Cracked laid out for us in their article a very simple hypothetical situation: if you were someone who lacked resources but wanted to have one of the newest pieces of technology at that time, the boombox, but also, for some reason, contracted a disease that gave you a dangerously high fever, where will you decide to put your money into? Should you admit yourself to the hospital or go to your nearest electronics store and buy the boombox?

In order to answer the question, we need to know the numbers. Based on Cracked's research, we find that in 1983, the best boombox that money could buy, the JVC RC-M90, cost $550. On the other hand, a one night stay at the hospital, including all the associated doctor's fees and the like, would have cost you $369.

Anyone might have gone for the hospital stay, and that's a reasonable decision, unless you're a big music fan and tech geek, who wants to be the coolest kid in the block. Although questionable, I think no one can blame anyone who would just buy some aspirin from the pharmacy, and then, scurry off to buy the new boombox. Wait a few days for the fever to die down, and all is well.

That was back in 1983. Of course, things are a lot different now. Factoring in inflation, Cracked found that the JVC RC-M90 would have cost about $1,468 in 2021. Meanwhile, the average cost for an overnight hospital stay in the same period was $2,883. If you were to find yourself at a hospital in New York, that would balloon up to $3,609.

So, there you have it folks. In 1983, the boombox cost more than a hospital stay. But that has reversed almost 40 years later. Then again, we can all chock this up to the advancement of medical technology, as well as the obsolescence of the boombox. It might be different if we were to compare, say, the cost of an Apple stock in the 80s, and cancer treatments. But that's a discussion for another day.

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Traveling around the world these days is fast and convenient due to modern transportation. But before planes and bullet trains were invented, people had to travel the old-fashioned way, on ships or sometimes on foot. And perhaps, one traveler who truly had it rough was James Holman, who circumnavigated the globe in four different trips during the 19th century.

Holman had entered the Royal Navy between the ages of 10 and 12. After serving about 12 years, he contracted a disease, a rare form of arthritis which first affected his joints, and later left him completely blind.

He could have lived a comfortable life at Windsor Castle on his navy pension, but Holman longed for adventure and thrill, so he first decided to study medicine in the University of Edinburgh to figure out whether his arthritis could be cured.

When it was clear to him that the disease was final and incurable, Holman hatched this idea of traveling around the world. He made four separate trips. The first was a Grand Tour of Europe. He published a book about his travels which became a huge hit, despite having such a long title.

During that trip, Holman crossed Siberia which was featured in his second successful book, in which he recounted in detail how he and his driver ate stale bread for weeks, and how he was accused of being a spy and taken to the Polish border.

Holman's third trip involved going to Africa and parts of Asia. Despite the successes of his first two books, it seemed interest started to die down, and people were no longer buying his third book. And finally, his swansong trip took him from Spain down to the Middle East, then from Egypt to Bosnia, Montenegro, and finally, Hungary.

Holman's fourth book was never published, and he died just a few days after completing his memoir in 1858. The end might have been bittersweet, but one can truly say that James Holman had lived an adventurous life.

(Image credit: John Richardson Jackson, Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)

New research on the rongorongo script suggests that it might have been an independent invention of a writing system, similar to that of the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese.

This finding came about when a fourth wooden tablet was dated to around 1493 to 1509, 200 years before the first Europeans set foot on Rapa Nui (another name for Easter Island). It could probably explain why the glyphs are harder to decipher as there's no other writing system to which it can be compared.

The first three rongorongo tablets' date of creation had been pinned to around the 18th and 19th centuries, but the fourth one surprisingly was said to have been made in the 15th century, although there are theories which suggest that "old wood" was used, and that's why the radiocarbon dating tests resulted in a much earlier date.

In that case, it would mean that a piece of wood had been stored for 200 years before it was finally used to write on, which Silvia Ferrara, the lead author of the study and a philologist, said was highly unlikely. So, it's a more plausible explanation that the rongorongo script is an original invention, having no external influence from other languages.

So far, there have been 400 different glyphs identified in the rongorongo script which contains 15,000 characters, and cross-referencing these glyphs with other writing systems, the team has not found any similarities, which gives even more credence to the idea that it had been invented from scratch. - via The Daily Grail

(Image credit: INSCRIBE and RESOLUTION ERC Teams)

How far will you go to restore something that has been lost through time? A few superfans of the old Nintendo racing game F-Zero have searched high and low for anyone who may possess the ROMs and/or data from the SNES add-on of the original F-Zero game. And here's the story of how they successfully recreated the game.

