There are people in this world who can afford to spend millions of dollars on a wedding. That's the perfect way to show the world how filthy rich you are, because there's going to be a lot of pictures testifying to how much you spent on a one-day party. And what good is money if you can't conspicuously consume it? Ryan George was obviously inspired to make this video by Jeff Bezos' and Lauren Sánchez' wedding last year, which reportedly cost $50 million. That wedding made all the papers for its outrageous flaunting of wealth, while Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie Scott quietly spends her days writing large checks to charities.
But that's not the only over-the-top wedding designed to flaunt a family's wealth highlighted in this video. Some are more expensive than others, and some are just weird. He also takes a special look at ridiculous wedding cakes, which probably won't even make you hungry.
Marisa Whittamore, a stained glass artist, and Amanda Rosenblatt, a photographer, collaborated to create this extraordinary work of stained glass. This mind-bending work emerges from two dimensional space into the viewer. It's on display at the THAW Group exhibition in Jacksonville, Florida.
Janus Cycle faced the challenge of powering a modern device with humanity's earliest artificial energy source: fire.
The key components are a pair of Peltier modules. These devices convert heat into electricity. Janus Cycle placed these modules over an open flame in a cardboard box to concentrate the heat. He used thermal compound to conduct the energy and route the electricity to the Game Boy.
Obstacles included the fragility of the Peltier modules, which can endure a maximum heat of 250°F, while generating enough electricity (about 4 volts) to power up the Game Boy. The project was successful and Janus Cycle played Castlevania.
-via Hack A Day
A mere ditch separates the American and Canadian border between South Surrey, British Columbia and Blaine, Washington. On a daily basis, the Canadian cat Louis Vuitton flaunts US sovereignty by crossing that border whenever he wishes.
CBC News reports that there are security cameras and guards, but Louis Vuitton ignores them (and the Oregon Treaty of 1846) and strolls around the territory of the United States of America to receive tribute in the form of pats and belly rubs. He occasionally hunts squirrels, mice, and snakes to bring back across the border to Canada to offer to his humans.
-via Wholesome Side of X
Let's not overcomplicate this.
— Dr. Ann Olivarius (@AnnOlivarius) March 17, 2026
"Alpine divorce" is just plain ol' coercive control but in a Patagonia vest and hiking boots.
Putting your partner in a dangerous situation and leaving her there is a classic abusive tactic of punishment and control.
https://t.co/OEomZdZR9g
When I first heard the term "alpine divorce," I assumed it meant a case of murder or at least negligent manslaughter, like the recent case in Austria where a man abandoned his girlfriend on a mountain to die. But the term isn't limited to cases that end in death. There are plenty of stories on social media of dates that involved hiking or mountain climbing that ended the relationship.
An outdoors enthusiast wants to take a romantic partner or spouse up to a mountain to share their passion. But the lesser-experienced person, usually but not always a woman, cannot go as fast or as far. Do you slow down to accommodate your partner, or do you abandon her and push on ahead to conquer the challenge of the hike? How mountaineers answer that question reveals whether the priority is the relationship or their ego. Everyone is new to the experience when they start out, and not accommodating a newbie will not only ruin a relationship, it can put them in serious danger. Read about the phenomenon of alpine divorce at the Guardian. -via Metafilter
Georgia is proud to be called the Peach State, and that branding is everywhere, from water towers to the many streets named Peachtree in Atlanta. How did the state get that way? Peaches aren't a native fruit in America- they came from China by way of Europe. And when colonists found peach trees growing across the south, they didn't much like them. Instead, they started growing cotton, mostly for export, and made a ton of money. Even today, the cotton crop in Georgia is bigger than peaches, but "the land of cotton" as a slogan doesn't resonate the way it did 200 years ago.
How peaches became the symbol of Georgia is a neat story, but the most useful thing you'll learn is the difference between cling peaches and freestone peaches, which is good to know when you're at the grocery store. This video has a sponsor ad from 4:12 to 4:54.
I feel sympathy for students who have to do the scut work in scientific studies on their way to becoming a scientist, like sorting through millions of insects or timing and measuring poop. Finally, one of these sacrificial lambs is getting the recognition they deserve. Chris Zuo was an undergraduate when he volunteered to help with a study on mosquitos (he now has a masters) at the University of Georgia. He wore a mesh suit, presumably the kind of mesh used for mosquito netting, and went into a room with 100 mosquitos. In four minutes he was covered with mosquito bites.
They found the mesh suit didn't work, but that wasn't even what the study was about. Instead, they were studying the flight patterns of mosquitos on their way to detecting a human target. Zuo didn't quit the study, however. He was game to try again, using other methods of protection so that the researchers could get high-speed video of the insects' flight patterns. Read what Zuo went through, and what the team discovered about how mosquitos detect a target at the Conversation.
(Image credit: David L. Hu, Georgia Tech)
Creating a LinkedIn profile is essential for the job hunting process in many professions. I gather that so is despairing over the content posted therein. LinkedIn is notorious for being popular with business influencers who share ficticious or wildly inaccurate stories about their working lives or how they apply incidents in their personal lives for the workplace. There's a subreddit called LinkedIn Lunatics for the worst offenders.
