A man by the name of Jonathan Childe, an army officer, had fallen into the delusion that the young Queen Victoria was madly in love with him. At the time, she was only 18 years old and had just met her future husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a year before.

In the course of five years, Childe had sent Queen Victoria several love letters which grew in intensity and offense. These were rebuffed by the young queen, and Childe was then requested to stop sending the letters. When he didn't stop, his father determined to have him checked by doctors.

At the time, nobody understood Childe's psychological condition, and doctors merely marked it as some form of partial insanity. Nevertheless, he was sent to a private asylum. Childe maintained that such treatment was uncalled for, and appealed to various people who defended him on his behalf.

Twelve years after his admission into the asylum, he was given a day in court in 1854. Overall, Childe appeared rational and normal in everyone's eyes and he had the public on his side.

Childe had written a lot of letters to his friends and supporters. But some of these letters had strange codes written on them. So, his father sent some of his letters to Charles Babbage, the polymath, to decode the enigmatic ciphers.

Apparently, the ciphers, an example of which can be read on History Today, revealed the true nature of Jonathan Childe and his obsession over Queen Victoria, which bordered on insanity. Due to this revelation, Childe was sent to Ticehurst asylum, where he spent his days until his death at the age of 49 due to necrosis.

Although the case proved that the doctors had been justified in their assessments of Childe's psychological condition, many believed that the way they dealt with it, particularly Childe's confinement in a lunatic asylum, was unjust.

(Image credit: Prints, Drawings and Watercolors from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. Public Domain)

Many people have probably heard about the Ten Commandments which God gave Moses on Mount Sinai. But though these summed up the basic moral laws that God told his people to keep, they were not the only laws that he passed on to his people.

All in all, there were 613 laws for the ancient Jewish people to live by. Many of the laws involve Jewish rites and are related to Jewish festivals. There are also more practical laws which relate to properties, legal procedures, and health. But there are some laws that may sound strange.

For example, there is the law that acquits a person who killed a burglar before sunrise. Now, although it sounds like it's giving an okay to violence or murder, the core of the provision is that a thief must make restitution for what he has stolen.

In the case that the owner accidentally kills the thief at night, then the owner will not be guilty because it is presumed that it is difficult for the owner to identify who the thief was. If it were during the day, then the owner could simply accuse the thief publicly and they will be brought to justice.

It is also possible that killing a thief at night exonerates the killer because it might be that the owner of the goods (let's say, livestock) was under the impression that the thing that trespassed and tried to do away with the livestock is a wolf or a wild beast.

Another strange law is the one that involves a woman drinking bitter water to prove that she did not commit adultery. The whole procedure is called the ordeal of bitter water, which is an elaborate trial in which a husband who suspects his wife to have committed adultery brings her to a priest, and the priest then lets the woman drink bitter water.

The priest says to the woman that if she is innocent of adultery, then let no harm befall on her from drinking the bitter water. If she is guilty, then curses will be brought upon her, causing her womb to discharge and her uterus to drop.

Whether or not such cases actually happened is uncertain, although it is believed that these laws might never have been observed, for some due to the highly specific nature of the circumstances.

(Image credit: Hendrick de Somer/Wikimedia Commons)

Having watched a lot of Saturday morning TV in the 1960s, I was aware of the Easy-Bake Oven, but I never really craved one until I got to elementary school and found out that many of the girls in my class had one. I asked for one, but my parents thought that was silly, since I was already using the regular oven to make tiny cakes in tiny pans whenever my mother baked a full-size cake. Besides, it was too expensive -and so were the tiny packets of cake mix. That was logical, but not easy for a six-year-old to hear. So the most nostalgic part of this video for me is seeing the Kenner Gooney Bird.

Forty years later, my own children never expressed any desire to bake tiny cakes with a light bulb. I honestly didn't know they were still made until I watched this video from Weird History Food. The Easy-Bake Oven turned 60 years old just tecently, and has had a lot of ups and down in its history. The older ones that still work fetch a premium in the vintage toy market, but good luck finding light bulbs that are hot enough to bake a cake.   

