Robert Götzfried visited twenty Catholic churches in southern Germany to photograph their magnificent pipe organs. Each is beautiful in its own way, but as a collection, they show how the placement of pipes is an art form completely separate from the music they make. The pipes were placed to look good instead of in keyboard order. Now imagine being the one who has to match up each pipe with the corresponding organ key. Good thing that only has to be done once.
Five years ago, we introduced you to Japanese yodeler Takeo Ischi. The 70-year-old "chicken yodeler" has quite a following -in Germany. Now he's the star of a music video about a ninja chicken. Really. This video contains a little NSFW language.
While Tyrannosaurus rex was the badass of the Cretaceous Period, we get a kick out of poking fun at the dinosaur's tiny forelimbs. We wouldn't do that if it weren't long extinct. Those little "arms" weren't useful for much of anything as far as we know. Then again, we don't know everything about the animal.
MinuteEarth gives us some theories and possible ways that T. rex ended up with the short end of the foreleg game. Someday we might determine which it is. -via Viral Viral Videos
In the Harry Potter series, the caretaker at Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft And Wizardry is Argus Filch, who has a cat named Mrs. Norris. The cat has the run of the school, and a remarkably close bond with Filch. In fact, she's apparently the only thing he really cares about. That, and puzzlement about her name led Amanda Mannen to pose a fan theory about Mrs. Norris.
To say that Mrs. Norris is an exceptionally smart cat would be like saying Superman is an exceptionally strong dude. Filch and Mrs. Norris often work as a team, patrolling different areas of the castle for misbehaving students. Getting caught by Mrs. Norris is as bad as getting caught by Filch, because she will fetch him straight away. This means that Mrs. Norris has memorized the school's rules, understands them, and recognizes when a student is breaking them. In the first book, Hagrid tells Harry and Ron that he suspects Filch has trained Mrs. Norris to follow him specifically. You'll recognize all of these as things cats can't do. (It's been theorized that Mrs. Norris might be part Kneazle, a cat-like magical creature with superfeline intelligence, but Rowling has shot it down.) She also shows up on the Marauder's Map, while other animals don't. It's almost like she's a person in the body of a cat in a magical universe where that exact thing can definitely happen.
The Crufts Dog Show is going on this weekend in Birmingham, England. Here we see Olly the Jack Russell terrier taking part in the agility competition, in the class for rescue dogs. Olly steals the show with his performance.
I love how the announcer blows off the technicalities in favor of praising Olly's energy and joy, especially during his grand exit: "You'll never catch him now!" A good time was had by all. There's a version of this video with sound effects added, too. -via Tastefully Offensive
Route 6 in Japan runs from Toyama on the coast, through a tunnel under Mt. Tateyama, and on to Nagano. Mt. Tateyama is part of the Hida Mountains, where snow falls are measured in feet instead in inches. The mountains can get 125 feet of snow in a year! That's why a part of Route 6 is called Snow Canyon. It is closed in winter, but come spring, someone has to clear all that snow off the highway. While hundreds of snowplow drivers work all winter clearing the streets of Toyama, the Snow Canyon project starts with finding where the road is under 60 feet of snow. Then it get really technical. Read about the process of uncovering Snow Canyon at Atlas Obscura.
A "household tip" has been circulating about burning batteries in your fireplace. That was actually published in a 1951 issue of Popular Science magazine. This may have been doable in the '50s, although probably not all that useful. In the 21st century, it could be deadly.
While tossing a modern battery into a fire would likely result in an explosion, a rush of toxic fumes, and possible chemical burns, the advice provided by Popular Science back in 1951 was not nearly so dangerous for its time. As the magazine noted in responding to a reader’s question about burning batteries in fireplaces a decade later, zinc batteries of the early 1950s were typically non-sealed and thus would not build up pressure and explode when exposed to fire:
Modern batteries come in quite a variety, and are more powerful and more dangerous than earlier batteries. Each have their own safety tips, but don't throw any of them in a fire. Ever. -via Boing Boing
In 1856, 23-year-old widow Kate Warne answered an employment ad for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. She had to convince Allan Pinkerton that she could gain information in ways that a man couldn't, and she was right. Warne's success at gathering intelligence led Pinkerton to hire more woman detectives, and Warne was put in charge of them. During the Civil War, Pinkerton agents were charged with infiltrating Confederate society to gather information on troop movements
It was in this second role that Warne helped to prevent an assassination attempt on President Abraham Lincoln. By this time, Warne was the superintendent of all of Pinkerton’s woman detectives, but he called on her especially to pose as a Southern lady in Baltimore and help learn details of the suspected plot.
