Like many branding logos, the familiar Ghostbusters icon went through a lot of changes before the filmmakers settled on a final design. But it wasn't designed for marketing purposes- this one was part of the prop department. The ghost with a red line was going to be a logo used in the movie for our heroes' ghost extermination business. It turned out pretty good considering how little time was spent on it.   

But again, this was going to be a relatively small logo you'd only see on the costumes, outside the fire station, and on the side of the Ecto-1. So the art department "didn't think twice about it," because they had a buttload of other stuff to design. But when it came time to release the movie's first teaser poster, there was a problem. The studio, Columbia, hadn't obtained the rights to the title Ghostbusters, which was still owned by a short-lived 1970s children's show, nowadays best remembered for ruining the Saturday mornings of every 1980s kid who didn't read their TV Guide closely enough. (Younger readers: TV Guide was a tiny magazine you had to buy so you knew what was playing on TV. The past was awful.)

Because of this legal snafu, Columbia desperately needed a way to advertise a movie without using its title. The solution ended up being slapping Gross' final logo on the poster.

It was a brilliant marketing move, even if they didn't realize it at the time. Just a workaround to avoid a lawsuit. However, they got a lawsuit anyway that didn't have anything to do with the Ghostbusters name. Read the rest of that story plus the evolution and stories behind three other movie logos at Cracked.

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Pusic, Russia's most spoiled cat (previously at Neatorama), is fascinated with the new treadmill. He learns how to use it in only six days! It's an accomplishment, alright, but since he's conquered the learning process, he can go on to other things. The hooman can practice every day until he gets it right.   

They say there are no stupid questions, only questions that are weird enough to provide entertainment. On the forum Physics Stack Exchange, Billy-bodega posed the question, "Supposing that the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries, what would happen from the perspective of a person on the surface?" That brings up an entertaining picture, but Anders Sandburg of Oxford University kept thinking about it, and ended up writing a paper on the subject, released just a few days ago. There's a lot of factors to consider when building an imaginary planet.

This process of imagining blueberry earth begins with fat, thick-skinned highbush blueberries (the kind you find in grocery stores, not in the blueberry barrens of Maine). Given the estimated density of blueberries, the mass of an Earth made of berries would be a fraction of its current mass, with weaker gravity. Blueberries, Sandberg points out, are not particularly strong, able to resist the weight of a sugar cube but not a milk carton. Within a few yards of the surface of whole blueberries, the force of gravity would pulp the blueberries into mash, releasing the air that had separated each berry from its neighbors and shrinking the planet to a smaller radius. If no other forces were involved, the blueberry planet would collapse under its own weight in an estimated 42 minutes.

But there are other factors at play. The air released by the pulping of berries would create a thick, dense atmosphere, which Sandberg compares to Titan’s. Little light would filter through to the surface, so the dramatic events that followed would happen in almost total darkness.

The pressure of the weight of the fruit would soon cause other reactions. You can read Sandburg's science paper for all the details or a summary of the project at Atlas Obscura.

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Now, these are some freaky-looking pies! Doesn't matter. If they've got berries in them, I'll eat it. I believe these pies were made by Ashley Newman of Folsom, Louisiana. Her Etsy store is here. Newman posted a tutorial a few years ago on how to make these pies. -via reddit

In the ancient world, the color purple was a sign of royalty. Anything dyed the color of Tyrian purple was instantly precious, because the dye was so labor-intensive and the source of the color was so tiny. The expense itself made purple a status symbol. Wearing it was an example of conspicuous consumption, in that it was a signal to others of what one could afford. And that was about all that Tyrian purple had going for it, because wearing it wasn't all that pleasant.

Purple is a paradox, a contradiction of a colour. Associated since antiquity with regality, luxuriance, and the loftiness of intellectual and spiritual ideals, purple was, for many millennia, chiefly distilled from a dehydrated mucous gland of molluscs that lies just behind the rectum: the bottom of the bottom-feeders. That insalubrious process, undertaken since at least the 16th Century BC (and perhaps first in Phoenicia, a name that means, literally, ‘purple land’), was notoriously malodorous and required an impervious sniffer and a strong stomach. Though purple may have symbolised a higher order, it reeked of a lower ordure.

It took tens of thousands of desiccated hypobranchial glands, wrenched from the calcified coils of spiny murex sea snails before being dried and boiled, to colour even a single small swatch of fabric, whose fibres, long after staining, retained the stench of the invertebrate’s marine excretions. Unlike other textile colours, whose lustre faded rapidly, Tyrian purple (so-called after the Phoenician city that honed its harvesting) only intensified with weathering and wear – a miraculous quality that commanded an exorbitant price, exceeding the pigment’s weight in precious metals.

