Where’s the last place you want to be during an earthquake? For Justin Allen, it was the urology clinic. https://t.co/0wywGLXPX2

— WIRED (@WIRED) April 6, 2024

Last Friday, a mild but rare earthquake hit the New York area. Just a slight tremor, but enough that everyone called around to make sure it wasn't their imagination. Justin Allen, on the other hand, was in the most delicate situation at the time- in the middle of his vasectomy. The doctor explained the procedure thoroughly, and that it would take around twenty minutes. But ten minutes in, the room started shaking. Allen thought it might be a nearby train, but then the doctor stopped and put his instruments down. The urologist mentioned an earthquake, and Allen thought he was joking, trying to lighten the mood. But it was a singular timing coincidence for Allen.

In an interview with Wired, Allen said that the doctor asked how long does an earthquake normally last. He waited several minutes before resuming the surgery. We are glad that that unnerving moment turned out all right in the end. -via Damn Interesting

Did you get to see the solar eclipse today? Millions of people traveled to the path of totality, but all across the contiguous US and northern Mexico, people stopped working, went outside, and stared at a partial eclipse. With protective glasses, of course. You can see it in the image above behind the Statue of Liberty in New York. In my neighborhood, the clouds opened up just in time for me to enjoy a 93% eclipse with my neighbors. It was that rarest of rare sights, a crescent sun. There are archives of livestreams and plenty of photos to come of the eclipse itself, but part of the fun is seeing how people celebrated the celestial event from coast to coast.  

The couple above got married today at the Total Eclipse of the Heart festival mass wedding in Russellville, Arkansas, and then enjoyed the totality. Take a look at a gallery of professional images of the day's viewing at Smithsonian. Then we can do it all again in twenty years. The next total solar eclipse in the US will be in August of 2044.

The Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini) builds the largest webs of any spider on earth. There are several species, most of them found in Madagascar. This spider can shoot a web up to 25 meters (82 feet) across a river! Sure, she's taking advantage of the prevailing winds, but that's a lot of silk from a tiny arachnid. It pays off, though, because rivers are where the insects are. This particular spider has some competition in the form of another spider that wants to use her bridge to start a web. And can you blame her for wanting to save some energy? Anyone who has been pregnant or has breastfed can imagine the resources it takes to produce that much spider silk, much less the strong premium silk this spider produces. Luckily, it is recyclable. This segment, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, is from the BBC nature documentary series The Hunt. -via Born in Space

I've been following the Twitter user and Substack writer Old Hollow Tree for a few months. He has an interesting life story about his return to the Vermont woods of his youth and writes about his quest to find meaning in family and a newfound rural lifestyle.

What is his authentic way to experience today's solar eclipse? With pie, of course. His mother prepared this Boston cream pie to show the path of the moon across the sun.

Randall Munroe gives us a generator to make a unique pinball machine, with more features than you can shake a stick at. You have yellow, blue, green, and red balls constantly entering, and you are supposed to direct each color to a different designated output. Balls will disappear after 30 seconds, so you can't fill up the screen. Click the wrench to see a toolbox of your device options, and scroll down because there are a lot of them. Just exploring what they do is a lot of fun, or you can find a handy guide at Explain xkcd. Yes, each ball color has different properties. What you see above is the mess I made after about ten minutes. It's nowhere near efficient- yet. I was having too much fun causing chaos with the fans!

But there's much more. Click the "view machine" button, and you'll be taken to a scrollable gallery of completed machines that are linked together, so that the outputs of those machines, or cells, feed the balls into each other. While the number varies, there have been as many as 528 cells! When you have successfully separated your balls by color, you can submit your machine to the gallery grid, although it must pass an inspection before it's included. Munroe took on this project for April Fool's Day, but it's so complicated that the launch was delayed. The machine works better on a desktop than on a phone or tablet. -via Metafilter

It's been 50 years since Stephen King's first novel was published. Carrie was published on April 5, 1974, and adapted for the big screen a couple of years later. But it almost wasn't written at all. In the early 1970s, King was teaching and taking on other part time jobs while writing short stories for magazines. His wife Tabby, also an aspiring writer, was taking care of a baby and working part time when she could. They were barely getting by. King's short stories were often rejected, but were most likely to be accepted by men's magazines, where science fiction and horror were sandwiched between pinups, leading to an accusation that King couldn't write a decent woman character. He took that as a challenge.

King developed the character Carrie from two women he knew in school who were badly treated by their peers. But he didn't like what he wrote, and tossed page after page in the trash. Tabby discovered those pages and offered her help in fleshing out the character. The story ended up being too long for a magazine, so it went to a book publisher. Carrie changed the family's fortunes and set King on a 50-year career trajectory. Read how Carrie came about at Mental Floss.

What an electric performance! Franzoli Electronics synchronized four singing Tesla coils together to form a band. These plasma speakers generate tones by changing their spark output. Hook them through a MIDI and you've got a concert! Here the quartet plays AC/DC's "Thunderstruck." The coils play guitar and vocals, while the percussion and bass are added from elsewhere. This quartet's latest video is a performance of "Billie Jean," but I happen to like "Thunderstruck better. It's such a classic and recognizable song (not to mention rockin') that we've seen it performed on cellos, gayageum, guzheng, tubulum, slapophone, household devices, and baby babbles. It's fun to dance to, as well.

The Drinker’s Dictionary, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, contains a substantial list of synonyms and phrases that mean alcohol intoxication. Drunkenness is seen as a vice, but is also so common throughout human history that using other terms is to be expected. These synonyms, called drunkonyms, can come and go or could have a long life, and the list is being added to daily as new generations produce their own slang, so we have counted thousands of them. You can find a very long list of drunkonyms in the appendix of this paper.

