Month: December 2016

You’ve made your Christmas card list and you’ve checked it twice. Now comes the hard part: actually getting started. To shake up what could otherwise be a pretty tedious process, two brothers decided to put their own spin on the traditional holiday card using a machine they built from LEGO bricks, as Gizmodo reports.

Fourteen-year-old Sanjay Seshan and his 12-year-old brother Arvind recently debuted the Holiday Card Plott3r, a machine powered by a series of LEGO MINDSTORMS sensors, gears, and motors, which prints out holiday greeting cards and their corresponding envelopes. Operating much like a dot-matrix printer, the machine uses two markers to draw a festive image dot-by-dot. The robot features three designs—a snowflake, a Christmas tree, and Santa’s signature—while a connected machine slides out envelopes using a pair of wheels.

“LEGO MINDSTORMS is a great way to prototype real world machines. We have been interested in dot matrix printers for a while and wanted to build one ourselves using LEGO,” Sanjay and Arvind told mental_floss over email. “We have been working on different versions all year. We thought it would be fun to create a complete holiday-themed machine that automated the process of creating Christmas cards.” But, they note, “it can be modified for any occasion.”

Sanjay and Arvind are LEGO enthusiasts and budding engineers from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Together, they founded Ev3Lessons.com and Beyond The Instructions, websites and communities that encourage other kids to explore concepts like robotics and coding using LEGO blocks. The Seshan brothers are also part of “Team Not the Droids You Are Looking For” in the FIRST LEGO League, a competitive engineering league for children ages 9 to 16. Teams develop solutions for real-world problems using nothing but LEGO MINDSTORMS.

The Seshan brothers have made the design for their Holiday Card Plott3r project public, so others can build their own—and finally finish that Christmas to-do list.

[h/t Gizmodo]

Header/banner image courtesy of iStock 

From America to Australia, everyone wants to start the New Year off on the right foot. Here are 15 rituals from around the world that are said to ensure a forthcoming year filled with happiness, prosperity, love, and adventure.

1. LATIN AMERICA // CARRY AROUND AN EMPTY SUITCASE.

In many Latin American countries, New Year’s revelers with a case of wanderlust will set an empty suitcase by their front door (or even drag it around a room in circles, or around the block) to conjure an upcoming year filled with adventure and travel.

2. SPAIN // EAT 12 GRAPES AT MIDNIGHT.

Some people guzzle sparkling wine at midnight on New Year’s Eve, but in Spain (and in some Latin American countries, too), they stick with grapes until the clock is done striking the hour.  They’ll gobble 12 bits of fruit—one grape for each stroke of midnight—to ensure the next 12 months will be filled with luck.

3. ARGENTINA // EAT BEANS.

In Argentina, beans aren’t just prized for their fiber content—they’re also considered to be a lucky New Year’s Eve dish. Eating them right before midnight is said to provide job security for the coming year—perhaps the most responsible tradition on this list.

4. BELARUS // HAVE A ROOSTER PREDICT YOUR LOVE LIFE.

In Belarus, single women looking for lasting love sit in a circle, each with a pile of corn in front of her. A rooster is placed in the circle’s center, and the woman whose grain heap it pecks at first is believed to be the first of the bunch to get married.

5. CHINA // CLEAN THE HOUSE (BUT WATCH WHICH WAY YOU SWEEP THE DIRT).

The Chinese New Year (known as the “Spring Festival”) corresponds with the turn of the lunar-solar Chinese calendar, and technically isn’t celebrated until late January to mid- February. But just like in many Western countries, the occasion is marked with numerous traditions and superstitions. One good-luck custom is to clean your home from top to bottom as a way to usher out the prior year. But to ensure the good luck doesn’t accidentally get pushed out along with the bad, people sweep the home inward, collect the dirt, and dispose of it out the back door instead of the front one. And during the first two days of the New Year, homemakers aren’t supposed to clean their dwellings at all, to avoid sweeping away any lingering fortune.

6. DENMARK // THROW BROKEN DISHES AT YOUR NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE.

Most people toss broken dishes into the trash, but in Denmark, they dispose of them in a much more creative fashion. They save them, and on New Year’s Eve, they toss the shards at their friends’ and family’s homes as a gesture of good luck. (No word on whether they volunteer to clean up the mess after.) Danes (and Germans) with less-pugnacious personalities—or simply weaker throwing arms—can opt to leave a heap of broken china on doorsteps, instead.

7. ROMANIA // PERFORM A CEREMONIAL BEAR DANCE.

In Romania’s eastern Moldova region, villagers dress in real bearskins and dance up and down the streets to ward off bad luck. The ritual takes place each year, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and stems from an ancient Roma tradition.

