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.

During the World War II Nazi occupation of France, there were many who were desperate to flee the country. Jewish people, exposed French Resistance members, and frankly, anyone who feared the Nazis wanted out. There were organized escape routes, but they were so secretive that many who worked for these networks did not know who else was involved, and they did not use their real names anyway. One of these escape schemes was run by a Dr. Eugène. The French Gestapo investigated, to the point of torturing potential escapees into exposing him, but Dr. Eugène managed to slip through their hands.

Throughout 1943, French Gestapo agents continued to assemble their dossier on this elusive Dr. Eugène. They learned that he had a surprisingly large network of agents combing Paris for Jews seeking extraction, and that the beauty parlor at 25 Rue des Mathurins was the network’s primary clearinghouse for escapees. Whenever an escapee-to-be arrived at the parlor, if the doctor decided he would furnish his services, he would instruct them to return at a specific time and date, prepared for departure. The escapee must have already concluded all of their affairs in France, including goodbyes to loved ones. They were to produce 10 passport-style photos for use in forged travel documents⁠—five portraits and five in profile. No more than two adults could travel together, and no more than two suitcases per person. Escapees were told to amass their cash and valuables, and hide them in their luggage and in their clothing. Part of the cash was for the network’s fee, the rest to pay for travel and to establish a new life. Importantly, escapees must leave behind all identifying documents so they would not be caught with conflicting names or initials. This included any monogrammed clothing or luggage.

As the war dragged on, the story takes quite a turn. Besides setting the stage, it's not even a World War II story. Read about the mysterious and elusive Dr. Eugène and his elaborate scheme at Damn Interesting. Beware that it is pretty gruesome. Also available in podcast form.

A bola is a traditional tool originating in South America. It usually consists of three stone balls attached by cords. Throwing them correctly wraps the cords around the legs of a target, immobilizing it. Cowboys in Argentina and Uruguay have used them capture stray cattle.

The BolaWrap is a modern-day bola used by police to restrain people without seriously injuring them. The handheld device fires a bola 10 to 25 feet away and locks around the target. Fire it at the legs and the suspect soon finds he can't walk anywhere.

-via Marginal Revolution

Like European swallows and coconuts, harbor seals migrate. But how do they know where to go? Navigating by the stars (astronavigation) may be possible, but harbor seals have limited vision even while above the surface of the water, let alone below it.

This quandary inspired scientist Björn Mauck and his colleagues to create a hollow tube that would control seal access to seeing stars. They trained the seals to examine the starry night sky through this tube, then displayed star-like dots of light. Were the seals able to see them? According to their 2005 paper, some celestial bodies are bright enough to make astronavigation a hypothetical possibility:

Experiments with Venus and Sirius showed that our harbor seal could see these bright heavenly bodies. However, due to varying background brightness of the night sky and due to being sometimes partly occluded by high clouds, these “stars” in fact did not represent stimuli of constant intensity. Furthermore, it was sometimes difficult to decide whether or not another star had come into the seal’s view when the seal reacted. Therefore, a false-alarm rate was not determined for these experiments and detection rate for Venus and Sirius might be contaminated by an undefined rate of spontaneous reactions. Results of these experiments therefore demonstrated the seal’s capability to see some real stars, but had to be confirmed by tests with stimuli of reproducible and constant intensity. This was done in the experiments with artificial stars, which showed that our harbor seal detected the light emitted from celestial objects as faint as 4.4 stellar magnitudes.

-via Super Punch | Image: Marine Mammal Science

Once upon a time, animation in feature films was a tedious, expensive process. Each animation cel went through numerous processes. First they were hand-sketched, then cleaned up, then copied, then colored. The 1959 film Sleeping Beauty required a million animated cels that went through numerous hands, at a cost of six million dollars. And then it only made five million in its initial run. Something had to change.

