Why do people have such a hard time staying awake after Thanksgiving dinner? Most people blame tryptophan, but that’s not really the main culprit. And what is tryptophan, anyway?
Tryptophan is an amino acid that the body uses in the processes of making vitamin B3 and serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate sleep. It can’t be produced by our bodies, so we need to get it through our diet. From which foods, exactly? Turkey, of course, but also other meats, chocolate, bananas, mangoes, dairy products, eggs, chickpeas, peanuts, and a slew of other foods. Some of these foods, like cheddar cheese, have more tryptophan per gram than turkey. Tryptophan doesn’t have much of an impact unless it’s taken on an empty stomach and in an amount larger than what we’re getting from our drumstick. So why does turkey get the rap as a one-way ticket to a nap?
A new artificial intelligence system can now lip read better than humans, according toNew Scientist. Though films and pop culture usually show lip reading as some incredible tool that allows you to decode what anyone says, in practice, it’s fairly spotty: Even for experienced lip readers, one estimate puts the amount of speech you can interpret from someone’s lip movements at a mere 30 percent.
But artificial intelligence researchers from Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford’s engineering department have been working on a network that transcribes natural sentences just from visuals of people talking with no audio. It can also transcribe audio with no video. Their pre-publication paper is posted on arXIV [PDF].
The system recognizes syllables and short phrases, and has learned on a far-reaching database called “Lip Reading Sentences,” drawn from a half-dozen BBC programs and containing more than 100,000 sentences and 17,500 words. It works independently with both audio and video, helping it decode speech even if the audio stream is noisy or if the audio and video aren’t perfectly aligned.
This model was significantly more accurate than professional lip readers in a comparative test. The experimenters commissioned professional lip readers from a company that provides transcription services, each with around 10 years of experience lip reading in situations as diverse as videos for court use and national events like the British royal wedding. These lip readers could correctly decipher just 12 percent of the words they saw, while the computer model could decipher almost half of the words accurately. Aside from providing more accurate transcription services, “it is possible that research of this type could discern important discriminative cues that are beneficial for teaching lip reading to the hearing impaired,” the researchers write.
Try out your lip-reading skills with the video below:
This Thursday, Macy’s will send its 90th Thanksgiving Day Parade down the streets of Manhattan—a spectacle more than 50 million people tune in to watch from the comfort of their homes. Here are a few things you might not have known about the iconic holiday event.
1. IT WAS INITIALLY CHRISTMAS-THEMED.
Courtesy of Macy’s
The “Macy’s Christmas Parade” debuted in 1924 as a way to celebrate the expansion of Macy’s flagship Manhattan store, which would now cover an entire city block and became the self-proclaimed “World’s Largest Store.” According to The New York Times, “the majority of participants were employees of the stores. There were, however, many professional entertainers who kept the spectators amused as they passed by. Beautiful floats showed the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe, Little Miss Muffet, and Red Riding Hood. There were also bears, elephants, donkeys and bands, making the procession resemble a circus parade.” (The animals came from the Central Park Zoo.)
Courtesy of Macy’s
The parade began at 145th Street and Convent Avenue and continued down to Macy’s huge store on 34th Street. All along the route, according to the Times, the parade “was welcomed by such crowds that a large force of policemen had its hands full maintaining the police lines.” Some 10,000 people watched Santa—who rode on a float designed to look like a sled being pulled by reindeer—be crowned “King of the Kiddies,” then enjoyed the unveiling of the store’s Christmas windows. The parade was such a success that Macy’s decided to make it an annual event; it would become the Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1927.
2. THERE WERE OBJECTIONS EARLY ON.
Two years after the first parade, the Allied Patriotic Societies protested, telling Macy’s that it shouldn’t hold the event on Thanksgiving because “it would interfere with Thanksgiving Day worship,” according to The New York Times, and because it wasn’t appropriate for a commercial company to hold a parade on the holiday. If the company didn’t acknowledge its protest, the association declared that it would go to the police commissioner and ask him to revoke the parade permit.