“Mrs. Warne was eminently fitted for this task. Of rather a commanding person, with clear-cut, expressive features, and with an ease of manner that was quite captivating at times, she was calculated to make a favorable impression at once,” Pinkerton wrote in his book The Spy of the Rebellion. “She was a brilliant conversationalist when so disposed, and could be quite vivacious, but she also understood that rarer quality in womankind, the art of being silent.”
Warne won over the wives of several conspirators, gaining key information to uncover their scheme to kill Lincoln while he traveled by train and destroy a section of track as well. She then aided Pinkerton himself in smuggling the president secretly aboard a train so that he could pass through Baltimore undetected.
March 10 is known as Three Flags Day in St. Louis, Missouri. The city was part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which expanded the US into what later became all or part of 15 states. But see, France had just gained most of that land from Spain mere weeks before the deal with the United States, and some cities remained under Spanish administration for quite some time. A treaty ceremony was held New Orleans, but other areas didn't get the news until later. So they planned another ceremony in St. Louis for March 9, 1804.
But there was a small problem: St. Louis was one of the cities the Spanish hadn’t gotten around to giving up. Authorities soon realized that, in order to actualize the territory’s new identity, “two treaties must be put into effect at one time,” writes historian Walter Barlow Stevens in St. Louis, The Fourth City. First, the land had to be be transferred from Spain to France. Then, it had to be be transferred again, from France to the United States.
St. Louis residents were so happy to be suddenly French that the powers-that-be hesitated to tell them they were actually American. So they delayed the second ceremony until the next day! Read about the handover of St. Louis at Atlas Obscura.
Simon Tofield and Nicky Trevorrow bring us another edition of Simon's Cat Logic, in which they address a cat's complicated relationship with water. The average cat knows there's a big difference between water for drinking and water that gets on one's fur. And there's a difference between falling rain and water one can drown in, like a bath.
There's also a difference between the water in a cat's water dish and the more delicious water found anywhere else. You'll find some really good tips for cat owners in this video. It ends with two Simon's Cat cartoons about cats and water.
Le Panoramic is a restaurant 3200 meters up the French mountain called Grande Motte. The mountain saw a snowstorm last week that left two meters of new snow, and wouldn't you know it, someone left the window open in the ladies' restroom (to be fair, it looks like it was blown in). And you thought your toilet seat was cold in the winter! -via reddit
Steve McQueen was a superstar in the early 1970s, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, but he was also a motorcycle enthusiast, making him doubly cool. McQueen's biker life intersected with his movies, which understandably made producers nervous. The movie star hung out with the brothers Dave and Bud Ekins at Bud's Triumph and Honda dealership. They introduced him to off-road motorcycle racing.
This closeness led McQueen to tap Bud as his stunt double for “The Great Escape,” which like “The Magnificent Seven” was directed by John Sturges. Filmed in Germany in 1962, “The Great Escape” was released to great acclaim the following year. According to McQueen’s biographer, William Nolan, McQueen made sure “The Great Escape” would have plenty of motorcycle scenes for himself and Bud. “John and I worked a hairy motorcycle chase into the script,” McQueen told Nolan for his book, Star on Wheels. “By inserting this cycle sequence into ‘The Great Escape,’” Nolan wrote, “Steve had outfoxed the studio; now the executives had no choice. Steve would race. On film, and at their risk.”
In the end, Ekins, who died in 2007, would spend three months in Germany shooting “The Great Escape,” and he would continue to double for McQueen throughout the actor’s too-short career (McQueen died of mesothelioma in 1980). But as Ekins told Matt Stone in an interview, McQueen did most of the motorcycle riding captured in “The Great Escape” himself. “I really didn’t do much of it,” Ekins said. “Anything where he may get hurt, that’s what I did. There’s a chase sequence in there where the German stunt riders were after him, and he was so much a better rider than they were, that he just ran away from them. So, they put a German uniform on him and he chased himself! I rode as a German soldier too, but he chased himself several times in the movie.”
