Every Letter Has a Story Behind It



Each letter of the English alphabet has an origin story, and each one could fill a book. We don't have time for that, so linguist Olly Richards gives us the short version of all 26 letters. They start out as pictograms, which often having nothing at all to do with their modern usage. Then they get filtered through other languages, often ending with Greek and then Latin, but not always. And we learn about ancient cultures that didn't have certain sounds in their own language, but used those letters for something else. By the time we got our standard 26-letter alphabet, those origins were left behind in the mists of obscurity. By the time he's finished with all 26 letters, you will have a new respect for the people who dug all this up for us. -via Laughing Squid


The 12-Day Hunt for President Lincoln's Assassin

A new series on AppleTV+ called Manhunt follows the search for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. The first two episodes of the seven-episode miniseries are already available for streaming. The series focuses on John Wilkes Booth, of course, but also on Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was very close to the president and directed the search for Booth, involving both the Union Army and detectives from New York City. Stanton also offered $100,000 in reward money for the apprehension of Booth and two of his accomplices.

Despite the intense efforts of the federal government, Booth wasn't located until April 26, 12 days after the crime. How could a renowned actor, who face was recognizable up and down the Atlantic seaboard, kill the president in front of a theater full of people and evade capture for so long? It was because Booth had plenty of support from Confederates and Confederate sympathizers who were not ready to face the fact that they had lost the Civil War. Read the historical facts behind the show about the hunt for John Wilkes Booth at Smithsonian.


The Figure 01 Robot Shows His Stuff

The company Figure has a robot that is powered by artificial intelligence, Open AI to be exact. Meet Figure 01. Now, we've seen humanoid robots perform some impressive feats, and we've held uncanny conversations with household assistants. But this robot combines both those abilities with super-smooth dexterity guided by his own vision, and logical reasoning when conversing with a human. You will notice a few things. This robot has learned to use the human "uh" in its language when there is a pause caused by information loading -just like we do. There's also a stutter at one point, which is just too human, especially when partnered with a natural inflection. Also notice that when it puts all the dishes together, at about 1:34, the robot shows a slight hesitation when the plate wobbles, and gives the rack a tiny shove to make sure it falls into place. It was a snap decision, probably unnecessary, but a much faster reaction than most decisions in the video. The only real "mistake" I see is that he identifies the dishes in the rack as a (singular) plate and (multiple) cups. If pluralizing nouns is its only language flaw, it's doing better than most humans.

Throughout the video, I was waiting for Figure 01 to say, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." But it did all the things, and seems almost human. The guy talking to him does, too. -via the Awesomer


Python Meat Could Offer an Efficient Option for Mass Meat Production

Would you like try some python meat? We're told that it tastes like a mix of chicken and calamari.

ABC News reports on a recent study conducted by conservationist Patrick Aust and his colleagues about the sustainability of python meat production. They examined the farming of Burmese and reticulated pythons in Southeast Asia and concluded that the mass production of python meat could be an efficient way to provide meat to more people.

Pythons mature rapidly, reproduce in huge quantities, and efficiently turn their food, such as wild rodents and fish meal, into harvestable meat. They are also more durable to extreme weather than mammals. So try a slice of snake. Maybe add some hot sauce because, Aust warns us, python meat can be a bit bland.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Florida Fish and Wildlife


Harnessing the Drinking Bird Toy to Produce Electricity

The classic drinking bird toy is probably the closest thing we have to a perpetual motion machine, except that it will eventually run out of water. The action of the bird constantly dipping its beak in the water and then standing back up and then dipping again are due to the design of its glass body and the fluid dynamics of the methylene chloride inside. That's explained in the linked article and in this video. Pretty cool, huh?

But listen- there's also a gadget called a triboelectric nanogenerator that harvests electricity from a static charge that happens when two materials are rubbed against each other, like when you pet a cat or comb your hair. A team led by Professor Hao Wu of the South China University of Technology linked two triboelectric nanogenerator modules to the sides of a drinking bird. The movement of the bird, powered only by evaporating water, caused the materials to constantly rub together and produce electricity. The drinking-bird triboelectric hydrovoltaic generator, or DB-THG, ran for 50 hours straight and generated output of up to 100 volts, which is enough to power a range of electronic devices. This little miracle gadget is explained and shown in a video at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: RobinLeicester)


The Demise of Smashmallow Illustrates the Dangers of Scaling Up

Everyone has a story about a friend who ran a store or a service and had more customers than they could handle. You ask why they don't hire assistants or open a second location, and the answer is usually "I don't want to work that hard." That wasn't the case with Jon Sebastiani. He was born into mass market business and wanted to make his own mark and to change the way people ate. One of his big ideas was to sell artisanal marshmallows, the kind he saw in France, and make them an upscale snack with a variety of flavors.