In the mid '90s, Nintendo offered a satellite modem peripheral that could be attached at the bottom of the SNES so that players can download games and other content through the burgeoning satellite broadcast connection, for which Nintendo partnered up with St. GIGA.

One of the games that was offered through the Satellaview service was a couple of supposed sequels to the F-Zero series titled F-Zero Grand Prix I and II. Broadcasts for BS F-Zero Grand Prix survived and have been uploaded to the internet. However, Grand Prix II was not so fortunate.

So, a programmer named Guy Perfect decided to launch a project that would recreate these games, but they needed data for the Grand Prix II broadcast. The community on Reddit even offered anyone $5,000 if they were able to provide them with any kind of data of that Soundlink event broadcast.

In 2018, they got it. Youtube user kukun kun uploaded recordings of all the Soundlink broadcasts of F-Zero, including the ones from the second Soundlink event which showed the Grand Prix II game.

From these, Guy Perfect, along with Porthor and Power Panda, were able to recreate the game's graphics, courses, and program to come up with a playable mod of Grand Prix I and II. That mod is called the BS F-Zero Deluxe and can be downloaded from Archive.org. It can be played using an emulator or the original SNES. - via MetaFilter

(Video credit: DidYouKnowGaming/Youtube)

In 2014, three Japanese physicists received the Nobel Prize in Physics: Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura for their invention of the blue LEDs. But the story behind it is probably one that the ordinary person wouldn't know, even though it's because of their invention that we get to enjoy many technological advancements that make our lives more convenient.

The story began in the late 1980s when many technology companies and semiconductor manufacturers were in a race to create the blue LED. For decades, only red and green LEDs were available, and that's because creating the blue LED was much more technically challenging, requiring a lot of trial and error. It needed somebody who had the guts to take risks.

Enter Shuji Nakamura, who was an engineer at Nichia Corporation, in a time when the company was almost at its lowest point. His coworkers and bosses were haranguing him for a lack of results in his research, and so he submitted a proposal to the then-president Nobuo Ogawa, that led him on the journey to unlocking the secrets of blue LED.

The first phase of this journey brought him to Florida, where he worked on an MOCVD, a machine used to grow crystalline layers, an important component in producing LEDs. After spending a year tinkering with a non-functional MOCVD, he returned to Japan and ordered a fully-functional MOCVD for Nichia.

With that in his arsenal, he spent about a year and a half working on making gallium nitride crystals suitable for LEDs. At the time, the consensus among LED manufacturers and scientists was that zinc selenide was the more plausible path toward the blue LED, so Nakamura went against the grain and tried to make the less popular gallium nitride work.

This is where Akasaki and Amano come in, who have been researching on the matter before Nakamura entered the picture. There were three problems that these scientists tried solving to make gallium nitride viable for blue LED production, and for the first two problems, Nakamura took the lead from Akasaki and Amano, adding a few tweaks to improve on their initial results.

The third problem became a difficult obstacle for Akasaki and Amano, but Nakamura's innovative thinking helped him break through and solve the problem. In 1992, Nakamura showed Nichia's chairman the very first functional blue LED. The company announced it to the world, catching everybody by surprise, and this resulted in double and later, triple the profits for Nichia.

But as with many inventions, their inventors don't always get compensated properly. Nakamura later quit Nichia and migrated to the US. Legal battles were fought along the way, and Nakamura still has a tense relationship with Nichia to this day.

At the moment, Nakamura is currently working at the University of California Santa Barbara, and making progress on the next generation of LEDs, paving the way for technologies like augmented and virtual reality, and even a solution to COVID-19.

For the full details of the science behind the making of blue LEDs, you may watch Veritasium's video above. - via Laughing Squid

(Video credit: Veritasium/Youtube)

Our computers and mobile devices have become completely essential to our everyday lives that we spend, on average, 6.5 hours a day looking at a screen, a little over a quarter of our day.

Kristin Blain, a researcher from Smartick, wanted to find out which countries spent the most time in front of their screens on any given day. So, using data from Data Reportal, she looked at the data of about 40 countries, and compared their average screen time. With design from Iryna Osipchuk, they laid out the data on the map above.

Based on the data, South Africa led the pack of 40 with amount of time spent on their screens at an average of 9 hours and 38 minutes per day. Closely following their heels is Brazil with 9 hours and 32 minutes per day. In third place is the Philippines with 9 hours and 14 minutes per day.

They attributed this internet usage statistic to mainly internet penetration and adoption in these countries despite still not having widespread accessibility to high-speed internet connections. For the Philippines, the researcher mentioned a lack of censorship and an increase in the cost of living as significant factors to this high screen time.

