I can’t even hold a regular pan properly without fearing I might spill its contents. This chef takes cooking to a higher level, as she spins her wok and swings it around her body. That might sound simple, but it’s not really. I’m not sure how she can do that, but it’s really amazing! 

Mitosis (not the biological process) is a sustainable architectural concept that focuses on regenerative sustainable living and urban development. The structure, a collaboration between Amsterdam-based architecture firm GG-loop and Arup, has the ability to expand itself to accommodate more people. YankoDesign has more details: 

Just like flexible organism evolves to adapt to different settings, Mitosis will also be able to do that with its individual, rhomboid-shaped modules that are stacked together to create shared outdoor spaces and private terraces. The outdoor areas would be filled with enough plants to make a lush green cover which will allow the residents to reconnect with nature while offsetting the urban heat island effect – pretty ‘cool’, eh? These plants will also elevate the air quality levels, especially in cities while encouraging sustainable living practices of urban farming and community gardens. The terraced build provides ample natural light to both plants and apartments. The greenery will also help the existing wildlife of the area to continue having their space and coexist with the residents.

“Mitosis adopts the 14 principles of biophilic design and articulates the relationships between nature, human biology, and the design of the built environment. Its construction is organic and flexible, providing large areas of urban and vertical farming, greenhouses, wildlife corridors, and integration of habitat creation, that encourage shared outdoor activities among residents,” said the team in their project statement. The unique concept aims to give its residents an outdoor space along with the amenities needed to participate in environmentally friendly communal activities. 

Image via YankoDesign 

Nick Drummond and Patrick Bakker bought an old house in the small town of Ames, New York, and set out to repair and renovate it. The house had once been owned by "Count" Adolf Humpfner, who was rumored to have been a bootlegger, but he died in 1932, so those stories may have been just a legend. Two families lived in the home since then, for decades each. So it was quite a surprise when Drummond and Bakker pulled some wall panels out and found whisky bottles. A lot of them.

“I was in the process of removing this rotted wood skirting that went around the mudroom sort of where the foundation would be if it was a truly finished structure, and as I’m peeling back the boards on one of the sides, all of the sudden all this hay falls out and I was very confused," Drummond said. "And at first, I was like ‘oh this must be insulation’ – of course all this is taking place within a few seconds in my head -- and then I look and I’m like ‘well wait a second, what’s that glass thing? And then I pull it up and I’m looking at this old liquor bottle. And then I’m looking at the other package and there’s these other little tops poking out of the hay. And then I look back at the wall and there’s like the edge of this other package tied up with string and I’m like, ‘Holy crap, this is like a stash of booze.’”

Brown paper packages tied up with string filled with an alcohol lover’s favorite thing.

“I was totally excited and we ended up finding the rest of the mudroom was lined with these packages,” Drummond said.

“At the end of the day we were just sitting, and we were like, ‘We really like the house so much more now,'” Bakker said.

So far, they've found 72 bottles, some empty, but most containing Prohibition-era Gaelic whisky under the name Old Smuggler. The bonanza led them to find out more about Adolf Humpfner, who led quite a colorful life, although much of it is still shrouded in mystery. The house has since been dubbed the Bootlegger Bungalow. Read about Humpfner, the house, and the whisky at the Denver Channel. Find out more at Drummond's Instagram page. -via Laughing Squid

The Knights of Renesmee, from Tauranga, New Zealand, spent three years making a shot-for-shot Sweded version of the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy. You may ask, "why?" but I have no answer for that. It's actually quite funny due to creative prop choices, wardrobe malfunctions, and the world's least expensive CGI. While these guys put their hearts and souls into this, they can't help but laugh at themselves. The 6-hour video includes The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and bloopers. If you don't want to watch it all at once, the YouTube page has a handy linked index for each scene.  -via reddit   

(Image credit: The Knights of Renesmee)

Boston Dynamics gives us a New Year greeting in the form of dancing robots. This is terrifying. If robots can dance this well, is there anything they can't do? -via reddit

A new discovery has been made in Pompeii! Remains of a hot food and drink shop has been uncovered by archaeologists. The shop, also known as a thermopolium, contained 2,000-year-old food stored in deep terra cotta jars, as Reuters detailed: 

The front of the counter was decorated with brightly coloured frescoes, some depicting animals that were part of the ingredients in the food sold, such as a chicken and two ducks hanging upside down.

