You have probably heard of a movie that's been called the Bible of science fiction, Blade Runner.

Set in a dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, the movie centered on cops, known as Blade Runners, that specialize in tracking down replicants or genetically engineered organic robots made by powerful mega corporations. These replicants are used for dangerous, menial, or leisure work on off-world colonies, but are banned on Earth. Those that defy the ban are "retired" or hunted down.

The film became a cult hit when it was released over thirty years ago and continues to gain fans of all ages even to this day. Critics and fans alike have described it as a philosophical manifesto. Despite the popularity of the film, however, there are many facts about Blade Runner that remained unknown to most fans.

For example, did you know that Ridley Scott's inspiration for making Blade Runner was a novel that he never even finished reading? The novel was, of course, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

Or did you know that Dick never actualy watched Blade Runner, yet predicted with creepy accuracy that it would have a huge impact on future generations?

In October 1981, Philip K. Dick wrote a letter to Jeff Walker, the executive for The Ladd Company that produced Blade Runner, and mentioned among other things:

“The impact of Blade Runner is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people — and, I believe, on science fiction as a field. [ ... ] Nothing that we have done, individually or collectively, matches BLADE RUNNER. [ ... ] My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER. Thank you...and it is going to be one hell of a commercial success. It will prove invincible.”

Five months after he wrote the letter, Philip K. Dick suffered a stroke and died without ever watching the movie. Blade Runner was released nearly three months after his death.

We do know that Dick saw a special effect test reel of the movie, and liked it instantly. "It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly," he said.

Despite his prediction, Blade Runner wasn't a commerical success, but there's no denying that it has become an iconic science fiction masterpiece. Perhaps Philip K. Dick could really see the future after all.

This NeatoFacto was written by Theodoros II (@TheodorosII).

You've probably heard that Blockbuster has closed its remaining 300 company-owned stores (what? They still had 300 stores?), which marks an end of an era of what used to be the dominant player in the video rental industry.

Blockbuster, which at its height had 9,100 stores around the world - more than half of that in the United States, became a dinosaur almost overnight. Its business of renting video tapes, then DVDs and video games, suffered from the rise of Netflix's rental-by-mail (which then evolved to streaming over the Internet) and cheaper competitors like RedBox.

But did you know that the once-mighty Blockbuster had a chance to buy Netflix for a mere $50 million but passed? And if you thought that was a bad decision, just wait till you find out what Blockbuster did instead. Boy, don't they wish they could rewind time.

Here's the story.

In 1997, Reed Hastings rented a copy of Apollo 13 in his local Blockbuster store. He returned it late and was socked with a $40 late fee. "It was six weeks late and I owed the video store $40. I had misplaced the cassette," Hastings said, "It was all my fault. I didn't want to tell my wife about it. And I said to myself, 'I'm going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee?'" Later, on his way to the gym, Hastings realized that there's a much better business model: a flat-rate rental service with unlimited due dates and no late fees, and Netflix was born.

Fast forward a couple of years. Hastings' fledling Netflix was growing but like many startups, it had cash flow problems. So it tried to sell itself to none other than Blockbuster. A former high-ranking Blockbuster executive told Jill Goldsmith of Variety, "We had the option to buy Netflix for $50 million and we didn't do it. They were losing money. They came around a few times."

And what did Blockbuster do instead of buying Netflix? In 2000, they signed a 20-year exclusive video-on-demand agreement with Enron, as the energy company tried to launch into telecom. Yes, that Enron that failed spectacularly because of the 2001 accounting scandal. Blockbuster canceled the pact after only 9 months.

Netflix solved its problems and went on to go public in 2002. It currently has over 36 million subscribers worldwide and is worth nearly $20 billion.

And Blockbuster?

You already know how that movie ends.

See also: Blockbuster's Very Last Movie Rental (and man, is it appropriate!)

Image: Chris Green / Shutterstock.com

Look around any toy store and you'll see hundreds of Disney characters sold as action figures and stuffed toys, so it's quaint to think that there was actually a time when Disney had trouble selling stuff. But there was.

Back in 2000, Disney's consumer products division was overstretched and underfocused, according to Peggy Orenstein in her 2006 New York Times article "What's Wrong with Cinderella?"