Percy Straus, who worked for Macy’s, attended the association’s meeting. He pointed out that there was no blatant advertising in the parade, and that the word Macy was used just once. “He also said that Thanksgiving morning was the only time when children would be free to watch and traffic would be light enough to permit the parade’s passing,” the Times wrote. “It would be over, he thought, in ample time to permit churchgoing.” Straus’s justifications didn’t make a difference; the association voted to protest the parade, but its efforts to get the event canceled were unsuccessful—the parade went on as usual.
3. THE CHARACTER BALLOONS WERE INSPIRED BY A FLOAT.
Courtesy of Macy’s
The Balloonatics float—which, as the name would suggest, was festooned with balloons—inspired the creation of the character balloons. These days, the people who design the balloons are called “Balloonatics.”
4. THE CHARACTER BALLOONS DEBUTED IN 1927.
Courtesy of Macy’s
Three years after the first annual parade, balloons made their debut. According to The New York Times, the parade included “a ‘human behemoth’ 21 feet tall … [that] had to crawl under the elevated structure at 66th and Broadway,” “a ‘dinosaur’ 60 feet long attended by a bodyguard of prehistoric cavemen,” and “a 25-foot dachshund [that] swayed along in the company of gigantic turkeys and chickens and ducks of heroic size.” Also in the parade that year, but not mentioned in the Times, was the first character balloon, Felix the Cat.
5. FOR A FEW YEARS, THERE WERE “BALLOON RACES.”
The first year, Macy’s had no plans for deflating its balloons, so they were released into the air, where they quickly popped. But that all changed in the 1928 parade.
That year, Macy’s released five huge figures—an elephant, a 60-foot tiger, a plumed bird, an “early bird” trailing worms, and a 25-foot-high ghost—into the sky. While the majority of the balloons in the parade used regular air to stay afloat, these figures were built around helium balloon bodies, which were designed to slowly leak the gas. As The New York Times explained, “The figures are expected to rise to 2000 to 3000 feet and are timed by a slow leak to stay aloft for a week to 10 days. By then it is expected they will have alighted in various parts of the country.” Whoever returned the balloons would receive a $100 reward.
The first balloon to land was the Tiger, which the Times reported landed on the roof of a Long Island home: “A tug of war ensued for its possession … neighbors and motorists rushed up from all directions. The rubberized silk skin burst into dozens of fragments.”
By December 1, four of the balloons had landed (one in the East River, where it broke in two and was pursued by tugboats). The ghost, however, was “reported as having been sighted moving out to sea over the Rockaways with a flock of gulls in pursuit,” according to the Times. The parade held its last balloon race in 1932 after two incidents involving airplanes. In 1931, aviator Colonel Clarence Duncan Chamberlin snagged a balloon in mid-air and towed it back to his home and received $25 as a reward. In 1932, according to some sources, a 22-year-old woman taking flying lessons purposefully flew the plane she was piloting into one of the released balloons. It was only the quick action of her instructor that kept the plane from crashing.
6. MICKEY MOUSE MADE HIS DEBUT IN 1934.
Macy’s designers collaborated with Walt Disney to create the 40-foot-high, 23-foot-wide balloon, which was “held down to Earth by twenty-five husky attendants,” according to The New York Times. The parade that year also featured the first balloon based on a real person—comedian and vaudeville star Eddie Cantor.
7. THE PARADE WAS HALTED DURING WORLD WAR II.
There were rubber and helium shortages, so Macy’s canceled the parade from 1942 to 1944. The company deflated its rubber balloons—which weighed 650 pounds total—and donated them to the government. (These days, the balloons are made of not rubber, but polyurethane fabric.) The parade returned in 1945, and in 1946 got a new route, which started at 77th Street and Central Park West and ended at 34th Street—half the length of the previous route.
8. A HELIUM SHORTAGE IN 1958 ALMOST GROUNDED THE PARADE’S BALLOONS.
Initially, it looked like a helium shortage would keep Macy’s parade balloons from flying in 1958. But the company collaborated with Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and the rigging specialists Traynor & Hansen Corporation to come up with a creative solution: According to The New York Times, the balloons were filled with air and dangled from “large, mobile construction derricks.” The paper also described a test of the method:
“A motorized derrick with a 70-foot boom had a specially built wood-and-steel hanger attached to the end of the wire hoisting cable. The Toy Soldier, weighing more than 200 pounds deflated, was stretched full-length on a canvas carpet. Limp and sickly looking, it was not the robust figure children and adults are used to seeing. Lines from the body of the balloon were attached to the hanger while two vacuum cleaners, working in reverse, blew in air. An hour of blowing filled the figure out nicely and the boom hoisted it into the air.”
