Boing Boing » holidays

Celebrate the first interplanetary holiday!

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:54:57 +0000

Tonight is Yuri's Night — a holiday celebrating the first human spaceflight. You can throw a Yuri's Night party yourself, or simply join one of the 340 parties that are already scheduled. Scheduled events range from the ubiquitous "let's drink vodka shots in a Russian restaurant" to more kid-friendly, telescope-centric themes. And this year, you can even virtually join the Mars Curiosity Rover as it throws itself the first Yuri's Night party to be held on another planet. (Which, frankly, sounds a little lonely and sad, so hopefully people turn up for the virtual side of that shindig.)

In which Charles Darwin gets trolled

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:53:19 +0000

From Darwin's diary written aboard the HMS Beagle, an accounting of an epic April Fool's prank of 1832.… Knowing what I know about 19th-century sailors, this seems like a good way to get beaten up.

Muppet Danny Boy, the only St Paddy's celebration you need

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 01:30:50 +0000

In what's becoming a regular St Paddy's tradition around here, here's the Muppet Danny Boy you know you want to hear but were afraid to ask for.

Muppet Danny Boy performed by Beaker, Swedish Chef and Animal …

Celebrate "Pi Day" by throwing hot dogs down a hallway

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:07:37 +0000

No, that's not a euphemism for anything. Buffon's Needle is an 18th-century experiment in probability mathematics and geometry that can be used as a way to calculate pi through random sampling. This WikiHow posting explains how you can recreate Buffon's Needle at home, by playing with your food.

One man's kindly benefactor is another man's fetishist

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 19:28:57 +0000

Consider the following corollary to Rule 34 — No matter how unattractive you think a certain feature (or lack thereof) might be, there will always be somebody who is totally into it. Case it point: Nose-less syphilitics in 19th-century London. You might suspect that would doom one to a life of loneliness. But no. At the Chirurgeons Apprentice you can read about the older "eccentric" gentlemen who liked to throw underground parties for his many nose-less friends.

Economist valentines

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 19:10:46 +0000

Liz Fosslien offers 14 graphs explaining love from the perspective of a twitterpated economist.…

Ancient money shot, caught in chert

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 20:28:46 +0000

In a fossil of 400-million-year-old plants, the world's oldest sample of ejaculate….

10 possibly romantic facts about shark reproduction

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:42:41 +0000

Warning: Story includes photos of a male shark's genitalia….

What your New Year's Resolutions tell us about the way you think

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 19:11:41 +0000

It's a little late, but I kind of love these 2013 props made by PaperandPancakes on Etsy.

How did you write your New Year's resolutions? I don't mean, like, the tools you used — pencil and paper vs. tablet and bluetooth keyboard. What I'm talking about is how you put the goals into words — how you described what it was you wanted to do.

There's more than one way to make a resolution.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran across a great example of this in an old sociology paper from 1977. Researchers had collected New Year's resolutions from two groups of 6th graders — one of average middle class kids, and another group made up of Amish and Mennonites.

The researchers meant to study differences in gender. They were trying to figure out how different cultural backgrounds affected behavior that we tend to associate with one gender or another. But in that data, they noticed something odd, something they couldn't easily translate into statistics. The Amish kids' resolutions were different from those of the "normal" children.

Average kids in the 1970s wrote resolutions in a way that was pretty familiar to me, and probably to you. They focused on goals. One kid wanted to raise his rank in Boy Scouts. Another wanted to improve her swimming time by 10 seconds. Other kids wanted to get an "A" in a class, instead of a "B". There was nothing really surprising here.

And the Amish kids had similar goals in mind. The difference is that their resolutions weren't about the goals. They focused on the process of getting there. Instead of resolving to get a better grade, for instance, the Amish kids resolved to spend more time doing their math problems. What's more, the Amish kids made resolutions that were much more related to the experiences they were already familiar with. The middle class kids might resolve to climb a local mountain or learn to scuba dive. But the Amish kids's resolutions were focused on stuff like working faster at chores, so they all get done on time.