Disney had mistakenly triggered price wars by granting multiple licenses for their core characters, and sales were dropping as much as 30 percent a year. Adding to their problem was the 1998 "A Bug's Life" movie had trouble translating to merchandising opportunities. "What child want[ed] to snuggle up with an ant?," wrote Orenstein.

A new Disney executive named Andy Mooney, who came over from Nike, was checking out his first "Disney on Ice" show in Phoenix, when he came to a solution that would save Disney from its woes.

"Standing in line in the arena, I was surrounded by little girls dressed head to toe as princesses," Mooney told Orenstein, "They weren't even Disney products. They were generic princess products they'd appended to a Halloween costume. And the light bulb went off. Clearly there was latent demand here. So the next morning I said to my team, 'O.K., let's establish standards and a color palette and talk to licensees and get as much product out there as we possibly can that allows these girls to do what they're doing anyway: projecting themselves into the characters from the classic movies.'"

Mooney and his team picked Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan, and Pocahontas to be in the new Disney Princess line. It was the first time that Disney marketed characters separately from a movie release, and it was also the first time that different characters from different movies were lumped together.

Orenstein wrote that to "ensure the sanctity of what Mooney called their individual 'mythologies,' the princesses never make eye contact when they're grouped: each stare[d] off in a slightly different direction as if unaware of the others' presence."

What Mooney did worked: As of 2006, there were 25,000 Disney Princess items. Sales shot up from $300 million in 2001 to over $3 billion globally. And to this day, no Disney princess has ever looked at one other's eyes when they're displayed together as a group.

Did Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes out of thin air? Elementary, my dear Neatoramanauts, he did not. Meet the real life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes: Dr. Joseph Bell, a physician and lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh.

Conan Doyle met Bell in 1877 while he was studying to be a physician. Later, Bell would appoint Conan Doyle as his clerk, which allowed the author plenty of opportunities to learn about Bell's legendary deductive abilities (somewhat similar to playing Dr. Watson to Bell's Sherlock Holmes.)

Bell emphasized the importance of close observation when making medical diagnosis - to demonstrate this, he would often pick a stranger and deduce the man's occupation and recent activities by observation alone.

In the book Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, author Daniel Stashower illustrated Bell's observation skills: Bell was able to tell that a man was an alcoholic by observing that he habitually carried a flask in the inside breast pocket of his coat, and that another man was a cobbler by seeing that the inside of the knee of the man's trousers was worn (that's where the man had rested the lapstone - a tool used by cobblers to condition leather). Bell was able to discern different accents to deduce a man's origin. He was also able to tell the difference between hand calluses of a carpenter from a mason, and the difference in the walking gait of a solider and a sailor.

Conan Doyle recounted this celebrated example of Bell's abilities when a patient whom Bell had never seen or talked to before came forward:

"Well, my man," Bell said, after a quick glance at the patient, "you've served in the army."

"Aye, sir," the patient replied.

"Not long discharged?"

"No, sir."

"A Highland regiment?"

"Aye, sir."

"A non-com officer?"

"Aye, sir."

"Stationed at Barbados?"

"Aye, sir."

Bell turned to his bewildered students. "You see, gentlemen," he explained, "the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilians ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British, and the Scottish regiments are at present in that particular island."

For Bell, observation skills are integral to become a great doctor. "In teaching the treatment of disease and accident," he said, "all careful teachers have first to show the students how to recognize accurately the case. The recognition depends in great measure on the accurate and rapid appreciation of small points in which the diseased differs from the healthy state. In fact, the student must be taught to observe."

Conan Doyle acknowledged Bell's influence in the creation of Sherlock Holmes, when he wrote a letter to his old university professor, "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes ... round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man."

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It took twenty years for Walt Disney to create the Haunted Mansion. The whole thing actually began well before Disneyland came into being. Disney had always wanted a spooky haunted house attraction for the theme park (he even commissioned Disney Legend Harper Goff to draw some sketches), but Disneyland opened in 1955 without it.

Three years later, Disney decided to expand Disneyland and the effort to create the Haunted Mansion began in earnest. The first plan for the mansion called for an old New Orleans-style antebellum manor with boarded doors and windows and overgrown with weeds and dead trees. Disney, however, didn't like the idea of a run-down building in his park and said, "We'll take care of the outside and let the ghosts take care of the inside."

