They taught us that animals can be divided into warm-blooded or cold-blooded categories, depending on whether they generate their own heat or depend on the sun to provide it. But it turns out that the divide is not so clear, and that different species have varying methods for staying warm enough to thrive. While many animals can be described as one or another, there are also many species that fall somewhere between, which tells us that heat-generating strategies are really a spectrum. Or maybe not, because the word "spectrum" suggests a straight line of gradients, while animal species are really all over the chart.   

This video is only 2:40 in length. The rest is an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The City hall in Perth, Scotland, is being transformed into a museum. City officials launched an online poll to come up with a name for the museum, and more than 450 people submitted their ideas. When the dust settled, you would expect that Museumy McMuseumface would be the winner, but that's not the case.

More than 60% of respondents voted for a name they believed encompassed both the history of the building and the stories of the community.

That was Perth Museum.

While it seems like a wasted opportunity to those far away, Perth residents are happy with the results. While the name campaign was waged online, one thinks that maybe the actual voting was limited to those with a local address. Now that's the way to run a serious internet naming poll. Perth Museum in the old City Hall will open in 2024. -via reddit

(Image credit: Perth and Kinross Council)

Shomphole Wilderness Camp is a private getaway to nature in Kenya's Rift Valley. Wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas (previously at Neatorama) is one of their favorite visitors. He teamed up with camp management to build a watering hole for wildlife in the very dry valley. For Burrard-Lucas, it was an opportunity to make taking pictures of animals easier for himself and for other visiting photographers.

The process involved not only digging a pond, but running five kilometers of pipe to supply the water. They also erected a relatively luxurious hide for photographers, with beds and a toilet, so they can observe creatures who came by without being seen. There is also carefully-designed lighting for nighttime water hole photography. When the project was ready, it didn't take long for wildlife to show up. Read about the project and enjoy the lovely images that resulted at Burrard-Lucas' blog. -via Digg

In his latest video, Tom Scott visits this unique ferry design in Denmark. The Udbyhøj Cable Ferry across Randers Fjord is a cable ferry in the sense that motors pull the ship along undersea guide cables back and forth between its destinations. But it's also a cable ferry in that it's powered by an electrical power cable that gradually unrolls on a drum mounted on the side of the ship.

The ship carries 70,000 people per year with an average of 88 trips per day. Occasionally, it must stop to slacken the guide cables and allow deep-keeled traffic to pass--as all cable ferries must. But the electrical cable just rolls up on the ship.

Imagine taking the most terrifying novel of existential horror that was made into a classic movie monster franchise, and make it into ... no big deal. Here, Dr. Frankenstein encounters the corpse he put together and reanimated and they just have an everyday conversation. Trent Lenkarski and Joel Haver (previously at Neatorama) appear to have turned the camera on while they were free-associating and then rotoscoped it into a Frankenstein movie. This was for some Halloween project, which Lenkarski admits is late. That's the wages of procrastination. It's still worth your time for the recipes. -via reddit

#IdahoDidYouKnow In 1928, Idaho became the first state in the nation to feature a graphic on a license plate by proudly displaying an impressive Idaho potato that filled the entire plate. pic.twitter.com/g1ii2TGWfB

— Idaho Commerce (@IdahoCommerce) July 16, 2019

Every state wants to have a distinctive license plate design for their vehicles. Trying to be different, however, can backfire, as several states have learned the hard way. In 1928, Idaho decided to feature a potato, the state's biggest cash crop, on their plates. A large, long, tan potato was embossed right on the otherwise green plate with the numbers inside. Idaho residents thought it was ugly, and they didn't feel like advertising potatoes on their cars, so the design only lasted a year. Tourists kept stealing them anyway. Strangely, they tried such advertising again, going with the slogan "world famous potatoes" in 1948, and since 1957, they've said "famous potatoes."

This is just one of several stories about license plate failures from different states you can read about at Smithsonian.

Not included: last year's Ohio plate design.

We've all learned an amazing amount about viruses, immunity, and vaccines over the last two years, thanks to COVID-19. Even if you are are up-to-date with the latest COVID vaccine, you still need to get a flu shot, because influenza mutates like any widespread virus, and different strains come around every year. Some years the flu shot is more effective than others, because they are designed to battle whichever strain our health experts predict will be big that year, and they aren't always right. Keep in mind that "just the flu" is not a thing, because influenza is highly contagious and it's dangerous for many people. But what if we were to develop a flu shot that fights any possible strain of influenza? Immunologists are working on different ways to tackle flu viruses no matter how they have mutated, as explained in this TED-Ed lesson. And now any time I hear the word hemagglutinin, I will think of Napoleon Bonaparte. -via Geeks Are Sexy

YouTube maker Scott Prints created this gag for his car. No, it doesn't actually eject the passenger, but it is a wired button that does activate something.

Specifically, it's wired to a garage door opener. The device lodges into a cubby in his car. This video shows his step-by-step process for designing and building the gadget.

