Janelle Shane has been testing the relationship between artificial intelligence algorithms, possibly to see if they can operate without human input. They aren't doing all that well. In a recent project, she had ChatGPT4 generate lyrics to Christmas songs and then had DALL-E3 illustrate them. This is their attempt at "The 12 Days of Christmas." While the neural network understands how to draw birds and tree ornaments, it doesn't really understand how to use them. Both programs dropped the ball when it comes to numbers and words.

Another prompt had the programs illustrating Santa's reindeer, as they were named in the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which was also used as the intro to "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." The name labels weren't 100% fractured, but the small print below was a mess. Were they supposed to be species names or the full birth name of each animal? The algorithms did better making cartoon illustrations of "Jingle Bells," if you don't count the spelling of the lyrics. Check those songs out at AI Weirdness. -via Nag on the Lake

You've heard the old saying, there is strength in numbers. There's also lots of money in groups who cooperate with each other to commit crimes. With money comes power, and money and power can attract more members and keep those members loyal to the group. There's always someone else who wants a piece of the action. Organized crime includes all kinds of cooperative groups, from street gangs to drug cartels to the Mafia, some of which have continued for hundreds of years. You have to be pretty organized to keep that running. The activities of these groups sometimes run over into politics and legitimate business wherever money and the power can be found. However, this video does not include political or religious terrorist groups, because that would be too broad of a subject. While violence is often involved, these crime organizations are mainly going after riches. Weird History brings us eleven stories of organized crime activities from all over the world.  

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons reports on a recent scholarly journal article which considereswhat is the aesthetically ideal shape for the male buttocks (content warning: nudity). The authors, who published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, surveyed 2,095 people, of whom 60% were male. The researchers showed the respondents photos of men's butts and asked for ratings.

In survey revealed a general preference for butts that are midway between flat and protruding, as well as between narrow and wide. Dimples are highly valued, too.

-via Study Finds

Photo via Andrea Fistetto because my wife says that I'm not allowed to just use a selfie for this post, even though that would be the obvious choice.

Rovaniemi, Finland, the capital town of Finnish Lapland, has long claimed to be the home of Santa Claus. The winter weather of northern Finland is certainly suitable for Santa Claus, his reindeer (which are native to the region), and his sleigh.

Children around the world are responsive to this claim and, each year, Santa Claus's cabin in the woods in Rovaniemi receives about 30,000 letters from children. That's a lot of mail and Santa needs your help sorting it.

That's why Airbnb is offering a one-night stay in the cabin, which has three beds and one bathroom.

Weird Universe points us to an undated story from Austin where a man gets his food budget down to $5 a day. That seems altogether extravagant as he had meat in two of his three meals. Having fed a family on much less per person, I could share the diet common in my area, where families eat beans and cornbread, with occasional poke sallet or collards and fried potatoes for years on end. But that's not altogether nutritious.

During the Great Depression, food was cheap, but people didn't have enough money anyway. Sociologist Gladys Sellew conducted an experiment with herself as the subject to see how cheaply one person could eat and get adequate nutrition. To the point, Sellew wanted to see if people could actually eat on 15 cents a day. The diet she worked out over the course of five years came to 13 cents a day! Sellew spelled her diet out for the newspapers, but don't expect to use her tips today. You no longer get a discount on day-old bread, turnips are not sold in most supermarkets, and bacon ends go to the butcher's dog instead of the sales bin. That said, eating that cheaply isn't the most pleasurable experience, but as you can see at Weird Universe, Sellew wasn't about to give up her cocoa. -via Strange Company       

(Image credit: Austin American Statesman, June 3, 1942)

Travis Pastrana's Nitro Circus is running a series on "life size toys." What does that mean? In this video, they consider the humble yo-yo. It was meant to be a kid's toy, but adults got more out of it. I could never get a yo-yo to return when I was a child, but as an adult, I could spin it both down and up. That can be pretty satisfying in a mindless way, but there are those who can make yo-yos into a world class floor show. However, these guys wanted to make a yo-yo big enough for a person to ride on it! They built a yo-yo eight feet in diameter, with harnesses so a person could ride on each side. Then they suspended it from a crane. Will it work? No one on the crew wanted to try it. If you want to skip the exposition and get to the action, go to the four-minute mark in this video. I get the feeling that this is way more fun to watch than to do.  -via Born in Space

Living in a big city, one gets used to the busyness all around - how everyone is always in a rush, cars honking at each other, the busy chatter of people walking by - that it's quite refreshing to capture moments of stillness amidst the cacophony. And that's what British photographer Oli Kellett chases after in every expedition he goes on around the world.

