Many authors publish literary works under a pen name, to made their name easier to pronounce or remember, or to avoid being judged by past works, or, like yours truly, just to keep their professional life separate from their private life. It was a different story for Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. He took different pen names, or what he called "heteronyms," as completely different personalities, and wrote from the viewpoint of each personality. In other words, Pessoa created characters and then inhabited them, writing as if he were in the character's body, even if the writing itself wasn't about the character. It was a habit he picked up as a child, to unleash his creativity without revealing too much of himself. The strangest part of the story was that no one knew that these different writers were all one person until Pessoa passed died! Pessoa's unpublished writings were discovered after his death in 1935, revealing him to be 70 different authors.

Today is March the first, and if we were in ancient Rome, that would come with a "Happy New Year!" greeting. A couple of days ago, we learned that in the Roman calendar, they just doubled February 24th to have a Leap Day. That seems confusing and nonsensical, but you haven't heard the half of it. The Roman Empire had a real time trying to come up with a workable calendar. See, early calendars were decreed by absolute rulers instead of by astronomers and mathematicians, so correcting any anomaly was a political risk.

Ancient calendars only had ten months (304 days) because no one did any agricultural work in the midwinter. Yes, those days existed, but they just weren't counted. In 731 BC, King Numa Pompilius decreed two new months, but that only brought the calendar up to 355 days. No problem, they just added another month when needed, but that didn't work so well, either. A few hundred years later, the harvest festival was falling in springtime, so something had to be done. That fell to Julius Caesar in 46 BC. He created a new calendar for only one year that aimed to set everything straight, but it ended up being 445 days long!

That long year helped to set the calendar right by the seasons, but it wasn't perfect. In another few hundred years, it again had to be adjusted again. Read about the Roman attempts to create a calendar that made sense at BBC Future.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Leomudde)

The earth is surrounded by a cloud of space debris. We have been launching things into space for more than 60 years, and they usually just stay up there long after their job is done. They do fall apart and collide with each other, so that we have tiny pieces of metal, plastic, and paint orbiting the earth and posing danger to spacecraft and other satellites. Yeah, we've managed to even pollute space. So what can we do about it? Many ideas have been proposed, but they are difficult and expensive, and may be dangerous. But what about space lasers? Vox explains how lasers would work, and the pros and cons of launching such a program to deal with space debris. What could possibly go wrong?

Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner studied the language of the Gullah Geechee residents of coastal Georgia in the 1930s. He recorded Amelia Dawley singing a song in another language that she was taught by her grandmother. No one knew what the song said, or where it came from, but it had been passed down through Dawley's family from her grandmother Catherine, who was kidnapped in Africa and enslaved on a coastal rice plantation in America in the early 1800s. A student from Sierra Leone recognized the lyrics in the recording as being of the Mende language.

Decades later, anthropologist Joseph Opala took a recording of Dawley's song to Sierra Leone. His colleague, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt, searched through villages in that country to find anyone who might recognize the song. In 1990, she finally found one woman, Baindu Jabati, in an isolated village called Senehun Ngola, who sang a song she learned from her grandmother. It was the same song. Her family had preserved it for hundreds of years.

Since the song contains about 50 words, it’s “almost certainly the longest text in an African language ever preserved by an African American family,” says Opala. “By comparison, [Roots author] Alex Haley was led to his roots in the Gambia by about five or six words in Mandinka.”

Through this song, Amelia Dawley's family was traced to a specific area in Sierra Leone. Dawley's daughter, Mary Moran, was 11 years old when the recording was made. She met Baindu Jabati in 1997, as seen above. Read how the preservation of a song in its original language led to the breakthrough in a family's history at Smithsonian.

(Image courtesy of Sharon Maybarduk)

The annual Dance Your PhD competition invites PhDs and graduate students to illustrate their dissertation with an interpretive dance video. Yes, it seems weird, but it's a lot of fun, and a great way to communicate science ideas to those who don't read dissertations. The contest has been going on since 2008, and we've covered it sporadically since then.

The winner for 2024 is Dr. Weliton Menário Costa of the Australian National University (ANU) for his video Kangaroo Time (Club Mix). It illustrates his paper "Personality, Social Environment, and Maternal-Level Effects: Insights from a Wild Kangaroo Population." Costa illustrates the diversity in kangaroo personalities and how they interact in groups. Kangaroos are quite accepting of each other's differences, and get along well, at least until it comes time to battle for mates. But the Brazilian biologist had a leg up on the competition in that he is also a musician, under the name WELI. He wrote and produced the song "Kangaroo Time," which is available on his new EP Yours Academically, Dr. WELI. It has four songs and drops tomorrow. See a behind-the-scenes video here. -via Metafilter

February 29th is a day that only appears on calendars once every four years, which we call Leap Year. It makes up for the fact that a year is actually 365.25 days long. Why do we put that extra day in February? I used to think it was because February is the shortest month, but that raises the question of why February got shortchanged in the first place. The simple answer is because in ancient Rome, the calendar year began with March. That's why October has a name that means eight even though it's the tenth month. In the Roman calendar, February was the final month of the year, so the placement of Leap Day at the very end of the calendar makes sense.