In the Star Trek universe, Bloodwine is what Klingons drink, often to celebrate winning battles or during ceremonies. It is twice as potent as whiskey, and will knock non-Klingons for a loop. Believe it or not, Klingon Bloodwine is not available at Star Trek Spirits as they specialize in Romulan liquor, but you can order it through Star Trek Wines. Still, it might not be what you imagined because the title comes with "Cabernet Sauvignon" appended, telling us that it is made with earthly grapes instead of blood.

Firewhiskey figures in the Harry Potter books and movies as a liquor that witches and wizards drink. It's quite a step up from Butterbeer, and leaves one with a burning sensation and expanded courage. Both Jack Daniels and Jim Beam produce Fire Whiskey, but since they use two words for the product, it couldn't be the Harry Potter drink.

So what are fans to do if they want to toast their favorite franchise with someone that will leave you totally tipsy? Make your own at home. The Fresh Toast offers recipes for cocktails that will replicate the imagined taste and the cachet of Firewhiskey and Klingon Bloodwine. The Firewhiskey is literally a "goblet of  fire" and the bloodwine has an extra kick with a dash of tabasco. -Thanks, Hearsetrax!

A gene called ORF1, referred to as Line 1, is found in the human genome, but it has no purpose that we can find. Scientists have long considered it an example of junk DNA. But just because it does nothing to benefit our bodies' functions doesn't mean it doesn't do anything, as Hank Green of Sci Show explains. Line 1 is a cut and paste machine, replicating itself and inserting its copies into other strands of DNA. It's not too picky about where it inserts those copies, either, which can be a problem. Line 1 can turn up in a place that breaks another gene sequence and cause chaos as the affected cells replicate, enabling many horrible syndromes including cancers. However, the fact that it replicates rapidly with growing cancers means that we may find a way to detect it in a blood test. Elevated levels of line 1 will not exactly diagnose cancer, since it won't show us the location of tumors, but it might turn out to be a simple screening test that sends affected people for more tests. This video is only 6:45; the rest is an ad.

All Terrain Wheelchair I built for my wife
byu/AkmJ0e inredneckengineering

At the magnificent subreddit /r/redneckengineering, /u/AkmJ0e exemplifies the improvosational talents of that community with this all-terrain wheelchair that he built for his wife.

It's built over a zero-turn mower that allows it to instantly turn in any direction. The track is a single snowmobile track that he cut in half and attached to rims from an old trailer.

As you can see, she can go anywhere in it. /u/AkmJ0e is thinking about attaching a snowblower to give her something to do as she's traversing their property. It already has a winch under the seat so she can haul firewood.

The Simpsons has been running since 1989, and now has 760 episodes in 35 seasons. The prime time animated series always had gags for adults and children, who appreciated different parts of the show. If you are too young to have seen the earliest episodes, you've probably been able to catch them in reruns. There are plenty of jokes you may have missed the first time around because 1. you were too young to get the joke, or 2. the gag may have relied on much older cultural references that you never encountered, and there were also 3. some jokes that relied heavily on current events, which were no longer current when you caught the episode years later. 

In looking through the 13 joke explanations at Cracked, some were always funny to me because I was an adult when the series premiered and I knew the cultural references. Some are just too subtle and may have only gotten a laugh from the production crew. And a few were only funny for that one week 20-something years ago, and only then if you were up on the news. Check them out and see how many you recall.

An antique silk dress with a secret pocket. Inside, scraps of crumpled paper with seemingly random words and numbers written on them. These appear to be elements of a good mystery, and they are. It has come to be called "The Silk Dress Cryptogram".

Sara Rivers Cofield, an archaeologist, had been shopping for old dresses and handbags in 2013, and happened upon a shiny bronze-colored dress, which she presumed to be dated around the 1880s. After buying the dress and giving it a thorough look, she found the pieces of paper with lines of words written on them such as:

Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank

Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, fagan

Spring, wilderness, lining, one, reading, novice.

