Miss Cellania's Links

Improbable Research Review: Microwaves, Human Fat, and Don Juan.

10 Star Trek: The Next Generation Episodes Awkwardly Romantic Enough For Valentine's Day. The series tackled romance often, but it often ended up as comedy.

The Saint We Call Valentine. There were three Valentines, none of whom had anything to do with the holiday as we know it.

A rundown of how the current administration's policies are affecting the LGBT community. And then this came out.    

This Prolific Nerd Is Shaping the Future of Wikipedia. Steven Pruitt has made over two million edits to the site, more than anyone else in its history.

From the Green Book to Facebook, how black people still need to outwit racists in rural America. 

An Optical Illusion Makes This Robotic Doodler Appear to Draw Faster Than It Moves. It's actually only drawing faster than the camera records.

The Ski Pole That Norway Will Never Forget. The moment Oddvar Bra's ski pole broke during a cross-country relay in 1982 is an enduring touchstone for the nation.

Abraham Lincoln's Secret Visits to Slaves. The president became a fictional metaphor in the folklore of emancipation.

Reddit Terrorizes Another Teen, This Time Over the Bitcoin App She Created. And you wonder why more women don't go into tech careers. (via Boing Boing)


 

Tweet of the Day

I JUST ASKED SIRI IF A CERTAIN BOY WOULD EVER TEXT ME AND SHE SENT A TEXT SAYING WILL YOU EVER TEXT ME TO HIM. My funeral will be held at 8pm this Thursday.

— Ceci ✮ (@CeciMula) January 17, 2018

(via Pleated-Jeans)

Robot Skiing

If you are growing bored waiting for the skilled Olympic skiers in PyeongChang to crash and fall, you need to switch gears and watch the robot skiing event! While robots may be pretty good at driving us around and waging war, skiing is still beyond most of them. 

The video comes from the Ski Robot Challenge in South Korea outside of PyeongChang 2018 yesterday. This week’s robot ski event was held at the Welli Hilli resort in Hoenseong, about an hour’s drive from the actual Olympic games.

And there are few things funnier than robots falling down. The last DARPA Robotics Challenge in 2015 was great for robot fail videos and GIFs. But humanity has largely been deprived of hilarious robotic failures in the past couple of years. We’ve mostly been faced with the terrifying reality of robot backflips and super-human agility.

This is great on so many levels. We can enjoy the slapstick aspect without worrying about painful injuries. We can laugh at the attempts to make these robots resemble human skiers without getting it quite right. Most importantly, we can comfort ourselves about the ability of killer robots to catch us in the snow during the robot uprising.

The Sound of Ice Singing

On the lake called Lissma Kvarnsjö near Stockholm, a brave man skates on new ice that is only a couple of inches thick (45mm). The ice sings and groans and echoes as he glides along. Those who've done this say that the skater doesn't hear much of this, that it takes some distance for the sound to reverberate properly. The eerie sounds are generated by a phenomenon called acoustic dispersion. There's a neat explanation in this video. In case you are simply disappointed that he never fell through the ice, you'll be rewarded by watching this clip.  (via Digg)

Hey, Buddy, Got a Light?

Imagine someone asks if you have a light and you whip out a flammenwerfer. This image initiated an argument at reddit about whether this is a flammenwerfer or a zigarettenanzünder, which is odd because obviously they are using a flammenwerfer as a zigarettenanzünder.

The photograph was taken by Alexander Zertsalov, who has an entire gallery of a Russian reenactment of a World War II battle. But there is some historical evidence that such a thing happened. (via reddit)  

Cautionary Tales

When you were a kid making faces, your mother might have told you that your face could freeze like that, and you'd have to live with it forever. That's exactly what happened to Aaron in Cautionary Tales.

But the story isn't entirely about him. Aaron goes to a support group for people who have to wear their young indiscretions for the world to see. How many different cautionary tales can you identify? They will be revealed during the credits. The moral of the story is that you should always listen to your mother. (via Metafilter)

Tooth Brush

(via Pleated-Jeans)

Musical Spider

Animator Joshua Slice is single-handedly making people fall in love with a spider. Or is it his nephew Lucas, who does the voice of of Lucas the spider? In the latest episode of Lucas' adventures, he tells of his aspirations. He wants to be a musician when he grows up! And for that, we get a little song. (via Tastefully Offensive)

Miss Cellania's Links

The Story of Honest Abe’s Family Tree. What happened to President Lincoln's descendants?