The search engine Kagi created an AI tool that takes the work out of creating nonsense for your LinkedIn followers. It automatically generates LinkedIn gibberish based upon prompts from your daily life experiences.
-via kanav
Last week when I wrote about the guy who turned blue, I knew there were two reasons for people to turn blue, but I couldn't recall what the other one (besides colloidal silver) was. Now I remember! It's methemoglobinemia. I've even written about it. What does that have to do with Tylenol? You'll have to watch the video to find out.
Tylenol has been sold since 1955, but its history goes back much further. The underlying medicine's fever-reducing talent was discovered purely by accident, and I mean an accident at a pharmacy that could have been much, much worse. But it worked, not only to reduce fever, but to squelch pain as well. Testing has deemed it safe and effective, but scientists still don't know the exact mechanism of that effectiveness. It's possible that we might never know, because there are much more important problems than the exact mechanism of a drug that's already safe and effective. This video from Half as Interesting is a minute shorter than it looks, because that last part is an ad.
When we think about an uprising of the common people against ruthless overseers, we think of the French Revolution or maybe the Haitian Revolution, but one story from medieval Spain illustrates the concept well, whether it's true or not. And it all started over a single fish.
In 1158, in the town of Zamora on the border between the kingdoms of León and al-Andalus, a marketplace dispute began. A shoemaker bought the last trout of a fishmonger, when a servant of the local ruling knight Gómez Álvarez showed up and demanded the fish for his lord. A dispute ensued, and other townspeople joined in both sides. The servant left without the fish, and Álvarez was angry that the peasants didn't know their place. He gathered other knights together with the idea that such resistance cannot stand because it would undermine their authority. Meanwhile, the townspeople who supported the shoemaker gathered to burn down the church where the knights were meeting. The battle eventually escalated to the King of León. Some doubt the details, or if it ever even happened, but it's a great story you can read at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: New York (State) Forest, Fish and Game Commission)
The board game Monopoly was invented by Lizzie Magie in 1904. She called it The Landlord's Game, and it was designed to illustrate the evils of capitalism. Charles Darrow stole the idea and made Monopoly to appeal to a player's greed, and that's when it took off. The game has been teaching children how to be ruthless ever since.
But people don't read the rules of the game anymore. They are long and involved and the print is too small. People tend to just play Monopoly the way they were taught, forgetting half of it, and many of the original rules have fallen by the wayside. Simon Whistler explains some of the most common Monopoly rules that are altered or ignored in the 21st century, and how the way most folks play it these days slows the game down and makes it more boring. It's still pretty ruthless, though. Your children will learn better things by playing Scrabble, or even Candyland.
People who are born blind and have their sight restored at a later age tend to not look at people's faces when they speak to them- they instead look at their hands. That's because they have built their sensory world around touch, hearing, and other senses and have more experience with someone else's hands than with faces. But that's only one way newly-sighted people have to learn how to deal with a world they can suddenly see.
Children born with cataracts can be treated surgically, but in developing countries this treatment may be out of reach. This gives us a population of people to study who have their sight restored after they have learned to live as a blind person. Their brains have to adjust to perceive the signals that an infant learns naturally over time, like separating shapes from colors, depth perception, distinguishing outlines, and facial recognition. During blindness, the visual cortex is often rerouted to process non-visual signals. Still, the brain is very adaptable. Read about the way people see for the first time at Big Think.
(Image credit: MC3 Michael Feddersen)
I had to look up a lot of terms to understand this video, but you don't really have to understand it to be impressed. The sarabande is a dance that dates back about 500 years that is notable for being three times as fast as a normal dance. Sarabande 2X Co-Op is a very difficult video game that uses a sarabande song at 157 beats per minute. It's played on the Pump It Up arcade game console that you play with your feet, like Dance Dance Revolution, except there are five foot pads, or ten if you play with a partner. Got all that?
Gamers ElijahTS and Tomatonium recently became the first team ever to finish this truly difficult game with a perfect score, during a livestream with plenty of witnesses. This is not just watching two guys play a video game; this is serious fancy footwork. They don't really get going until about 50 seconds into the video, and by then you'll be glad you stuck with it. -via Born in Space
Disney animated movies are not all sweetness and light. A good drama tugs at your heartstrings, and Disney has perfected the art of building up your hopes and dreams by making you care about the characters, and then yanking them away in a minute. A consulting firm called sheets.works crunched the numbers and found that the moment of heartbreak most often comes halfway through a Disney film, although they vary from five minutes in (Encanto) to 96% of the way through the story (Pocahontas). Almost half involve the death of a parent.
They have a chart listing 33 Disney animated films, ranked by where the heartbreak comes in. Click the movie title to bring up the moment and its statistics, such as its type and how devastating it is. If you've seen the movies, it will take you back to how you felt watching it for the first time. -via Metafilter
Once, as a child, I visited the Louvre in Paris. There was a crowd around the Mona Lisa--a surprisingly small painting--but not around other works.
It's the most famous painting in the Louvre, so it attracts a lot of attention. Writer David Friedman wondered: what do other museums regard at their most famous items on display? He found 17 museums that officials had specifically identified works of art as their own Mona Lisa.
In the case of the middle work above, it's a silkscreen by Andy Warhol of Marilyn Monroe in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Friedman also includes museums of history and paleontology.
