This video contains NSFW language. There is so much documentation about the struggle for the American colonies to separate from British rule, but for some reason we focus on one quip in a letter from John Adams to his wife about celebrating independence with "bonfires and illuminations." This custom quickly settled into fireworks, because if there's anything Americans love, it's blowing things up.

Roger Horton is back to get honest with us about the Fourth of July, which was supposed to be the Second of July. We tend to just ignore that, as we do the fact that many of the things our country was founded on were compromises that made no one happy, but got the document out that started the Revolutionary War. The way we celebrate today has little to do with the actual events that gave us the holiday, but at least we have a good time. Still, be careful out there.  

George Frandsen has been collecting coprolites since he was 14. Those are fossilized turds, or dinosaur poop. It's a subject that may not appeal to everyone, but we've learned a lot about dinosaurs by the things they left behind, so to speak. Frandsen has the world's largest coprolite collection, despite giving them away regularly to museums. In 2014, Frandsen launched the Poozeum as a virtual and traveling exhibit, hosted by various museums around the country. But as of May, the Poozeum has a permanent home in Williams, Arizona. The displays include the largest dino coprolite ever found, so big it got its own name, Barnum. There's also a statue of a T. rex on the toilet, reminiscent of Rodin's sculpture The Thinker, which has become the Poozeum's most iconic image.



You could say the Poozeum is a crappy museum, but that's kind of the point. The museum doesn't smell; after all, these are fossils that are millions of years old. They also have a gift shop where you can buy all kinds of poop-related souvenirs. The Poozeum is open every day except Monday, and admission is free. Be sure to check it out the next time you are in Arizona. -via Boing Boing

In the latest episode of Ze Frank's True Facts series, he learn about five very strange species of eel. There are more than a thousand species of eel, so you probably haven't seen anywhere near most of them. Still, all eels are fish, but not like other fish. or example, the ribbon eel is born male -all of them. But you can't reproduce like that, so some turn into females as they mature. Moray eels have a second set of jaws like a xenomorph, and some can hunt prey on land. The pelican eel is called that because of its terrifying mouth. American eels and European eels don't even have sex organs until late in life, when they grow a pair (literally), and meet up to have an orgy in the ocean, right before they die. But those facts are just a tiny taste of the weird things you will learn about eels. Expect double entendres, snide remarks, and juvenile humor, as always. This video has a 70-second skippable ad at 6:23.

See Also: Previous True Facts videos.

Woolly mammoths died out around 12,000 years ago, except for a couple of populations that were stranded by rising seawater on St. Paul Island and Wrangel Island off Siberia. These small herds flourished for much longer, thanks to plenty of vegetation and no predators. The Wrangel Island mammoths became very much inbred, and they died out around 4,000 years ago, the last of the woolly mammoths.

The assumption was that the Wrangel Island mammoths died from genetic diseases due to inbreeding. One specimen's genome showed multiple disabilities, but is that what killed the last mammoths? A new study released this week suggests not. Scientists analyzed the DNA of 14 Wrangel Island mammoths and compared their DNA to seven mainland mammoths that lived much earlier. While some anomalies were found, they weren't enough to cause extinction. Mutations can arise in a limited population, but those are often eliminated when the affected animal doesn't breed. The scientists conducting the study say that the Wrangel Island mammoths were doing just fine breeding within their small population. When they suddenly disappeared, it must have been from an environmental disaster or a disease. Read about this research that throws a new light on the extinction of the woolly mammoth at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Lou.gruber)

LeBron James and Bronny James become the first father and son duo to be in the NBA at the same time.

Now they are teammates on the Lakers! pic.twitter.com/dITQ4WQ9RA

— NBA (@NBA) June 27, 2024

On Thursday, Bronny James of the USC Trojans made history when he was drafted into the NBA. He was pick #55 (out of 58), and went to the Los Angeles Lakers. That means he and his father, LeBron James, will be teammates. It is the first time that a father and son have played in the NBA at the same time, much less on the same team. That's because athletic careers usually do not last that long. LeBron James has been in the NBA for 21 years. Within minutes, everyone on Twitter came up with the same joke.    

Savannah James, LeBron's wife, took the jokes in stride. But the real punch line came from Grok, the Twitter chatbot available to premium members. The AI program summarizes news and trends on Twitter to present to users. Due to overwhelming "evidence," it took the story seriously.