The balloons have only been grounded once since 1927, when winds during the 1971 parade were too strong for them to fly.
9. THE FLOATS FOLD DOWN SMALL.
Getty Images
Since 1968, the floats have been designed by artists at Macy’s Parade Studio in New Jersey. The floats can be up to 40 feet tall and 28 feet wide—but they fold down into a 12-foot-by-8-foot box to make the journey through the Lincoln Tunnel.
By the way: The parade features float-based balloons called falloons—a combination of “float” and “balloon”—which were introduced sometime around 1990. There are also balloon vehicles called balloonicles (a portmanteau of “balloon” and “vehicle”), which made their debut in 2004. Trycaloons—balloons on tricycles—hit the parade in 2011.
10. ALL OF THE BALLOONS ARE DESIGNED IN-HOUSE BY MACY’S ARTISTS—AND THEY’RE NOT CHEAP.
Macy’s balloon designers—dubbed “balloonatics”—begin up to a year before the parade with pencil sketches of each character, analyzing not just aesthetics but also aerodynamics and engineering. The sketches are followed by scaled-down clay models that are used to create casts of the balloons. Two miniature replicas are created: One that’s marked with technical details, and one that’s painted in the balloon’s colors. The models are immersed in water to figure out how much helium they’ll need to float. Finally, the schematics are scanned by computer, and the fabric pieces are cut and heat-sealed to create the various air chambers of the balloon. Once the balloon is created, it’s painted while inflated (otherwise, the paint will crack), then undergoes leak testing and indoor and outdoor flight tests. No wonder it costs at least $190,000 for a first-time balloon (after a first appearance, it costs $90,000 a year after that). The balloons are completed by Halloween and stored along a wall the design studio’s balloon warehouse.
11. THE BALLOONS ARE DIRECTED BY “BALLOON PILOTS.”
They’re the people walking backwards in front of the balloon, directing a crew of volunteers holding guide ropes (called “bones”) and two Toro utility vehicles. Macy’s offers training three times a year for pilots. “We offer the pilots and captains the chance to go around the field a couple times with the balloon a couple of times and practice the instruction and guidance,” Kelly Kramer, a longtime Macy’s employee and balloon pilot, told Vanity Fair in 2014. “We also have classroom training.” It’s also important for balloon pilots to train physically; if not, “The next morning you wake up and you almost cannot get out of bed because your calves seize up,” Kramer said. “I walked backwards in my neighborhood at night.”
12. PEOPLE WHO WANT TO VOLUNTEER TO WALK WITH THE BALLOONS HAVE TO MEET CERTAIN REQUIREMENTS.
Getty Images
It takes 90 minutes to inflate the big balloons, which, on average, contain 12,000 cubic feet of helium, which is capable of lifting nearly 750 pounds (or filling 2500 bathtubs). Each balloon requires up to 90 handlers, who have to weigh at least 120 pounds and be in good health.
The balloons are inflated the day before the parade outside the American Museum of Natural History, then topped off the day of. Because helium expands in the sun, the balloons are typically left slightly underinflated.
13. ONE CHARACTER HAS APPEARED MORE THAN ANY OTHER.
Courtesy of Macy’s
That honor goes to Snoopy, who debuted in the 1968 parade and has had a grand total of seven balloons. This year marks the character’s 40th time in the parade.
14. SOME WEIRD BALLOONS HAVE BEEN FEATURED IN THE PARADE.
15. WIND AND GIANT BALLOONS ARE NOT A GOOD COMBINATION.
There are many things that pose threats to the parade balloons: Electric wires (which caused the Felix the Cat balloon to burst into flame when it hit them in 1931), rain (which filled the Popeye balloon’s hat with water, which got dumped on spectators along the parade route in 1957), tree branches (which once tore off Superman’s hand). But a balloon’s greatest enemy is wind: In 1993, wind caused the Sonic the Hedgehog balloon to hit a lamppost; the light fell and injured one. In 1997, police stabbed a Pink Panther balloon when wind sent it careening; that same year, the wind made an oversized Cat in the Hat balloon hit a streetlight, sending two people to the hospital with head injuries (after the incident, the parade instituted new size rules). In 2005, an M&M balloon got tangled on a streetlamp, causing the lamp to fall and injuring two, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Each balloon flies at a height determined by its size and weather conditions, and the wind poses such a threat that if sustained wind speeds or gusts are too strong, the balloons won’t fly.
