Chill Dude Explains titled this video High-Paying Jobs Nobody Applies For, but that's contradicted by the very first job, which has a waiting list of applicants. Still, these are unusual jobs that pay well because they are dangerous, difficult, very unpleasant, and/or require lots of talent and training. When you see the descriptions, you'll remind yourself that money isn't everything. And even the idea of "high-paying" is doing some heavy lifting here, since his threshold is about $50,000. That's only considered high-paying if you're not making that much already. Heck, you can go back to school for a few years or marry your boss's boss and make that much, without having to endanger your life. 

That said, these ten jobs are interesting as well as difficult. The people who do them deserve our respect. If you want to know more about the color-changing cats, check out the article Ray Cats, Artificial Moons and the Atomic Priesthood: How the Government Plans to Protect Our Nuclear Waste. 

Fifty-seven years after the Tate/LaBianca murders, people are still intrigued, or even obsessed, with the Manson Family. Nine people were killed in the summer of 1969 in horrific manner. As the case unfolded, it had all the salacious buzzwords to get it into the headlines: murder, movie star, sex, cult, hippies, celebrities, pregnant, runaways, drugs, revolution, etc. etc. Charles Manson and his followers were in the news for years afterward. 

All this time later, different mythologies have grown up around the murders. Charles Manson has become a legendary killer, even though he personally committed no murders himself. Manson encouraged people to think of him in a grandiose and puzzling way, acting up any chance he got so that people regarded him as either psychotic or a criminal mastermind. He was neither, but he knew how to put on a show. Read up on some misconceptions about the Manson and his followers at Mental Floss. 

Have you ever looked at a large city office building and noticed how wavy the windows are? Did you wonder if they looked that wavy from the inside? No, I can't say that I've wondered about that, mainly because there are no such buildings in my small town, although I have briefly noticed that waviness on city trips. Once inside the building, the view is fine, but I never connected those observations until this video brought all that to mind. Not only does MinutePhysics answer that exact conundrum, but they explain a lot of neat things about how light and glass works. And why you want to draw the curtains before you get undressed at night. 

Someone in the comments noted they were always looking out of windows because they wear glasses. And yes, people's eyes seem distorted when you look in through thicker glasses, but the view is fine from inside. The rest of the comments are jokes about the Windows operating system. 

When we make pop culture references, there are certain phrases that everyone understands, even when they never happened in the first place. A longer quote gets turned into a shorter meme that encompasses an idea. When someone says, "Lucy, you've got some 'splainin' to do," you know they are referring to Ricky Ricardo in I Love Lucy and his not-so-perfect English. But he never said that exact line; it's a cultural shortcut that some regard as a quote. Likewise, airplane food is the "kind of thing" Seinfeld was known for. 

You see what I'm saying with the example from Lassie. The misquote began as a joke, as if any human could interpret Lassie's barks as a complicated explanation. I don't know when it became a quote. Not only was it never said, it was never a plot point. Still, this list trips over the most famous quote of the 20th century.

They may call it a misquote, but those of us who were listening on July 20, 1969, know exactly what we heard. Armstrong meant to say "One small step for a man," but what was broadcast was "One small step for man." He may have misspoke, or the "a" might have been dropped in transmission over 240,000 miles. At any rate, there are 25 of these pop culture quotes that never happened, or are different from the original, or are misattributed, that you can read about at Cracked. 

In a post-apocalyptic world, a scavenger robot learns about human life from the detritus we left behind. What is happiness, and what is required to be happy? A companion, of course, according to ancient women's magazines. He finds such a companion, but this is animated science fiction, so we have to suspend our disbelief about power requirements. Just go with it, because it's funny. He can move, and she can communicate, but are they really compatible? And does that matter when no one else is around? Yeah, it's a strange relationship in a strange world. Two machines trying to recreate a simulation of romance. 

Then, just when you start to care about the robot, you are reminded that he isn't human, and that his search for happiness hinges on what this machine knows about happiness. It's possible to change your definitions to make reaching your goal easier.  -via Geeks Are Sexy 
  

The term "permafrost" is becoming an anachronism as climate change is affecting the way the world works. Last year, the Swiss village of Blatten was evacuated ahead of a glacier collapse that destroyed the town. A different kind of danger is looming over Kandersteg, which lies below a rock formation called Spitze Stei. It is a mountain of rock that is held together by permafrost. But that permafrost is proving to be not so permanent. 

Unlike Blatten, the mountainside near Kandersteg is expected to collapse gradually, and residents have seen rocks roll down the side for years. Scientists are monitoring the thawing formation closely, so the villagers will have some notice if the situation calls for evacuation. The question remains as to what will happen to suddenly homeless people in this and other Alpine communities when the mountains no longer maintain their integrity. Read about Kandersteg's situation at AP News. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Adrian Michael) 

The second film in the new DC Universe features Superman's younger cousin from Krypton. Supergirl was released in June, and soon proved to be a box office bomb. The movie needed to gross around $315 million to break even, but only made $126.3 million during its theatrical run. Supergirl in this movie is Kara Zor-El, a rebellious 23-year-old who drinks too much after the destruction of her home planet and family. She's recruited by a younger girl to help her in a revenge plot. You'll recognize several plot points from other movies, rendered in colorless or too dark cinematography. Critics found the movie so-so, and lamented that the characters' struggles were intriguing, but not developed enough to make the audience care. Jason Momoa was criminally underused. You might wonder how this is a James Gunn movie, considering it was written and directed by others, but there's a sequence showing how Supergirl copies Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. If you're interested in the excruciating details, Screen Junkies has a feature-length video on how bad Supergirl really is. 

