Dr. Indiana Jones was a well-regarded, if fictional, archaeologist in his day. That is, well-regarded by his colleagues in the movies. In the real world, he's been criticized as a grave-robber, looter, and an all-around disaster as a scientist. His catch phrase "It belongs in a museum!" seems just plain silly, considering the way museums were run in the 1930s and '40s.

Jones is the last great monster of the treasure-hunting age of archaeology. To judge him by modern standards is to indulge the same comforting temporal parochialism that leads us to dismiss post-Roman Europe as a “Dark Age.” Jones may be a lousy archaeologist as we understand the field today. But is he a lousy archaeologist in context?

Max Gladstone presents arguments defending Dr. Jones' abilities as a scientist at Tor. He may have been an unrepentant looter, but at least he was good at it. -via Metafilter

A lot of people have curly hair that's hard to comb, but this is something else altogether. Shilah Madison Calvert-Yin has "uncombable hair syndrome," which is a real condition. Each shaft of her hair is triangular instead of round. It's caused by a gene mutation, and is very rare. Only about 100 people in the world have the syndrome. But Shilah's family has embraced her awesome hair.

“Shilah loves her unique hair, but that has come from constant positive reinforcement at home from friends and family,” her mom Celeste Calvert-Yin, who lives in Melbourne Australia, told TODAY via email.

“As a little, little girl she often told us she was like a unicorn as they are very special and unique just like her. It brought a tear to our eye.”  

People often say she has hair like Doc Brown from back to the future, lucky it's one of our fave movies #uncombablehairsyndrome

A post shared by Shilah Madison Calvert-Yin (@shilahmadison) on Jul 12, 2017 at 2:49pm PDT

You can follow 7-year-old Shilah at her Instagram page. -via Boing Boing

In 1895, Marvin R. Clark published the essential cat dictionary, called Pussy and Her Language. The 150-page guide is full of cat facts, stories, and fanciful prose about felines, in an era when cats didn't get all that much respect. You can learn a lot from this book, about cats or, more precisely, about how Clark felt about cats.

11. There are 17 vital cat vocabulary words



12. Cats have French accents

“The word ‘purrieu’… is a note of self-satisfaction and content… give attention to the number of vowels and the Frenchman’s roll of the liquid ‘r,’ so that it comes to the ear like ‘pur-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rieu,’ with a gradually ascending inflection.”

13. Cats can get very mad

“The word ‘yew,’ when uttered as an explosive, is the Cat’s strongest expression of hatred, and a declaration of war… The word ‘yow’ means extermination from the face of the earth.”

Atlas Obscura selected the twenty most interesting lessons about cat communication from Pussy and Her Language. You can also read the entire book online.

The fictional character Sarah Connor underwent a profound change between The Terminator and Terminator 2, which made sense. She went from victim to badass in order to protect her son and the world he lives in. Actor Linda Hamilton went the extra mile to illustrate that evolution, and impressed us immensely with her athleticism and physique in Terminator 2. In more recent movies, ripped muscles on women heroes have become more common, so that younger audiences might not even notice. Check out some of those heroes showing off their stuff in a video list at TVOM.

Chris Pool made a maze for his cats Cole and Marmalade. Lucky cats! This is a project so simple anyone can do it. And if you have more than one cat, the floor show that ensues will be worth the effort.

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What's great about this idea is that it's modular. If you have the room, you can set up all 50 boxes, or 25, or ten, and put them in a different order each time. If the boxes are all square, like these, rearranging them would be very simple. -via Tastefully Offensive

Melting glaciers and ice caps are not good, overall, for the environment and sea levels, not to mention the polar bears that live there. As the ice recedes, we are finding some really strange things that were lost underneath them, some ancient, some as recently as the 20th century.