16. DEFLATING THE BALLOONS TAKES JUST 15 MINUTES.
After the parade is over, the balloons are deflated behind Macy’s on Seventh Avenue. First, the volunteers open up zippers on the side of the balloons; when most of the helium has escaped, they lie on the balloon to get all the helium out, then roll the character up from front to back. The balloon is then put in storage until the next parade.
Last month, paleontologists announced a new species of ancient pinniped—a group that includes modern seals, sea lions, and walruses. The animal lived off the coast of what is now Washington state about 10 million years ago and probably fished like seals do, relying on the power of its oversized eyes to track its prey. Robert Boessenecker, an adjunct lecturer who works for College of Charleston’s department of geology and environmental sciences, recently presented a study on the newfound fossil at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Salt Lake City.
Discovered in Washington’s Grays Harbor County in the 1980s, the incomplete skeleton consists of neck vertebrae, a well-preserved ribcage, a partial sternum, and a skull with jawbones. It was encased in exceptionally hard rock that took scientists prepping the fossil two decades to clear away. Judging by the available remains, the animal was more than 8 feet long—about the size of an adult male California sea lion.
Boessenecker and his team were able to classify the creature as a new species of Allodesmus, a pinniped genus whose members once roamed coastal Japan and North America’s western seaboard. Although a species name has been chosen for the animal, it has yet to be made public. “We plan on naming [it] after a beloved colleague who has contributed extensively to pinniped paleontology,” Boessenecker tells mental_floss. “But we’re going to keep that under wraps for now.”
The newly discovered animal hailed from a marine mammal family known as the desmatophocids, which evolved around 23 million years ago. From the neck down, they looked very much like today’s seals and walruses, both of which sport a combination of enlarged front flippers and well-developed hind limbs. But the skulls contained a mix of features seen in a variety of pinnipeds today—and some evidence suggests that they had trunk-like noses similar to modern elephant seals.
Notably, the new Allodesmus also features proportionally huge eye sockets, each of which could house a poolroom eight ball. Their dimensions suggest it had exceptionally keen eyesight, allowing the animal to function as a deep-diving predator. Because the ocean gets darker the farther you get from the surface, the size of its eyes would have allowed it to absorb large quantities of light far beneath the waves. While navigating through the inky depths, it would’ve most likely hunted down such game as fish and squid.
Boessenecker’s team closely studied the skeleton to see what they could learn about its life. With the exception of some seals, most pinnipeds are strongly sexually dimorphic: Their relative body size, in other words, makes it easy to distinguish their gender. Fossil evidence reveals that the same was true of this Allodesmus species; the skeleton’s size and the thickness of its canines suggest it was male.
It’s also obvious that the Grays Harbor specimen was nibbled on after it died. “Fossil dogfish teeth were found around the skeleton of our Allodesmus, and numerous bite marks are present [as well],” Boessenecker says. Then, as now, a marine mammal’s corpse must’ve looked like an irresistible banquet to the ocean’s many opportunists.
At about 10 million years old, the animal is the youngest-known desmatophocid specimen on record. Its relative youth may reveal quite a bit about the evolution and ultimate disappearance of this pinniped group. “Truth is, we have no idea why desmatophocids died out,” Boessenecker says. “Perhaps our new species was in a very specialized niche, surviving as long as possible [until it was] eventually snuffed out, a possibility that remains for our most charismatic extant pinniped.”
To Boessenecker, the “most charismatic extant pinniped” is the walrus. In fact, the rise of walruses might have been a factor in the disappearance of pinnipeds like the Grays Harbor animal, because they may have gradually outcompeted Allodesmus and its kin between 13 and 8 million years ago. Back then, the walrus family was a large and diverse group whose members included such oddballs as the four-tusked, mollusk-eating Gomphotaria pugnax. But today, there’s only one remaining species of walrus—and it’s currently at risk of becoming endangered. Boessenecker and his team hope that by learning more about the Grays Harbor Allodesmus, we’ll be able to better understand and protect pinnipeds today.
