Most Americans don’t need to fly across an ocean to immerse themselves in the French language. There are millions of French speakers just to our north in Canada.

1. CANADA IS OFFICIALLY BILINGUAL (AND THE ONLY NAFTA COUNTRY WITH ANY OFFICIAL LANGUAGE AT ALL).

Not every country in North America has an official language, but Canada has two. The U.S. and Mexico don’t have official languages, meaning that while everyone realizes that English and Spanish, respectively, are the de facto languages of the countries, there are no government edicts declaring any particular language official. Canada has declared both English and French official, which does not mean that all citizens must speak English and French, but official government documents and services must be available in both English and French.

2. CANADIAN OFFICIAL BILINGUALISM IS WHY COMPUTER TRANSLATION OF FRENCH IS SO GOOD.

Automatic translation tools like Google Translate perform much better on some pairs of languages than others. For example, translations between Chinese and Spanish are less smooth and accurate than those between French and English. Part of the reason for this is that the algorithms that support automatic translation are created by training on large collections of already translated texts. One of the biggest such collections is the Hansard French/English Corpus. It contains over 1 million matched French/English pairs of text passages from Canadian parliament records.

3. THE WORST POSSIBLE SWEARS IN CANADIAN FRENCH ARE INNOCENT-SEEMING RELIGIOUS WORDS.

The most offensive swear words in languages are usually drawn from the domains of sex and bodily excretions. Swears from the domain of religion, like hell and damn, once had stronger force, but are now considered pretty mild. Not so in Canadian French, where the most offensively profane words are tabarnack (tabernacle), calvaire (Calvary), and calisse (chalice). Use with caution.

4. THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT MAIN DIALECTS OF CANADIAN FRENCH.

When you think of French in Canada you probably think of Quebec, and most of the French speakers in Canada do live there and speak what is known as Quebecois. But there is another dialect, Acadian French, which is largely spoken in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The two varieties differ in accent and certain words and phrases. Acadian French uses more terms derived from seafaring, and a number of old words now obsolete in France. The two varieties developed differently as the languages of separate 17th century French colonies (Canada and Acadia) with separate administrations.

5. CANADIAN FRENCH IS LESS ACCEPTING OF ENGLISH BORROWING THAN FRANCE FRENCH.

Both France and Quebec have institutions dedicated to encouraging the use of French words instead of borrowed English expressions. For example, instead of du snowboard, the Académie Française recommends de la planche de neige. Instead of le binge drinking, the Office Quebecois de la Langue Française recommends l’hyperalcoolisation rapide. According to a study by Olivia Walsh, the French versions are much more likely to be actually adopted by French speakers in Quebec than they are in France. Language purism is stronger in Quebec than it is in France—so much so that, while in France stop signs say STOP, in much of Quebec they say ARRÊT.

6. THERE ARE STRONG PROTECTIONS FOR FRENCH IN QUEBEC THAT SOMETIMES GO OVERBOARD.

While all federal proceedings are mandated to be bilingual in Canada, provinces can set their own language rules. The official language of Quebec is French, and the Office Quebecois de la Langue Française can enforce the use of French in public institutions and businesses. In 2013, the OQLF warned an Italian restaurant in Montréal that their menu contained too many non-French words, such as … pasta. The restaurant owner posted the warning letter on social media, initiating a backlash of eye rolling, joking, and genuine frustration at overzealous language policing. The president of the OQLF was forced to resign, and pasta stayed on the menu.

7. FRENCH SPEAKERS IN NEW BRUNSWICK ARE CREATING A NEW FRENCH/ENGLISH HYBRID.

While there is a lot of English resistance in Quebec, some of the Acadian French speakers of New Brunswick mix English words into French syntax in a dialect known as Chiac. The dialect is looked down upon as bad French, but younger generations have begun to take pride in it, claiming it as a mark of a unique Acadian identity. See some of the musicians and artists working with dialect in their expression of this identity in this piece from Public Radio International.

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Night rides can be dangerous for cyclists, even if their bikes have lights and reflectors. To stay safe on dark roads, Mashable reports that two engineers have designed a smart helmet called Lumos, complete with a red brake light and yellow turn signals.

Lumos comes with a small, wireless remote, which riders clip onto their bike’s handlebar and use to control the lights. It also has an accelerometer, which switches on the brake lights when cyclists make a rapid stop. The helmet and remote are both battery-powered, so an accompanying iOS app keeps tabs on how much juice they have, and notifies you when to charge them. (An Android version of the app is reportedly on the horizon.)

The helmet’s designers, Jeff Chen and Ding Eu-wen, raised funds to make the helmet with a Kickstarter campaign. The project is now fully funded, but Lumos isn’t ready for the open road quite yet; beta testers are still providing feedback on its fit and design, and Chen and Eu-wen are tinkering with the accelerometer. They’re also contemplating adding a ride tracker to collect activity data.

You can keep tabs on the helmet’s status by visiting their website, where a limited first-edition version is currently available for pre-order, starting at $170. In the meantime, learn how it works by watching the video below.

