In the short Instagram reel posted by comedian Ronny Chieng, he asked the audience if they knew what the state motto of Texas was. There were a few good guesses. The "Lone Star State" was one of those he considered "good guesses" but that's actually just the nickname for Texas, not the state motto.

After rattling several possible mottos people might have come up with, he finally revealed the correct answer: "Friendship". I'm not from Texas neither am I American, and since that was a comedy clip, I needed to make sure. So, I found this article on USA Today which listed all the state mottos across America. And there it was, Texas' state motto: "Friendship."

They included a little explanation and backstory to that motto, and it was because the state name actually originated from a Caddo Indian word roughly translating to "friends".

Of course, the US' national motto is "In God We Trust" which was established in 1956 through a law signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. And in 2011, Congress voted to reaffirm that national motto. But before the current motto, the unofficial de facto US national motto was E pluribus unum, which translates to "Out of many, one". - via Digg

(Image credit: Nico Smit/Unsplash)

John Paul Getty was 16 years old when he was kidnapped in Rome in 1973. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of $17 million because Getty's grandfather was oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, the richest man in the world at that time. Some family members thought that the kidnapping was a hoax, but then the kidnappers sent John's severed ear to a Rome newspaper. The only person who had enough money to pay the ransom was J. Paul Getty, but he didn't want to. The young Getty was held for five months before a deal was worked out. His notoriously cheap grandfather negotiated the ransom down to $2.89 million, and insisted that his son, John's father, pay a substantial part of it, which meant getting a loan- from his father. The trauma of the kidnapping stayed with young Getty for the rest of his life.

Other kidnapping stories involved prominent and not-so-prominent people. Frank Sinatra, Jr. was held until his father paid $240,000 for his release. Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of publisher William Randolph Hearst, was taken by the Symbionese Liberation Army and then appeared to have joined forces with them. Adolph Coors III, heir to the Coors Brewing Company, was kidnapped in 1960 for a half a million in ransom, but was never released. Read the details of all these kidnappings and more, nine in total, at Mental Floss.

The US is going through a cold snap right now, but in Antarctica, the sun is up and it's summertime!

You might recall the blogger at brr (previously at Neatorama), who writes so eloquently about his experiences there. After overwintering at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, 14 months on the continent in all, he finally left Antartica in November after the sun came up and regular transportation became available. He's back in the US, where he can experience winter all over again, but it's still quite moderate compared to the South Pole.

Now that he's had time to adjust, he fills us in on the process of leaving Antarctica, which involves waiting for the sun to rise through September and October. Then the station swings from "winter mode" into "summer mode" as the crew prepares for the arrival of the larger summer crew. That means restocking all supplies, checking the infrastructure, and cleaning up. Read how it's all done in part one of his redeployment post. In part two, he explains how airlines work in Antarctica. A Canadian airline comes to ferry people on and off the continent, and it's not all that easy even getting the planes there!  -via Nag on the Lake

The Drunk Men's Choir is just what it says on the tin. YouTuber DougDoug organized a group of singers who do cover versions of well-known songs while drunk. The purpose is to offer the use of their music to any content creators without having to pay royalties or receive DMCA takedown orders, because the filters that find copyrighted music can't detect it. They are that drunk. Yet the songs are recognizable enough to use in place of a protected soundtrack. Their catalog so far is mostly video game songs. They even did the THX sound effect for your listening pleasure.



Each musician has their own link at the YouTube page. These guys are going places. Let's just hope they aren't driving there. -via Boing Boing

In 1990, ex-cop and bodybuilder Tim Todd was looking for a hitman to kill his wife Patti. She had thrown him out of the house for having an affair with a teenager. For help, he turned to his boss, Bill Pagano, who was also his best friend, mentor, and the father of the girl he was having an affair with. Bill, who was the former police chief and the richest man in Festus, Missouri, recorded the conversations and confided in the county prosecutor. At that point, Tim had not committed a crime by talking about the hit for hire, but if Bill could arrange a transfer of money for that purpose, that would be evidence of a crime. Bill facilitated a money transfer, and then arranged to meet Tim at his house, where he planned to arrest him.

