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Natural disasters bring out the best in people. In the wake of a major Hurricane like Florence, people even from outside the effected area will drop everything to go help. Unfortunately, natural disasters also bring out the worst in some people. There have been over five hundred cases of price gouging reported in North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Florence. There is a law in effect that prevents price spikes during natural disasters, so if you’re in North Carolina and see any price gouging, call 1-877-5-NO-SCAM or file a complaint at www.ncdoj.gov.

There has been grumbling about the quality of Netflix’s streaming library for awhile. It may seem like the entitled whining of spoiled millennials, but there is evidence to the contrary. Out of the 250 top movies on IMDB, Netflix has only 35––just above ten percent. A few years ago, Netflix had 20% of those titles. It seems that now Netflix is moving towards original content. If you’re curious, here’s the movies Netflix has from the IMDB list of movies.

The Ouija Board is now firmly in the realm of teenage sleepovers and crappy scary movies––contrary to the claim of this Vox video, which says it’s a “big part of our lives.” Despite the overstatement, this Vox video is an interesting foray into the history of a weird object. Essentially, the board is linked to the antebellum phenomenon called Spiritualism. Spiritualists believed that the spirits of the dead could communicate with the living. The board was one way that they could do so.

On TV or in movies, police interrogations are big, dramatic affairs. There is lots of shouting and table slamming. But the reality is much different. Interrogations are rather banal affairs. They take place in boring, small rooms. The detectives questioning you would be mellow at first, probably even nice. They’ll give you coffee and make small talk. And then things will slowly change. Before you know it, you’ll be convinced that the detectives have an iron clad case against you, and you’ll be willing to confess. 

Awhile ago, John Oliver did an exposé of the U.S. Border Patrol. The Border Patrol, according to this investigation, doesn’t exactly hire the best of the best, and their rules and regulations are, well, loose. Unfortunately, Oliver’s warning went unheeded. A Border Patrol supervisor was recently charged with going on a killing spree, murdering four women. The spree ended when a fifth woman––undoubtedly a future murder victim––escaped and raised the alarm. According to the Texas Tribune, the supervisor shot four people in the head, all women and all sex workers. 

Space colonization may seem like something out of science fiction, but this Kurzgesagt explains how we can actually begin colonizing the moon today. The process would take place in three stages, moving from very temporary landing pads to more permanent colonies. What this video does not ask, however, is whether we should colonize space. As C.S. Lewis wrote in his Space Trilogy, the desire to spread human civilization is “the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome.”

The economists who predicted the 2008 financial crisis recently predicted that another crisis is on its way. That should scare you, and it should also inspire you to look into the 2008 crisis. This video explains how predictable that crisis really was. It was rooted in bad mortgage assets, called “toxic” at the time, which were then traded and insured. Insiders made a ton of money by selling these mortgages, so no one thought to ask what might happen if they gave mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.

Eliud Kipchoge might be the best runner on the planet. Of all time. 

Let that sink in for a minute. It’s hard to describe just how incredible Kipchoge’s feat was at the recent Berlin Marathon. He pulled ahead of all his competitors at around mile sixteen. They simply couldn’t keep up. So he had to run the last ten miles alone, meaning that he had no one to inspire him to run faster. He ran on sheer discipline for that last ten miles and beat the world record by 78 seconds.

Our beloved dogs and cats are so intertwined in our lives that we do not often think about how they got there. Not in the “where did you adopt that cute dog?” sense, but rather in the “why did humans start keeping pets to begin with” sense. This video explores the origins of domesticated animals, and how humans bridged the gap between working animals, animals to eat, and animal companions. The history is far longer than you think, which explains in part why humans are so keen to keep pets. 

Cooking isn’t complicated. There are a few people who can burn ramen, but most of us can handle the basics. That’s as far as most people get, however. This video will take your cooking from total amateur to “hey, this isn’t bad!” with fifteen simple tips. And we mean simple. You won’t need a sous vide machine to make tender and properly cooked chicken––just a meat pounder. Chicken breasts are complicated because they’re different sizes throughout. Pounding evens them out. 

Cybersecurity is not yet a “sexy” topic. But the more “sexy” cyber crimes are committed, the more people will pay attention to cybersecurity. This video is one of those crimes. A Tesla was recently stolen from the mall of America with ease. As you might imagine, this cybercrime was accompanied by a bit of social engineering: “The person allegedly responsible for taking the car is believed to have reached out to Tesla’s customer support to add the stolen Model 3 to his Tesla account by its vehicle identification number. Once the vehicle was accessible on a smartphone that was signed into this person’s account, he was reportedly able to unlock the car and drive away without ever needing a key.”

Even today, the TV show ER is among the most popular hospital shows of all time, up there with House, M.D. and (believe it or not) General Hospital. It was full of fascinating medical scenarios and lots of medical jargon, but it was also a television show, so it was not totally accurate. This video features a real-life doctor commenting on some of the scenes in the show. It’s not all medical jargon, either, he offers some interesting insight on the current state of medicine.