These might seem like relatively small differences, but when small differences so clearly form a delineation between two cultures, social scientists pay attention.

Hazel Markus is one of those people. She's a professor of behavioral sciences at Stanford and she told me that the 1977 study of New Year's resolutions reminded her of a study in a paper she published in 1999.

In that study, Markus and her team recruited two groups of people from the waiting areas at the San Francisco airport. The first group was made up of people who had been born in America, and who spoke English at home. The second group was made up of people who were born in Korea or China, they were citizens of those countries, and their primary language was Chinese or Korean. One at a time, each of these people was asked to fill out a survey. Afterwards, they were told that they could pick a pen as a thank-you gift, and were offered a selection to choose from.

Most of the pens were one color — orange, say — while one or two would be a different color — green. The participants made their choices individually, but there was a distinct pattern to the choices they made.

Seventy-four percent of the Americans chose the color that was least common. If there was one green pen and four orange, they went with the green. In the group from Korea and China, that tendency was completely reversed, with only twenty-four percent of them choosing the less-common color.

To Markus, this is representative of differences in culture. In multiple studies, she's seen evidence that Americans look favorably on uniqueness in a way that a lot of other cultures don't. Here, it's not just okay to be unique. Standing out is part of how we create public identities. It's actively encouraged.

That doesn't seem to be true in most East Asian cultures, she told me. There, people have more of a tendency to think about themselves and their identity in terms of relationships to other people and community. You want to be a part of something. You don't want to be the person who is trying too hard to be different.

Markus calls this a difference between individualism and collectivism. But she also said that you can't just simply draw a line and say Americans are like this and Chinese are like this. It's more complicated than that, because the preference for individualism varies a lot within American society.

And that brings us back to those Amish kids. Certain cultures within the US tend to be less individualistic, Markus said. And the Amish community is one of those.

"When you are aware of yourself as a part of a group, it's quite reasonable that you would see yourself in terms of tasks you're trying to accomplish," Markus said. "It's also reasonable that middle-class American kids would have more of a focus on outcomes. In their culture, you are supposed to become someone, do something, stand out."

But culture isn't just one thing, and it isn't static. What you learn about Amish kids in 1977 might not hold true today. What you learn about Amish kids and how they behave as a part of an Amish community might not hold true if those same kids spend a few years living outside that community.

You can see that effect in action in an article published last February in The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Eric Shiraev told me. He's a professor of psychology and international affairs at George Mason University and he wrote a textbook on cross-cultural psychology — the study of how our cultures affect the way we think and act.

The study he told me about compares the behavior of Facebook users to that of people using Renren, the Chinese equivalent of Facebook. The researchers found that users on Facebook tended toward posts that reflected individualism — posting about their own activities, posting pictures of themselves — while Renren users tended to display a more collectivist ethic. For them, social media was mostly about sharing. They shared links. They shared their friends' posts.

But the really interesting thing was that some people used both Facebook and Renren. "And when people switched platforms they changed their behavior," Shiraev said. "On Facebook, you become more individual. On Renren, you become more collectivist. The same person will do different things to adjust to different cultures."

In fact, Shiraev said, when you look at individuals the "cultural" differences that we see are often the ones that we expect to be there. We seek out the things in someone's personality that confirm our prior hypothesis about how they ought to behave because of where they're from. So if we think a Chinese person is going to be more collectivists and deferential to authority, we're more likely to notice the examples that verify that idea. Same thing for narcissistic, loud, boorish Americans.

But that doesn't mean it's totally useless to study cultural differences. While thinking that we know individuals because of their cultural background can lead us astray, we can actually find ourselves just as far off track if we don't pay attention to the different ways different cultures approach the same ideas.

Case in point: Happiness. In surveys of which countries are the happiest, Russia often ends up down at the bottom, Eric Shiraev said. But you can't assume every Russian you meet will be dour. And, maybe more importantly, you can't even assume that that survey really means Russians aren't happy, in general. That's because it's not culturally normal there to publicly admit to happiness.

