You may have seen viral "weird news" story over the weekend about a man in Japan who died when his six tons of pornography fell on him. It was exactly the kind of story that goes viral. The problem is that it did not happen, or more accurately, it did not happen that way, but was "sexed up" to grab headlines.

So what really happened? Recently a Japanese man was found dead in his apartment. The man lived alone and had been dead for a month before he was discovered. The coroner ruled that he’d died of a heart attack. How do we know the real story? It was reported in Nikkan Spa in Japan on February 28, 2017. The Daily Mail story was published on March 3rd, 2017.

The Daily Mail story doesn’t link out to Nikkan Spa, or acknowledge at all where its information came from. The average reader would assume that all the information presented in the Daily Mail story was collected by the Daily Mail alone. It appears that nothing in the Daily Mail’s version contains original reporting, aside from the sensationalist errors that it introduced.

Yes, the man had a porn collection, and it factored into the story, but not in the way it was circulated. The story of how it got changed along the way is even more interesting than the viral hoax. Gizmodo looks at how the story became something it's not and the importance of digging deeper when something doesn't pass the smell test.

Any time you are playing a round of golf and see an alligator is an opportunity for a video -if you aren't too terrified. In Florida, you have to be ready for such encounters. But this gator was just minding his own business, taking home the bacon, er, fish to the family, as he strolled across the fairway with his catch.

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Or was he showing off? It's a pretty big fish! -via Viral Viral Videos

Electric cars are eerily silent. Hybrid cars will give you a start when they go from gas to electric or vice-versa, because we are used to the sounds go a gas engine. We've read about how car manufacturers are adding artificial sound to make electric cars sound real, but that will become even more important in the future when there are self-driving cars on the streets.  

As a pedestrian, it’s been pretty great being able to hear if a car’s coming. But with the rise of electric vehicles, pedestrian accidents have increased. These problems will only get exacerbated once self-driving cars go mainstream. The computers behind the wheel will need a way of alerting others to their surroundings — Google’s autonomous car team has already said their cars will “honk patiently,” but there’s no denying the fact that computers will have to make up for even more of the noises missing from traditional cars.

With a series of regulations set to come into force, car manufacturers are getting ready: the next generation of cars are going to need to make noise, and somebody has to come up with them.

Read about the need for those regulations and the technology that is being developed for car sounds in the age of self-driving vehicles at Inverse. -via Digg

(Image credit: Thomas Wolf)

Key West, Florida, has long been the home of quirky folks with a sense of humor. That humor is reflected even in gravestones. The Key West Cemetery is famous for its many one-liners, some with backstories that are still available, others for which one must use one's imagination. The gravestone shown here is for Thomas Romer, 1783-1891. The epitaph says he was a good citizen for 65 years. That's nice, but he died at age 108. That's just one of many witty one-liners found at the cemetery, some with pictures, that you'll find at Amusing Planet.  -Thanks, hearsetrax!

(Image credit: Flickr user Stephen Weppler)

Ornithologists Tim Gallagher and Martjan Lammertink went looking for the possibly-extinct Ivory-billed woodpecker in the protected Ojito de Agua area of eastern Cuba. They took along writer Mac McClelland, photographer Greg Kahn, plus a guide and a driver to get them to the remote forest. The group was sidetracked by government regulations before finally getting permission to enter the forest, but even locals doubted they would be able to get past the point where the pavement ends.  

The government driver tries anyway. He takes a deep breath and gathers himself when the pavement ends, and they crash forward through the uneven landscape, jeep rocking violently and Gallagher and the media trying to keep from slamming into one another in the backseat. Until they stop. Stuck. Mired in a deep mud trench. Everyone ejects, and rocks are collected and thrown under the tires and into the muck ahead, and after a while the truck is dislodged. And then more crashing—and some very near tipping—and then they get stuck again. And the driver kills the battery trying to drive out. And everyone again decamps, and the gear and luggage and provisions are offloaded, splayed around the muddy clearing, and the driver runs away, and after a long time he returns leading two yoked oxen from a farm somewhere and they’re tied to the truck and everybody pushes and rocks it while the farmer beats the oxen relentlessly, breaking branches and then entire small trees over their backs and across their faces until they break free and escape and don’t trample anybody but have to be chased down and wrangled and re-tied to the truck.