Read the history of Tyrian purple dye at BBC Culture. -via Metafilter

On September 20, 1919, a group of black sharecroppers who had joined the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America met with a lawyer at a church near Elaine, Arkansas, to discuss pressing their employers for a more equitable share of crops. The customary portion demanded from landowners at the time kept the workers constantly in debt, and they weren't allowed to quit while in debt. Fearing an insurrection, landowners and other white men surrounded the church and began shooting. The men inside the church shot back. Three days of rioting followed, in which the governor called in military troops and at least 200 African-Americans, including women and children, were killed. Five white men also were killed. Dozens of black men were arrested for their murder, and twelve were quickly convicted and sentenced to death.

Jury deliberations lasted just moments. The verdicts were a foregone conclusion – it was clear that had they not been slated for execution by the court, they mob would have done so even sooner.

“You had 12 black men who were clearly charged with murder in a system that was absolutely corrupt at the time – you had mob influence, you had witness tampering, you had a jury that was all-white, you had almost certainly judicial bias, you had the pressure of knowing that if you were a juror in this case that you would almost certainly not be able to live in that town...if you decided anything other than a conviction,” says Michael Curry, an attorney and chair of the NAACP Advocacy and Policy Committee. No white residents were tried for any crime.

The convictions were appealed, and six of them were thrown out on technicalities. The other six men saw their case appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1923. Read the saga of the Elaine Massacre and the subsequent Moore v. Dempsey ruling at Smithsonian. 

(Image source: Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Bobby L. Roberts Library of Arkansas History and Art, Central Arkansas Library System)

Although most of the people in the United States live in cities, you'd never know it by looking at a map of the country, because those urban areas take up very little room in a big nation. What are we doing with the rest of that land? You might be surprised. Not only is a big proportion home to cows and other livestock, but a huge chunk is devoted to raising feed for that livestock -and livestock in other countries. And just look at the little bits we set aside for national parks, state parks, and federal wilderness areas! Other maps show us where the crops, the forests, the people, and the wetlands are. See an interactive set of maps at Bloomberg that give us views from different angles on how the US uses its land. Alaska and Hawaii aren't included, maybe because the size of Alaska would change all the other statistics. -via Boing Boing

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Would your dog go out of his/her way to help you if you really needed it? We'd all like to think so. This experiment involved 34 dogs of different breeds and how they reacted to seeing their humans in distress. The good news is that most of them wanted to help, or at least be with, their owners. One might suspect that some were just too dumb to know what to do. Others may be smart enough to realize it was a setup. At least that's what we'd like to think. After all, they are all good dogs. Read more about the experiment at the New York Times. -via Laughing Squid

Cars straight from the factory have gone through a detailed finishing process that primes, paints, and seals the color in several layers and processes, sometimes with novelty additives. And companies have used more than 50,000 different colors. So what happens when you have your car repaired after a collision? The process of making the repair match the rest of the car is an art as well as a technology. Adalberto Gonzalez is an automotive artist, a color matcher at Alameda Collision Repair. His process entails a lot more than just grabbing a color off the shelf.

Gonzalez is making what's called a metamer, a color indistinguishable from a reference even if its physics and chemistry differ. It's not easy. Automotive colors are increasingly sophisticated and complicated. "Harlequins,” for example, show three different colors depending on what angle you’re looking from; new mattes compete with pearls and metallics. But in a deep, philosophical way, none of that matters, because the physics of how light interacts with a paint is less important than the biology and neuroscience of how the eye and brain turn that physics into an idea of color.

Gonzalez begins by consulting a wall-mounted computer touchscreen for basic recipes that replicate colors from the original equipment manufacturers. A given OEM paint might require a recipe of seven, eight, a dozen paints from an aftermarket company like AkzoNobel1 or PPG. (I should disclose here that my cousin's company supplies paint to Alameda Collision and put me onto Gonzalez.)

But even with a recipe in hand, Gonzalez will have to account for “field variance.” That’s a polite way of saying, how messed up is this car? Has it been parked outside for two years? Was it painted at the beginning of a new run, when the assembly line’s paint system might not have been cleaned properly and still contained a little bit of the last color? Is it “darker and dirtier?” A little redder? A little bluer?

You can see how easy it would be to mess this up. Read about car colors and how they are recreated at Wired. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user Ed)

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The latest episode of the video series Scatterbrained is all about bears, but not necessarily the bears that live in the woods (although they are represented, too). This is also about Gummi bears, which is actually a history of gummy candy. And the Chicago Bears. And the many fictional bears we know and love.  