Those who know have been telling us that artificial intelligence can have a sense of humor, but it appears that AI has a long way to go in detecting when people are telling a joke. -via Uproxx

The University of Nebraska is a school located at a football stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska. That stadium, Memorial Stadium, is the holiest of shrines for Cornhusker fans.

The Associated Press reports that at a recent meeting of the board of regents, the governors of the program considered building a columbarium under the football field so that deceased fans will never miss any future home games. The proposal would have set different prices for the location of one's ashes, with higher prices charged for the 50-yard line and the end zones.

Sadly, the Board of Regents rejected the proposal, apparently with dismissive laughter.

Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri

Eating right is only part of proper nutrition. You need to also consciously consider how you are digesting your food. Influencer Mairlyn Smith proposes going on a "fart walk" about an hour after you eat. This is a walk in which you let rip with any flatulence you feel forming in your body or, as I call it, a walk.

The New York Post explains the science behind the trend. The motion of the abdominal muscles during a walk encourages intestinal activity. To optimize your flatulence, walk with your hands behind your back and your neck flexing in front of you.

Smith and her husband engage in fart walking as a couples activity. Think of it as a bonding opportunity.

-via Dave Barry

This falcon head is a pretty good work of taxidermy, except it isn't. It's not just a simple recretion, either. Look closely, and you'll see this is a construction of found objects, specifically non-recyclable trash, placed in just the right position to make something totally different at just the right angle. This is the work of Thomas Deininger, whose work highlights environmental concerns. The intricate assemblage shows us the massive variety of trash we produce, but also shows us the wildlife it affects. The falcon head was made quite some time ago, but after an accident trashed it, the buyer came back and Deininger repaired and reworked it into this masterpiece. Let's see another one of his illusions.

The ruby-throated hummingbird is part of an exhibit of Deininger's works called Apocalyptic Ornithology at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Coconut Grove, Florida. See more of Deininger's art at Instagram.  -via Everlasting Blort

The first human flight in a hot air balloon was. in 1783. The development of a parachute seems to have followed soon after. It makes sense that if a balloon will descend slowly because of the air inside, even when it's no longer hot, a similar piece of fabric can slow a falling person. However, the first parachutes were not all fabric, but were made of fabric stretched over a frame to keep its shape, like an umbrella.

Robert Cocking was a British artist, and a big fan of hot air balloons. He was in Paris in 1797 to watch André-Jacques Garnerin demonstrate a parachute that brought him to the ground after he released the hot air balloon it was attached to. Cocking wanted to do that, and spent years designing his own parachute. It was also supported with struts like an umbrella, but the fabric was cone-shaped to hold more air. It was honestly a good idea, but was not as thoroughly tested as it should have been before Cocking tried it out in 1837, at 5,000 feet above the ground with a crowd watching. Read what happened the day Robert Cocking became the first death attributed to a parachute at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company

Some experiments tell us that monkeys can count to three, but not to four. Is there some cognitive function that keeps them from counting higher? After all, monkeys have five fingers on each hand, and ten toes as well, so you'd think they could count at least as high as five. And how do scientists construct these experiments, anyway? You might be amused to find that they do it with magic tricks, because a monkey will display dismay and confusion when a number of objects does not match their expectations. However, it turns out that what we know as counting, and math as a whole, isn't the same for animals as it is for humans. Once scientists figured that out, the way monkeys and other animals calculate amounts makes perfect sense. Human are the weird ones here, and it doesn't have as much to do with our understanding of math as it has to do with our language.  -via Laughing Squid

More pics direct from @MBTA HQ. This is the greatest timeline to be a MBTA rider. pic.twitter.com/NMscmXEiqm

— ariloo 🌱 (@ariellelok) June 26, 2024

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), often called "the T" by locals, is responsible for mass transit in Boston and 176 nearby communities. That's a lot of people to service, and the MBTA has suffered criticism for a long time. However, getting the system fixed would cost $24 billion dollars. So this past April, a group of protesters organized a rally to ask for a smaller goal: to put googly eyes on the trains. The group called Googly Eyes MBTA said, "If the trains can’t be reliable, at least they can be fun and bring a smile to the faces of over a million people per day."

It took a while, but the MBTA has come through. Googly eyes have been installed on five trolleys and trains. The public reasoning for the request was to spread joy to Bostonians when they are waiting for a train, but we suspect it was also to judge whether the T was paying any attention to the desires of the public. The appearance of trains with ridiculous faces on the front shows that they do indeed listen to citizens, although they cannot fix the system without adequate funding. And googly eyes are always a good idea. -via Metafilter 

In my undergraduate days, I had delusion fantasies of becoming a medieval European historian and wasted a lot of time and money moving in that direction. One of the reasons why this was and remains a very difficult career path is that there are few college teaching positions available in the humanities.