Not knowing what they meant, she posted it online and asked help from cryptographers and antiques experts to decipher what the code was referring to. Ten years later, a researcher from the University of Manitoba, Wayne Chan, had decided to try and crack the code.

Given everything that was known about the dress and about codes, Chan waded through 170 telegraphic codebooks to figure out what the cryptic lines represented.

Despite not finding anything from those codebooks, he did find a book called Telegraphic Tales and Telegraphic History which contained a section that matched several of the words from the cryptogram. He dug a bit deeper, and his search led him to the "Weather Code" from NOAA's Central Library in Silver Spring, Maryland.

With the help of that codebook, Chan was able to decipher what the lines meant. For example, the line Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank referred to the station name (Bismarck, North Dakota), air temperature, dew point, state of weather, and current wind velocity.

After ten years, the silk dress cryptogram's code has been cracked, but questions lingered. Whose dress was it? Why did they keep pieces of paper with weather codes written on them? Rivers Cofield had tried to do some sleuthing in that regard, but there's no way to conclusively know such details, and so, that part of the mystery is left for someone else to solve. - via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: Sara Rivers Cofield)

The way we express laughter online as English speakers have evolved throughout the years. From the simple "haha", acronyms and slang terms emerged to signify different kinds of laughter. The acronym "lol", meaning "laugh out loud", has probably become the most ubiquitous slang term for laughter online. But there are others of its kind like "lmao" (laughing my ass off) and "rofl" (rolling on the floor laughing).

However, these terms are only limited to the English language. Other languages have their own ways of expressing laughter as well. For example, the Japanese way of typing "haha" is by using the character for grass, 草.

The reason for this is that the Japanese word for laughter is "warau" which was then shortened to just the first syllable or letter "w". However, people started noticing that "www" looked like blades of grass, and so they represented laughter by the kanji for grass. To take a bit further, for a bigger laugh, Japanese people would type 大草原 which means "a giant field of grass".

Turkish people have an interesting way of typing out laughter, by keyboard spamming. So, something like "asdfkhglkjlj" means that the person has been overcome by laughter because they could not form any coherent words or sentences.

Many of the other cultures simply type "haha" in their own languages like "jaja" in Spanish and Guarani, "ههههه" in Arabic, "χαχαχα" in Greek, and "חחח" in Hebrew.

A few interesting acronyms are "mdr" and "ptdr" in French which mean "mort de rire" and "pété de rire" and translates to "dead from laughter" and "exploded from laughter", respectively. And in Irish, "abmtag" which is shorthand for "ag briseadh mo thóin ag gáire," meaning "lmao". - via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: Surface/Unsplash)

In the short Instagram reel posted by comedian Ronny Chieng, he asked the audience if they knew what the state motto of Texas was. There were a few good guesses. The "Lone Star State" was one of those he considered "good guesses" but that's actually just the nickname for Texas, not the state motto.

After rattling several possible mottos people might have come up with, he finally revealed the correct answer: "Friendship". I'm not from Texas neither am I American, and since that was a comedy clip, I needed to make sure. So, I found this article on USA Today which listed all the state mottos across America. And there it was, Texas' state motto: "Friendship."

They included a little explanation and backstory to that motto, and it was because the state name actually originated from a Caddo Indian word roughly translating to "friends".

Of course, the US' national motto is "In God We Trust" which was established in 1956 through a law signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. And in 2011, Congress voted to reaffirm that national motto. But before the current motto, the unofficial de facto US national motto was E pluribus unum, which translates to "Out of many, one". - via Digg

(Image credit: Nico Smit/Unsplash)

John Paul Getty was 16 years old when he was kidnapped in Rome in 1973. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of $17 million because Getty's grandfather was oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, the richest man in the world at that time. Some family members thought that the kidnapping was a hoax, but then the kidnappers sent John's severed ear to a Rome newspaper. The only person who had enough money to pay the ransom was J. Paul Getty, but he didn't want to. The young Getty was held for five months before a deal was worked out. His notoriously cheap grandfather negotiated the ransom down to $2.89 million, and insisted that his son, John's father, pay a substantial part of it, which meant getting a loan- from his father. The trauma of the kidnapping stayed with young Getty for the rest of his life.

