Valentines Day came about like other holidays: an ancient pagan festival was rebranded by the Catholic Church in honor of a saint, after which it turned into a celebration that had nothing to do with that saint. Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out explains the many details around that bare bones outline as they pertain to Valentines Day.
The legend can be dated back to 1552. It was Francisco López de Gómara who first said that the Spaniards conquered Mexico because the indigenous people had seen the conquistadors as gods. While he had never been to Mexico, López de Gómara was chaplain and secretary to the retired Hernando Cortés, the one who lead the conquistadors. But is the story true?
Cortés own letters during the conquest make no mention of being mistaken for or interpreted as a god. Nonetheless, López de Gómara’s version quickly became the accepted story, writes the historian Camila Townsend, even among the post-conquest indigenous peoples. The fleshed-out version of the story had it that “a god named Quetzalcoatl, who long ago had disappeared in the east,” had promised to return on a certain date. By extraordinary coincidence, Cortés appeared out of the east in that very year. Seduced by their religious credulity, the Mexica—“Aztec” was a post-conquest term—were ripe for conquest by their “white gods.”
Historians of early Mexico have buried the myth of the “white gods,” but this news hasn’t filtered into general knowledge. The story is clearly potent. After all, how else could just a few hundred Spaniards bring down a state with a capital city larger than any in Europe at the time?
Check out the full story over at JSTOR Daily.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Over a decade ago, in 2009, the New York Times appeared with the headline, “After 44 days in the White House, Obama’s hair is grayer.” It was a reference to a common trend of presidents’ hair turning dramatically gray during their terms in the White House.
The idea of stress turning hair gray, is often called the Marie Antoinette syndrome, which is a reference to the often-told, but most likely apocryphal, story of the ill-fated French queen’s hair, which is said to have turned white overnight after she was captured during the revolution.
While the idea of one’s hair turning white in an instant after a sudden fright is an amusing cartoonish fiction, there is a solid body of anecdotal evidence describing instances where hair rapidly turns white after months, or even weeks, of stress or trauma.
“Everyone has an anecdote to share about how stress affects their body, particularly in their skin and hair – the only tissues we can see from the outside,” explains senior author on the new study, Ya-Chieh Hsu. “We wanted to understand if this connection is true, and if so, how stress leads to changes in diverse tissues. Hair pigmentation is such an accessible and tractable system to start with – and besides, we were genuinely curious to see if stress indeed leads to hair graying.”
Learn more details about this study over at New Atlas.
(Image Credit: Julim6/ Pixabay)
In December, the crew of the ISS baked the first cookies in space. They managed to thoroughly bake two cookies, which were not eaten, but were returned to earth on a SpaceX supply flight to be analyzed. That may seem disappointing, but there was no way to share those two cookies with the entire crew, anyway. The experimental baking process was time-consuming to say the least, as Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano reported.
The first cookie — in the oven for 25 minutes at 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 degrees Celsius) — ended up seriously under-baked. He more than doubled the baking time for the next two, and the results were still so-so.
The fourth cookie stayed in the oven for two hours, and finally success.
“So this time, I do see some browning,” Parmitano radioed. “I can’t tell you whether it’s cooked all the way or not, but it certainly doesn’t look like cookie dough any more.”
Parmitano cranked the oven up to its maximum 325 degrees F (163 degrees C) for the fifth cookie and baked it for 130 minutes. He reported more success.
Additional testing is required to determine whether the three returned cookies are safe to eat.
Why did it take two hours to bake one cookie? A look at the oven's website has clues. They say convection cooking is not feasible in space. Then you remember that heat doesn't rise in microgravity the way it does on earth. A fan might help. And a maximum temperature of 325 degrees is low for cookies. But most pointedly, each cookie was enclosed in a silicon envelope to keep crumbs contained. Clearly, further research is needed. The upside of the experiment for the astronauts is that the baking session made the ISS smell better for a short time. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Christina H Koch)
In this place, there are no abandoned buildings, or homes, or any visible infrastructure that would suggest human habitation, except for a lonely stretch of road that cuts through this settlement. The once thriving mining town of Gagnon, in Quebec, became a ghost town unlike any other.
… less than four decades ago, [the town had] an airport, churches, schools, a town hall, an arena, a hospital, and a large commercial center, despite being isolated and accessible only by plane.