Neatorama Facts: Haunted Mansion

Disney put Imagineers Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey in charge of building the Haunted Mansion special effects. The two had plenty of ideas and apparently often left the special effects running all night long. The night cleaning crew were spooked and complained to the management, who in turn, asked Crump and Gracey not to scare them off.

But instead of leaving the lights on and the special effects off, Crump and Gracey decided to connect their "spectral effects" to a motion-detector switch. When the duo came in the morning, they found a broom hastily left in the middle of their studios. The Imagineers had to clean their studios by themselves from that point on, as management told them that the night cleaning crew were never coming back.

Bonus Fact: The Real Ghost that Visited Haunted Mansion Creator Yale Gracey

When they were working on the Haunted Mansion special effects, Crump asked Gracey whether he had any experience with the supernatural. "Oh yeah, I had a ghost read to me when I was 10 years old," Yale replied without hesitation, as reported by Disney History Institute.

Crump told the story, which went like this: When Gracey was a child, he and his mother went to visit relatives on the East Coast for the summer. They lived in a big old house, and Gracey and his cousins would sleep together in a large bedroom, with an old lady who lived in the closet. The lady would come out and read stories to the kids, under the condition that the children do not talk about the lady to the grownups or she'd disappear forever.

At the end of the summer, Gracey's mother asked him what he liked best about the vacation and the small boy replied, "The little lady that lives in the closet that reads to us every night." Gracey's mom was surprised and the children were mad at him, saying "No, no, Yale, she'll never come back."

Crump said that Gracey's mother was so concerned that she went to the local history society and found a photo of the woman who lived there. When she showed it to the kids, they said that she was the lady that lived in the closet.

Did Gracey make the whole thing up? Disney History Institute reported that Crump swore that this was exactly as Gracey had told him. "Yale would never make anything up. He was about as straight as they come," Crump added, "As far as I'm concerned it's true. It can't be any truer than that."

1. The Origin of "It's All Greek To Me"

According to Harry Oliver's Flying by the Seat of Your Pants: Surprising Origins of Everyday Expressions, it comes from the latin phrase Graecum est, non legitur or Graecum est, non potest legi (It is Greek; it cannot be read). Medieval Latin scribes in monasteries would write that phrase if they had trouble translating Greek alphabet and language, which was dwindling in use by the Middle Ages.

The phrase probably entered modern English usage when William Shakespeare used it in his 1599 play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Here it is in Act 1 Scene 2:

Cassius: Did Cicero say any thing?
Casca: Ay, he spoke Greek.
Cassius: To what effect?
Casca: Nay, an I tell you that, I'll ne'er look you i' the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me. I could tell you more news too: Marullus and Flavius, for pulling scarfs off Caesar's images, are put to silence. Fare you well. There was more foolery yet, if I could remember it.

In this context, an educated and wealthy aristocrat in the Roman Republic should be able to read and speak Greek. Casca, who speaks fluent Greek, is probably just playing dumb because he doesn't want to repeat a remark that is unflattering to Caesar.

2. Well, what do the Greeks say?

Obviously, when a Greek doesn't understand something, he doesn't say "It's all Greek to Me." Rather, he says, Αυτά μου φαίνονται κινέζικα, or "This strikes me as Chinese."

3. It's all ______ to me

That brings up an interesting question: what language is deemed the most incomprehensible and therefore most worthy of the phrase "It's all ______ to me" in various countries? Wikipedia and Omniglot have the list of the idioms.

Mark Liberman of Language Log distilled the info into this nifty graphic:

(Liberman has an updated version here)

4. From Greek to Gringo

The word "gringo," which is a Spanish slang to denote foreigners or non-native speakers of Spanish, comes from the phrase "hablar en griego" (or speaking in Greek). You can see how the phrase accusing someone of not being intelligible because he's speaking Greek eventually evolved into a slang for foreigners.

5. Coming Full Circle: Greeking ... in Latin!

When web or print designers create a mock up of a design with a block of text, they often put in place dummy text in the layout before the actual text is available. This process is called "greeking" and the most commonly used placeholder text is Lorem Ipsum, which is actually Latin, not Greek.