It was difficult enough to find a small bakery to make his marshmallows by hand, but they were a hit. Sebastiani wanted to move into large-scale manufacturing. But there was no way to scale up hand-made marshmallows, and there was no factory or equipment that could handle large batches. That equipment had to be invented. Still, a deal was made, and he fired his small bakery. What could possibly go wrong?

The story of one business that went wrong is also the story of many other businesses that scaled up too soon and too fast. Read about the rapid rise and explosive bust of Smashmallow and find out why staying small is sometimes for the best.  -via Nag on the Lake


How Diet Coke Became the King of Low-Calorie Sodas



Since I avoid sweet drinks, carbonated drinks, and cold drinks, one soda pop seems the same as all the others to me. People who drink soda pop would consider that sacrilege, since everyone has their favorite. Apparently, Diet Coke is particularly popular. Weird History Food explains why by going through the entire history of soda, especially diet sodas. The upshot is that a product's name is more crucial than what's in it.


All Chemists Eventually Break Something Expensive

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and it also appears that you can't have a career in chemistry without an embarrassing experience of breaking some expensive laboratory glass. Keith Hornberger is the chemistry director at a biotech firm, and he knows the feeling. His son felt bad about breaking a beaker in his high school chemistry class, so Hornberger wanted to make him feel better about it by showing him that it happens to everyone. More than a hundred stories rolled in of expensive lab whoopsies.

It's not just beakers, either. Respondents have dropped and broken Geiger counters, microscopes, and thermometers. Or an entire rack of expensive glassware they just cleaned. Plus even the cheapest dropped beaker could be holding something very expensive that spilled, or something dangerous that caused a lot of damage. You can read the entire thread at Twitter, or X, or just the best of them at Chemistry World. -via Real Clear Science


Poisoning Our Essential Inner Colonies with Salt

Salt is an essential mineral in our diets, but almost all of us consume way more salt than we need, because we are programmed to crave it. The conventional wisdom is that too much salt raises our blood pressure, which raises the danger of heart attacks and stroke, because that's what we've always been told. However, there are other dangers in consuming too much salt.

Early civilizations discovered that salt is a natural food preservative, because it kills the microbes that spoil food. It was thousands of years later that we discovered our own digestive systems depend on a variety of microbes to function. This is what we call our gut biome. Now imagine the effect of too much salt in our food killing off the natural bacteria living inside us. Some of these bacteria interact with fiber to produce metabolites, which keep our blood vessels relaxed and reduce inflammation. And besides their effect on blood pressure, our microbiome helps to regulate other systems, like sugar processing and fat absorption.

So what can we do? Sure, we can put away the salt shaker, but it would help a lot to limit our intake of processed foods, which are loaded with salt, sugar, and fat to appeal to our tastes. Read about about the effect of salt on our gut biomes at the Conversation. -via Geeks are Sexy

(Image credit: Joseph Barillari)


Snif & Snüf Confront the Shapes of Things

In this animated short, two characters, Snif & Snüf we assume, encounter a circle and a square -which eventually becomes a "wreck-tangle" as they explore the possibilities. The story involves one-upmanship, selfishness, and learning to share. But while the story is rather cute, it's not the story that's the most remarkable thing about the cartoon. Snif & Snüf is a new animation by Michael Ruocco, but it evokes the early days of the medium, when the whole point of animation was to humorously illustrate things that cannot be done by live actors. The retro look is delightful. Another thing that's particularly impressive is the score. The cartoon has no dialogue, no words at all, but the music emphasizes every movement perfectly, which is rarely seen in modern animation. Ruocco's fans have been following the development of this cartoon on Twitter and are delighted to see the finished product. -via Metafilter


The Pilgrimage Site of St. Patrick's Purgatory

Saint Patrick was a 5th-century English bishop who is credited with converting Ireland to Christianity. He is so revered in Ireland that many legends grew up around his legacy, and it's hard to separate truth from fiction in some of them. One involves the entrance to Purgatory, on an island off the northwest coast of Ireland called Station Island. The concept of Purgatory was already established in the canon of the Catholic church, but it was considered a process instead of a place. St. Patrick, asking God for help in converting the Irish, was led to Station Island and to a cave, which is said to be the entrance to Purgatory. Anyone who entered would be confronted with the flames of judgement, and would be scared into conversion.