The TV series Breaking Bad ran for five seasons, and the climax of the entire story arc came in the third-to-last episode, "Ozymandias." That's the one where Walter White's precarious manufactured life as a drug lord came crashing down for good. The two episodes after were important as they tied up the loose ends, but no other episode of the series had as much impact. Five years later, the people behind the show explain how it came about.

Vince Gilligan (creator–executive producer): People give me credit personally for having some sort of master plan for where the series was going right from the earliest days. I did not. We truly did not. The only thing we knew for certain: We wanted the show to end as well it could. Not to say we wanted a happy ending necessarily, but we wanted an appropriate ending.

Melissa Bernstein (coexecutive producer): They wanted it to be an ending that they were proud of, that would stand the test of time. Vince would literally bang his head against the table. There was a lot of pacing going on and a lot of anxiety.

Moira Walley-Beckett (writer–coexecutive producer): It was clear to us in the writers’ room that at that point in the season all the chickens were coming home to roost. Every consequence for each of Walt’s choices was playing out with unbelievable force, brutality, cruelty, angst, terror—everything. And it was all gonna happen in that one episode. And had to happen.

Those folks are joined by stars Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, and Dean Norris, director Rian Johnson, and others in an oral history of "Ozymandias."

Tongue twisters are probably just a tiny bit younger than language itself, but possibly slightly older than the pun. English tongue twisters are not only jokes, they have been used to practice elocution for hundreds of years. Some of the tongue twisters we know today go back centuries, but others are contemporary enough to have a well-documented story.

7. SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS

Maybe the best-known one-word tongue twister, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious isn't short on complicated back story. Most people associate the mouthful of a nonsense word with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke dancing with cartoons from the 1964 movie adaptation of P.L. Travers's book series Mary Poppins.

But according to songwriters Barney Young and Gloria Parker, they'd used the word first (or a slight variation on it, supercalafajalistickespeealadojus) in their song, which was also known as "The Super Song." So when Disney came out with their song, written by Robert and Richard Sherman, Young and Parker took them to court for copyright infringement. The Shermans claimed they'd learned the funny word at camp as children in the '30s. Young and Parker said Young had made up the word as a kid in 1921 and the pair had sent their song to Disney in 1951. They sued for $12 million.

Read how that lawsuit turned out and the origins of other tongue twisters at Mental Floss.

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In the 1991 movie Hook, Peter Pan goes back to Neverland as an adult. The movie features a star-studded cast that includes Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins, and Magggie Smith, and they were all directed by Steven Spielberg. Despite all that, it was a financial disappointment and was critically panned. Even Spielberg wasn't pleased with the finished product. However, many GenX and older Millennial viewers loved the movie as children. This Honest Trailer may be a warning for them not to bother re-watching Hook. -via Geeks Are Sexy

We often think of the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the first animated feature film. That's not quite so. While the Disney movie was a breakthrough, the small print says that it is the first animated feature film produced "in America" or "the first full-length cel animated feature film." The very first feature-length animation was El Apóstol, an Argentine stop-motion animation from filmmaker Quirino Cristiani, which was a big hit in theaters in 1917! Cristiani also beat Walt Disney to the punch for a feature-length animated film with sound, with his movie Peludópolis.    

Peludópolis premièred in mid-September 1931 at the Cine Renacimiento in Buenos Aires. It was a glorious day for Cristiani. To start, General Provisional himself—President General Uriburu—attended the première and congratulated Cristiani directly on the “great work of satire and a noteworthy acclamation of the Argentine armed forces.” On top of that, Cristiani’s 70-year-old father Luigi was also at the event and proudly watched his youngest son receive the president’s compliments afterwards. Furthermore, most of the critics’ reviews of Peludópolis praised it as stellar. Several publications independently assessed the film with statements along the lines of “What more could we want?”

But Peludópolis made relatively little money—so little that in spite of the film’s warm critical reception, Cristiani’s studio lost an impressive 25,000 pesos (about $1.65 million in modern dollars). The disparity may well be attributable to how chaotic the political scene was in Argentina.

Yes, both El Apóstol and Peludópolis were political satires, and both are lost films, having been destroyed in separate fires. But they were a small part of Cristiani’s body of work as an animation pioneer in the early 20th century. Read about the fascinating life and work of Quirino Cristiani at Damn Interesting.   

Not sure of source but oh my god????? pic.twitter.com/7z87zRoUzO

— Kirsten Howard (@emotionalpedant) July 30, 2018

Be sure the sound is on when you watch this Twitter video. We don't know who edited it, but they deserve a salute. You can see the rest of the original video here. -via Digg