8. THE AMERICAN SOUTH // EAT BLACK-EYED PEAS.

In America, many Southern families eat a festive New Year’s Day dinner of collard greens, pork, and black-eyed peas—a type of legume with a distinctive black spot on its cream-colored shell. The latter dish is said to bring good luck (and whoever finds a coin hidden in the beans’ serving pot will have the most of it). Nobody quite knows where this tradition originated, but some people say it began after the Civil War, when Union soldiers stole all Confederate food supplies aside from black-eyed peas  (thus making them “lucky”). Another theory is that Sephardic Jews—who settled Georgia during the 18^th century—ate black-eyed peas to ring in the New Year, and brought the tradition with them to America.

9. SOUTH AFRICA // TOSS FURNITURE OUT THE WINDOW.

In Johannesburg, South Africa, locals who live in the city’s Hillbrow neighborhood toss old furniture out the windows, or off their balconies. Presumably, this act symbolizes shedding the old for the new, and embracing the promise of a new year. (Sadly, people have been injured from this practice, and the police have gotten involved, so think twice before emulating this one.)

10. ESTONIA // EAT MULTIPLE MEALS.

In Estonia, people eat seven to 12 meals on New Year’s Day to provide them with the strength of seven to 12 men. (They then, presumably, take seven to 12 food coma-induced naps.)

11. FINLAND/SCANDINAVIA // POUR MELTED TIN INTO WATER.

In some Nordic countries, like Finland, people melt tin horseshoes, then pour the resulting liquid into cold water and watch it swirl into a new, solid form. The shape it makes is said to predict what kind of year you’ll have.

12. BRAZIL // TOSS WHITE FLOWERS AND GIFTS INTO THE OCEAN.

Many Brazilians believe that giving gifts to Yemanja, an Afro-Brazilian ocean spirit, on New Year’s Eve will give them newfound vitality and strength. They travel to Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, and toss white flowers and other offerings into the waves.

13. ECUADOR // BURN A SCARECROW.

To New Year’s Eve revelers in Ecuador, a scarecrow serves as a symbol for the previous year’s bad energy. They burn the straw effigy to promote a fresh, positive start to the year.

14. SCOTLAND // THE YEAR’S FIRST GUEST BRINGS YOU GIFTS.

In Scotland, the first person to cross your home’s threshold in the New Year is required to bring you an assortment of symbolic gifts: a coin, salt, bread, coal, and whiskey.

15. THE PHILIPPINES // MAKE LOTS OF NOISE

New Year’s Eve is typically rowdy in most cultures, but people in the Philippines make lots of noise. To scare off evil spirits, they bang together pots and pans, set off fireworks, and even shoot guns into the air.

If your New Year’s resolutions involve saving money, you’re going to want to give GEICO a call. You may even be able to cut back on your bills by switching.

The holiday season is all about unity, but few topics are more divisive than which Christmas movie is the ultimate seasonal film. For every Home Alone fan, there’s an Elf enthusiast. To settle the score, the folks at online TV service provider CableTV.com have collected the top-rated yuletide films as rated over at AMC, and cross-referenced them with Google Trends state data from the past 10 years. They crunched the data, and compiled it into a map of each state’s favorite holiday flick.

Residents of Connecticut, Illinois, New York, and Vermont liked films set in their home states: Christmas in Connecticut, Home Alone (filmed in Winnetka, Illinois), It’s a Wonderful Life (set in the fictional city of Bedford Falls, New York), and White Christmas (set in the fictional town of Pine Tree, Vermont) all came out on top in those states, respectively.

As for Southern residents, they preferred Christmas cartoons and comedies, like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In New England, movie fans kept it cozy with the classics, including White Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street. Pockets of the Midwest appreciated National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and residents of the Atlantic Seaboard and the Great Lakes region liked Home Alone and Elf. And out West, the Nightmare Before Christmas reigned supreme.

Check out the full results in the map above.

The Afternoon Map is a semi-regular feature in which we post maps and infographics. In the afternoon. Semi-regularly.

It’s been 50 years since artist, producer, entrepreneur, and all-around game-changer Walt Disney passed away from lung cancer on December 15, 1966. Half a century later, it’s easy to forget that Disney was a real guy, not just a caricature or company figurehead. In honor of the man, not the corporation, here are 15 facts about his life.

1. HE ONCE PLAYED PETER PAN IN A SCHOOL PLAY.

The story Peter Pan surely held a special place in Walt Disney’s heart: not only was it a hit movie for him in 1953, it also took him back to his childhood. After seeing Peter Pan on stage, young Walt was given the opportunity to play the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up in a school performance. Walt later recalled that his brother was in charge of the rope used to hoist him over the stage to simulate flying, proving that Roy has always been an integral part of Walt’s life.

2. HE WAS A HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT.

Walt was just 16 when he left school to join the Red Cross Ambulance Corps, wanting to do his part in World War I—but because he was just shy of the minimum age requirement of 17, he forged a different date on his birth certificate. Disney didn’t see much action, however. He was sent to France in late 1918, not long after the armistice was signed that ended the fighting. He still helped where he could, driving Red Cross officials and performing other tasks, before he was discharged in 1919.

