When Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped and killed in 1932, news media covered the story extensively. Newspapers, radio, and newsreels gave us details from the crime to the ransom to the arrest and conviction of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. While many books have been written about the kidnapping, Tom Doherty focuses on the journalism around it in his book Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century. Doherty gives us an overview of the ways the kidnapping changed how news outlets cover crimes and how we consume those stories.  

One of the things that happens at the trial, which is sort of true forever on, is the forensic evidence becomes fascinating to people. You don't have shootouts or dramatic confrontations. There are no fingerprints, there's no gun. Nobody can really place Hauptmann at the crime scene.
 
So, you've got to follow the forensic trail. And what you have is this sort of relentless accumulation of forensic detail, which together leads unmistakably to Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Things like ransom money bank records, handwriting analysis, analysis of the wood grain of a ladder. People are obsessed with these details. They are reading three thousand words a day in The New York Times on the case.
 
This is something you see in the true crime genre today with these 15-part series that lead you through every little nook and cranny of the investigation. Some of that starts with the Lindbergh case.

There are other ways the Lindbergh case changed news media, which you can read at BrandeisNOW. -via Strange Company

Alex the African grey parrot was the subject of Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s research into animal psychology. With the help of Alex, Dr. Pepperberg has shown the capabilities of birds through various exercises in cognition. Alex is also the first ever animal to have an ‘existential crisis’ or alternatively, the first to ask an existential question, as My Modern Met details: 

By the time of his death in 2007, Alex had amassed a variety of skills generally thought beyond animal reasoning. He had proven that some birds’ intelligence is even on par with that of dolphins and primates—typically considered to be some of the world’s smartest animals.

[...]

One of Alex’s most impressive moments was when he asked an existential question about his own appearance. He had been presented with a mirror, and—after observing himself for a moment—he asked, “What color?” He then learned the word “gray”—the color of his feathers—after having it taught to him six times.

Image via My Modern Met 

Orchestra conductors all over the world present the music of Beethoven, but even when they are trying hard to reproduce his original work, they almost always slow down the tempo of his written directions. Why did Beethoven want his music played so fast?

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was one of the first composers to start using a metronome, a device patented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in 1815. At that time, he started to edit his works with numerical marks with metronome indications. Doubts about the validity of these marks date back to the 19th century and during the 20th century many musicological analyses were carried out, some of which already pointed to the hypothesis that the metronome was broken, an assumption that could never be verified. In any case, most orchestra conductors have omitted these marks as they consider them to be too fast (Romanticism), whereas since the 1980s, other conductors (Historicism) have used them to play Beethoven. However, music critics and the public described these concerts as frantic and even unpleasant.

A few years ago, scientists posited the theory that Beethoven's metronome might have been broken -or even sabotaged. However, new research says it's possible that the composer suffered from early adopter syndrome, before usage standards were commonly agreed upon. Read about the research into Beethoven's metronome use, and the conclusions so far at EurekAlert! -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Mutatis mutandis)

Belgian animator Soetkin Verstegenused ice for her experimental stop-motion film Freeze Frame. There's ice cubes, ice spheres, ice sculpture, ice as background, ice as water, and melting ice. You can imagine she had to work quickly to take stills of each scene! The result is hypnotic, and kind of cold. -via Nag on the Lake

Astronomers scanning the skies for signals at the Parkes telescope in Australia picked up an unusual radio beam last spring. They've been analyzing it since then, and have not yet found a terrestrial source to attribute it to. The Guardian has more.

The latest “signal” is likely to have a mundane explanation too, but the direction of the narrow beam, around 980MHz, and an apparent shift in its frequency said to be consistent with the movement of a planet have added to the tantalising nature of the finding. Scientists are now preparing a paper on the beam, named BLC1, for Breakthrough Listen, the project to search for evidence of life in space, the Guardian understands.

The beam that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star 4.2 light years from Earth, has not been spotted since the initial observation, according to an individual in the astronomy community who requested anonymity because the work is ongoing. “It is the first serious candidate since the ‘Wow! signal’,” they said.

The “Wow! signal” was a short-lived narrowband radio signal picked up during a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or Seti, by the Big Ear Radio Observatory in Ohio in 1977. The unusual signal, which gained its name after astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote “Wow!” next to the data, unleashed a wave of excitement, though Ehman cautioned about drawing “vast conclusions from half-vast data”.

Cute. The search for the source of the radio wave continues, and before you consider it proof of intelligent alien life, Phil Plait has a broader explanation and some cautionary words at Bad Astronomy.  -via Metafilter


(Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser/CC BY 4.0)

Going for a hospital stay is no fun, especially if you must travel far from home to do it. Then they serve bland, overprocessed foods that you're not all that familiar with and not inclined to eat. That was the law in Alaska until a few years ago, and those bland foods are frightfully expensive there, too, but things are changing.

You’re not going to find jello cups on the menu at Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, Alaska. Instead, patients and visitors choose between reindeer pot pie, smoked hooligan, birch sourdough biscuits with fireweed jelly, herring roe, salmon-belly or seal soup, and Eskimo ice cream (made with animal fat, fish oil, and berries).

Depending on the season, the hospital’s Executive Chef, Amy Foote, receives boxes of fiddlehead ferns and spruce tips trimmed in the late spring, coho salmon and halibut caught in late summer, cloudberries and blueberries picked and packed in the fall, and whale or other game meat in late winter. They are all donations, sent in by a state-wide network of hunters and gatherers who keep ANMC’s traditional foods program stocked with the ingredients that Alaska Natives have routinely enjoyed for generations.

