You might have never heard of the Great Smog of 1952, or you may have been introduced to it by an episode of The Crown on Netflix, like I was. While London is notoriously foggy, it was infinitely worse than usual on December 5, 1952, when a combination of fog and air pollution reduced visibility to only a few feet.
The smog smothered the city for five days. Transportation came to a virtual standstill. Flights were grounded and trains cancelled. Only the Underground was running. Ambulance services were affected, leaving people to find their own way to hospitals. The fog even seeped indoors though windows and doors. Plays and concerts were cancelled because the audience were unable to see the stage.
Remarkably, there was no panic as Londoners were accustomed to fog. But the death toll increased. Most of the victims were the very young and the elderly with pre-existing respiratory problems. Estimates of how many people died during that period vary from 6,000 to as high as 12,000.
The smog was produced by a combination of weather, geography, and several sources of air pollution. Read about the factors that produced the smog and what's been done about them at Amusing Planet.
A TikTok video asked people to share the dumbest tattoo they ever got. Leah Holland wins this one, although it was an unfortunate accident of timing.
Leah Holland, 25, had wanted to get this specific tattoo for two years before she finally did it.
"Basically I had a friend that said this quote about me," she told BuzzFeed News. "We were just talking about things that we really admire about the other person, and he said, 'You courageously and radically refuse to wear a mask.'"
She said she's the type of person who thinks it's pointless to pretend you're something you're not, so she liked the quote enough to get it tattooed.
She got it done on March 4, 2020. Two days later, Kentucky announced its first case of COVID-19.
Holland is not anti-mask, and was so mortified as time went on that she spent most of the summer wearing a cardigan. Read her story at Buzzfeed.
The meme that just won't die has gotten the LEGO treatment! LEGO artist Ochre Jelly went ahead and put his toy pixels to work and created sculptures of the Hollywood Housewives, and Smudge the cat.
And then he uses these images to illustrate his own (mostly LEGO-themed) jokes. Click the image to the right to see more.
And since I've discovered Ochre Jelly's Instagram account, you can continue reading to see more of his internet memes in LEGO that you may have missed or haven't seen in a while.
It is often said that our imagination knows no bounds, and time and time again the phrase is proven to be true by artists and inventors alike. Imagination does have no limits, and we only have to open our minds to the countless possibilities.
In this series of photos, visual artist Helga Stentzel shows us that, with just a little imagination and creativity, ordinary household objects could be turned into images of animals and people.
Laughing Squid shares some of her photos. Why don’t you check it out?
The Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts in 1620 and began a settlement called Plymouth. That's where our history classes about the region begin, but what happened before that? New England was home to 69 villages, each with a few thousand residents of the Mashpee Wampanoag people. The spot where the PIlgrams settled was previously a town called Patuxet. Wampanoag historian Steven Peters tells us what happened to Patuxet.
In 1616, we think the village of Patuxet becomes ground zero for what became the Great Dying. There was a plague that ripped through the Wampanoag nation where there are estimates of over 100,000 Wampanoag dying in just three short years. There were accounts of a French fishing ship that had wrecked off the coast of Patuxet, and of some of the fishermen coming into the village exhibiting signs of sickness, with yellowing of the skin and fever, and dying. Shortly after that, the plague just starts to rip right through the Wampanoag nation. Everyone in Patuxet either dies or fled the village, and they never returned. And that’s how the village of Patuxet ends up vacant in 1620 when the Pilgrims arrived. We know that the Pilgrims knew about the Great Dying, and they also must have known that that village of Patuxet was empty when deciding to make that Plymouth Colony.
Juanita Moody dropped out of college in 1943 to serve in the US Signal Intelligence Service, analyzing coded messages during World War II. She stayed on after the war, rising in the ranks of the SIS despite being both a woman and a civilian, until she was in charge of intercepting data from most of the world. By the 1960s, that included Cuba. The SIS had by then become the NSA, charged with data collection which was then handed over the CIA for analysis. That became an issue when it came to the Soviet buildup of arms in Cuba, as the White House wanted to be kept up-to-date with any new information, and Moody's boss Louis Tordella was wary of skipping over the CIA.
Impressed by her expertise, alarmed by what she had to say, and perhaps concerned that no one was providing the White House with this level of detail about an aggressive military buildup in Cuba, [assistant secretary of defense Edward] Lansdale asked Moody to write up her findings. Along with a few colleagues, she spent the next three days and nights compiling “wheelbarrow loads of material” into what she called “a special little summary for the assistant secretary of defense.” When she was done, Moody urged Tordella to “publish” her report, meaning circulate it among the intelligence agencies, the White House, the State Department and the military. Cautious not to step outside NSA’s prescribed role, Tordella rebuffed her, but he did send it to Lansdale, who sent it to President Kennedy, who returned it with his initials—signaling he’d read it. “I told my troops, ‘Keep this updated,’” Moody said of her report. “‘If you get anything to add to it, do it immediately and tell me.’”
Over the next few months, Moody repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, pleaded with Tordella to release her updated report. By early 1962, she said she was “really getting scared.” The amount of military equipment piling up in Cuba didn’t square with the Soviets’ repeated assertions that it was all “defensive.” Details about Soviet technicians “moving around in Cuba” were especially worrisome, and by this point the NSA likely knew the Soviets had moved surface-to-air missiles (not to be confused with ballistic nuclear missiles) to Cuba as well.
Moody was determined to rush data to the president, and the CIA was not happy about it. Read the story of Juanita Moody's role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the rest of the NSA career, at Smithsonian magazine.
