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

You've heard of the Irish goodbye, which is where you leave a party without telling anyone. It's not really Irish, and it was most likely universally developed to avoid the Midwest goodbye. In this skit from Charlie Berens (previously at Neatorama), the Midwest goodbye starts with "Welp, I spose..." and morphs into a never-ending horror of epic proportions.

Use this as a lesson. If you are planning to visit the Midwest for the holidays, it's always good to be prepared for what you will encounter. If conversation starts to lag during a gathering, all you have to do is act like you're leaving, and suddenly everyone has something important to tell you about. But you have to time it just right- always indicate your exit at least an hour before you need to be somewhere else. Now, if someone insists you take home some leftover glorified rice, I can't help you. -via reddit

Us surface dwellers don't usually have to think twice about what lurks below, but what would we find if we did? https://t.co/MeKzzePDng

— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) November 4, 2022

When London's sewer system was built in the mid-19th century, it was a infrastructure wonder, leaving the city cleaner and safer, and was designed to accommodate the city's growth. Then the city grew much larger than anyone predicted, and modern living presents problems for a sewer system that no one could have foreseen. The monster in the sewer these days is the fatberg. When calcium-rich water meets fats or oil (including some soaps), it will solidify. A chunk gets caught on a corroded pipe or a piece of trash, and other chunks join it. The growing fatberg captures wet wipes, menstrual products, and other items of trash as it grows. Eventually, the mass will restrict or totally clog even the largest sewer pipes.

On any given night, there may be hundreds of workers battling dozens of fatbergs in London's sewers. They use high-power water jets, vacuums, shovels, pickaxes, and sometimes even their hands. It's dirty, dark, and dangerous work, but someone's gotta do it. Read about the ongoing battle against fatbergs at Atlas Obscura.

Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues famously invented the World Wide Web in 1993 at CERN--the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN's facilities are in Switzerland so it's commonly said that the Internet was invented in Switzerland.

But that's not quite correct. David Galbraith writes that CERN's facilities actually cross the French border, but the main entrance is in Switzerland, which is why it is thought of as a Swiss location. But Building 31 of the scientific research complex--where Tim Berners-Lee actually worked--is actually a few feet across the French border.

There's a commemorative plaque at CERN noting the invention of the internet. The plaque, though, is in Switzerland, which contributes to the popular confusion about this French invention.

-via Kottke

Alright. Okay. My long-dead grandpa Milt’s unfinished stained glass menorah piece. It’s been in my basement workshop for literal years now. I keep not tackling the job of picking up where he left off. I want to get past that block. pic.twitter.com/wMUOfItsDt

— Corvidae of Reckoning (@joshmillard) October 18, 2022

Artist Josh Millard started exploring the art of stained glass in recent years. When his parents heard, they asked if he'd like to have his late grandfather's stained glass supplies. Millard didn't even know his grandfather did stained glass, but Milt Millard had apparently taken it up later in life. In those supplies was an unfinished project- a large menorah. Millard thought about it for three years, and then plunged into finishing it.

This project was intimidating to me for a few reasons: the unusual creative and ethical prospect of finishing someone's work posthumously; the feeling that any attempt to finish the work would involve first the irreversible decision to destroy a (however damaged and unfinished) existing family artifact; and the sheer logistical complexity of picking up someone else's design and fabrication mid-stream.

But Dad liked the idea of me finishing it.  And I imagine Grandpa would have as well.  And preserving it indefinitely in bad shape in my basement where no one would ever see it again wasn't really much of a life for the existing artifact.

So the only difficulties left were: literally everything else.  All the logistical and creative problems of adapting someone's unfinished work.  

Millard Tweeted the project as it went along. His account is much more than a DIY project. Along the way, he grapples with handling and manipulating a fragile family artifact and design decisions for a two-person collaboration in which one artist is silent. Altogether, it makes a beautiful story. And the finished work is beautiful, too.

 

You can follow the process of completing the menorah at Twitter or more easily at Threadreader. -via Metafilter

Ask any historian, and they will tell you that the first time something important happens, we often don't know how important it is, and that make proper documentation for posterity a hit-or-miss situation. The US copyright office is part of the Library Of Congress. They have known for quite some time that their earliest record of a motion picture copyright was in 1893. But since no movie had been copyrighted before, there was nothing in the surviving documentation to show what movie it was. The copyright was for "Kinetoscopic Records." But was that the title of the film? What was the movie about? Did it still exist?

Film scholar Claudy Op den Kamp finally solved that mystery in 2022 by painstakingly searching through boxes and boxes of records. One envelope held the key: the first copyrighted movie was Edison’s The Blacksmith Shop, shown above. It was filmed by W.K.L. Dickson, the head photographer at Edison's studio. The story of that film, how and why it was copyrighted, and how the mystery was solved is told at the Library of Congress blog. -via Strange Company

It's the way science works: just when we think you have it figured out, evidence arises that forces us to reconsider how things are. Or were, in this case. The ability to sequence DNA from human remains from thousands of years ago has turned our theories of human migration and evolution on its head. It hasn't been all that long since we learned that modern humans carry traces of DNA from Neanderthals. Genetic analysis had also led to the discovery of new but extinct human species like the Denisovans, first found in 2010. Denisovan DNA has only been identified in remains from Siberia, Tibet, and Laos. Until now.

A study has uncovered traces of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in ancient human remains in Brazil and Panama. One individual from Panama also showed markers of Australasian descent. The genetics do not indicate these people were Neanderthals or Denisovans, but were descended from modern humans who carried some DNA from the other human species. These discoveries are unique in that Denisovan DNA has not been found in other genetic samples sequenced from North and South American remains. The current theory that the Americas were populated by people migrating down from the Bering Strait is not disproven by the new findings, but it opens the possibility that migration from Beringia may not be the only way humans arrived. Read more about the new discoveries at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Henry Lavalle, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and Ana Nascimento, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco)

In the movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, Dobby the house elf died in Harry's arms on the beach. That heartbreaking scene was filmed at Freshwater West Beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Harry Potter fans came to the beach to pay their respects to the character, and someone erected a gravestone that says "Here lies Dobby, the free elf." Over time, fans began leaving objects at the "grave," mostly socks. Dobby was freed from his indentured servitude when he was given a sock, which he wore for the rest of his life.

After a consultation with the public, National Trust Cymru say Dobby's grave can stay on Pembrokeshire's Freshwater West. But they're asking visitors to leave no trace after paint chips and socks have been damaging the natural environment here. pic.twitter.com/Ydea3WRmqr

— Charanpreet Khaira (@CharanpreetBBC) November 1, 2022

However, Freshwater West Beach is part of a nature preserve, and the number of Dobby tributes started to get out of hand. National Trust Wales conducted an eight-month review of the site and decided that the shrine can stay, as long as it doesn't grow any bigger. Fans have been asked to please stop leaving socks, painted rocks, and other objects which may damage the environment. They ask that fans "only take photos when visiting the memorial to help protect the wider landscape.”

(Image credit: Tim Difford)