Jeff Raw runs a construction company in Atlanta. He bought a vacant lot with no utilities, and ordered a water meter in 2022. The meter was installed, but there was no water line to the property yet. A month later, Raw got a water bill for $8,899, indicating he used 305,184 gallons of water. After five months, the water bill totaled $29,669.43, but there was still no water line. Raw asked for an inspection, and the water department came and found no leak and still no water line. When the water line was finally installed for the new house, the monthly bill sank to $13.12 for a month. But Raw was expected to pay the entire bill of almost $30,000 for around a million gallons of water.

Board Chair Clifford Ice said there are only three options: use of water, loss of water, or theft of water.

I can think of other options: error in installing the meter, error in the billing department, or embezzlement. I'm sure there are other possibilities. There was no evidence of flowing water found, and no one noticed anything that could be attributed to theft. Raw appealed to a higher-up at the Department of Watershed Management, and received an admission that the bill was due to a leak caused by the utility. But then the utility appealed that ruling, and suddenly Raw is on the hook for the bill again anyway! Read how all this came about in a news report. -via Fark

Unrelated image credit: Infrogmation)

Some countries are more addicted to the internet than others. Smartick crunched the data and tell us that people in South Africa lead the world in screen time, spending an average of 9 hours and 38 minutes looking at their devices. That's followed by Brazil in second place and the Philippines in third. Argentina and Colombia round out the top five, also spending more than nine hours a day on average looking at screens.

Amateurs. My desktop pops up occasionally to tell me how much screen time I use, and it's usually 13 to 14 hours. That's because I work online, use my desktop as a TV, and I live alone. Besides, I don't know how they can tell; I'm up and down from my desk constantly, doing other things that wouldn't last long enough for a machine to determine that it's downtime. You can see the above map in a much larger size at Smartnick. They also have graphics that break down screen time by device, whether it's desktop or mobile. I use my phone as mostly just a phone, so I'm only looking at the screen when I'm showing someone photographs. I don't know why watching a TV isn't considered "screen time," especially since so many people get their movies and shows via internet. -via Digg

NBC News reports that Bella Lin of San Francisco was 12, she noticed that her pet guinea pigs kept disappearing from her backyard. She was unsatisfied with traditional "prison-barred" cages, so she decided to design and build her own.

The result is the GuineaLoft system. The cages have 2-tiered bottoms to make them easier to clean, as well as transparent plastic walls that snap together to make them easy move and see through.

Lin scrounged up $2,000 of her own money to launch this business and sell her cages on Amazon. Last year, she earned $410,000 from the business.

Lin is reinvesting all of her earnings into the company while applying to colleges and planning on a trip to the factory in China that manufactures her cages. This is only the beginning of her entrepreneurial ventures.

-via Debby Witt

U.S. President William McKinley was shot in the abdomen at close range in 1901. He was rushed to a clinic where gynecological surgeon Matthew Mann operated on McKinley's wound. The president died eight days later from necrotizing pancreatitis due to infection. Afterward, Dr. Herman Matzinger did a thorough autopsy to determine whether McKinley died from the gunshot wound or the botched surgery, or from some weird theories like the assassin used poison or bacteria on the bullet. He concluded that the gunshot caused the president's death.

More than a century later, Dr. Matzinger's notes from the autopsy were found by his family and were put up on auction earlier this month. They reveal how Matzinger came to conclusions in his report, and revealed the lengths he went to in studying the president's infection. He grew cultures of the bacteria from McKinley's body and injected them into several rabbits and one dog! That experiment was unknown until the discovery of Matzinger's documents. Read about the assassination, the autopsy, and the animal experiments at LiveScience. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Achille Beltrame)

In the 1974 film The Godfather Part II, young Vito Andolini from Corleone, Sicily is processed by immigration officials at Ellis Island. A clerk who doesn't speak Italian writes his name down as "Vito Corleone", thus changing the name of this fictional family for all time.

I remember learning in middle school that it was common for these immigration officials to change the names of immigrants because they didn't understand them or to intentionally Anglicize them to encourage assimilation.

That is an urban legend.