5. WWI SOLDIERS // NORTHERN ITALY

As the highest settlement of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the small village of Peio in modern-day northern Italy was dragged into the conflict of World War I in 1915. Here, at altitudes over 6500 feet, intrepid soldiers fought in what became known as the White War. Due to the inhospitable conditions and the freezing weather, specialist mountain soldiers were recruited—the Italians had the Alpini, who sported distinctive feathered caps, and the Austrians had the Kaiserschützen. The fierce conflict high in the mountains went largely unnoticed by the rest of the world at the time but today, as the region's ice melts, archaeologists and historians are learning more about the amazing feats of bravery of those involved.

A variety of artifacts have been uncovered from the melting glacier, including a poignant unmailed love letter to a girl named Maria, soldiers’ helmets and guns, and, of course, bodies. In 2012, the mummified bodies of two blond and blue-eyed Austrian soldiers, aged just 17 and 18 years old, were uncovered from the ice—both had been shot through the head and buried in a crevasse on the Presena glacier by their comrades. Locals held a funeral for the pair in 2013, and 200 people from around Peio attended.

Read about artifacts, frozen bodies, geologic formations, and even pathogens unearthed by melting glaciers at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Agnes Monkelbaan)

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

"People always wanted us to stay the same, but we can't stay in a rut. no one else expects to peak at 23, so why should we? Rubber Soul, for me, is like the beginning of my adult life." - Paul McCartney.

"You don't know us if you don't know Rubber Soul -John Lennon

Rubber Soul was the sixth studio album recorded by the Beatles. The title came from Paul, who said he'd overheard another musician refer to Mick Jagger's singing style as "plastic soul." You can hear Paul use the expression "plastic soul," for the first time, at the end of the first take of the Beatles record "I'm Down" (released a few months earlier). John confirms the title credit: "That was Paul's title... meaning English soul. Just a pun."

It was the second album (after A Hard Day's Night) to feature all original Beatles songs. It was the first album to feature composing credits from all four Beatles. The U.S. Rubber Soul album featured 10 new songs, with two carry-overs from their previous album Help! The British LP featured 14 all-new songs. The recording sessions for Rubber Soul began on October 12, 1965.

Odette Doest is a veterinarian and a wildlife rehabilitator on the island of Curaçao. The few rescued birds she cannot return to the wild find a permanent home with her. That includes Bob the flamingo. Bob was injured when he crashed into a window. Doest nursed him back to health, and found out he was raised by humans and is not equipped for life in the wild. So Bob became an ambassador for his species, visiting schools with Doest to teach children about island wildlife and the importance of conservation.

While Doest would have preferred to free Bob, she says he’s helping to instill a conservation ethic in the next generation. Kids want to know all about the four-foot-tall pink bird: how his life differs from that of his free-flying cousins, why his feathers are pink (as a result of compounds in the shrimp and algae he eats), and his favorite snack (caviar, which he tries to eat straight out of Doest’s hand). After each school visit, Doest asks one student to carry Bob back to her car. “You see them glowing with pride,” she says of the newest members of Bob’s growing fan base.

Doest's cousin Jasper Doest is a wildlife photographer. He visited Dr. Doest and accompanied her to a school and a television station with Bob. You can see those photographs, along with Bob's story, at Audubon magazine. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jaspar Doest)

Here's something you probably haven't seen before: a domino run for pyromaniacs! Kaplamino, who brought us Magnets and Marbles last year, built a chain-reaction featuring matches, sparklers, candles, fireworks, and open flames. Rube Goldberg would have been proud.

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This had to be terribly precise, as it even harnesses warm air currents.

The ideas you can see in this video are more reliable than you think and work almost everytime if you build it correctly (the hardest part was to find how to build it correctly, in the screenlink you have the first version of the trick and in the final machine the 100% working version). And when there was a fail it was never caused by the part with the rubber band ( the match always lights up). Feel free to use it in your videos ! I'm sure there is so many tricks to invent with this concept.

If you try this kind of thing, be sure to have a garden hose or a fire extinguisher handy. -via Digg

A. Stiffler and K. Copeland have adopted a new cat. Nix was an adult feral cat with cerebellar hypoplasia that was taken in by a shelter. He has adjusted to domestic life quite well. See more of Nix, both in comic form and in photographs, at Chaos Life. 