However, the meeting did not go as planned. Tim was dead, shot in the head twice. Both the prosecutor and the town's medical examiner knew of the meeting ahead of time, and to them it was surely a case of self-defense. Everyone knew that Tim was taking anabolic steroids and had some crazy episodes in his past. But the prosecutor recused himself from the case and brought in two investigators from Cape Girardeau to look into Tim's death. They determined that the first shot was to the back of Tim's head, so how could it have been self defense? As they looked further into everyone involved in the case, they uncovered a web of connections, crimes, and coverups in Festus. Read a full account of this strange murder in a small town at Truly Adventurous.

We know that snowflakes are ice crystals that form in the atmosphere from water vapor. We've also heard that no two snowflakes are alike, but how would we ever prove that? Only a miniscule percentage of the world's snowflakes will ever be examined, and if they don't melt immediately, they are mashed up with all those other flakes that we shovel from our driveways. Another thing we know is that snowflake crystals form in six-sided shapes, hexagons to be exact, but why is that? Johannes Kepler thought snowflakes had something in common with the hexagons of a beehive, which is an intriguing idea. Physicist Brian Cox explains exactly why snowflakes form in a hexagon, and why we find them beautiful in this pleasantly charming video from the Royal Society.  -via Kottke

 

We are selling our baby trebuchet. We only used it a couple of times. PM me for a quote. pic.twitter.com/uJnf0TLDsM

— Bojan Tunguz (@tunguz) January 12, 2024

Mr. Tunguz no longer needs the baby yeeter, as he has completed this stage of parenting. Nonetheless, he labels the device incorrectly. Twitter used to have a community note attached to this post:

Amazon has a surprising number of items that are called "I cannot fulfill that request" or something close to that. They have fewer after several websites highlighted the phenomenon yesterday and sent Amazon scrambling to take them down. That's what happens when you use a large language model to name your products, and even worse, write your Amazon ads. While some of these ads may be the result of clueless translation attempts, far more of them are scammers, counterfeiters, and drop shippers who are generating so many ads that they cannot be bothered to actually look at them. And neither does Amazon.

The ads that made it through without encountering any sort of quality control can be hilarious, like when the item name includes a mention of OpenAI's rejection of trademark infringement. After the article was published, Amazon took down all the items that were screenshotted and more, but the same oddities are rampant in social media platforms.



We can laugh, but the real problems come when AI is somewhat supervised and therefore not so easy to detect. Read about the Amazon sellers letting AI run amok at Ars Technica.  -via Fark

(Top image: Amazon via archive.org)

Twenty-five-year-old Lawrence Nelson of Lenoir, North Carolina, went missing in 1906. His body was found a couple of months later, and two men were arrested for his murder. Charles Hampton Kendall and John Vickers were convicted and sentenced to 30 and 26 years, respectively. Soon after the conviction, Nelson's father, the pastor of a local church, erected a tombstone for his son that gave his name and birthdate, then underneath was carved, "Murdered and robbed by Hamp Kendall and John Vickers, Sept. 25, 1906." Most families would have been discouraged from using such an epitaph, but it was his son and his church cemetery.

But Kendall and Vickers were pardoned by the governor ten years later, mainly because there were doubts about the one witness against them. Then the real murderer confessed. But the tombstone remained, because to change it would be grave desecration, which was a crime. That set up a conundrum that went on for decades. Read what eventually happened to the falsely accused murderers, the tombstone, and the laws surrounding gravestones at Atlas Obscura. Yes, there's a picture of the tombstone. 

"Celebrity" is a catchall term for someone who is famous, or at least notable. Usually there is a reason for their fame, some accomplishment in movies, TV, sports, music, politics, business, or even crime. In our modern media-obsessed culture, there are also people who are just famous for being famous. We call them celebrities because there's no other way to describe them, except maybe "influencer."
 