Take a closer look at Walt Disney’s 1961 animated One Hundred and One Dalmatians film, and you may notice its animation style looks a little different from its predecessors. With its dark outlines defining characters from backgrounds, its departure from the subtle and sensitive animation of Sleeping Beauty just two years prior was considered jarring to some.

That’s because the film is completely Xeroxed. The technology, invented by American physicist Chester Carlson in the 1940s, completely streamlined the animation process, and ultimately saved Disney’s beloved animation department.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians proved that a good story and cute animals were more important than beautiful artwork, or at least more cost-effective. Read how Disney adopted Xerox technology and how it changed the industry at Smithsonian.

Many of my friends believe that Central Australia is a large desert with a huge Uluru rock in the middle. The first time I visited these places was in 1995. It was here that I first got acquainted with the art of the aborigines. Probably not many people also know that the famous Royal Flying Doctor Service was founded right here in Alice Springs, and its creator John Flynn, whose face you can see on the $ 20 Australian bill is buried nearby. With this issue, I begin a series of stories about Central Australia. In the next few episodes, I will share with you the amazing story of John Flynn, and the sacred stone that was placed on his grave, tell you about the first official teacher of Central Australia, whom many Aborgian children called mother. We will walk with you through the Royal Canyon, and I will tell you why this place is of such great interest among tourists all over the world. In the meantime, I suggest you look at the short sketches that I made during my last regular trip to Central Australia just a few days ago. If you enjoy this video, I would appreciate any comments you may have. It would also be interesting to know which places, of those that you personally visited, do you consider the most unusual and amazing.

A fellow who goes by ModernDayCaveman was recently released after 26 years in prison. In this video, he goes into a Walmart for the first time. He's just looking for a box of Cheerios, and is astonished to find he can select from ten different kinds. Watch him confront chips, too. The production values are awful, but his reactions are so wholesome it doesn't matter. -via Digg

Businesses occasionally seek out and listen to feedback from their customers. Sometimes customer comments are sarcastic, which confuses artificial intelligences tasked with gauging verbal sentiments. That's why computer scientists Ramya Akula and Ivan Garibay, with funding from DARPA, created a program that can reliably detect sarcasm. From the abstract of their article in the journal Entropy:

Inherent ambiguity in sarcastic expressions make sarcasm detection very difficult. In this work, we focus on detecting sarcasm in textual conversations from various social networking platforms and online media. To this end, we develop an interpretable deep learning model using multi-head self-attention and gated recurrent units. The multi-head self-attention module aids in identifying crucial sarcastic cue-words from the input, and the recurrent units learn long-range dependencies between these cue-words to better classify the input text. We show the effectiveness of our approach by achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets from social networking platforms and online media. Models trained using our proposed approach are easily interpretable and enable identifying sarcastic cues in the input text which contribute to the final classification score. We visualize the learned attention weights on a few sample input texts to showcase the effectiveness and interpretability of our model.

I'm sure it works well.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Pixabay

Russia has always relied on apples for sustenance and delicious treats. One that was particularly popular among 19th-century aristocrats was pastila, a dessert that may remind you of marshmallow, meringue, or divinity, made from apples. And like those fluffy sweets, it once required lots of elbow grease, as Russian food expert Darra Goldstein explains.

In the days before electricity, making pastila was painful labor. Without a mechanical mixer, beating cooked apples into fluff had to be done by hand. One “particularly exquisite” 19th-century variety, says Goldstein, had to be beaten for an agonizing 48 straight hours. “So in Russia, you had serfs and they were in the kitchen and they were whipping the pastila,” notes Goldstein. “So it wasn’t any effort on the part of the people who would be enjoying it.”

