In the days of yore, Tulare Lake was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. Then in the 19th century, the lake in what would become Kings County in California was drained by agricultural farms as the fertile soil was used to grow nuts, cotton, tomatoes, and safflower. In its place was a small lake that reappeared during rainy times, but most of the acreage went to farmland. Then in 2023, winter storms dumped enough snow and water to resurrect Tulare Lake to more than 100,000 acres of water! Farmers found their fields underwater and orchards drowned. Tourists flocked in, but they couldn't swim in the lake because the water was laden with agricultural chemicals and had irrigation equipment in it.

But those who held out hope that Tulare was back to stay had their visions dashed this year. As fast as Tulare grew, it has once again shrunk to almost nothing. Read about disappearance, reappearance, and second disappearance of Tulare Lake at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image: USGS/the Guardian)

This July, thousands of young, healthy athletes from all over the world will converge on Paris for the Summer Games, and the City of Love is getting ready to welcome them. Olympic organizers have ordered 300,000 condoms for 2024, to be distributed free to the athletes in the Olympic Village. We've come a long way from pretending that hookups didn't happen among the participating athletes. After all, back when the modern Olympics began in 1896, women didn't compete at all. But even before the free condom distributions began, on-site pharmacies stocked plenty of them at the Olympics for those who wanted them.

The first Olympic condom giveaway was in Calgary, Alberta, for the Winter Games in 1988. Organizers stocked 6,000 of them. The number has been raised exponentially since then. In 1992, they came in the colors of the Olympics rings at Albertville, France. There have been attempts to charge money for them, and vending machine have been tried over the years, but it's just easier to hand them out free.  The 300,000 condoms for the 2024 games isn't even the record number, either. Read up on the history of condom giveaways at the Olympics at Mental Floss.

It's March Madness time, when college sports outshine everything else, so how about an Honest Ad for the NCAA? This video puts the sponsor message at the beginning, so you can skip to 1:12 to see the skit. Then Roger Horton does his thing exposing the seedy underbelly of the exploitation of the student athlete. The NCAA is the NPAA here, for obvious reasons. The controversy about "amateur athletes" in the Olympics was that some countries followed the rules while others didn't, and we eventually had to change the rules to make the competition more fair. For college athletics, the problem is that everyone in the business makes oodles of money, from coaches to administrators to TV networks to bookies to scalpers to hotels, everyone except for the college players who actually do the work to make the system worth watching. For them, college sports is like an unpaid internship, where their future is a gamble and they might or might not have time to actually earn a degree. This video contains NSFW language.

Almost 150 years after the fact, future neurologist Dr. Kári Stefánsson heard his father talk about the shopkeeper in his hometown of Djúpivogur, Iceland, who was a Black man named Hans Jónatan. Jónatan wasn't born in Iceland, but he settled there, married, became a valued member of the community, and fathered descendants who still lived nearby. Later biographies pieced together the story of Hans Jonathan, who was born into slavery in the Caribbean, was brought to Denmark, walked away from his enslaver and joined the Danish Navy, became a war hero, and then had to fight for his freedom in court more than once. After losing the final court battle in 1802, he simply disappeared. There was also the story of a teenager named Hans Jónatan, who arrived in Djúpivogur on a merchant ship in 1802, and who spoke Danish and played the violin. He was also ready to settle down, and worked at the local general store and trading station, which he later ran.

The story of Hans Jonathan is quite compelling in itself, but there was a new chapter in the 21st century, when Kári Stefánsson, now a neurologist, began a vast DNA study in Iceland to investigate the genetic markers of multiple sclerosis. Since Iceland is quite genetically homogenous, mutations would stand out from the crowd better than with other populations. But the study also yielded intriguing information from Hans Jónatan's 788 verified living descendants. By studying the DNA of these descendants, Stefánsson's team was able to reconstruct large parts of not only Jónatan's genome, but that of his mother as well -two centuries after they lived, with no trace of their own DNA. Read the intriguing story of Hans Jonathan and his legacy in Iceland at Damn Interesting. Or you can listen to it in podcast form. -via Strange Company

Warning: do not watch this video while you are enjoying a meal, because you won't be enjoying it so much. Sam O'Nella Academy (previously at Neatorama) runs down several dishes that are considered delicacies in various places or at various times in the past, but aren't allowed to be imported to the US or are else a really bad idea for one reason or another. Some have to be prepared just so or they are dangerous, others are infringing on species that we should be protecting, and some are just contrary to what we expect to eat. These include casu martzu, shark fin soup, ackee, bird's nest soup, and ortolan. The ones you've heard of may make you curious about the ones you haven't, or maybe you dread learning about them. This video contains a little NSFW language and some gross drawings.

