Just look at this door! How utterly fabulous! The quality of construction of the church and all of the carved detailing is extremely (and unusually) high, and some think it may have been built as a chantry chapel for Robert de Tattershall. pic.twitter.com/3AVEm8HNim

— Jay Hulme (@JayHulmePoet) August 20, 2020

Jay Hulme got an invitation to go see an old church in the English countryside, but he received no address. Just the coordinates (latitude and longitude). It turns out the church is so far out in the middle of nowhere, it doesn't have a street address. Or a street. Hulme had to hike the last half a kilometer or so.  

St. Leonard's is around 800 years old. Before the pandemic, it had services only once a month. No one had been there for six months when Hulme visited. He got to see the beautiful architectural details and even explored a tiny staircase leading to the roof. Take a tour of St. Leonard's with plenty of pictures posted at Threadreader. -via Metafilter

A woman from Southwestern China became an online star for dancing on a river. No, she can’t miraculously make herself float above water; Yang Liu dances on a single bamboo pole. Now that’s impeccable balance and talent! Besides dancing, Liu can also perform splits while standing on a bamboo pole. Amazing, right? 

If you’re familiar with the concept of plate tectonics (the outermost layer of our planet, where we live on, is a collection of plates that continuously move around each other), then it’s no surprise to you that millions of years ago, your present-day address was not in the same place it is now. Thanks to an online tool, we can now trace where a location on Earth was a long time ago. The Ancient Earth simulation allows you to type in the name of a city, highlight it, and then select an ancient date from a drop-down menu to see where it was back at some point in the distant past, as How Stuff Works detailed:

Ancient Earth was created by Ian Webster, a software engineer who is the founder and chief technology officer of Zenysis, a San Francisco-based company that does analytics and visualizations of data designed to improve the delivery of health care in developing countries. He previously worked as an engineer at Google and also at NASA and for other companies in the space industry. He's also the creator of Dinosaurpictures.org, which allows you to search through a database of images of the ancient creatures, and even view a random dinosaur.

In addition to being interested in paleogeography, Webster also likes to explore the power of turning data into images.

Image via How Stuff Works 

What's more fun than a barrel of monkeys? A wheelbarrow of orangutans! These youngsters live at the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation. They are rescued orphans taking part in Orangutan Jungle School, where they are taught the skills they will need to live in the wild on their own when they are old enough. After a day of jungle activity, they catch a ride back to the shelter in wheelbarrows!

The school is the subject of a TV series, aired on different platforms in different countries. You can see clips from Orangutan Jungle School at YouTube, and here's a full introductory episode if you want to learn about the orangutans. -via Metafilter

After getting “a little scrappy” with a man who suddenly mentioned his Asian wife as a way to disagree with her in a conversation, international relations researcher Rui Zhong decided that she’s had enough.

"I was doodling around on my tablet and was like, you know, I'm really sick of people using Asian wives as some kind of credential," Zhong said.

And so, she wrote these words.

"I drew it out, slapped it on one of those T-shirt websites, and I guess people sort of connected with that kind of feeling." By July, Zhong's shirt was real, sold through her store Cancel Couture, and boosts from popular figures in Asian Twitter had earned it a level of viral fame.

Lots of people tweeted about Zhong’s shirt. Those tweets became viral, and this shocked Zhong.

"I made this as a joke—what is happening?"

The "wife guy" is well-known: a man who "defines himself through a kind of overreaction to being married," the New York Times's Amanda Hess wrote last summer, necessitated by the year's establishment of the "cliff wife guy," the "elf wife guy," and the "fake wife guy."…

But as Zhong's shirt and the response to it have articulated, there's a very particular kind of wife guy well-known to people of Asian descent, if not yet the rest of the world: the "Asian wife guy," whose outward identity is formed not on his own culture but on his wife's (or his girlfriend's or his former partner's). Through that relationship, the "Asian wife guy" absorbs elements of his wife's culture, often reimagining himself as an authority on that culture.

For Asians, this isn’t just some joke t-shirt — it’s a statement against the objectification of Asian women.

More about this over at Vice.com.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: @rzhongnotes/ Twitter)

Despite the fact that he was never president of the United States, Benjamin Franklin is arguably the most interesting of the Founding Fathers. Or at least the most fun to study. Franklin had a varied career which made him a wealthy man. In his will, he bequeathed his various properties to many family members and organizations. An addendum to the will also laid out an investment plan for two cities close to his heart.  