We think of cells as very tiny, whether they are part of a larger organism like humans, or a single unit like bacteria. But single cell organisms can grow large enough to be seen, or even as big as an eyeball. Meet Valonia ventricosa, a single cell algae that can grow centimeters wide. They are round and green and found in the ocean, which is why they got the name the sailor's eyeball. They are also called bubble algae or sea grape, all pretty descriptive names so you will know them when you see them. 

One reason Valonia ventricosa grows so large is because it has a very large vacuole. Another is because it contains more than one nucleus. But we don't know what advantage those traits give the algae over growing as a colony of cells. They reproduce by budding, much like mitosis, but also sexually by releasing gametes into the sea, slightly like meiosis. Read about the very weird cell Valonia ventricosa at Kuriositas. 

(Image credit: Hsing Wei) 

Your mother told you not to use baby talk, but that's when you were old enough to use regular speech. She changed her mind when you had children of your own. We just can't help ourselves when we talk to a baby. But what is baby talk? One kind is just gibberish, when the speaker is imitating baby sounds that aren't real words, which is useless. The other is "parentese," or "infant directed speech" (IDS). The word pronunciation is correct, the grammar is correct, but the tone and accent are especially designed to grab an infant's interest. And it comes fairly naturally to anyone interacting with a baby. Once denlounced by experts, the tide has turned to encourage such speech. 

Dr. Erica Brozovsky breaks down what infant directed speech is and how it helps babies learn to speak a real language. This video is more than a minute shorter than it looks, as it ends with a sponsor.

If you're from a very small town, you've probably made jokes about having only one traffic light, and no one pays attention to it. Himakajima is a small island of the coast of Aichi Prefecture in Japan. Himakajima is also the name of the town on the island, which has about 1600 people. You can walk all the way around the island in about 90 minutes, and you don't really need a car, although the island has cars. They don't really need a traffic light, either, but there is one. Most of the year, the lights flash red one way, and yellow the other way. 

But once a year, the green light is used. Or the blue light, as it is called in Japan. You can imagine the bulb on that light hasn't been changed since the traffic signal was installed. What kind of occasion would require a green light? And does it draw a crowd? Find the answer, which makes perfect sense, at Jalopnik.  -via Fark 

Vijay Malhotra is an Indian bicycle vlogger who traverses the world on two wheels and his own muscle power. In Tilburg, the Netherlands, he encountered a ferry with bicycle and foot traffic in mind.

The Netherlands is, of course, famous for being bicycle-friendly. It's also a nation in constant war with the sea and laced with canals built over centuries. To cross this canal, people can bike onto the ferry, then turn the crank that pulls the platform along a chain.

There are cranks on both sides of the canal so that you can move the ferry to your side as needed.

-via Core77

We're getting into that time of year when you look for ways to make an impression for Halloween. YouTuber and crafter North of the Border (whose fans call him Adam) made a bowl of spaghetti that wants to eat you instead of being eaten. You could call it creepypasta. It's very detailed, all made of clay and some metal wire. I would have just used a real bowl, fork, knife, and spaghetti and thrown in the homemade eyes and teeth, but he went all out. After all, those eyes and teeth could be used in other dishes. The twelve minutes of the building process are cut into chapters in the progress bar in case you want to skip something, but the commentary can be funny at times. See the finished product from all angles at 10:38. 

I cannot quite peg where North of the Border learned English, from the way he pronounces pasta and oregano, but the channel reveals he's in the UK even though the accent is not quite British. The channel also reveals he's made quite a few other weird things you might want to try. -via Laughing Squid 

Zachie Fluff is a cartoonist who, in addition to telling tales about his original characters, lampoons the comic book industry and parodies popular works. He's especially fond of King of the Hill, which inspires him to depict alternate versions of this tale from the Texas Hill Country.

The comics show a great fidelity to their source material and a deep knowledge of Trek and Hill lore. The men from Arlen adapt very well to space. Fluff hasn't collected them in one location (that I can detect), but you can read them by browsing his X or Instagram feeds.

An experiment from the University of Melbourne in Australia tried a different technique to determine the best method of harvesting timber to encourage forest regrowth. The usual method of "clearfelling" means taking all the trees in a certain area, burning the remains, and then seeding the area for new trees. The alternative is "retention harvesting," which means leaving 30 to 50% of the trees standing. A followup three years later determined that clearfelling was more efficient for forest regrowth. 

The experiment began in 1987. Forest monitoring stopped around the turn of the century. But those same forests were revisited in 2014 and have been monitored ever since. A 2026 report has determined all these years later that retention harvesting is more effective for growth and better for the environment when measuring a range of parameters. It appears that Mother Nature doesn't work on our timeline. Read about this research and what it tells us at Nautilus. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Centre for Forest Tree Technology) 

Comedian Tim Hawkins wrote a little song about Buc-ee's, the unique travel stop that I once called the most inconvenient convenience store ever. Buc-ee's is know for clean restrooms, expensive food, and a hundred gas pumps all lined up outside. The stores are about the size of an airport, and sell everything from barbecue sandwiches to "Bible verses on shot glasses." No one seems to mind walking a half-mile from your parking space to the store, just to walk another half-mile to the other side of the store. Buc-ee's is like an amusement park of late stage capitalism. 

The subject of the song is excited to see a billboard for Buc-ee's and sings the praises of its over-the-top offerings. As a takedown of redneck taste and consumerism, it's pretty funny, but you can also hear the advertisement value, because Buc-ee's has exactly the experience that some American travelers want to see and spend money on, for some reason.