We all know about the ridiculous varying pronunciations of cough, tough, bough, through, and though, which are all spelled alike but cannot be made to rhyme successfully. It's just one of the many ways that English is thoroughly weird, and very hard to master if it's not a language you learned in early childhood. How did English spelling get this way? To begin with, English is a mishmash of other languages, constantly changing over the centuries. Ever tried to read something in Old English? When the spoken language began to be a printed language, there was no authority over spelling, like a bureau of language standards. Words were spelled whatever way the printer wanted, usually to give some idea of how they were pronounced. But pronunciation changes over time and place, and the printed word, for the most part, stays the same. That's why we can still read Shakespeare, but we are probably not using the same word pronunciation. -via Laughing Squid
What period of history is most like the early internet? It had to be the medieval era, when the only books were hand-copied by bored monks and no one knew how to read anyway. No one knew what an elephant looked like, either, but you only needed paint to give it a try. There were so many jokes illustrated in pictures that you have to wonder about the ones they told.
No one appreciates those things more than Matt Ponesse, history professor at Ohio Dominican University. At Instagram, he's medievalistmatt, who gives us a glimpse into the way things were back then with a dose of laughs.
Looking through his gallery of memes can suck up the rest of your day. And always check the captions for more pithy remarks and the source of each image, which sometimes even includes the year. I may have learned a little about medieval history along the way. I bet Ponesse's classes are a blast. -via Boing Boing
あなたはどの寮に入りたい？🦁🦡🦅🐍
— アイシングクッキー作家Fiocco (@Fiocco_cookies) July 28, 2023
おみくじみたいな『組み分け帽子』のアイシングクッキー作りました🧙♂️🪄
Hogwarts House Reveal Cookies!🦁🦡🦅🐍
Which house would you want to be in?🏰#ハリーポッター #sortinghat pic.twitter.com/3s7lBbBOZF
Shiori, a Japanese chef who goes by the online name of Fiocco Cookies, makes extraordinary confections that look like perfectly-decorated sweets. And if you break them open, you'll also find even more sweets inside!
These cookies that serve in place of the Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter franchise is an especially ingenious application of the cookie design. I hope that you pick the right cookie lest you end up in the wrong house!
The Great Lakes of the US and Canada are the world's largest freshwater ecosystem in the world, and those who manage it have been battling invasive Asian carp for 50 years, to the point that migrating fish must go through gates and be sorted or rejected by species. But as conservationists are starting to win the battle against carp, they are confronted with a growing number of goldfish in the lakes. They started out as discarded pets, but in the wild, they grow to enormous size and reproduce like no one's business. They displace native species and wreck the ecosystem.
Goldfish are commonly a beloved family pet, but when they outgrow their tank or otherwise must be discarded, people understandably don't want to take the easy way out, like, say, feeding it to the cat. Flushing a goldfish seems cruel, and does not guarantee their death. To solve this dilemma, the Erie Zoo launched the Last Chance Lagoon, a place to "retire" pet goldfish without releasing them into the wild. The zoo has taken in 52 pet goldfish. That doesn't seem like much, but it may inspire other communities to launch similar programs to keep goldfish out of public waterways.
People have always gambled because the rush of winning is perceived to be worth the risk of losing. In the 1600s, enterprising folks figured out that the real money is in hosting other people's gambling addictions, and they were right, but they didn't understand the odds even then. Meanwhile, mathematicians began studying the science of probability.
The owners of gambling houses sought to increase their profits by guiding patrons to games with long odds, which works because those patrons didn't understand probability, either. But the brothers Johann and Jacob Bernoulli came up with the law of large number or long averages in 1713 (the Golden Theorem), which proved that even with only a very small advantage, the house will always win if people play the games long enough. Abraham De Moivre tried to explain the concept to gambling parlor owners, but they and the gambling public were mostly illiterate and understood numbers in only the simplest terms. It took a long time for operators to realize that they could make plenty of dough even without cheating, and fair games would draw more participants.
