This is a pretty difficult 10-item quiz. I only got 6, and I guess that means that I only know a few of these Victorian slang terms. (This really meant that I was able to correctly guess 6 out of 10 Victorian slang terms).

What about you? Try and test yourself to see how much you know about these slang terms of the Victorian era.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Welcome to Queensland Police Museum, home to many police archival materials such as vehicles, uniforms, equipment, and badges. One item here, however, stands out. It’s a taxidermy body of a dog named Peter. What’s so special about this dog? He just helped convict a murderer.

On May 22, 1952, 23-year-old taxi driver Athol Henry McCowan was murdered. The investigation progressed quickly, as police had witness reports and details about the suspect’s vehicle—and even the dog he had with him.

After an intensive Australia-wide investigation, Arthur Ernest Halliday was arrested that November and charged with murder. His dog, named Peter, had died in the meantime, but the prosecution insisted that he was mounted for his court appearance. 

On the big day, witnesses identified Peter as the kind of dog seen at the crime scene. Halliday himself was so surprised to see his faithful friend in the courtroom that he blurted out it was his dog. This outburst, along with other evidence, linked Halliday to the crime scene. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

(Image Credit: JBartlett2000/ Atlas Obscura)

We know that leaves get their green color from the chlorophyll present in them. This is the green pigmentation which helps plants absorb energy from light. So, in that case, why do leaves turn a variety of warm colors from charming reds to bright yellows in the fall? Dan West, an entomologist from Colorado State University, explains at The Denver Post.

(Image credit: Valiphotos/Pixabay)

Though digitizing one's system and processes would make operations more convenient and streamlined, doing so in haste might make it vulnerable to attacks where there are gaps in security. Recently, the ones being targeted by ransomware are those from the healthcare industry.

In February 2016, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center paid a then unheard of $17,000 ransom to recover their encrypted files. The attack got so much coverage that Hollywood Presbyerian now has a section on their Wikipedia page discussing the attack. The following month, MedStar Health had to turn away patients because of a SamSam attack. Unfortunately, these were just the start of ransomware attacks against healthcare providers.

These attacks can disrupt patient services, create confusion, and in 2019, have forced at least two healthcare providers to shut down. Given that these attacks are such a persistent concern, I was surprised that no one had looked at the scope of ransomware attacks against healthcare providers. It turns out that collecting data on these attacks is more complex than it first appears.

Read more on Recorded Future.

(Image credit: Michael Geiger/Unsplash)

The US Census Bureau has all kinds of data on the way Americans live and have lived for many years, and Apartment List has turned some of them into a series of charts. For example, a 26-year-old in America is now more likely to live with his/her parents than to live with a spouse. But the marriage rate has plummeted in the last 50 years, and 26-year-olds are also more likely to live with a partner, or roommates, or alone than they were 50 years ago. The chart pictured above is interactive at the site, so you can plug your own age in to find out how your living arrangement compares with others and with those of that age in past years. Another chart allows you to look up statistics in your metro area. There's also a chart that shows how things have changed since the recession of 2007. And there are more charts that look at the data in different ways. Check them all out at Apartment List. -via Boing Boing

Artists usually tend to find inspiration from other artists and they incorporate those styles and ideas into their own work, adding their own twist to them. For Vincent Van Gogh, there were a lot of artists who had an impact on his art but none more so than the French master Jean-Francois Millet.

Today Millet (1814-75) is not particularly well known outside his native France, but in Van Gogh’s time he was arguably the world’s most famous 19th-century artist.

In 1875, as a 22-year-old living in Paris, Van Gogh had seen an exhibition of Millet’s drawings which filled him with inspiration. Six years later, when Van Gogh first set out to become an artist, he drew copies of Millet’s prints, to help improve his own figure drawing.

(Image credit: Vincent Van Gogh/Kroller-Muller Museum; Wikimedia Commons)

Stephanie Porkorny is a master of the crochet hook. Every year, she asks her kids to choose what they will dress up as for Halloween. This year, Jake chose the xenomorph from the Alien franchise.

45 hours of work later, the boy is ready to hunt for prey. The entire project was done freehand with no patterns. The green-tinted yarn is glow-in-the-dark, which will be especially terrifyingly adorable on Halloween night.

-via Aaron Starmer

Tammany Hall was the famously corrupt political machine attached to the Democratic Party that ran New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the election of 1898, they backed William Astor Chanler as their candidate for congress in New York's 14th district. His opponent was the incumbent Republican representative Lemuel Ely Quigg. Both campaigns had a lucky cat mascot. For Quigg, it was a black cat they named Lem who walked in and set up house at the campaign headquarters. Tammany Hall used a tiger as their symbol, and there were many cats called Tammany cats in New York. Many of them were even named Tammany, but the one that stood out was named Tiger.   

Tiger was described as a beautiful and intelligent cat with “a cast-iron constitution” who had been attached to the Health Board’s chemical laboratory in the Criminal Courts Building for several years. According to The Sun, the poor cat had been “used and misused by the Health Board’s chemists in making their poison tests.” Tiger reportedly ate a lot of poisoned food that had sickened people and he had “permitted himself to be drugged on a thousand different occasions for the cause of humanity.”

According to The New York Times, Tiger was the one who “had the honor of determining the difference between morphine and atropine” during the Carlyle Harris trial, which I have written about. The two chemicals were placed upon his eyeballs to show how the different drugs affected the dilation and contraction of the pupils. Tiger didn’t seem to mind the morphine, but he did a frantic waltz movement after the atropine was applied. (History is often a hard pill to swallow.)