Except the Romans had Leap Day on February 24th. They essentially had two February 24ths every four years, which was all kinds of confusing, especially if you had an appointment that day. You can thank medieval monks for adding a new day to the calendar, which had to be kept in February because of the calculations of the spring equinox. Read how all that came about at the Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

People love to gossip, and gossip about someone famous travels wider and is remembered longer than gossip about your neighbors. Some bizarre and totally made-up stories about royalty find new life in print (see any tabloid), and the tales grow larger and stranger as they are passed along until idle gossip becomes a full-blown conspiracy theory. However, the term "conspiracy theory" has inched beyond its original meaning of a secret group engineering something that has a perfectly normal explanation. These stories are more like gossip, alleged scandals, and tall tales that just won't go away.

Any time a monarch dies young, there will be rumors of murder. That happened when King William II died in a hunting accident in 1100, and again when James I died in 1625 after refusing the advice of his doctors. Illegitimate children are a favorite subject of gossip, because everyone likes to think of a hidden royal somewhere. We've all heard the rumor about Prince Albert Victor (pictured above), Queen Victoria's grandson, being Jack the Ripper. And if you can believe it, Charles III is a vampire. Sure, he's related to Vlad the Impaler, but so is all European royalty. Read up on ten stubborn conspiracy theories involving the British royal family at Mental Floss.

Korean YouTuber 아픈 니가 청춘 is 193 centimeters tall, or 6' 4". All his life, he's been the odd man out, with people staring at him and asking if he plays basketball. In this video, he goes to Netherlands, where the average man's height is the tallest on earth, just over six feet. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he is surrounded by men taller than he is. Many are two meters tall, which is 6' 6". He also discovers what normal accommodations for tall people are like. For example, he doesn't have to bend over to use a sink, and he can see his face in a bathroom mirror. He can stand up straight on a train! For contrast, he talks to an average-sized Korean woman who is also in Netherlands, and how she struggles with a world built for tall people. Those of us who are fairly average for our communities don't realize how much difference that makes. -via reddit

How large are US factory farms, really? According to data from the US Department of Agriculture, the most recent record in 2022 was a little over 10 billion animals being raised for consumption. This is almost a 100% increase from 1987, which was at 5.2 billion. 

As the chart above shows, majority of these animals are meat chickens. And this can be explained by the rising trend of chicken consumption, replacing beef as one of the staple meats Americans consume, since chicken meat is perceived to be healthier than red meat.

However, this has also posed certain problems. For one, raising billions of chickens in a concentrated area can cause air pollution, not to mention the waste that it brings. Moreover, disease spreads more rapidly in these spaces, which could easily disrupt the food supply chain, inflating prices.

Chickens are not the only ones overpopulating farmlands. Cows, pigs, and turkeys have also seen an increase in number. And they pose the same problems if not more seriously than chickens as waste management for these animals may become an environmental and public health safety issue. They are not being disposed of or treated at sewage plants, but stored in pits inside the farm, which can leak to water sources and cause contamination.

Not only this, but since there are more animals being raised on farms, farmlands are decreasing, and more land is needed to plant soybeans and corn to feed the animals, which can further aggravate the situation when pesticides and other harmful chemicals are being used in growing these crops, which could all be washed off into rivers, streams, and the ocean, further exacerbating environmental pollution.

Check out the rest of the charts on Vox.

(Image credit: Kenny Torrella/Vox, Data from USDA Census of Agriculture)

Redditor /u/PattonPending and their friends taught their commanding officer, a captain in the US Army, how to play Dungeons & Dragons. They wanted to schedule a campaign, but there were multiple scheduling conflicts. So the officer simply ordered the players to attend. Now playing Dungeons & Dragons wasn't simply an opportunity for them; it was a requirement under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Jim Simons is an American mathematician who turned hedge fund manager when he founded Renaissance Technologies, hiring several physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, and statisticians to work on the Medallion Fund, which is effectively the best counterexample to the efficient market hypothesis. Essentially, he and his team beat the market.

But the story behind his journey toward becoming the greatest Wall Street investor is one built on the shoulders of other greats in the past. It's no surprise why many mathematicians and physicists excel in financial markets as many of the formulas that make these markets go round can be expressed in mathematical terms.

In fact, one of the earliest works on being able to predict one aspect of financial markets, derivatives, came from the PhD student Louis Bachelier, whose doctoral thesis focused on figuring out what the best price is for options.

He saw that the movements of stock prices over time form a normal distribution, and also found that the best price for options was that which both buyer and seller would stand to gain the same amount for the risk that they are taking.

Building upon this idea, other mathematicians, namely Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, were able to formulate an equation that would allow stock traders to plug in the numbers and come up with an exact price for the option. Meanwhile, Robert Merton had an independent paper published with his version of the same concept in option pricing, and so he was later credited along with Black and Scholes.