Chef Foote tells us how the traditional foods program came about and how it works in her hospital at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium)

Augie, along with his mom, Katina Behm, loves to make fun of his uncle Aristotle Polites, who works as a model, by recreating Polites's photos. And because Polites is a model, Augie gets to have a lot of photos to recreate.

See Augie’s recreations over at Bored Panda.

Cute!

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)

Would you keep a leech as a pet? For many of us, the answer would be no, but believe it or not, there are some people who keep leeches as pets. To make things even weirder, these people even let these leeches suck their blood. But why in the world would they do that?

ScienceAlert documents the story of Ariane Khomjani, a leech keeper. This is what he has to say.

"They're amazing, curious creatures that grow like crazy and make wonderful pets,"...

He explained how individual leeches have their own unique personalities, with some being more adventurous and others more shy.

"Some like to try and sneak a feed more often than others, haha! But once they're full, they're content to sit and rest for a bit out of water if handled gently," he said.

… The species he keeps is one of the larger types: buffalo leeches (Hirudinaria manillensis) from Asia.

 Learn more about this strange practice over at the site.

(Image Credit: Ariane Khomjani/ Instagram/ ScienceAlert)

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could see tardigrades in action with our naked eye? Perhaps that’s what the guys Archie McPhee had in their minds when they decided to make these cute racing tardigrades.

These pull-back tardigrades come in a set of four so you can race up to three of your friends to see who has the fastest time in a drag race.

The full set goes for just $14.95 and would be lots of fun to race against some babies, possums, or cockroaches. Place your bets now!

I have a feeling that this will be a hit in the market.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Archie McPhee/ Technabob)

Two robots, both of which have brains that have evolved for over 300 generations, can be seen in the video. Both of them have one leg broken as well. However, only one of them can walk upright, while the other struggles to get back up. But why? That’s because one of them has been programmed to keep learning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) often relies on so-called neural networks, algorithms inspired by the human brain. But unlike ours, AI brains usually don’t learn new things once they’ve been trained and deployed; they’re stuck with the same thinking they’re born with.

So, in a new study, researchers created nets with “Hebbian rules”—mathematical formulas that allow AI brains to keep learning. Rather than their synaptic weights—the values dictating how activity spreads from one neuron to another—remaining static, they change based on experience. Then, the team partially removed the left front leg of both bots, forcing them to try to compensate for the injury. Both bots struggled at first, but the Hebbian bot was able to walk nearly seven times as far, the researchers report this month at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

Hebbian learning could someday improve algorithms used to recognize images, translate languages, or drive.

Truly amazing.

(Image Credit: Science Magazine/ YouTube)

After taking off on his powered parachute near a school in Rio Linda, California to deliver candy canes to children in his community, a man dressed up as Santa found himself in a maze of power lines and ended up being suspended in them. Thankfully, the man was not injured.

Video from the rescue shows the red-white-and-blue aircraft dangling overhead as Santa sat fastened to the pilot seat.

Neighbors watched from the ground as crews worked.

Colleen Bousliman, who lives nearby, said the pilot flies overhead often.

“He flies just around so people can see and flies around people’s houses,” she said. “This was the first time he was in his Santa suit.”

[...]

“W/o a scratch & full of good cheer we made sure Old St. Nick will use his reindeer when he sees you later this year,” the fire department said in a tweet after the incident.

I guess Santa has better watch out, too.

(Image Credit: California Highway Patrol via AP)

Footage from a trail cam at a beaver dam just south of Voyageurs National Park shows us a variety of animals using it as a river crossing. Over a year's time, we see wolves, bears, deer, beavers (of course), and other creatures, as well as the changing of the seasons. The dam is so sturdy that vegetation thrives on top, and the resulting pond is calm enough to freeze in winter. Good work, beaver! -via Metafilter

I had no idea that UPS invested so much time and resources in calculating the movements and actions of its drivers. The delivery company is already famous for not making left turns because it's more efficient to make a series of right turns.

But its training facilities teach more than efficient land navigation. There's even a simulator for walking on ice, as well as drills for drivers protecting themselves from dogs and getting into a truck with a minimum number of movements. As this video from Business Insider illustrates, what appears to be a casual if rapid process by drivers is actually precision drill designed to move quickly and safely through the delivery process.

-via Born in Space

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In the old days, before the internet, if you wanted to encounter the rantings of angry, semiliterate people, you usually had to go search your house for a family member or, possibly, even step outside. Now you can enjoy such delights from wherever you are seated at the moment.

To enhance this experience, you can listen to Instagram user Lubalin melodiously sing these online arguments. That he sings the misspelled words as they are written is especially delightful.

-via @kaijubushi

Minnesotastan has been running a series of pictures of his readers' bookcases at TYWKIWDBI. You can learn a lot about someone by looking at the books they keep and how they display them. The picture here of Bruce and Carol's bookcase also drives home how you can interact with people for years on the internet and still not know important things about them.

Blogger's note:  After scanning the rows of books, my eyes were drawn to the top of the photo, where sharp-eyed readers may note on the bookcase the bases of some trophies.  I emailed Bruce back to inquire whether they would be of interest to TYWKIWDBI readers.  The answer startled me...

Yeah, they are Emmys. Seven of them. Read the rest of the story at TYWKIWDBI.