We know that our ancestors, even our most ancient ancestors, drank wine all the time. While more expensive than water, wine was still affordable to the masses, while the more potent drugs were reserved for the rich and for special occasions, as well as medicinal use. A 2,700-year-old altar found in the Negev desert still shows traces of marijuana, showing us that the Israelites burned it during worship services. In Scythia, the Carpathian mountains, and western China, marijuana was burned at funerals, presumably to ease the mourners' pain. Greeks ate marijuana for the fun of it.
Opium was a more serious, and more expensive drug, used in Egypt to keep children quiet, to alleviate pain, and for a "bit of extra fun." Early physicians documented how to use opium as to reduce the danger of overdose, but Romans saw it as a painless method of suicide in addition to its medicinal uses. Opium may have been the most popular hard drug, but the ancient world also knew of and used hallucinogenic drugs derived from various plants. Read about the widespread use of drugs in the ancient world at Haaretz. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Radio Tonreg)
Artificial intelligence lent a hand in showing us what Star Trek would be like if it were more like 21st century life on earth. Remote work meetings by Zoom have become all too common, even though they are often useless, even when you can get them to work properly. Once you iron out the bugs, then it's a matter of getting everyone involved, and actually trying to discuss something worthwhile. But no, we get background interruptions and that one guy who wants to get everyone to participate in casual Fridays. Not to mention those who don't want to be there at all. Like they say, "This meeting could have been an email!" Yet they try again.
We need nonsense like this every once in a while to remind us that the 24rd century might be more advanced than the 21st. At least we can hope. If you want to see more of Worf's casual Friday experience, artificial intelligence has rendered a song about it. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Can you name a 28-year-old? Why yes, I can, my daughter is 28. Okay, can you name a famous 28-year-old? It's not as easy as it sounds. Dylan Fugel uncovered the fact that US birth rates hit a record low in 1997. Still, there were over three million births that year, and he can't find any of them. He looked for a week, and found that all the famous people in that age range were 26 or 29. At least he says they are famous; I quit keeping up when celebrities started being so young. He goes through the litany of Disney Channel stars of the 2010s, but found the actors were all older than the characters they played. Sports stars? All either younger or older. Timothée Chalamet? He's 29 now.
After all that research, Fugel identifies four people who are 28 right now, two that I've heard of. Yes, there are more in the comments, but Simone Biles is probably lonely in her age group. Read about Fugel's search at Defector. -via kottke
Smithsonian posted a comprehensive article about the Dionne Quintuplets, who we posted about recently. A single line in the article caught my eye, because I'd never heard of the Lyon quintuplets, who were born in Mayfield, Kentucky, in 1896, and were the first quintuplets in America to be born alive.
Elizabeth Lyon and her husband Oscar already had six children, and added five boys on April 29, 1896. They were delivered in one hour with a single placenta, meaning they were identical. They weighed between three and 4.25 pounds and were named Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. The news got out, and the Lyon's small farmhouse was inundated with people wanting to see the babies. The sheriff had to call in deputies to control the crowds. John, the smallest baby, died just five days later, and all of the boys were dead in two weeks. Elizabeth blamed the crowds for the infants' deaths, but later in life admitted they starved to death. She had one wet nurse to help, and shipments of milk were offered, but Elizabeth said "they" wouldn't let her bottle-feed the babies.
But that wasn't the end of the story. The family buried the first baby, but exhumed him in fear of grave robbers. The five emaciated cadavers were embalmed and displayed locally for a couple of years, after which Elizabeth looked for a safe place to keep them. Read the saga of the Lyon quintuplets gleaned from contemporary newspaper accounts at the Trigg Cunningham family website.
See also: The Bushnell sextuplets.
Parents are understandably wary about their children taking candy from strangers, but in modern times we have many more safeguards than people in the 19th century had. Halloween in Bradford, England, in 1858 saw at least 19 deaths, including children, from eating candy. The candy in this case was called peppermint humbugs, a popular confection that was locally made. After people started dying, an analysis found that each bite-sized candy contained twice as much arsenic as it required to kill someone! By then, it was too late for those who had ingested the candy.
However, this wasn't a case of intentional murder. The investigation uncovered a series of mistakes in the supply chain that involved greed, laziness, and inattention to detail. The incident led to reforms and new laws to keep those mistakes from ever happening again. Read about the case of the Bradford candy poisoning at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Willstewart)
Antonio Stradivari (1644?-1737) of Cremona in what is now northern Italy perfected the art of violin making, but did not limit himself to that instrument. As a master luthier, he also made guitars. The Sabionari guitar, which Stradivari made in 1679, is one of five such guitars that survive to the present time and the only one that remains playable.
In this video, Norwegian musician Rolf Lislevand draws forth musical perfection from this perfect instrument. As a specialist in Baroque instruments, he is uniquely qualified to play the Sabionari. He performs a piece by Santiago de Murcia (1673-1739), a Spanish composer.
-via Nag on the Lake
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, like other world-class rare book libraries, has treasures that could sell for vast amounts of money if auctioned. But it also has an item that does not have to be sold to collect cash value.
In 1624, the Dutch city of Utrecht needed to raise cash to build a dike, so it sold bonds. These are perpetual bonds--ones that never mature. The owners can collect interest indefinitely. It's also a bearer bond, so whoever possesses it can claim the interest.
In 2003, NPR reported that Yale acquired such a bond dating to 1648 from the Utrecht water authority. Geert Rouwenorst, a finance professor at the university, took the bond to the Netherlands and collected 26 years of back interest. When the library curator went to the Netherlands in 2015 to collect the next payment, it amounted to the equivalent of $153 USD.
At one time in my life, I was cooking for six people every day. I made huge pots of food, hoping for leftovers, but since most of the family were teenagers, that didn't happen often. Now I live alone, and whatever I cook on rare occasions is guaranteed to leave leftovers, if not for a couple of days, then for many individual meals in the freezer.
Leftovers weren't really much of a thing until we got refrigerators and freezers. Later innovations in leftovers were doggy bags, Tupperware, and ultimately microwave ovens. Along the way, we discovered that certain foods actually tasted better the next day after resting in the cold for a while. Spices diffuse, fats congeal, and food components meld into each other. It's not just your imagination (although that helps). Tom Blank of Weird History Food explains the science that proves some leftovers are better the second day, and thereafter.
Francesco Feliziani, a furniture designer in Australia, departed from his designs using wood to compose a chair from a basketball hoop and backboard. The rope from the net provides cushioning for the seat consisting of the hoop. The backboard, when twisted and reshaped, serves as a suitable frame. He calls it the "AIR Chair."
As a conscientious hunter uses all parts of an animal that he slays, Feliziani used the entire structure, leaving nothing to waste. He needed only a few 3D printed connectors to make the chair function.
-via Toxel
The "birthday" of television could be any of its many early points, depending on how you define "television," and it's hard to wrap our brains around how old the technology really is, since most people never saw any television until after World War II. However, it was on October 2, 1925, that Scottish inventor John Logie Baird successfully transmitted the first recognizable television image in his laboratory. He used a mechanical system that utilized the technology of German engineer Paul Nipkow to scan images of a ventriloquist's dummy's face (because its features had high contrast). Afterward, Baird scanned the face of 20-year-old William Edward Taynton to see what a real face would look like on television. The first public demonstration of his system was on January 26, 1926.
But Baird's mechanical television system was soon eclipsed by an electronic system invented by Philo T. Farnsworth, barely into his 20s when he demonstrated his system in 1928.
Television was slow to take off, first because of the competing systems, and then because it required receivers, which were too expensive for a general public that didn't understand TV. It also required programming to make the investment worth the cost. The larger radio networks worked on the problem, and Nazi Germany jumped on TV for propaganda purposes, but the rollout was halted by World War II. In the postwar boom of American prosperity, a television set became a status symbol, and TV slowly spread to almost everyone.
In the 100 years since that first transmission, television changed society, and you can explore with a mega-list of links at Metafilter.
Bill McClintock is still doing what he does best- seamlessly mashing up rock songs with disco dance tunes. Here, we have Van Halen's "I'll Wait" from 1984 mixed with Donna Summer's 1979 song "Bad Girls." It will grab you from the start with a clever constructed dialogue between Summer and David Lee Roth. Could that opportunity have been the inspiration for this mashup?