3. HE ALMOST SOLD VACUUM CLEANERS FOR A LIVING.

In 1923, Walt joined his older brother Roy in L.A. to pursue a career in animation. Roy had been selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door to make ends meet and encouraged Walt do the same. Walt considered it, but before he could get sucked in by a Kirbyesque scheme, he got a call from a company in New York that wanted him to make shorts for them.

4. MICKEY MOUSE WASN’T HIS FIRST BIG CREATION.

In 1927, Universal asked Walt and his chief animator Ub Iwerks to create a cartoon character for them; the result was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Oswald was a huge hit, complete with robust merchandising. With this success under his belt, in 1928, Disney went to New York to renegotiate his contract with producer Charles Mintz. Mintz, however, countered with a different deal: He wanted to cut the budget. And to add salt to the wound, Mintz had been working backdoor deals to hire Disney’s animators out from under him. In the end, Universal ended up with the rights to Oswald, and Disney left New York feeling as if he had lost almost everything. But it all worked out in the end—on the train ride back to California, Disney sketched a character that would eclipse Oswald in popularity: Mickey Mouse.

The company regained control of the obscure character in 2006, almost eight decades after losing him. The rights were part of a trade between Disney and NBC/Universal: They agreed to let Disney have Oswald back, and Disney, the owner of ABC and ESPN, agreed to let NBC use sportscaster Al Michaels for Sunday Night Football.

5. HE DIDN’T DRAW MICKEY MOUSE.

He did at first, but it didn’t last long—after 1928, Walt was no longer animating, focusing instead on story development and direction. He relied on Ub Iwerks and other superior artists to do the drawing dirty work. He never drew Mickey in any of his theatrical releases, and in fact, probably only really drew Mickey when autograph seekers requested it.

6. BUT HE DID VOICE MICKEY MOUSE.

From 1928 to 1947, Walt was the man behind the mouse—literally. Even after the voice work was officially turned over to Jimmy MacDonald in 1947, Walt continued to do Mickey’s voice for shorts on The Mickey Mouse Club.

7. HE DROVE HIS DAUGHTERS TO SCHOOL EVERY DAY.

Despite the fact that he had drivers, a live-in housekeeper, and a number of other staff members at his disposal, Disney took great pleasure in driving his two daughters to school every day. He also spoiled them unabashedly, which historian Steve Watts believes was a reaction to Walt’s own stern upbringing.

8. HE HAD A SECRET APARTMENT AT DISNEYLAND.

It’s still there, in fact, above the fire station. Walt’s private apartment isn’t typically open to the public, but VIPs are occasionally offered tours. The furnishings remain virtually unchanged from when Walt used to spend time there, including a lamp in the window visible from outside. It’s always kept on to signify that Walt is always in the park.

9. HIS FAVORITE SONG WAS “FEED THE BIRDS.”

There have been a lot of toe-tapping hits in Disney movies over the years, but Walt’s personal favorite was a ballad: “Feed the Birds,” the song about the pigeon lady in Mary Poppins. According to songwriter Richard Sherman, Walt often stopped by the Sherman brothers’ office at Disney on Friday afternoons and requested a personal performance of “Feed the Birds.” “He loved that song, and knew it was the heartbeat of the whole movie,” Sherman said.

10. HE FOUND GOLF ANYTHING BUT RELAXING.

Though many people play golf to relax, Disney couldn’t deal with it. After giving up polo at his doctor’s behest, Walt took up golf, getting up at 4:30 a.m. to squeeze in nine holes before work. He found the game so frustrating that he quit and took up a more chill sport—lawn bowling.

11. WALT FELT RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS MOTHER’S DEATH.

Once he became successful, Walt bought his parents a rather extravagant present: a new house. And when his parents needed something fixed, tweaked, or repaired, he sent his own repairmen from the studio over to take care of it. Such was the case when they discovered a problem with their furnace in 1938. Tragically, his team didn’t take care of the issue properly, and Flora Call Disney died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 70. His father, Elias, also fell very ill from the gas leak, but survived. Walt’s daughter, Sharon, said that even years later, Walt found the subject nearly impossible to talk about.

12. HIS HOUSEKEEPER WAS A VERY WEALTHY WOMAN.

Thelma Howard was the Disney family’s live-in housekeeper and cook for three decades. She was hired in 1951 and quickly became part of the family, even making sure the fridge was well-stocked with hot dogs—Walt liked to eat them cold as a snack when he got home from work. As part of her annual Christmas gift, the Disneys gave her stock in the company. She never did anything with them—and by the time she died in 1994, the woman was a multimillionaire because of them. She left nearly $4.5 million to poor and disabled children, and roughly the same amount to her disabled son.

13. DISNEY WAS OBSESSED WITH TRAINS.

Walt always had an interest in trains, even building an elaborate model in his office, which he enjoyed running for his guests. In 1948, his hobby grew to new heights when he constructed a 1/8 scale model in his backyard, with track spanning half a mile. He deemed it the Carolwood Pacific Railroad.