Rosemary Meszaros, a government documents librarian, and Katherine Pennavaria, a genealogical librarian, published an article in 2018 in the scholarly journal Documents to the People that argues that the documentary records simply don't support the notion that immigration clerks changed immigrants' names.

Immigration to the United States at the time was carefully controlled and recorded. Ellis Island officials used written records established before the immigrants even arrived on American shores. They knew who was on which ships and checked in immigrants against pre-established manifests.

Don't believe everything you learn in school.

-via Marginal Revolution

Wherever he goes, Ed People asks folks to show him what their favorite dance moves are. Many are glad to oblige, and then he learns to do them alongside his teacher. You can see a ton of these videos at his YouTube channel. This video is a "best of" compilation, in which people show him salsa, swing, ballet, and waltz dances, trendy dances to contemporary music, dances they do with their family, and traditional dances from cultures all over the world. It's a great way to make friends, showing your interest in something that brings people joy in so many different ways.  -via Nag on the Lake

Ada Blackjack was an Iñupiaq woman who married at 16 and had three children before her husband abandoned her. Only one child survived infancy, and he suffered from tuberculosis. Blackjack walked 40 miles to Nome, Alaska, carrying her son Bennett in order to place him in an orphanage, because she couldn't afford his medical treatment. She desperately wanted him back, and that's why she signed on to the doomed 1921 expedition that Vilhjalmur Stefansson organized to explore the possibility of a colony on Wrangel Island, the uninhabited Russian island in the Arctic Ocean where the last woolly mammoths survived until 4,000 years ago. The plan was iffy, but the $50 a month pay was enticing.

The four young men and one woman (plus a cat) only had six months worth of supplies. As the crew went into its second winter on Wrangel Island, they were starving. E. Lorne Knight was sick with scurvy, and the other three men left to try and reach Siberia, but did not make it. Blackjack was left to care for Knight, herself, and the cat, although she was only hired to be a seamstress for the crew. But she stepped up and hunted game, hauled firewood, built tools, and kept a diary of her experience. When a rescue ship finally reached Wrangel Island in August of 1923, Knight had been dead for 57 days, but Blackjack and the cat were holding on. Read how Blackjack spent two years on Wrangel Island and took on the work of four men to make it back to her son, at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting   

(Image source: Archive.org)

Rutherford B. Hayes was elected President of the United States in the very controversial 1876 election in which he squeezed into the White House after a razor-thin margin in the electoral college. He was fairly successful in office, but declined to run for a second term and retired from active politics. Hayes is well-remembered in his hometown of Delaware, Ohio (I've been there), but has largely receded from the American historical memory.

But not in Paraguay.

This small country in South America was once much larger until Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay ganged up on it to deprive it of almost half of its territory. Perhaps as much as two-thirds of the Paraguayan population died in the war.

In the postwar settlement, Argentina and Paraguay asked the United States to arbitrate their border dispute. President Hayes ruled in favor of Paraguay, for which the surviving Paraguayans were very grateful.

Even today, Paraguay remembers President Hayes. Atlas Obscura tells us that there's a museum, the Villa Hayes, in Presidente Hayes, which is one of the 17 departments (districts) that comprise the modern nation of Paraguay.

Photo: Visit Paraguay

Minnesotastan was naturally proud of his state when the University of Minnesota Dance Team won the College Dance Team National Championship last weekend. It's their 22nd national championship. Minnesota won the title for their pom routine, but their jazz routine (which took second place) was the one that went viral. The sequence that got everyone's attention starts at about 1:30, where all twenty dancers spin on one foot, then do a synchronized aerial flip, then spin on one foot some more. That's a very difficult move for one person, but to get the entire team so precisely synchronized is amazing. They had initially planned for only a few dancers to execute the move, but then went ahead and included everyone. The choice of Aerosmith's "Dream On" for the routine is a throwback to the 2004 team, which used it 20 years earlier. Also, in a case of nominative determinism, their assistant coach's name is Tina Tumbleson. -via TYWKIWDBI

The credit for this picture is NASA/JPL-Caltech, but it was actually taken by the Left Navigation Camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. The date on earth was January 9, but on Mars the date was Sol 4062. What we are looking at is the route uphill to Mount Sharp, or Aeolis Mons, where Curiosity is trying to figure out how water once flowed there. However, what we are seeing is that Starfleet got there first.