Less than a year before his death on April 17, 1790, Benjamin Franklin added a codicil, or addendum, to his will. In it, he bequeathed 1000 pounds sterling, or what would have been the equivalent of $4000, to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia. (Franklin had been born and raised in Boston but left for Philadelphia when he was 17, making both cities near to his heart.)

The money, he wrote, was to be handled in a very particular way. For the first 100 years, each of the 1000 pounds sterling would accrue interest and be used to fund loans for young tradesmen starting out in business. Franklin, who had become a printer as the result of a loan given to him, valued resources for apprentices.

At the end of the 100 years, the cities could take 75 percent of the principal and spend it in public works. Boston, he suggested, should invest in a trade school. Philadelphia could possibly pay for water pipes connected to Wissahickon Creek. The remaining 25 percent would be left until another century had passed, at which point the cities and their respective states could spend the funds in whatever way they wished. But after 200 years, would the economic needs of the modern world match up with Franklin’s wishes?

The legacy of that money makes an interesting story, as changing customs, government bodies, and laws have affected how the money was handled. Read what happened to Franklin's bequests over two centuries at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: David Martin)

This is a Spittle Bug. Say "hello!" Do you know why there are bubbles next to him? Well, he needs them for survival. This little fella makes his own AC. View the video here.

If you wander through various corners of the internet, you've seen memes based on Steamed Hams, a wacky Simpsons skit where one minor character has another minor character over for dinner and things get out of hand. As wildly popular as the sequence is now, you might be surprised to learn it was originally aired in 1996! And it wasn't even written to be a main story. Writer and showrunner Bill Oakley tells how it came about.

Midway through Season Seven, when Josh and I were the showrunners, we realized we were never going to be able to do any of those little shorts. One of us, Josh or me, had the idea of, “Let’s do a whole episode of nothing but those things.” This was just around the time Pulp Fiction had come out and there were a couple of other things that were little bits and pieces that were intertwined like that, so wewere like, “What if we did a whole episode like that, but with all the characters in Springfield?” We fell in love with the idea immediately, so that was the genesis of it.

We had to figure out how we were going to do this, so we decided that we were going to have everybody on staff get a chance to write for their favorite character. To make it fair, it was basically like a football draft and everybody got to pick a number and go in order and call dibs on their favorite characters to write a little segment for. My very first choice was Superintendent Chalmers and Principal Skinner. It might’ve just been Chalmers, but I think Skinner came along with the package.

So the ridiculous vignette came about as one of a collection of writing experiments. But how did Steamed Hams become such a viral meme all these years later? Read the history of both the Simpsons scene and the meme beginning with how it vexed an Australian grocery chain at Mel magazine.

The colorist SNAPPED

pic.twitter.com/lWClZkRoET

— IG: theBlingAddict (@stillT0XIC) August 18, 2020

Master hairstylist and colorist Agno Santos makes astounding sculptures with the hair of his clients. What I find most impressive is how he can style hair in such a way that it appears to change color as the head rotates.

-via Super Punch

The University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany is offering three grants, each of which pays the equivalent of $1,887 to people who will commit to doing nothing. The Guardian describes the grant application:

The application form consists of only four questions: What do you not want to do? For how long do you not want to do it? Why is it important not to do this thing in particular? Why are you the right person not to do it?

The premises of the project are to promote human sustainability by inaction and to question the assumption that activity is good:

The idea behind the project arose from a discussion about the seeming contradiction of a society that promotes sustainability while simultaneously valuing success, Von Borries said. “This scholarship programme is not a joke but an experiment with serious intentions – how can you turn a society that is structured around achievements and accomplishments on its head?” [...]

All applications will form part of an exhibition named The School of Inconsequentiality: Towards A Better Life, opening at the Hamburg university in November. It will be structured around the question: “What can I refrain from so that my life has fewer negative consequences on the lives of others?”

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Pixabay

The Mississippi River bisects the United States and separates the East from the West. It has figured prominently in much of the country's history. But it was here long before any people were. Research in just the last few years has revealed that the river is much older than the previously thought 20 million years. It appears the river was born 70 million years ago!