Most of these drunkonyms began as words meaning something else. Can any English word be turned into a drunkonym? Some believe that's possible, although the context would have to be right for others to understand how a new word is being used. There are obvious exceptions. Consider the phrase "I got laid last night." The context is there, but the word "laid" already means something different even in context, which would be understood by most of the people you know. Antonyms are a problem, too, because if you said "I got sober last night," no one would perceive that you are saying you got drunk. Cultural context matters as well, as in the word "pissed," which means drunk in British English and "angry" in American English. But if you know the speaker's language, it can be understood. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Mario Antonio Pena Zapatería)

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch will forever be known for the painting The Scream, even though he produced a large body of work over his lifetime. His paintings often conveyed melancholy, angst, and downright depression, which Munch knew all about because of his troubled childhood in a family plagued with health problems and mental illness. But The Scream stood out as a particularly overt symbol of dispair and existential dread. The scene itself was inspired by a meteorological event that colored the sky, and Munch heard, or maybe felt, a scream pass through nature. The face that Munch painted (several times) is not the one screaming, but rather a person reacting to the scream he heard. This TED-Ed lesson looks into the life of Edvard Munch and his inspiration for an enduring painting that speaks to the fear and anxiety in all of us. -via Damn Interesting   

Back in January, we looked at the rise of celebrity culture in the 18th century by way of Casanova, who became a celebrity for no other reason than being a celebrity. He had a counterpart in England named Kitty Fisher. Fisher's entry into high society and wealth came not from her family, but from the succession of high society lovers she charmed in the 1750s, plus her instinct for self-promotion. Kitty was a master at sparking rumors, and wasn't above staging a publicity stunt, like that time she was thrown from her horse and accidentally exposed her body to rescuers and onlookers. In other words, she became famous for being famous. Portrait artists found her both irresistible and lucrative, as people would buy prints of etchings of Kitty, making her the original pin-up girl. She was even connected to Casanova, although there was no chemistry between them. Or maybe it was celebrity rivalry. Read about the 18th-century celebrity Kitty Fisher at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Nathaniel Hone the Elder)

As customer service shifts rapidly to the customer, the most common place you'll find this new system is at the self-serve payment kiosk. Cashiers, if there are any, don't want to handle your germ-laden card, so it's up to you. But interacting with a machine doesn't get you out of the customary upselling. After you pay for what you've bought, do you want to give us more money? You might think it would be easier to say "no" to a machine, but this guy finds that it's anything but.

And now we have self-serve kiosks asking for tips. A tip for what? No one served me; it's a self-serve kiosk. There's no one around except for the business owner staring at you from a seat ten feet away. You can't tell me he's making a sub-minimum wage. But that's the thing about payment machines- you can't ask questions. You can only answer questions. And you can't refuse to answer questions, or the transaction is liable to be canceled. -via reddit

Millions of people will be converging on towns in the path of the total solar eclipse that will work its way across the US on Monday. If you can't go, hey, the rest of the America will get a partial eclipse. You'll want to look up and see how much of the sun will be blotted out where you live in this chart from NASA-  just enter your zip code to find out how much of the sun will be covered and when. I could see 92% coverage, but it also could be obscured by clouds.

But you don't have to miss the totality, since it will available online. Different organizations will be offering livestreams of the total eclipse on Monday. NASA will offer several, with commentary in English or Spanish, or without commentary. The University of Maine is sending a balloon to the stratosphere to broadcast the eclipse. You can find livestreams geared toward children, or even a feed from Torreón, Mexico, where totality will last four and a half minutes. You can select a feed and time your viewing so you can watch a livestream and also go outside to check out the eclipse in your part of the world -although you will need eclipse glasses if you can find them. Check out the schedule of eclipse livestreams at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: NASA)

While war involves uniformed soldiers shooting each other and airplanes dropping bombs, it also involves multiple networks of people behind the scenes, gathering information right under the enemy's nose, as spies. Some even worked to undermine their own governments when the price was right, or when they believed their own government must be defeated. Many lost their lives doing this work, while some escaped by the skin of their teeth, and others were never found out. In this roundup from Weird History, we learn about nine World War II spies who did audacious things to further one side or the other, including a major league baseball player who was more satisfied with his second career than his first.    

After a person dies, the brain is usually the first organ to deteriorate, turning to liquid rather quickly. But in certain cases, brain tissue is preserved and found hundreds or even thousands of years later. Science has found 4,400 brains that were preserved after burial, representing only a tiny fraction of the dead who are disinterred in the name of science. The reasons for brain preservation are dehydration, freezing, saponification, and tanning. But these causes apply to the whole body. Some brains are found preserved when the rest of the soft tissue in the body is long gone, and we don't know why.

Alexandra Morton-Hayward is an undertaker who became a palaeobiologist at the University of Oxford. She is part of a research team looking into the brains that continue to exist when the rest of the body's flesh doesn't, and it's her job to collect these brains and keep them in refrigerators. Some of them are still soft and wet, hundreds of years after their owner died. It's a morbid but fascinating task you can read about at Atlas Obscura. -via Strange Company

(Image credit:Alexandra L. Morton-Hayward)

In 1859, a huge solar storm called the Carrington Event damaged what little electrical infrastructure existed in the world at the time. If a similar storm happened now, the damage to our electricity-dependent modern world be severe.

Nuclear weapons detonated high in the atmosphere could have the same effect. This type of attack is called an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack and national security agencies have considered how to prepare for and mitigate against such destruction.

What would you, as an individual, do in order to prepare for life after an EMP attack? Some preppers and the companies that sell products to them consider options. MOS Equipment is a firm that specializes in protective gear, including a tent that can shield a car's sensitive electronics from an EMP. It's basically a huge Faraday cage.

-via David Thompson