Forty-five years ago, we thought colonizing the moon was surely in our future. But once the space race was won, the moon was found to be not useful enough to justify the expense. And the expense of getting there was astronomical. Maybe that’s where the word came from. Our dream of living on the moon would be even more expensive.
This video from Wendover Productions (previously at Neatorama) explains the economics of space colonization. The planned Mars mission looks different when you look at it from the financial side. The Apollo missions also look different. Did we really spend that much money just to beat the Soviets to the moon? -via Digg
You can’t lose when you 1. think outside of the box, and 2. tell the people what they want to hear, even if it’s something they haven’t thought of before. That may even work on your opponent! This is the latest from Raynato Castro and Alex Culang at Buttersafe.
Mercury is a dense metal, but it’s also liquid, which makes it a rather odd substance to play experiment with. The same volume of mercury is 13 times heavier than water. Mad scientist CodyDon Reeder wondered if you could flush mercury down a toilet. No, not your toilet, because it’s dangerous to put mercury in the sewer system. But a working toilet with a closed water system? Let’s see.
He also wondered how much mercury it would take to stop up a toilet, and then what would it be like to flush a toilet with mercury and no water! A toilet tank of mercury weighs about 240 pounds, so that in itself presented challenges, but Cody managed to do it. This is way more interesting than you might think. YouTube commenters say he should be nominated for an Ig Nobel next year. -via Metafilter
In 1900, the city of San Francisco decided not to bury any more dead people in the city limits. In 1914, they decided to move the existing cemeteries, which meant digging up thousands of remains. All San Francisco residents were to be buried instead in Colma, a small community south of the city.
Today, Colma is home to 1,800 living residents and 1.5 million dead including some of America’s most famous personalities such as the denim trouser pioneer, Levi Strauss, newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and business tycoon Amadeo Giannini, the founder of Bank of America.
The large number of under-the-ground population have earned the town the somber moniker “the City of the Silent”. Colma’s residents, however, take their situation with humor. The town’s official slogan is “It’s great to be alive in Colma.”
It’s a big, scary world out there. Leaving the soft, warm cocoon of family can make one turn hard. Is this an apt analogy, or just plain silliness from Lunarbaboon?
Michigan State professor and urological surgeon David Wartinger noticed that some of his patients tended to come home from vacation with fewer kidney stones, mainly because they told him about passing kidney stones while visiting the Disney theme parks in Orlando. One man passed three kidney stones, one every time he rode the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Wartinger decided to investigate by going to Florida himself.
First, Wartinger used a 3-D printer to create a clear silicone model of that three-time-stone patient’s kidney. He then filled the kidney with stones and urine. (Not real urine, I assumed, as I know the park already has plenty.) Then he and colleague Marc Mitchell bought two tickets and flew to Orlando.
Of course, the researchers had to get permission from Disney World before bringing the model kidney onto the rides. “It was a little bit of luck,” Wartinger recalls. “We went to guest services, and we didn't want them to wonder what was going on—two adult men riding the same ride again and again, carrying a backpack. We told them what our intent was, and it turned out that the manager that day was a guy who recently had a kidney stone. He called the ride manager and said, do whatever you can to help these guys, they're trying to help people with kidney stones.”
Amazingly, the fake kidney passed the stones in the real urine, in 16.67 percent of the rides in the front of the coaster and 63.89 percent of rides in the back of the coaster.
Sam Klemke recorded some footage of himself every year from 1977 through at least 2011 (and probably since then as well). In this video, small clips are shown in reverse order. This project was eventually made into a documentary.
While we see him getting younger, he constantly talks about how old he is getting. I suppose that’s normal. Today is my birthday, and I can’t help but think about how I’ve never been this old. Yet I think the same thought every year. -via reddit
“Curry” has become the unofficial cuisine of England, which has boosted that country’s culinary reputation considerably. It was once considered exotic, but shouldn’t have been, since it is eaten around the world and even appeared in an American cookbook as far back as 1824. In fact, the only place that doesn’t have a curry tradition is India.
That word “curry,” now as then, has a meaning as vague and inclusive as its ingredients. It can mean any stew made with “Indian” spices, as well as the yellow spice powder (usually a mixture of turmeric, coriander, cumin, and fenugreek) used in raisin-studded chicken salads. It’s not difficult to trace the spread of curry—it traveled by sea, following traders and slavers and laborers, the ancient vectors of colony and conquest—but the word itself is an altogether different beast, a bastard with many potential parents and no clear pedigree.
The Portuguese first came to India’s palm-toothed southern shores in 1498, in search of cardamom, cloves, and black pepper, each among the world’s most valuable commodities. Lacking a word to describe the spicy, coconut-thickened stews they found there, they went ahead and made one up: carel, taken from the Tamil word kari.
From those early traders, the Indian dishes we call curry followed the spread of imperialism. Read about how curry took over the world at the A.V. Club.
