The New Year holiday is unique in that it revolves around time itself. All we are really celebrating is a change of date or a new calendar, but we've made it symbolically a holiday of hope and renewal. Not that there's anything wrong with that. One of the traditions of celebrating on New Years Eve is counting down the seconds until the clock strikes midnight. Before the 20th century, bells would ring at midnight and celebrants would cheer, but the actual countdown is more recent than you might suspect. The first New Years Eve countdown was on radio in 1957, and it was only in 1979 that the crowd at Times Square began to chant along with the countdown!
No one ever really thought about counting down the seconds to an event until nuclear detonations and the space race came along. Those two subjects illustrate how countdowns ranged from despair to celebration in their history. Read how the New Year countdown evolved and became a tradition at Smithsonian.
🍺 Getting hamsters drunk is actually next to impossible as they have an insanely high alcohol tolerance. Hamsters can drink 10 times the amount of alcohol humans could drink (when adjusted for body weight) before they show any signs of impairment. Plus, they don't get hangovers!
Hamsters also prefer alcohol to water. According to this tweet by @LawtonTri, "given the choice, they will consume up to 20g/kg ethanol a day - equivalent to a 'standard man' drinking 21 bottles of wine each day."
The only thing hamsters like more than alcohol is a chocolate milkshake.
🏠 This hidden drawer inside a kitchen cabinet is a genius way to get more storage space!
🎬 The badass myth of how James Cameron pitched the movie Aliens turned out to be absolutely true.
⛄ Comedian Ryan George imagines how the idea of making a snowman first came about (warning: raunchy humor).
🐴 Awww: This blind horse loves her owner's bald head.
👕 For a limited time: Get up to 20% off all Movies T-Shirts, TV Shows T-Shirts, Comics & Cartoons T-Shirts over at the NeatoShop.
More neat stories over at our new network of sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Pop Culturista, Laughosaurus, and SupaFluffy.
Image: Ricky Kharawala/Unsplash
When your goth phase isn't just a phase, but a total lifestyle, you might think about buying a house in Lincoln, Illinois. It has two bedrooms and two baths, on a quiet street in a nice neighborhood, room for the kids to play, and it's black. All black. And not just the outside.
The living room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, and laundry room are black. There are a few gray appliances and some white accents, but that's just to keep you from getting lost. There's a freestanding three-car garage, and it's black, too.
Honestly, even if you love the look, this could be dangerous for someone whose eyesight is not as sharp as it used to be. There should be a warning against anyone prone to seasonal affective disorder as well. But I also imagine that it would be easy to invite people over, since everyone in town knows where the black house is. See a lot more pictures of this real estate listing at Zillow. -via Fark
This horse head is now in the the custody of the Sanxingdui Museum in Guanghan City, Sichuan Province, China. It was excavated from the Sanxingdui archaeological site, and is estimated to be over 3,000 years old. But it looks quite modern, doesn't it? In fact, it looks downright familiar. What does it remind you of? Commenters at reddit suggested Donkey from Shrek, Quickdraw McGraw, and Marty the Zebra. I personally thought of Jar Jar Binks, but I've seen way too much Star Wars. The consensus is that ancient Chinese craftsmen were really into Disney/Pixar characters. Or maybe our modern age animations are just another step in a long lineage of amusing art. It's not the only stylized Sanxingdui relic that resembles modern pop culture characters.
In Alaska, you may have some special needs that you need a special pickup truck for. Instead of buying a whole new vehicle, there's usually a way to make what you need. Now, This particular design must have a purpose. You think? It's possible that this is the only way they could figure out how to get it on the road again after some unfortunate accident. It's well worth waiting through the first ten seconds to catch a first glimpse, but that will not prepare you for the majesty of the entire truck. This vehicle was spotted in Wasilla in October. The guy filming should have chased it down, because everyone wants to ask, "Why?" -via Digg
A sufficiently large family gathered around one table makes dining difficult. It can get frustrating to spend too much time passing dishes back and forth instead of shoveling goodies in one's mouth.
Matty Action writes that his father-in-law built this replica Thomas the Tank Engine train set to facilitate the process. Watch it slowly circle the table like conveyor belt sushi, repeatedly offering each dish to each diner.
There's at least one potential drawback: it becomes increasingly difficult to decline your aunt's disgusting green bean and mushroom casserole when she mentions it every time it passes by your position.
-via First We Feast
If you didn't get a new calendar for Christmas, you're probably going to buy one this week. And while you're jotting down birthdays and anniversaries on it, you might also want to mark the eclipses and planetary alignments that will occur in 2022.
There will be two, count 'em, two total lunar eclipses available to viewers in the US. The first one, on the night of May 15-16, will be visible from all 48 contiguous states -unless the clouds move in where you are. The second, on November 8, will occur at night the west coast and during daylight on the east coast. There will also be an alignment of six planets on June 24, which is an excuse to buy a telescope or at least find a community event with telescopes. Read more about these events, and see the entire schedule for meteor showers and full moons, at WABC. -via Fark
This is scary. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be taught how to persuade people to make decisions that benefit its creators or owners. This technological marvel can only do so through huge amounts of data from other people obtained by private companies. AI can convince people to do a lot of things, such as buying something, sharing a post, or even voting for a candidate!
In a study conducted by a team of experts from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia’s federal scientific and research agency, it was discovered that AI could locate and exploit weaknesses in human decision-making, and use that to guide people toward certain decisions. “The implications of this research are potentially quite staggering,” Amir Dezfouli, an expert in machine learning at CSIRO and lead researcher on the study, said in a press release.