… The city was founded in 1960 following the discovery of iron ore in the region. The shore of Lake Barbel was chosen as the site to build the future town of Gagnon. The city rapidly grew in size. Infrastructure such [as a] hospital, airport, churches, primary and secondary schools and other businesses were quickly built to make life easier for new residents. At its peak, the city had about 4,000 inhabitants.
Because of the 1973-75 recession, however, steel production fell across North America. In 1977, the mines ran out of resources and mining operations were transferred to the mine in Fire Lake, which was located 90km northeast of Gagnon.
By the mid-1980s, the mines were no longer turning profit, and it was decided that the mines be closed. The city was evacuated, but instead of leaving the existing buildings intact, the entire town was razed to the ground in 1985. All that remains today is the town's deserted main street and the airport's runway.
Check out the old photos of the town over at Amusing Planet.
(Image Credit: Donnacona/ Wikimedia Commons)
Kevin Dickinson loves to go to the bookstore to check a price. However, he ends up walking out of the bookstore with three books that he “probably didn’t know existed beforehand.”
I buy second-hand books by the bagful at the Friends of the Library sale, while explaining to my wife that it's for a good cause. Even the smell of books grips me, that faint aroma of earthy vanilla that wafts up at you when you flip a page.
The problem is that his book-buying habit outpaces his ability to read them, which leads to FOMO and occasional feeling of guilt over the large amount of unread books across his shelves.
But it's possible this guilt is entirely misplaced. According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, these unread volumes represent what he calls an "antilibrary," and he believes our antilibraries aren't signs of intellectual failings. Quite the opposite.
More about this over at Big Think.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: Pixabay)
In 1995, Pepsi ran a promotion in which they offered merchandise for "Pepsi points." You could redeem your Pepsi points for clothing and accessories and all sorts of neat stuff, as you can see in the original ad. The prizes ran all the way up to a Harrier jet for seven million Pepsi points.
The joke is simple enough: they took the idea behind Pepsi Points and extrapolated it until it was ridiculous. Solid comedy writing. But then they seemingly didn’t do the math. Seven million sure does sound like a big number, but I don’t think the team creating the ad bothered to run the numbers and check that it was definitely big enough.
But someone else did. At the time, each AV‑8 Harrier II Jump Jet brought into action cost the United States Marine Corps over $20 million and, thankfully, there is a simple way to convert between USD and PP: Pepsi would let anyone buy additional points for 10 cents each. Now, I’m not familiar with the market for second-hand military aircraft, but a price of $700,000 on a $20 million aircraft sounds like a good investment. As it did to John Leonard, who tried to cash in on this.
Leonard did the math, and bought enough Pepsi points to get the jet. The company was caught by surprise, because they didn't do the math. Read how that turned out, and why the ad company couldn't see it coming at Literary Hub. -via Digg
Tennis. An old sport with a history filled with technological development in equipment. Through the years since the sport has been created, the tennis racket has changed considerably, from its length to the material it is made of, as well as its shape.
More details about this over at The Conversation.
(Video Credit: Tom Allen/ YouTube)
This is Bazooka, an orange tabby cat. The 5-year-old cat was delivered to a shelter after his owner died of old age. The said owner had dementia, so it was most likely that he forgot when he fed his tabby cat, and so he always filled up his bowl when he saw it empty. This caused Bazooka to weigh over 35 pounds (around 16 kilograms).
That is a lot of weight for a cat. However, we shouldn‘t be mad at the previous owner, he was trying his best to take care of and love Bazooka.
Bazooka was soon heading to a new home to a trained foster family that would monitor his health and help him lose those extra pounds. In one video, we can see him trying to climb the stairs. With the love and support of his foster parents, he achieved that goal. Slowly but surely, he started losing weight.
When Bazooka’s health became better, he was finally ready to go to his new family. His new owner fell in love with him the first moment she saw him! It was a very sweet sight. Soon, Bazooka had a new name that is quite fitting for a cat with his stature—King Augustus (A Roman statesman and military leader who became the first emperor of the Roman Empire).
See the full story over at BoredPanda.
(Image Credit: SPCA of Wake County/ Instagram)
Kate Wagner is taking on the project of writing the history of the McMansion year by year. She'll tackle the state of American culture and architecture over the past 50 years, and how those things collided to bring us the McMansion. This could easily be a book by the time she reaches 2020. The first installment focuses on 1970, and a "proto-McMansion," a home built that year with some foreshadowing of what the McMansion would eventually become and a mishmash of 1970 style (carpets and dark wood) and 1980 style (brass and glass) with more ostentatious French and Colonial styles.