14. ONE OF HIS LAST WRITTEN COMMUNICATIONS WAS RATHER MYSTERIOUS—AND INVOLVED KURT RUSSELL.

Shortly before his death, Disney wrote “Kurt Russell” on a piece of paper. It was later found on his desk, and, according to Disney historian Dave Smith, the notes were among Disney’s last few written words. At the time of Disney’s death, Russell was a largely unknown child actor working for the studio. No one has any idea what Disney was referring to with his note—including Kurt Russell.

15. WALT DISNEY IS NOT CRYOGENICALLY FROZEN.

Bob Nelson, the former president of the Cryonics Society of California, makes a good point: if Disney was the first cryogenically frozen man, it would have been a pretty big deal for cryonics, and they would have publicized the heck out of the Mickey Mouse-cicle. No, Walt was cremated and buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale. His gravesite is in a public area for people who want to see it for themselves.

The chilly rumor may have been started by Ward Kimball, one of Disney’s famed “Nine Old Men” animators, who had a wicked sense of humor.

Some people save for years to enjoy a meal at one of the top restaurants honored by the Michelin Guide. But starting Friday, December 16, New York City diners will be able to purchase a one-star meal for less than the price of a grande latte at Starbucks. As Gothamist reports, Tim Ho Wan, the cheapest eatery to earn a coveted Michelin star, is bringing its dim sum to a new location in Manhattan’s East Village.

In 1900, Michelin started publishing annual city guides as a way to encourage travel among its customers. Today, restaurants around the world can receive up to three stars from the company—one if it’s worth a stop, two if it’s worth a detour, and three if it’s worth a special journey.

These honors are usually awarded to fine dining establishments, which is why Tim Ho Wan captured the food world’s attention in 2010 when it secured a star for its affordable dim sum menu. Based in Hong Kong, restaurant founders Mak Kwai Pui and Leung Fai Keung have since opened dozens of locations around the world. Their New York outpost marks their 45th, and it will serve up many of the same specialties diners find in Hong Kong including barbecue pork buns and steamed shrimp dumplings. The menu will also feature two new items that are unique to the city: fried vegetarian spring rolls and French toast with custard filling. What makes the offerings sound even more appealing is that they’re all priced at $5.50 or less.

The full menu will be available when the restaurant has its soft open this Friday. Unless you’re planning a trip to Singapore, where street vendor Chan Hon Meng was awarded a Michelin star earlier this year, you’ll be hard-pressed to find Michelin-approved eats this cheap elsewhere.

[h/t Gothamist]

If you’re feeling pressure to buy the perfect Christmas or Hanukkah present, experts have some advice for you: Don’t try so hard. According to The New York Times, social science researchers say that most people are satisfied with receiving a generic, boring, or even regifted gift instead of one that’s surprising, novel, thoughtful, or unique. To put it bluntly, as researchers concluded in a 2012 study, “If you want to give a gift that someone will appreciate, then you should focus on getting a good gift and ignore whether it is a thoughtful gift or not” [PDF].

Next time you hit the mall, follow a few guidelines to save time and effort. One major rule of thumb is to buy loved ones a practical object—not a novelty object intended to astonish or delight, the Times advises. In a recent study published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, business professors from Indiana University and Carnegie Mellon University found that gift givers often focus on how someone will react when they open their present, and not on whether the gift is actually something they will keep and use.

“We exchange gifts with people we care about, in part, in an effort to make them happy and strengthen our relationships with them,” Jeff Galak, a study co-author and associate professor of marketing at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, said in a press statement. “By considering how valuable gifts might be over the course of the recipient’s ownership of them, rather than how much of a smile it might put on recipients’ faces when they are opened, we can meet these goals and provide useful, well-received gifts.”

To avoid feeling like you’re giving a boring gift, study co-author Elanor Williams recommends pairing a practical gift with a fun accessory, like a blender and margarita mix, for instance.

Studies also show it’s best to just give the people what they want. Researchers from Stanford and Harvard business schools published research in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that revealed that—gasp!—most people prefer getting something they’ve asked for.

If your loved ones don’t provide you with a wish list, there’s no shame in giving a gift card—just choose one that gives them flexibility in how they use it. A study published in The Journal for Consumer Research found that people are less likely to redeem a gift card if it’s to a specific institution. “For example, a giver might personalize a gift card for a friend who loves sports by getting him a gift card for his favorite sporting goods store or a local sports venue,” the study’s lead researcher, psychologist Mary Steffel, said in a press statement. “However, the sports lover might prefer a more general card, like a Visa- or Mastercard-backed gift card, as it would allow him to purchase sporting equipment, tickets to a sporting event, or anything else that he might want or need.”

Another tip: Don’t feel like you need to give everyone in your life a personalized gift—especially when the recipients don’t know each other. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that the more specific you get with your presents in order to avoid giving the same gift to multiple people, the more likely you are to choose one that someone doesn’t like—so if you’ve found an object that will win over everyone on your holiday list, stick with it. For example, if several of your friends like sports, go ahead and give them all subscriptions to a sports magazine.