Cue the Russian Revolution. Under the restrictions and scarcities of the Soviet Union, pastila slowly faded away. “It wasn’t part of the necessary food groups,” says Goldstein. “It was hard enough for them to get basic foods to market, which they didn’t succeed in doing either.” Many of Russia’s traditional, unusual, or unique foods met the same fate. But recently, there has been a massive upswing of interest in recovering ancestral Russian recipes. A decade ago, my friend Stas took notice that the interest in restoring Russian foodways became mainstream. To him, it was especially poignant. “We always grew up thinking that a lot of our culture had been just completely obliterated,” he says. “Then there’s this wave of people unearthing really old recipes such as Belyov pastila. And so everybody’s like, holy shit, this is what this thing is supposed to look like.”

The rise of electrical appliances has made pastille accessible again. And if you want to try it out yourself, you can get a recipe for pastila at Atlas Obscura along with the history of the dish.

It is the duty of every citizen in a free republic to stay informed of current events that affect public policymaking. Consuming quality sources of news on a daily basis should be a daily habit. You could include, among those sources, the New York Times. This respected publication would like for you to know which American cities are the best and the worst for gardening in the nude. And so it presents the above list (paywalled), using data compiled by the lawncare company LawnStarter, to keep you in the know:

The study used a number of metrics, including: the percentage of nudists and the friendliness of laws governing public nudity and toplessness in each city; local Google searches for “nudist” and “World Naked Gardening Day”; safety concerns, addressed by measuring the number of registered sex offenders amid the population; weather-related factors such as temperature, rain and wind speed; and a previous Lawnstarter study ranking the best cities for urban gardening. The resulting top and bottom 10 cities are uncovered in this week’s chart.

I'm shocked to see San Antonio at the bottom. My in-laws are in that city. When I next visit them, I will engage in research to verify if this conclusion for myself.

-via Dave Barry | Image: New York Times

Is this Brian David Gilbert’s short film come to life? Do I have to contemplate whether or not some odd force is compelling me to type into spreadsheets? Fortunately, no! It turns out that the new update for Microsoft Excel allows its users to automate tasks. Meet Office Scripts, a new tool within the software that lets users record their actions inside an Excel workbook, as TechRadar details: 

On its blog overview for the new update, Microsoft states "as an example, say you start your workday by opening a .csv file from an accounting site in Excel. You then spend several minutes deleting unnecessary columns, formatting a table, adding formulas, and creating a PivotTable in a new worksheet. Those actions you repeat daily can be recorded once with the Action Recorder.

From then on, running the script will take care of your entire .csv conversion. You'll not only remove the risk of forgetting steps, but be able to share your process with others without having to teach them anything."

You can even set a specific time to run a script on a schedule using Power Automate, formerly known as Microsoft Flow, allowing you to trigger a set of actions to react to a specific event, even outside of other applications and services. This can also be set to just respond to a timer to create hourly reports or declutter ongoing downloads. 

Microsoft has provided a list of script samples and scenarios for you to use right off the bat, as well as instructional video tutorials to guide you through creating your own.

Image credit :Mika Baumeister via Unsplash 

According to a new study, certain mammals live quite successfully among humans. The research, which was published in Global Change Biology hypothesized that ‘mammals with certain traits and life strategies are more likely to suffer outsized consequences from humans.’ The researchers discovered that smaller mammals, such as raccoons tend to appear frequently in areas with higher human presence-and they fare better among us and our urbanized structures: 

Why do smaller, quickly reproducing animals fare better among us and our infrastructure? The researchers suggested it may be that they are better able to tolerate threats like sensory pollution and vehicle strikes or have a more generalist diet. Alternatively, areas near humans tend to have fewer predators.

But the results might be a bit misleading. For example, the cameras might have captured a certain species showing up frequently near human disturbances not because the animals prefer it there but because humans are destroying their natural habitat.

The study noted another caveat: Once human disturbances become too intense, even once-tolerant mammals start responding negatively. In other words, there seems to be a threshold of human disturbances beyond which co-existence with other mammals becomes difficult or impossible.

"We suggest that such thresholds are critical to consider when attempting to promote 'landscapes of coexistence' (i.e., ecological conditions that allow the long-term persistence of sensitive mammal species in human-dominated landscapes) and functional connectivity between populations, particularly as several large mammal species continue recolonizing modified landscapes in North America and globally," the researchers wrote.