The BBC was interviewing Professor Robert Kelly of Pusan National University in Korea about the impeachment of former (as of today) South Korean President Park Geun-hye, when it became very clear that he was working from his home office.
Will he be able to get a coherent thought out before Mom arrives? Did he have to stay seated because he's not wearing pants? So many questions, and none of them about the impeachment results. You can guarantee he will lock the door before his next Skype interview. -via reddit
Sergey Zimov has a dream to take a chunk of the Siberia tundra back to the last Ice Age, to the Pleistocene era, when giant mammals roamed the earth. Zimov and his son Nikita founded Pleistocene Park twenty years ago, and since then have stocked it with bison, musk oxen, wild horses, reindeer, and other grass-eating beasts. But to really move the ecosystem back to the way it was, they need the tree-trampling talents of wooly mammoths.
Pleistocene Park is named for the geological epoch that ended only 12,000 years ago, having begun 2.6 million years earlier. Though colloquially known as the Ice Age, the Pleistocene could easily be called the Grass Age. Even during its deepest chills, when thick, blue-veined glaciers were bearing down on the Mediterranean, huge swaths of the planet were coated in grasslands. In Beringia, the Arctic belt that stretches across Siberia, all of Alaska, and much of Canada’s Yukon, these vast plains of green and gold gave rise to a new biome, a cold-weather version of the African savanna called the Mammoth Steppe. But when the Ice Age ended, many of the grasslands vanished under mysterious circumstances, along with most of the giant species with whom we once shared this Earth.
Nikita is trying to resurface Beringia with grasslands. He wants to summon the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem, complete with its extinct creatures, back from the underworld of geological layers. The park was founded in 1996, and already it has broken out of its original fences, eating its way into the surrounding tundra scrublands and small forests. If Nikita has his way, Pleistocene Park will spread across Arctic Siberia and into North America, helping to slow the thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Were that frozen underground layer to warm too quickly, it would release some of the world’s most dangerous climate-change accelerants into the atmosphere, visiting catastrophe on human beings and millions of other species.
The possibility of cloning a mammoth Jurassic Park-style has been in the news for years, but finding viable mammoth DNA still eludes us. But there's another possibility: designing a cold weather elephant species by tweaking the genes of existent elephants. Read about this research and about the development of Pleistocene Park at the Atlantic. -via Metafilter
Some people at NASA think we’ll discover alien life by 2025. What will life on Earth be like then?
1. WE’LL FINALLY DISCOVER WHO THE MONA LISA WAS.
The identity of Mona Lisa has long been a mystery. Some think Leonardo da Vinci modeled his masterpiece on his mother; others, on a secret male lover. In fact, one art historian identified her just a few decades after the painting was completed as Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, the wife of a wealthy cloth merchant who commissioned the piece to a then-broke da Vinci. (The fact that the artist named his work La Gioconda was a big clue.) Now, thanks to radiocarbon dating, this hunch may finally be confirmed. Researchers believe they may have found Gherardini’s remains in a convent in Florence. If the carbon-14 tests confirm that it’s her, scientists will also do DNA tests to determine the color of her eyes, skin, and hair. With that information, they’ll be able to confirm if she is the world’s most famous half-smiler.
2. GROCERY STORE CHECKOUT LINES? ANCIENT HISTORY.
The question “Paper or plastic?” will be a distant memory in the not-so-distant future. The Food Marketing Institute predicts that by 2025, customers will no longer wait in lines to check out at grocery stores. Just like a car zipping through an electronic tollbooth, shoppers will walk out the door and a “frictionless checkout” will automatically account for products in their carts. Also coming soon: stores with moving walls. With a flick of a switch, businesses will be able to change their floor plans and turn into restaurants in the evenings or farmers’ markets on Saturday mornings.
3. THE STRONGEST ROBOTS WILL BE MADE FROM...ONIONS.