He takes photos of crosswalks, that part of urban life that one would expect to be busy most of the time. But, once in a while, he would find a moment as if the whole world has stopped turning, frozen in time. This collection of photos has been the subject of his new art show titled "Waiting for a Sign".

In most of the photos in the collection, it almost always features the subject illuminated by sunlight, standing still at a crossing, waiting for the light to turn green. At times, subjects would be a bit animated, pointing at something in the sky or talking to their companions. But, there's always this element of solitude and peace.

Check out some other photos in the collection on CNN.

(Image credit: Oli Kellett)

My favorite photo

(Image credit: Oli Kellett)

The ancient Greeks, Romans, and the knights and other warriors of the Medieval Ages saw a lot of violence and bloodshed.

War was a typical occurrence in those days, and although we read about how wars started, how they ended, and why they were even waged in the first place, we never really got an idea of how people who experienced wars back then felt about it. Much less, how they coped with the trauma brought about by the horrific experiences of war.

We may not have firsthand accounts or anecdotes from survivors of wars in ancient times, but we can infer from other documents how those people coped.

In Medieval Europe, many turned to religion. There were many cleansing rituals and forms of penance recorded in the Ermenfrid Penitential that speak of what warriors needed to do to absolve themselves from "moral injury". Some justified the war by considering it as a holy act to release themselves from the guilt.

Ancient Rome used gladiatorial battles to desensitize warriors by making them accustomed to violence. Moreover, as the Romans were superstitious and legalistic people, they always sought the counsel of the gods before going into war. If they did not have the favor of the gods, then they typically will not go into war.

For Ancient Greece, their way of dealing with trauma was through drama. They processed their distress and memories from battles through plays, seeing them as a form of catharsis.

(Image credit: Birmingham Museums Trust/Unsplash)

Mosquitoes are the creatures that have killed the most number of humans on average each year. An estimated 1 million people die because of the myriad diseases they carry, which they transmit through biting.

All mosquito bites come from females as they are the only ones with the mouth structure to pierce and suck blood. The male's proboscis does not have the piercing power that the females have, thus they do not feed on blood but rather, they eat flower nectar and fruit juices.

Researchers, however, have found the oldest-known mosquito fossil in Lebanon, and these come with some surprising features. It showed two male mosquitoes which have the specialized mouth anatomy to pierce and suck blood. Therefore, at some point, male mosquitoes evolved from being hematophagous to simply feeding on plant nectar.

This also indicates that, originally, all mosquitoes were hematophagous and with the emergence of flowering plants, the males simply transitioned into becoming nectar-feeders. The significance of this is that the usual trajectory for hematophagous insects was for nectar-feeders to become blood-feeders.

With these mosquito fossils, researchers will have a better idea of the evolutionary pathway that mosquitoes took, and it will give them new avenues to study how and when those changes took place.

(Image credit: Erik Karits/Unsplash)

Rarely do we find fossils that have other fossil remains inside them. We should expect that things that have been digested would not become fossilized. But a new recent find in Alberta, Canada shows exactly that: a gorgosaurus fossil with what seems to be fossilized remains of baby dinosaurs in its stomach.

Most of the previous finds that had stuff in their stomachs were from herbivores, and that's why this rare discovery is stirring up a lot of excitement among the scientific community. The fossil was first discovered in 2009 by Darren Tanke, a technician from the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

Tanke later noticed, as the team was cleaning up the fossil, that there were some toe bones poking out of the dinosaur fossil's belly. When they looked further into it, they discovered that there were two complete pairs of legs and feet inside. They identified the two baby dinosaurs as Citipes elegans, a bird-like dinosaur.

Apparently, the gorgosaurus only ate the leg parts as they are considered the meatiest part.

(Image credit: Darla Zelenitsky/University of Calgary)

Every year since 1927, Time Magazine has chosen a person whom they consider to have influenced the world events for that respective year, for better or worse.

Over the past century, many of Time's persons of the year have included presidents, politicians, business tycoons, moguls, figureheads, and other people who have achieved incredible feats worthy of global acclaim.