There are eights days left until Hanukkah begins and nine until Christmas—happy shopping!

[h/t The New York Times]

New York City’s subway has more riders than any other city transit system in the U.S., averaging more than 5.5 million riders per weekday over its 660 miles of track. (It’s possible to ride the whole system in a day, if you have 22-plus hours to spare.) It’s easy to imagine what a single train looks like at rush hour, but how about the whole system? An intrepid Columbia University student decided to find out, as CityLab reports.

Using data from the Metropolitan Transit Authority and Google Maps, Will Geary created a moving map of New York City subway data from a single day. Geary has previously done the same with the city’s bike share service, breaking down Citi Bike activity by gender over the course of October 2015.

Each train line is represented by the color it’s assigned by transit maps. The visualization spans 24 hours, and has been sped up around 400 times its real-time length. It’s set to some classical music, making it a much calmer experience than actually riding a subway train.

[h/t CityLab]

B.F. (Burrhus Frederic) Skinner was one of the most eminent American psychologists of the 20th century. Skinner founded “radical behaviorism”—a twist on traditional behaviorism, a field of psychology that focused exclusively on observable human behavior. Thoughts, feelings, and perceptions were cast aside as unobservable.

Skinner dubbed his own method of observing behavior “operant conditioning,” which posited that behavior is determined solely by its consequences—either reinforcements or punishments. He argued that people can be manipulated to exhibit or inhibit a behavior based on these consequences.

To Skinner’s critics, the idea that these “principles of reinforcement,” as he called them, lead to easy “behavior modification” suggested that we do not have free will and are little more than automatons acting in response to stimuli. But his fans considered him visionary. Controversial to the end, Skinner was well known for his unconventional methods, unusual inventions, and utopian—some say dystopian—ideas about human society.

1. HE INVENTED THE “OPERANT CONDITIONING” OR “SKINNER” BOX.

Skinner believed that the best way to understand behavior is to look at the causes of an action and its consequences, responses to stimuli. He called this approach “operant conditioning.” Skinner began by studying rats interacting with an environment inside a box, where they were rewarded with a pellet of food for responding to a stimulus like light or sound with desired behavior. This simple experiment design would over the years take on dark metaphorical meaning: Any environment that had mechanisms in place to manipulate or control behavior could be called a “Skinner box.” Recently, some have argued that social media is a sort of digital Skinner box: Likes, clicks, and shares are the pellet-like rewards we get for responding to our environment with certain behavior. Yes, we are the rats.

2. HE BELIEVED ALL BEHAVIOR WAS AFFECTED BY ONE OF THREE “OPERANTS.”

Skinner proposed there were only three “operants” that had affected human behavior. Neutral operants were responses from the environment that had a benign effect on a behavior. Reinforcers were responses that increased the likelihood of a behavior’s repetition. And punishers decreased the likelihood of a behavior’s repetition. While he was correct that behavior can be modified via this system, it’s only one of many methods for doing so, and it failed to take into account how emotions, thoughts, and—as we learned eventually—the brain itself account for changes in behavior.

3. HE’S RESPONSIBLE FOR THE TERM “POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT.”

 
Skinner eventually moved on to studying pigeons in his Skinner Box. The pigeons would peck at a disc to gain access to food at various intervals, and for completing certain tasks. From this Skinner concluded that some form of reinforcement was crucial in learning new behaviors. To his mind, positive reinforcement strengthens a behavior by providing a consequence an individual finds rewarding. He concluded that reinforced behavior tends to be repeated and strengthened.

4. SOME CRITICS FELT THIS APPROACH AMOUNTED TO BRIBERY.

Critics were dubious that Skinner’s focus on behavior modification through positive reinforcing of desired behavior could actually change behavior for the long term, and that it was little more than temporary reward, like bribery, for a short-term behavioral change.

5. “NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT” ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK.

Skinner believed negative reinforcement also helped to strengthen behavior; this doesn’t mean exposing an animal or person to a negative stimulus, but rather removing an “unpleasant reinforcer.” The idea was that removing the negative stimulus would feel like a “reward” to the animal or person.

6. SKINNER TAUGHT PIGEONS TO PLAY PING PONG.

 
As part of his research into positive reinforcement, he taught pigeons to play ping pong as a first step in seeing how trainable they were. He ultimately wanted to teach them to guide bombs and missiles and even convinced the military to fund his research to that effect. He liked working with pigeons because they responded well to reinforcements and punishments, thus validating his theories. We know now that pigeons can be trained in a whole host of tasks, including distinguishing written words from nonsense and spotting cancer.

7. HIS FIRST BOOK, THE BEHAVIOR OF ORGANISMS, BROKE NEW GROUND.

Published in 1938, Skinner’s debut tome made the case that simple observation of cause and effect, reward and punishment, were as significant to understanding behavior as other “conceptual or neural processes.”

