Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is all about history. Many families take a trip there as their children begin to study the American Civil War, so they can experience the actual battlefield and visit the many museums dedicated to the Battle of Gettysburg and the larger history of the war. One that may be especially interesting for children is Civil War Tails at the Homestead Diorama Museum. This museum features expansive dioramas that illustrate the military engagements of the war, with a twist. All the tiny soldiers are cats! Look closely, and you'll see ears and tails on all the figures.

Civil War Tails is a project by twin sisters Rebecca and Ruth Brown who are fascinated with Civil War history and have been making clay cat soldiers to scale since they were children. Rebecca bought the Homestead Museum in 2013 as a place to display their battle cat dioramas. They are very serious about conveying the importance of the war, but think making the combatants into cats is a way to make the subject more engaging. Besides, making a cat is easier than crafting a human figure. They have recently unveiled their 10,000th cat figure! See more pictures of Civil War Tails at Facebook.  -Thanks, William!

(Image credit: Civil War Tails at the Homestead)

This is what can happen when you live on the internet. Not just that an internet outage will destroy your whole day, but how this guy got into the shape he's in. He's apparently been researching internet conspiracy theories, down the rabbit hole into a world of paranoia and altered perception. Okay, an internet outage requires a call to the service provider, miraculously resulting in a service call, which is suspicious enough in this day and age. But you get the feeling that this may be the first actual live person he's talked to in weeks. You can also believe that it's probably been that long since he took a shower or walked outside. This guy has his problems, and the further we go into the scene, the worse those problem prove to be. Don't let this happen to you!

Steakhouse, directed by Ft. Langley, is described as a "sci-fi comedy," although I would classify it as a short horror film. -via Nag on the Lake

The US Constitution is the framework for how the American government works. It's been that way for more than 200 years, so it's hard to imagine how the system could be any other way. But when that framework was hammered out at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, there was no blueprint for a nation to govern itself. A number of ideas were proposed by our Founding Fathers that didn't make it into the Constitution or any of its Amendments. Some representatives were wary of the idea of a president, because one man leading the country sounded too much like a king. Alternative ideas included having three presidents at once, or a council of 12 with equal powers. They also toyed with the idea of having no states at all, or else treating the states like lesser entities, for which the federal government would appoint governors. And the very first proposed Amendment would have set a constant number of constituents for each congressional representative. If it had been adopted, we would now have a House of Representatives with 6600 members! Read about the ideas that were floated for our Constitution that never made it into the final version at Mental Floss.  

(Image credit: Junius Brutus Stearns)

Randall Munroe of xkcd spends an awful lot of time and brain power answering theoretical questions in his What If? series (previously at Neatorama). For example, one question is "If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time?" The answer is Australia, not because it's the largest country (it is 6th), but because it's the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, which tends to point more to the center of the Milky Way.

Dumb questions can lead to a lot of learning. In the video above, the question is "If all the lightning strikes happening in the world on any given day all happened in the same place at once, what would happen to that place?" My first thought was that everyone would avoid that place, and that is certainly one of the consequences. But to understand the implications, we must first learn a few things about lightning, which is well worth the time it takes for Munroe to get to the actual question in this video. Spoiler alert: if it happened, it would look awesome. From a distance.

An extremely rare chunk of Tyrian purple dye has been found in England, in the archaeological dig on the grounds of the Carlisle Cricket Club. The dye was found in the drainage area of the remnants of a Roman bathhouse dating back to the third century CE, during the reign of Roman emperor Septimius Severus. It is a rare find because Tyrian purple, also called imperial purple, was such an expensive dye that it was restricted to royalty, and someone lost it in the bathhouse drain. You can imagine the uproar that must have caused. It is also rare to find Tyrian purple in a solid form, as it was used mostly for paint and for dying fabric. Also, the specimen is still quite colorful after 1800 years!  

