Anyone who has ever tried to moderate content on the internet knows how hard it is. When you allow strangers to post or comment on your website, you have to keep an eye on what they say. If it is your responsibility to encourage free and open exchange of ideas, while at the same time protecting your site from becoming a cesspool of threats, harassment, spam, or odious content, you have to make some hard decisions. The biggest sites have a content policy as a guide.

In the game Moderator Mayhem, you are confronted with many decisions on whether to keep or toss content on a fictional social media network. Some comments are easy, but many are edge cases and you may need to consult the content policy to decide. It can still be difficult. But whatever your score is, you'll learn about the process of content moderation and what professional moderators are up against. Read more about the purpose of the game.  -via Metafilter

This video is framed with the joke that tourists go to Austria and want to see kangaroos. There are no kangaroos in Austria. However, as you zoom about Vienna in this video, you might catch a glimpse of one here or there. But pretty soon you forget all about kangaroos because this animated hyperlapse focuses on the beautiful and historic city of Vienna. It's way more impressive than kangaroo chasing.

Kirill Neiezhmakov created this delightful video, and also posted a list and description of the Viennese locations in the video at the YouTube page. You really should watch this in full-screen mode, because it's just lovely. Oh, by the way, you just might find that kangaroo at the Schönbrunn Zoo.  -via Nag on the Lake

Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles was long the main highway to the western United States. Approved in 1926 (and completed in 1938), Route 66 was the path Dust Bowl victims used to escape to California. It was the subject of many a college road trip, or the path to start a new life somewhere on the West Coast. In 1946, Nat King Cole recorded a song that ensured everyone knew Route 66. There was even a TV show called Route 66 in the 1960s. But in the 1980s, the interstate highway system bypassed and replaced Route 66. A lot of it fell into ruin.

But now, ahead of the road's 100th anniversary, some states are working on repairing and preserving their portions of Route 66 to bring it back to its mid-century glory. Many of the famous gas stations, hotels, and tourist stops along the way are also staging a comeback. If you've always wanted to recreate those road trips of yesteryear on a historic highway that takes you through scenery you can see, your opportunity is coming. Read about the state of Route 66's revival and Smithsonian.

(Image credit: US Department of Transportation)

A guy finds a purse with some change in it, and it leads him into an adventure in consumerism that resembles a snowball rolling downhill, until he is literally in over his head. It's a cute and clever animation, and if you look beneath the surface, it brings up many familiar aphorisms about money. Don't buy something just because someone wants to sell it to you. A great deal may end up costing you dearly. Possessions only weigh you down. Spending can become a habit you eventually can't afford. I'm sure there are more.

Animator Aaron Hughes made this with thousands of hand-drawn images on financial pages. The finished animation Five Cents won the South by Southwest Animated Short Audience Award last year. -via Everlasting Blort

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has released their annual list of endangered historic places in the US. Over the past 36 years, they've listed 350 places, which usually galvanizes local or government entities to put forth efforts to preserve these places. The reasons these historic places are in danger of destruction vary. Any house with no one living there will deteriorate, and eventually become more expensive to preserve than it's worth, unless people think its history makes the difference. Some historic neighborhoods suffer from the very value of the land, as corporations move in and knock everything down to build new buildings. A historic business on Route 66 has been unused since the interstate routed people in a different direction. Historically ethnic neighborhoods lose their flavor when longtime residents can no longer afford to live there.

Whether a place is "historic" enough to preserve is a matter of opinion. Some spaces might be better used for something else. Maybe preservation is worth the effort and money, or maybe not. And sometimes market forces are just too much to fight back against. Read the stories of these places and ponder those questions those questions for yourself.  -via Kottke

(Image credit: Joe Mabel)

Have you ever come across an internet list and realized that most of the listings don't have much to do with the title? That's the case with the article entitled 5 of the Objectively Stinkiest Humans to Ever Walk the Earth. What we have is one historical celebrity who smelled so badly that people wrote about it (shown above), two people who went a year or more without showering or bathing so their smell was assumed, one doctor with a disgusting experimental technique, and an entertainer who probably didn't smell bad at all yet would make you assume such if you went to his show. Yeah, it's plausible to assume that anyone who goes a year without a shower might smell, but at least one of them was eager to fix that when the opportunity came. Still, each of the stories is interesting in their own way, and well worth a read. They might even squick you out a bit, but at least you don't have to smell them.