This year would mark the first year someone will be recognized for their success in the arts. And that someone is Taylor Swift. With her Eras Tour still ongoing as she will be visiting more countries in 2024, Swift has managed to do something that 2023 seems to have been bereft of. She brought a lot of people together and stood as a shining light in a world currently mired in darkness.

Perhaps, one of the biggest reasons why Time chose Swift to be their Person of the Year for 2023 is the way in which her story has unfolded, how she embarked on a kind of hero's journey in which her fans and the world around her have steadily watched her grow and walked alongside her as she continues to be a trailblazer.

This year seems to be Swift at her finest, with three no. 1 albums, becoming a billionaire, and receiving keys to the cities. And why not? Her Eras Tour is bringing in streams of revenue for all the cities she has performed in.

More than that, because of her honesty and candid persona, many people can relate with her and trust her. That's how she was able to encourage thousands of people to vote or become new fans of the NFL. In a world that has suffered successive blows over the past few years, Taylor Swift has helped us rediscover the sense of community that we seemingly have lost.

(Image credit: Time Magazine)

Geography can sometimes be tricky, and there are some common facts that many people get confused by a lot. For example, people may misremember what the capital city of Canada is (Ottawa), or for that matter, Australia (Canberra). Or, something that I recently found out was the location of Switzerland in Europe (nestled between France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, and Austria). I had often mistaken it for where Denmark is.

There are landmarks that many people may know about, but not exactly where they are found. Like that time when Coach Prime was corrected by a reporter when he alluded to Mount Rushmore being in California (it's in South Dakota).

Still, it's better to freshen up on our geography knowledge, so Kaitlyn McInnis and Mariana Zapata have taken on the liberty to list some of the facts that almost everyone gets wrong.

Now, perhaps the most surprising for me on this list and the most relevant is the fact that the Statue of Liberty isn't "technically" in New York. Although it has been legally declared part of New York by the Supreme Court in 1987, it is technically located on New Jersey's side of the state line. Well, that's a very interesting tidbit to note if I were to visit New York someday.

(Image credit: Louis Hansel/Unsplash)

Can anyone guess what’s going on here https://t.co/Ddkdcdl3RQ pic.twitter.com/W60uYGqTJH

— Zillow Gone Wild 🏡 (@zillowgonewild) December 8, 2023

Zillow Gone Wild posted about a house for sale in Batavia, New York. It has a four-car garage, six bathrooms, and a pool. It was selected for the X account because of the generous dose of taxidermy throughout the home. But what's going on with this bathroom window?

At first glance, it appears that the window is looking out on the scene of a plane crash, or possibly a parked plane. It's hard to tell with the reflection of the photographer and the arch around her. The location is a clue. Batavia has a fly-in community around Genesee County Airport, where you can keep your plane at your home and also close to the airport. This home is for an aviation enthusiast. So are we looking out at a plane in the backyard? No, look at the upper part of the window, where you see trees are growing. Someone guessed that the lower window has a wrap commemorating a crash that the homeowner survived. Continue reading for more. 

YouTuber Posy has taken what seems like still scenes and shows us just the parts that move. He's termed this technique "motion extraction," and he explains exactly how he did it, and how you can, too. But this is more than just a tutorial, because even if you will never try this, you'll be amazed by watching these clips. First, we get scenes in which only the moving parts are shown, no matter how subtle, and then he overlays the motion extraction video with the original video to make the motion a highlight. From there, he does all kinds of effects to make the motion the centerpiece of the scene, no matter how small or slow the movement may be. The clips are all quite beautiful, except for maybe the one where the guy makes the building shake by walking across a wooden floor, but that one is interesting in its own way. -via Digg

Luke Pickman is a musician who calls himself the "Instrument Maniac". He has an astonishingly vast collection of musical instruments from around the world. To call him a "multi-instrumentalist" is a huge understatement.

Last year, we shared Pickman's video in which he played "The Lick" on 92 instruments. Since then, his collection has grown. In 1 minute and 51 seconds, he performs a complete composition with 111 instruments. Some are ones I've never hard of, including an otamatone, a flexatone, and two different types of stylophones.

With each instrument, Pickman lists the manufacturer. Amusingly, for the musical saw, that's just his garage. For a conch shell, Pickman identifies the ocean as its creator.

-via The Awesomer