After a couple of hours of this, Gallagher turns to the writer and remarks, “This gives you a little idea of how hard it is to study these birds. And why nobody’s doin’ it.”

The expedition was difficult for everyone, but Gallagher and Lammertink tell of worse, where they dealt with violent drug cartels, botflies, and water that can kill you. Read about the quest for the Ivory-billed woodpecker at Audobon magazine. -via Metafilter

(Image credit:  Greg Kahn)  

You know how people complain about a mote in their neighbor's eye when they have a beam in their own? This story isn't about sin or judgment, but about how people can be oblivious to their own behavior. Still, it's good to have data about objective observations under controlled conditions, because if we had to rely on just plain common sense, we'd have to argue endlessly with people who refuse to see what's in front of their noses. It's bad enough that we have to argue with people who distrust objective observations under controlled conditions. This comic is from The Gentleman's Armchair. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Here's a timeline app at the Atlantic that pulls up facts and trivia based on your age. It could make you feel old, but should make you feel nostalgic. Or, if you're young, it could just be boring. Enter your birth date to get started. Here's part of what came up for me.

At 10 years old, you were alive to behold people walking on the moon.

You're one of the first people who's never lived in a world without The Cat in the Hat.

Around the time you were born, Jack Kilby demonstrated the use of his invention, the first working integrated circuit.

Each fact also has links to Atlantic articles about the same subject. You can add or subtract a few months to get different facts, or enter a random date to see how different it is for people of different ages. -via Nag on the Lake

Talking to a couple of people at a time is easy, but the prospect of addressing critical number of people at once can make you become paralyzed with fear. I was terrified of public speaking when I was young, but over time, I realized that people in the audience look at you as an admirably brave person for even attempting it. In some cases, that's more important than your overall performance. But getting there is terrifying. This is the latest from Sarah Andersen at Sarah's Scribbles.

Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.

Why rich people really love to pretend to be poor every once in a while, just like in Pulp’s “Common People.”

The greatest six minutes that the British band Pulp ever put to wax pulled off a lot of small victories as it leaped into a larger one. “Common People” highlighted the lingering definitions of class that the U.K. still hasn’t managed to shake; it drew a vibrant character sketch that few songwriters can put together in a single album, let alone a pop song; and it broke through to the mainstream at a time when most British music buyers were focused mostly on Blur and Oasis. It’s still highly regarded, and Jarvis Cocker’s masterwork still generates cultural discussion. But more than two decades after the song reached its peak on the U.K.’s Official Singles Chart, I have to admit to being curious—are there people like the Greek college student who likes slumming at grocery stores and swilling working-class pubs? Are there people who pretend to be lower-class just because they dig being poor? We have to start it somewhere, so we’ll start it there.

Who's Rich?

It's been estimated that 40% of respondents with more than $5 million in assets do not consider themselves rich, according to a 2013 UBS study. The study, which emphasized that lacking stability was the key cause of this opinion, also found that 50 percent of respondents considered a lack of financial constraints as the key signifier of wealth.

Russia’s richest man likes hanging out with the regular folk

The following article is from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into California.

Kelso Dunes (Image credit: Binksternet)

If we told you that there are sand dunes in California that can actually play music all by themselves, would you believe us?

WHEN IN DOUBT, BLAME EVIL SPIRITS

In the 13th century, while traveling through the Gobi Desert, explorer Marco Polo heard eerie sounds coming from the sand dunes around him. He described the noise as “all kinds of musical instruments, and also of drums and the clash of arms.” After hearing the mysterious noises, Polo came to the “logical” conclusion that he must be in the presence of evil spirits. These days, we know that all that music was nature, not spirits. Of all the sand dunes in the world, only a few have the ability to “sing” in the ways that so startled Marco Polo. Beach sand sometimes makes brief squeaking noises, but it’s rare to find dunes that produce the magnificent instrumentals Polo described. There are actually only about 30 singing sand dunes on earth, and California has four noisy sets of them.

