Since I avoid sweet drinks, carbonated drinks, and cold drinks, one soda pop seems the same as all the others to me. People who drink soda pop would consider that sacrilege, since everyone has their favorite. Apparently, Diet Coke is particularly popular. Weird History Food explains why by going through the entire history of soda, especially diet sodas. The upshot is that a product's name is more crucial than what's in it.
Working at NASA back in the day we destroyed a $10k gold plated mirror trying to drill a hole in it for a Herriot cell.
— Josh McBee (@JkMcBee) March 6, 2024
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and it also appears that you can't have a career in chemistry without an embarrassing experience of breaking some expensive laboratory glass. Keith Hornberger is the chemistry director at a biotech firm, and he knows the feeling. His son felt bad about breaking a beaker in his high school chemistry class, so Hornberger wanted to make him feel better about it by showing him that it happens to everyone. More than a hundred stories rolled in of expensive lab whoopsies.
Yikes!
— Miss Cellania (@misscellania) March 17, 2024
It's not just beakers, either. Respondents have dropped and broken Geiger counters, microscopes, and thermometers. Or an entire rack of expensive glassware they just cleaned. Plus even the cheapest dropped beaker could be holding something very expensive that spilled, or something dangerous that caused a lot of damage. You can read the entire thread at Twitter, or X, or just the best of them at Chemistry World. -via Real Clear Science
Salt is an essential mineral in our diets, but almost all of us consume way more salt than we need, because we are programmed to crave it. The conventional wisdom is that too much salt raises our blood pressure, which raises the danger of heart attacks and stroke, because that's what we've always been told. However, there are other dangers in consuming too much salt.
Early civilizations discovered that salt is a natural food preservative, because it kills the microbes that spoil food. It was thousands of years later that we discovered our own digestive systems depend on a variety of microbes to function. This is what we call our gut biome. Now imagine the effect of too much salt in our food killing off the natural bacteria living inside us. Some of these bacteria interact with fiber to produce metabolites, which keep our blood vessels relaxed and reduce inflammation. And besides their effect on blood pressure, our microbiome helps to regulate other systems, like sugar processing and fat absorption.
So what can we do? Sure, we can put away the salt shaker, but it would help a lot to limit our intake of processed foods, which are loaded with salt, sugar, and fat to appeal to our tastes. Read about about the effect of salt on our gut biomes at the Conversation. -via Geeks are Sexy
(Image credit: Joseph Barillari)
In this animated short, two characters, Snif & Snüf we assume, encounter a circle and a square -which eventually becomes a "wreck-tangle" as they explore the possibilities. The story involves one-upmanship, selfishness, and learning to share. But while the story is rather cute, it's not the story that's the most remarkable thing about the cartoon. Snif & Snüf is a new animation by Michael Ruocco, but it evokes the early days of the medium, when the whole point of animation was to humorously illustrate things that cannot be done by live actors. The retro look is delightful. Another thing that's particularly impressive is the score. The cartoon has no dialogue, no words at all, but the music emphasizes every movement perfectly, which is rarely seen in modern animation. Ruocco's fans have been following the development of this cartoon on Twitter and are delighted to see the finished product. -via Metafilter
Saint Patrick was a 5th-century English bishop who is credited with converting Ireland to Christianity. He is so revered in Ireland that many legends grew up around his legacy, and it's hard to separate truth from fiction in some of them. One involves the entrance to Purgatory, on an island off the northwest coast of Ireland called Station Island. The concept of Purgatory was already established in the canon of the Catholic church, but it was considered a process instead of a place. St. Patrick, asking God for help in converting the Irish, was led to Station Island and to a cave, which is said to be the entrance to Purgatory. Anyone who entered would be confronted with the flames of judgement, and would be scared into conversion.
The story was first documented in 1184, hundreds of years after Patrick died. The book Treatise on St. Patrick’s Purgatory told the story of Patrick's discovery, and of a knight named Owen, who spent 24 hours locked in the cave and reported a thoroughly harrowing experience, sort of a preview of hell. The book became a bestseller across Europe, and brought thousands of pilgrims to Station Island. Eventually, the cave was filled in, and a basilica was built overtop. But it's still a pilgrimage site, although it's an unpleasant journey designed to test one's fortitude. Read about St. Patrick's Purgatory at Smithsonian.
