewage system. The engineering marvel that is Venice has stood for more than a thousand years. This video has a one-minute skippable ad at 3:50. -Thanks, Brother Bill!

The latest clicker game from Steam to take the gaming world by surprise is Banana. The name is simple, and so is the game. You click on a picture of a banana. That's it. But you click over and over and over until you start unlocking rewards and advancing to higher levels. You can win a new skin for your banana, trade skins with other players, and buy skins and other enhancements. That's typical of "clicker games" that arose more than ten years ago. Clicker games are very easy to play. You just keep clicking. You don't expect to have fun doing the game itself; that comes with the microtransactions when you unlock the rewards. Yes, some people find the transactions and trading to be fun. You can even automate the clicking, so the game advances while you are doing other stuff. It's estimated that most of the players are bots anyway. 

The success of "Banana" is another example of how much our digital lives have been devoured by automation. It’s also the logical end point of video-game microtransactions. Is engagement with the game authentic or inauthentic? Who cares, so long as people are spending money.

The whole idea of clicker games started out as a joke, but now they are a bona fide thing, and companies are making money off them. Read about Banana and the rise of clicker games at Sherwood. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Titus Tscharntke)

In the days before MRIs, antibiotics, or even germ theory, things regularly happened to human bodies that no one could explain. Even when they could be explained, there are cases that defy imagination and sent shivers down the spines of anyone who heard about them. Some cases worked themselves out, and at least one was a hoax, while others led to death or lifelong disability. As you hear about these very strange medical cases, you should think of how grateful you are that we live in the age of medical science that we do.

You know the cases of Phineas Gage and Mary Toft, which were so weird they had to be included. Dedicated Neatorama readers will also remember the exploding teeth. But that leaves us nine other bizarre tales from the history of medicine that might make you a bit nervous to think about in the latest video from Weird History.

When a "fact" gets repeated often enough, it becomes lore, and sometimes even an idiom. You've heard "blind as a bat" and "the wise owl" so many times it seems natural, but neither is true. Bats aren't blind. Sure, they use echolocation, but that's because they fly in the dark. It's hard to see in the dark no matter how good your eyesight is. Owls may look wise, and they are in many storybooks, but studies show they have more trouble learning a new task than other birds do.

Sometimes even the refutation of an old wive's tale can be inaccurate. The custom of bullfighters waving a red cape was once explained as their way of enraging the bull for a fight. That was later "debunked" by the "fact" that cattle are colorblind. The real story is that bulls can indeed see red, but they have trouble distinguishing blue from green. Whether red actually enrages them is another story. Okay, how many other often-repeated commonsense "facts" about animals can you think of? They may likely be pure myth. Mental Floss has a list of 64 misconceptions about 63* different animals they will happily debunk for you.

* The list says 64 different animals, but both cows and bulls are in there, and they are the same species.

New Zealand filmmaker Éowyn Aldridge filmed a simple, wordless scene of herself entering a room and drinking some water, but did it over and over again to illustrate the various filmmaking styles of ten different accomplished directors. I haven't seen enough Christopher Nolan movies to recognize his style, but as soon as we got the Kubrick stare, I was hooked. In the above video you'll see an interpretation of the work of Christopher Nolan, Stanley Kubrick, Edgar Wright, Quentin Tarantino, Denis Villeneuve, Wes Anderson, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Taika Waititi, and Éowyn Aldridge. Then she did the same with ten more directors! The second video features the styles of Ari Aster, Alfred Hitchcock, Tim Burton, Paul Thomas Anderson, Greta Gerwig, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Jane Campion, Gullimero del Toro, Ridley Scott, and Martin Scorsese. You don't have to guess which is which, as they are all labeled.

I'm familiar with just enough of these directors to enjoy her interpretations. -via Laughing Squid

The Cold War was cold because the US and the Soviet Union both had nuclear weapons, and neither side wanted to use them. But competition was fierce in other arenas besides the battlefield, the most obvious being the Space Race and the Olympic games. Both were opportunities to to prove which political system was better, but the Olympics were where people from each nation actually got together. There have been quite a few defections from the USSR and communist Eastern Bloc countries during the Olympics, and the US covertly encouraged those as another point for the West in the one-upmanship battle.

The CIA sometimes involved US athletes in engaging Soviet athletes to discuss defecting during the Olympics. We might never know the extent of their efforts, but in 1960, javelin star Al Cantello was approached by a mysterious government agent about arranging the possible defection of Soviet long jumper Igor Ter-Ovanesyan. US sprinter Dave Sime had already been recruited by the CIA to help facilitate such a defection. Cantello, who died earlier this year, told his story decades after the fact, and you can read it at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

The stereotype that other countries have of Americans is that we are all rich, fat, and armed. There are other things the rest of the world finds strange abut Americans, like how loud we speak, how we smile too much, and how we bare our teeth when we smile. British immigrant Laurence Brown looks at another American stereotype- our use of ice cubes. We feel the need to put them in our drinks at all times, even in winter. One reason is because it is much hotter in the US than it ever is in Britain, where it rains a lot and they don't even put screens in their windows because it's too cool for mosquitos. But that isn't the whole story.