So, you're a vegan and you're mad that you can't drink Starbucks' Pumpkin Spice Latte. Well, maybe you want to skip this post because your day ain't going to get much better. You see, almost *everything* in the world contains something made from animal parts and by-products.

Don't believe us? Here are 5 things in the world that you wouldn't believe are made from or contain animal by-products or use them in the manufacturing process:

1. Car Tires

Yes, tires are made of rubber, which are plant products but the wheel on the bus goes round and round with a little help from stearic acid.

Stearic acid is a fatty acid with many industrial applications - and when we say many, we mean a bajillion. This chemical compound is used as a surfactant and softening agent. It is found in soaps, cosmetics, detergents, lubricants, candles, food, and even fireworks. Car tires manufacturers use stearic acid as an additive to help "cure" the rubber in the tires and make them strong enough to hold their shape while under steady friction yet flexible enough to grip the road.

Oh, and that "stearic" in stearic acid is derived from the Greek word "stear" which means tallow, a rendered form of beef or mutton fat.

2. Drywall

Unless you live in a brick or mud house, then chances are, your wall is made of drywall or sheetrock. These are gypsum plaster sheets used to make interior walls and ceilings. Then, unless you live in an unfinished garage, chances are your walls are painted. Well, both drywall and paint contain animal by-products.

Drywall is made by creating a slurry of gypsum with additives such as starch, paper pulp and fatty acids like stearic acid (ta-da!) and oleic acid (also made from animal fat) as emulsifier and thickener.

3. Paint

Many brands of paint (even latex-based paint) contain a binder called casein, a protein found in cow milk. Never heard of casein? You may not know it, but you are familiar with casein: in its coagulated form, casein is called cheese.

4. Sugar

Good ol' white sugar isn't white to begin with. Rather, large sugar manufacturers use a filter made from bone char - basically charred ash of animal bones (mostly from cattle) - to decolorize sugar cane to the desired white form.

Well, how about if I just use brown sugar, you say. Turns out most brown sugar is just white sugar with molasses added as brown colorant.

5. Asphalt

Yes, that black stuff used to pave roads and parking lots contain glycerin, a release agent that prevents it from sticking to the containers, as well as other animal by-product based additives to help the ease of mixing and paving as well as control rutting and cracking.

Quick: what mammal is covered with spikes, lays eggs, has a four-headed penis, and no nipples?

The answer is the echidna, one of the strangest animals that exist on Earth today. And to celebrate this bit of mammalian weirdness, here are Neatorama's Five Fascinating Facts about Echidnas:

1. Echidnas Can Control Their Spines

Photo: Vmenkov/Wikipedia

Echidnas are covered with fur and spiky spines. These spines are modified hairs, similar to that of the porcupines. There are tiny muscle bundles connected to the base of each spine so the echidna can control the spine's movement and direction.

Short-beaked echidna curled up into a ball of spikes. Photo: Nachoman-au/Wikipedia

An echidna erects its spines for protection (like the picture above), to anchor itself against a log, to help it climb, and to help upright itself after it has fallen or placed on its back. It cannot, however, throw or eject its spines as the legend said.

2. Baby Echidnas is Called a Puggle and It's Incredibly Cute!

Photo: Anthony De Zoete-Baker/Australia Zoo - via ZooBorns

A mom echidna lays a single leathery egg in her pouch, then carries it for about ten days before it hatches. The baby echidna, called a puggle, is born hairless and spineless - but with formidable claws.

As the puggle grows, it develops its covering of fur and spines. After two months, its mom would evict it out of the pouch, because, you know, it's not fun carrying something with spiky spines in your pouch.

The cute puggle above is a 30-day-old echidna born in captivity at the Australia Zoo, to proud parents Tippy and Pickle. You can view more pics of the yet-to-be-named puggle over at ZooBorns.

More puggle cuteness: this one named Beau the orphaned echidna is from the Taronga Zoo:

Photo: Ben Gibson/Taronga Zoo - via ZooBorns

3. Echidnas Don't Have Nipples

Female echidnas produce milk, but they have no nipples. Instead, they secrete milk in two small, hairy areas known as aerola patches, which are connected to the milk glands. A baby echidna suckles milk straight out of its mom's skin.

4. Male Echidna has a Four-Headed Penis

Show me the picture of the four-headed echidna penis!