"In Russia, it's supposed to be good luck to be grumpy and pessimistic," Shiraev said. "In the US when someone asks, 'How are you?', you say 'I'm fine'. In Russia, they expect you to say something nasty about yourself. It comes from a superstition against bragging."

XKCD on New Year's resolutions

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 21:36:03 +0000

Today's XKCD is holds wise advice for those of us contemplating New Year's resolutions. Be sure to click through for the tool-tip bonus punchline.

Resolution …

Could you get a restraining order against Santa?

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 16:37:28 +0000

The excellent Law and the Multiverse blog (which seriously considers legal questions arising from funnybooks) examines the legal options available to someone seeking to get a restraining order against Jolly Old St Nick. As with all stories whose headline ends with a question-mark, the answer to this one is "no," but the reasoning behind that "no" is a fascinating look at the law of protective orders.

We don’t think Santa’s behavior would meet this standard. People couldn’t have a reasonable fear of material harm because Santa has an unbroken record of hundreds of years of peaceful activity. It could be enough that he has actually caused material emotional harm to someone, except that the harm would have to be caused by contact or communication initiated by Santa. The problem here is that Santa doesn’t initiate communication; instead people write letters to him. Arguably he initiates indirect contact by entering people’s homes, but there’s no evidence that he enters homes where he is unwanted. In fact, staying up late to ‘catch’ Santa is traditionally considered to cause him not to visit. And of course visits from Santa Claus have rarely, if ever, caused someone to lose their job.

Law of Superheroes organizes the best material from Law and the Multiverse into a kind of first-year lawschool compressed into one set of covers where all the hypotheticals revolve around comic-book storylines. It's the best quick legal education going, really.

Santa and Restraining Orders

(Image: Original Bad Santa kicks arse, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from dancentury's photostream)

Santa's privacy policy

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 23:09:39 +0000

"Santa's Privacy Policy" is a McSweeney's classic from 2010. On the one hand, the joke is pretty much all in the headline and doesn't really need much elaboration. On the other hand, this is pretty well done.

We obtain information from a variety of sources. Much of it comes from unsolicited letters sent to Santa by children all over the world listing specific items they would like to receive for Christmas. Often these letters convey additional information as well, such as the child’s hopes and dreams, how much they love Santa, and which of their siblings are doodyheads.
The letters also provide another important piece of information—fingerprints. We run these through databases maintained by the FBI, CIA, NSA, Interpol, MI6, and the Mossad. If we find a match, it goes straight on the Naughty List. We also harvest a saliva sample from the flap of the envelope in which the letter arrives in order to establish a baseline genetic identity for each correspondent. This is used to determine if there might be an inherent predisposition for naughtiness. A detailed handwriting analysis is performed as part of a comprehensive personality workup, and tells us which children are advancing nicely with their cursive and which are still stubbornly forming block letters with crayons long past the age when this is appropriate.
Our network of fully trained, duly deputized mall “Santas” file reports from the field, telling us which children are well-behaved, which are elf-phobic, which are prone to sphincter control issues, and which are squirmy beard-pulling monstrous little brats. Digital copies of photos taken with these “Santas” are automatically sent to our database for further evaluation, with particular attention given to the ones where the children are crying.

Santa’s Privacy Policy. (via Dan Hon)

(Image: Santa Claus, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mattimattila's photostream)

Soviet space-program Christmas cards

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 02:26:13 +0000

"Soviet Christmas card" sounds like a mere kitschy improbability, but what if I told you that they were space-race-themed Soviet Christmas cards? It's a Christmas miracle, dude.

Old Soviet Christmas card collection (via Richard Kadrey) …

Gingerbread Saturn V rocket

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 16:45:01 +0000

Matt sez, "For Christmas I decided to make a model Saturn V out of gingerbread. This one's 40 inches tall. I'm waiting for my niece and nephew to show up before we paint the flag and 'USA' on the sides."