US Air Force pilot Captain Charles Shelton was shot down over Laos in 1965. He survived the crash, and was in radio contact with American forces. But the weather turned bad and he couldn't be found. Shelton reportedly hid for several days before he was captured. Eight years later, in 1973, POWs from Vietnam were repatriated, but Shelton was listed with those who died in captivity. Yet stories continued to come out from people who had met Shelton or had seen him, or had heard those stories to pass along. Some of the stonewalling and secrecy was assumed to be connected with the fact that American pilots should not have been over Laos in the first place. Shelton's wife Marian worked for years to track down witnesses to those sightings, but never came upon concrete information of where he might be or what ultimately happened.
The last rumor of Shelton in these stories was in 1985, twenty years after he was captured. Marian kept up the fight to find him until 1990, when she took her own life. It was only in 1994 that, at the request of his children, Colonel Shelton (he was promoted in absentia) was officially listed as deceased. But we still don't know what happened to him. Read the story of Colonel Shelton, the last Vietnam War POW, at Historic Mysteries. -via Strange Company
Dustin Ballard is at it again. The YouTuber who goes by There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) has once again harnessed artificial intelligence for the stupidest project imaginable, and the result is pure gold. The "voices" of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel perform Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" to the tune of "The Sound of Silence." But wait, there's more! Piggybacked onto this song are the lyrics from "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas. Ballard tells us it's from their album Booty Over Troubled Water.
Whatever you think of the implications of artificial intelligence, it's still good for a laugh when you don't take it seriously. Ballard doesn't totally depend on AI, though. There I Ruined It is now also a live band, and you can catch their shows in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.
Crocodiles eat plenty of other animals. They can digest bones and feathers and meat, but they cannot digest hair, so any fur from a mammal meal just sits inside their digestive systems until they hack it up, and that can be years. The hairballs, or bezoars, can be relatively fresh and hairy, or they could be smooth like a stone if they've been tumbled around inside a croc for a long time. One bezoar that was analyzed contained hair from flying fox, wild pig, Papuan wild dog, possum, cuscus ...and more than one human. John Lever owns a crocodile farm in Queensland, Australia, and says he doesn't have many hairballs because his crocs are fed meat that has been skinned, but he tells the story about the time he got a deal on rabbit parts, and ended up with clogged plumbing because of the rabbit fur.
Yes, people actually collect crocodile bezoars. Finding one in the wild is a special time, because you know a crocodile is near. They can be as big as a football, which means the croc is quite huge. There is a drawback in that guests often find them disgusting. Read about the men who collect crocodile hairballs at ABC News Australia. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Mark Norman)
Did you manage to eat a pie today? It's Pi Day, the perfect day for it. Americans write March 14th as 3/14, so it's pi, the irrational number that gives us the circle, and it's also Albert Einstein's Birthday. Einstein features in some of the memes of the day, like advertising pie for sale and a baby who is an Einstein lookalike, but the greatest pies you can imagine are being shown around the 'net today. The pie above was made by redditor Itzjacki with a pi symbol, but it's not a circle. That's because pie are square. But if you're going for a work of art, you need to turn to Jessica Clark-Bojin, also known as thepieous, who made the awesome pi pie below.
For sheer work involved, you can't beat this apple pie filled with apples cut into the shapes of numbers by nerdynummies. It must have been difficult to arrange them in the right order.
You'll see plenty more pies made for Pie Day, and some pies that are impressive even without any reference to the number, plus a wide range of Pi Day celebrations of all kinds in a ranked list at Bored Panda.
The plane pictured above doesn't quite look like an essential World War II military plane. The B-24D Liberator started out as a bomber out of Algeria named Thar She Blows Again, then was transferred and renamed Bucket of Bolts. After sustaining a lot of damage, she was converted to a lead assembly ship named First Sergeant. Lead assembly ships, also called Judas goats (meaning goats that were trained to lead herds to the slaughter), were planes that assembled and led squadrons of bombers on their way to their targets. At some point, they would turn back for home. These planes were bombers past their prime, often too disabled for bombing missions, painted with bright colors, polka dots, and stripes to be extra visible to the planes they were leading. In addition to goats, they were compared to rodeo clowns, and they looked the part.
Read about the lead assembly planes of World War II and see a gallery of photographs at Vintage Wings of Canada. Seeing the photographs together will remind you of a circus, but these are planes that worked past their retirement to ensure victory. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: U.S. Army Air Force)
Ollie loves Jane, and would do anything for her. Life was good, but changed when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Jane was home all the time, and Ollie was happy to have Jane at home all the time. But that didn't keep her from getting sick, and everything changed again. Ollie tells the story from his canine point of view. You might need a hankie for this one.