The San Francisco Gate reports that officers in the California Highyway Patrol pulled over a gentleman driving his car alone in the carpool lane on Interstate 880 near San Francisco. A shirt and hat took the place of an actual person in the front passenger seat. The driver, though, said that the setup represented an imaginary friend.

The express lane system allows for reduced tolls for cars with multiple occupants. This driver, the police allege, was attempting to trick cameras into reading a passenger. This is not permissible.

What about an anime hug pillow if it depicts your waifu? I'm asking for a friend.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: California Highway Patrol

Imagine one day you see your roommate, and his face looks like a demon or something out of Star Trek. That was the experience of Victor Sharrah when he began to suffer from a rare condition called prosopometamorphopsia. Other people with the condition may see faces with features in the wrong places, weird textures, or other distortions, but only on actual faces they encounter. Pictures of faces appear normal to them, which allowed an artist to recreate what Sharrah sees in the images above. Prosopometamorphopsia is so rare that only around 100 cases have been identified since 1904. However, it is probable that people who suffer from it do not seek help for fear that they will be diagnosed with schizophrenia or other mental illness. Yet the problem in perceiving faces seems to be the only symptom. Scientists don't know what causes it, but the effects are often temporary, and if not, there are ways to treat it. Farrah is able to see faces as normal with the help of color-shifting glasses. Read more about prosopometamorphopsia at Smithsonian.

(Image credit:  A. Mello et al.)

Jeremie Carrier demonstrates a "15 note poly tempo pendulum." He describes it as "an amazing sweep of the rythmic subdivision spectrum!" I didn't understand those words, either, but I'll try to explain.

What he did was record himself 15 times, each time playing a steady beat of one note, but each recording is of a different note and a different beat. The tempos vary by only two beats per minute from one video to the next. Then all the videos were edited together. What we get is a beat that becomes more discordant, but then several of the notes will play a tune of sorts, then veer off from each other, and another set of notes will then stand out as if they were playing a tune. It's no symphony, but it gets more interesting as it goes. Carrier rang a bell to show us where a new "movement" begins. At five minutes and five seconds, all the notes and beats line up again as they were in the beginning. Cool.

As I listened, this started to sound familiar. The very first post I ever published at Neatorama was for a geometric music generator called the Whitney Music Box that produced this same effect.

-via Laughing Squid

You know about The Year Without a Summer, when the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora caused crops to fail around the world in 1816. People couldn't afford to feed their beasts of burden, and that threw a damper into transportation, which relied on horses. But necessity is the mother of invention, and a young German named Karl von Drais invented a machine to make walking faster and easier. His device that he called the laufmaschine (running machine) consisted of two wheels connected by a frame with a saddle. The rider pushed off the ground with his feet, and propelled himself further and faster than was possible by just walking. Von Drais patented his invention in France as the vélocipède. In England, the invention was called a draisine, or a hobby-horse. It wasn't long before other engineers found a way to propel the running machine without running, leading to the modern concept of a bicycle. But without a volcanic explosion, we might never have have had them. Read about the laufmaschine at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Wilhelm Siegrist)

According to the respected Pew Research Center, which conducts public opinion polling on many topics, 12% of young Americans can operate a SSBN, which is one of these:

The SSGNs are US nuclear-powered submarines that, instead of firing nuclear missiles, fire non-nuclear cruise missles at land-based targets. Navy nuke school is famously demanding, passing only the most focused, intelligent, and physically fit people into the ranks of American submariners. Yet, despite the negative reputation of Generation Z, fully 12% of them have qualified. This percentage far outstrips that of older generations.