Image credit: Dan Gold via Unsplash

Reading through multiple paragraphs and pages of history can be somewhat boring or tedious. If you want to learn about the history of a city, or how it developed over time, why not view it through visual media? Antonis Antoniou and Steven Heller have presented the visual history of New York through their new book, Decoding Manhattan. The book compiles over 250 architectural maps, diagrams, and graphics of the island of Manhattan in New York City: 

In a very real sense, the island of Manhattan is a place created by a diagram: The Commmissioner’s Plan of 1811, which laid out the future streets north of Houston Street and south of 155th Street, was essentially a map disguised as a planning document. So there’s real conceptual beauty to Antonis Antoniou and Steven Heller’s new book, Decoding Manhattan, a rollicking, wide-ranging visual compendium of more than 250 maps, diagrams, and graphics, all related to that incomparable chunk of bedrock. It’s a fascinating, visually vibrant book, often quite funny, and catnip for someone like me, obsessed with New York City-themed historical images. I recently talked to the authors about the genesis of the book. 

You can check ArchDaily’s full interview with the authors here! 

Image Credit:  Steven Guarnaccia and Pentagram New York, from Decoding Manhattan (via Archdaily) 

We see ancient Greek clothing in art, television, and games. Our knowledge of ancient Greek clothing was derived from marble sculptures. That’s why we see a similar style in different modern depictions, and this is also why many would assume that the ancient Greeks wore only white clothes! This is untrue, however, as people from ancient Greece used natural dyes to add different colors in their wardrobes: 

Ancient Greeks, indeed, were using natural dyes from shellfish, insects, and plants, to color fabric and clothing. Skilled craftsmen extracted dyes from these sources and combined them with other substances to create a variety of colors. In time the colors became bright. Women preferred yellow, red, light green, oil, gray, and violet. Most Greek women’s fashion garments were made from rectangular fabric that was normally folded around the body with girdles, pins, and buttons. Decorative motifs on the dyed fabrics were either woven or painted on. There were often geometric or natural patterns, depicting leaves, animals, human figures, and mythological scenes. 

Although some women bought imported fabric and textiles, most women wove the fabric creating their own clothing. In other words, by using different textiles people differentiated by gender, class, or status.  Greek pottery and ancient sculptures provide us with information on fabrics. They were brightly colored and generally decorated with elaborate designs. Ancient fabrics were derived from the basic raw materials, animal, plant, or minerals, with its main wool, flax, leather, and silk.

As time passed and finer materials (mostly linen) were produced, the draped dresses became more varied and elaborate. There was silk from China and a  further variety in draping was created by pleating. It’s worth mentioning that the silk from China and fine muslins from India began making their way to ancient Greece after the victorious conquests of Alexander the Great.

Image credit: Engin Akyurt via Unsplash 

The game Monopoly can be cutthroat, but its most enduring feature is that it takes a long time. While some of that has to do with how evenly matched the players and their motivations are, the ultimate outcome depends on the roll of the dice. If the dice fall just so, the game can be quite short.

After our recent attempt to play the shortest actual game of Monopoly on record, we started to wonder about what the shortest THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE game of Monopoly would be. That is, if everything went just the right way, with just the right sequence of rolls, Chance and Community Chest cards, and so on, what is the quickest way one player could go bankrupt? After working on the problem for a while, we boiled it down to a 4-turn (2 per player), 9 roll (including doubles) game. Detail on each move given below. If executed quickly enough, this theoretical game can be played in 21 seconds (see video below).

It's been a long time since I played the game, so I had forgotten that a turn can be extended with a double roll. The guys at scatterplot explain how a game can end in sudden death, with a very short bonus video to demonstration it. Personally, if confronted with a group who wanted to play Monopoly, I would go bankrupt as quickly as I could, in order to go do something else. -via Boing Boing