Scott Prints hopes that his next passenger asks about it. He already has a few lines prepared:

• "It came with the car. I've never actually pushed it." (while reaching for the button)
• "It's for my other job."
• "We'll get for that. But first, who did you vote for?"
• "Eh, don't worry about it. Also, don't push it."

He asks that viewers suggest their own lines to feed to unwary passengers.

-via Hack a Day

Hans Talhoffer was a Fifteenth Century German martial artist who was a master swordsman. He earned his living by, in part, teaching fencing. He was a well-educated gentleman who could write well and produced several written works about armed combat. His book Fechtbuch includes illustrated instructions about how a man and a woman could fight a formal duel and be evenly matched.

Dr. Kenneth L. Hodges of the University of Oklahoma provides images from this text along with translations. Talhoffer advocates sinking the man into a pit, giving the woman a mobility advantage to use over the man's greater physical strength:

Here is how a man and woman should fight each other, and this is how they begin.

Here the woman stands free and wishes to strike; she has in the cloth a stone that weighs four or five pounds.

He stands in a hole up to his waist, and his club is as long as her sling.

-------------------------------

I'd like to note that this story has circulated the internet for the past few months as procedures for "divorce by combat" in Medieval Europe. Various blog posts and website articles attribute the claim to Prof. Hodges, but did not link to anything he actually wrote. This made me suspicious. Like a recent story about a Medieval duel between a man and a dog, this story, which seemed too good to be true, did not survive some brief fact-checking.

-via Super Punch

Our feel-good news story of the day comes from Bellevue, Washington, where a criminal faced accidental justice. Idaho News reports that a 17-year old shoplifter who prosecutors say is a member of a gang of shoplifters tried to run out of a Louis Vuitton accessories store with $18,000 worth of purses that were on display.

He was in such a rush that he didn't bother trying to open the glass door that stood athwart him and freedom. After smashing head-first into the door, he fell to the ground unconscious. A security guard on site detained him until police arrived.

-via Dave Barry

My son playing dead to try to attract vultures pic.twitter.com/OACKQh3BBX

— The Birdist (@TheBirdist) October 22, 2022

Nicholas Lund, a birdwatcher and science writer in Portland, Maine, is passing along his life lessons to his son. In this video, the boy lies still on the ground in the hope of attracting circling vultures to approach him.

The child is not doing anything novel. Lying down on the ground to attract carrion feeders is apparently a shared practice for ornithologists when they are children.

BBC News reports that there are about twenty wild wolves living in Hoge Veluwe National Park in the Netherlands. They have no fear of humans and one was recently recorded strolling next to a human family in the park. Park officials suspect that some people have been feeding them, which encourages them to seek out humans.

Since wolves are dangerous to humans, park officials would like to make them afraid of our species and avoid contact with us. So they plan to equip rangers with paintball guns to shoot at the wolves. The paintballs will teach the wolves that humans should be avoided, as well as mark which wolves have been shot.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Retron

Essayist Gerard Van Der Leun is now in his 70s. He is a Baby Boomer and grew up in the postwar prosperity of Los Angeles. When he was a little boy, his family moved to the scenic mountains of the town of Paradise in nothern California.

Van Der Leun was 9 and his brother, Thomas, was 7. They enjoyed the freedom of wandering through the woods of this old gold prospecting territory, having adventures as young boys should. While exploring the wonders of the area near their home, the boys found a box of dynamite.

Yes, actual dynamite.

In a beautiful essay titled "I Once Had Fortress in Paradise," Van der Leun tells the story of what he and his late brother did with that dynamite. And he tells that story masterfully.

-via Instapundit | Photo: US Forest Service

Some time in the 1980s, an unknown artist started leaving tiles embedded in asphalt roads. These tiles were later determined to be made of mostly linoleum and tar, and they were first left in Philadelphia, then in cities across the US, and in four South American cities. There are hundreds of these Toynbee Tiles, as they are called, with cryptic word jumbles on them like the one you see above. The words are thought to have derived mainly from the works of historian Arnold Toynbee and from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. What do they mean? And who put them there?

We don't know when the tiles were laid, if they are still being made, or how many there are that haven't been discovered. As for the artist, there have been investigations over the years, and a full-length documentary has been made about the search. There are a lot of clues, but no definitive answer yet. Read about the Toynbee Tiles and the mystery that surrounds them at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Justin Duerr via Toynbee Idea)

If you think a mortgage is onerous today, the terms of early mortgages were downright frightful. While the concept has its origins in Persia thousands of years ago, the Romans refined it and took the idea to Britain. There, the terms for borrowing to buy land were varied and always in favor of the creditor. In some cases, the lender would use the collateral property to generate income which paid for the loan. In other cases, the borrower made payments. Whether the borrower got any use of the land at all during this time was on a case-by-case basis, so land loans were often more like a layaway program. But if the lender decided to demand full payment at any time, the borrower might be completely out of luck and lose his entire investment! It's no wonder mortgages weren't all that popular until they were further refined in the United States. Read the history of the mortgage at The Conversation.  -via Damn Interesting