Photo: Prof. Gordon Grigg

You read that right. Male echidna has a four headed penis. During mating, two of the heads shut down and the other two are used to ejaculate sperms. A male echidna would swap which heads are shut down and which are used to inseminate the female each time the animal copulates. The echidna penis is somewhat prehensile - it can move about when erect (see the video clip below)

Oh, and male echidnas do not use the penis to urinate. It is solely used for mating. Instead both males and females have cloacas.

5. Super Sperm, Assemble!

As if a four-headed penis isn't bizarre enough, there's more to the echidna mating habit. You know you're seeing echidnas mate when you see a train of male echidnas "queueing" to copulate with a single female. In fact, when in heat, a female echidna could mate with up to 11 males one after another. (There's a bit more to this mating prowess - for example, echidnas can also mate underground.)

See also: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits

Mating with multiple males present a tremendous competitive pressure on the sperms to fertilize the egg. So echidna sperms do something very unusual: hundreds of individual sperms team up to form giant super-sperm bundles. These sperm bundles can swim much faster than individual sperms, and therefore present an evolutionary advantage.

Bonus Fact: Echidna is Named After the Greek "Mother of Monsters"

Image: Sarapsys/deviantART

Echidnas are weird - they have a mish-mash of reptilian and mammalian features, which was recognized early on by biologists. In 1802, British anatomist Everard Home named the curious animal after the Greek goddess Ekhidna (meaning "she viper") who was half-snake and half-woman. She's the goddes "Mother of Monsters" because most of the monsters in Greek mythology were her offspring.

Bonus Fact: How Does Echidna Taste Like?

In 1792, the ship HMS Bounty*, captained by William Bligh, arrived in Tasmania on its way to Tahiti. Its crew discovered a strange creature with a "beak like a duck." Naturally, they shot one and ate it. The crew noted that "the animal was roasted and found of a delicate flavour." (Source: Echidna: Extraordinary Egg-Laying Mammal by Michael Augee, Brett Gooden, Anne Musser).

*Yes, this is the same ship that's famous for Mutiny on the Bounty in 1789.

In 2007, scientists had feared that a species of Attenborough's long-beaked echidna (named after the famous naturalist Sir David Attenborough) had become extinct in New Guinea. But they were told by hunters that the echidna species was still around. These hunters knew because they had just eaten some and said "the meat was very greasy and extremely tasty."

As you know, President Obama is urging Congress to approve a strike against Syria for using chemical weapon. Earlier this week, Secretary of State John Kerry asserted forensic evidence pointed out that the Syrian government used the nerve gas sarin to kill more than 1,400 people (including more than 400 children).

But have you ever wondered how sarin came to be? Or even how it got its name?

Birth of a Nerve Gas

Here's the story: In 1936, a German scientist named Gerhard Schrader at Bayer (yes, that Bayer which made aspirin) and later the IG Farben factory (which also produced Zyklon B, the chemical agent used to gas millions of Jews and other "undesirables" to death during the Holocaust), was working on an insecticide designed to disrupt the insect's nervous system.

Schrader experimented with a class of chemical compounds called organophosphates to kill leaf lice or wooly aphids. He and his assistant had synthesized a compound called tabun when, accidentally, they were exposed to a drop of the colorless liquid which fell onto the lab bench. They became very dizzy and had severe difficulty seeing and breathing. It took them three weeks to recover fully.

Schrader has just discovered the first class of nerve agent known to man. Tabun or GA is the first in the G-series of nerve agents discovered by the "father of nerve gas."

Immediately, the Nazi government instructed Schrader to change the focus of his research from killing insects to humans. New factories dedicated to the production of tabun were built, and the Nazi stockpiled over 12,000 tons of tabun. In the following years, Schrader refined two more compounds in the G-series, sarin (or GB), soman (GD) and cyclosarin (GF), but the Germans stuck to tabun as their main chemical weapon.

How Sarin Got Its Name

Sarin, which was 500 times more toxic than cyanide, was named in honors of the people who first discovered it: Schrader, Otto Ambros, Rüdiger and Hermann Van der Linde.

It later became the preferred nerve gas by Western governments because of its greater lethality over tabun, cheap production cost, as well as its ease of turning into gas.

