There is no activity on earth that people will not turn into a competition eventually. The Sheep to Shawl competition at the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival took place earlier this month. In this contest, teams of five people have three hours to shear a sheep, card and spin the wool, and weave it into a shawl. The teams have names like the Quaker Bakers, the Fidget Spinners, and Mutton but Trouble. The teams are judged on their speed and the quality of the finished work, but also on their teamwork, theme, and costumes. The 2023 competition also had something rare- an all high school team from a fiber arts class. That hasn't happened in Maryland since the 1970s, which gives us a clue as to how long this has been going on.  

NPR talked to the competitors about what the Sheep to Shawl contest is all about. The secret to success is finding a sheep that doesn't have much lanolin, since they do not have time to wash it out. Spinning is much easier with wool from a less-greasy sheep. Maryland isn't unique; Sheep to Shawl competitions can be found across the US, wherever sheep are raised. -via Boing Boing

Apple TV+'s new movie Killers of the Flower Moon received a nine-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival Saturday. The film will not be released in the US until October, the perfect time to build Oscar buzz.

Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of the Osage Indian murders. In a bit of cosmic karma, Native Americans who had been forcibly relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma discovered oil reserves in 1897 and the Osage people grew wealthy. By the 1920s, that oil was increasingly valuable, and more than 60 Osage of all ages were murdered or died under mysterious circumstances, with their wealth inherited by white relatives or assigned guardians. Eventually, the FBI investigated.

Director Martin Scorsese tells the story from two perspectives: an overview of the history of the FBI, and a more intimate focus on two historical characters, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife Mollie Kyle Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). This approach resulted in 206-minute movie- that's three hours and 26 minutes long! The viewers at Cannes didn't seem to mind. Killers of the Flower Moon certainly has star power. Besides DiCaprio and Gladstone, the cast includes Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, and John Lithgow. Digg has a roundup of review highlights, with links to full reviews. DiCaprio and Gladstone are particularly singled out for praise.

Since the producers of Killers of the Flower Moon did not fictionalize the character's names, reading the historical account of the Osage murders will reveal spoilers for the somewhat-mysterious teaser trailer, but it only made me want to see the movie more.

Guy Dupont, a computer programmer and tinkerer, received a request from a friend to develop pants that send the user a notification when the fly is down. This invention will hopefully save us needless embarrassment when we discover at the end of the day that our pants were open the whole time.

Dupont used hot glue and safety pins to attach a sensor to the fly, which he then wired to a microcontroller in his pocket. If the sensor detects that the fly is open, after a few seconds, the microcontroller pushes a notification to the Pushover app on Dupont's Android phone.

-via Hack A Day

The Nez Perce War of 1877 was the last great Indian war in which the US Army, protecting encroaching white settlers, pursued the Nez Perce people from Oregon, through Idaho, and into Montana before finally defeating them. The war began with the Nez Perce having the upper hand in several attacks and battles that gave their few warriors a reputation as terrifying fighters led by the military genius Heinmot Tooyalalkekt, also known as Chief Joseph. When the Nez Perce, represented by Chief Joseph,  surrendered in October of 1877, it was the culmination of a riveting war that people in the eastern US had been following avidly in the papers.

But the newspaper accounts only told one side of the story. The actual war followed decades of negotiations and broken treaties between the US and the Nez Perce. The US had a fundamental and possibly deliberate misunderstanding of the Nez Perce- they weren't one nation, but a network of bands of people, and none of them spoke for all of them. Chief Joseph was one of several chiefs, but it fell to him to communicate their final surrender to the army. The early victories of the Nez Perce had more to do with the US military's ignorance of how their culture worked, plus some major blunders, and the local civilians who did more harm than good. Meanwhile, Chief Joseph was more concerned with the safety of the women and children of his people than with military victories. Read how the war unfolded from the perspective of the Nez Perce in a chronicle at Damn Interesting. You can also listen to it in podcast form.

British artist Ernest Howard Shepard became internationally famous for his illustrations included in the first edition of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh.

In 1966, Britain commemorated the nine hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which was recorded for future generations in the 230-foot long Bayeux Tapestry. It was also, Victoria Botkin informs us, the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh. Shepard marked the occasion by designing a Pooh version of the Bayeux Tapestry, which you can see below:

But that was just on paper. Kate Jarman shares on Twitter that her mother has used her embroidery skills to turn Shepard's illustration into an actual piece of fabric art.