I bet the Star Trek fans on the @MarsCuriosity team smiled like Cheshire Cats when they saw this new image appear on their screens... :-)

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech pic.twitter.com/SdWyq4Sc5P

— Stuart Atkinson (@mars_stu) January 10, 2024

There's no way the many Star Trek fans who work at NASA missed the unique and ubiquitous shape of a Starfleet insignia, worn as a badge by all service members, and used as a communicator in Star Trek: The Next Generation and other series. I have one in my jewelry box. You could say it's pareidolia, but considering it's a new planet we're exploring, the first one we've been able to, it might be a sign of something. -via Boing Boing

Airline pilots were asked which airports they'd rather not fly to, and got some wild stories. LaGuardia, Lake Tahoe, and and the Hillary-Tenzing Airport in Lukla, Nepal got mentioned by more than one pilot. Kai Tak gives at least one pilot nightmares even though it closed a quarter-century ago. One is an aircraft carrier, which is quite understandable.

What makes an airport difficult for a pilot? Some runways are very short, and may have a sudden cliff at the end, above or below the runway. Some require you to climb suddenly for noise abatement, like Los Angeles airports. Some are surrounded by mountains or buildings. Skiathos Airport in Greece (pictured above) has a low approach that requires you to fly just a few feet over the heads of gathered tourists. At least one airport made the list because of the staff's attitude. Read the reasons why 35 pilots don't want to fly into certain airports at Bored Panda. Keep in mind, the rankings are from readers of the site.  

(Image credit: Timo Breidenstein)

The first people to fly through the air were balloonists, beginning with the Montgolfier brothers in 1783. The early balloon trips were called flying circuses because they were so novel. Seeing one, or for a few people, going up in one, was pure entertainment, and any flight would draw a huge crowd. But for Thomas Baldwin, the very idea of an aerial balloon offered a chance to advance science, to study the atmosphere, and to see the world from above it.

Baldwin was no balloonist, but when daredevil balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi came to Chester, England, in 1785, Baldwin was ecstatic. Lunardi was injured before his scheduled flight and offered Baldwin the chance to take his place. It was Baldwin's only balloon flight, but he made the most of it, taking scientific instruments with him on his trip to take measurements, and a sketchbook to illustrate what he saw. Read how Baldwin gave us the first aerial maps from human eyesight at Atlas Obscura.

Look at the people around you. Do any of them have ring fingers longer than their index fingers? If so, run for your life.

The actual scientific article is more nuanced, of course. Researchers with the Centre de Recherche Charles-Le Moyne in Quebec examined 44 people for finger lengths to consider the hypothesis that longer ring fingers are associated with high testosterone exposure during fetal development.

Such people generally had higher incidences of mental toughness, antisocial personality disorder, amphetamine abuse and, most importantly, dark triad traits--narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

The authors note that the small sample size is a limitation to the validity of the study, so consider contributing to the research yourself in the comments.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff

Atlas Obscura informs us that if we ski along particular slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside of Taos, New Mexico, we may encounter birdhouse-sized boxes attached to particular trees. Inside each one is a martini.

These are martini trees. The practice of attaching martinis to rural trees began during the winter of 1958 through 1959 when a lady on the slopes of a ski resort sent a young man off in search of a martini to calm her jittery nerves. He returned with one served in a porrón, a traditional Spanish wine pitcher with a long spout. It worked well to calm the woman, so resort owner Ernie Blake set up several martinis in boxes around his facility. By the 1980s, the practice had spread throughout the region.

Photo: AdventureJay

The tabloid news service TMZ reports that two nights ago, famed wrestler Hulk Hogan rescued a teenage girl from a car crash in which the vehicle had flipped upside down.

Hogan's wife, Sky Daily, posted on social media that the accident happened right in front of them in Tampa, Florida. Hogan ran to the wrecked car, punctured the airbag with a pen, and then pulled the teenager from the car. No one was injured in the crash, although the girl was emotionally shaken.

Only a few photos of the event are available. Sadly, none of them show Hogan ripping his shirt off after performing the rescue.