But the phenomena is not new. Giacomo Casanova was born in 1725 in Venice and was neither fabulously wealthy, nor powerful, nor all that talented in any one area. Yet he was definitely a celebrity, always appearing in the news and in gossip. He cultivated that reputation because his greatest goal in life was to be famous. We remember Casanova today mostly because of all the women he was associated with- in fact, his name became a term for a womanizer. He would have appreciated that. But in his time, he was noted for simply being noticed. Read the story of Giacomo Casanova's self-made fame at Jstor Daily. -via Strange Company     

(Image credit: Francesco Narici)

Medical-X is a company in the Netherlands that produces technologically advanced medical testing and training equipment. Edgaget visited the company's booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where the Adam-X doll was on display.

Adam-X is, like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, fully functional. He has "working genitalia", which is, of course, essential for proper CPR training. He can produce either urine or blood depending upon the situation.

Above the belt, Adam-X offers other simulated responses, including flushed cheeks, dilated pupils, a swollen tongue, pressurized blood vessels, deflated lungs, and extremities that turn blue if you don't save him quickly enough. He's the ultimate tool for simulated medical emergencies.

-via paige

Auralnauts has redone the first Star Wars movie, now known as A New Hope, as if Zack Snyder had been at the helm. The story is familiar, but is now chock full of Snyderesque touches, like the overuse of his signature slow motion shift for dramatic emphasis (executed appropriately and perfectly at 8:50), the camera lingering unnecessarily on the most gory details, and too much nonsensical exposition in the dialogue. That weird explaining is necessary to save time for the slow motion shots. All this comes with an over-the-top score to clearly tell us what we are supposed to be feeling. While these tropes can be tiring over a whole movie, you have to admit that Auralnauts greatly improved the originally lame lightsaber fight between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Oh, and the ending telegraphs the fact that Snyder just ran out of time. Those slow motion sequences sure do eat up cinematic minutes!  -via Boing Boing

On March 10, 2020, Food and Wine informed us that McDonald's was going to start serving Big Macs with four hamburger patties, to be called the Double Big Mac. Do you recall what else happened on March 10, 2020? My kids called me from from school crying because they were told to vacate their dorms by Friday and go home. Their graduation was off because the school was shutting down due to the COVID-19 epidemic. Also, the Double Big Mac didn't get much notice for its limited run.  

Four years later, McDonald's is going to try this again. The Double Big Mac will be on the menu starting on January 24, for a limited time at participating restaurants. If it sells well, this massive meat monster could find a permanent place on the menu. The real question is: how much will it cost? A company spokesman wouldn't say, because prices will vary by location. True carnivores should start saving up. -via Mental Floss

In the latest video installment of his What If? series, Randall Munroe explains the disasters that would follow if our earth stopped spinning on its axis. The hypothetical question included the fact that the atmosphere would continue moving at the same speed, so that part is enough to blow us all away pretty much immediately. We are used to the earth's movement at up to a thousand miles per hour at the equator, so it would be quite disorienting if the rotation stopped, but we wouldn't have time to deal with it because of that atmospheric movement.

Then the long-term consequences would kick in. The oceans would throw a lot of water into the atmosphere, but retain plenty enough to blast the land with tsunamis, and our days would change to years. That makes surviving the effects pretty darn difficult. But all things considered, the earth would eventually start rotating again someday, probably without us. -via Damn Interesting 

Lulu Lotus is a children's book author and illustrator from Canada. Her books focus on teaching children the importance of being kind to each other and animals. They do not -so far- teach children how to whistle with their noses.

Nose whistling is skill that Ms. Lotus has carefully honed like a blade since childhood. She used it while growing up to play pranks on her teachers. From the above video, you can see why: when she whistles, there is no change in her facial expressions. It's a silent, ninja-like art.

Guinness World Records has declared her nose whistle, which measures at 44.1 decibels, the loudest in the world. That is approximately as loud as a bird call.

-via Born in Space