History professor John Eglin explains this small advantage using roulette, in which the house has a small chance of winning without risking any money. That small chance will eventually make a casino tons of money, but it took hundreds of years for people to understand that. Read how mathematical laws make money for casinos at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Thomas Rowlandson)
In 1960, an ancient suit of armor was discovered in the Greek village of Dendra. It has been dated to around 1,500 BC, making it a part of the Mycenaean civilization, which ruled Greece at the time. The armor is made of plates of copper alloy, held together by leather strips, and would cover a soldier from face to knees, supplemented with arm and leg pieces and a helmet decorated with pieces of boar tusks. The Dendra specimen was in strangely good shape, and might never have been used in battle. That brought up a question- was this armor designed to be used during warfare, or was it ceremonial? It seemed to be too hot and heavy to be worn by actual warriors.
To see if this armor could be used in battle, 13 exact replicas were made of the armor, and actual Greek soldiers from the 32nd Marines Brigade of the Hellenic Army were recruited to fight while wearing those replicas. To recreate battle conditions from 3,500 years ago, the soldiers ate a meal typical for the military of that time and were put in a temperature-controlled environment. Fight choreography was taken from Homer's Iliad. They fought for 11 hours with replicas of Mycenaean weaponry. You can see a video from the experiment here. Read about this re-enactment, er, experiment, and what we've learned about the Dendra armor at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Zde)
When you're playing Super Mario Bros. 2, or any other adventure game, you keep your eye out for new challenges. When you see something new or different, you go for it. What's the worst that could happen? You might waste time not getting points. Of course you go for it, and you never stop to think about the implications for anyone else, because you're just thinking about yourself, aren't you? Yeah, I thought so. Maybe before you pull someone's turnips out of the ground, you could stop just a minute and look up what those turnips really mean. Sure, it cost you a few seconds for nothing, but the folks who planted those turnips were counting on them for survival. It's easy to point out Mario as the bad guy, but who's playing this game, anyway? This pixilated cartoon from Dorkly is only two minutes long, the rest is credits and promotional.
Two weeks ago, the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, Illinois became famous on the internet for their viral video illustrating the 17-year life cycle of a cicada (Magicicada septendecim). The video features employees in simplistic costumes playing the roles of our insect friends in their quest to grow, thrive, and find mates.
Now the forestry workers are back with an updated video showing what the cicadas are up to lately. Tom Velat, the ecology supervisor, describes how the cicadas are trying to avoid predators. Velat also provides advice on how to live alongside the cicadas while preserving our pets and favorite plants.
Science fiction and fantasy author Ellen Klages was once asked to fill time during the Nebula Awards ceremony while technical difficulties were worked out. She told a personal story about her father's Smithfield ham. He received it as a gift some time in the 1990s, and knew that Smithfield hams were supposed to improve with age. They have already been aged in a smokehouse before purchase, but he wanted to age it more, so he hung it in their damp basement. For years. When asked, he always had plans for the ham, but never got around to them. Klages' father died in 2008, with the ham still in the basement, permanently covered with a thick layer of mold. Klages and her sister, who had avoided the scary ham as best as they could, had to dispose of it some way. Her sister wanted a Viking funeral, or maybe they could just leave it somewhere, but they were afraid that would get them in trouble.
They put off disposing of the ham until all the other details of her father's estate were taken care of. By then they had arranged an elaborate funeral that you have to read about, accompanied by pictures of the event. Some people just know how to tell a story. -via Metafilter
(Unrelated image credit: Isle of Wight County Museum)
Yes, we manage to blow things up real good. MetaBallStudios (previously at Neatorama) takes us through the power of various explosives starting with a firecracker, which is not supposed to kill anyone but could under the right circumstances. Most of the other devices here were intentionally designed to kill. The comparison moves up through ever-more destructive explosions. Not all bombs are included; the ones they selected have quite enough power, thank you very much.