What happened to all that nerve gas that the Nazi made? Fortunately, it was never used against Allied troops (more below). In 1945, at the end of World War II, Soviet forces captured the factory that produced tabun and poured the nerve agent into the Oder River.

Unwanted Chemical Weapons? Throw 'Em in the Ocean!

Wait, what? They just dumped chemical weapons into the water to get rid of them? Actually yes - even the United States government did this until the early 1970s. In fact, that's the preferred method of getting rid of unwanted munitions and chemical weapons

In a series of Operation CHASE, the US Army loaded a dozen or so ships with tens of thousands of tons of unwanted munitions, over 32,000 tons of nerve and mustard gas, sailed the ships some 200 miles off the coast of the US East Coast, and then sank 'em. (CHASE stands for Cut Holes and Sink 'Em - cheeky, eh?).

Thanks to incomplete record keeping, they currently only know the rough whereabouts of half of these ocean dumps.

Soooo ... What happened to the discoverers of Sarin gas?

After the war, the British government tried to recruit Gerhard Schrader, but in 1947 he had gone back to work at Bayer and declined the intelligence officers that approached him:

"I am glad to be fully engaged again in the field of plant protection. My work during the war in the field of toxic substances never complied with my wishes.

"I should like to assist in improving nutrition, but not in inflicting new wounds."

In 1948, Otto Ambros, who was Hitler's chief chemical weapons engineer and one of the main driving forces behind the Nazi chemical weapons program, was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremburg and sentenced to 8 years in prison.

Three years later, after only serving a fraction of his ridiculously light sentence*, Ambros was whisked off to the United States to advice the US Army on its own Sarin chemical weapons program.

"Honest John" warhead containing dozens of M134 bomblets, each containing a pound of Sarin.

*There's a theory that it was actually Otto Ambros himself that convinced Hitler not to use chemical weapons against Allied troops. Some historians suggested that Ambros lied to Hitler that Western forces also had similar chemical agents (they never did) and would use them against the Nazi in retaliation. So, in a sense, he's both a war criminal and a hero who prevented millions of deaths of Allied soldiers at the same time.

Did you hear about this one: Your dad constantly tell bad jokes in socially inappropriate situations. That's just dads being dads ... or is it? Maybe he's suffering from the Joking Disease.

No, it's not a joke: though rare, the Joking Disease or witzelsucht (derived from the German word witzeln meaning to joke and sucht meaning addiction) is quite real. The neurological disease is caused by damage to the frontal lobe of the brain. People with witzelsucht compulsively tell jokes and puns, but do not seem to "get" the humor - they don't laugh or smile, nor do they show any emotional reaction to jokes, either their own or other people's.

In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

Mike Power of The Guardian has more: Link

Proving once again that the rich get richer while the rest of us get jealous, this person will get two pots of gold at the end of the rainbow -one from her family, and one through her own talent and hard work. The answer is not Audrey Hepburn -this just seemed like an appropriate image for the subject.

* She was born in New York; her father was born in Paris.

* Her grandfather was a hero in the French Resistance during World War II.

* Her father's name is Gerard, but he uses "William" in the United States, where he runs a business, because he thought his real name sounded too French.

* He is worth and estimated $3.4 billion.

* She moved to Washington, DC, when she was two, after her parents divorced.

* She studied acting at Northwest University, class of 1982.

* She never graduated.

* She got her first break in 1982, getting a part on a late-night TV comedy.

* She stands to inherit in the neighborhood of $500 million from her father, who is 75.

* She doesn't really need it- she made (and, thanks to syndication, still makes) millions of dollars a year from a TV show in which she co-starred.

* Her role wasn't part of the show's original plan, but after the first episode the producers felt they needed a woman to offset the male characters.

* One of her cousins owned the Adidas Shoe Company.

* Another (distant) cousin starred in The Goodbye Girl.

* After two bombs, she landed a successful TV show all her own.

Who is she? Continue reading to see the answer.

