During the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, there were so many atrocities committed that you will be forgiven if you aren't familiar with The Jameson Affair. In fact, most of the horrific events of those years were never documented. James Sligo Jameson, a naturalist and heir to the Jameson Whiskey fortune, went on an expedition to the Congo in 1887 and died there a year later. The expedition suffered from supply issues and lack of support from the locals because of Jameson's relationship with a slave trader. Jameson was known to have been fascinated with the tales of cannibalism in Africa. After Jameson's death in 1888 in the Congo, excerpts from his diary and accounts from eyewitnesses tell of the day Jameson purchased a 10-year-old girl in order to witness her ritual murder and the consumption of her flesh. If you want more details after watching this video from Weird History, check out Jameson's entry at Wikipedia.

 

In 1946, renowned author Lin Yutang filed a patent for a typewriter that printed Chinese characters. This is the MingKwai typewriter, with a reasonable number of keys. By pressing two keys, eight characters from thousands in the machine's mechanical hard drive would appear in the typewriter's "magic eye" window. Pressing a third key would select from those and print the character. It was the first Chinese typewriter with a workable keyboard. Lin sank his life savings into producing a prototype in the United States, but the typewriter did not appear to be a profit-making venture, and was never mass produced. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Revolution happened. Lin moved from China to Taiwan in 1966. The prototype MingKwai typewriter remained in New York and became lost.

Fast-forward to January of 2025, and Nelson Felix was cleaning out his wife's grandfather's basement. He found a strange typewriter with Chinese characters and posted it to the Facebook group What’s My Typewriter Worth? The comment section exploded with information about the historical significance of the find and offers to buy it. There were also pleas to donate the typewriter to museums in China or Taiwan. The typewriter ultimately ended up at Stanford University. Read the story of Lin, his typewriter, and how it stayed in a basement in Queens for decades, at Made in China. -via Metafilter

Get a closer look at the typewriter in this video.

I just learned about Pub Choir from an unrelated video at kottke. Pub Choir is an Australian project led by Astrid Jorgensen where people go and learn to sing popular songs in three-part harmony. They describe it as an "ENTIRELY improvised, comedy music lesson." It's somewhat similar to the Toronto-based Choir! Choir! Choir! You don't have to be a singer to join the fun, and in fact non-singers are encouraged to participate because many voices make it much easier for shy people to belt out a tune.

At every Pub Choir show since 2022, one of the things they did was record all the participants singing at least one line from Queen's operatic anthem "Bohemian Rhapsody" for a project almost three years in the making. Now all those shows have been compiled into one video. The participants totaled more than a hundred thousand singers! See more Pub Choir videos at their site.   

The German magazine Stern had a journalist who was an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia. Gerd Heidemann was so avid that he once bought Hermann Göring's yacht and restored it. During that project he dated Göring's daughter and met a lot of former Nazis. So when Heidemann managed to get his hands on 60 volumes in Hitler's handwriting, his bosses were inclined to believe these were diaries Hitler kept from 1932 to 1945. A renowned historian examined the diaries and their provenance and believed they were genuine. So Stern paid an enormous amount of money for the volumes in 1983. As word got around, Rupert Murdoch paid for the right to publish the dairies in his British newspaper The Sunday Times.

But as The Sunday Times announced their world exclusive, a day before Stern published the story of the diaries' discovery, doubt were starting to add up about the authenticity of the books. Find out how the fake diaries was unearthed and who actually wrote them at BBC Culture. -via Strange Company

Online dating is fraught with all kinds of dangers. The available inventory of fellow users is rife with creeps, narcissists, married people, fake profiles, and a serial killer or two. If you find someone you think is perfect for you, the odds are that they probably won't find you quite as attractive. But one thing you always need to remember is that if a service is free to use, that means you are the product. It's your attention span and suggestibility that are the payoff for advertisers.

