Although it may be hard for most of us to imagine, there are people who don't experience mental imagery, or seeing pictures in your head. Most of us can conjure up images from memory, imagination, or an external description without much effort. About 4% of people cannot do that, although they think and navigate the world just fine. This condition is called aphantasia. It's not really a disability, and many folks who have it are completely unaware. How can you know that the way you think is any different from the way other people think? I can't imagine what it would be like to think without visualizing what I'm thinking, so why would people with aphantasia be able to imagine what those images in the "mind's eye" are like?

Scientists have been studying people with aphantasia, and have found some interesting things about people who have it. This TED-Ed lesson from Adam Zeman tries to explain what aphantasia is like. -via Laughing Squid

Among the many occupations of the Victoria era that no longer exist, you can count the cat's meat man. These were vendors who went from house to house selling fresh meat for cats and dogs. Dogs had always been both working and companion animals, but cats were rising in popularity among city dwellers as members of the family as well as pest control experts, and those who loved them were willing to buy meat for them. These vendors sold horse meat as well as organ meat and other castoff pieces from beef and pork slaughterhouses. In the mid-19th century, there were a thousand cat's meat men in London serving some 300,000 cats, and quite a few dogs as well.

The history of the profession had its ups and downs. Just the title was confusing- did these fellows sell meat for cats, or the meat of cats? There were always whispers of the latter, and even worse when one of Jack the Ripper's victims was found at the back door of a juvenile cat's meat man. But overall, the cat's meat men's services were appreciated. In 1901, 250 of the vendors gathered to enjoy an appreciation banquet sponsored by the new magazine Our Cats, and presided over by famous cat lover and artist Louis Wain. Read up on the cat's meat men of London at the Public Domain Review.  -via Nag on the Lake

Here's a story that illustrates the problems that arise when civilization encroaches on wildlife. A leopard mother will often leave her babies someplace she thinks is safe while she hunts. But this one left three cubs in a field that was plowed for crops, which isn't safe at all. She might have retrieved them soon, but someone took the cubs in as abandoned. We don't find out from the video where this was, but it's from Wildlife SOS, which operates in India, mainly to save elephants, so that may be a clue. Anyway, the best place for leopard cubs is with their mother. Volunteers took the cubs to the place where the mother was last spotted (or last seen, as she is presumed to be spotted at all times). And here you have to consider the bravery of the person who is carrying a litter of leopard cubs in the dark where you know the mom is hiding. That's true dedication to the mission! Still, this story has a happy ending, and if anyone was injured, they would have told us about it.   

There are truth in advertising laws that tell us you can't label a food product as "butter" if it has no butter in it. But you can label a butter substitute as "I can't believe it's not butter." Some say you only need the second half of that phrase, while the company hopes you only focus on the last word. But I digress. Truth in advertising laws won't help you when a product has used the same name for a hundred years or more. A young American might hear of black pudding and assume it's a creamy chocolaty sweet dessert. It is not. There is no seafood in Rocky Mountain oysters. An egg cream contains no egg nor any cream. And refried beans have only been fried once. That particular misleading name has a logical explanation having to do with the differences between Spanish and English. The Takeout gives us the real ingredients in 14 foods with misleading names, and explains how they were named. -via Fark

(Image credit: Stanistani)

Hurricane was a 69-pound black Belgian Malinois whose career in the Secret Service left him the most decorated dog in American history. In October of 2014, he took down an intruder who had scaled the White House fence and made it to within 100 yards of President Obama and the First Lady. He raced from the east side of the lawn as the intruder fought off another Secret Service dog. Hurricane suffered injuries in the incident that forced him into retirement in 2016. His actions caused the Secret Service to employ more guard dogs to White House duty.

Hurricane was awarded the Secretary’s Award for Valor from the Department of Homeland Security in 2015 and the Distinguished Service Medal in 2022, among other awards. After retirement, his handler Marshall Mirarchi founded a charity called Hurricane's Heroes that provides veterinary care for retired law enforcement and military dogs. Hurricane became an ambassador for the organization, and excelled at that job, too, since he was able to socialize and even play with children while off duty, a quality not found in most security dogs. At almost 16 years of age, Hurricane made one last trip to the White House on February 12th and met with the entire K9 team before he was put down. He was a good dog. -via Metafilter

The movie Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was the first of the Harry Potter films, released in 2001. It was known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone everywhere besides the US, India, and the Philippines. You would have thought that Screen Junkies would have already done an Honest Trailer for the movie, and they sort of did many years ago. But that was a quick overview of all the Harry Potter films, and didn't go into depth with any of them. However, the first four Harry Potter movies are being re-released in theaters this year, with The Sorcerer's Stone now playing in select theaters.

