Determining what is the world's oldest cookbook depends on how you define cookbook, but a collection of cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia may fill the bill. The four clay tablets are dated to about 4,000 years ago, and contain dozens of recipes. The tablets are part of a collection of 45,000 artifacts stored at Yale University's Babylonian Collection, which has only recently been available to the public. Part of that effort is translating those old recipes. And trying them out.

Recreating those recipes is a challenge, because they contain ingredient lists but no specific instructions for preparing them. The inscribers must have assumed that cooks of the day knew what to do with them. That's not so easy 4,000 years later, but chefs have been working on them. Some of the dishes turned out pretty bland, but others are still tasty to this day. It must be a matter of the missing directions, since cuneiform writing wasn't as easy as typing on a computer, and only the best recipes would have been saved. The collection as a whole gives us a glimpse into the early days of agriculture, when grains and beer favored heavily in the recipes, and a variety of ingredients tell us about Babylonian trade practices. Read about these ancient recipes at Atlas Obscura, where you'll find a recipe for Babylonian Lamb Stew, with cooking. directions.        

(Image credit: the Yale Peabody Museum)

Here's a bike stunt that has never been done before, either because no one thought to do it, or if they did, they couldn't afford to make it happen. Enter Red Bull, who will pay for stupid human tricks all day long if anyone is up for trying them. Polish cyclist and world champion Dawid Godziek is willing and has the skills, but does he have the nerve? The plan is to show us some bike tricks including a flip on a moving train. He and his brother Szymon Godziek designed and built the run on top of ten cars from the Polish State Railways. The locomotive here is a high-tech model that can maintain a steady slow speed in order to load cargo from hoppers without stopping and starting. That allows Dawid to get used to the physics of performing on a moving train, and helps keep him in the shot.  -via Metafilter

Spoon & Tamago shares images of leather accessories created and sold by Cokeco, a firm in Fukuoka, Japan. The company offers a wide variety of handcrafted leather goods, most notably a series of fashion accessories that resemble octopodes and their kin.

At the subreddit /r/DataIsBeautiful, /u/profound_whatever showcases a huge chart illustrating when famous people in Western Civilization lived. It's useful for showing which lives overlapped each other.

The chart starts at the year 1200 and stretches to the current year. I focused on the era of Winston Churchill, that giant of the Twentieth Century who, during a 90-year lifespan, straddled multiple major political and technological changes.

Some redditors are looking at the simulanteous and sequential lifespans and drawing conclusions:

It would be interesting to see an expanded version that includes Asia. But other redditors are complaining about particular individuals being left out. I agree: the absence of Gallagher is unsettling.

-via My Modern Met

Ancient Roman military camp discovered in Swiss Alps via @https://twitter.com/Archaeology_Mag https://t.co/nn6DB5QNZL

— Alexa Russell (@AlexaHawaii) September 6, 2024

Around the year 15 BCE, the Roman army was conquering its way through Europe and fought the Suanetes tribe of what is now eastern Switzerland. Students from the University of Basel have been studying the battlefield near the Crap Ses Gorge since 2021. Last fall, they found something intriguing on the mountain above. They discovered the outlines of a Roman camp, perched high above the battlefield at around 7,000 feet in altitude. Using LiDAR technology, they have been able to locate an unearth its boundaries.

The encampment is bordered by three substantial ditches and a wall. From this high vantage point, the Romans could keep an eye on four important valleys, plus a well-traveled road. Talk about taking the high ground! Artifacts that have been found include Roman weapons and equipment, plus lead slingshot bullets stamped as belonging to the 3rd Legion. It must have been in use for quite some time.  -via Damn Interesting

The kids have gone back to school again, and it occurs to me that this year is the first that I don't have any children in school in a quarter-century. Yeah, they grow up fast, but they stay in school as long as they can. Anyway, a video from Charlie Berens popped up about teachers. Berens is best known at Neatorama for illustrating life in the American Midwest. The accent is still there, but the experience he relates here is universal. He completely captures the gym teacher, the cool teacher, the art teacher, and the substitute teacher in every school. They are exactly the same as they were 50 years ago when I was a student- I can even name the names from my days as a student, from my friends who became teachers, and as the parent of students. You know these folks, even if you haven't been to school in a long time.

Damon Beres, an editor for The Atlantic, shares this image of an elevator. He doesn't share its location, but various people on reddit have posted similar photos of elevator control panels with buttons marked yes and no.

Redditor /u/allysx3 explains that New York City's safety code for elevators includes options for people with disabilities in emergency situations. After pushing the emergency button, remote operators can ask people in the elevator yes or no questions through a speaker, which are answered with the appropriate buttons.

-via Super Punch

Rock star Jon Bon Jovi was a big deal back in the 80s, but has never stopped performing since then. In fact, he and his team were recording a new music video on Tuesday in downtown Nashville when they spotted a woman climbing over the railing of a bridge across the Cumberland River.

The crew realized that the woman was considering jumping off the bridge. Bon Jovi and his companions walked over to talk to her. They convinced her to climb back over the railing and seek help. The Tennessean reports that Nashville police credit Bon Jovi and his colleagues with saving her life.

-via Colin Rugg

Banks are where the money is, but people don't often rob them because 1. it's wrong, 2. there are security measures, and 3. if you could pull it off, the long arm of the law will find you, and the consequences will be severe. But every once in a great while, someone does pull it off and gets away with it.  