In the sci-fi rom-com short Sweet Nothings, the latest Omeleto film from director Christian Klein, a young man does his best to find a match on a free dating site. Instead, he gets a lesson in algorithms and marketing that he won't soon forget. The story is set in the near future to show us where things are heading in the tech business. -via Geeks Are Sexy

We've covered truck spills that made unbelievable messes, like slime eels, beer and Doritos, milk, ink, and even bees. The latest presents some unique challenges in cleanup, although it's not gross at all.

A semi truck carrying $800,000 in newly-minted dimes overturned on Highway 287 in Alvord, Texas. We don't know where the truck was going, but the dimes were not secured in rolls or bags, so some suspect they were going to a facility to be packaged. So that's eight million dimes spilled onto the highway and shoulder. Cleanup crews used industrial vacuums to pick up the biggest part of the dimes, but still had to resort to using brooms and rakes and then getting on their hands and knees to pick up the coins. Someone should calculate whether picking up the last of the dimes cost more than they were worth. There is no word yet as to whether all the dimes are accounted for. Read the story as we know it at The Drive. -via reddit

When his planet and all his family and friends are destroyed, an alien comes to earth because he's tired of being sad. Well, you'd be sad, too, if your entire species was wiped out and you had to venture into foreign territory to do something about it. He has an artifact that tells him that Earthlings have the secret to happiness. The little boy he contacts is only happy to help him out. And that's how we learn what "Fun Kitai Furai Dei" is.

"Fun Kitai Furai Dei" is also the name of the new song from Jazz Emu, the alter ego of British comedian Archie Henderson. This animated video is funny and ridiculously weird, but also bittersweet and somewhat touching. This is the kind of thing that can happen when a standup comedian can't go on the road because of a pandemic and turns his creative juices to producing videos.  -via Metafilter

Who knew rats could become wine connoisseurs? Most people know what white wine is, but couldn't identify the variety of grape it was made from. A few people are very good at this, and won't ever let you forget it. The question was whether this learned skill is affected by the language we use in wine tasting. Rats have no wine-tasting language, but an experiment shows they can learn their grapes. Some rats were trained to push a lever if the wine they were exposed to was Sauvignon Blanc, while others were rewarded for pushing the lever when they were exposed to Riesling. During training, these wines were two consistent brands. Then the rats were tested on their knowledge without rewards, and were presented with different brands and types of wine made with Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc grapes, and they could still identify which was which.

Lest you imagine a rodent wine-tasting party with progressively drunken rats, the science paper reveals the detail that the rats were only exposed to the scent of the wine, and never actually drank any. Still, considering how many different kinds of wine the researchers had to purchase, you know someone had to dispose of the leftovers. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Elisa Frasnelli et al)

The more time travel movies we see, the more it becomes clear that the future is too close. In the 1989 film Back to the Future Part II, our hero zipped from 1985 to 2015 and found technology to be quite advanced 30 years into the future. Yet that date is now ten years in the past and we still don't have flying cars. Quite a few other movies set in the future have already been lapped without interplanetary travel or dystopian collapse -not to mention time travel itself. Those who follow such things have a sense of how long major technological advances can take. Plus, we still watch movies that are 50 years old. Star Trek had the right idea, setting its stories 300 years into the future, although we may still be watching when the time comes. Chris and Jack (previously at Neatorama) leverage that movie knowledge to judge whether they've really been visited by a time traveler.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

George Washington didn't have much of a sweet tooth, or many teeth at all, but he did enjoy fruit and alcoholic beverages. His favorite dessert contained both, and was served on special occasions and always on January 6th for Epiphany, which was also George and Martha's wedding anniversary. It's called Great Cake, which may be because the Washingtons liked it so well, or it may be because it's enormous. Martha Washington's recipe called for 40 eggs (separated) and four pounds of butter, as well as proportionate amounts of flour, sugar, fruit, and other ingredients, like brandy and wine.

While Great Cake is Martha Washington's recipe, it was made by enslaved people, and took hours to bake, not to mention all the time it would take to whip all those eggs whites into a meringue. If you have a really large cake pan and plenty of time, you may want to follow Washington's recipe, or if you prefer a normal-sized cake, you can follow an adapted recipe from Mount Vernon.