“This is an extraordinary find. It’s the first time we are excavating an entire termopolium,” said Massimo Ossana, director of the Pompeii archaeological park.

Archaeologists also found a decorated bronze drinking bowl known as a patera, ceramic jars used for cooking stews and soups, wine flasks and amphora.

Image via Reuters 

If 2020 were a movie, this is what it would be. And the critics would have a field day with the believability factor. Screen Junkies takes movies we've seen and tells us everything that's wrong with them in their Honest Trailer series -although they are often much longer than a normal movie trailer. They also do the same thing with TV shows and video games, so why not a year? Now that 2020 is almost over, there's plenty of material to go over and illustrate with movie clips. In this case, a lot of horror movie clips, of course. Patton Oswalt steps in to help describe the carnage.  

Through most of history in general, rich people wore nice clothing and poor people wore what they could afford. But sometimes, an ambitious person from a lower social station could become wealthy and dress in expensive garments. This wouldn't do at all, as it upset the ruling class, who preferred to be identified as separate from the masses. Therefore, in different places at different times, sumptuary laws went into effect to codify who could wear what kind of clothing, in order for everyone to tell what social class one belonged to. China's Ming dynasty tried to encode what everyone would wear. It worked for a while.

As time passed and commerce grew, violations increased. Wealthy commoners dressed in fabrics and styles supposedly reserved for nobler classes. They scorned plain silks and adopted forbidden brocades. They wore off-limits colors, including dark blue and scarlet. They sported gold embroidery. They bought hats and robes that were formally restricted to court officials. "Customs have changed from generation to generation," complained a Ming scholar, writing in the late 16th century. "All people tend to respect and admire wealth and luxury, competing for them without considering the bans of the government."

Nor were commoners the only offenders. Officials and their families dressed above their station. The sons of nobles, themselves in the lowly eighth rank, habitually donned the dress reserved for their high-ranking fathers. "They wear dark brown hats and robes patterned with qilin," a dragon-like creature with cloven hoofs, "tied with golden ribbons, even when they live at home or have been dismissed from official positions," complained another Ming writer. Emperors themselves undermined the rules too, he observed, bestowing robes on favorites without regard to whether their status merited the design.    

As they say, dress for the job (or social class) you want, not the one you have. Meanwhile in Italy, legal dress codes had to do with keeping people from showing off, which didn't work as intended, either. Virginia Postrel looks at the rise and fall of sumptuary laws at Reason magazine. -via Digg

Arcangelo Ambrosi, a craftsman of smoking pipes, recently made this whimsical mushroom. It's composed of maple with an acrylic mouthpiece. I can imagine Papa Smurf or, perhaps, the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland puffing from it.

In the Roaring Twenties, boxing was huge. There were reputations and money to be made, and people came out of the woodwork to watch their favorites go at each other. In Shelby, Montana, real estate developer (and the mayor's son) James “Body” Johnson Jr. was looking for a way to invigorate his town after an oil boom had crested, and was taken with the idea of staging a fight with world champion Jack Dempsey. Johnson and his associates arranged a fight between Dempsey and an upcoming boxer named Tommy Gibbons, although it would cost the town several hundred thousand dollars it didn't have. Up front.

Rather than despair, Johnson’s gang decided to bluff their way through, arranging lines of credit through the town’s three banks: the First State Bank of Shelby; the Stanton Trust & Savings Bank; and the First State Bank of Joplin. Lumber was bought with promissory notes to the tune of $82,000, agents launched a haphazard promotional campaign on the East and West coasts, and hundreds of locals began to swirl around the town in the excitement of the run-up. To accommodate the expected 40,000 attendees, makeshift hotels were hastily thrown up by enterprising locals sure of a healthy profit. The match was scheduled for 4 July 1923, in the hopes of capitalizing on patriotic fervor and the promise of a fight to remember. This was to be a boxing match for the ages.

Well, it was, in the respect that it became a huge story for the town of Shelby, but it didn't turn out the way Johnson hoped it would. Read about the championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons and what it did to Shelby, Montana, at Damn Interesting.