DIY Prophacks found animatronic Yodas with lightsabers at 90% off regular price, and bought them all. There were four, but only three responded to his voice as they were supposed to. The fourth was a "doofus Yoda." So he set them up to battle each other!

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Yep, right there is $80 worth of fun. I think the cat enjoyed it, too. He may recoup some of that as the video is doing well, and he's going to make more videos with them, even doofus, if he gets it to work. -via reddit

Update: today he posted "The follow up video everyone was asking for…" 

Two Snapchat users, friends Baierman and Cammy tried to share their everyday lives for one day and see how well they could sync one up with the other. Difficulty: Bairman is in Brooklyn, New York, and Cammy is in Glasgow, Scotland.

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They did a pretty good job of getting into each other's routines, didn't they? (Thanks, Chris!)

The end of the U. S. Civil War left the nation in shambles. President Abraham Lincoln faced the monumental tasks of re-integrating the South back into the Union, healing political wounds, and guiding freed slaves into a new life. But Lincoln was assassinated, and Andrew Johnson became president. Johnson's approach to postwar rebuilding was different from what Lincoln had in mind. Historian Michael Les Benedict and history professors Heather Richardson and Brooks Simpson explain what went on.

“He pardons all but about 1,500 of the leading Confederates,” Richardson says. “Those people who took the South out of the Union are now free and fair citizens again of the United States, less than a year after the end of the war.” The move infuriated northern Republicans, who rallied behind the message depicted in Nast’s cartoon, which Richardson describes as, “don’t put Johnson’s people in office because he’s going to give us back the world we had before the Civil War.”

Left to manage their own affairs, many of the former Confederate states passed Black Codes that stripped African-Americans of almost all rights and essentially returned them to a forced labor system. Republican legislators were appalled when they returned to Congress in December 1865, and immediately tousled with Johnson for the future of the country. “They’re worried about not fully solving the slavery problem and letting it fester, and that might cause instability and even civil war again in the future,” Benedict says.

And there's way more to the problems of Reconstruction. In the midst of the turmoil, illustrator Thomas Nast produced the above political cartoon, which skewers different aspects of Johnson's plans. Smithsonian has an interactive graphic that explains each panel in the political context of the day.

In 2008, a farmer in the Chita region of Russia (north of Mongolia) found that a new litter of kittens had been born in his barn. They were unlike any kittens he'd seen before. He called the office of the Daursky Nature Reserve, and an officer came who identified the kittens as Pallas's cats, also called manul. They waited for the mother to return, but she didn't, so the kittens were taken to the wildlife office. The Fedotov family volunteered two nursing mother cats, and brought them in (with a remaining kitten) to feed the wild kittens.

The nature reserve sheltered the kittens for six months, then released them with radio collars. But it was autumn, and the hand-raised Pallas's cats had trouble hunting in winter, so they were found and brought back to the preserve.

Once spring arrived, and the cats were older, they were released again, this time successfully. The source of the story is in Russian, but there's an English version here both with more pictures.  -via reddit

(Images credit S. Balzhimaevoy)

Rachel and Jun (previously at Neatorama) already had two cats, but then they found Poki, injured and malnourished, on a highway. After his recovery, he showed his true personality. Poki is annoying, selfish, persistent, obsessive, and won't take "no" for an answer. Those traits are fairly typical of cats, and we find them endearing up to a point. Poki takes them to extreme.  

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In this video, Poki has become obsessed with the plastic recycling bin, in addition to his other annoying habits. What can Rachel come up with to keep him out of it? Nothing, it seems. Poki is going into the garbage bin again. -via Metafilter