But it would appear that if you can land one, you're set for life with a salary in excess of a billion dollars.

I think that the original (and since corrected) job posting is for this one at Sarah Lawrence College, which has a salary of $10,500 to $14,000, not $1,050,014,000. We humanities people struggle with math sometimes.

-via Matthew Thiessen, who quips "Announcing my immediate shift toward research and teaching on Medieval Literature.

Ever since chests of tea were thrown out into the Boston Harbor during the American Revolution, coffee had been the staple beverage for Americans. So it didn't come as a surprise that one of the main factors that the Union considered as an ingredient of their victory during the Civil War was coffee. However, coffee at that time was pretty hard to come by, given the blockade that the Union had set up in the South, preventing coffee imports from Brazil from entering the country. Luckily, Stephen Allen Benson, who was born in Maryland but emigrated to Liberia to escape tensions in the South, had an interesting proposal to the North.

Being president of Liberia, Benson had told the Americans in the North that they had ample supply of coffee in their country, and they would gladly export them. Thus began the partnership between Liberia and George W. Taylor, a member of the Free Labor Movement, which would continue for the next decade, and supplied the North with coffee for much of the remainder of the Civil War.

However, one thing stood between this partnership, and it was that Liberia had not yet been recognized, and so, no formal trade treaties had existed between the two countries until President Abraham Lincoln officially recognized the republic in 1862. This created an opening for Liberian coffee to enter the American market, and before long, the Union Army was once again invigorated by the sweet-smelling aroma of caffeine.

On the other hand, the dwindling supply of coffee in the South made it difficult for the troops to maintain morale, with some soldiers even attempting to engage in secret trades with the North for their coffee in exchange for tobacco. This was further aggravated when Union troops destroyed 500 sacks of Brazilian coffee in Atlanta, which showed just how much coffee the North had, as instead of consuming the South's supply themselves, they just destroyed it.

At the end of the war, Benson unfortunately died but the trading partnership between Liberia and the US continued, even paving new partnerships to be formed with other countries like Britain and Germany. By 1885, Liberia was exporting about 800,000 pounds of coffee per year, which drastically jumped to over 1.8 million seven years later.

This whole trend of drinking coffee became embedded in American culture, and soon enough, the US was importing 11 pounds of coffee per person, per year.

(Image credit: Library of Congress/Battlefields)

It has only been 70 years since Alan Turing suggested the idea of computers that can think or act similarly to the way any human would. Now, we have AI like ChatGPT that can write entire books with the help of some prodding and prompting, which goes to show how far we have come from those days when Turing and a colleague of his, Christopher Strachey, programmed the Mark 1, one of the largest computers in those days, to generate a random love letter.

Some of the love letters generated by the Mark 1 can be seen above. They read and sound mechanical, although it's perhaps one of the earliest works of artificial intelligence, preceding ChatGPT, and the story behind Turing and Strachey's collaboration is one that can be considered riveting and poignant at the same time.

Both were students at King's College, Cambridge, where Turing was a master's student in mathematics while Strachey was an undergrad in the same department, but was struggling with his academics, unlike the more prominent Turing, who was considered a genius in his field. Despite Strachey's struggles, he was a brilliant computer programmer.

Their friendship continued until Strachey wrote to Turing about his work on the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine), but mentioned that he was limited by the ACE, and he wanted a more powerful machine to test out some of his programs. Since Turing was working at Manchester at the time, he invited Strachey to visit him so that he can work on the Mark 1.

With that, Strachey was able to program the machine to play a song as well as a run a computer game of checkers. During that period, the two men had also been discussing the future of machines and machine intelligence. Intrigued by the subject, they experimented on how the computer can act more like a human with its own "free will" of sorts, despite being more limited since computers needed to be programmed to function.

In order to bypass this limitation, Turing suggested adding some feature of randomness to give the computer the appearance that it was thinking on its own. Ecstatic at the prospect of programming a computer to think like a human, Strachey collaborated with Turing to create a love letter generator. The rationale being that, to Strachey and Turing, writing love letters was a benchmark of intelligence.

They created a template and gave the computer a pool of choices from which it wold randomly pick words to fill in the template for the love letter. This is why, like the examples shown above, the letter reads a bit clunkily, albeit one can argue that, despite the clunkiness of the output, it had its own personal flavor and, to some extent, originality. In any case, the same can be said about human beings: our free will is limited by an exponentially greater pool of options, but still we can choose.