Taking a look at screen times segmented by devices i.e. desktop computers and mobile devices, we still see these three countries claiming the top spots, but there are other countries who made it onto the respective lists. For example, Russia is second in internet usage via computers. Meanwhile, Thailand and Indonesia secured spots 3 and 5 on top internet usage via mobiles.

It's possible that infrastructures and availability of devices coupled with the strength of internet connectivity, whether by wired or wireless connections, contributed to these numbers.

The US, on the other hand, has mostly been in the mid-range, while countries like China and Japan spent the least amount of time on their screens which might have something to do with productivity, work ethic, and perceptions on the use of these devices and the internet. - via Digg

(Image credit: Smartick)

Collectors' items are worth a fortune because of their rarity, and vintage toys have risen in resale value these days due to nostalgia fueled by some new movies slated to come out in the near future.

With this increase in demand, '90s toys have seen a bit of resurgence, and you might want to dig through your toy stashes in the attic to see if you've got some of the most valuable '90s toys. Based on The Toy Zone's research, here are some '90s toys that are worth a fortune today:

Out of all the '90s Nintendo video games, Mario Kart 64 has a current value of $21,812.56 beating out some classics like Kid Dracula, the 1993 Game Boy spinoff of Castlevania, selling at $20,400, and The Flintstones: Treasure of Madrock for the SNES, with a current value of $19,999.

Pokémon cards are also worth a lot, with some going as high as six figures, and Logan Paul's Pikachu Illustrator topping the list, selling at $6 million. If you have the 1st Edition Shadowless Charizard card, however, it can fetch you up to $420,000 on the auction market. Sitting in third place is the Wizards of the Coast Presentation Galaxy Star holo Blastoise card, currently at $350,000.

Due to the recent critical success of the Barbie movie, some vintage Barbie dolls are also fetching quite a good price, but none as high as the De Beers 40th Anniversary Barbie from 1999, which is selling at $85,000. The rest of the Barbie collection are priced at $1,200 or less, which might still be a good deal.

The ones above are the most expensive from the list but The Toy Zone also included electronic consoles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures, and vintage blasters, although not as lucrative save for the Scratch the Cat (AFA 80) TMNT action figure, whose resale value is currently at $10,000. - via Digg

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Manuel Eisner, the deputy director of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, along with his wife, had this hobby of mapping medieval crimes, which led to the creation of the Medieval Murder Maps project in 2018, with the help of Cambridge historian Stephanie Brown.

The particular case of the chaplain John Ford piqued Eisner's interest, as the clergyman had been stabbed by three people in broad daylight. Those three people were Hugh Colne, John Strong, and John Tindale. They were hitmen hired by the noblewoman Ela FitzPayne. But the question that stuck in Eisner's mind was why?

What could the clergyman have done to provoke the ire of the rich and famous Ela FitzPayne? To get down to the bottom of the matter, the team searched for any connections between the two. And they came across a letter that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Metham, had written to the Bishop of Winchester, dated January 29, 1332.

From the letter, the team found out that FitzPayne had previously been convicted of adultery, and was sentenced to public humiliation, which involved walking barefoot from the western entrance of Salisbury Cathedral to the high altar, much like the "walk of shame" in Game of Thrones. This she had to do every day for seven years. Not only that, but she was also prohibited from wearing any jewelry or makeup.

The letter also revealed one other thing: the connection between FitzPayne and Ford. Apparently, Ford had been a former lover of FitzPayne, and we can deduce that it was he who told the Archbishop about FitzPayne's adultery. However, his involvement with her had been swept under the rug, going without punishment. Needless to say, Ela FitzPayne took matters into her own hands, and served the poor chaplain a dish of revenge.

(Image credit: Walters Art Museum, Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)

During the Dome Fire of 2020, it was estimated that as many as 1.3 million Joshua trees in Mojave National Preserve were killed. The wildfire started when lightning struck near Cima Dome and spread to about 43,273 acres in nine days before being fully contained and suppressed.

There is no estimate of the total population of Joshua trees in the world, but the 1.3 million Joshua trees that were killed in the fire constituted approximately 13% of the Mojave National Preserve tree population.

Considering that the yuccas are native to California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and parts of northwestern Mexico, the preservation of Joshua trees is critical especially with the difficulty of dispersing the seeds due to the lack of large megafauna like giant ground sloths which used to take on that role.

