In 1860, New York City seriously considered leaving the United States and forming its own country. The mayor, Fernando Wood, consulted with the city's movers and shakers like William Astor, August Belmont, and Sam Tilden about the plan, which they considered would be peaceful. Their problem was not so much with the United States, but with the state of New York- the city had a completely different culture from upstate. New York City was focused on trade, and consisted of people from all different cultures. They saw the rest of the state as populated by New England "Puritans," who were too religious, monocultural, and intolerant -especially when it came to alcohol. Strangely, most city authorities had no problem with slavery, because of the trade thing. 

New York City's plan to secede from the Union was stopped short by the Civil War, but the rift between city and state continued for more than a hundred years. Read about the Big Apple's desire to secede at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Samuel Augustus Mitchell) 

To celebrate the anniversary of the 2001 movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, it's returning to theaters starting January 16th. The Two Towers will be released on January 17th, and The Return of the King hits theaters on January 18th. If you're in the right place, you can spend 12 hours of your weekend watching the trilogy. Yes, these are the extended editions, which makes The Fellowship of the Ring three hours and 48 minutes long. And it's the perfect excuse for an Honest Trailer. 

While Screen Junkies gently pokes fun at the characters, it's obvious they can find little fault with the movie. We do get to see some of the tropes pointed out, like how Frodo is constantly interrupted while trying to sleep. It's no wonder he never thought of just flying to Mordor like Gandalf did. At any rate, you can expect Honest Trailers for the other two films in the trilogy to come out soon.  

Isn't this little fighter jet cute? It is less than 15 feet long, and it has a wingspan of 21 feet. But those wings fold up, making the plane even tinier. This is the McDonnell Goblin XF-85 parasite fighter jet, developed during World War II. See, American bombers got bigger and bigger, and could fly missions further and further away. But they needed protection from fighter escorts, and those escorts could not carry enough fuel for long-range missions. So the Goblin was developed small enough to fit inside a bomber! 

When approaching a target area, the Goblins would be deployed from underneath the bomber, which must have looked like the jet was giving birth. What was really tricky was retrieving and stowing the Goblins after a mission. After all, the little jets didn't have the fuel to get back on their own, and they were too compact to carry landing gear anyway. Read about the Goblin XF-85 at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: US Air Force) 

The Awesomer properly labels this familiar if unsettling movement: like a life-size living bobblehead doll.

Callytrappy is a trap dancer. He moves his body rhythmically and robotically to the music deep in the uncanny valley between a human and an android.

I'm especially impressed with his capacity to refrain from blinking, sometimes for entire videos. The visual effect is like an animation glitch.

Depression is a horrible malady that's often hard to pin down. Situational depression is when you feel awful with a reason, like personal loss, trauma, or the world is falling apart, and clinical depression is a mental illness, but these lie on a spectrum and it's hard to determine where the line is. Medical science has some standards for diagnosis, but they can be subjective. There are no biological injuries that point out clinical depression, and treatments vary in effectiveness from person to person. Still, the worst is no treatment at all. 

Adding to that, the very symptoms of depression make it hard to seek help. Then there's the stigma and expense attached to treatment. Sure, there are a few things you can do to fight depression, and those things are healthy whether you are experiencing depression or not. But it's very important to recognize the symptoms and seek help if you or someone you know is suffering from depression, no matter what form it takes.  -via Geeks Are Sexy 

It never occurred to me to try frying foods in a microwave, and it sounds kind of dangerous. Frying means oil, and oil gets extremely hot. But it is possible. So what would you fry in there, anyway? The Takeout explains that you might want to fry garnishes until they are crispy, like fried onions to put on your salad or a sandwich. That way, you can use a small amount of oil and a small dish for a small amount of food and not have to wash a frying pan. They also explain the proper way to do it. Just be sure that you avoid splashing any oil as you remove the dish from the microwave. 

But microwave frying will only work for a small amount of food- you won't get good results frying chicken in the microwave, for more reasons than one, which they also explain. But who fries just one piece of chicken at a time, anyway? Entrees for a family are worth pulling out the frying pan. Get a rundown on the practical way to fry some things in the a microwave at the Takeout.  

(Image credit: Famartin) 

Small arrowheads have been found in South Africa that date back 60,000 years, tens of thousands of years older than any other known poison arrows. What's even more intriguing, the traces of poison recovered from them are from the plant known as the Bushman's poison bulb (Boophone disticha). The poison extracted from the plant does not kill quickly, but will weaken prey over time. The small arrowheads indicate that they were made to deliver the poison instead of killing an animal outright. Such an arrow would slow the animal down, though, giving human hunters the advantage of their endurance and perseverance in taking down large prey. 

The implications of this technique are that early Homo sapiens hunters were strategic thinkers who understood cause-and-effect and delayed results, in addition to the practice of using poison to their own advantage. Read about the discovery and what it means at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Ton Rulkens) 

It looks like a storefront in a stripmall in suburban America, but Big Iowa BBQ is in Tokyo.

A piano can produce beautiful music if you know how to play it, but what if you could see the music as well as hear it? This idea presented a challenge for the guys at HTX Studio (previously at Neatorama), and they spent three years making it happen. In this video, we get to see the many ideas that didn't work, which are all pretty cool anyway. With every failure, the challenge became more important, and that's why they persevered to the end. 

The one guy with the dream (I wish we knew his name) also explains why the project meant so much. There is a great joy in seeing an idea successfully brought to life, especially if the one making it happen is you. That joy is there even when you didn't have to invent everything along the way. In that respect, we also have to admire his dedication to learning to play piano in those three years, in order to do the magic piano justice. The result is not only a fascinating musical instrument, but also beautiful music and an astonishingly high-quality DIY video.  