Skinner believed behavior was everything. Thoughts and feelings were just unreliable byproducts of behaviors, he argued—and therefore dismissed them. Many of his fellow psychologists disagreed. Regardless, Skinner’s theories contributed to a greater understanding of the relationship between stimuli and resulting behavior and may have even laid the groundwork for understanding the brain’s reward circuitry, which centers around the amygdala.

8. HE CREATED “THE BABY TENDER.”

Skinner was fond of inventions, and having children gave him a new outlet for his tendencies. He designed a special crib for his infant daughter called “the baby tender.” The clear box, with air holes, was heated so that the baby didn’t need blankets. Unlike typical cribs, there were no slats in the sides, which he said prevented possible injury. Unsurprisingly, it did not catch on popularly.

9. HE ALSO DEVELOPED HIS OWN “TEACHING MACHINE.”

 
You may have Skinner to thank for modern school workbooks and test-taking procedures. In 1954 Skinner visited his daughter’s classroom and found himself frustrated with the “inefficiencies” of the teaching procedures. His first “teaching machine”—a very basic program to improve teaching methods for spelling, math, and other school subjects—was little more than a fill-in-the-blank method on workbook or computer. It’s now considered a precursor to computer-assisted learning programs.

10. SKINNER IMAGINED AN IDEAL SOCIETY BASED ON HIS THEORIES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR.

Skinner admired the work of Henry David Thoreau’s famous book Walden, in which Thoreau writes about his retreat to the woods to get in greater contact with his inner nature. Skinner’s “Ten Commandments” for a utopian world include: “(1) No way of life is inevitable. Examine your own closely. (2) If you do not like it, change it. (3) But do not try to change it through political action. Even if you succeed in gaining power, you will not likely be able to use it any more wisely than your predecessors. (4) Ask only to be left alone to solve your problems in your own way. (5) Simplify, your needs. Learn how to be happy with fewer possessions.”

11. HE WROTE A UTOPIAN NOVEL, WALDEN TWO.

 
Though inspired by Walden, Skinner also felt the book was too self-indulgent, so he wrote his own fictional followup with the 1948 novel Walden Two. The book proposed a type of utopian—some say dystopian—society that employed a system of behavior modification based on operant conditioning. This system of rewards and punishments would, Skinner proposed, make people into good citizens:

“We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, desires, the wishes.”

12. SOME FELT HIS IDEAS WERE REDUCTIONIST …

Critics, of which there were many, felt he reduced human behavior to a series of actions and reactions: that an individual human “mind” only existed in a social context, and that humans could be easily manipulated by external cues. He did not put much store in his critics. Even at age 83, just three years before he died, he told Daniel Goleman in a 1987 New York Times article, “I think cognitive psychology is a great hoax and a fraud, and that goes for brain science, too. They are nowhere near answering the important questions about behavior.”

13. … OR WORSE. HIS ACADEMIC COLLEAGUES WERE HORRIFIED BY WALDEN TWO.

Astronomer and colleague JK Jessup’s reaction is a good example of their take on his idealized world. Jessup wrote, “Skinner’s utopian vision could change the nature of Western civilization more disastrously than the nuclear physicists and biochemists combined.”

14. HE IMPLIED THAT HUMANS HAD NO FREE WILL OR INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

 
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Skinner wrote several works applying his behavioral theories to society, including Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). He drew fire for implying that humans had no free will or individual consciousness but could simply be controlled by reward and punishment. His critics shouldn’t have been surprised: This was the very essence of his behaviorism. He, however, was unconcerned with criticism. His daughter Julie S. Vargas has written that “Skinner felt that by answering critics (a) you showed that their criticism affected you; and (b) you gave them attention, thus raising their reputation. So he left replies to others.”

15. HE DIED CONVINCED THAT THE FATE OF HUMANITY LAY IN APPLYING HIS METHODS OF BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE TO SOCIETY.

In 1990, he died of leukemia at age 86 after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association. Proud of his work, he was nonetheless concerned about the fate of humanity and worried “about daily life in Western culture, international conflict and peace, and why people were not acting to save the world.”

For decades, students desperate for a summary of Crime and Punishment or a thematic analysis of motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved looked no further than the yellow and black guides available at their local bookstore. Started by a Nebraska bookworm in 1958, CliffsNotes has been the salvation of many a time-crunched, inquisitive—and yes, downright lazy—student. But who was Cliff, anyway? And who wrote the guides? Consider this your study guide.

1. THERE REALLY WAS A CLIFF.

Born in Rising City, Nebraska in 1919, Clifton Hillegass was a voracious reader who reportedly read five books a week up until his death at age 83. A math and physics major in college, he worked as a meteorologist for the Army Air Corps during World War II and eventually took a job distributing textbooks for the Nebraska Book Company. In 1958, he borrowed $4000 from the local bank and began channeling his love of literature into a series of guide books he called Cliff’s Notes. Within 10 years, his little black and yellow books were a million-dollar business. Hillegrass spent 40 years at the helm of his company, retiring after IDG Books Worldwide (publishers of the “For Dummies” series) bought him out for $14.2 million.