See also: Previous posts about cats with cerebellar hypoplasia.

During World War I, the military needed enough food to fight, and civilians back home sacrificed so that they had it. But there weren't any treats. In fact, ice cream was considered "not essential," so the sugar that would have gone into its manufacture was diverted elsewhere, despite the pleas of the ice cream industry. That would change drastically over the next two decades, as Americans turned to ice cream during Prohibition as a substitute for alcohol, and then during the Great Depression as a rare affordable treat. Ice cream came to be associated with the American way of life. So when the U.S. joined in World War II, ice cream went with them.

In 1942, as Japanese torpedoes slowly sank the U.S.S. Lexington, then the second-largest aircraft carrier in the Navy’s arsenal, the crew abandoned ship—but not before breaking into the freezer and eating all the ice cream. Survivors describe scooping ice cream into their helmets and licking them clean before lowering themselves into the Pacific. By 1943, American heavy-bomber crews figured out they could make ice cream over enemy territory by strapping buckets of mix to the rear gunner’s compartment before missions. By the time they landed, the custard would have frozen at altitude and been churned smooth by engine vibrations and turbulence—if not machine-gun fire and midair explosions. Soldiers on the ground reported mixing snow and melted chocolate bars in helmets to improvise a chocolate sorbet.

Read more about the American obsession with ice cream, and how the frozen treat went to war, at the Atlantic. -via Metafilter

The cat sneezed for 15 minutes straight, according to redditor withagecomesnerdines. Then he finally found a clue as to her troubles. A tiny patch of green in her nose. It was a blade of grass! So he pulled it out.

My goodness. That had to be a relief for the poor cat. The joke, of course, is that you're not supposed to snort grass, you're supposed to smoke it. Others have speculated that the cat was probably eating the grass, but instead of going down to her stomach, the blade went up into her nasal cavity. She's all better now. If your cat won't stop sneezing, you might want to look in its nose.   

Summer camp is a great place to set a movie: you're away from your parents, you meet all kinds of new kids (and weird camp counselers), and anything can happen. What happened to us when we went to camp as children was usually fun but not outrageous, yet the possibility of something really outrageous was always there. So of course, those awesome ideas go into movies about summer camp. Relive the most outrageous moments from summer camp movies in a list at TVOM. With video evidence. 

Ancient people (and not-so-ancient people) thought the end of the world was coming when the sun went dark. Today, we know the celestial cycles that produce a solar eclipse and the earth's shadow that produces a lunar eclipse. But when the world did not end, those ancient people looked for meaning in the events. Many myths grew out of their experiences, which are quite different in various parts of the world.

When something dreadful happens in Norse mythology, you can safely assume Loki had something to do with it. The trickster god managed to father the ultimate world-consuming serpent, the queen of the underworld and a god-slaying giant wolf. That wolf, Fenrir, spawned the eventual doom of both sun and moon in the lupine duo Sköll and Hati. Yes, everything Loki touches turns to Ragnarök.

Sköll doesn’t get to gobble up the sun ‘til the end times arrive—and when he finally sinks his teeth in, the light of the world extinguishes in his grim belly. Meanwhile, Hati eats the moon. Stephen Hawking described the wolves as eclipse monsters in The Grand Design and many other publications follow suit, but not everyone’s convinced. Some commentators, such as skeptic Eve Siebert, argue that the often-cited Old Norse poem Grímnismál merely points to a dark eventuality and not recurrent events. Still, it’s possible the Norse saw these tales of doom reflected in eclipses, or even considered them near misses in an eternal race between light and all-consuming dark.

Read about other eclipse myths from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Persia in an article at Atlas Obscura.

If you leave a pile of rocks in place for over a hundred years, it becomes an island with its own ownership papers, history, designation, and controversy. That's what happened to U Thant Island in New York City's East River.

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Even the smallest places can be interesting when you look into what happened to them over time. When we finally saw contemporary footage of the island in this video, all I could see was the survival of plenty of double-crested cormorants. -via Digg