Fans of Breaking Bad are familiar with the origin of the story: Vince Gilligan was commiserating with a writer friend about the lack of work during the writer's strike, and the friend suggested making meth in an RV. They didn't so that, but the idea became Breaking Bad. There's certainly more to the story than that. Behind the Curtain compiled various interviews to produce an oral history of sorts that explores how Walter White evolved from a normal science teacher to a man addicted to money, risk, and power. It was a radical idea for TV, which turned into a devastating character study over the years. -via Laughing Squid
Even thought measles was considered eradicated in the US in 2000, there have been 695 cases reported this year. How immune are you? If you received a measles vaccination many years ago, you might need a booster shot. Children who received the vaccine between 1963 (when it was first available) and 1989 got one measles shot. After 1989, two shots were recommended to confer maximum immunity.
CDC guidelines for measles vaccines haven't changed since the current outbreak began. The department says that anyone born after 1957 should have received at least one dose of the vaccine, which is 93 percent effective against the disease. But if Gen Xers want to be extra cautious, they can ask their doctor to test their antibody levels to see if they're immune. If they're still vulnerable to measles, they can get a second booster shot, which together with the initial vaccination is about 97 percent effective.
But the CDC's current priority is children who haven't been vaccinated at all. Thanks to the misinformation around vaccines, a growing number of parents have opted not to get their kids vaccinated, which has fueled the current health crisis in the U.S. According to a 2016 review of measles studies, out of 970 measles cases, almost 42 percent of patients had skipped the vaccine for non-medical reasons.
And that's why we have a nationwide measles outbreak now. If you don't have vaccination records or a way to get them, you can have your antibodies tested. But if you've actually had measles, your immunity is considered to be high. Read more about the CDC guidelines at Mental Floss.
It took more than 50.000 matches and 160 working hours to make this Death Star from Star Wars movie serial. Like the "real" Death Star, this one also features north and south hemisphere, a superlaser and an "equatorial trench". Each hemisphere consists of approximately 28.000 matches and there are additional 4.000 matches (match heads, to be precise) inside the globe. Two pounds of hot glue were spent on gluing this sphere, and two hemispheres were glued on both sides of equatorial trench using wood glue.
Some of you probably know there were two Death Stars. The first one was destroyed by Luke Skywalker, flying along equatorial trench and shooting the only weak spot of the Death Star. The other one was destroyed by Lando Calrissian (actually it's more complicated than this, since it was really big operation on several fronts) flying Millennium Falcon and destroying the regulator of the Death Star's reactor.
Darth Vader threw Emperor Palpatine into the abyss and down to the reactor core and we all expect the Emperor is dead, but maybe... just maybe we are talking about an unconfirmed kill. Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker trailer suggests that indeed Emperor Palpatine is alive somewhere inside the Death Star remains. It looks like he was just laying low and getting ready for when the time comes to strike the Republic and Rebels for the last time.
Whenever there have been sightings of strange goings on in the airspace, with aircraft exhibiting bizarre activity patterns or lights flashing about in the sky with no way of recognizing or identifying whose aircraft it is, we often dismiss these as UFO phenomena.
But the US Navy has been receiving a number of strange sightings such as that would spring them into action by laying out new guidelines on how to report these "unexplained aerial phenomena" as they now call it. No longer will these occurrences be "unidentified flying objects" as there must be some scientific basis behind them.
"There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. "For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.
"As part of this effort," it added, "the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."
Moreover, the Navy will approach the phenomena with the objective of breaking down the myths and destigmatizing them. The questions remain however, whether these sightings are mere folly or if there are more sinister schemes afoot. The view that these may be extraterrestrial beings with more highly advanced technology is not within the explanations being considered.
“Right now, we have situation [sic] in which UFOs and UAPs are treated as anomalies to be ignored rather than anomalies to be explored,” he said. “We have systems that exclude that information and dump it.”
The development comes amid growing interest from members of Congress following revelations by POLITICO and the New York Times in late 2017 that the Pentagon established a dedicated office inside the Defense Intelligence Agency to study UAPs at the urging of several senators who secretly set aside appropriations for the effort.
-via The Daily Grail
(Image credit: Stefan Stefancik/Unsplash)
Time exists but the movement of time or its flow is subjective. It is something that depends only on our perception. That's what Max Tegmark, physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains in his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality.
It certainly feels to us like time is flowing. Yet that’s not the only way of looking at this reality. I could say that 10 to the power of 29 particles constitute me, and they are moving around in some very complicated patterns. Einstein pointed out that the most elegant way of describing this mathematically is to say, Let’s look at where each particle is in the three-dimensional space at each time, and draw this in a four-dimensional spacetime, where time is the fourth dimension.
In every instance of the illustration, we see that all of these elements exist still in a four-dimensional pattern. Time doesn't flow, but everything within the boundaries of time moves and so it sort of feels like time is moving to the observer inside that dimension.