2. BEFORE THERE WAS CLIFF’S NOTES, THERE WAS COLE’S NOTES.

In the 1950s, Hillegass got to know a Canadian book store owner and publisher named Jack Cole, who put out a series of study guides called Cole’s Notes. Cole convinced Hillegass to become the U.S. distributor for his guides, starting with a run of 16 Shakespeare titles. Reluctantly, Hillegass agreed, and in 1958 printed 33,000 copies of the guides. With his wife mailing letters to contacts while his daughter stuffed envelopes, Hillegass ran the business out of his Lincoln, Nebraska basement. He sold more than half of the guides, which he renamed, in the first year, and managed to grow his sales each following year. By 1964, Hillegass’s side business had become so lucrative, he quit his job at the Nebraska Book Company and devoted himself full-time to writing and distributing Cliff’s Notes.

3. THE NAME HAS SUBTLY CHANGED OVER THE YEARS.

By the early ’60s, Cliff Hillegass was producing so many of his own study guides, he stopped distributing Cole’s Notes. To signify this break, he dropped the apostrophe, and “Cliff’s Notes” became “Cliffs Notes.” For decades the company operated under this name, until John Wiley & Sons, which became publisher in 2001, streamlined the name to CliffsNotes.

4. CLIFF NEVER INTENDED THEM TO BE “CHEATER BOOKS.”

With their chapter-by-chapter plot summaries, character descriptions, and analysis of structure, themes and other elements, CliffsNotes’ literature guides became, for many students, a substitute for doing the actual reading. This dismayed Hillegass, who always maintained that his booklets should be used as supplemental aides. For decades, the company printed an edict alongside Hillegass’s signature inside its guides: “These notes are not a substitute for the text itself or for the classroom discussion of the text, and students who attempt to use them in this way are denying themselves the very education that they are presumably giving their most vital years to achieve.”

5. THE COMPANY STILL MAINTAINS THEY ARE STUDY GUIDES.

With plot summaries, pre-written reports and other shortcuts scattered across the internet, the threat of CliffsNotes seems almost quaint these days. Still, the company (now owned by publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) upholds Hillegass’s vision of CliffsNotes as a literary supplement rather than a substitute. “Most people use CliffsNotes by reading a chapter of the book or an act of the play, and then reading the corresponding section in the CliffsNotes,” its website asserts, perhaps wishfully.

6. GRAD STUDENTS WROTE A LOT OF THEM.

CliffsNotes has long promoted the fact that teachers and professors write its literary guides. But in interviews, Hillegass revealed that most of the work fell to graduate students. This was primarily a strategic move, since Hillegass didn’t want to overburden his guides with scholarly details and asides. “Someone involved in 20 years of teaching Shakespeare often has too specialized a knowledge,” he said in a 1983 interview.

7. SOME TEACHERS USED THEM.

In a 1985 interview with The Chicago Tribune, the executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English admitted some of his members used CliffsNotes. Many of these teachers utilized the guides when they were students, and found them helpful in planning lessons. Others, meanwhile, read the guides in order to catch would-be plagiarists. Writer Jessica Reaves remembered her mother, an English teacher, kept a collection of CliffsNotes at home. “Every time my mom wrote a test or even a quiz on a book she was teaching, she would first sit down with the corresponding Cliffs Notes (and any spinoff cheater books that were on the scene) and painstakingly write the test around the information in the booklets,” Reaves wrote in Time magazine. “In other words, she made it virtually impossible to cheat.”

8. …BUT MOST TEACHERS HATED THEM.

“The sole purpose of Cliffs Notes is to get a kid through a course and fake it,” one teacher told the Tribune. Said another: “What’s onerous is not that they summarize the plot, but that they offer commentary on what to think about literature that is accessible and vibrant.” In addition to what they considered pre-packaged analysis and summary, teachers have constantly battled with students who plagiarize the guides. Pre-internet, some instructors tried to stay ahead of the problem by assigning books that had no corresponding CliffsNotes. Others took even more drastic measures, like a teacher in Washington, D.C. who told the Tribune he once went into the bookstore next door to his school and moved all the Cliffs Notes copies of Moby-Dick, which he was teaching at the time, to the romance section.

9. THE COMPANY RESPONDED TO CRITICISM BY REVISING ITS GUIDES.

After years of deflecting claims by angry teachers that it was helping students cheat, CliffsNotes in 2000 began updating its literary guides to encourage critical thinking and get students engaging with the source text. The new guides asked questions, referred students to web sources, and offered more background information about each book’s author and the time period in which it was written.

