I was surprised to see that lighters weren't invented until 1823, so I looked it up. Döbereiner indeed invented the first lighter of its kind, but there were other lighters before that. Matches are actually ancient, but the "first successful friction match" was indeed developed in 1826 by John Walker. The factoid above is clever, yet it also requires context. It's from a list of things from history that "everyone gets wrong," but keep in mind that some debunking only replaces one myth with another. Some of these busted myths are things you are already aware of, since you do read Neatorama. Some have been debunked, like the story that Swedish meatballs originated in Turkey. Some are still being disputed. But some have sources that you can check, like how the authorities at Ellis Island didn't change people's names as has been assumed. There was one fascinating Ellis Island story that made the news and gave rise to the myth, but the truth is that the idea grew because it was a handy frame for name jokes. 

Jörg Hillebrand is the greatest living Star Trek scholar. We've previously noted how he's proven that Patrick Stewart exists within the Star Trek universe. This conclusion is the work of Hillebrand meticulous research of encyclopedic scope and perfect organization. To us Trekkies, Hillebrand is a colossus bestriding Ten Forward.

So I follow him on X for the connections that he draws. Today, Hillebrand noted that Captain Picard's dress uniform tunic gets shorter as the series progresses. The uniform fortunately includes pants, so we fortunately don't see anything improper. But viewers should remember to look Picard in the eyes and not cast their vision downward.

A street organ is the instrument used by organ grinders going back to the 15th century. They became more elaborate, and the Dutch street organ (draaiorgel) is an entire wagon with a full set of pipes in a wide array of voices and often percussion included, yet it is still all mechanical, powered by air. We assume it's compressed air, because you can imagine grinding one will exhaust you. James the Mechanical Music Man has a hundred-year-old draaiorgel named Blauwtje. The music is recorded digitally on folded and perforated cardboard, fed into the mechanism much the same as a music box or a player piano. But it's not just old music- these "music books" are still being made to play familiar modern tunes like Guns 'n' Roses' hit "Sweet Child O' Mine." Read about how the draaiorgel works, the history of street organs, and how you can hire Blauwtje or another antique mechanical instrument at The Mechanical Music Man website. -via Everlasting Blort 

Yesterday, I watched a YouTube video, thinking I might be able to use it at Neatorama. The story was interesting, it was fairly recent, and less than ten minutes long. The narrator's voice wan't annoying, and it had images instead of just a talking head. But about three-quarters of the way through, he mispronounced a common word and then there were a couple of instances of mashing two words closely together. Oh, this is artificial intelligence. It's an improvement over previous AI narration, but still, I got a creepy sensation that I'd been fooled for several minutes. I lost all interest. 

I'm just a blogger, but I spent years as a commercial voice artist, and I know how it's supposed to be done. How does an actual artist feel about the rise of AI? Matthew Inman brings us a long form comic about what AI-generated art has done to artists, the creative process, and how the rest of us regard art. Sure, it's an essay, but with Inman's delightful and sometimes gross illustrations, it goes by fast. Read the whole thing at The Oatmeal. -via Metafilter, where opinions vary wildly. 

Pay one price, eat as much as you want. The early all-you-can-eat buffets were loss leaders, meaning the establishment lost money, but they did it because it brought people in which paid off in others ways. That works in a casino, but when the idea spread to restaurants, management had to carefully keep up with the economics and adjust prices to avoid losses. That's important, because people can and will eat an astonishing amount of food. Most buffets don't have much in the way of expensive seafood. 

Then there's Red Lobster, which offered all-you-can-eat crab legs and then was astonished that they lost money. So what did they do? They switched from crab legs to endless shrimp on limited days. Then the days went unlimited. When that lost money, they did everything else they could before they rolled back on the shrimp. Red Lobster is still there, but the chain is a shadow of what it once was. However, most folks agree that it wasn't the shrimp that did them in, it was a leveraged buyout by venture capitalists who pulled some pretty skeevy tricks to make a quick profit. That doesn't always work the way you think it will. 

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists, Shimon Sakaguchi, Mary Brunkow, and Fred Ramsdell, for their work in studying the balance of our immune systems. That balance in immunity cells is between ferociously attacking the body's invaders and not attacking the body's own cells. We have trouble fighting our own cancers because the immune system identifies cancer as our own cells -which they are, but we'd like to change that. Organ transplants would work better if we could stop attacks from the immune system, but not destroy our immunity completely. And that balance sometimes fails. Autoimmune disorders like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis occur when the immune system identifies our own cells as invaders and attacks them. 

Our bodies attempt to sort out immune cells that will attack our own bodies when they are first generated, and then other cells police them after they are released into the system, but it doesn't always work perfectly. The Nobel-winning scientists discovered the genes that regulate these self-defense systems within our immune systems. Read about what they've found, and how it could change the world, at the Conversation.  -via Geeks Are Sexy 

(Image credit: Gwilz) 

When Optimus Prime orders his Autobots to transform, he comes across as bold and commanding. He speaks like a leader decisively addressing challenges that they face. But he's actually being conflict avoidant. It's a form of escape, not engagement.

This is true especially when Optimus is in couples' counseling. Here, he is more vulnerable than in combat and more fearful than in a duel with Megatron. On the couch, Optimus must face who he has not been in this relationship. New Yorker cartoonist Adam Sacks illustrates our hero's failure.

My kids once rigged up a pulley to take their clean laundry upstairs. However, after they inched a basket up, they still had to walk up the stairs to put it away and were just as tired. Maybe if they'd studied how to use a pulley a bit more, they'd have tried it a little differently. 

A pulley is one of the basic simple machines, those that harness physics so people can do more work than they could without them. How a pulley works seems really intuitive, until you examine them closely. Single pulleys will transfer work from down to up, but once you multiply them, they transfer work from weight to length. You can balance weight with two pulleys, but once you cross the ropes, you get different results. 

