Page 49 - Best of the Month

In Minnesota, women can face up to 30 days in jail for impersonating Santa Claus!

There are some crazy laws in our states. Apparently, every man in Brainerd, Minnesota is required to grow a beard. It’s illegal to tease skunks and women can face up to 30 days in jail for impersonating Santa Claus in Minnesota.

A Michigan law says it is illegal to make love in a car unless it is on your own personal property and a woman’s hair belongs to her husband. In Detroit it is illegal to “ogle” a woman from a moving car. In Montana it is a felony for a woman to open her husband’s mail.

In Las Vegas, Nevada it is illegal to feed the homeless. The city doesn’t want tourists to realize how many homeless there really are. They also closed all the parks in Vegas so that the homeless won’t congregate. They must continue to move all day or be arrested. To feed the homeless, you have to make two lunches and eat with them so that you are technically “eating with a friend.”

(Source)

Tripping on LSD has helped at least 2 Nobel Prize winners with their scientific discoveries!

Lysergic acid diethylamide, simply known as LSD because its name is somewhat of a tongue twister, is an extremely controversial yet powerful hallucinogen. The reason for LSD's controversy is because many of the users of the drug insist that the drug has aided them in becoming a better person, and that they've been able to do things that they couldn't do while sober.

Two examples of this are Nobel Prize Winners Kary Mullis, who discovered how to amplify certain DNA sequences so that we can view them. The second example is the case of Francis Crick, the man who discovered the double helix structure that DNA is formed in. That's right - the guy who came up with the double helix shape you studied in grade school, was tripping on acid.

However, the drug is such a strong hallucinogen, and many feel that the drug is unsafe because many people have died after believing their hallucinations to be real. For example, the classic 'I'm flying' hallucination found in cartoons where the user thinks they've gained the ability to fly, and they jump off something very high...only to find that they can't actually fly.

(Source)

A New Mexico tribe speaks a language eerily similar to Japanese!

The Zuni tribe have perplexed anthropologists with their language. They speak a language that is too similar to Japanese to be coincidental. Anthropologists can't figure out why this would be the case.

Some similar words as an example. Clan in Zuni is 'kwe,' in Japanese 'kwai.' The word for priest is 'shawani' in Japanese and 'shiwani' in Zuni. Both Zuni and Japanese use the verb as the last word of a sentence, a feature only 45% of languages share. This might not seem like much, but the Zuni language is very different in this than other languages around them.

This sparked some research and scientist discovered that both Zuni and the Japanese have similar frequency of Type B blood, a rare kind of kidney disease and very specific oral traditions about their origins. The working theory is that Buddhist missionaries somehow made it to California around the 12th century somehow.

(Source)

Mannequins are being equipped with cameras to study shopping habits!

Sounds like something out of Minority Report or 1984, but it's true. An Italian company called Almax SpA is selling a new type of mannequin called the EyeSee. It costs about $5000.

The EyeSee looks ordinary on the outside. However, inside one of it's eyes, there is a camera and software that can detect your age, gender and race. The data is being used to change store displays and sales.

The EyeSee is making retailers change their strategies. For example, using data from the EyeSee, a store realized that men who shopped in the first two days of a sale spent more than women. As a result, they've changed their displays to better suit men in the first days of a sale.

What do you think? Clever marketing idea or creepy invasion of privacy? Let us know in the comments.

(Source)

The Imperial Walkers from Star Wars were inspired by the largest land mammal ever discovered!

Paraceratherium is an extinct giant, hornless rhinoceros-like mammal. It lived in Eurasia and Asia during the Oligocene epoch. Its remains were first discovered in Pakistan in 1910 by an English paleontologist.

It is considered the largest land mammal known with an average mass of 12 tons. The largest individual known was 16 feet tall at the shoulders and 26.2 feet in length and weighted 18 tons. Despite their large size, Paraceratheriums were herbivores that ate leaves.

According to the movie’s special effects creator, Phil Tippett, Paraceratherium was the inspiration for the AT-AT walkers in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

(Source)