Although the secrets have been let out of the bag, Simons was able to use his background in mathematics and all of these derivations and formulas to exploit the inefficiencies in the market. To do that, he and his team gathered data from the stock market and the federal reserve, on which they used machine learning to find patterns in the stock market, and use models to become the highest-returning fund of all time. - via Digg

(Video credit: Veritasium/Youtube)

Twitter user Harry Jeffries shares this image of a map that his grandfather made of Scotland using rocks from that nation over the past 30 years. He's an amateur geologist and this map is geologically accurate, as the rocks are gathered from the locations on the map.

It must be a completely surreal experience to be able to remember everything that you have seen, heard, felt, or experienced in any way, down to the minute detail. Solomon Shereshevsky was one such individual. He could remember everything that his editor had instructed them, verbatim, at the morning meeting without having to take any notes.

It was fascinating, and it became the subject of Alexander Luria's study on human memory. As a mnemonist, Shereshevsky was able to experience everything in a visceral way, and in multiple senses which enabled him to form memories resistant to interference.

To put it simply, the way Shereshevsky recalled things was to create stories in his imagination piecing those memories and bits of information together, in order to make elaborate multisensory mental representations.

To use a more familiar analogy, it's similar to how Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock has a mind palace from which he can pull bits and pieces of information that he witnessed or experienced. But instead of a palace that resembles a vast library of information, Shereshevsky has a whole world of images and stories.

This brings us to Sir Frederic Bartlett's study on how humans remember. And in his famous experiment, he told the Native American story of the "War of the Ghosts" to British students. When asked to retell the story, the students were able to get the gist, but missed certain details.

The important insight he got from this experiment was that it wasn't simply a matter of misremembering the details, but that the students adapted those details and made the story their own infusing their own cultural expectations and norms into them. So, Bartlett finds that the act of remembering is not simply recalling minute, seemingly fragmented details but an exercise of imaginative reconstruction. - via The Daily Grail

(Image credit: Jon Tyson/Unsplash)

Traditional IQ tests usually measure an individual's mathematical ability, logical reasoning, and language proficiency, but many have found these types of tests to be lacking. Although these types of tests may indicate an individual's potential academic ability, it has been argued that they do not capture the full potential that an individual possesses. Moreover, they do not measure all aspects of an individual's intelligence.

Looking back at one of the earliest archives of IQ tests conducted on Scottish children in the 1930s, Lawrence Whalley decided to compare the results of those individuals with their current mental ability. Just based on those, he uncovered a few things.

One of the more striking insights from his investigation on the matter was that the motive behind the 1932 survey of Scottish schoolchildren's IQ was to identify children who would perform better at school, and give them the opportunity for education instead of their poorly-performing peers. It was a survey funded by the Eugenics Society.

Of course, these days, we have the theory of multiple intelligences, and many educators are advancing the idea that children should be taught collective scientific problem-solving, which urges them to exercise and learn interpersonal skills, teamwork, and rational thinking.

It seems that even for those we consider as great minds, IQ tests were either insignificant or irrelevant, when it came to human ingenuity and progress. For them, creativity, curiosity, and intuition were the necessary ingredients to pushing the boundaries of human achievement. And of course, the only way to foster these qualities even further was in the context of collaborative and even competitive landscapes.

Finally, when Whalley interviewed the participants of the 1932 survey, what they remembered most from their school days was not those IQ tests but the bonds they shared with their peers, and they spoke of how glad they were that schools no longer tested children by those IQ tests.

(Image credit: Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu/Unsplash)

The current film rating system that the Motion Pictures Association of America implements did not start out with five different tiers. It was in the 1930s when Hollywood began to self-regulate and impose content regulation guidelines on films due to criticism from the public and the push for censorship on certain subjects.

Back then, the industry turned to Will H. Hays to draft for them a set of guidelines that will ensure moral standards on the films being put out in theaters. This document was called the "Hays Code".

For the first couple of decades, it governed the way films were made based on the morality being depicted so that parents may rest assured that the films they will see won't adversely affect their children. But as times changed, people in the industry felt the need for the Hays Code to change as well.

In comes Jack Valenti, in the 1970s, who proposed a classification system that comprised of four tiers: G, M, R, and X. Later on, M would be replaced by PG, and so the rating system was as follows: G for general audiences; PG for films wherein parental guidance is advised; R stands for restricted, and requires that anyone under 17 be accompanied by an adult; and X, which is strictly prohibited for anyone under 17.

When the 80s came in, a few things happened that urged the MPAA to add an intermediate PG-13 rating. Ronald Reagan's presidency brought with it a stronger sense of morality in the public sphere which affected the film industry as well. But more than this, three films in particular drove the industry to action toward a more nuanced rating system: Poltergeist, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Gremlins.

And so, today, the MPA's film rating system is comprised of five tiers: G for general audiences; PG which urges parental guidance; PG-13 which strongly recommends parents to exercise caution with their children; R for films which require adult supervision for those under 17; and NC-17, which is for clearly adult films.

That's the short history of the creation of PG-13.

(Image credit: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)