Some of the real historical explosions are shown happening in fictional scenarios so that we can picture in our minds and understand the effects better. For example, the atomic bomb detonated over the city of Nagasaki in 1945 is shown as if it were deployed over modern-day Tokyo, and the 2020 Beirut explosion (which was an industrial accident and not a bomb) is shown happening in New York City. That can be pretty unnerving. -via Geeks Are Sexy
You may think the paperwork and legal procedures are onerous in buying a home or any kind of real estate, but there are good reasons for this. When you buy something, you want to make darn sure the person you're handing your money to has a legal right to sell it. That wasn't quite the case in 1879 when Stephen D. Richards was a newcomer in Kerney, Nebraska, and managed to sell the farm at which he was boarding. The farm belonged to the Harelson family. Mr. Harelson had been gone for some time, said to be a fugitive from the law. Richards told everyone that Mrs. Harelson and her three children had gone to be with him and had left the farm and all its contents to him. However, the bodies of Mrs. Harelson and her children, who had been bludgeoned to death, were found in a haystack.
An interstate manhunt chased Richards down and the sheriff finally arrested him in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio. It turns out that Richards was a serial killer, and claimed responsibility for at least nine deaths! You can read about that case at Murder by Gaslight, although it never explains what happened to the farm that had been sold through fraud. -via Strange Company
CBC tells us about a pair of ingeniously-designed football games that were played in 1944. They took place between American and Canadian troops in Britain. The organizers called the games the Tea Bowl I and II in reference to the English national beverage and the winning team took home a silver teapot trophy.
The first half of each game was played according to American football rules and the second half according to Canadian football rules. The Canadians won the first game and the Americans won the second game. There was going to be a Tea Bowl III, but everyone involved became distracted by Operation Overlord.
-via Raffi Melkonian
The question is, just how much water is really required to go kayaking? Not much, as a group of adventurous (read: crazy) friends in British Columbia found out. They took their kayaks out after a rain storm in Lion's Bay to slide down a really long drainage ditch into the ocean. Getting their kayaks deployed was a job, but then it's just like a waterslide, right? Not quite. For one thing, there are four of them in boats, so a pileup was inevitable, but not bad enough to stop the fun. For another thing, there are tree branches and other obstructions along a drainage ditch that you wouldn't see anywhere near a waterslide. It's a good thing they were wearing helmets. Notice the blood on one guy's hand when they are through. A good time was had by all. -via Born in Space
In 1978, I was really put out at having to pay $8 to see the Eagles. Everyone knew that concert tickets were $5 and had been for years. Less than 50 years later, you could easily pay 100 times that much to see your favorite musical artist perform. And there's plenty of blame to go around. For one thing, there are lot more people now, wanting to see a limited number of touring artists. Even at the largest venues, an astonishing number of tickets are reserved for fan clubs, sponsors or their clients, and VIPs, which make retail tickets even more scarce than they appear. Then there are fees added. Then there's the infrastructure that allots tickets, which is expensive even when it works. Buying tickets online with a credit card opens up the system to all sorts of abuses that didn't work so well when you had to visit a box office to buy a paper ticket. Scalpers use the latest tech to bypass the safeguards that make ticket buying difficult for fans. The ease of making tons of money for nothing mean that scalpers are extremely hard to thwart. Read how the modern ticket-selling system works to hoover up your money at Vox.
You will be forgiven if you start watching this video and think it to be a comedy skit. Or a movie trailer. I started reading what I considered to be a serious tech article and then the video came up, and I had to read more carefully to make sure it's not a parody -especially when they went into doing a face transplant to go along with the brain transplant. BrainBridge is a medical engineering startup, and the "head transplant system" you see here is just a concept. It has a long way to go before it can actually be used, or even built. The real hurdle is that we do not know how to successfully attach brains to bodies.
One of the most significant challenges in realizing this ambitious concept is the current inability to fully repair nerve and spinal cord damage. BrainBridge acknowledges this hurdle and is actively recruiting top specialists in various fields to collaborate on finding solutions.
It's no surprise that BrainBridge is actively recruiting investors as well. At least they got a talented graphics company to put the concept video together. It would make a decent movie trailer, but that idea has already been done a few times. -via Damn Interesting