-via Marilyn Terrell

We live in a world that offers an amazing array of consumer goods. Thanks to the internet, our range of choice is wider than ever before because now we can order consumer goods from not only out-of-town vendors, but from all around the world. That's not always a good thing, because we can become confused or even paralyzed by the prospect of making the wrong selection. It's not only online stores, but online reviews and rankings of goods that can cause confusion -not to mention a serious commitment of time. And who's to say which reviews and rankings are valid?

An article at the New York Times (non-paywalled here) describes the phenomena of people who do endless online research to make sure they are buying the absolute best toaster before making their purchase. These people are called maximizers, as opposed to others who look around for a "good enough" deal on a toaster and are called satisficers (a word that combines satisfy and suffice). Of course, legitimate concerns over what we can afford will impact our decision-making style. I used a toaster as an example, but this phenomenon can apply to everything from groceries to college choice to dating sites to real estate.  

The research tells us that maximizers often do make the best choices, but that doesn't necessarily leave them happy, as they can feel anxiety over possibly making the wrong choice before the purchase. After the purchase that anxiety may continue as regret, because there might have been a better option after all. Satisficers are more likely to buy the first thing that meets all their personal criteria, and will save time and cognitive energy by not worrying about their decision once it's made. People rarely fall completely into one category or the other. Most of us will devote way more time and energy into researching large decisions like a new house than small ones like tonight's restaurant. Yet there are folks who will spend so much time reviewing restaurants that they forget to go to dinner.  

The discussion at Metafilter makes it clear that many of us are checking listicles and reviews mainly to avoid buying crap that will fall apart before the purchase is justified, because there is an awful lot of subpar goods for sale in our modern throwaway society.   

(Image credit: Masod Shahrestani)

A shake table is not where you pick up your milkshake, nor is it furniture for a strip club. The shake table at the University of California San Diego is a stretch of ground intricately engineered to simulate various forms and strengths of earthquakes. Underground pressure pipes are constantly upgraded to cause different kinds of tremors so their effects can be studied. Tom Scott visited the shake table at UCSD to talk to the engineers and find out how it works. Then he went back to witness a test of a ten-story building with innovative architectural features designed to withstand an earthquake. So you can see that it has to be extremely strong, plus it must have plenty of redundant safety features for the sake of the engineers who work there and for the expensive items they test. Not to mention, the shake table itself has to survive the work it does.   

Well, that’s our entire weekend schedule right there. 

Sometimes with the many struggles in our daily lives, we tend to look for small, fun things to do to relax. Mindless tasks can help us unwind after a long day or week of doing nothing but work and stressing over problems. Coloring, while considered a childish activity, is now one of the few adult hobbies considered one of the best methods for destressing. 

Now there are a lot of adult-oriented coloring books (by this we mean more details and intricate compared to the usual ones), but they can be a bit expensive. However, Color Our Collections is now offering new pieces that you can color in your downtime for free. This campaign, initiated by The New York Academy of Medicine Library, collects coloring pages from over 100 cultural institutions from across the globe and makes them free to download online.

Check out all the available art you can color on their official website here! 

Image credit: Color Our Collections 

Oh, dear. 

Beth Bogar, an American tourist, was having a good time in Mason Elephant Park and Lodge, located in Bali, Indonesia, with her husband when she got one of the most shocking and a bit traumatizing moments in her life. It started quite innocently: she was in a resort that had animals in it and wanted to pose for a photo with one of the animals in the area. 

Bogar shared that she only realized the situation she was in when she heard the cracking of her bones. An elephant apparently decided to grab her arm and put it into his mouth while she was taking a picture. “I couldn’t get my arm out, I could just hear cracking, and I started to panic,” she told WMUR.

Now this isn’t an illegal place to take photos of animals or pose with them. The Lodge usually promotes their photo booths on social media pages. The park generally has good reviews from other visitors. Additionally, as Bogar was taking her photo, she shared that she was being directed by the animal’s trainer as well. “I just feel like the guide was guiding me and he let my arm get too close to his mouth and I didn’t know how close too close was,” she explained.

She survived the incident, with a $10,000 medical bill after getting emergency surgery. Bogar and her husband claimed that the resort initially said they would help her pay the bill, but they stopped responding to all calls and messages. “They were assuring us all the while ‘Don’t worry we have insurances we can handle this situation we’ll get you taken care of’,” her husband shared.

Image credit: Harvey Sapir

Well, this honestly just made us want to go inside a mechanical typewriter. Do you ever get that feeling when you see the interior of something, and your brain just tells you that it looks explorable? Yeah. But this animation is amazing though. 

Animagraffs’ Jake O’Neal decided to give people a tour of the inside of an early 20th-century mechanical typewriter. For those unaware, these are the machines that people used way before computers were in, okay? The detailed animation was created using descriptive language, with O’Neal also explaining each component and its purpose as the video further progresses. 