10. SPY MAGAZINE LAUNCHED A PARODY SERIES IN THE LATE ’80s.

In 1989, the satirical magazine Spy put out “Spy Notes,” a CliffsNotes parody that focused on hip urban novels by authors like Brett Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Jill Eisenstadt. Sample essay questions included “Who’s cooler, McInerney or Ellis?” and “Why do so many authors rely on dead-mother plot devices?” “Spy Notes” got rave reviews from lit critics, but CliffsNotes was not amused. Thinking the booklets too closely resembled its study guides in form—including yellow-and-black covers—and in content, Cliffs Notes sued Spy and won, but had the case overturned on appeal. Summing up the legal intricacies of the case, Spy founder Kurt Anderson told the Chicago Tribune, “We’re not trying to start a competing line of study aids for lazy students.”

11. THE PASS/FAIL GRADING REVOLUTION HURT SALES.

Between 1969 and 1975, sales of Cliffs Notes plummeted from 2.8 million per year to less than 1.8 million. The reason? Hillegass and general manager Dick Spellman blamed the rise of experimental grading systems like pass/fail, which swept the nation beginning in the early ’70s. “Students weren’t interested in grades anymore,” said Spellman in 1983.

12. THEY GOT SHUT OUT OF BARNES & NOBLE.

In 2002, the bookselling chain abruptly took CliffsNotes off its shelves. This wasn’t because the study guides weren’t selling well—quite the contrary. Rather, Barnes & Noble wanted to exclusively stock SparkNotes, a competing study guide series it had purchased the previous year. The guides appeared on shelves for a dollar cheaper than CliffsNotes, giving Barnes & Noble a big sales boost. Eventually, the company lifted the ban, and these days you can find a trove of CliffsNotes titles on its website. 

13. COLLEGE BOOKSTORES BANNED THEM.

Twenty years ago, a group of professors at Villanova University signed a petition asking the school to discontinue sales of CliffsNotes in its campus bookstore. The university complied, and in doing so joined a growing number of schools like Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore in shutting out the popular study guides. Administrators acknowledged it was mostly a symbolic gesture, since students could simply buy the booklets from another source. “We don’t put our institution’s endorsement behind it,” the associate dean for academic affairs told the Associated Press at the time. CliffsNotes, meanwhile, wasn’t taking any of this lying down. The company took out a full-page ad in Villanova’s student paper calling the move “censorship.”

14. COMPETITION IS FIERCE THESE DAYS.

CliffsNotes has always had competitors. And for decades, the company was able to win out through the strength of its name and through its ties to bookstores, who would typically only sell a limited number of study guide brands. Nowadays, though, with online sources and digital publishers able to bypass traditional channels, the competition has exploded. Looking for a summary of Crime and Punishment? You have hundreds of options to choose from. Even contemporary titles like The Girl on the Train, an unofficial survey by the Observer found, have as many as 10 summary options available through channels like Amazon Kindle and Google Play.

15. THE COMPANY DOESN’T MAKE MUCH OFF ITS LITERATURE GUIDES ANYMORE.

CliffsNotes, like its competitors, has tried to stay relevant with literature guides (all now available online for free) to contemporary classics like All the Pretty Horses, The Kite Runner, and The Poisonwood Bible. But the growth side of the business these days lies with the company’s study guides, test prep guides, and subscription content. Earlier this year, publisher Houghton Harcourt Mifflin announced a subscription service that would offer personalized feedback for students using its test prep and subject learning guides. CliffsNotes’s famed literature guides, though, weren’t right for the service, a company rep told Education Week. “We’re not going to write your paper for you,” he said.

Holiday feast season is here—but if your food processor is made by Cuisinart, think twice before using it to whip up your tasty treats. This week, the company announced that it’s voluntarily recalling around 8 million units, after 69 people reported finding broken pieces of its riveted blade in processed food.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, “the food processor’s riveted blade can crack over time and small metal pieces of the blade can break off into the processed food. This poses a laceration hazard to consumers.” Already, they’ve received 30 reports of mouth lacerations or tooth injuries.

Wondering if you own one of the problematic models? Flip your food processor over, and look at the model number on the bottom. According to CNET, you’re good if the model number starts with FP or ends in Y, or is a DLC-6 model.

If your food processor contains any of the following numbers, stop using it immediately, and contact Cuisinart for a free replacement blade:

CFP-9
CFP-11
DFP-7
DFP-11
DFP-14
DLC-5
DLC-7
DLC-8
DLC-10
DLC-XP
DLC-2007
DLC-2009
DLC-2011
DLC-2014
DLC-3011
DLC-3014
EV-7
EV-10
EV-11
EV-14
KFP-7
MP-14.

Need additional reassurance? Check the food processor’s blade. If it has four rivets and a beige center, it’s getting recalled—but if it doesn’t have rivets, it’s fine.

To get a replacement blade, contact Cuisinart at 877-339-2534, or visit the company’s website and fill out a replacement form. Nobody wants to book it to the emergency room or dentist’s office when they should be relaxing in front of a fire with family and friends.

[h/t CNET]

All images courtesy of Cuisinart.