Nowadays, rodents have been the ones, scientists say, to help in the seed-dispersing of Joshua trees but unlike the giant sloths, they don't travel far. So, with that problem in mind, a couple of concerned friends, Jennifer Lagusker and Nance Fite, have volunteered their camels to help in delivering some Joshua tree sprouts for the restoration efforts in the Dome Fire burn scar.

This is a huge aid especially since the National Park Service said that majority of the Joshua trees planted in 2021 and 2022 have died. So, it's going to take a lot of effort and close attention to get the trees back to their previous numbers.

Thankfully, Lagusker plans to continue working with NPS and hopes that they will be able to bring as many as 12 camels to help with the transportation of the Joshua tree sprouts. So far, Lagusker's three camels - Chico, Sully, and Herbie - were able to help in planting 24 new Joshua trees on Cima Dome.

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We won't be getting into the neh-VAD-uh / neh-VAH-duh distinction with this one, as we have already looked into how Nevadans prefer their state name to be pronounced in a previous article. But the question is, why do Nevadans insist so much in going against the grain, with how the rest of America pronounces the name of their state?

To be perfectly clear, it's not a capital offense to pronounce 'Nevada' one way or the other, but it does say something about the person pronouncing it. More than the geographical element, Nevadans want to differentiate themselves from the rest of the country as a source of local identity.

Historically, Nevada made its way into its statehood much later in 1864, the 36th state to be admitted into the Union. And there wasn't exactly any particular local symbol that represented Nevada and made it stand out from the other states.

It was a hodgepodge of demographic groups when it first started out. There's no state dish, no distinguishing 'Nevadan accent', and even sports teams have only been recently created, with the Vegas Golden Knights NHL hockey team in 2017, and the recent relocation of the football team, the Las Vegas Raiders in 2020. (Originally, the Raiders were based in California.)

So, in a way, presenting their state to the rest of America might have been difficult for Nevadans, and one way to make inroads was to start with how locals wanted their state name to be pronounced. Although not necessarily a faux pas as to merit scorn or ridicule, the distinctive pronunciation that locals set have become a symbol for community, one of the things that ties Nevadans together.

Of course, with more and more people moving to Nevada in recent years, will that pronunciation hold up? Well, we can say that the longer people live among a certain community or group, the more they are able to assimilate themselves with the rest of the group. And so, there may not need to be any worry regarding that.

(Video credit: KCLV Channel 2/Youtube)

Afrobeats refers to popular music from West Africa which were initially developed in Nigeria, Ghana, and the UK during the 2000s and 2010s. 

It's an umbrella term for all the different genres coming out of this region, which include hiplife, jùjú music, highlife, and naija beats, so as not to be confused with Afrobeat, also called Afrofunk, a Tanzanian music genre which is the amalgamation of West African musical styles with American funk, jazz, and soul.

In 2017, Spotify recorded 2 billion streams of Afrobeats on the platform. Since then, Afrobeats has grown by 550% to a staggering 14 billion streams in 2023. Analysts attribute this massive growth to the platform's efforts in bringing Afrobeats to the world stage.

Apart from hosting local events to promote Afrobeats in 2023, Spotify has also put Afrobeats artists like CKay and Rema on the spotlight, recommending them to its users and including their songs in Spotify's curated playlists as well as posting massive billboards on Times Square to support the artists, which has been one of the driving forces for the growth of Afrobeats, within Africa and around the world.

The majority of the Afrobeats streams came from cities like London, Paris, and Nairobi, and although these numbers in themselves cannot be the only indicator for the success of Afrobeats' growth, it is a good jumping point for the industry to get more exposure on the world stage.

To give a sample of what Afrobeats sounds like, the video above is a lyric video of Nigerian Afrobeats artist CKay titled "Love Nwantiti", which is at the top of Rest of World's Afrobeats playlist, which they included on the article page or check out through this Spotify open playlist. - via Atlas Obscura

(Video credit: Vibe Music/Youtube)

Everybody knows Peanuts, about Charlie Brown and the gang. It was written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz from 1950 until his death in 2000. From then on, it continued in reruns. There have been 17,897 strips published of Peanuts, which makes it arguably one of the most, if not the most, popular and influential comic strip of all time.

One thing that people may not know, however, is the story of how Charles M. Schulz decided to add Franklin, a black character, into the cast. Franklin appeared first on the July 31, 1968 strip, shown above, and has been featured ever since until his last appearance on November 5, 1999, a few months before Schulz's death.