The American obsession with ice has to do with our history, from back when ice was one of our biggest exports. It's one of the peculiarities of having a nation that is so big that it covers several climates, and since there was a lot of money to be made, we got used to having ice all the time. But we also need refrigerators and freezers because it's a long way to the supermarket, and we don't want to go there every day. Yes, Laurence gives us a concise history of ice in America in his latest video. There's a 50-second skippable ad at two minutes in.

I'm not a killer pinball player, but I am a fan, which is why I always stop by the Stern pinball room at SDCC. This year, I was actually treated to a special press presentation of the John Wick machine and I am so glad I got to play this game. As you can see above, John Wick himself had the chance to play the game at the con, but sadly I missed that opportunity.

There's so much to love on these machines if you're a fan of John Wick. His dogs serve as slingshots, enemies are on the ramps, the New York Continental Hotel is right there in the center, his weapons crate pops open during play —and his gorgeous car even moves! The gameplay is fast and entertaining —you'd hardly expect anything with John Wick to drag on, would you?

Perhaps one of the coolest features of this and other modern Stern games though is that you can actually play levels, save your progress, and update worldwide leader boards when you register an account and scan your QR code. Yes, getting one of these pinball machines for your home is a little pricey, being as how they start at $6,900 (about average for a machine of this quality), but the Stern Pinball account means you don't have to fork out the money to bring the game home just to be able to master it.

My verdict: if you like John Wick and you like pinball, find an arcade with this game ASAP.

Link

Heritage Auctions held a two-day auction of Hollywood memorabilia last week and sold that bikini from Return of the Jedi for $175,000. And it wasn't even the costume that was in the final film! This one is authentic from the production, but it was only used for screen tests.

Why did it Princess Leia's bikini fetch such a high price? Because that costume was such a memorable part of the movie series. After two Star Wars films, audiences were shocked at seeing the beloved princess showing so much skin while she was being held in slavery by Jabba the Hut. It was titillating, but also illustrated her humiliation. Viewers were either excited or else scandalized by the costume in a story that was so appealing to children. Actress Carrie Fisher was among those. She didn't feel good about being nearly naked, and counseled Daisy Ridley not to give in if the producers wanted her to wear something she wasn't comfortable with in the sequel series. The upshot is that Star Wars fans have been talking about the bikini for 41 years now. Read more about the impact this costume made at Smithsonian. -via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Michael Barera)

A filmmaker's vision for a movie, the script, the resulting footage, and the finished product are often four very different stories. At any stage of the process, the team may decide that they need to go in a completely different direction.

John Hughes wrote the screenplay for the 1986 movie Ferris Beuller's Day Off in less than a week, and shot the film to follow that first draft. Once the scenes were assembled, the first cut was two hours and 45 minutes long! Even worse, test audiences didn't like it. Enter legendary editor Paul Hirsch to save the movie by re-editing the footage that had been shot. Not only did he shorten it, but most importantly, he rearranged all the sequences. When you see what order they were in originally, you'll see how this made a vast improvement in the pacing and the audience's emotional involvement. CinemaStix fills us in on how that happened to Ferris Beuller's Day Off forty years ago. -via The Awesomer

Let's see how ArtButMakeItSports (previously at Neatorama) is finding the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. We've already seen some wonderful photos, magic moments captured from the athletic competitions, but is it art? It sure is! Let's see US gymnast Frederick Richard on the parallel bars.

Closed by Sorcery, by Luis Felipe Noe, 1963, 📸 by @Dan_Mullan pic.twitter.com/aPudLCtpQA

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) July 31, 2024

The guy who runs the artbutmakeitsports social media accounts does not use AI to find the artworks that match the photographs. It's all from memory, which fuels speculation that he must be an art history professor or possibly a museum curator. Continue reading to see more of his Olympic/art comparisons.

We have already often heard that living sedentary lives have caused us so many health problems that if we continue to sit for extended periods of time every day, we might just find ourselves slowly killing ourselves.

Dr. James Levine, co-director of the Mayo Clinic and the Arizona State University Obesity Initiative, even stated how sitting has become more sinister than smoking, HIV, or even parachuting. He exaggerates but the point he was trying to make is that we need to spend more time expending energy on non-exercise activities, which are those light, physical activities that can help our bodies get moving while at work.

Standing up, walking around, and doing house chores are some of the activities in which we can engage so that we don't spend most of our days just sitting on a chair.

A few suggestions for workstations include the treadmill desk, allowing employees to exercise and work at the same time. Granted, it's an expensive investment at $4,000 for burning a few calories daily, so it may not be the most practical solution. A cheaper alternative would be the standing desks which is slightly better than sitting.

In a research conducted by researchers from the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Texas A&M university, they looked at different workstations — height-adjustable workstations, sit-stand workstations, fixed stand-based workstations, and traditional desks — and how they affect work performance, physical activity, and discomfort.

From the study, they found no significant different in productivity, no differences in energy expenditure, step count, or step time per day, and 65% of all participants reporting neck discomfort with 80% of those using traditional desks reporting lower back pain.

Despite the results showing no significant differences, researchers continue to believe the further studies on standing desks can lead to potential benefits.

At the end of the day, one thing is certain. We need to keep our bodies physically active to stay healthy. It's more than just simply changing the type of furniture that we use at work. It's a lifestyle and a paradigm shift that we need to consciously put in effort to get benefits and see future results. - via Real Clear Science

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