It’s less of a secret, and more of a not-well-known feature of Amazon. Who doesn’t love having coupons ready when you go online shopping? I sure do, especially if it could cut down the total cost of the items big time. Amazon has an entire page dedicated entirely to coupons! These coupons are available in almost every product category Amazon offers, as BroBible details:
The coupons on Amazon are also broken out into categories.
God bless the beauty of mother nature, and the sweet coincidence that photographer Andrea Zampatti had when she was able to capture this delightful photo of a very happy-looking dormouse. In the photo, the small creature can be seen perched on a flower, beaming with happiness. The photo, titled as The Laughing Dormouse, was the winner of the 2017 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards for the On Land category. While the photo is old, hopefully it still brings a small spark of serotonin for you. God knows we all need one.
Hopefully by the time we’re all allowed to travel around the world, the cost stays the same. What better way to check alcohol prices than using an infographic? Personal finance site Expensivity tracked the cost of beer in some countries around the world. Researchers (for the website) considered grocery store prices, online menus from bars and hotels, and statistics on alcohol consumption:
The resulting World Beer Index 2021 shows the most expensive and cheapest places for brews, with Qatar at the pricey end ($11.26 per beer) and South Africa the most affordable ($1.68).
Beer prices also appear on a handy map, which is pictured at the top of this post and can be viewed in full size at Expensivity's website. Prices have been converted to U.S. dollars—and, by the way, the average price of a beer in the U.S. is $4.75, according to the map.
When it comes to consuming suds, the Czech Republic tops the list; drinkers there put away 468 beers per person each year. At the other end, Haitians consume just 4 beers per person annually—a relative drop in the keg.
Luther's native Germany, meanwhile, spends the most on beer annually: About $1,900 per person goes to filling steins.
Have you wondered what makes a post on the Internet go viral? Well, research by James Currier and the psychology testing website Tickle.com combed through the data of its 150 million users to crack the code of virality. The research showed that there are eight psychological aspects that can push people to press the share button on respective social media sites. To know the eight aspects that make Internet posts go viral, check the full piece here.
Alright, at first glance this might seem too trivial. A nail polish bottle is so small, you can lift weights made out of a lot of these small items! Simply Nailogical uses two bags full of nail polish bottles as weights to test how many she’d be able to carry. Spoiler: it’s over a hundred bottles per bag.
The other night, my grandfather left a comment on how scientists are smart but also greedy, thinking that they're intentionally modifying the genetic makeup of plants and crops in order for them to gain money. You know, the myth that they're creating problems so they'll earn by providing solutions.
That conversation made me curious about the pre-GMO state of the food we take for granted. I heard about them in my biology class before, but for some reason, it's more interesting to learn about them now. So here is a photo of watermelon mentioned in an article I found online.
This 17th-century painting by Giovanni Stanchi depicts a watermelon that looks strikingly different from modern melons, as Vox points out. A cross-section of the one in the painting, which was made between 1645 and 1672, appears to have swirly shapes embedded in six triangular pie-shaped pieces.
Did you know that Harvard scientists have this controversial plan to dim sunlight? It's been in the news for years, but it's becoming closer to reality as the scientists propose a "June 2021 test flight of a research balloon designed to drop small amounts of chalky dust and observe its effects."
This first flight would not inject the particles; it would only be a dry run of the steerable balloon and instruments needed to study chemical reactions in the stratosphere, the calm, cold layer more than 10 kilometers up. Even so, the project, called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), must first win the approval of an independent advisory board, a decision that could come in February 2021.
The need to study the real-world effects of releasing reflective particles is pressing, says David Keith, a Harvard energy and climate scientist and one of SCoPEx’s lead scientists. Solar geoengineering is no substitute for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, he says, but it could ameliorate the worst damage of global warming, such as the extreme heat waves and storms that claim many lives today. “There is a real potential, maybe a significant potential, to reduce the risks of climate change this century—by a lot.”
Inasmuch as there's a great potential for solar geoengineering, there's also a downside.
But research in solar geoengineering has long been taboo, says Faye McNeill, an atmospheric chemist at Columbia University who is unaffiliated with SCoPEx. “We didn’t want it to appear that we were encouraging it.” One fear is that solar geoengineering could be done unilaterally by groups or nations, with unknown effects on plant growth and rainfall patterns. Another worry is that it would encourage a sort of addiction, adding more and more particles to block warming while not addressing the root problem of mounting emissions. But now, with so much warming already locked in, “the urgency of the climate problem has escalated,” McNeill says.
If you've been a fan of C.S. Lewis' writings, you won't want to miss this virtual dramatic presentation of William Nicholson's Shadowlands. It's a two-hour story showing the love story of Clive Staples Lewis (or Jack, as known by his friends) and Helen Joy Davidman.
As I've just watched it, I didn't know that I could relate that much to Joy's enthusiasm! She's indeed such an extraordinary woman, and it's no wonder why she captivated CS Lewis.
The structure looks straight from a video game. Meet the IH Residence, a family home in Bundung, Indonesia. Designed by andramatin, the home’s design was influenced by the natural topography and the climate in the region. The eye-catching oversized roof has a purpose- to offer shelter and protection from the heavy rainfall as well as from direct sunlight, as Homedit details:
The house also engages with the site and its surroundings in a really cool and interesting way. The sloping terrain allowed for a series of spaces to be created below the floor level of the main section of the house. They’re mainly a service area and a basement. The house also features several outdoor-oriented functions such as a series of terrain, balconies and reflective pools which surround the living areas and help them transition towards the landscape surrounding the house.