The Lord of the Rings showed us the cozy underground homes of the Shire, where Hobbits live. They were intriguing, how they meshed with the surrounding natural world, and their Middle-Earth details. There are quite a few Hobbit homes in the real world, either specifically designed to be Tolkien or that happen to share the esthetic. Underground homes are quite eco-friendly and energy-efficient, and some of these houses fit into the landscape so well that you might not even realize they are there, like the Dune House in Florida.
Look too quickly, and you may miss the fact that a house is built under all of the greenery. It’s called the Dune House, is located in Atlantic Beach, Florida, and is practically hidden in the landscape. As far as Hobbit houses go, this one is completely decked out. It’s a two story building and was built in 1975 by famed architect William Morgan — that means he had a jump on the trend before LOTR was even a thing. The home is worth $1.4 million dollars, and it definitely looks expensive inside.
Well, The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the ‘50s, but most of the ten homes on this list are relatively recent and resemble the Hobbit homes in the movies. You can even visit and sleep in a couple of them!
While the alien race we know as the Klingons appeared in the original Star Trek TV series, they only achieved the iconic look and used their own language in the first Star Trek feature film in 1979. The language they spoke in Star Trek: The Motion Picture consisted of words made up by James Doohan, who played Engineer Scott. The role of non-human species and their languages would expand for further movies. About that time time, Marc Okrand of the National Captioning Institute was preparing to do close-captioning in real time for the 1982 Academy Awards.
During preparations in L.A., Okrand was having lunch with an old friend when serendipity struck. The friend was working on what would become Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and the film just so happened to need a linguist to dub a conversation between Vulcans Spock and Saavik (played by a young Kirstie Alley). Using clues from the little bit of Vulcan spoken in the first film, Okrand got to work. But Vulcan at this time wasn't really a language. "The scene was filmed with the actors speaking English. My job was to make up gobbly-goop that fit the lip movements and then was dubbed in," Okrand says. Two years later, he was asked backed to work on the third Star Trek movie, but this time the task was a bit more complex: to develop the Klingon language.
Okrand started with the scraps of words the Klingons had already used, and built an entire language from the bottom up. He tells a little of how he did it at Popular Mechanics.
Russian history in U.S. schools is usually limited to Lenin, Stalin, the space race, and maybe now they include the fall of the Soviet Union. Depending on your age, you likely learned about Nicholas II, the last Tsar and his family from movies, because it was a very dramatic story. There were several movies about Rasputin, and I would recommend the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra. But even more people recall the movies Anastasia (1956) or Anastasia (1997), neither of which tell us much about the family or the Russian revolution. They are about Anna Anderson, who was presented as the youngest of the Tsar’s four daughters, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. Anderson was only taking advantage of the rumors that Anastasia was the only member of the family who had survived the assassination of 1918 and had been missing ever since. How did those rumors ever get started? Probably because, despite the Soviet Union's refusal to say anything about the Tsar's fate, there were a few people who knew that not all the Romanovs were buried together.
In the spring of 1979, Alexander Avdonin and Geli Ryabov discovered the pit in which five of the seven Romanovs (and four of their servants) had been buried. Since the Communists were still ruling Russia at the time, Advonin and Ryabov decided to keep the finding a secret. The pit wouldn’t be officially opened until 1991, the same year that the Soviet Union dissolved.
DNA and skeletal analysis matched the remains in the pit to Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, Yevgeny Botkin, Alexei Trupp, Ivan Kharitonov, Anna Demidova, and three of the four grand duchesses. William R. Maples (a forensic expert) concluded that the two bodies missing from the family grave were that of Tsarevitch Alexei and Anastasia. However, Russian scientists believed that it was the body of Maria that was missing. Using a computer program to compare photos of the youngest grand duchess with the skulls of the victims from the mass grave, they identified one the bodies in the pit as that of Anastasia.
The actual fate of Grand Duchess Anastasia was not fully revealed until 2007. You can read the short version of the story at History Buff.
First, try to answer this question from your own experience. Don’t spend too much time thinking about it. I immediately said Hamlet, maybe because that was the first of Shakespeare’s plays I ever knew about. My mother had to read it for college, and she read most of it out loud to me. It was years before I knew there were any others. We studied a half-dozen or so of Shakespeare’s plays in school, but not the one play that is the most performed now. According to data from the site Shakespearances, these are the William Shakespeare plays most often performed by professional troupes since 2011.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the most popular even when you divide the list into American and non-U.S. performances, but the rest of those two lists are different. Read about how modern audiences prefer Shakespeare’s legacy at Pricenomics. -via Digg
This morning, redditor twilling8 found a skunk wandering around his neighborhood in Ontario with a Coke can stuck on his head. What to do? He could ignore the skunk, and go about his business, but that could return to haunt him later. Or he could risk getting sprayed.
He is indeed a brave man, and did the right thing. Now if people would only keep their trash picked up and lids on their garbage cans, this would have never happened.
Plain or fancy, the addition of crown molding can make a cheap home suddenly look established and well-built, but only if it’s done right. There are a lot of factors to consider: the size and shape of the room, the size and shape of the molding, the cost of the materials and labor, and the final look you are aiming for. Get some design tips and see 100 examples of what crown molding can do for a room at Housely.