Production values have soared since the Dance Your PhD competition was launched in 2008, but we still get a kick out of doctoral students attempting to explain the subjects of their dissertations through interpretive dance. Dr. Sulo Roukka of the University of Helsinki sang and danced his way to the top of the heap this year with a production number about chemesthesis, or the way people react to extreme taste compounds such as hot peppers and menthol. His dissertation is titled Insights into oral chemesthetic perception: A focus on food-related behavior. Roukka won the chemistry division and the overall grand prize. There are also winners in the categories of biology, physics and AI, and social sciences. Continue reading to see them.

"Kerning" is the art of spacing letters so that the finished words are visually balanced and easy to read. It's more than just consistent spacing, because letters are shaped differently, and some should be closer to the next letter than others. Bad kerning gives us the word "keming," which is gloriously self-explanatory.

Pope Francis lived humbly for a pope, and requested that his tombstone be engraved simply with his name. He was laid to rest on Saturday at the St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome, and the tomb has a stone with his name, Franciscus, spelled FRANCISCVS in the Latin style. But the stone reads more like “F R  A NCISC VS.”

Some have argued that the bad kerning is a symbol of humility before God, but there is no tradition of such a gesture in papal tombstones. It may have been because the stone carving was a rush job, or possibly incompetence. Fast Company has a possible explanation of how the poor design could have occurred.  -via kottke

If you knew about an isolated mountain lake that was ringed with a whole bunch of human skeletons that no one had retrieved, you might think about avoiding that area, lest you become one of them. But that's not quite the case at Roopkund Lake, also called Mystery Lake or Skeleton Lake, at 16,470 feet of elevation in northern India. Plenty of Himalayan hikers have visited the site, and rearranged the skulls and bones found there.

An ancient tale tells of a royal entourage on a pilgrimage that was caught in a hailstorm near the lake and were all killed. But scientists have found evidence that whatever disaster befell those people happened more than once, and hundreds of years apart. Not only that, the dead of Roopkund Lake came from different corners of the earth! What happened to them? And where were they going? Savannah Geary of SciShow tells us what we now know and what we don't know about the Roopkund Lake skeletons. There's a 45-second skippable ad at 4:05.

Only a couple of hundred years ago, people weren't sure why birds disappeared in the winter (or the summer, depending on where you are). The idea that birds flew away and came back was common, but where did they go? Other theories were that they hibernated, possibly underwater, or as Aristotle mused, maybe they turned into another species. One Harvard scholar suggested that birds flew to the moon for the months they were missing. And people believed him, because they didn't know how far away the moon is. What they needed was a way to track where a particular bird had been.

Then in 1822, someone in northern Germany shot a stork. The stork was retrieved and was found to have a 31-inch arrow in its neck! We don't know how long the bird survived carrying the arrow, but it was sent to the University of Rostock for study. There it was determined that the arrow originated in central Africa, proof that the stork had flown more than 1,800 miles with an arrow in its neck. Over time, other birds were discovered flying with arrows from faraway places, and scientists confirmed the theory of bird migration. Eventually, we started tagging birds with less painful identifiers. Read about this discovery and how it changed ornithology at Xatakaon. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Zoologische Sammlung der Universität Rostock)

Birds are dangerous for planes, and vice versa. Up until the last decade or so, most airports killed owls and other birds that took up residence near airports. But Boston's Logan Airport was the exception. Snowy owls live in the Arctic most of the time, but migrate south during the coldest months of winter. They often ended up at the airport in Boston, where they could find plenty of mice and rats to eat, as well as other birds.

In 1981, Norman Smith began trapping and relocating the airport owls instead of exterminating them. He's been doing this ever since, and the idea has spread to other airports, especially for birds that are threatened or endangered. Logan Airport has relocated more than 900 snowy owls since Smith came on the scene, and he vows to continue saving these birds as well as the planes for as long as he can. -via Nag on the Lake