A team of researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have built an edible battery. Yum! The battery is made from nothing but non-toxic food-grade materials. These include beeswax, seaweed, cellulose, and activated charcoal, among other things. Once again, yum! It can deliver 48 microamperes of current for more than ten minutes. Yeah, it's tiny, and not all that powerful. But it's edible! Still, it wasn't developed in order to grace a meal. In fact, they are rechargeable, which would be useless if you made them just to be eaten.

These batteries could be very useful for children's and pets' toys, since small batteries are often ingested by those who don't know any better. Conventional batteries accidentally ingested can be quite dangerous. Another use would be in cutting-edge medical therapies, like tiny robots that are swallowed to monitor conditions in the digestive system, or even tinier drug-delivery robots. Another benefit of edible electronic components would be the non-toxic disposal of old batteries in our environment. Along those lines, the team is also working on developing edible transistors. Read about these batteries at ars technica, and marvel at the way we've learned how to harness organic matter for hi-tech solutions. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia)

The sitcom Arrested Development and the drama Succession are both about dysfunctional family businesses. Well, the businesses are what you'd expect, but the families are dysfunctional. The difference is that one is a comedy and the other is a drama. Still, the subject matter is close enough to lend itself to a twisted mashup. The video is from Succession, but it is presented in the kooky style of Arrested Development: the editing, the music, and the narrator. The narrator is an artificial intelligence version of Ron Howard, as would be appropriate. This video contains NSFW language, despite the bleeps.  -via Nag on the Lake

Fashion has always been influenced by status, and status has always been the reason for fashion. A suntan carried a status of sorts that remained fixed for thousands of years. Pale skin meant status. A suntan indicated that the person was a laborer and spent a lot of time outdoors, usually tending to crops or livestock or building structures for the wealthy, who had the leisure to stay pale indoors or under shade. In ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt, this unspoken rule was slightly modified for men, because warriors were exposed to the sun. But eventually came the Industrial Revolution, in which poor laborers moved inside factories to work, away from the sun.

But what made a suntan into a status symbol was the concept of a beach vacation. Only wealthy people could afford to spend time frolicking on beaches far from home. When Coco Chanel was photographed after getting a tan on the French Riviera in 1923, a new status symbol was born. That turnaround might remind you of the Dr. Seuss story "The Sneetches." And yes, there were hiccups along the way, like the lead and arsenic cosmetics women used to make their skin pale, and the gadgets that were invented to battle vitamin D deficiency when time in the sun would have done the same job. Read about the historical ups and downs of the suntan at Messy Nessy Chic.

Cancer is not caused by bacterial infections or a virus, like so many other diseases. Cancer happens when our own cells start to grow and divide abnormally (although some infections can create conditions in which our cells are encouraged to turn cancerous). By the time a cancer is large enough for modern medical science to detect it, your body has already thrown many defensive weapons against it. In fact, finding and destroying cancerous cells is part of the body's everyday routine. Cancer as we know it happens when the body's defensive weapons are losing the battle against that abnormal growth. That's when we have pull out the big guns: surgery, radiation, and/or powerfully destructive chemicals.

That our immune systems go to work constantly to fight the body's own cells when they become destructive is astonishing in itself. Some of our cells have tiny testing labs looking for odd proteins, along with a library of those proteins, plus we have an army of killer cells detecting abnormalities in different ways. So not only does our immune system look for cells that shouldn't be there (like bacteria and viruses), they also inspect all our cells to make sure they stay in line. Kurzgesagt explains how that works at the cellular level, and even further down in our DNA.

When you hear the statistics on food waste, they are mainly about the amount of food each household tosses out. But when you consider farms, delivery systems, and stores, an astonishing amount of edible food goes to waste before we even see it. Grocery stores can be pretty good at getting their excess food to local food banks (if they are willing), but what happens when a semi truck full of broccoli that won't last more than a few days lands in your lap? That happens more often than you realize, when a shipment is rejected by the vendor and it's not cost-efficient to take it back to its source. Mobilizing that food for people who need it takes some serious logistics.