Sadiel Gomez made this film for a student assignment, and it ended up in ten film festivals, where Ollie won awards. He used his own dog Charlie as the star, and found out how difficult it is to work with animals. Charlie did real well in the end, making us fall for Ollie. -via Laughing Squid
In the 1930s, there was a balloon race of a sort. Auguste Piccard managed to ride a hydrogen balloon to the stratosphere in 1931 and '32, reaching a record altitude of 53,153 feet on his second flight. In a precursor to the space race, both the US and the Soviet Union decided they could do that, too, and even higher. They formed three teams, one from the American military, one from the Soviet Air Force, and one from Osoaviakhim, a Soviet paramilitary training organization. In September of 1933, the Soviet Air Force reached an altitude of 60,698 feet in the USSR-1. In November, the Century of Progress balloon from the Americans ascended to an altitude of 61,237 feet. That left the Osoaviakhim team, whose flight was postponed to January 1934. That coincided with the 17th Congress of the Communist Party, so Stalin made a big deal out of the flight of the balloon called Osoaviakhim-1. They were counting on it exceeding the record of the American balloon.
However, Osoaviakhim-1 had a lot of design problems. But if you know anything about the Stalinist era, you know that didn't make a bit of difference in whether it flew or not. On the one hand, the Osoaviakhim-1 beat both the American and Soviet altitude records. On the other hand, none of the three men aboard survived. Read an account of what happened when the Osoaviakhim-1 reached the stratosphere, as best as it could be reconstructed, at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: About KOMANDE STRATOSTATA)
Klingons may be "foul-smelling barbarians," but they sure know how to make coffee. The Klingon coffee known as raktajino became a staple on the Enterprise during the time of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. Captain Sisko was particularly addicted to the highly-caffeinated raktajino.
John DiMarco (previously at Neatorama) made a supercut of Starfleet personnel ordering or discussing raktajino over the course of several seasons. It will leave you craving a cuppa Klingon coffee, or else give you the caffeine jitters. I particularly enjoyed the sequence that involved time travel, as Odo and his DS9 companions encounter Klingons they do not recognize because they are made up in the low-budget Star Trek: The Original Series fashion. That's the kind of touch that makes us love Star Trek so much. By the way, those iconic cups they are drinking out of are available from many vendors online. -via Geeks Are Sexy
We've posted before about Frozen Dead Guy Days, a festival held in Colorado every year in honor of Bredo Morstoel, who has been frozen since his death in 1989. Since 1993, he has been kept on ice in Nederland, Colorado, which threw the festival every year from 2002 until the pandemic. The festival in 2023 was canceled by city authorities because it had grown out of hand.
But Frozen Dead Guy Days is back for 2024, and will be held on Saturday, March 16, in Estes Park, Colorado. Morstoel's body has been moved there to a permanent home in the ice house of the historic Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, the inn that inspired Stephen King to write The Shining. But that's not all that's new. The ice house has been transformed into a museum. It is now the the International Cryonics Museum. It is the only museum dedicated to cryonics, the science of "long-term, ultra-cold storage of human remains for possible future organ banking and transplantation of viable organs, up to and including the brain."
Since there are plenty of tourists visiting the Stanley Hotel every year, and a larger town to accommodate festival crowds, the organizers are hoping that Frozen Dead Guy Days has now found a permanent home in Estes Park, and Morstoel can once again begin receiving visitors. Read about Morstoel, the festival, and the new museum at Smithsonian. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: 1progressivedem1)
The booking agency Commercial Entertainments was founded in 1964 in London and they are still going strong. Back in 1969, if you wanted to hire a band in England, they would send you a roster of their best acts available, with prices. Looking at who you could have hired back then, you might wish for a time machine, as long as you could take your wallet with you. Imagine hiring Fleetwood Mac to play at your party for £500! Of course, the exchange rate was different then, so you'd have to pay around $1200 American. And that was years before Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham joined the band. Besides, they were the most expensive band on the list. You could settle for Pink Floyd at only £250, or if you were really strapped for cash, Deep Purple for £125. They most likely wouldn't have performed "Smoke on the Water" as it was recorded three years later, but they would certainly have ended the show with "Hush," which was a hit the year before, but not in the UK. -via Nag on the Lake