Though this house tends to feature more Louis XV-style furniture (my suspicion is that this might be evidence of an 80s or 90s era redecorating), the emphasis on bulky, ornate 18th century reproduction furniture, moldings, and wallpaper is indicative of the fascination in the 1970s towards the (American) Colonial era in anticipation of the 1976 American Bicentennial.
This home in New Jersey is for sale. Read the entire critique at McMansion Hell, and bookmark the site to follow the coming entries from each year. -via Metafilter
To some, squirrels are adorable little creatures. To others, they are a persistent pest bent on chewing everything in sight. But no matter how you view these creatures, did you know that they are the most important animals around when it comes to planting forests? This is just one fact about the squirrels.
Mental Floss gives us 15 reasons why we should love squirrels. See them over at the site.
(Image Credit: eluxirphoto/ Pixabay)
You can marvel at the length of time this frisbee keeps going on the ice. You can ponder the physics that keep it upright. You may be impressed with the camera stabilization, and the stamina of the skaters chasing it. But if you really want maximum enjoyment from this video, you will turn on the closed captions. Trust me. -via Metafilter
A man just broke his own Guinness World Record of 67 days in a barrel atop a pole — and he’s still going as of this moment.
The man, named Vernon Kruger, had set the Guinness World Record in 1997, when he spent 67 days living in a barrel at the top of a pole. Just this week, Kruger surpassed his own record atop an 80-foot pole in Dullstroom.
"I have broken my own record now - 22 years ago I broke it, it was a British record, of 54 days. I took it to 67 [days] and this time I'm going to try to push it to about 80."
He said it was "not too lonely" adding that: "This time we have social media so I feel more connected.
More details about this over at Sky News.
Do you think he can push it to 80?
Via UPI
(Image Credit: Sky News)
Mountain Dew cheesecake might seem like an abomination if you don't drink Mountain Dew, but to those who consider it the nectar of the gods, it could be your new favorite dessert. James Lamprey shows us how to make No-Bake Mountain Dew Cheesecake. The recipe is close to mine, although I use lemon juice and berries instead of the soda pop syrup. Also eggs, because I bake mine. A baked cheesecake tastes a little more traditional, doesn't need to set for several hours, and most importantly, doesn't require a springform pan. Laughing Squid has a second video showing a different way to make Mountain Dew Cheesecake, using cheesecake and Mountain Dew Jell-O in separate layers. While I am not inclined to put either Mountain Dew nor Jell-O in a cheesecake, I am intrigued by the swirling colors. That I might try!
So many of our modern pop culture stories are about good vs. evil in that every character must pick a side, and we know that one side is right and the other is wrong, and we are supposed to root for good over evil. In Star Wars, these two factions are explicitly named, to shape our expectations and label who we are to identify with. It doesn't always work as intended, since while Darth Vader may be evil, you have to admit his menace is thrillingly cool. The dichotomy of good guys and bad guys is clear in superhero movies, Westerns, murder mysteries, horror, fantasy, and even history books ...is there any doubt that World War II reads like a morality tale? But it wasn't always that way.
Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy or bad guy in them, despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy? Jack is the protagonist we’re meant to root for, yet he has no ethical justification for stealing the giant’s things. Does Sleeping Beauty care about goodness? Does anyone fight crime? Even tales that can be made to seem like they are about good versus evil, such as the story of Cinderella, do not hinge on so simple a moral dichotomy. In traditional oral versions, Cinderella merely needs to be beautiful to make the story work. In the Three Little Pigs, neither pigs nor wolf deploy tactics that the other side wouldn’t stoop to. It’s just a question of who gets dinner first, not good versus evil.
The situation is more complex in epics such as The Iliad, which does have two ‘teams’, as well as characters who wrestle with moral meanings. But the teams don’t represent the clash of two sets of values in the same way that modern good guys and bad guys do. Neither Achilles nor Hector stands for values that the other side cannot abide, nor are they fighting to protect the world from the other team. They don’t symbolise anything but themselves and, though they talk about war often, they never cite their values as the reason to fight the good fight. The ostensibly moral face-off between good and evil is a recent invention that evolved in concert with modern nationalism – and, ultimately, it gives voice to a political vision not an ethical one.
The shift to battles of morality only began a couple hundred years ago. Robin Hood had been around a long time, but didn't rob the rich and give to the poor until 1795. Grimm's Fairy Tales added some morality to old folk stories soon after. Read about the rise of the good guy trope at Pocket.