Tyrian purple was so expensive in its day because it was made from the glands of murex snails, the most productive being the species Hexaplex trunculus. It took about a quarter million snails to produce one ounce of dye. These sea snails live in shallow water and die when exposed to air. Yet the dye gland can only be extracted from a living snail (which causes its death), or the dye will deteriorate immediately, so each snail must be kept alive until the glands can be harvested, one by one. The process for doing all this is explained in this post. The smell of the dye was remarkably bad, as you would imagine the smell of rotting sea creatures to be, and would not yield to washing the fabric. Emperors who wore Tyrian purple had to be heavily perfumed to disguise it.

The name Tyrian purple came from the Phoenician city of Tyre, which, along with the city of Sidon, was a center of the dying industry. In fact, the word Phoenicia came from the Greek word Phoinkes, which means "the purple people." Both cities were wealthy from Tyrian purple, and both cities were known to smell awful. There is no mention of whether the chunk recovered in England still smells. You'll find even more links about Tyrian purple at Metafilter.     

(Image credit: Wardell Armstrong)

Sweden has the odd PhD tradition of Lutherishly nailing your thesis to a wall a few weeks before your defense, so here is my PhD student Vidya Somashekarappa nailing her thesis into the designated thesis nailing wall (officially required btw). pic.twitter.com/2s8DiwCy1l

— Asad Sayeed @asayeed@zirk.us (@asayeed) April 3, 2024

Sweden is historically a Lutheran nation, so the tradition of nailing statements to buildings is strong. At Umeå University, when doctoral students complete their theses, they nail a copy to the wall of the library in a ceremony called spikning or "thesis spiking." The library's website says that this procedure "is no longer mandatory," implying that, at some point, it was a formal requirement. Still, many students choose to participate in this ritual.

Yesterday I drove through Atlanta as the construction season is starting to ramp up, so I am very impressed with this pavement replacement project in Switzerland. They simply erect a bridge over a section of the road so that cars can drive right across while work is going on underneath! The crew carves up the old pavement, repairs and prepares the sub-pavement, lays new asphalt, steamrolls it smooth, and cleans up the mess, before moving the bridge to a new repair section. Here's a machine translation of the YouTube description:

The mobile ASTRA Bridge construction site bridge has been in use again on the A1 in the direction of Zurich since the beginning of April 2024. The decking work under the ASTRA Bridge is progressing according to plan. While work is going on under the bridge, traffic above is moving in two lanes at 60 km/h.

You have to wonder how long it takes to move the bridge, because they probably do have to divert traffic for that part- or do they? Here's another video from the Swiss Federal Roads Office showing how the ASTRA Bridge is erected.



So yes, they close lanes to put the bridge up, but even so, it is a minimal closure compared to the weeks that lanes are closed in the US while miles of highway are repaved at a time.  -via Boing Boing

We tend to take it for granted that blue jeans were invented by Levi Strauss, who made work pants for the miners of the California Gold Rush. It's true that Strauss designed tough work pants with rivets, but the blue denim they were made of had already been worn by working class people in Italy for at least a couple of hundred years! We know this because of ten paintings by an unidentified Renaissance painter known only as the “Master of the Blue Jeans.” This painter depicted a family of working class people clad in denim, with a white weft and blue warp, the same as the jeans we wear today. The warp threads were dyed with indigo, which brought the price of blue fabric down considerably after it began to be imported from India.

The Master of the Blue Jeans is the subject of a new exhibition at Galerie Cenesso in Paris opening May 16. Read up on the history of blue denim and see two of the paintings from the mysterious Master of the Blue Jeans at Smithsonian.

(Image source: Galerie Canesso)

Ontario horse groomer Autumn Purdy plays music while she works in the stable. One quarterhorse mare really likes the music, and will bob her head and dance -but only to heavy metal tunes. She loves music by Rammstein, Motörhead, Of Virtue, Rob Zombie, Pantera, and Korn, but her absolute favorite music is by Slipknot. Purdy did a little music experiment, and the horse just turned her back when hearing country music! She bobbed a little to Tom Jones, but then soon lost interest. We don't know the horse's real name, but she's become famous as Rock Horse. Some of the bands have actually sent Purdy new songs for the horse to check out and give her opinion. You can see more of her head-banging joy at TikTok. -via Laughing Squid

La plus grande baguette du monde - record battu ! Elle mesure 140,53m et a été confectionnée à Suresnes @villedesuresnes pic.twitter.com/2uHY9g5Npn

— Colas Aura (@ColasAura) May 5, 2024

Charles De Gaulle once said of his homeland:

My mind assures me that France is not really herself unless she is in the front rank; that only vast enterprises are capable of counterbalancing the ferments of disintegration in­herent in her people; that our country, as it is, surrounded by the others, as they are, must aim high and hold itself straight, on pain of mortal danger. In short, to my mind, France cannot be France without greatness.

