Last January, I noticed something peculiar in my 2yo’s bedroom that - after a year of obsessive reporting - led me to a profound cosmic revelation about what’s even possible in our universe. A 🧵. pic.twitter.com/pHFStIdawh

— Latif Nasser (@latifnasser) January 26, 2024

Latif Nasser is a writer, radio show host, and dad. His child has a poster illustrating the solar system. Nasser noticed something odd about it: the illustration suggested that Venus has a moon named Zoozve.

This was news to Nasser, who didn't know that Venus has moons. NASA asserts that Venus has no moons and a web search for Zoozve returned no results in English. One of his friends, who works for NASA, insists that Venus has no moons. So Nasser contacted the illustrator, who says that he saw the moon on a list.

Nasser kept investigating. It turns out that a small asteroid (approximately the size of 160 Chester A. Arthurs) is in the vicinity of Venus. It's called 2002-VE, which the illustrator misread as Zoozve.

But Zoozve (let's keep using this name) is not, strictly speaking, a moon. It is a extremely rare object called a quasi-moon. Zoozve orbits both Venus and the Sun at the same time.

-via Virginia Postrel

The 'Dune 2' popcorn bucket is being seen very differently than how WB probably intended it to be interpreted.

See more ⬇️ https://t.co/R3aK5QHM4U

— TMZ (@TMZ) January 27, 2024

We live in the Age of Dune. The magnificent (yes, I'll stand by that description) David Lynch film from 1984 is returning to theaters. You can buy the beautifully presented miniseries from 2000 on DVD. Denis Villeneuve's second film in his treatment of the timeless story is coming to theaters in March.

Warner Bros. is, of course, heavily promoting the new film and offering promotional items. They include, TMZ reports, this popcorn bucket. I immediately recognized it as Shai-Hulud, known to offworlders as sandworms. But other people see a particular part of the human anatomy serving in place of the Maker's mouth.

-via Super Punch

Gustav Klimt portrait found after almost 100 yearshttps://t.co/SBjlxqPovF

— Debby Witt (@debbywitt) January 26, 2024

Gustav Klimt died in 1918, but his works still captivate the popular imagination. This Symbolist painter from the Vienna retains an iconic status among art lovers today due to his vibrant use of bright colors, even the use of gold leaf, as well as his subtle eroticism.

Klimt was in high demand as a portrait painter, and his Portrait of Fraulein Lieser, painted in the final year of his life during World War I, belonged to a Jewish family in Vienna when it was exhibited in 1925. In the ensuing decades its location became a mystery.

BBC News reports that its current owners have possessed it since the 1960s. Now that they are putting it up for auction, people in Germany, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Britain will be able to view it before it is sold.

Until a few days ago, the streets of Provo, Utah, were safe at night due to the work of the mysterious hero known as the Fish Bandit. This modern-day Robin Hood filled a desperate need in the city by taping fish to ATMs across the town, then publishing photos of his deeds on social media. No greedy bank was safe from his vigilantism.

Alas, the gallantry of the Fish Bandit has come to an end. ABC News 4 reports that Provo police have identified the teenage boy (of course) responsible for the fish tapings and pressed property damage charges against him.

-via Dave Barry

Michelle Frankl, an American and a chemistry professor at Bryn Mawr, instigated a furor in Britain with the publication of her book Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea. In it, she cast aside centuries of wisdom from the foggy isle and, The Hill reports, argues that people should drink their tea with salt.

The British took offense at this heretical attack upon their national drink. It was up to the United States Embassy in London to smooth over the tensions with this prudent concession to British sensibilities:

An important statement on the latest tea controversy. 🇺🇸🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/HZFfSCl9sD

— U.S. Embassy London (@USAinUK) January 24, 2024

-via Aelfred the Great | Image: bryan

John Baylies is a sousaphone player. The sousaphone has been around since 1893, but Baylies is famous for playing a far more advanced version called the SousaFX. This electronic accessory lets him control audio effects that give his instrument abilities that you'd never expect to hear in a classical orchestra, such as stutter and tremolo. What you see him manipulating with his left hand is actually a PlayStation 4 controller.

Baylies performs with Sousastep, an improvisational group based in Boston. You can listen to their work on SoundCloud.

The pulsating LED lights are a nice accent and Baylies has helpfully provided instructions on how to install them.

-via Massimo

Some are born great, some acheive greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. But Macie Davis-Southerland has greatness growing upon her.

Specifically, it's growing on her left arm.

In 2012, while in high school, Davis-Southerland discovered that one particular hair on her arm was longer than the others. She developed a plan: she would grow this hair until it secured for her a Guinness World Record.

Over the years, the hair sometimes fell out or was pulled out. But Davis-Southerland strove for victory and regrew it. Now she has secured the Guinness World Record for the longest arm hair on a woman. The hair measures 7.24 inches long.

NBC News reports that Bella Lin of San Francisco was 12, she noticed that her pet guinea pigs kept disappearing from her backyard. She was unsatisfied with traditional "prison-barred" cages, so she decided to design and build her own.