The song, which McClintock calls "I'll Wait for Bad Girls" by Van Summer, also contains guitar solo snippets from Steve Vai from David Lee Roth's song "Ladies' Night in Buffalo?" and Zakk Wylde from Ozzy Osbourne's "Breaking All the Rules."
While the music moves smoothly, the video can be jarring in places. The clips are taken from footage up to more than 20 years apart. While Donna Summer is recognizable in all of them, Van Halen's appearance changed considerably as they aged. Donna Summer passed in 2012; Eddie Van Halen in 2020. -via Laughing Squid
Jane Goodall, who knew more about chimpanzees than anyone, died from natural causes today while she was on a speaking tour in California. Goodall spent decades studying chimpanzees in Tanzania, but also dedicated many years working to reform the treatment of chimpanzees and other wild animals, educate people about animals, and to protect their habitats.
Since childhood, Goodall dreamed of going to Africa to work with elephants. She went to Kenya and got a job as a secretary for Dr. Louis Leakey, who sent her to the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to study chimpanzees as part of Leakey's Trimates plan. Goodall also earned a PhD in ethology from Cambridge, despite the fact that she didn't have a bachelor's degree. Her work for National Geographic brought her research to a worldwide audience. In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, and went on to found other organizations to care for orphaned chimpanzees, to set aside animal reserves, and to advocate for the environment. She almost single-handedly ended the practice of using chimpanzees for medical research at the NIH.
If you see a reference to "that Jane Goodall tramp" (like in our archives) be aware that it is not meant to be derogatory. It was the punch line to a 1987 Far Side comic. The Jane Goodall Institute took umbrage at the comic, but when Goodall arrived from Africa, she found it amusing, and later called it her favorite depiction in pop culture. Goodall later wrote the forward for one of Larson's Far Side collections.
Goodall was still working for the benefit of the animals she loved so much when she died today. She was 91.
Renato Casaro died yesterday at the ago of 89. This Italian artist became famous for composing movie posters that inspired film-goers. His works include the above heroic image for Conan the Barbarian, arguably one of the greatest films of the Twentieth Century. Similarly, he captured stories in single images for Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, David Lynch's Dune, and Wolfgang Peterson's The NeverEnding Story.
Deadline informs us that he retired in 1998 as digital composition replaced his hand-painted style, but Quentin Tarantino convinced him to take up his brush once again for the 2019 movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Casaro retired to his hometown of Treviso for his final years. Five years ago, a documentary was made about his life.
-via Daddy Warpig | Photo: Alessio Sbarbaro
The premise of the "What If" series has always been to treat stupid theoretical questions seriously, and therefore we might learn something or other. The dumb theoretical question in this video is "How long can the human race survive on only cannibalism?" Cannibalism is a disgusting idea and has always been taboo, but Randall Munroe and Henry Reich tackle it as serious (while still inserting their opinions). Relying on cannibalism would quickly make us pure carnivores, and there are many reasons that eating carnivores is a bad idea. This prohibition is passed down in cultural and religious rules, but even animals avoid it.
Once you get around that, you get into the law of diminishing returns. If you are trying to "save" humanity, how many people must survive? It won't be enough to keep the freezers full of the unlucky ones going. Otherwise, if we all just eat each other over time, humanity will not last all that long.
Helen Brayton was a wealthy woman whose hobby was breeding cats. In 1912, she imported a prize-winning English silver chinchilla cat named Don Dai. The cat had his own stateroom aboard the ship, plus his own private steward. On his arrival, Mrs. Brayton planned an opulent wedding for Don Dai and her show cat named The Quakeress at New York City's Plaza Hotel and invited her genteel friends who were cat lovers. The newspapers had a great time with that story.
But even more interesting was how the Plaza Hotel began allowing pets in the first place. The rich are used to being catered to, and when one wealthy patron showed up with a tiny dog, the manager declared the hotel pet-friendly. But there are always those who push the envelope. Only a year after the new policy was enacted, an artist who was also technically a princess brought eight "pets" to the hotel that included a bear and two alligators! Then she stayed for five years. Read about the cat wedding in the latest post at The Hatching Cat, and the full story of the princess in an earlier post.