The story was first documented in 1184, hundreds of years after Patrick died. The book Treatise on St. Patrick’s Purgatory told the story of Patrick's discovery, and of a knight named Owen, who spent 24 hours locked in the cave and reported a thoroughly harrowing experience, sort of a preview of hell. The book became a bestseller across Europe, and brought thousands of pilgrims to Station Island. Eventually, the cave was filled in, and a basilica was built overtop. But it's still a pilgrimage site, although it's an unpleasant journey designed to test one's fortitude. Read about St. Patrick's Purgatory at Smithsonian.


What Happened to the Last Vietnam POW?

US Air Force pilot Captain Charles Shelton was shot down over Laos in 1965. He survived the crash, and was in radio contact with American forces. But the weather turned bad and he couldn't be found. Shelton reportedly hid for several days before he was captured. Eight years later, in 1973, POWs from Vietnam were repatriated, but Shelton was listed with those who died in captivity. Yet stories continued to come out from people who had met Shelton or had seen him, or had heard those stories to pass along. Some of the stonewalling and secrecy was assumed to be connected with the fact that American pilots should not have been over Laos in the first place. Shelton's wife Marian worked for years to track down witnesses to those sightings, but never came upon concrete information of where he might be or what ultimately happened.

The last rumor of Shelton in these stories was in 1985, twenty years after he was captured. Marian kept up the fight to find him until 1990, when she took her own life. It was only in 1994 that, at the request of his children, Colonel Shelton (he was promoted in absentia) was officially listed as deceased. But we still don't know what happened to him. Read the story of Colonel Shelton, the last Vietnam War POW, at Historic Mysteries. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Dennis Rogers)


Simon and Garfunkel Like Big Butts



Dustin Ballard is at it again. The YouTuber who goes by There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) has once again harnessed artificial intelligence for the stupidest project imaginable, and the result is pure gold. The "voices" of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel perform Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" to the tune of "The Sound of Silence." But wait, there's more! Piggybacked onto this song are the lyrics from "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas. Ballard tells us it's from their album Booty Over Troubled Water.

Whatever you think of the implications of artificial intelligence, it's still good for a laugh when you don't take it seriously. Ballard doesn't totally depend on AI, though. There I Ruined It is now also a live band, and you can catch their shows in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.


The People Who Collect Crocodile Hairballs

Crocodiles eat plenty of other animals. They can digest bones and feathers and meat, but they cannot digest hair, so any fur from a mammal meal just sits inside their digestive systems until they hack it up, and that can be years. The hairballs, or bezoars, can be relatively fresh and hairy, or they could be smooth like a stone if they've been tumbled around inside a croc for a long time. One bezoar that was analyzed contained hair from flying fox, wild pig, Papuan wild dog, possum, cuscus ...and more than one human. John Lever owns a crocodile farm in Queensland, Australia, and says he doesn't have many hairballs because his crocs are fed meat that has been skinned, but he tells the story about the time he got a deal on rabbit parts, and ended up with clogged plumbing because of the rabbit fur.

Yes, people actually collect crocodile bezoars. Finding one in the wild is a special time, because you know a crocodile is near. They can be as big as a football, which means the croc is quite huge. There is a drawback in that guests often find them disgusting. Read about the men who collect crocodile hairballs at ABC News Australia. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Mark Norman)


30 Pies, Costumes, and Math Jokes for Pi Day

Did you manage to eat a pie today? It's Pi Day, the perfect day for it. Americans write March 14th as 3/14, so it's pi, the irrational number that gives us the circle, and it's also Albert Einstein's Birthday. Einstein features in some of the memes of the day, like advertising pie for sale and a baby who is an Einstein lookalike, but the greatest pies you can imagine are being shown around the 'net today. The pie above was made by redditor Itzjacki with a pi symbol, but it's not a circle. That's because pie are square. But if you're going for a work of art, you need to turn to Jessica Clark-Bojin, also known as thepieous, who made the awesome pi pie below.



For sheer work involved, you can't beat this apple pie filled with apples cut into the shapes of numbers by nerdynummies. It must have been difficult to arrange them in the right order.



You'll see plenty more pies made for Pie Day, and some pies that are impressive even without any reference to the number, plus a wide range of Pi Day celebrations of all kinds in a ranked list at Bored Panda.    






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