Gingerbread Saturn V

Star Trek mummer's play

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 12:10:06 +0000

"King Boreas and the Vulcans" is a Star Trek-themed rewrite of a traditional mummer's play, by the delightful (and sadly departed) John M Ford and friends.

Kirk: In comes I, old Captain Kirk
All my fans know I’m a...great actor,
Brilliant novelist, and a swell guy besides
I come here from space
My rug glued in place
I come with my ship
To shoot from the hip
I come with my crew
Scott: It’s something to do.
Chekov: We know he’s a jerk.
McCoy: Yes, but it’s work.
Kirk: A ship, a ship
For me and my supporting cast
For we are the merry Starfleet
That seek out new worlds
We are the merry Starfleet
That necks with your girls
We are the merry Starfleet
All frequencies hail

King Boreas and the Vulcans (via Making Light)

NSFC: Cyriak's horrific Christmas animation

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 23:02:26 +0000

"The Spirit of Christmas," a video from UK animator Cyriak, is not really like anything I've ever seen. It's definitely not for the faint hearted or weak of stomach. Don't watch it if, for example, you have an aversion to prehensile, tentacle-like red noses.

The Spirit of Christmas (via JWZ)

Lord Buckley meets Groucho Marx

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 19:51:03 +0000

Nothing says Christmas like jazz poetry, and nothing says jazz poetry like Lord Buckley's appearance on You Bet Your life. If you only watch one 10-minute video of a jazz poet trading quips with Groucho Marx this holiday season, make it this one. Bonus: a totally unsubstantiated comment on the YouTube page says that Buckley's partner is actor Amy Poehler's grandmother.

Lord Buckley / Groucho Marx

Over the river and through the woods

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:28:50 +0000

We still don't know exactly what causes motion sickness…. NASA has some working theories, though.

Roast dinosaur for Christmas

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:26:21 +0000

Tired of turkey? Bored with beef? Maybe it's time to consider a more exotic roast this holiday season. At Popular Science, Erin Berger has taken the time to figure out what dinosaur would hypothetically make the best dinner for people (as opposed to the other way around). The analysis turns out to be surprisingly fascinating — Dinosaurs probably tasted more like beef than chicken! Armored tails are the other other white meat! — and it turns out that what you really want is a nice chunk of sauropod neck.

Lord Buckley recounts the life of Christ: The Nazz!

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 16:40:21 +0000

Boing Boing is committed to bringing you your annual portion of Lord Buckley's inspirational beat poetry. Earlier this month, I posted his version of "A Christmas Carol". Now, here's "The Nazz," Lord Buckley's indispensible biography of Jesus Christ. This is all the Christmas cheer anyone needs. With this alone, we could rebuild civilization from rubble.

Lord Buckley - The Nazz (Thanks, Iain!)

See also: Dig Infinity!, a biography of Lord Buckley

Vince Guaraldi Trio: "My Little Drum," from "A Charlie Brown Christmas"

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 22:47:12 +0000

The Vince Guaraldi Trio performing "My Little Drum," from the CBS children's holiday special, "A Charlie Brown Christmas."…

The Gingershred Man

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 22:39:15 +0000

"The Gingershred Man," a creation of Boing Boing reader Brock Davis of Minneapolis, MN, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.…

What to drink this winter — according to Smithsonian

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:01:49 +0000

Smithsonian's Food and Think blog has a (Northern-hemispherically biased) list of ideal Christmas/wintertime drinks — along with some cool history about where those drinks come from and how they're made. For example, Imperial Stout beer was invented in the late 1690s as a way to help delicious English stout beer survive frigidly cold Russian winters. Raise the alcohol content — and bam! — beer fit for a czar.

Red-nosed reindeer are real

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:07:39 +0000

It's true! Science proves it!

And it's more than just an effect of infrared imaging. If you duck over to Joseph Stromberg's post at the Surprising Science blog, you'll see a photo of a real, live reindeer with an adorably red nose (and upper lip).