Furthermore, things became more complicated when quantum mechanics emerged but according to Tegmark, the math is not entangled in these web of complications. It is "beautiful and clean".
Randomness is fundamentally an illusion because there is no randomness in the math, even though it might feel random. I’m saying the same thing about time. Even though the flow of time is fundamentally an illusion, there is nothing flowing about the math, the equations aren’t changing, there is just a single four-dimensional pattern, albeit a very complicated and beautiful one, in spacetime.
If we were to think about it, Tegmark makes a point. Our perception of time feels like it's lurching forward every second of every hour of every day. But the thing is, time doesn't move at all. We're the ones constantly in motion and perhaps the patterns that exist in nature are merely markers we use in order to keep track of where we are and where we've been.
We mark time simply for our benefit, to make things easier for us to know, say, how productive we have been or to remember certain appointments that we have had. And even that doesn't contradict the concept that time does not flow.
-via The Daily Grail
(Image credit: Andrik Langfield/Unsplash)
Potoooooooo was a thoroughbred racehorse that won 30 races between 1776 and 1783. He was sired by the undefeated Eclipse. However, his long-lived fame mostly comes from his name. You can better understand the name if you see it written Pot-8-Os. This newspaper clipping from The Washburn Leader in North Dakota was published in 1915. -via Strange Company
It's hard for today's citizenry to relate to how their ancestors suffered during the Great Depression, since many of today's millennials consider mere lack of Wi-Fi an unendurable hardship. But how about when there was no work to be had for years on end and no money for new clothing or much else for that matter, as experienced by so many people in the USA between 1930 and 1940?
Pictures of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl are legion, but one area that has not had all that much exposure is the repurposing of animal feed sacks, bulk flour sacks, and other cloth sacks of that era into clothing and other goods habitually made from fabric. Flashbak has a series of photographs that document this activity, and some good anecdotes about how it affected the industries that sold these sacks as originally purposed. It seems that quality of contents was secondary to quality and patterns of the sacks themselves and this phenomenon disrupted the consumer products industry as nothing else ever had, and the race was on, as seen in the photographs archived therein.
So count your blessings in today's prosperous environment and have a look at the kind of thing your great-grandparents endured with a smile along with other newfangled traditions of the time such as Meatless Tuesdays.
Memes have been deeply integrated as an identifying feature of internet culture as consumers of content themselves become creators by adding wit or silliness into otherwise neutral or even serious settings or online pieces.
No doubt, it helps bring some fun but some say that it may reduce the significance of historical events especially iconic photos of the same.
For example, scholars looked at over thirty examples of the so-called “Accidental Napalm” meme, which uses the famous image photographed by Nick Ut featuring the Vietnam War napalm girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, in 1972.
In analyzing several specific examples, the scholars took note of how “some memes may actually dissolve the original significance of iconic photographs and potentially degrade, rather than enhance, public culture.”
For many who were born during the time when the internet has become an ubiquitous part of daily life, we would most likely be introduced to historical events either in books or the more probable source, the internet.
Though memes may distort or degrade the original meaning of some iconic photos, the act of editing or manipulating these images to satisfy a particular narrative has been done for the longest time.
Not to downplay the effects that memes may have on these historical events, but I would argue that it is up to people to do their due diligence regarding these photos and try to preserve the significance of the event without completely tarnishing or erasing the original.
At the end of the day, in an age where everything is shared online and meanings become more fluid, there is no impeding people from doing what they want with these content.
(Image credit: Highway2Hell/Reddit via HuffPost)
In the history of commercial television there have been few shows that could be considered phenomenonal. Time for Beany was one, closely followed by I Love Lucy and the original Dragnet. And then, moving into the late 1960's, we find Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in (RAMLI), a genuine phenomenon for which I had the good fortune to experience firsthand. From the IMDb:
This show popularized a rapid style of vignette comedy show where comedy sketches, punch-lines and gags are edited together in a rapid and almost random format. Regular trademark elements included the joke wall, the dancing women painted with one-liners and the fickle finger of fate award. This series inspired such shows as Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969) and Sesame Street (1969). Many of the original one-hour shows were re-edited into two half-hour programs in the early 1980s for syndication. Often, bloopers and outtakes were used to fill out a segment, especially during the joke wall sequence which occurred at the end of each show during the closing credits. New graphics were generated for credits on re-edited endings and run in the same sequence as the originals, but were in a different font.
I think that it also inspired Saturday Night Live since SNL used so many of the same formulas as first seen in RAMLI. Of course, this was in the late 1970's, when SNL was actually funny.
RAMLI created catch phrases that are still with us today - 'sock it to me' and 'you bet your sweet bippy' - and it featured cast members such as Goldie Hawn, as cute as a button in her early 20's, Arte Johnson, JoAnne Worley, Lily Tomlin, Henry Gibson, and others since made famous by their appearances. It also attracted a wide variety of Guest Stars such as John Wayne, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Richard Nixon. Nixon's appearance on RAMLI has been widely credited with his winning the 1968 Presidential Election (his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, was also invited on but declined).
