In 1865, 17-year-old Mollie Fancher fell from a trolley in New York and was dragged behind by her scarf. She survived the accident, but spent the next 48 years in bed, until her death in 1916. Fancher became rather famous for the psychic abilities she developed in her invalid condition, and she reportedly gave up food and drink, saying she no longer needed it.  

Fancher slowly recovered from basically being declared dead by her physician, and claimed to experience a series of trances. She had lost her sight, but, placing her hands behind her, claimed to see through the back of her head. “I am sometimes conscious of what others are not,” she said, and explains how she stopped eating. “I rejected it. My doctor thought I was insane, but, as a matter of fact, I had never been more rational in my life.”

She claimed she could read, even without use of her eyes, and predict the future; she created beautiful tapestries despite the fact that her hands were paralysed. You can actually find one of her creations on display at a hotel in Lily Dale, New York’s “Village of Psychics”, a blossoming Spiritualist community during the time of Mollie Fancher’s notoriety.

Fancher was never put to a test about her fasting, nor about her psychic abilities. But she was only the most famous of the "fasting girls" of the Victorian era, and others who were put under medical supervision actually died of starvation. Were they frauds, victims of anorexia nervosa, or was it something else entirely? Read about Fancher and the other fasting girls at Messy Messy Chic.

Smart light bulbs are, well, light bulbs, but with added features. You can turn them on and off without needing to press a switch; you just need a mobile app or a digital home assistant. What’s more, you can also change the color of the light bulb to your liking.

It turns out, however, that these light bulbs can be used to hack the computer networks in our homes.

So if one of your smart light bulbs starts to malfunction, it may be a sign that it is being hacked, and a sign that your home network is under threat.

More details about this over at Fast Company.

(Video Credit: Check Point Software Technologies, Ltd./ YouTube)

In 1963, Helen Klaben and Ralph Flores crashed their plane into a mountain in Yukon territory. No one could find them in the snow-covered wilderness. They were lost for 49 days, but lived to tell the tale! -via Digg

Freddie and Truus Oversteegen and their mother Trijntje were communists who lived in Schoten, Netherlands, during World War II. The sisters had been raised to always help the underdog, which included sheltering refugees in their home.

When the leader of a Dutch resistance group took notice of their radical bent, he asked Trijntje if she would permit her daughters to join. Freddie was 14. Truus was 16. Without knowing explicitly what they were agreeing to, the three women all said yes. And soon, the teenage girls were doing more than handing out literature. They were luring Nazis into the woods and assassinating them.

Before long, Freddie and Truus supplemented their resistance orders by freelancing their Nazi-killing. They were joined by 22-year-old Hannie Schaft in 1943, making them the real-life civilian girl equivalent of Inglourious Basterds. Read about the exploits of this girl gang at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Ministerie van Defensie)

Adorned with shades of gray, orange, blue, and white, the female kingfisher perches atop a driftwood filled with moss. Below her is a male kingfisher. With his wings half-open, he offers fish to her.

This realistic sculpture is called “The Mating Proposal”, made by a self-taught artist based on New Delhi, Niharika Rajput.

Over the past five years, the Indian wildlife artist has built around a hundred species.

When she was in college, she joined as an intern at People Tree, a craft boutique. There, she was able to sketch and build a lot of 3D stuff with various materials such as bamboo and rope, and many others.

“That is where I got introduced to building very basic models of birds with epoxy. But I wanted to experiment and make it more realistic. Later, in 2015, when I saw a flock of red-billed blue magpies take off from a pine tree in Himachal Pradesh, I started building birds. I experimented with different materials and landed on the process that I follow now.”

“The Mating Proposal”, which took three months to complete, has been Rajput’s most challenging and longest-running project.

More details about Rajput and her artworks over at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Credit: Kunal Rajput)

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is available in over 80 languages, including Latin and Gaelic. Two years ago, Yiddish enthusiasts, funded in part by a Swedish government program to promote minority languages, launched an effort to render the entire series into that endangered language.