In 1995, a group of four chess enthusiasts were devastated when their opponents took their queen in a very public New Year's Eve match at Madison Square Garden. Exactly 25 years later, they are staging a rematch, online of course. Phish will present "Dinner and a Rematch" on New Year's Eve, pitting themselves against online participants. You can join in through Chess.com (registration required). In addition to chess, there will be recipe swapping and some music. Drinking is optional, since you'll be at home anyway. And may the best mass player win.  -via Metafilter

Rosemary Mosco, a naturalist, science writer, and cartoonist, proposes that Santa consider replacing his reindeer with other magical animals. I would personally go with the anglerfish and do not consider their lack of flying abilities to be a detriment: it turns out that, as I recently learned, normal reindeer cannot fly. Their flight is just part of the Santa Claus narrative.

-via Marilyn Terrell

This time of year you'll find tons of lists of the best and worst things of 2020, but the most interesting are the ones that focus on the odd, strange, and bizarre. A list at LiveScience will entice you to read all ten stories, because they are medical reports of the weird things that can happen to someone's health. Maybe not you. We hope.  

The 54-year-old man suddenly lost consciousness after experiencing a life-threatening heart rhythm problem, according to a report of the case, published Sept. 23 in The New England Journal of Medicine. His family said that the man had a poor diet, and in recent weeks, he had consumed one to two large packages of black licorice every day. Despite receiving multiple treatings in the intensive care unit, the man died 32 hours after arriving at the hospital, the report said.

Black licorice often contains a compound called glycyrrhizin, which is derived from licorice root, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Consuming too much licorice root or candies flavored with licorice root can be dangerous because glycyrrhizin lowers the body's potassium levels. This, in turn, can lead to high blood pressure and abnormal heart rhythms.

So how much licorice is too much?

The FDA says that eating just 2 ounces of black licorice a day for two weeks can cause heart rhythm problems, particularly for people ages 40 and older.

This is the only case in the list in which the patient died. Read more of the strangest medical cases of the year, like the man with green urine, another man with three kidneys, and a woman who shed infectious particles of the novel coronavirus for 70 days straight, at LiveScience. -via Digg

(Image credit: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration)

When interpreting literature (or, more broadly, narratives), what should be the role of the author in the interpretation of that work? Carl Jung said that "Poets are humans to, and what they say about their work is often far from being the best word on the subject." What are we to do when an author explains his or her work in a way that makes no sense? Is interpretation bounded by the author's intentions or life experiences?

In a 1967 essay, the French literary critic Roland Barthes famously proclaimed the "death of the author." He meant that the author's interpretation of the meaning of a work should not be prioritized over other interpretations. Authorial intent is not authoritative.

Now game designer David J. Prokopetz helpfully updates the Death of the Author to critique other abuses of literary interpretation:

Death of the author: Treating the author’s stated interpretation of their own work as merely one opinion among many, rather than the authoritative Word of God.

Disappearance of the author: Treating the context and circumstances of the work’s authorship as entirely irrelevant with respect to its interpretation, as though the work had popped into existence fully formed just moments ago.

Taxidermy of the author: Working backwards from a particular interpretation of the work to draw conclusions about what the context and circumstances of its authorship must have been.

Undeath of the author: Holding the author personally responsible for every possible reading of their work, even ones they could not reasonably have anticipated at the time of its authorship.

Frankenstein’s Monster of the author: Drawing conclusions about authorial intent based on elements that are present only in subsequent adaptations by other authors.

Weekend at Bernie’s of the author: Insisting that the author would personally endorse your interpretation of the work if they happened to be present.

-via Alex de Campi | Image: 20th Century Fox

I don't know what they expected, riding bikes down a ski slope, but you know what to expect, you just don't know when. When it starts, it's all downhill from there, so to speak. You can see the long version here.

Held annually at the Les Deux Alpes ski resort in France, the Mountain of Hell pits 700 racers against a 15-mile course of snow, ice, rocks, and singletrack. The riders descend 8,530 feet in the process. And what’s best is they all start at the same time. So when one rider loses it on the slippery glacier, well, it becomes a pinball machine at full tilt.

-via Bits and Pieces