The result is the GuineaLoft system. The cages have 2-tiered bottoms to make them easier to clean, as well as transparent plastic walls that snap together to make them easy move and see through.

Lin scrounged up $2,000 of her own money to launch this business and sell her cages on Amazon. Last year, she earned $410,000 from the business.

Lin is reinvesting all of her earnings into the company while applying to colleges and planning on a trip to the factory in China that manufactures her cages. This is only the beginning of her entrepreneurial ventures.

-via Debby Witt

In the 1974 film The Godfather Part II, young Vito Andolini from Corleone, Sicily is processed by immigration officials at Ellis Island. A clerk who doesn't speak Italian writes his name down as "Vito Corleone", thus changing the name of this fictional family for all time.

I remember learning in middle school that it was common for these immigration officials to change the names of immigrants because they didn't understand them or to intentionally Anglicize them to encourage assimilation.

That is an urban legend.

Rosemary Meszaros, a government documents librarian, and Katherine Pennavaria, a genealogical librarian, published an article in 2018 in the scholarly journal Documents to the People that argues that the documentary records simply don't support the notion that immigration clerks changed immigrants' names.

Immigration to the United States at the time was carefully controlled and recorded. Ellis Island officials used written records established before the immigrants even arrived on American shores. They knew who was on which ships and checked in immigrants against pre-established manifests.

Don't believe everything you learn in school.

-via Marginal Revolution

Rutherford B. Hayes was elected President of the United States in the very controversial 1876 election in which he squeezed into the White House after a razor-thin margin in the electoral college. He was fairly successful in office, but declined to run for a second term and retired from active politics. Hayes is well-remembered in his hometown of Delaware, Ohio (I've been there), but has largely receded from the American historical memory.

But not in Paraguay.

This small country in South America was once much larger until Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay ganged up on it to deprive it of almost half of its territory. Perhaps as much as two-thirds of the Paraguayan population died in the war.

In the postwar settlement, Argentina and Paraguay asked the United States to arbitrate their border dispute. President Hayes ruled in favor of Paraguay, for which the surviving Paraguayans were very grateful.

Even today, Paraguay remembers President Hayes. Atlas Obscura tells us that there's a museum, the Villa Hayes, in Presidente Hayes, which is one of the 17 departments (districts) that comprise the modern nation of Paraguay.

Photo: Visit Paraguay

Look at the people around you. Do any of them have ring fingers longer than their index fingers? If so, run for your life.

The actual scientific article is more nuanced, of course. Researchers with the Centre de Recherche Charles-Le Moyne in Quebec examined 44 people for finger lengths to consider the hypothesis that longer ring fingers are associated with high testosterone exposure during fetal development.

Such people generally had higher incidences of mental toughness, antisocial personality disorder, amphetamine abuse and, most importantly, dark triad traits--narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

The authors note that the small sample size is a limitation to the validity of the study, so consider contributing to the research yourself in the comments.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff

Atlas Obscura informs us that if we ski along particular slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside of Taos, New Mexico, we may encounter birdhouse-sized boxes attached to particular trees. Inside each one is a martini.

These are martini trees. The practice of attaching martinis to rural trees began during the winter of 1958 through 1959 when a lady on the slopes of a ski resort sent a young man off in search of a martini to calm her jittery nerves. He returned with one served in a porrón, a traditional Spanish wine pitcher with a long spout. It worked well to calm the woman, so resort owner Ernie Blake set up several martinis in boxes around his facility. By the 1980s, the practice had spread throughout the region.

Photo: AdventureJay

The tabloid news service TMZ reports that two nights ago, famed wrestler Hulk Hogan rescued a teenage girl from a car crash in which the vehicle had flipped upside down.

Hogan's wife, Sky Daily, posted on social media that the accident happened right in front of them in Tampa, Florida. Hogan ran to the wrecked car, punctured the airbag with a pen, and then pulled the teenager from the car. No one was injured in the crash, although the girl was emotionally shaken.

Only a few photos of the event are available. Sadly, none of them show Hogan ripping his shirt off after performing the rescue.

All Terrain Wheelchair I built for my wife
byu/AkmJ0e inredneckengineering

At the magnificent subreddit /r/redneckengineering, /u/AkmJ0e exemplifies the improvosational talents of that community with this all-terrain wheelchair that he built for his wife.

It's built over a zero-turn mower that allows it to instantly turn in any direction. The track is a single snowmobile track that he cut in half and attached to rims from an old trailer.

As you can see, she can go anywhere in it. /u/AkmJ0e is thinking about attaching a snowblower to give her something to do as she's traversing their property. It already has a winch under the seat so she can haul firewood.

We are selling our baby trebuchet. We only used it a couple of times. PM me for a quote. pic.twitter.com/uJnf0TLDsM

— Bojan Tunguz (@tunguz) January 12, 2024

Mr. Tunguz no longer needs the baby yeeter, as he has completed this stage of parenting. Nonetheless, he labels the device incorrectly. Twitter used to have a community note attached to this post: