Anyone who develops a new technology is sure that it will be a hit and change the world in some way or another. The public isn't so sure, and it often takes time to win us over. There are plenty of products that turned out to be not so cool or useful (or even dangerous) in the long run, and they fell by the wayside. Then there are the products that eventually became ubiquitous, and looking at the backlash in hindsight can be a hoot.

Yeah, early predictions can be hilariously wrong, even when they come from those who have something to lose if the product succeeds. See a list of 15 such products that faced initial backlash at Cracked.

Sheep can be pretty nervous, and it's not unusual for that nervousness to spread among a flock. But in 1888, it was more than just a flock, as a panic exploded across a huge sheep-raising area in England.  

The first widely recorded sheep panic occurred on the night of November 3, 1888, in Oxfordshire. Around eight o’clock, tens of thousands of sheep across an area of about 200 square miles, around the town of Reading, impulsively and simultaneously went berserk. They broke through their pens and dwellings and bolted out into the open fields, destroying property and overrunning fences as they did so. The next morning they were found widely scattered, some miles from their fields. Some of them still panting with terror under hedges, and many crowded into corners of fields.

Another such panic occurred in 1889 and again in 1893. There was no evidence of an earthquake, meteor, or human intervention. What caused the sheep panic? We still don't know for sure, but you can read about the experts' best guess at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: بدارين)

Here’s a new suggestion on how to support our birds: instead of just installing simple bird feeders, why not go big and build a habitat in your backyard? Not only does it serve as a new aesthetic addition to your home, it could also serve as a shelter for wild birds that need to survive. The San Diego Union Tribune has more details: 

The Audubon Society has made it really easy to discover the most bird-friendly plants for your neighborhood with its Native Plant Database created by Rowden, using data compiled by John Kartesz, director of the Biota of North America Program. All you do is enter your ZIP code (and your email address) to get a list of the best native plants for your area, along with nearby nurseries where they can be purchased and a list of the birds the plants are likely to attract.

The California Native Plant Society’s CalScape database and Garden Planner are additional resources for finding native plants best suited to your region.

And please note, this is much more than a landscaping tip. We’re talking about the future of our bird communities here, because the threat to their survival is high.

Birds have evolved to eat the seeds and insects native to the areas where they live, but farms, herbicides and urban development have destroyed many of those native plants, along with the insects that feed off them, causing ripples up the food chain. Think about how few insects you find on your windshield and grill these days. Then ask your parents what it was like a few decades ago, when a drive through the country left cars bristling with dead bugs. Our cars may be cleaner, but it means our birds have dwindling access to food.

image via wikimedia commons

Tomorrow we’ll have a six year old, and like so many girls her age she insisted on a cake depicting the future Queen Elizabeth I witnessing the execution of Anne Boleyn by Henry VIII pic.twitter.com/4HC5khHjur

— Edmund Kingsley (@KingsleyEdmund) May 29, 2021

Anne Boleyn, a Queen of England under her husband, King Henry VII, lost her head when the king decided to move on to a new marital relationship. Some breakups are harder than others and Queen Anne definitely had a rough one.

The daughter of Edmund Kingsley, a stage actor and producer, appreciated the drama of that moment in history. It was the theme of her sixth birthday party. BuzzFeed reports:

“She said, ‘Well, my friend is getting unicorns, but I think what I'd really like is Henry VIII executing Anne Boleyn with Elizabeth I watching,” Kingsley told BuzzFeed News. [...]

Morrissey, a theater and movement director with a history background, was able to share with their daughter the details of the royal family who once occupied the Hampton Court Palace.

“I think that's where the seed was sown, seeing that castle and having a really fun day there. She just got really into the story of his big, fat, horrible king who had six wives," Kingsley said.

-via Nag on the Lake

Blackmouth Design, a custom fabrication firm in Seattle, made this home entertainment console and table for a dedicated Trekkie. It's built to imitate the navigation and helm console from the Enterprise on Star Trek. One of the engineers describes the build on reddit:

The table is approx. 56" x 36" and 21" tall. It features 16 vintage rocker switches that activate custom programmed light patterns (Screen accurate LED backlit replica resin "gumdrops" controlled by an Arduino Mega) and plays sound effect audio files from The Original Series as well as a few hidden Easter Eggs (like playing the theme song or the Amok Time fight music) when the correct combination of switches are thrown.

In addition to the 16 rocker switches there are 8 red momentary push buttons that control the customers home media system (Turn on/off lights, lower projector screen, etc.). The table top and trim are 3/16" Powder coated Aluminum over red, grey and black laminated plywood. LED backlit graphics (recreated from scratch) sit under 1/4" plexiglass panels. The table also has 2 drawers for game controllers and remotes as well as 2 hidden shelves to support beverages.