Turns out, it's the result of an evolutionary adaptation. Some (but not all) reindeer have noses full of densely packed blood vessels — a difference that makes those reindeer better at regulating their own body temperatures.

To come to the findings, the scientists examined the noses of two reindeer and five human volunteers with a hand-held video microscope that allowed them to see individual blood vessels and the flow of blood in real time. They discovered that the reindeer had a 25% higher concentration of blood vessels in their noses, on average.

They also put the reindeer on a treadmill and used infrared imaging to measure what parts of their bodies shed the most heat after exercise. The nose, along with the hind legs, reached temperatures as high as 75°F—relatively hot for a reindeer—indicating that one of the main functions of all this blood flow is to help regulate temperature, bringing large volumes of blood close to the surface when the animals are overheated, so its heat can radiate out into the air.

Also: red-nosed reindeer on treadmills, you guys. This is clearly the most adorable science of the holiday season.

Read the full story

Via Bart King

Chemis-tree

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:47:00 +0000

Breokz uploaded a photo of "Xmas at the lab of Avans University of Applied Science." Chemistry may all be "pretty colors and things that go bang," but it sure makes for a festive tree.

True Chemistree (imgur.com) …

Santa and an adoptable dog in Las Vegas

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:59:37 +0000

Photographer, animal-lover, and Boing Boing reader heiney shares this photograph in our Boing Boing Flickr pool, and explains that this was a shot from the Animal Network Holiday Adoption Low Cost Vaccination/chip Photo Event at Ann Road Animal Hospital, Las Vegas NV.

"This was my first time shooting anything like this, I normally only shoot poochies for their Petfinder profiles," he says. "I thought it went pretty well, certainly learned a lot, for instance, perhaps an exam room at an animal hospital is not the most conducive environment for pets to feel their most calm & photogenic."

It looks like Rocco has been adopted! Other pets at this Las Vegas shelter are still looking for homes. Apparently there's a big pet abandonment/overpopulation problem in Vegas, even more so than in other US cities.

More technical details on the shoot here.

Wham's "Last Christmas" remixed, with erotic butter art dancing (messed-up holiday music video)

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:36:03 +0000

Video Link. Dylan Mitchell-Funk and Slugabed remix a Wham! holiday classic, with a woman dancing erotically on cubes of melting butter or lard or something. Merry Chrimbus, everyone.

Update: the source video is Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo's "EXERGIE - butter dance," a performance she first gave in 2000. Material used: 20 blocks of butter.

There's a problem with the Christmas lights

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 11:53:55 +0000

…

Atheist Christmas novel from a former Disney World Imagineering show-writer

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 04:04:30 +0000

Darryl Pickett, the Walt Disney Imagineering contract show writer whose videos about life in the trenches at Disney World I blogged in Jan 2011 has written a fun-sounding Christmas novel called The Secret Feast of Father Christmas. He writes,

The story seeks to reinvent the traditional Christmas gift giver. No toy-making elves or flying reindeer here. Father Christmas lives in a secret palace called Very North, and is married to Mother Solstice, a pantheistic demigoddess. (I suspect Father Christmas is Unitarian Universalist.) My hero is a 13 year-old New Zealander named Mannie, who has lost his beloved Aunt Audra, a free-spirited atheist. He struggles with the idea propounded by his Anglican family, that his aunt may have been relegated to Hell. The story has its bittersweet moments, and it's certainly heartfelt. Though it has no direct connection to anything Disney, I believe my Imagineering roots will become clear to anyone who reads through to the end.

The Secret Feast of Father Christmas (Thanks, Darryl!)

O, tennenbohm

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:04:12 +0000

Cubicle Christmas
by jingle_balls123
Artist's statement: This wasn't really a tree... I just twisted the wires and moves around the components to make it look like a tree. The parts are just LEDs, resistors (i used 100 ohms) and a 9v battery. Wire structures are just the leads from the LEDs and resistors.

This is how I decorated my cubicle (imgur.com) (via Neatorama)