One group that is working on getting foods systems to work together is Boston Area Gleaners. The organization began as a way of saving the 30% of crops that are never harvested, and getting it to people who need it. They've expanded into the area of logistics, which is crucial when food that could be used is in one place and the food banks that need them are elsewhere, and have no one to spare for a road trip. Free food isn't free when it's 200 miles away.

Read about the challenges of saving perishable food that could feed those in need at Harvard Magazine.  -via TYWKIWDBI

Question Mark, Ohio, is a fictional town that is much like many small towns you know. It is also a slow-rolling internet mystery story that is quickly gathering fans. Question Mark high school student Violet Bookman is documenting the weird things going on in her town at Instagram (start here and click the left arrow to read her posts in order). First, her shoes went missing. Then she hears strange sounds that continue through the account. Then the cat Mr. Business went missing. It turns out there are a lot of missing pets in Question Mark.



Along the way, we meet interesting characters, like the city worker who used to be a wrestler and the teacher from Cleveland with an umbrella tattoo. In addition to Violet's Instagram account, you can keep up with contributions from other Question Mark residents at the city's announcement page. The goings-on are rather entertaining (like the elementary school play), but you are drawn to stay with it to get the answers to lingering questions. Does the fact that Violet wears hearing aids have anything to do with the odd sounds she hears? Why does Bruno communicate with pictograms instead of speaking? What does the umbrella signify? Why does the French teacher hate Violet? And where does that big hole in the ground go?  

This project is the brainchild of Joe Meno and Dan Sinker, who talk about Question Mark in this interview. They worked on it for six months before launching late last month.  -via Metafilter

PS: If you cannot access Instagram, this link may help you keep up.

The 2002 movie Gangs of New York was a strange film that introduced people to a historic subculture they had no clue about. Really, unless you grew up in New York City, your history classes never addressed what was going on in the city during the Civil War. Weird History looks at the Five Points neighborhood in Manhattan depicted in the film, why it was such a slum, and how the people who couldn't afford to live anywhere else dealt with it. Forming gangs is a logical move when normal government protections fall apart.

What happened in Five Points is not an isolated case. Poverty leads to substandard and unsafe living conditions, which lead to desperation, which leads to crime. Housing and infrastructure regulations can lift a neighborhood, but the question will remain: if we don't tolerate poor living conditions, where can the poor afford to live? -via Digg

We humans once thought we were special because we had language, but animals of other species communicate with each other in many different ways. It may be that language of words and phrases and syntax isn't unique to humans, either. Chimpanzees talk to each other all the time, and we may be just a little closer to understanding what they are saying. Scientists have collected many sounds they make, such as "alarm-huus" when they are surprised or detect a danger and “waa-barks” which means something like "Come here."

A new study published in Nature Communications found that chimps combine such sounds into phrases that mean something completely different from the sounds when used alone. Combining an "alarm-huu" with a “waa-bark” apparently means "snake." That makes sense, as in saying "Come here, you're in danger," but the combination has the added meaning of a very specific danger to chimps. That's the kernel of how syntax develops. Read more about how the researchers determined this meaning at Boing Boing.

(Image credit: Frank Schwichtenberg/CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Ku Klux Klan began in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee. The first members were young fiddle players starting a social club, eager to harness the trappings of ancient secret societies to draw intrigue and respect. They were also quite frustrated over the Confederacy's loss in the recent war. They were publicized as a minstrel group or a drinking club, but it wasn't long before politics and "vigilantism" made the klan what it came to be.  

The costumes members wore changed considerably over time, but eventually settled on the long robes and conical head coverings that resembled the Spanish capirote or the capuchon that mocked them. Their terrifying midnight raids were modeled after the European custom of harassment called charivari. Charivari was used in Europe to shame a member of the community. Read about more of the traditions that were made up for the Klan at Lapham's Quarterly.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Green Berry Raum)