And so the love letter generator was born, the lovechild of Turing and Strachey, and perhaps, as Patricia Fancher asserts, was the only form through which the two men could express their sweet nothings to each other in a time when such acts were considered criminal in England. Still, it was the "something new" that Turing had been looking for, in his pursuit of developing machine intelligence.

Of course, later on, Turing would be convicted for gross indecency and given a choice between serving time in prison or chemical castration. Choosing the latter, Turing lived his final years, ultimately succumbing to cyanide poisoning ruled as suicide. It's a poignant story, but one that shows how our curiosities, passions, and ambitions can lead to riveting discoveries and creative endeavors.

(Image credit: Gwen Bell/Computer History Museum)

When I quit my job in mid-2022, I had no idea what was going to happen, and I was anxious about how I'm going to support myself during the period that I would be unemployed and looking for a job. That whole situation was exacerbated by the fact that I'm living abroad and would also have to deal with the ramifications of being unemployed while applying for a residence visa.

Now, it would have been a relief if I had some financial support from the government as I ventured into the unknown in search for another job. However, I was pretty much left to fend against the world all on my own, and that took a lot of hoping and searching to get through, but in the end, I was able to find another job that fit my needs at the time, and so, I didn't have to burrow through my savings too much.

I also had the option of having my folks back at home to wire me some of my money just so that I could survive for a couple more weeks, but thankfully, I didn't need to resort to that option. My case is a bit different than those in the US, since the US has what is called "unemployment insurance" or UI, which can be summarized as financial aid or support for those who got laid off of their jobs.

Focusing on the part where it only applies to people who were laid off, that meant that people who voluntarily quit aren't eligible. Thus, it forces people who may be working in low-wage jobs to continue working at their less-than-ideal job just so that they don't have to face the brutal reality of the current job market.

Despite this, a handful of economists are suggesting that perhaps they need to revisit the UI system, which they think requires a major overhaul, one in which people who voluntarily quit their jobs would be able to apply for UI and receive the benefits. That seems a bit counterintuitive to the ethos of the program itself, but some economists have argued that giving people the incentive to quit their jobs will actually be beneficial to the economy as a whole as it helps in the efficient matchmaking of workers to jobs.

I'm not really an economist so I won't be able to explain the nitty-gritty details of the concept, but in essence, the reason behind this idea is the assumption that there are many people who are mismatched to their jobs, or basically have awful jobs and whose skills are being under-utilized. But since it would be more disadvantageous for them to quit and try to look for another job, they just endure and stay at their current jobs.

This also assumes that these people will go on a search for better employment when they do quit, and that they're not simply taking advantage of the unemployment benefits out of laziness. In theory, the idea makes sense. You're giving individuals a sort of safety net that would allow them to look for better, higher-paying jobs that match their skillset which should make the economy better off as a whole. 

You might ask whether this is what would happen in reality. Well, the pandemic actually gave us an avenue to test that theory out, as many people were either laid off or quit their jobs voluntarily, and were given increased UI benefits. With the dataset provided by the unique circumstance of the pandemic, it showed that, despite the moral hazard of giving people financial aid for quitting their jobs or being unemployed, studies found no connection between the boosted UI and laziness or joblessness.

The truth of the matter is people want to work and given the stress and pressure being heaped upon them by the hard-pressed economy at the moment, they don't see being unemployed as an option. People will continue to look for work, but what they need is the kind of work that fits their skills, their goals and career path, and their threshold for satisfaction.

Now, even the country I lived in for four years had that kind of program. I knew someone who became a naturalized citizen, and after she became unemployed, the government sent her support every month for the next six months while she was looking for a more stable job. And it didn't diminish her desire to look for a job, rather, it pushed her even more to find employment. Given, she was a single mother of two, whose children were already going to college.

Of course, we cannot haphazardly overhaul the entire system simply because it's outdated. We still need to identify the proper eligibility criteria and closely monitor whether the unemployed are actually looking for jobs, but in a capitalistic system, people should be given the freedom to choose what they think would be better for them. The whole idea of capitalism is predicated on allowing individuals to let their preferences dictate where the market should go. And so, stifling that freedom makes the market less efficient.

Should people who quit their jobs be given an incentive? It's a complex issue but one in which these alternative perspectives should not be ignored.

(Image credit: Saulo Mohana/Unsplash)