Oh, they find enough to criticize in the film, but your reaction will most likely be "Man! Those actors are young! And short!" After all, it was 24 years ago and they were little kids who all grew up to be famous adult actors long before their time at Hogwarts ended.

Over at TYWKIWDBI, Minnesotastan talks about natural tree fractures and what to do about them. You can trim a tree to promote scar tissue and recovery, but not all broken trees can be saved. Sure, you can just remove a broken tree, but there's a better solution. "Fracture pruning" and specifically "coronet cuts" are practices that promote rotting. But why would you promote rotting? It couldn't be good for the tree!

No, but it would be good for the tree's descendants, and other species of plants, animals, insects, fungus, and microorganisms. A dead tree, or a rotting log on the forest floor, is an entire ecosystem. Different kinds of fungus break down the hard parts of the wood, softening it enough for insects to move in. Birds, bats, and other animals come and eat the insects and the fungus. The softening tree provides shelter for some species and nutrition for others, including new plants that may take root there, from mosses to trees. Meanwhile, the decaying wood that isn't consumed becomes compost for the forest floor. Read about the crucial role of rotting wood in a forest ecosystem at Knowable magazine.

(Image credit: redditor narkotikahaj)

NASA has released the results of its engine performance tests on the new X-59 research jet, which is not built for space, but has the potential to change air travel down here on earth. You might not know this, but civilian planes that travel faster than the speed of sound were banned in the US in 1973 because their sonic booms could shatter glass and frightened the daylights out of people on the ground. And that's why passenger jets cannot travel at 800 miles per hour. Even in Europe, the Concorde was phased out for being too expensive to operate.

But NASA intends to upgrade commercial flight with the X-59, bringing back airline travel at faster than the speed of sound. The X-59 not only has a quieter jet engine, it is mounted on top of the plane to reduce shock waves going to the ground. It also sports a slim fuselage that can slice through the air, again reducing shock waves.



They would have done much better getting their point across if they showed us the jet with natural sound. Read up on the advantages of the supersonic X-59 jet at Gizmodo.   

(Top image credit: Lockheed Martin/Gary Tice)

Children's books are under the gun, but it's been that way for a long time. Usually it's for content that may be too sexual for some tastes, or too violent, or because someone's feelings were hurt. Sometimes the most innocuous books get a ban because people read things into them that aren't there at all, which tells us more about the book critic than about the book itself.

If you were to read a line in a children's book that said a character licked his lips, a well-read person would know that means they were anticipating eating something tasty. But that went completely over someone's head, or quite a few someones, because that was the line that got James and the Giant Peach banned in Wisconsin once. A spider licked her lips and that was interpreted as being overly sexual. Read about that case and those of eight other books that were banned for the strangest reasons at Cracked. 

We all know that blue is not a natural color for food. The exception that proves the rule is blueberries, which have a delicate flavor that belies their dark and dramatic color and doesn't factor into junk food much at all. When we see bright blue candy or blue syrup, that's coded in our heads as raspberry flavor. Or more specifically, artificial raspberry flavor, which is actually pretty good even when it falls short of the real thing. Yeah, yeah, raspberries are red, except when they are black, or white, so how did that flavor become blue? I thought it was just a color assignment because red was already in use for cherry flavoring, but it's a lot more complicated than that. Blue raspberry is its own flavor, even though its artificial. Tom Blank of Weird History Food is glad to share the story of blue raspberry flavoring with us.

The cemetery of Trinity Churchyard in Manhattan had a stone slab engraved with the name of Charlotte Temple. People once made pilgrimages to the graveyard to lay flowers for poor Charlotte, a sympathetic character who died in poverty soon after childbirth, betrayed and forgotten in the city. But she was a character- a fictional character from the novel Charlotte, A Tale of Truth. It's not so well known these days, but it was America's best-selling novel between its publication in 1791 and the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 -and remained quite popular for another hundred years.