Wildly popular during its first few seasons, RAMLI went into eventual decline, having become a victim of its own success as later would also SNL. As cast members made their bones, they left the show for greener and more lucrative pastures, with the result at the end of its run there were only four of the original cast left. It was canceled in 1973, with TV Guide's comment that it was 'a tired reminder of the hit of the 60's'. And this is where SNL is today.
YouTube features many segments of RAMLI episodes but no full hour-long shows. It hardly matters, since there was no continuity or plot, but embedded below is one of the 'Best Of' videos. Below are links to some of its most famous segments. So hunker down, get out those tie-dyed clothes, and return to the manic late 1960's if but for a little while.
Nothing brings delight to a book lover's heart more than a charming library. Not only should it have an amazing and vast collection of books to peruse, but they also need to look elegant, from the shelves to the ceilings and even to the interior decoration.
The community of readers at Atlas Obscura sent in their recommendations for some of the finest and most beautiful libraries you will ever see. Check them out here.
(Image credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons)
You recall how the cat named Pusic is very affectionate and very much spoiled by his family. Like many cats, he loves to play with toilet paper. So his humans lined an entire room with toilet paper for Pusic to play in!
When you visit a public restroom, do you prefer to dry your hands with paper towels or an air dryer? Each has their drawbacks. Paper towels run out, and fill up waste baskets as well as landfills. Air dryers are loud, take too long, and sometimes don't work. Some studies show that they blow bacteria around. And for a lot of folks, public restrooms are all about the germs.
The holy grail for such phobists is the contactless restroom. In the industry, people speak with shining eyes about this ideal chamber, where our hands need not touch anything that other hands have defiled. Already, we enter some airport bathrooms through a brief switchback of walls, so that we don’t ever grasp a door handle. Once inside, sensors can eliminate the need to yank the flush, turn the tap, jab at the soap dispenser or pull a paper towel from the dispenser. The modern hand dryer, with no buttons to push, ought to fit neatly into this fantasy of the zero-contact loo. Instead, towel companies are convinced that dryers are the filthy exception to the rule, and that the singular safe item to touch in a public restroom is an old-school leaf of rough, thick paper.
Do you recall cloth towels in public restrooms? They came in a roll, and you pulled down a clean section to use. Those went away when industrial linen services faded. Now paper manufacturers have a lot of clout, but so do air dryer manufacturers, and Dyson went big when they introduced the Airblade hand dryer. They are locked in a battle for supremacy in public restrooms. The Guardian has a deep dive into the history of hand-drying, and the battle between paper towels and air dryers. -via Digg
What if the new movie Avengers: Endgame came out forty years ago? Darth Blender took existing footage and the narration style of yesteryear to imagine what it could have been like. And if we were actually watching this in the 1970s, we would have liked it! The latest edition of Marvel's Avengers have plenty of precursors from movies and TV, but they don't quite resemble what we've grown accustomed to from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. -via Digg
Believe it or not, the video series called Autotune the News is ten years old. To celebrate the occasion, Andrew Gregory of the Gregory Brothers went back to Autotune the News #2 and expanded on the segment with Kate Couric that includes the phrase "very thin ice," and made an entire song about it. Ten years later, we are on even thinner ice. -via Metafilter
You might recall seeing a woman bursting out of a cake in old movies, or more likely, old cartoons. It was a trope reserved for truly lavish and hedonistic occasions. If you've ever wondered how that idea got started, it was a party in 1895, ostensibly to celebrate Ellliot Cowdin’s 10th wedding anniversary, but since there were no women invited, it was more of a stag party. The dessert was a huge pie, from which 16-year-old Susie Johnson emerged, to the surprise and delight of the guests.
For the posh set of late-19th century New York City—a coterie as obsessed with public prudery as with private adultery—the “Pie-Girl” dinner was a sensation. “The ‘Girl in the Pie’ at the Three Thousand Five Hundred Dollar Dinner in Artist Breese’s New York Studio,” declared the New York World, above an illustration of Johnson thronged by besuited men, spread like a Venus in pastry. The picture was as scandalous as the dinner’s cost: more than 2,300 times the daily wage of a day laborer.
In the New York World illustration, architect Stanford White stands to Susie Johnson’s left, wielding a large kitchen knife as though about to carve her. According to the article, shortly after the party, Susie Johnson posed “by electric light” at an artist’s studio, a euphemism for sex work, and went missing soon after. “Poor Susie Johnson, dazzled by the lavish compliments and surprised by the liberality of her distinguished patrons,” reported the World. “Perhaps this article will bring Susie Johnson home to her parents and put a stop to the midnight revels in New York’s fashionable studios.”
The guests at the notorious party included Nicola Tesla and Stanford White, who later made the papers for raping Evelyn Nesbit and then being murdered. Read about the girl in the pie at Atlas Obscura.
