It was the murder of the century in Iceland -but not a recent century. In March of 1828, Agnes Magnúsdóttir alerted the neighbors that the farmhouse where she worked, called Illugastaðir, was on fire.
When the rescuers arrived and extinguished the blaze, the scene was even worse than they expected. Inside, they discovered the bodies of Natan Ketilsson, the farm’s owner, and his guest, Pétur Jónsson. Though the two were badly burned, the rescuers could see it wasn't the fire that had caused their deaths: They'd been murdered. The men had been stabbed 12 times and bludgeoned with a hammer before the fire had been set with shark oil.
The authorities quickly arrested both Agnes and Illugastaðir’s other maid, Sigríður Guðmundsdóttir, as well as a young man named Friðrik Sigurdsson. Although the trio's motives were murky, local gossips suspected the crime had something to do with their romantic entanglements.
"Entanglements" was the word. Agnes was in love with Natan, who loved a married woman in a lengthy and public affair. But Natan also slept with 15-year-old Sigríður, which made Agnes jealous, and who knows what Friðrik thought of all that. Anyway, the case ended with two beheadings, which were the last executions in Iceland. All these years later, there are still many questions surrounding the murders that will never be answered. Read the story as we know it at Mental Floss.
For decades guitar players had to deal with miles and miles of cable when playing on a large stage, but the wireless instrument systems are here and they're cleaning up the stage.
The BOSS KATANA-AIR amplifier is the cutting edge in wireless guitar tech- it can be charged for 12 hours of use and therefore requires no outlets or cables to play, and its motion sensing technology gives guitarists the freedom to move around without affecting the sound.
Now guitar players can play pretty much anywhere they want and freely rock out without getting hung up on cables or cords, how cool is that?!
Dami Lee has Olympic fever! Let this be a lesson to you: don't order your prom (or other dressy occasion) dress until the winter Olympics are well over. Seeing how pretty figure skaters can be in sparkles and Spandex will give you illusions you won't be able to shake for a week or so. And prom pictures can last a lifetime ...especially on the internet! The comic is from Dami Lee at As Per Usual.
The whole zombie thing is starting to make fans groan, but if you dig around a little you'll find that fresh visions of a zombie infested world have been out there all along, hiding out in all the unusual places.
Raised By Zombies was written and created by Guy Collins back in 2013, and while it isn't a reinvention of the subgenre it presents lots of fresh and interesting ideas in a simply eye pleasing style. In fact, it might be the most chill zompocalypse story ever told!
Holy cow, that's wasteful! The latest "pictofacts" post at Cracked tackles weird spending habits. Many of them have huge totals for what we spend money on, possibly because so many people are buying something. After all, there are 350 million Americans. But not all the facts are about Americans.
What's so weird about that? Clothing costs more over there, and Europeans aren't expected to spend money on their health, it's a government benefit. What's weird is how much Americans spend on health care. See all twenty submitted facts at Cracked.
Photographing wildlife is a lot like taking photos of thugs, gangsters and criminals on the streets- they both force you to shoot without being seen, neither group knows how to pose properly, and taking the pics could cost you your life.
But as American street photographer Bruce Gilden has discovered the resulting photos are worth the risk, because the untamable creatures he photographs aren't always going to be around to smile for the camera.
Bruce spent just over two weeks in a small provincial town in Russia populated by criminals, drug addicts and other "lost people", a terrifyingly rough and tumble place he referred to as a "Dark Ages community".
And, much like the photos you'd expect to see taken at a wildlife reserve, Bruce's photos showcase wild creatures in their natural habitat, feeling free to go about their regular daily business while a visitor takes a pretty picture.
If you are growing bored waiting for the skilled Olympic skiers in PyeongChang to crash and fall, you need to switch gears and watch the robot skiing event! While robots may be pretty good at driving us around and waging war, skiing is still beyond most of them.
The video comes from the Ski Robot Challenge in South Korea outside of PyeongChang 2018 yesterday. This week’s robot ski event was held at the Welli Hilli resort in Hoenseong, about an hour’s drive from the actual Olympic games.