It proved to be a great challenge because the translators had to find ways of rendering Rowling's word plays in ways that were both faithful to the authorial intent but also meaningful in Yiddish. Tablet magazine describes their efforts:

But Rowling didn’t just coin names, she coined many magical terms and concepts, and each of these required its own Yiddish rendering. Translating Quidditch, the fictional aerial sport played on broomsticks in which participants fire a ball through hoops to score points, posed its own challenge. “I could’ve just called it Quidditch [in Yiddish transliteration], but meh, we could do better than that,” Viswanath said. He cast about for something more authentically Yiddish. Inspiration struck when he “remembered that there’s this saying, ‘az got vil, sheest a bezem,’ which means, ‘if God wants, a broom shoots,’ and which possibly refers to somebody who’s impotent, or maybe to a gun.” And so, “shees-bezem”—or “shoot-broom”—was born. Along similar lines, rather than merely transliterate the name of the small flying “golden snitch,” whose capture ends a Quidditch match, Viswanath dubbed it the “goldene flaterl,” or “golden butterfly,” as butterflies are a common motif in Jewish and Yiddish folklore. By riffing off Yiddish sayings and symbols in this way, Viswanath hopes “people will feel the Yiddishe taam [taste].”

-via Instapundit | Photo: Warner Bros.

The Academy Awards Ceremony is this coming Sunday. To get us ready, Screen Junkies gives the mini-Honest Trailer treatment to all nine nominees for Best Picture, with a glimpse at the movie itself, the hype surrounding it, and a punny alternate title for each one. Then there's a look at the trends and similarities among them. Only one of these nine films will win the Oscar, but it won't make a bit of difference for anyone who wasn't involved in making those movies.  

Many stamp collectors love finding stamps from small, faraway nations to add to their collections. But there are only so many nations on earth. A serious philatelist might wrinkle their nose at a stamp from Molossia, Bumbunga, Tui-Tui, or Sealand, because these are micronations that have no real legitimacy. Molossia, for example, is a neighborhood in Dayton, Nevada. However, there are collectors who love these stamps for what they are.

Laura Steward, curator of public art at the University of Chicago, who organized an exhibition of stamps from micronations and other dubiously defined places, believes that these tiny squares are more than a toss-off: They’re art, proof of imagination, and rather sophisticated bids for public recognition. “A postage stamp is a small but mighty symbolic emissary from one particular nation to the rest of the world,” Steward writes in text accompanying the exhibit. “A functioning postal service, made visible in stamps, is an unmistakable expression of national legitimacy…. As a result, the postage stamp is an excellent vehicle for spurious, tenuous, or completely fictitious states to declare their existence.”

Steward even has stamps from Celestia, which is outer space. Read the story of those stamps and others in an interview with Steward at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Laura Steward)

Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games have had their roots in the late 90s and the early 2000s. One of the games that heavily influenced the development and the definition of the MOBA game genre is the Defense of the Ancients, which is more commonly known as DotA. It wasn’t a stand-alone game in its first incarnation, however, but rather a mod of the real-time strategy game Warcraft 3, which was developed by Blizzard Entertainment.

Dota was indirectly birthed by Blizzard, which is why they weren’t too happy when rival PC juggernaut Valve put out a game called Dota 2 to massive ongoing success.

In order to prevent the DotA history from repeating itself, Blizzard decided to add new policies alongside the release of the remastered version of Warcraft 3, called Warcraft 3: Reforged.

Users can’t use copyrighted third-party content, so no more bootleg Dragon Ball Z games. Blizzard can delete any custom game for any reason. And all custom games created in Warcraft 3: Reforged automatically become Blizzard copyrights, a policy that would have drastically altered the history of Dota had it been around during the company’s pre-Activision days.

Fans of the game are understandably not too happy about these new policies.

What are your thoughts about Blizzard’s move?

(Video Credit: IGN/ YouTube)

The latest pictofacts article at Cracked gives us plenty to argue about. While most of the cooking tips are fairly good advice, some of them go on to explain the reasoning behind them, which vary from sensible to something totally made up for the show. And the comment section reminds us that people have very particular opinions on cooking.

This one requires more explanation. You should grate your own cheese for sauces instead of using packaged shredded cheese. The packaged stuff has extra ingredients to keep it from caking. The package I have contains potato starch, corn starch, dextrose, and something hard to spell, all to prevent the shreds from returning to solid form.