James Orgill of The Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) shows us some of the weirder effects of a pulley. The weirdest is the floating table, which seems like a cool idea until someone bumps into a corner and your dinner goes flying. This video has a 65-second skippable ad at 2:00. -via Damn Interesting 

Vacuum tubes powered the development of new electronics through the first half of the 20th century. That was one reason early radios, television sets, scientific equipment, and even hearing aids were so big and bulky. Tech companies were working on the problem, though, and in the 1930s, Raytheon engineer Norman Krim managed to make vacuum tubes smaller than today's triple-A batteries. These were subminiature tubes, which made the military's Cold War weapon the proximity fuze possible. It also led to the first portable radio and revolutionized the hearing aid industry. Meanwhile, it put Raytheon on the map.

But then Bell Labs gave us the solid-state transistor in 1947. Krim had spent his career miniaturizing vacuum tubes, so he could have led an all-out war between the competing technologies. Yet he was able to see the future of transistors, and made the hard decisions that led to transistors everywhere. Read the story of subminiature tubes and how the transistor took over at Tedium. 

(Image credit: Engradio)   

This is not only dandy, but handy. Any time you start to feel blue about all this (gestures wildly around), click on Have a Dandy Day. Dandy Dan will sing you a curiously uplifting song. It very much reminds me of an '80s sitcom intro. Then you can go for a quote and boop Dandy Dan on the nose to get one of his encouraging lines, like the one shown above. You're not limited to one quote, so keep booping that nose. Going to the faqs and the about pages won't give you much in the way of real information, but there are more good wishes for you in every line.  

Send the link to anyone you know who needs a smile today. Sure, it's silly, but there is a dearth of silliness on the 'net these days, and we need to encourage what little is there, especially when it's this quick and wholesome. -via Boing Boing 

At 19 minutes, this video is a bit longer than any I would normally post, but I couldn't stop watching. We are well aware that Elon Musk is the richest man in the world today. But how does that compare to wealthy men (they are all men) from history? That's a sticky question for a number of reasons. First, you have to adjust for inflation. But that's still just numbers. Then you have to separate personal wealth from state riches under their control. How wealthy was each of the historically richest men compared to other people of his time? And what was the foreign exchange rate then? And most importantly, how can we really define wealth- by units of currency or by power over your neighbor? 

The Corridor Crew wrestles with each of these questions to determine the wealthiest man in history. That is/was probably something these rich guys are/were personally proud of, while the rest of us look at it as shameful. The video tries to alleviate our anger by portraying these guys as goofy CGI contestants in an elimination contest. -via Memo of the Air 

An ambigram is an illustration of a word or phrase that changes depending on its orientation, or it could be that the word or phrase stays the same despite a change in orientation. Changing the orientation could mean rotating it 180°, or 90°, or flipping it as a mirror image, horizontally or vertically. It's a kind of optical illusion. The website Ambigr.am is where ambigram enthusiasts go to see them, learn about them, and show off their own ambigrams. There are constant discussions and competitions between those who craft ambigrams. 

The most impressive page is the Hall of Fame filled with the best winning ambigrams ever. Click on each image to change the orientation (if it isn't already animated). If you can't read it, click on the title to remove the spoiler guard. These are really clever, and some even find novel ways to define "orientation." Who knows? It might imspire you to become an ambigramist.  -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Otto) 

Okay, I got a little carried away with the aliteration in the title, but have you ever looked at a drawing or other depiction of the moon and laughed? That most likely happened when you see a crescent moon with stars visible inside. That's impossible, but it is only the beginning of the many ways you can screw up a picture of the moon.

Once you get away from the more common mistakes, we get into moon mistakes that you were not even aware of until now. How the crescent moon is angled depends on where on earth you live. That explains why the angle of the moon is different on the many national flags on which it appears. If you are out in the African savanna, the moon does not look at all the way it was depicted in The Lion King. Still, if it had been correct, that's what people would have been talking about after seeing it instead of what a great movie it was. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

The image above is described as a "graphic representation," which sounds like it would be a photo, but in this case I'm pretty sure it's an illustration. It's meant to represent two overlapping "odd radio signals," or ORCS. Now, Tolkien fans and D&D players know what an Orc is (they are bad news), but in this case it's a huge ring of magnetized plasma, hundreds of thousands of light years wide, and only visible in radio wavelengths. They've never been seen overlapping until now, and this "Venn diagram" is particularly large and powerful. It was spotted by citizen scientists observing distant space through a radio telescope in Europe called the Low Frequency Array. 

Read some of what we know about these ORCs at Gizmodo. What we don't know covers even more ground, but studying them could lead to breakthroughs in the formation of black holes and the behavior of the universe. -via kottke 

Fire drills were always fun when I was in school. It got us outside for a while, and away from the drudgery of "learning." We didn't realize it at the time, but those protocols became well ingrained in every student and teacher, until we couldn't imagine doing it any other way. We also had nuclear attack drills occasionally, but no one took those seriously because we couldn't imagine actually surviving one.  

It's sad that most safety innovations come after a tragedy, because no one ever visualized what could possibly go wrong until it's too late. American schools grew bigger and bigger over time, and still became crowded during the Baby Boom. In December of 1958, a fire broke out at a parochial school in Chicago. Before it was over, 92 students and three nuns were dead. Immediately, school authorities nationwide rethought building standards and safety protocols for schools. The tragedy was that many of these fire codes were already in place in Chicago, but older buildings were exempt. The new idea of fire drills was found to be very useful in only a short time. Stewart Hicks explains how those came about. The video is not as long as it looks, as the last minute and a half are promotional.