Still, 70 million years ago the Mississippi was nowhere near as large as it would become. [Geologist Michael] Blum has detailed how the waterway grew as it added tributaries: the Platte, Arkansas and Tennessee rivers by the late Paleocene, then the Red River by the Oligocene. Around 60 million years ago, the Mississippi was collecting water from the Rockies to the Appalachians; by four million years ago, its watershed had extended into Canada, and the Mississippi had grown to an enormous size, carrying four to eight times as much water as it does today, Cox and colleagues have found. “This was a giant river, on the order of the Amazon,” said Cox.

Learn how the mighty Mississippi was born, and how it has changed, at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: NASA/Jesse Allen)

Beachcombers and urban explorers flock to the shores of Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn to explore the amazing stash of vintage trash. The beach is strewn with broken glass and intact bottles, ceramics, and rusty metal from a bygone era, but not all that much in the way of plastic. Or at least they did up until this year. The beach is now closed to the public due to radiation.

The surprisingly pretty trash spews from the site of an old landfill. Casually capped by the 1950s, it is now eroding, unpacking its contents onto the beach. “It’s easy to imagine [the trash] being brought in by the tide, but it’s the opposite,” says Miriam Sicherman, author of Brooklyn’s Barren Island: A Forgotten History. “It’s getting almost burped by the land where the reeds are, and moving toward the water.” Named for the foul-smelling factories on Barren Island that once made glue, fertilizer, and more from horses and other animals (and then discarded their carcasses in the water), Dead Horse Bay is a popular place for urban archaeology enthusiasts with strong stomachs and closed-toed shoes. Part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, it is managed by the National Park Service, which means that visitors have been able to look but not take. But as of August 2020, even gawking is off limits. After detecting chemical contaminants back in 2002 and gamma radiation in 2019, the Park Service recently declared part of the area closed to everyone but authorized personnel.

Read what is causing the radiation and how dangerous it could be at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Flickr user edwardhblake)

In his professional life, geology professor Kevin McCartney can tell you all about iron. As a collector, he can tell you all about irons, the ones you press your clothing with. Or at least some people do. McCartney has a collection of around 500 antique irons from the days before electric appliances.

Electric irons arrived in the 1890s. McCartney does not collect these. Again, from the perspective of the 21st century, you’d be forgiven for concluding that once electric irons arrived, it must have been game-over for coal, liquid fuel, and natural gas irons, right? In fact, initially, electric irons were perceived to be more dangerous than irons filled with billowing flames and potentially explosive fuel tanks in their handles. That’s because it wasn’t until 1928 and the invention of the thermostat that electric irons had more than one heat setting—high. As counterintuitive as it might seem today, for almost 40 years, electric irons were more deadly than ones heated with actual fire.

“Electricity was the nuclear power of its day in the sense that people were not thinking rationally about it,” McCartney says. “It was bad. People got electrocuted, and there was no temperature regulation in those irons. You’d plug it in until it got really, really hot, then you’d unplug it and do your ironing. When it cooled off, you’d plug it in again, unplug it, use it again, and so on. And if you plugged it in and the baby started crying and you got distracted and forgot to unplug it, you’d lose your house. These things were fire hazards.”

You might wonder how "coal, liquid fuel, and natural gas" irons worked, which McCartney tells us about at Collectors Weekly. Learning how the chore was done back then will make you appreciate electric irons, tumble dryers, and permanent press clothing.

When it comes to packing for a trip that will last for a few days, it is always better to be safe than sorry. This is why we pack more than what we usually use on a normal day, so that we’ll be prepared when something unexpected happens.

If you’ve overpacked before, then you might find these posts, which Bored Panda collected, to be relatable.

Bored Panda [also] wanted to learn more about overpacking, so we reached out to professional organizer Janine Adams who is the creator of Peace of Mind Organizing.

See the interview, as well as the tweets, over at the site.

Which post relates to you the most?

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)

Who needs a farmers tan when you can get a @cavs Finals hat burn? pic.twitter.com/rIUXldi4nz

— Mark (@MarkdFL) June 23, 2016

It only takes a few months of school, work, or winter to make you forget the power of the sun. When the sun is high overhead, be sure to protect those parts of your body not covered by clothing by applying sunscreen. Also, consider the reason that baseball caps have visors before you decide to just wear yours backwards. Below is an example of what happens when you sit in a kayak all day without sunscreen.

(Image credit: BustersHotHamWater)

If he had known what was going on, he could have adjusted those rolls for a more even burn. See a ranked gallery of 40 people who learned the value of sunscreen the hard way at Bored Panda.