-via Hack A Day

In June of 1858, a ship named the Mary Russell landed at Cork Harbor in Ireland. It had returned from delivering a shipment of mules to Barbados under the command of Captain William Stewart, who had just bludgeoned seven men to death- six crew members and a sailor who had hitched a ride on the ship. Stewart didn't make any attempt to hide the murders, as he was thoroughly convinced they were planning a mutiny. There were no such plans, but the six-week journey was a descent into extreme paranoia for Stewart.   

As Stewart revealed to Scoresby later, he hadn’t originally planned to harm anyone. He had asked the men to furl the sails so he could sail on without their help, in search of a ship to rescue him from their treachery. But one had already passed them by during the battle with Howes, and a second turned away—possibly thinking the Mary Russell was a pirate ship—despite Stewart’s attempts to flag it down.

And then a new thought struck him: Surely if the crew were innocent, God would have directed the second ship to rescue them. And since death was, in Stewart’s understanding, a punishment befitting the crime of mutiny, that must be what God intended for them. That notion, together with the terror that Howes, still at large, could murder him at any moment, gave way to a sudden, sobering realization.

Stewart must kill his crew.

Read the story of the Mary Russell's journey and the trial that ensued at Mental Floss.

Have you ever wondered why the chicken is the go-to poultry of the world today? It wasn't because of Colonel Sanders. No, we need to go back further to see how the chicken supplanted ducks and geese on our tables. Back to Queen Victoria, the trendsetter (see white wedding dresses and childbirth anesthetic) and monarch of the British Empire, who popularized chicken for dinner.  

Queen Victoria, an abolitionist whose title gave her an outsize influence on trends of the day, helped make chicken a food so universally associated with wholesome nourishment that within just a few decades after her death, politicians would start promising would-be voters a “chicken in every pot.” By the time KFC franchises were spreading across the nation after World War II, all Colonel Sanders had to do to sell his deep-fried breasts, wings, drumsticks, and thighs was to promise customers that his birds were so full of fat, they’d happily lick their fingers to keep the tasty grease from running down their elbows.

The crash of hen fever in 1855 made such table manners possible, for the chicken would not have become so universally consumed if its price had remained at $700 for a breeding pair. The collapse was also a boon to Charles Darwin, who was finally able to afford enough chickens to study—Darwin’s work with chickens would inform On the Origin of Species, which was published in 1859.

But what does an evil sea captain have to do with it? That's an interesting part of the story, which you can read at Collectors Weekly.

The reasons are more than the oversaturation of young adult (YA) novels over the years, as Polygon’s Bashirat Oladele writes. Maybe it’s my disinterest over popular YA novels over time, but after the success of The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner, to be honest, I barely see any coverage or movie adaptations for new novels. Oladele believes that the hype for this kind of fiction has faded as time passed, and for good reasons: 

Which left nowhere for these stories to go after the injustices were overturned and the fascist villains were defeated. They all built momentum and excitement around action, but few of these stories ever considered what young-adult readers want to know: After one cruel leader is gone, what comes next? Injustice rarely ends with the death or departure of one unjust ruler, but YA dystopian stories rarely consider the next world order, and how it could operate differently, without stigmatizing its people. Revolution, post-apocalyptic survival, and restructuring society are fascinating topics, but apart from the Hunger Games’ brief coda about Katniss’ future PTSD, most YA dystopia stories just don’t explore these areas.

And just as YA dystopian stories weren’t particularly interested in the future, they also were rarely that interested in their pasts, or even their present. They almost never explored their societies in any depth, beyond declaring them to be evil, violent, and controlling. We don’t really know much about the destructive regimes in the Maze Runner or Divergent series — we just know they’re bad. The run of dystopian movies in particular only offered the quickest, shallowest explanation of why a government would force its children into mazes, or make them kill each other. The Capitol’s desire to terrorize its citizens in The Hunger Games, or The Maze Runner’s focus on population control and disaster response — these are political excuses for mass murder, but not nuanced ones. 

Image credit: Lionsgate via Polygon 

Artist JohannesVIII did this piece of Doctor Who's Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) as a cat!

source: twitter

Velox, which is Latin for "swift", can quickly go almost anywhere with its undulating locomotion. It can move over flat land, through snow, and through the water. The designers at Pliant Energy Systems explain that:

These fins are best described as four-dimensional objects with a hyperbolic geometry that allows the robot to swim like a ray, crawl like a millipede, jet like a squid, and slide like a snake.

Pliant suggests that Velox could be used rescuing humans who have become trapped on ice floes, delivering supplies in littoral combat situations, or hauling divers through water.

-via Kottke

Before movies and television took over entertainment, anything unusual could be made into a show and taken on the road. Clarence Willard did just that, with a performance that consisted mainly up standing up straight. Willard toured with the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and later with Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

While on stage, Willard would invite a volunteer from the audience to join him, usually someone taller than him. Standing next to each other, Willard would stretch himself until he stood taller. Willard was found that he could add seven and half inches to his natural height of 5 feet 10 inches simply by stretching. He was also able to extend the length of his arms by 8 to 15 inches and make one leg 4 inches longer than the other.

In the September 1927 issue of the Science of Invention, the magazine set out to explain how Willard grew on demand. Editors took x-rays of his spine and determined that his spinal curvature is “perhaps greater than that of the average man.”

Most people with spinal curvatures remain that way unless there is some medical intervention, but Willard learned to straighten and relax his spine by his own muscle power. Read the story of The Man Who Grows at Amusing Planet. 

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I've sat on this news story for a few days because I couldn't find it in what I would call a quality news source to support it. But NPR reaches that bar, so it's probably true that Italian artist Salvatore Garau sold an invisible, intangible sculpture.

High Snobriety has details about this artistic wonder:

Garau instructs that the sculpture will need to be displayed in an unobstructed area that is five feet by five feet. It should also be displayed in a private home. And it may be displayed in any light since it's not there.

Embedded above is an Instagram video of a previous work by Garau, which is likewise more conceptual than existential:

Last month, Garau displayed another immaterial sculpture titled, "Buddha in Contemplation," in the Piazza della Scala in Milan, near the entrance to the Gallerie d'Italia. Garau posted a video of the "statue" to his Instagram page, writing, "Now it exists and will remain in this space forever," says the video. "You do not see it but it exists. It is made of air and spirit."

-via Slate

As with nearly every facet of life, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected Mexico's mezcal makers, too. But several of these mostly family-run distillers found new ways to reach both mezcal enthusiasts and the mezcal curious as well.

The BBC's Ann Deslandes explored today's mezcal business in Mexico:

"When the pandemic hit I was really scared for my business," says Ms Daw, whose label is called Eterna Libertad. "I was getting ready to put my mezcal in restaurants, in retail stores, and I had to put that all on hold."

"Nobody was buying", she says.

However, the entrepreneur says she now believes "this pandemic came into my life to show me something - that people want to know about mezcal".

She realised that in the pandemic "everyone is behind the screen". So she took her product to Zoom, hosting online tastings for anyone who wanted to join, and selling bottles via an online drinks store.

Ms Daw says the tastings have been a hit: "I reach more people now - in 2020 and 2021 - than in the previous five years I have been producing mezcal.

¡Salud!

Getty Images via BBC

The Superhero Club at Facebook ran images of Marvel's Avengers through FaceApp to change their gender. The results look eerily believable -except for the Hulk, who is always a cartoon.

The app changes facial dimensions slightly, like widening the cheekbones for females and narrowing them for males. It also adds makeup to female versions, and removes it for male versions. You might notice that when changing a male superhero into a female, the app removes ten years of age. When changing a female into a male, the two characters look the same young age. You can see all 14 of them in a post at Geeks Are Sexy.

While the characters look like the same person or siblings, I could swear that the female version of Captain America is an actress I've seen somewhere.

We think of flappers as the trend-setting women of the Roaring Twenties, but the style was introduced years earlier. Dancers Vernon and Irene Castle brought jazz music and the dances that go with it to America in 1912. America ate them up.

They popularised dances like the foxtrot, the waltz, the maxixe, the tango, and the bunny hug. They opened a dancing school across from Manhattan’s Ritz Hotel and their supper club, “Castles in the Air”, was located on a Broadway theatre’s roof. They also had a nightclub called “Castles by the Sea” on the Long Beach broadwalk and their own restaurant, the “Sans Souci”.

But the Castles, particularly Irene, did not just start trends on stage. She became a fashion trendsetter in every sense of the word, and came to be known as America’s Best Dressed Woman. What came after her was a fashion revolution – the perspective on style and dress changed completely.

Castle dressed in ways that made dancing easier- shorter skirts, no corset, and a stylish band to hold her hair. When she cut her hair short, suddenly young women all over wanted the "Castle bob." Read about Irene Castle and how her style influenced flapper culture at Messy Nessy Chic.