Check the full video above!

The above picture is from the Instagram account Cooking for Bae, the title of which is a joke about inexperienced young people trying to make impressive meals for someone they love even though they don't know how to cook. The person who drained their macaroni, like it said on the package, obviously never bothered to watch their mother do it when they were a child. Nor did they ever learn about food safety. Macaroni and cheese isn't that difficult to make, but they have examples of inexperienced cooks jazzing it up with strawberries, avocado, and mint-vanillla milk. Those are three different cooks. Other abominations are clearly from school lunch rooms, restaurants, stoned experiments, or even a grocery store.

More macaroni! This person apparently picked up the wrong paper packet when making mac and cheese, and then decided to go ahead and use the cheese packet for a hot drink. The pasta is most likely a loss, but that drink, if made with real milk, might make up for it. Bored Panda has a ranked list of 30 of the best deranged cooking attempts from the Instagram account. Beware, there are some pictures of food that no one can confidently identify.  

Even the most outlandish legends and cryptids may be traced to real experiences that made a good story for someone somewhere. A good story tends to get larger with each telling, and details are added when different people try to translate them or pass those stories down to younger people who have less context. We are familiar with medieval artists who tried to draw exotic beasts from nothing but an oral description. That same transformation could happen to any strange sighting when the witness and the artist are different people. As we gain more knowledge about the ancient world, we find more analogues to our modern legends, like the drop bear. A string of unreliable narrators can easily transform a natural phenomena that no one understands into a fantastic fairy tale. Weird History take a look at a whole string of mythical creatures, from cyclops to vampires to unicorns, and ties them to plausible natural but misunderstood origins.

The odds of an exoplanet being Earth-like in the sense that it could be successfully inhabited by humans are, well, astronomical. Many specific environmental qualities must be in place.

But a recently-discovered planet about 86 light years away from our solar system ticks off some of the essential factors. LP-791-18 b orbits a red dwarf star. It doesn't rotate, so one side is always facing its sun and the other is always away from its sun. But, NASA reports, it's volcanically active, so it could have water condensation on the dark side.

CalTech says that  planet is about 1.46 times the size of Earth, so the gravity might be acceptable to humans. It orbits its star at a Goldilocks distance--not to hot and not too cold. These are essential characteristics of planet that could at least hope to serve as a refuge for humans.

-via Marginal Revolution | Artist's visualization courtesy of NASA

Orcas, also called killer whales, have sunk three sailboats off the Iberian coast since 2020, the latest on May 4th. They've also attacked numerous boats without sinking them. Such attacks involve several orcas, and the younger ones appear to be imitating the behavior of older orcas. In many of these attacks, the orcas approach the rudder of the boat, which they bite, bend, or break, and then lose interest when the boat stops moving forward. You could call these interactions rare, as the orcas only attack about 1% of boats in the area, but since 2020, that's 500 cases.

Scientists suspect the behavior started with a female known as White Gladis, who may have had a traumatic experience with a boat. Orcas are very social, and new behaviors can spread quickly among the population. And that population is rather small- the last census of Iberian orcas in 2011 found only 39 individuals. That subpopulation is listed as critically endangered. Five hundred boat attacks by such a small number of orcas is concerning. While the behavior was quickly spread among the orcas, experts don't know if it's just something fun they've learned to do, or if it may be a malicious and deliberate way for sea creatures to inflict harm on the human ocean interlopers. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: NOAA)

A drop bear is a cryptid that Australians love to warn tourists about. They resemble koalas, but are super vicious. A drop bear will hide in a tree until an unsuspecting person walks underneath and then drop onto them and rip them apart. Or at least that's the story. I don't understand why they try to scare tourists like that, since people visiting Australia from elsewhere are all primed to believe every living creature there is trying to kill you already.  

But there were once real drop bears. Like koalas, they were not bears, but marsupials. The genus called Nimbadon roamed the rainforests of southern Australia 15 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene Epoch. Nimbadon looked somewhat like a wombat, but grew to be 70 kilograms (154 pounds)! While they were first considered something like a "marsupial sheep," scientists have determined that these creatures lived in the trees, slung underneath branches like sloths. Occasionally, a Nimbadon would fall out of a tree, just like a drop bear. They know this because some Nimbadons fell out of trees and into caves, where their remains were found 15 million years later.

That's wild enough, but the article about prehistoric drop bears also mentions crocodiles that climbed trees. Now that would make a great legend! -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Peter Schouten)