And there are few things funnier than robots falling down. The last DARPA Robotics Challenge in 2015 was great for robot fail videos and GIFs. But humanity has largely been deprived of hilarious robotic failures in the past couple of years. We’ve mostly been faced with the terrifying reality of robot backflips and super-human agility.
This is great on so many levels. We can enjoy the slapstick aspect without worrying about painful injuries. We can laugh at the attempts to make these robots resemble human skiers without getting it quite right. Most importantly, we can comfort ourselves about the ability of killer robots to catch us in the snow during the robot uprising.
The varied and numorous citizens of the galaxy don't know anything about God or Jesus or Mother Mary of Earth, nor do most of them understand the idea of sainthood or how some guy with mystical powers could be the savior of an entire planet. But then they met the one who calls himself Star-Lord and his group of guardians and realized that saints are essentially superheroes- and Star-Lord is truly worthy of sainthood. He's not the vow of silence type, nor is he too humble to sing his own praises, but Saint Peter of the Quill is a holy terror when it comes to handing the bad guys their asses!
Bless your wardrobe with a geeky masterpiece by bringing home this Lord Of The Stars t-shirt by Creative Outpouring, it'll make people say "holy hell that's a funny shirt!" wherever you go.
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!
Star Trek was written for adults from the beginning. In the original TV series, we became accustomed to Captain Kirk finding a love interest on every planet the Enterprise visited. Star Trek: The Next Generation continued that tradition, although it had a wider range of characters involved in such romances. Captain Picard had a past (and sometimes a present) with Dr. Crusher, and Riker and Troi were definitely a thing, although both couples were on-and-off, so the characters were free to look elsewhere. But the series' trysts were often played for comedy, because there is nothing more down-to-earth than crossed signals, unwelcome advances, and unrequited love. For example, Deanna Troi's mother Lwaxana had the hots for Picard which she never bothered to hide, seen in the episode "Manhunt."
The telepathic and always inappropriate Lwaxana Troi returns to the Enterprise in the throes of the Betazoid version of menopause, which sees her sex drive essentially quintupling. Her mate of choice? Captain Picard, who is put off by her blatant come-ons. Lwaxana’s version of hello is using her species’ advanced mind-reading abilities on Picard to expose his “naughty thoughts” in public. En route to the Pacifica conference as the representative for Betazed, she lures him into what is supposed to be an ambassadorial dinner for the crew (to which she only invites the mortified captain).
When you were a kid making faces, your mother might have told you that your face could freeze like that, and you'd have to live with it forever. That's exactly what happened to Aaron in Cautionary Tales.
But the story isn't entirely about him. Aaron goes to a support group for people who have to wear their young indiscretions for the world to see. How many different cautionary tales can you identify? They will be revealed during the credits, although the British tale about crusts is supposed to be a good thing instead of cautionary. The moral of the story is that you should always listen to your mother. -via Metafilter
Shakespearean scholars have been debating for centuries about whether William Shakespeare was a rip-off artist or not, and whether the true "inspiration" for his works can be traced back to one of his contemporaries.
And now thanks to the research done by two Shakesepearean scholars and an open-source plagiarism software called WCopyfind we may be one step closer to solving the mystery.
Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter ran Shakespeare's plays through WCopyfind and discovered a connection to an unpublished manuscript from the 16th century called "A Brief Discourse Of Rebellions and Rebels" by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth:
Mr. McCarthy used decidedly modern techniques to marshal his evidence, employing WCopyfind, an open-source plagiarism software, which picked out common words and phrases in the manuscript and the plays.
In the dedication to his manuscript, for example, North urges those who might see themselves as ugly to strive to be inwardly beautiful, to defy nature. He uses a succession of words to make the argument, including “proportion,” “glass,” “feature,” “fair,” “deformed,” “world,” “shadow” and “nature.” In the opening soliloquy of Richard III (“Now is the winter of our discontent …”) the hunchbacked tyrant uses the same words in virtually the same order to come to the opposite conclusion: that since he is outwardly ugly, he will act the villain he appears to be.