The Alt-Right is Killing People. More links here. 

Figure Skating Jumps, Explained. We all become experts for two weeks every four years, so we might need to brush up on what's happening on the ice.

Thank These Master Alchemists for the Magic of Alcohol. Distilled spirits are a product of the Islamic Golden Age.

Meet the Women Who Led the Klondike Gold Rush. The northern frontier enticed those looking for riches, freedom, and adventure.

Candidate Ejected From West Virginia House Floor for Listing Lawmakers’ Oil and Gas Donors. Here's what she was going to say. Lissa Lucas is running for a spot in the House of Delegates.   

What Kurt Vonnegut Can Teach Us About Coping with the Internet. Our online footprints exist forever, like time-traveling aliens.

Conjoined Twins Abby and Brittany Hensel are Now Fifth Grade Math Teachers. While student may expected two different perspective, the sisters are perfectly in sync.

The Orangeburg Massacre. Two years before the infamous Kent State shooting, a Civil Rights demonstration on the campus of South Carolina State College led to the deaths of Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith, all age 18. 

Admiral Ackbar's Final Repose.

Road Rage

(via reddit)

How Star Wars: The Last Jedi Should Have Ended

The folks at How It Should Have Ended have made bank by rewriting our favorite films. Here they take on The Last Jedi, which means this video is full of spoilers for a film you should have seen by now. But it's not just the ending that gets re-written. All the elements are changed in one way or another, to make them more logical, to make them fit in with our preconceived notions, or to make them just plain funnier. They added one very important element that we expect from all Star Wars films in that someone got their hand cut off. That's a pure staple that The Last Jedi overlooked. "Shut up, Carl, nobody asked you!" (via Tastefully Offensive)

Tweet of the Day

[figure skater does something]

me: “THAT’S AMAZING”

announcer: “And that’s really going to cost her, you just can’t be making those sloppy mistakes at this level”

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) February 11, 2018

The Hensel Twins Are Teachers

Abby and Brittany Hensel are conjoined twins who share a body. Specifically, they each control half of their body, and learned at a very early age to work together in perfect sync in order to walk and do all the other things people with two arms and legs each do. The Hensel twins had their own reality TV series on TLC a few years ago. What's happened since then? Abby and Brittany graduated from college in 2012 and got a job as math teachers for fourth- and fifth-graders.   



While students may think they are going to get two different perspectives, Abby and Brittany are in perfect sync. While they are do not share any brain connections like the Hogan twins, they are very good at completing each other's sentences. They are receiving one salary, with half the funds going to Abby and half to Brittany. (via Laughing Squid)

Vacation Story

(via reddit)

Age 19

(via Mark Hamill)

Miss Cellania's Links

10 Carnival Traditions From Around the World. The lead-up to Lent is a party wherever you go.

Why Donald Trump suddenly cares about “due process.”

Your Olympic experience is incomplete if you're not following Leslie Jones' commentary on Twitter. 

Albert Einstein's Forgotten Inventions. He held patents on a wide range of devices, from a refrigerator to a blouse.

The Indestructable Alkemade. The World War II gunner survived an 18,000-foot fall without a parachute when his plane was destroyed. (via Metafilter)

Lando's Droid is Liable to Steal the Solo Movie. L3-37 will be played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge in motion capture and voice. (via Uproxx)

The King of the Cats. An old folktale in England concerning cats takes many forms, told in different ways in different areas. (via Strange Company)

The Truth Behind the Pope’s Ruby Red Slippers. The tradition has been handed down through centuries. 

I ♥ Gerrymandering: Valentines for the Love of Democracy.

Free Printable Science and Math Valentines from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.  (via Geeks Are Sexy) 

The Count

(via Fark)

Talkative Cheetahs

Two cheetahs charm onlookers with some meows. For such huge cats, they sound altogether adorable! This video was taken at the Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon. (via Metafilter)

Tweet of the Day

Iconic feminist graffitti (UK), 1979, photographed by Jill Posener, British photographer and activist #womensart pic.twitter.com/7bgnTUtVmR

— #WOMENSART (@womensart1) January 31, 2018

That's What an Ark was Made For

(via Bad Newspaper)