[h/t Mashable]

Pedestrian culture varies quite a bit between cities across the world, especially when it comes to crosswalks, according to a new study in Royal Society Open Science (highlighted recently by Science magazine).

Japanese and French researchers teamed up to observe stoplights at four different intersections in Nagoya, Japan and three different sites in Strasbourg, France, hypothesizing that France’s individualistic society might encourage people to take more risks than Japan’s collectivist one.

They found that out of 1631 Japanese road crossings observed, only 2 percent of pedestrians crossed against the red light. By contrast, French pedestrians crossed against the light almost 42 percent of the 3814 crossings observed. Furthermore, even law-abiding French pedestrians stepped off the curb sooner than Japanese pedestrians when the light finally turned green.

In both countries, the number of jaywalkers increased when no one was around to notice. When no other people were nearby, French pedestrians crossed illegally 67 percent of the time. Japanese pedestrians jaywalked almost 7 percent of the time when no one was around to see it happen. The researchers hypothesize that people are more afraid of judgment from their peers than of getting a ticket from the police. The researchers write that “they are more afraid of being criticized than they are of being fined.”

But city culture isn’t the only thing that influences whether or not people decide to scamper across the street outside the safe confines of a walk signal. People are more likely to jaywalk when the streets have fewer lanes or when there’s a median, as well as when the wait time between lights is long, among other things.

This study only examined crosswalk culture in two countries, so it can’t really be extrapolated to the whole world, but perhaps other researchers are at work on international jaywalking behavior. It would be interesting to compare the difference between crosswalk behavior in a place like the U.S., where jaywalking is largely against the law, compared to the UK, where jaywalking fines do not exist.

[h/t Science]

Make the act of grabbing a cup of tea more like picking a book from the shelf. NovelTea, known for their literary-themed tea bags, is now offering brand new packaging that resembles old-fashioned tomes with flowery embellishments and detailed spines.

Each tin includes a packaged bag of loose tea (we have some suggestions for tea infusers) and a corresponding classic book—with an interesting spin. The lineup of punny titles include Matcha Do About Nothing, Pride and Peppermint, Oliver Lemon Twist, The Picture of Earl Grey, and War and Peach. Customers can also send in their own suggestions for clever title/tea flavor combinations on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.

[h/t EBook Friendly]

Tucked away in an unassuming field in the town of Croaker, Virginia, sits perhaps the greatest presidential monument you’ve never heard of. That’s because this private farm is home to 43 presidential busts that were originally crafted to be the centerpiece of Presidents Park, an open-air museum in Williamsburg, Virginia that would rival anything found in Washington D.C. Today, though, they sit as crumbling colossi waiting for a new home.

The park was originally conceived by Houston artist David Adickes, who was struck by the idea after visiting Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. He teamed with investor Everette “Haley” Newman to turn this idea into a lasting monument for these larger-than-life politicians. When it opened in 2004, Presidents Park featured a sculpture garden with every Commander in Chief from George Washington to George W. Bush, all meticulously crafted by Adickes and his team of sculptors. The busts ranged from 18 to 20 feet tall and weighed in at around 22,000 pounds.

Unfortunately, the $10 million experiment that was Virginia’s Presidents Park wasn’t long for this world; it was shut down in 2010 due to lack of visitors. Though it was located in Williamsburg, Virginia, it wasn’t near the tourist-friendly colonial section. Instead it was located adjacent to a highway, obscured by woods and a motel, which left these 20-foot presidential heads as nothing more than an obscure curiosity. Money got so tight toward the end that they couldn’t afford the $60,000 to add a bust of Barack Obama to the roster.

After the park was shut down and the land auctioned off, Howard Hankins, who helped build the park, had the heads moved to his family’s farm in Croaker—even though Newman originally just wanted to destroy them. It took nearly a week to move all 43 busts to their new location, and due to their immense size and weight, the move didn’t exactly go smoothly. Cracked heads and damaged noses were just some of the maladies suffered during the $50,000 relocation. The most notable damage was inflicted upon Abraham Lincoln, who now sports a not-too-subtle gaping hole in the back of his head. That’s in addition to the dilapidated state the busts were in before the move, including a lightning strike that claimed half of Ronald Reagan’s face and severe weathering from years of neglect.

Though they’ve been at their new home since 2012, there are still no specific plans for the heads. Weather and nature have now taken a considerable toll on the busts—some frogs apparently call James Buchanan “home” now—and a GoFundMe campaign by the Hankins family to repair the statues and move them to a new museum has earned a paltry $841 of its $500,000 goal in 12 months.

Still, Hankins is keeping his dream of a new museum alive, telling PBS, “It’s amazing, the history of it all, I want to preserve all I can and share it.” Until Hankins can find a permanent home for these statues, tourists looking for an obscure site to see should know that there are 240 years of American history peeling and cracking in a field in Croaker, Virginia.

Forget the Pooper Scooper. With Piqapoo, your dog can pick up after itself.