Other kidnapping stories involved prominent and not-so-prominent people. Frank Sinatra, Jr. was held until his father paid $240,000 for his release. Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of publisher William Randolph Hearst, was taken by the Symbionese Liberation Army and then appeared to have joined forces with them. Adolph Coors III, heir to the Coors Brewing Company, was kidnapped in 1960 for a half a million in ransom, but was never released. Read the details of all these kidnappings and more, nine in total, at Mental Floss.

The US is going through a cold snap right now, but in Antarctica, the sun is up and it's summertime!

You might recall the blogger at brr (previously at Neatorama), who writes so eloquently about his experiences there. After overwintering at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, 14 months on the continent in all, he finally left Antartica in November after the sun came up and regular transportation became available. He's back in the US, where he can experience winter all over again, but it's still quite moderate compared to the South Pole.

Now that he's had time to adjust, he fills us in on the process of leaving Antarctica, which involves waiting for the sun to rise through September and October. Then the station swings from "winter mode" into "summer mode" as the crew prepares for the arrival of the larger summer crew. That means restocking all supplies, checking the infrastructure, and cleaning up. Read how it's all done in part one of his redeployment post. In part two, he explains how airlines work in Antarctica. A Canadian airline comes to ferry people on and off the continent, and it's not all that easy even getting the planes there!  -via Nag on the Lake

The Drunk Men's Choir is just what it says on the tin. YouTuber DougDoug organized a group of singers who do cover versions of well-known songs while drunk. The purpose is to offer the use of their music to any content creators without having to pay royalties or receive DMCA takedown orders, because the filters that find copyrighted music can't detect it. They are that drunk. Yet the songs are recognizable enough to use in place of a protected soundtrack. Their catalog so far is mostly video game songs. They even did the THX sound effect for your listening pleasure.



Each musician has their own link at the YouTube page. These guys are going places. Let's just hope they aren't driving there. -via Boing Boing

In 1990, ex-cop and bodybuilder Tim Todd was looking for a hitman to kill his wife Patti. She had thrown him out of the house for having an affair with a teenager. For help, he turned to his boss, Bill Pagano, who was also his best friend, mentor, and the father of the girl he was having an affair with. Bill, who was the former police chief and the richest man in Festus, Missouri, recorded the conversations and confided in the county prosecutor. At that point, Tim had not committed a crime by talking about the hit for hire, but if Bill could arrange a transfer of money for that purpose, that would be evidence of a crime. Bill facilitated a money transfer, and then arranged to meet Tim at his house, where he planned to arrest him.

However, the meeting did not go as planned. Tim was dead, shot in the head twice. Both the prosecutor and the town's medical examiner knew of the meeting ahead of time, and to them it was surely a case of self-defense. Everyone knew that Tim was taking anabolic steroids and had some crazy episodes in his past. But the prosecutor recused himself from the case and brought in two investigators from Cape Girardeau to look into Tim's death. They determined that the first shot was to the back of Tim's head, so how could it have been self defense? As they looked further into everyone involved in the case, they uncovered a web of connections, crimes, and coverups in Festus. Read a full account of this strange murder in a small town at Truly Adventurous.

We know that snowflakes are ice crystals that form in the atmosphere from water vapor. We've also heard that no two snowflakes are alike, but how would we ever prove that? Only a minuscule percentage of the world's snowflakes will ever be examined, and if they don't melt immediately, they are mashed up with all those other flakes that we shovel from our driveways. Another thing we know is that snowflake crystals form in six-sided shapes, hexagons to be exact, but why is that? Johannes Kepler thought snowflakes had something in common with the hexagons of a beehive, which is an intriguing idea. Physicist Brian Cox explains exactly why snowflakes form in a hexagon, and why we find them beautiful in this pleasantly charming video from the Royal Society.  -via Kottke