-via Metafilter 

The modern world is ripe for global viruses thanks to the relative ease of travel, but we also have tools on our side, like vaccines and infectious disease experts who monitor viruses around the world. Sure, the viruses that are the scariest are the ones we don't know about, and the ones we are very familiar with are bad enough, like influenza and COVID. There are also some viruses that are currently localized, but could become a problem if they spread. 

For example, have you heard of the Oropouche virus? It's indigenous to the Amazon area, but in the last twenty years has started to pop up elsewhere. It is spread by insects, and those insects are increasing their range. Travelers also carry the virus to other parts of the globe. Bird flu was bad enough in birds, but it has spread to cattle, and can be transmitted from cattle to humans. And virologists are monitoring HIV infections, which are poised to rise under disruptions in international aid. Oh yeah, and measles, too. Read about the global viruses that now worry experts at the Conversation. 

(Image credit: NIAID) 

Like all morally decent and right-thinking people, I enjoy pineapple on pizza. But that's not the only fruit that can do well on pizza. The Takeout has a list of 10 others, including pears. Pictured above is a pizza photographed by Flickr user Edsel Little. It is topped with caramelized pears, field, greens, onions, mozzarella, and fontina. The Takeout recommends crisp pears because they're unlikely to go soggy while baked and their soft flavors will accent rather than overwhelm the cheese.

What other fruits work? The Takeout suggests apricots, apples, berries, pomegranate seeds, plums, melon, mango, melons and dates. Which have you tried on pizza?

How many soldiers does it take to cut down a tree? In this case, it was 813, in a convoy of 23 heavily-armed vehicles supported by helicopters, fighter jets and bombers, and even rafts. While that sounds absurd on the surface, it was a response to a horrific murder. This all happened in the DMZ between North Korea and South Korea in 1976 (although the narration says 1973 at one point). Cold War tensions were high. In the Joint Security Area, a tree was blocking the view from the south, which was quite important for keeping an eye on North Korean activity. The first crew of 15 sent to trim the tree was attacked by North Korean soldiers, who killed two Americans with their own axes and injured others. Retaliation could have led to war between the two Koreas, which meant war between the US and China also. But the incident could not be ignored.

The response was to return and cut down the entire tree, using all the military might necessary to keep interference from the KPA from happening again. This was Operation Paul Bunyan. Half as Interesting takes us through the entire incident. The video is only 6:35; the rest is an ad. 

The first Social Security numbers were issued in November of 1936 as part of the New Deal. It didn't take long for people to start appropriating numbers that were not assigned to them. In 1938, a wallet manufacturer included dummy cards in their wallets to show how cards would fit into the slots. They used a mockup of a Social Security card that displayed the real number of a company executive's secretary, Mrs. Hilda Schrader Whitcher. What could possibly go wrong? 

People immediately began using the mockup card as their own Social Security card. It was printed in red instead of blue, but when the program was new, few people knew what the cards were supposed to look like. The wallet company claimed it was only half the size of a real card, but that makes no sense since it was made to show the size of a wallet slot, and a picture of Whitcher with the card shows it was the same size as her real card. 

Over the years, 40,000 or so people have claimed the number 078-05-1120, even without the mockup card. Some still use it today! Read the story of the first major Social Security card fraud at the SS website. -via Weird Universe 

Cities and states have climates and cultures attached to their names, and then it's easy to get a totally incorrect idea of where it is. The same happens when you take a piece of a round globe and straighten it out on a two-dimensional map. We think of Canada as north, Mexico as south, and South America as far south of the United States. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Laurence Brown pulled out a US map to determine where our National Parks are because he got a calendar of park posters for Christmas. That's when he found that what we think of the 48 contiguous United States doesn't have much to do with where they actually are. Besides what's in the video, commenters added more geographic facts that may blow your mind.

If you go south from Detroit, you enter Canada.
Over half of Canada's population lives south of the entire states of Washington and North Dakota.
The Atlantic Ocean enters the Panama Canal from the west and goes east to enter the Pacific.
Boston is roughly on the same latitude as Barcelona. 
The whole of the contiguous USA is further south than the whole of Britain.
New Orleans is about the same latitude as Cairo.
The International Date Line crosses Alaska, so it is both the westernmost and the easternmost state. (not true; see comments)
The state closest to Africa is Maine. 
Tijuana is closer to North Dakota than it is to Mexico City. 
Texarkana, Texas, is closer to Chicago than it is to El Paso.
Berlin is farther north than Winnipeg.

See, we've all been fooled by the weather and our own mental maps! 

In 1862, John Gilleland was a 53-year old carpenter in Athens, Georgia. He was too old to serve in the Confederate Army, but he was a private in a home guard unit. Determined to find some way to counteract the Union's massive manpower advantage, he devised this cannon to fire chain shot.

Chain shot--a length of chain between two cannon balls--had been used for centuries for anti-personnel purposes or, in naval applications, to destroy rigging. But such shells were usually loaded into a single cannon.

Gilleland's innovation, according to a 1996 article by military historian Lonnie R. Speer, was to cast a cannon with two barrels side by side. The barrels were pointed 3 degrees away from each other so that the chain would fan out and sweep through the bodies of Union soldiers.

Test firings revealed many technical problems. The chains would break apart and the balls would scatter wildly--a problem exacerbated when the firing of each barrel was not precisely simultaneous.

Gilleland's cannon was used in battle only once in August 1864 outside of Athens. I have no information about the utility of the cannon in that battle, but the Confederate forces were compelled to withdraw despite its use.

This unusual weapon resurfaced in the 1890s and, in 1957, was put on public display in Athens.

-via Michael Brasher | Photo: Jud McCranie