“People don’t realize how rare these words actually are,” Mr. McCarthy said. “And he keeps hitting word after word. It’s like a lottery ticket. It’s easy to get one number out of six, but not to get every number.”
Rather than straight up ripping off George's book scholars believe the book must have been an endless source of inspiration for the Bard of Avon, something which he consulted often while writing his plays:
“It’s a source that he keeps coming back to,” said Mr. McCarthy, a self-taught Shakespeare scholar, during a recent interview at his home in North Hampton, N.H. “It affects the language, it shapes the scenes and it, to a certain extent, really even influences the philosophy of the plays.”
In reviewing the book before it was published, David Bevington, professor emeritus in the humanities at the University of Chicago and editor of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (7th Edition),” called it “a revelation” for the sheer number of correlations with the plays, eclipsed only by the chronicles of Holinshed and Hall and Plutarch’s “Lives.”
Martin Meisel, professor of dramatic literature emeritus at Columbia University, said in another review that the book is “impressively argued.” He added that there is no question the manuscript “must have been somewhere in the background mix of Shakespeare’s mental landscape” while writing the plays.
The 1998 Disney movie The Parent Trap concerned twins separated by their parents' divorce who find each other and scheme to reunite the family. The movie was a remake of the 1961 film starring Hayley Mills, in a time when divorce was rarer and lifelong separation of siblings was somewhat more plausible. The intriguing gimmick of both versions was the interaction of twins played by the same actor. Pulling it off made 11-year-old Lindsay Lohan a star. Twenty years later, let's learn some more about what went into The Parent Trap.
10. For the split scenes Lohan would wear an earpiece that would allow her to hear the dialogue of the other sister.
This would make an easier dialogue between Lohan and her other self and provide less of a gap in between the different parts of the conversation. Plus it would look more natural.
9. This was Lohan’s first movie.
This was pretty good for for a debut to be honest and it managed to get her noticed and signed to other parts eventually.
First off, this is a difficult quiz about pregnancy, not a quiz about difficult pregnancies. The questions take a deep dive into a natural process that billions of women have experienced, yet most never knew these things. Whether you've given birth or not, you'd have to be pretty well read to get them right. Take the quiz here. It was written by our own Jill Harness, who read quite a bit on the subject before she gave birth to her son last year. I scored a mere 48%, which is unsurprising, as I've never been pregnant and haven't studied it much. Maybe you'll do better.
On the lake called Lissma Kvarnsjö near Stockholm, a brave man skates on new ice that is only a couple of inches thick (45mm). The ice sings and groans and echoes as he glides along. Those who've done this say that the skater doesn't hear much of this, that it takes some distance for the sound to reverberate properly.
The eerie sounds are generated by a phenomenon called acoustic dispersion. There's a neat explanation in this video. In case you are simply disappointed that he never fell through the ice, you'll be rewarded by watching this clip. -via Digg
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
Improbable theories, experiments, and conclusions compiled by Dirk Manley, Improbable Research staff
Effect of Microwave Ovens on Astronomy “Identifying the Source of Perytons at the Parkes Radio Telescope,” E. Petroff, E. F. Keane, E. D. Barr, J. E. Reynolds, J. Sarkissian, P. G. Edwards, J. Stevens, C. Brem, A. Jameson, S. Burke-Spolaor, S. Johnston, N. D. R. Bhat, P. Chandra, S. Kudale, and S. Bhandari, arXiv:1504.02165, April 9, 2015. The authors, at many institutions in Australia, the UK, the USA, and India, report:
“Perytons” are millisecond-duration transients of terrestrial origin, whose frequency-swept emission mimics the dispersion of an astrophysical pulse that has propagated through tenuous cold plasma. In fact, their similarity to FRB 010724 had previously cast a shadow over the interpretation of “fast radio bursts,” which otherwise appear to be of extragalactic origin. Until now, the physical origin of the dispersion-mimicking perytons had remained a mystery. We have identified strong out-of-band emission at 2.3--2.5 GHz associated with several peryton events. Subsequent tests revealed that a peryton can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle. Radio emission escaping from microwave ovens during the magnetron shut-down phase neatly explain all of the observed properties of the peryton signals.
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