Thanks to some persistent superstition, black cats are believed to be notoriously difficult for adoption agencies and humane shelters to place in homes. That’s why Seattle Humane in Bellevue, Washington is offering free adoptions for inky-black cats this coming Black Friday.
According to data collected by The Huffington Post in 2013, more than a quarter of respondents felt color was “important or very important” when selecting a new cat, while 13 percent of Americans find it unsettling when a black cat crosses their path. Sounds like a bad combination. But in a separate analysis done by the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), researchers found that black cats made up more than 30 percent of overall adoptions—the Society argued that perpetuating the myth only helps reinforce it.
That hasn’t seemed to slow the promotions down, however. Recently, a Nevada shelter advertised them as “mini-panthers” and successfully rehomed 18 of them.
The Seattle shelter plans on being a free black-kitty dispensary from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, November 25. Adoption fees usually range from $25 to $125.
If your smartphone’s battery life has seemed particularly pathetic lately, it may be time to do a little purging. Android users are reporting a 20 percent boost in battery endurance after deleting the Facebook app.
The app’s appetite for power is well established. Complaints about its drain on the iPhone have been amassing for years, thanks in part to Facebook’s constant location tracking and background refresh features.
Facebook has also had its share of issues with the Android version of its app. Last year, Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox encouraged his staff to switch to Android phones so they could see the problems and frustrations firsthand. The tactic apparently was not enough to get things sorted, and Android users are facing the same issues as their Mac-loving counterparts. Tech bloggers and reporters who removed the app from their Androids consistently saw their sluggish batteries perking up and lasting significantly longer.
“We have heard reports of a few people encountering speed issues coming from our Android application,” a Facebook representative told Tech World Zone. “We are investigating this and will update you as often as possible. We are focused on keeping on enhancing these issues.”
So yeah, the app is an energy vampire. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up your endless Facebook scrolling altogether. It’s still accessible through browsers like Chrome and Safari and through wrappers like Metal.
If you’ve deleted the app and still aren’t satisfied with your battery life, there are plenty of other things you can do. First, stop charging it every night; charge it only when the power is low. Next, switch on Airplane Mode when you’re in an area with no Wi-Fi. This will save your poor phone the fruitless struggle of trying to pick up a signal. You can also reduce the brightness on your screen, be liberal with your use of Low Power mode, and stop force-closing apps when you’re done with them.
As a recurring feature, our team combs the Web and shares some amazing Amazon deals we’ve turned up. Here’s what caught our eye today, November 21.
Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers, including Amazon, and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we only get commission on items you buy and don’t return, so we’re only happy if you’re happy. Good luck deal hunting!
Forget turkey gravy—McDonald’s wants customers to ring in the holiday season with the taste of barbecue sauce on their lips. As Fortune reports, the McRib recently returned to select restaurants, and will be available for purchase until December 31. To help fast food fans track down the limited-edition item, McDonald’s created an iMessage app, the McRib Finder, that locates the nearest franchise selling the popular pork-based sandwich.
Open the McRib Finder in iMessage, and a map will pop up showing your location, along with nearby McDonald’s outlets selling the sandwich. Click on the location markers to get the address—and if you’re meeting a friend for a bite to eat, you can even send it to them, along with a McRib-themed sticker. (Sorry, Android users—you’ll have to rely on the McRib Locator website.)
Few McDonald’s menu items are as elusive as the McRib. The franchise introduced the barbecue-flavored sandwich in 1981, but due to poor sales, it was removed from the national menu a few years later. Eventually, the McRib returned—but it wasn’t until 2005, when McDonalds began offering the savory sandwich for limited time spans only, that it truly reached cult status with customers. Today, the McRib returns at random, typically popping up at sporadic locations across America during the fall.
During prohibition in the US an exemption was made for whiskey prescribed by a doctor and sold through a pharmacy. The Walgreens pharmacy chain grew from 20 retail stores to almost 500 during this period, from 1920 to 1933. 10