Image credit: Hannah Wei
Networks of underground fungi will be mapped to protect these systems from damage. These networks use carbon to build their systems in the soil, which connect to plant roots and act as ‘highways’ for the exchange of carbon from the roots for nutrients. Also known as the ‘circulatory system of the planet,’ these fungal networks can extend for many miles without being noticed.
These networks are under threat because of agriculture, urbanization, pollution, water scarcity, and changes to the climate. To protect fungi, which are vital to soil fertility, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), will collect 10,000 samples of these fungi around the world to understand these underground networks for better conservation efforts.
Image credit: Biosphoto/Alamy
A resident from Rutland, England noticed an unusual glimpse of pottery on the ground of their family farm during his walk. After getting a spade, the man, Jim Irvine, dug a shallow trench to see what was there. According to the team of experts who excavated the site after Irvine, the ceramic tiles were a Roman mosaic depicting scenes from the Iliad. The artwork is the first of its kind that was found in the United Kingdom. “This is certainly the most exciting Roman mosaic discovery in the U.K. in the last century,” says University of Leicester Archaeological Services Project Manager John Thomas in a statement. “It gives us fresh perspectives on the attitudes of people at the time, their links to classical literature, and it also tells us an enormous amount about the individual who commissioned this piece.”
Image credit: University of Leicester Archaeological Services
Gamers have been treated to new games, unexpected ports and remasters, and surprising sequels for well-known franchises. While this is good news, there’s also bad news for the gaming world this year, with the complete removal and delisting of old games by publishers uninterested in keeping up with the maintenance. This means that players can no longer find or purchase these games on official sites. Kotaku lists the games or franchises that were removed, delisted, pulled offline, and/or straight-up murdered throughout the year. Check their full piece here.
Image credit: Rockstar Games
Drinking games have been with us since ancient times, because they are a somewhat socially acceptable way of getting completely wasted without having to admit that's what you intended in the fist place. An added bonus is seeing your friends get way drunker than they intended. And with New Year's Eve coming up, you might want some ideas for giving an international flavor to your party. The scariest drinking game I could think of is darts, but that really falls under the heading of "pub sport." Almost as dangerous is the German drinking game called Hammerschlagen.
You start the game off by having players hammer a nail into a tree stump until it stands on its own. Then each person raises the hammer above their head and tries to smash the nail all the way in … using the edge end. Every time you fail, you must drink.
Good thing that alcohol increases your dexterity and coordination (it's why police give you awards for driving after having a few); otherwise, some might consider this game irresponsible and dangerous.
Read up on 15 drinking games from various areas of history and geography at Cracked. Do not attempt any of these games unless you have made arrangements for a designated driver or overnight accommodations.
Many pasta shapes developed organically over the centuries as cooks modified preexisting designs to fit new needs. But that's not the approach that Dan Pashman took. He decided to start from scratch after studying the best qualities of pasta. The result of his research is cascatelli.
Cascatelli is, appropriate for its shape, the Italian word for waterfall. Core77 describes how this design simultaneously fulfills several pasta objectives.
The ruffled half-tube on one surface creates a lot of surface area for sauce to adhere to. The elongated edge allows the user to easily stab it with a fork. The right angles on the underside create maximum resistance to teeth, establishing what Pashman calls the ideal "toothsinkability." And the overall variations in textures and thicknesses provide a high contrast in textures.
What I haven't been able to learn from Pashman is the ideal sauce for cascatelli. What would you use?
The annual list of foreign objects that required medical intervention to remove from human bodies is out. Honestly, finding our previous posts for such lists was as easy as searching for the word "orifices" (they are now tagged). Every year, Barry Petchesky gathers medical reports from all over as detailed in the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of emergency room visits to compile the list, which is broken down by orifice from the top down. All details are verbatim from the report. Here's a sample from the throat section, which is always dominated by children.
“INHALED A SEWING NEEDLE IN A PLASTIC TUBE WITH A STRING ATTACHED WHEN TRYING TO USE IT AS A BLOWDART”
“PER MOM SHE WAS LOOKING FOR HER CAR REMOTE & SAID OUT LOUD ‘WHERE IS THE BATTERY THAT GOES IN HERE’ PT REPLIED, ‘I ATE IT’”
“SWALLOWED A PENNY BECAUSE SHE SAYS SHE IS A ‘HUMAN PIGGY BANK’”
The reports of objects stuck in other orifices get cringier as they go, so be warned that some of the cases may cause sympathetic pain or bring up mental images that are NSFW. The 2021 list is here. -via Fark
🐿️ Meet the squirrelzilla: Grey squirrels in Maine are so huge that they're now terrorizing the neighborhood dogs.
☕ That coffee mug you never use would like to have a word about your disrespectful attitude. BRB I'm rotating my coffee mugs now.
🤖 Now these are the pop culture action figures we all wish we got for Christmas.
🎵 Gregorian monks chant the Halo theme music in a medieval castle.
🏠 At 16 square feet, the Quay House is the smallest house in Great Britain. Still feels larger than my first college apartment, I'm sure.
🖼️ 9-year-old girl found out how museums work and decided to donate her "most precious" rock to the Poole Museum in Dorset, UK, so the museum proudly put it on display.
🛸 From the NeatoShop: The world's neatest Sci-Fi T-shirts you can buy.
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Image: Beth Ditkoff