A bank robbery in Krugersdorp, South Africa, in 1977 seems like something you'd see in a movie. The perpetrators rented a building next door to the bank, and dug a tunnel to the bank vault. Noisy construction equipment outside covered up the sound of the digging equipment inside. The extra noise also tended to trip the bank's alarm system, so bank employees turned it off. All of this came to light after the money was gone, and neither it nor the thieves were ever found.

Read the details of this story and of five other famous unsolved bank robberies at Mental Floss. But keep in mind that just because these schemes worked once, that doesn't mean they will work again.

In the 1979 movie Alien, we were transfixed by the xenomorph that went through different and terrifying life stages, and we were shocked when all the actors we'd heard of were killed off, leaving Sigourney Weaver to be the last survivor, along with the ship's cat Jones. Everyone liked Jonesy, and wanted him to make it out alive. So what if we made the whole cast into cats? Well, maybe throw in some dogs, a pig, and a turtle. And change the name of the ship to the Nostromeow.

Mean Orange Cat did just that, with artificial intelligence. Except the narrator's voice must be real, which explains the gender swap. If they had an AI voice, he would have made it Weaver's, or at least a woman's voice. But Mean Orange cat uses the same voice in all his AI movie remakes, with a cat wearing an eyepatch as the protagonist. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Do you have somewhere to go this fall? Would you like to use the excuse of seeing the fall colors to take a weekend getaway? You can plan that trip around the 2024 Fall Foliage Prediction Map from the folks at SmokyMountains.com, who would like you to visit Gatlinburg, Tennessee. But the opportunity is there for any place in the US, or at least the 48 contiguous states, for a leaf-peeping trip if you time it right. I will be traveling for a grandchild's arrival, and I'm delighted to see that the scenery will be lovely during my long drive.   

The entire map is green now, but you can use the slider underneath to see which areas will be at peak color during the months ahead. The image above shows the map for the week of October 7th. By that time, the people in New England will be inundated by the annual migration of leaf-peeping tourists, but will be glad they brought their money. My hometown will not peak until November 4th. You may see a startling amount of green right in the middle of autumn, but that doesn't really mean green. Green means "no change," so I believe the late autumn green means no change from the week before. Eventually, even Florida will see some fall colors. -Thanks, Brittany!   

If you are going to start carving Jack O'Lanterns in September, let's hope you have a lot of pumpkins, or else a lot of resin to preserve them with. That didn't stop Bre Ellis, who has pumpkins and chickens and knows how to use them. Ellis scraped the thin rind off of a pumpkin at strategic spots, unleashing the aromatic lure of the fruit underneath. We know tigers, bears, elephants, and other wild animals love a good fresh pumpkin, and apparently so do chickens. The chickens pecked and pecked at the parts that smelled good until they had eaten their way through. The result was a grinning, glowing Jack O'Lantern!

Sure, Ellis did this so early because she wanted to show you how it's done. When the time comes, you can let your chickens do the carving, or you can take your pumpkin to a farm and give someone else's chickens a treat, while you get your Jack O'Lantern carved by "nature." -via Laughing Squid

Look at this nice home for sale in the seaside town of Rhyl in north Wales. It has three bedrooms and one bathroom, and the asking price is only £179,950, but I don't know how many Euros that is. The description at the real estate listing has a checkbox for "Character Property." I thought that must be a UK real estate term I'm not familiar with, but once you step inside you realize what they meant. There are characters everywhere.

The above is the living room. The kitchen would look fairly normal once you removed all the Disney slogans gracing each cabinet. The staircase area is drenched in pink with images of castles. I'm not sure what this room is for, but I don't want to spend too much time there.

The home is filled with Disney collectibles and other toys, which we assume the current owner will keep. It would take a very special buyer to live in this house as it is, but most likely it could be returned to normal with two coats of Kilz and some regular wall paint. It's a good thing we have 18 real estate pictures for posterity. -via Digg

Giliam de Carpentier built a 12-legged coffee table that walks across the floor. The "how" is quite interesting. He started by writing a computer program that generated different designs for wooden legs that could walk. The program also tested each design for "fitness" along the desired kinetic parameters, and with those results generated more designs until the design evolved into the optimum leg Carpentier was looking for. Then he designed the table around a device with 12 legs, six on each side, which was the best number for moving smoothly and for steering in different directions.

All the components were modeled by computer and tested, tweaked, and finally carved out of laminated bamboo. Next, electronics were installed to power the table and control it remotely. If you are into computer design or woodcarving (or both!), you'll want to read Carpentier's process in designing what he calls the Carpentopod. It might remind you of Theo Jansen's walking sculptures, and he indeed contrasts the works. There are plenty of videos to illustrate the stages of the project. Carpentier is not building these to sell, but he will share the plans. -via Boing Boing

John McFall suffered a motorcycle accident when he was 19 and his right leg had to be amputated above the knee. He went on to compete in the Paralympic Games, where he won bronze for the UK in the 100-meter dash in 2008. McFall also became an orthopedic and trauma surgeon. Now he has another accomplishment to add to his resume: astronaut. The European Space Agency (ESA) hired McFall into its astronaut corps in 2022, making him the first individual with a physical disability to become an astronaut, or a "parastronaut."

McFall has not yet been selected to go into space, and there's no guarantee that he will, but the possibility is there. He took part in a feasibility study to study space travel for someone missing a part of one leg. In an interview about his experience, he explains that people with missing lower limbs or lower-limb paralysis might even have advantages in microgravity. However, ESA wants to know what accommodations will need to be made for astronauts with limb differences. Read the interview with McFall at Scientific American. -via Kottke  

(Image credit: ESA/P. Sebirot)