The unfortunately employed Tiger was known for his ability to bounce back from these experiments, and was never known to be ill until the day he heard the results of the 1898 election, which encompassed more than just the congressional race. Read the story of Tiger the laboratory cat and that of his pampered parallel Lem at The Hatching Cat.  -via Strange Company

The fires that have raged over the Amazon rainforest may have caught the world’s attention, but, unknown to many, the Gran Chaco, the second largest forest in South America, is also burning, and it’s vanishing in plain sight.

This extremely biodiverse forest, which spans from Bolivia and Brazil to Paraguay and Argentina, is home to over 3,400 plant and 900 animal species.

It is also home to at least 30 indigenous peoples, including the Ayoreo, some of whom live in voluntary isolation in their historic homelands, as well Mennonite colonies.

Now, due to the some of the fastest deforestation in the world, this once enormous ecosystem may soon be gone outside of protected areas. Since 2001, more than 31,000 square miles of forest were felled to make way for agriculture and cattle ranching in the Gran Chaco.

[...]

To clear forest land for grazing, both legally and illegally, Paraguayan cattle ranchers use what’s called “chaining.” That means leveling the forest with tractors that drag heavy chains. Then they burn the fallen trees.

It’s saddening to hear that our world’s forests are being burned, and it’s more saddening that our forests are burned intentionally.

(Image Credit: Joel E. Correia/ Fast Company)

In light of the deadlier and worsening wildfire seasons because of climate change, California steps up to help its first responders and firefighters. Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a few bills last Tuesday that seek to increase access to mental health services for the state’s first responders.

This comes almost a year after the state saw the deadliest wildfire in its history, and it’s much needed as climate change continues to intensify the blazes firefighters are expected to put out and save people from.

The bills Newsom signed will create a peer support network across the state, add post-traumatic stress disorder as an eligible injury for worker’s compensation, and prevent public agencies from contracting out their 911 services to private for-profit companies. The peer support programs and financial assistance for employees suffering from PTSD are the focus here, though. They’re creating new opportunities for individuals who are dealing with the severe mental stress that comes with fighting fires.

Nice!

(Image Credit: skeeze/ Pixabay)

I was really surprised that the popular belief that Vitamin C cures cold is not as true as it seems (I take 1-2 500mg tablets daily). It merely shortens the length of the common cold. But taking Vitamin C is not that bad in itself, provided that we don’t take too much of it as it can increase the risk of developing kidney stones.

Via Vox

(Video Credit: Vox/ YouTube)

A new study from the University of Cambridge has revealed that people can now type on their smartphones as fast as they can on the keyboard. I don’t know about this one, but what are your thoughts?

While a good typist can type around 100 words per minute (WPM) on a desktop keyboard, an average person (like most of us) can only type around 35-65 WPM. The research showed that people typing using only two thumbs can reach speeds that average up to 38 WPM.

“[That’s] only about 25% slower than the typing speeds we observed in a similar large-scale study of physical keyboards," Anna Feit, a researcher at ETH Zürich and co-author of the study said in a statement. Feit said the number of people who can achieve speeds of 100 WPM on a keyboard is decreasing.

You can take the same test that the researchers used here.

More details of the study over at Vice.

(Image Credit: JESHOOTS-com/ Pixabay)

Star Trek Captain Kirk Finger Puppet and Magnet

Your fridge, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Star Trek Captain Kirk Finger Puppet and Magnet from the NeatoShop. His mission to hang around and hold strange family information, rare documents, or unusual pictures. He looks forward to going where no finger puppet has gone before.   

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Magnets. New items arriving all the time. 

Don't forget to stop by the shop to check out our large selection of customizable apparel and bags. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months to adult 10 XL shirts. We know that fun, fabulous, and Star Trek loving people come in every size. 

One hundred years ago, in October of 1919, the Chicago White Sox played the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series. The Reds won the best-of-nine game series, five to three games. Then it came out that some of the Chicago players had conspired to throw the series for money. The eight players involved were acquitted at trial, but were nevertheless banned from professional baseball for life. The scandal is often referred to as the event in which baseball lost its innocence, but in context, it was part of a period of disillusionment all around.

In fact, the timing made perfect historical sense. The recently concluded slaughter in Europe had changed America in ways just becoming apparent. Rather than peace and prosperity, the First World War’s conclusion produced widespread unemployment and dislocation. Fear of anarchism was rampant, and so, too, was racial violence—much of it generated by a reborn Ku Klux Klan. Cynicism was in the air; America’s prolonged age of innocence was over.

Indeed, even as the public grappled with the scandal, the nation’s attention was jolted by the ugly underside of another major cultural institution, with the shocking news that screen beauty Olive Thomas had died after swallowing poison in a Paris bathroom. It was soon revealed that the doe-eyed ingénue was a “drug fiend.” It was the first in a series of Hollywood scandals, including, most notoriously, Fatty Arbuckle’s multiple trials for rape and manslaughter and the murder of hotshot director William Desmond Taylor that recast Tinseltown as America’s Sodom.

An article at City Journal looks back at the Black Sox scandal and its fallout, which helped shaped what baseball is today.  -via Digg

It has been 25 years since the first episode of Friends aired and in celebration of the momentous occasion, a group of friends from Auckland made their own version of the opening sequence to Friends, complete with the couch, lamp, and the fountain in the background. Watch their video on NZ Herald.

(Image credit: Romain Gabarra et al; screen cap)