Highlight below to see the answer.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Her father, Gerard (or "William") Louis-Dreyfus, runs the family business, the Louis-Dreyfus group, a "diversified commodities, shipping, real estate, manufacturing, and communications conglomerate." (Her Goodbye Girl cousin is Richard Dreyfuss.) Julia dropped out of Northwestern University in 1982 when she was invited to join the cast of Saturday Night Live, where she appeared for three years. She was then in two short-lived sitcoms before being cast as "Elaine Benes" in one of the most successful sitcoms in history, Seinfeld, in 1990. In 2006, she got her own successful show, The New Adventures of OId Christine, which ran for five seasons. Her latest series, VEEP, in which Louis-Dreyfus plays the Vice President of the United States, opens its second season tonight on HBO.  

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This article was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The tracking number, that string of digits that tell you where your package is and when it's going to be delivered, is so ubiquitous today that you'd probably never believe that there was a time before its existence.

Yet, this obvious piece of information didn't exist before FedEx (then Federal Express) created it forty years ago:

One of FedEx’s great contributions was the tracking number, which has become a standard in shipping. By entering a numeric string into FedEx.com, you can find out exactly where your package is as it works it way toward you. It’s immensely convenient, but that is but a pleasant side-effect. The tracking number was initially an internal process for quality control.

The system, launched in the late 1970s, was created to improve efficiencies. It worked so well that, in 1979, the system was offered to customers as COSMOS (Customers, Operations and Services Master Online System). When the system went online it included early prototypes of handheld computers that scanned package barcodes with wands. FedEx was aware that of the importance of all this data. FedEx founder Fred Smith is famous for saying, “The information about the package is as important as the package itself.”

Roberto Baldwin of Wired has the post: Link

I am currently reading The Bear: History of a Fallen King by Michel Pastoureau. It is a history of the bear as a symbol and as a living creature in Europe, especially medieval Europe.

Pastoureau describes how medieval intellectuals classified and described the European brown bear. It was deeply controversial to even contemplate that any animal was related to man, as this conflicted with the belief that man and man alone was made in the image of God. Nonetheless, some people considered three possible animals to be close to humanity: the monkey, the pig and the bear. Pastoureau writes:

For Aristotle and Pliny, the monkey was the closest to humans. This idea found support in some zoological learning in the High Middle Ages, but it considerably troubled Christian values, not only because man had been created in the image of God and any animal of any species was an imperfect creature that could not resemble him, but also because, for medieval sensibilities, the monkey no doubt represented everything that was most ugly, vile, and diabolical; it was an obscene and repugnant creature that it was impossible to associate with the human species [...] Scholasticism finally found a solution in the mid-thirteenth century; the monkey did not resemble man per naturam (by nature) but per imitationem (by imitation); it seemed to resemble man when it really did not resemble him at all. It "simulated," as the word for monkey in Latin indicated: simius. It therefore seemed even more demonic, because it tricked and deceived. [...]

Greek medicine considered the pig the animal closest to man because of its internal organization, notably with regard to the anatomy of the major organs and functioning of the digestive system [...] And medieval Christian medicine, the heir of both, also taught that the pig was "internally" the animal that most resembled man. Moreover, since the Church prohibited the dissection of the human body, at least up to the fourteenth century, human anatomy was often learned through the dissection of a sow or a boar. But that was not done without some reluctance: the pig was in no way an admirable animal. It was an impure creature, an emblem of dirtiness (sorditas) and gluttony (gula), sometimes of laziness (pigritia) and debauchery (luxuria); like the monkey, it found a place in the Devil's bestiary. This is why, although doctors knew that the pig was anatomically a cousin to man, they did not declare the fact too openly and allow clerics to assert that the animal that most resembled humans was neither the pig nor the monkey, but the bear (60-61).

Bears can stand up, grasp and throw objects, climb and dance. When they walk, they plant their entire foot on the ground. Bears are omnivorous. At least one medieval intellectual (William of Auvergne) claimed that bear meat tastes like human flesh. There were also widespread (but inaccurate) beliefs that ursine sexual practices resemble human sexual practices and that humans and bears are interfertile.

Image via Got Medieval

Thomas Jefferson imagined that what is now the continental United States would consist of three independent nations: from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific.

Well, of course, he did. When Jefferson died, railroads and electrical telegraphy were in their infancy. Almost all of the United States was a wilderness. Traversing, let along communicating across the vast continent was a monumental task.

In his 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, the distinguished historian Charles O. Paullin showed how long it took to travel across the country from New York City. Look through his maps for 1800, 1830, 1857 and 1930.

Link -via Ace of Spades HQ