Many people who read Charlotte, A Tale of Truth didn't realize it was fiction (the word "truth" in the title could have been confusing). Others knew it was a novel, but also knew that author Susanna Rowson said it was based on a real person. So who is buried beneath the stone slab in New York City? To learn the answer, Atlas Obscura goes into the history of the novel, the churchyard, and the stone, and explains a relatively recent investigation into the mystery of Charlotte Temple's grave.

They're random, and they don't make any sense. That makes them the perfect tool of communication. That's the idea behind crop circles. But let me back up a minute.

It's obvious to any observer that super intelligent aliens have been keeping an eye on Earth for a long time, trying to come up with ways to communicate with us. So far they haven't hit upon a clear method of letting us know they are there, much less that they are more intelligent than we are. But they are brainstorming. Now, the whole idea of brainstorming is to throw ideas out there, no matter how illogical, in the hopes that it may lead the group to come up with something feasible and effective. As Ryan George demonstrates, it wouldn't be logical to assume that super intelligent beings who could travel from distant galaxies to enslave Earthlings can't figure out a better way to tell us about their plans. This video is less than three minutes long; the rest is an ad.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

The UK organization Services Archaeology and Heritage Association posted this "average weekly diet" of a working class family in Oxfordshire in 1912. The graphic comes from the 1917 study "How the Labourer Lives: A Study of the Rural Labour Problem.” This family may have been rural, but they certainly weren't farmers. There are no eggs, fruit, milk, or cheese eaten in the entire week. Meat was included in exactly two meals per week, unless you were the head of the household, in which case you could have boiled bacon on a Friday evening. You really can't count suet pudding or lard as an entree. Most meals were bread, butter, and tea, which might fill you up but isn't conducive to great health. The "lard" mentioned would often be pan drippings saved from the Sunday dinner.  

Commenters who knew tell us that the biggest meal of the day ("dinner") was served at lunchtime, "tea" would be after work at five or six PM, and "supper" was more like a snack before bed. Not that it made much difference when every meal was practically the same. A diet like this should make you feel lucky to have refrigeration and supermarkets with a wide variety of food. -via Nag on the Lake

For about ten years in the early 21st century, there was a craze for competitive cup stacking, also called sport stacking or speed stacking. It consisted up stacking cups in certain forms and unstacking them as fast as you can, and it unleashed the competitive spirit among young people. My children did this in school, and I had no idea until today. Who in the world was responsible for the cup stacking craze? That would be Bob Fox.

Fox was a professional clown and theater teacher turned elementary physical education teacher. He did not invent cup stacking. In fact, Hasbro marketed the cups as a toy in the early '90s, but no one bought them. When Fox discovered cup stacking in 1995, he tried it out on his three children first. It turned out that what the activity needed was a demonstration by someone who knew what they were doing to get kids hooked. You can't just explain it; it has to be seen. Fox and his wife invested their life savings in 10,000 cups. To sell them, they went from school to school, with their three skilled kids showing what can be done with those cups. Kit Fox, former competitive cup stacker and the couple's youngest child, tells us the story of his father and the sport he brought to American schools. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: RogerAcr)

In 1876, General George Custer met his end at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The armies of the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho left no survivors among the US 7th Cavalry Regiment. It was days before the rest of the army knew what had happened, when a Crow scout who worked for Custer named Curley was found traumatized and broke the news. Curley became quite famous for surviving the battle, and later after the turn of the 20th century would travel from town to town in the West, telling the story of the Battle of Little Big Horn and Custer's dying words. As soon as his identity was known, the mayor and other prominent citizens would hurry to make him feel welcome. Curley also made deals that enabled white townspeople to buy fertile tracts of land on the reservation in Montana.

But that kind of activity couldn't last, especially since some of Curley's appearances made the papers. There were those who knew that Curley didn't speak English, and that he rarely ventured from the Montana reservation. Why, this guy, whose name was also Ben McIntosh, didn't even look like Curley the Crow! That was a particular shock for those who bought land and then went to Montana to claim it from Curley. Read the story of the real Curley and the fake Curley at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting