In the era of sailing ships, the 16th through the 19th centuries, ships couldn't recruit enough men to stay at sea for months earning low wages and eating hardtack, so they shanghaied them. That was the term for kidnapping sailors, possibly because Shanghai was the destination for many of them. Agents called "crimps" in America could make good money providing hands for ships, whether they were willing or not.
The most straightforward method for a crimp to shanghai a victim is to render him unconscious, often by drugging his drink but a blow to the head works equally well, then forge his signature on the ship's articles during the time of delivery to the ship’s captain. If the unconscious victim is not known to the crimp, a name would be invented. It was not uncommon for an unwilling sailor to wake up at sea and find himself with a new name.
The crimps made good money from shanghaiing. A well-run operation could fetch as much as $9,500 per year in 1890s dollars, equivalent to about a quarter million dollars in today’s money. Aside from the fee, the crimp also collected, on behalf of the men he shanghaied, the two months advance pay that was allowed before a trip so that sailors could pay off debts and prepare themselves for the trip. It was a very lucrative enterprise.
Dissolved corn starch makes a non-Newtonian fluid that turns solid under sudden force. We've seen how you can run across a pool of it, but a slow walk means you'll be swimming. What would happen if you forced it through an extruder with a hydraulic press? Lauri Vuohensilta shows us with his hydraulic press.
After the cornstarch, he has some fun with color-changing putty, cheese, ballistic gel, crayons, canned shaving cream, and soap bars, all which go through the extruder in spectacular fashion. -Thanks, Edward!
Psst, college students - are you stressed out? The University of Utah has the solution that is just in time for final exams. Behold, the "Cry Closet," a safe space where you can cry out the stress of college life in convenient privacy.
Shaquille O'Neal has a doctorate in education, but everyone has a brain fart occasionally. His came on the TV show Inside the NBA, which can be classified as either a sports talk show or a comedy. The subject is how to save money on gas, which devolves into a comedy of errors as each participant focuses on a different aspect of the problem.
It's about two minutes in before Shaq figures out his math error, but the logic problem remains. The price of running this particular car is going to be the same no matter how often you stop for gas or how much you put in. And the entire cast is ignoring the fact that the size of the tank really has no bearing on its mileage. What really matters is how how many miles you can drive on a gallon of gas.
That said, you shouldn't let your vehicle run all the way to empty, because in many cars, the fuel pump is cooled by the gasoline, and running it empty will wear out your pump. Don't ask me how I know.
Redditor bluebull62 fits perfectly in his great-grandfather's uniform from World War I. He (the great-grandfather) served in France as a mechanic and test pilot, meaning he repaired and flew airplanes made of sticks and fabric. Bluebull62's grandfather is 82 and wanted to see him model the uniform before he goes into a nursing home. You can see from the side-by-side pictures that it would take him back to the memory of his own father.
He also posted a few other pictures in a gallery, including one with the overcoat and hat. Bluebull62's great-grandfather on the other side of the family was in the Navy during World War II. Will he also go into the military? That remains to be seen -he's only 17 years old now.
Golden Age Hollywood gave us actresses whose names will live for as long as the movies do, like Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, and others. Behind the carefully-crafted publicity campaigns, there are plenty of secrets about these women that the studios hid from the public. But the trivia in the latest episode of Scatterbrained from Mental Floss isn't limited to scandals. Learn about the restrictions they worked under, the lengths they went for a role, and their lesser-known accomplishments, too. On top of all that, the show has a section debunking common misconceptions about Hollywood actresses.
When I was a child, I admired the lovely pink dishes my grandmother had in her china cabinet. She still had a house full of children at that time, and we all ate off those delicate pink dishes. They were Depression glass, a distinctive souvenir of both hard times and the rise of mass production.
Prior to the crash, most glass dinnerware was often clear, and handmade from cut crystal. It cost too much, for even a typical middle class family budget. After Black Tuesday, such extravagances were all but forgotten, as scores of Americans stood in lines waiting for bread.
But a revolutionary machine that used new processes such as mold etching—a method that utilized acid to etch patterns into an iron mold rather than directly onto the glass—made manufacturing glassware quicker and cheaper. The molds themselves were costly, but each one could produce thousands of dishes. Thanks to mechanization, one Depression glass manufacturer, Anchor Hocking, increased glass production from one piece per minute to over 90 pieces per minute. This allowed companies to sell individual dishes, such as tumblers, for a nickel or less.
The price was low enough that such dishes were often offered as premiums for buying other things, such as oatmeal, gasoline, or movie tickets. Read about how Depression glass went from a poor person's treat to collector's item at Atlas Obscura. I'm a collector myself, pink, please, like my grandmother's dishes.
This is Sam. He is seven years old. Sam's school celebrated the 100th day of class by having the students dress like they were 100 years old. Fortunately for the assignment, Sam has a mother who is an experienced face painter, and he was overdue for a haircut. So the day before, he got half of a haircut. A reverse Mohawk.
After school on the 100th day, Sam got the rest of his hair cut off. You can see a short slideshow of Sam's pictures here. A good time was had by all. -via reddit
You probably don't recognize the name Oscar Tschirky, but everyone who was anyone in New York during the first half of the 20th century knew him, and liked him. Tschirky immigrated from Switzerland as a young man, and worked his way up the ranks in the hospitality industry. In 1893, he was hired to be the maître d’ at the new Waldorf Hotel, a position he held for 50 years.
The original Waldorf, with Oscar as its public face, opened on the eve of a depression and specialized in tone-deaf displays of wealth. While impoverished New Yorkers formed bread lines downtown, financiers smoked in an oak-paneled café modeled on a German castle. The ladies’ drawing room, apparently without irony, reproduced Marie Antoinette’s apartment. Irresistibly ostentatious, it became the de facto headquarters of the late Gilded Age.
Most evenings, Oscar greeted guests outside the Palm Room and, based on their social standing, decided whether there was, in fact, a spare table for dinner. He stood with a hand on the velvet rope, something he invented to manage crowds but which only heightened the restaurant’s popularity. “It seemed that when people learned they were being held out,” he recalled years later, “they were all the more insistent upon getting in.” His smile of recognition was currency: It meant that you belonged.
Last year, Marcio Cabral's photo of a Brazilian giant anteater won first place in the "Animals in their Environment" category of the National History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. It was a night shot of a glowing termite tower with an anteater, taken with a 30-second exposure at Brazil's Emas National Park. Some folks marveled at how an anteater stayed still for a 30-second exposure. Someone else noticed the resemblance of the anteater to a taxidermy anteater on display at the park's entrance.
(Image credit: London Natural History Museum)
According to the museum, five anteater specialists were then brought in to find out whether it was the same "animal" used in Cabral's award-winning photo.
"The five scientists, working independently of each other, all concluded there are elements of the animal's posture, morphology, raised tufts of fur and patterns on the neck and head that are too similar for the images to show two different animals.
"The experts would have expected some variation between two individuals of the same species."
After the investigation, the Natural History Museum has disqualified Cabral's photo from the competition. Cabral insists the photo is real. Read more about the scandal at Buzzfeed.
The war cry is "Avengers assemble!" because there's strength in numbers ...up to a point. When you have to assemble eleventy-eight superheroes, it can take a bit of time. How many superheroes is too many superheroes? If the new movie Avengers: Infinity War is as big as Marvel hopes, you can expect way more superheroes to be introduced over the next few movies. You know what they say, nothing succeeds like excess. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Matthäus Schwarz had a passion for clothing, particularly any historical fashions he could find documentation on. That wasn't much in 1520 in Augsburg, Germany. Schwarz began to document his own garments at age 23 by hiring an artist to illustrate them, a practice he continued until he was in his 60s. The result is a handmade manuscript with 137 illustrations of Schwarz modeling clothing. A fashion diary that required so much work might seem to be the ultimate in self-obsession, but the result gives us a glimpse into the clothing of the 16th century. Ulinka Rublack, who co-authored the book The First Book of Fashion: The Book of Clothes of Matthäus & Veit Konrad Schwarz of Augsburg, tells us about the unique Matthäus Schwarz and the fashion book he left behind.
Today, Schwarz’s outfits might seem impractical and outlandish—from the close-fitting, padded jackets known as doublets to his tight pants or hose—but he was certainly on trend for the time. “I don’t think he was an eccentric, since his wardrobe was closely oriented in terms of cuts and styles with what aristocratic or upper-middle-class people wore,” Rublack says. “But within that framework, he was also innovative: I think Schwarz would have been known as someone who communicated his passion for fashion. For instance, when he ordered a new gown, he could be very inventive in terms of how the gown was cut—one sleeve might be different from the other, and he is often shown with his arms stretched out so that you can appreciate the experimentation that’s gone into a design.
“That was also very clear when he went to weddings, a real event to dress up for,” she continues. “You’d wear new, brightly dyed clothes to make a real impression, and he was often with a group of men who went together and chose an outfit to wear as a group. In that sense, it tells us that these styles were shared as well.” Schwarz was clearly enamored with the popular Germain tailoring techniques of “slashing and pinking,” used to give a garment additional texture by adorning it with patterns of long slashes or small cuts, often lined with contrasting fabric. “Schwarz was also interested in bringing in some traditional details, like old Franconian embroidery,” Rublack adds. “For me, that’s the Renaissance spirit—it’s not just about ingenuity and innovation, but a respect for the past.”
Despite wearing garments that appear almost comical today in their complexity, Schwarz’s lived experiences, as explained through his handwritten captions, are surprisingly relatable. His descriptions include everything from comments about his weight to the youthful hubris of his teenage years, of which he writes, “In my mind, I was a bad ass.” One entry from 1521—showing Schwarz in a wide-brimmed bonnet over a red wool coif—includes a later addition that says simply, “I had a terrible headache.” Other pages include more consequential notes, such as the caption referencing a major outbreak of the plague, which reads, “On the 20th August, 1535, when people in Augsburg began to die.”
We followed the adventures of the Rosetta spacecraft as it approached and sent the Philae Lander onto the surface of comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The European Space Agency (ESA) is just now releasing substantial data gathered during the expedition. And it's awesome. Twitter user landru79 combined that data into a gif, which Phil Plait converted to a video.
The landscape itself is the comet. Comets are lumps of ice — things like frozen water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia — and rock, mostly in the form of gravel and dust. Some orbit the Sun on long ellipses, and when they get close in the ice turns into a gas, releasing ice flakes and the gravelly bits. This surrounds the solid nucleus with a gaseous/dusty coma, and that can then blow away from the comet due to the solar wind and pressure of sunlight to form the tail.
67P is a double-lobed comet, looking more like a rubber ducky than anything else. It's very roughly 4 or 5 km across, and takes about 6.4 years to circle the Sun once. Rosetta was about 13 kilometers from the comet as it took these images, slowly moving around it so that our vantage point in the video changes slightly. Comets are very dark, and it was three times farther from the Sun than Earth is when these images were taken, so the lighting is fainter. Also, these were on the "dark side" of the comet, so the illumination you see is from reflected sunlight by the coma. The video represents about a half hour of real time.
At Alkali Flat, a site near White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, scientists are studying ancient footprints to reconstruct a hunting party of Pleistocene humans as they fought against giant ground sloths.
“Most of the time they are invisible. There is a lot of salt in ground, and when it rains, the salt dissolves. And, crucially, as it dries out, the fill dries at a different rate and the difference between the fill (footprint) and the surrounding sediment makes the track visible for a brief time while it dries out,” explained paleoecologist Sally Reynolds of the UK’s Bournemouth University, a co-author on the paper. The team, led by the US National Parks Service’s David Bustos, used aerial photography to spot the tracks and then selected a few groups for careful excavation and study.
The tracks reveal that ancient humans once hunted a group of giant sloths along the shores of Lake Otero. Several human footprints are clearly superimposed inside the long, kidney-shaped impressions of sloth feet, pointing in the same direction, as if the human was deliberately stepping in the sloth tracks. That would require real effort; the average human stride, according to Reynolds and her colleagues, is about 0.6 m, but a giant sloth’s stride was anywhere from 0.8 to 1.1 m, so the human tracker would have had to take bigger steps.
The Clovis people, even armed with spears, had to be really brave to hunt a group of three-ton sloths with giant claws. But even one could provide food for an entire community. Read about the research and what they've found so far at Ars Technica. -via Metafilter
The people behind Bad Lip Reading have gotten really good at what they do. In this retelling of Mark Zuckerberg's (or Bojane Bugabe's) congressional testimony, the lips match what they're "saying" perfectly, while the dialogue actually make sense in that setting. And it's funny. They had a ton of material to work with, and they made the most of it. -via reddit