De Gaulle rose to international attention at the moment of France's greatest humiliation. She needed De Gaulle and men like him to restore France to her natural station in the world.

Five years ago, bakers in Italy produced a baguette--that icon of French cuisine--that was longer than any other in the world. Now, The Globe and Mail reports, France has regained its title as the creator of the world's longest baguette. On Sunday, bakers at Suresnes baked one that was 140.53 meters (or approximiately 71 Charles De Gaulles laid end to end) long.

-via Dave Barry

Bob Knetzger of Boing Boing reports that, last year, Mattel teamed up with the National Federation of the Blind to produce a Hot Wheels toy car designed specifically for the visually impaired. The die cast car is covered with the raised bumps of Braille text to read "Hot Wheels Twin Mill."

This name is a reference to a concept car that was pioneered as a Hot Wheels design in 1969 before it was turned into a real car.

Mattel makes two of the Hot Wheels Braille Racer, both of which can be hunted on eBay by collectors eager for a rare piece.

This viral video of a provenance unknown to me shows a woman giving a preschool-age girl an unforgettable ride on a highly convincing roller coaster simulator. Sure, it just looks like an upturned chair, but when paired with a first-person point of view video of a ride, it's good enough to persuade the tyke that she's really at Six Flags.

-via TYWKIWDBI

The most common words to grace a cake are "Happy Birthday." Most people can spell "happy," but when it comes to "birthday," the danger of a brain fart increases. Jen Yates at Cake Wrecks has seen so many cases of bizarre spellings of that one word that she had to split a compilation into two posts, and the misspellings run the gamut of missing letters to completely different words to incoherent jumbles.

 

Having once worked in a supermarket, I know how this happens. Someone buys a blank cake and requests an inscription in icing. The bakery/deli department has as few people on duty as possible, and half of them are new, and the other half have avoided ever learning how to use icing. So a request goes out to the entire store for someone who's done it before, or is at least willing to try. Bob in the loading dock sees a chance to spend a few minutes in the air conditioning with no heavy lifting, and volunteers. And if any volunteer sees a misspelling, it is way easier to pretend not to see it than to fix it. The customer? They have a ready-made submission to Cake Wrecks.

See how people can can misspell "birthday" in ten ways here and eight more ways here.

Bernth, an Austrian guitarist who fills his YouTube channel with musical oddities, including using the worst rated guitar picks and amps and playing guitars made of LEGO pieces and an acoustic guitar that is partially submerged in water. Bernth also modifies extreme guitars, such as building one with an extremely long neck and another that has 24 strings.

Is it hard to play a 24-string guitar? Even that challenge was unsufficient for Berth, who most recently cobbled together guitars into a 109-string monstrosity that produces a lovely sound. It does, though, require a lot of coordination to play effectively.

-via The Awesomer

Welcome to Edgewood, BC
byu/robinnuber infunny

Redditor robinnuber make a promotional video for Edgewood, British Columbia. Despite the dry humor, it ends up being a place everyone wants to visit, or even live there. When you have a ribbon factory and more ostriches than people, you've got something to talk about. Edgewood has only a few hundred residents, but it has an extensive Wikipedia entry detailing the history of the town, with no mention of the population. That means that some Wikipedia member is pretty proud of their town. The reach of the internet means that commenters that are familiar with Edgewood came in to note that the general store and the gas station are, in fact, the same place. As if we couldn't tell.  

A noticeable detail is the can-and-string microphone. It makes this video look comically pre-industrial, but it's a genius idea. The phone slipped inside the can records the narrative while being protected from wind noise. -via reddit