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.
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.
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.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of the data presented on the map, a disclaimer needs to be said. In determining the highest-paid jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the illustrators of the map used annual mean wages, which leaves out other professions like athletes, lawyers, and CEOs from being considered since most of these professions are salaried.
Out of all the annual mean wages, the highest is in Maine at $287,030 for surgeons. Not including Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam, the lowest is in Arkansas at $247,280 for internists, or specialists in internal medicine.
A large percentage of the highest-paid jobs are for anesthesiologists, followed by surgeons. There's a large clump for OB-GYNs in the northwest, and a smattering of dental-related jobs in other states.
Despite being relatively close in range to one another, the main difference that the article points out is the cost of living for each state. So, for example, even though anesthesiologists make almost the same annual income in California and Ohio, the cost for housing is significantly higher in California, which would shift people's financial decisions greatly.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's very first single was "My Bologna." He wrote the song in 1979, the same year that The Knack took over our radios with "My Sharona." Yankovic recorded it in a bathroom for the Dr. Demento Show, and it became so popular that Capitol Records eventually let him record with a backing band, released as a single from his first album in 1983. But there was no official video. In those days when MTV was new, you have to be an established star to justify the expense of making one.
But now it has one, made by Yankovic fan Isaiah Ferguson. It took him ten months of work to produce this stop-motion video that captures the spirit of Weird Al quite well. It's less than a minute long, while the original song is just over two minutes, but let's be honest, that's about all we can handle. -via Laughing Squid
In the 1500s, cartographer Robert Thorne floated the idea that the North Pole wasn't covered with ice, but merely was protected by a ring of ice around it. In the 19th century, August Petermann resurrected the idea, and thought that ring might have channels through it, so that sailing ships could cross the North Pole and make intercontinental travel shorter. By then, some explorers claimed they had actually seen the North Pole ocean. But two expeditions, in 1869 and 1872, failed to get through the ice.
An American expedition wanted to try reaching the pole through the Bering Strait, and in 1879, the Jeannette sailed out of San Francisco. But upon reaching the Arctic, the ship became encased in ice -for two years. The crew abandoned ship in June of 1881 when the Jeannette fell apart. They carried three boats to the edge of the ice and then tried to reach Siberia. Two boats made it to land, but only one crew survived to reach civilization. Read the story of the Jeannette expedition at Amusing Planet.
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.
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.
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.
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
