The evergreen trees give kangaroos, bison, lions, and more extra shelter and fun. Capybaras use donated Christmas trees as wind breaks to protect their habitats. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The presents are unwrapped, the cookies are crumbs, and that real Christmas tree will become a fire hazard soon enough. Most of us haul it out to the curb for our local sanitation departments to take care of, but some lucky trees make it into the paws of animals living in zoos.

'They mirror our own impermanence: always in motion, always fading. Magical yet melancholy, the trees offer both a celebration and a gentle farewell, rolled into one.' Evergreen trees are full of symbolism. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Used with permission of Algonquin Books, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Imagine for a moment if visitors from another planet observed humans buying, selling, and decorating billions of trees every year.

WIRED brought 10 of the most popular artificial Christmas trees into a studio and got three interior designers to pick the best through blind judging. For extra trimming, we checked in on how those trees fared once they were taken home and decorated. Shopping for an artificial Christmas tree can be overwhelming, especially when you're doing it online. You'll find yourself staring at product photos, wondering: How realistic does it look? Will it shed all over my living room? Can you see daylight through the branches? Are the branches strong enough to hold that lopsided homemade macaroni ornament you've hung on your tree since 2004? We got tired of guessing, so we did a little experiment. We brought 10 of the most popular artificial trees from three top brands (Balsam Hill, King of Christmas, and National Tree Company) and hauled them to a photo studio in Kansas.

Black Friday lasts a month this year at The Home Depot, including half off select tools and tool sets. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Or at least, The Home Depot Black Friday deals have slipped all customary bounds of the calendar: Online deals have already started as of Wednesday, November 5, and will go all the way to December 3. This includes some very steep discounts on flagship tool brands like Milwaukee, Ryobi, and Dewalt tools--by which I mean half-off and buy-one-get-one steep.

John Viveiros exclusively works with discarded materials and sea glass from Rhode Island's beaches. The tree is constructed from a metal pole, with sea glass strung down from the top. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If a coastal Christmas is your vibe, then John Viveiros of Tiverton, Rhode Island is your guy. An arborist and tree climber by trade and a welder/craftsman by choice and chance, Viveiros constructs Christmas trees out of recycled material and some of the beach's most prized treasures: sea glass.

Recent work has highlighted the culturally-contingent nature of commonsense knowledge. We introduce AMAMMER${\epsilon}$, a test set of 525 multiple-choice questions designed to evaluate the commonsense knowledge of English LLMs, relative to the cultural contexts of Ghana and the United States. To create AMAMMER${\epsilon}$, we select a set of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) from existing commonsense datasets and rewrite them in a multi-stage process involving surveys of Ghanaian and U.S. participants. In three rounds of surveys, participants from both pools are solicited to (1) write correct and incorrect answer choices, (2) rate individual answer choices on a 5-point Likert scale, and (3) select the best answer choice from the newly-constructed MCQ items, in a final validation step. By engaging participants at multiple stages, our procedure ensures that participant perspectives are incorporated both in the creation and validation of test items, resulting in high levels of agreement within each pool. We evaluate several off-the-shelf English LLMs on AMAMMER${\epsilon}$. Uniformly, models prefer answers choices that align with the preferences of U.S. annotators over Ghanaian annotators. Additionally, when test items specify a cultural context (Ghana or the U.S.), models exhibit some ability to adapt, but performance is consistently better in U.S. contexts than Ghanaian. As large resources are devoted to the advancement of English LLMs, our findings underscore the need for culturally adaptable models and evaluations to meet the needs of diverse English-speaking populations around the world.

I tested three different string lights designed to go on a Christmas tree, and Twinkly's were easily my favorite. They're beautiful and easy to set up, and the black cord blends in nicely into the tree (the cord also comes in green). The app's Gallery tab has tons of premade light combinations to choose from, and you can also make custom effects in the app. It lets you design a light pattern by using an existing pattern, drawing with your fingers, or even uploading a GIF. The arrangement of lights on the tree works best for gradient and stripe-style patterns though--I love how the candy cane stripe effect looks.

In the early 2000s, my family and I were living in Iceland for a span of three years. Before landing in a place where we would be living for well over a decade once we moved back to the US, the land of fire and ice was where I called home. Iceland was a fascinating place to live, from the physical landscape to the history and culture of the country. I have vivid memories of hiking up the sides of an inactive volcano and seeing massive geysers for the first time. Once we moved back to the States, I knew I wanted to go back one day.

As we close out the year, I wanted to share Pat Spencer's story about working outside within communities. Pat Spencer, Senior Director of Strategic Solutions at Intervision, not only focuses on strategically leading the business he works for, but also the community around him. To accompany his successful 25-year career, Pat takes serving his community personally, placing extensive focus on human empowerment through talent incubation of abuse victims, students and service members. Led Lights Blinking and Computers are ... [ ] Working. InterVision Systems is based in Santa Clara, California, but Pat is in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The holidays are here, and if you haven't already started decorating, it's time to get going on creating an awesome display. Is the thought already stressing you out? You can simplify managing your amazing holiday light show by using smart plugs and other products that can be controlled remotely. Here are the five smart products you need to create an awesome holiday display. Control your holiday lights (or other festive decorations that plug into an outlet) from anywhere when you use an outdoor smart plug.