Maybe you'll learn something, or at least be ready to experiment, by reading all 26 pictofacts at Cracked.

"He was way ahead of his time." Ashley Boone Jr. was the first black president of a major Hollywood studio and helped make George Lucas’ quirky space opera #StarWars a hit — and chances are you’ve never heard of him https://t.co/4XEo9pETgb

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 6, 2020

Ashley Boone worked his way up the ladder at United Artists to become the head of overseas promotion. He was hired away by various studios until he found himself at Fox in the 1970s, working to promote movies that others had trouble believing in. Boone was innovative: it was his idea to resurrect the failed feature film The Rocky Horror Picture Show by staging midnight showings, and he was the first to open a film at many theaters nationwide on the same weekend. Then came Star Wars.

The film had to sell $32 million ($135 million today) worth of tickets for Fox to recoup its investment, though it secured only $1.5 million in guarantees from theaters. But Boone started thinking outside the box. The summer movie season had always begun in late June, after schools let out. Lucas and Boone argued for opening Star Wars a month earlier, around Memorial Day, on just a couple of screens in big cities, betting that it could attract young people who would spread word-of-mouth while they were still in school. John Krier, then president of Exhibitor Relations, would recall: "Ashley was an astute judge of pictures. He said Star Wars would do over $200 million before anyone had seen the picture."

On May 1, about three weeks before its release, a test audience was assembled in San Francisco, and Ladd, Boone and other Fox execs sat in the back row to monitor reactions. Boone Isaacs — who was working on another 1977 sci-fi film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind — also was there as Boone's guest and, 43 years later, recalls the crowd's reaction: "By the time that Millennium Falcon got across the screen, everybody was standing and screaming. I remember the guys — Laddie, Ashley and all of them — were kind of huddled together and hugging."

Star Wars debuted May 25 in 32 theaters nationwide. According to Pollock, "Boone gambled by opening it on a Wednesday rather than the weekend and began shows at 10 a.m. in New York and Los Angeles. By 8 a.m., when the theater doors opened, there were long lines in both cities."
 

Star Wars was only a part of Boone's legacy, as many other films owe their success to his marketing ideas. Yet today few people know his name. Read the story of Ashley Boone at The Hollywood Reporter. -via Digg

How gross could you get?

An unidentified passenger was spotted drying a shoe through the plane’s overhead air vent. The video, which was submitted by a man named Dylan Miller, and posted on the Instagram account Passenger Shaming on January 16, was viewed over 344,000 times and grossed out many people online.

It was not specified which airline the incident occurred.

I wonder how the plane smelled like during the incident, though I guess it’s a scent I wouldn’t like to smell.

YUCK!

(Video Credit: Toronto Sun/ YouTube)

I would never be a good lip reader, because everything in this Bad Lip Reading compilation looks infinitely plausible to me, yet it's a string of pure nonsense. Good job!

Just when you thought you knew all dog breeds, here comes another breed which was recently discovered. Introducing the platypus dog, which, well, looks more or less like a dog, except for its bill, which looks identical to your missing shoe. These bills vary in shape, size, and color.

See photos of platypus dogs over at Sad And Useless.

(Image Credit: Sad And Useless)

A team of researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Georgia Tech attempted to trick Tesla’s autopilot system into seeing “phantom objects” and taking them as real images. What they found out was it was really easy to pull off.

A cheap projector system displaying false speed limit signs in trees or shining a Slenderman-like figure onto the road can actually force Autopilot to change behavior, adjusting speed to the "road signs" and slowing down for what it thinks might be a pedestrian (nevermind the fact that the car still runs over the projection).

This would mean that computer vision still has a long way to go to improve their perceptual capabilities. Those who have cars equipped with the Tesla autopilot system, or a similar system to it, however, are prone to danger.

"We show how attackers can exploit this perceptual challenge to apply phantom attacks ... without the need to physically approach the attack scene…

More details about this study over at Popular Mechanics.

(Image Credit: Cyber Security Labs @ Ben Gurion University/ YouTube)