The period of the late 60s was quite turbulent in US history, as the Civil Rights movement had been underway, and 1968 was, of course, the year when a titan of the movement had been assassinated, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In light of such events, an avid fan of the Peanuts comic strip, Mrs. Harriet Glickman, wrote to Schulz in April 1968, asking him to consider introducing a black child in the Peanuts cast. What followed was a series of letters between Schulz, Glickman, and later on, one of Glickman's black friends, Kenneth C. Kelly, who urged Schulz to pursue the endeavor.

After the correspondence, Schulz was able to persuade his editors to the inclusion of Franklin. It wasn't without some resistance as Schulz had wanted to show Franklin inviting Charlie Brown and his friends to his house, as well as depicting Franklin going to the same school as his friends, which at the time was unheard of in the South.

And just to show how classy and courageous Schulz was, when the president of United Features which published the Peanuts comic strip, called him to change those scenes, he simply replied that they either print them as he drew them or he quits. And the rest is history.

(Image credit: Flashbak)

Published in 1981, Codex Seraphinianus is described as an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, and what it would feel like to experience such a world as you go through the pages.

Its author, Luigi Serafini, is a surrealist artist who spent two and a half years drawing the images and then later, coming up with the language to go with them. Needless to say, he intentionally made the language untranslatable, to further drive the point that the book is trying to make. In his own words, he wants to induce the experience of reading something without exactly knowing how to read it or what you're reading.

It sort of hearkens to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland wherein everything seems, to an outsider, so strange and bizarre. The lyrics from the original Willy Wonka film captures the spirit of Serafini's book, it's a world of pure imagination.

But inasmuch as the images in the book are so otherworldly, there's also a sense of familiarity as it doesn't exactly invent things that are new from the perspective of reality. It's just a hodgepodge of different things, like a thought experiment visualized.

The appeal is definitely in that dynamic between the surreal and the real. Couple that with an indecipherable conlang, and you have a tome that's sure to whet the appetites of curious minds.

And I think, that is at the heart of the matter. Codex Seraphinianus wants to stir our imaginations and draw creativity at the forefront. I think it wants us to feel that excitement when you see something for the first time, and have the nagging feeling of wanting to understand it, like an itch that you just have to scratch. Just like Wonderland or the Chocolate Factory, it wants to ignite that sense of wonder in us once again.

(Video credit: Great Big Story/Youtube)

Here's a brief overview of what's inside Codex Seraphinianus.

(Video credit: Curious Archive/Youtube)

Redditor 9oRo recently posted a photo of a rejection letter that Disney had sent a woman named Mary V. Ford who apparently applied to them in 1938 for a position related to preparing the cartoons (possibly sketching or drawing) or some other creative work associated with it.

Quite blatantly, the Disney representative who signed the letter told Ford that women were not considered for such positions, as they were only reserved for young men. Furthermore, it stated that the only work available for women were coloring and tracing, for which the representative bluntly advised against applying as there were few openings.

DetectiveAnitaKlew astutely pointed out in the comments that the letter was signed by a woman. While elgringo22 funnily adds how they even added a picture next to her signature.

Comments that followed tried to look at the brighter side of the situation, saying that at the very least, a rejection letter was sent, instead of having no udpate or response at all like what some companies do today. - via Messy Nessy Chic

(Image credit: 9oRo/Reddit)

I don't often go to coffee shops, especially independent ones which usually have that artisanal feel to them, but whenever I did, it always felt the same as with all the rest that I've gone to before. Almost all coffee shops these days follow the trend of the "millennial aesthetic" or some variation of it. And one can't blame them, since that's what it takes to keep their businesses afloat with consumer preferences leaning toward that kind of "experience" or the "Instagrammability" of the cafe.

In this piece, Kyle Chayka dives deep into the tyranny of the algorithm, and how it has shaped, not just coffee shops, but also co-working spaces, startup offices, and every other physical space out there. It breeds homogeneity and monotony. In a diverse world, that does seem odd. But it shouldn't come as a surprise with the rise of the millennial cohort, whose digital savvy brought such aesthetics to the forefront.

Still, what strikes me as the most crucial in this analysis is the irony of the disproportionality of benefits that platforms such as Instagram or Yelp offer businesses. Although they are great tools to use for promotions and advertising, in the long run, they make it harder for businesses to maintain engagement without being taxed by the platforms themselves.

In the end, the biggest winners are still just the big corporations who have monopoly over these spaces and means to reach millions. Even we, the consumers, are at their mercy as our information, likes, dislikes, shares, and follows become commodified. In an age when individuality and uniqueness are celebrated, it does get to the point when the sameness of it all becomes mundane. - via Messy Nessy Chic

(Image credit: Jonas Jacobsson/Unsplash)