What's going on here? Pew does not actually think so many young people have actually earned their Dolphins. Rather, Pew conducted this study to illustrate that opt-in polling produces unreliable results. Opt-in polling means that the study designers do not restrict who can participate in a poll and thus cannot argue that the participants are a representative sample.

The study found that young people and Hispanic adults were especially likely to affirm absurd claims, although I don't see an explanation of why this is the case.

Anyway, when you see the results of an online poll that says that an alarmingly large number of people believe in something profoundly disturbing, such as Holocaust denial, realize that extremely faulty survey design may be the cause of these numbers. The population has not gone completely insane yet.

-via Megan McArdle

Zoos in Japan train their employees for the possibility that one of the animals might escape. They can't use real animals for these training sessions, so they improvise with employees in costume. We've previously shown you escape drills featuring a zebra, a gorilla, a rhinoceros, and a bear. Recently, the zookeepers at the Tobu Zoo practiced capturing an escaped white tiger. The scenario was that an earthquake had broken the glass of the enclosure, freeing the tiger. The drill was apparently successful, and the "tiger" was defeated by a tranquilizer gun. It's not clear whether the tranquilizer was real, but if so, the employee probably got the rest of the day off.

While it's always good to know the protocol in advance, an actual escape would confront zookeepers with an animal that is much stronger, faster, and more bitey than any human could hope to portray. The actual white tiger makes a cameo appearance in this video, from behind glass. -via Boing Boing

In 1907, Georges Méliès illustrated how the sun and the moon fell in love and came together to create an eclipse in his movie The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon. Ever since then, both solar and lunar eclipses have played a role in cinema, often as an explanation for something magical or as a portent of coming doom. It make plenty of sense, as an eclipse is a natural phenomena that feels unnatural because they are so rare and the effects are bizarre. The sun is blotted out, or the moon changes shape, and residents of earth are left confused. The symbolism is clear when the powerful sun is defeated by the lesser moon, which should be a warning to those in power on earth.

While the alignment in the heavens is a significant element for any fictional story, an eclipse is also an excellent visual for a movie. One production in 1961 even delayed shooting so that the cameras could capture a real eclipse that was part of the story (shown above). Read about how eclipses have been used in movies at Atlas Obscura.

(Image source: YouTube)

Psst! Do you want to see a lot of optical illusions in one sitting? Get ready, because The Paint Explainer (previously at Neatorama) is going to go through forty (40!) of them in this video. See, our eyes are amazing devices, sensing light in all its variations of shade, color, and movement, translating it into signals that go to our brain. Our brains are even more amazing, because they take those signals and translate them back into information we can use, in an instant, so we can negotiate the world around us. To keep up the pace, our brains take shortcuts based on what is familiar to us. The brain relies on the world being consistent in order to make these leaps in perception that give us those shortcuts. When something messes with our brains' "rules" for interpreting visual signals, we get optical illusions. While they can be confusing, they are also fun to see, and even more fun to understand. Still, since there are so many in this one video, you might want to see a few and take a break, then go back for the rest in short sessions.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

The world is full of wonders, but it's also constantly changing. We know of places that changed completely, sometimes before man was ever around to see them. There are also places that we thought were legendary that were fairly recently discovered to have been real in the past. But the most fascinating are those that are documented, and even exist in images, that we will never see again. Pictured above is the Pink and White Terraces of New Zealand. The beautiful natural warm pools and mineral formations were sacred to the Maori, and later brought in a good living for people hosting the tourists who flocked to see them. But that came to an end when Mount Tarawera erupted on June 10, 1886. The Pink and White Terraces collapsed into the volcanic crater, along with a village, never to be seen again.

Read about the Pink and White Terraces and nine other places that no longer exist at Mental Floss. Or you can listen to the list in a video.  

(Image credit: Charles Blomfield)

A really bumpy train ride
byu/not_a_profession infunny

"Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night." What you see here is an everyday experience in Myanmar. The train ride from Yangon to Bagan takes around nineteen hours and is notorious for its bumpiness. Getting any sleep is impossible, even if you are in a sleeper car. The video above was posted at reddit to much delight. But then, everyone decided what it really needed was a musical soundtrack.