The sign on the highway that tells you to yield to oncoming traffic is not as old as you might think. Oklahoma police officer Clinton Riggs came up with the "yield" sign in 1950, which spread from its birthplace in Tulsa to all corners of the US.
It was during his time as a trooper that Riggs conceived the idea of the “yield” sign, and he began developing it while attending Chicago’s Northwestern Traffic Institute in 1939.
He spent more than a decade experimenting with the sign, according to the Tulsa Police Department’s history book. His goal was a sign that would not only control traffic at an intersection but would also attach liability in a collision if one driver failed to yield.
The sign was a hit, especially among women.
...engineers in Dallas were pleasantly surprised by how grateful women were for the signs, the article said. Some women were apparently afraid to stop at night, so a yield sign helped them feel safe from roadside prowlers.
Until today, the only thing I knew about "yield" signs was that old joke with the punch line, "Of course I yield! I yield and yield, but they kept coming anyway!" Link-Thanks, Michael Mason!
National Geographic posts many lists in December rounding up up the top ten of subjects you won't find anywhere else. The Ten Weirdest New Animals of 2010 has quite a few we've posted about, but seeing them all in one gallery is almost startling. Yes, the tiny purple octopus is there, and the snub-nosed monkey, and this friendly-looking bat.
This tube-nosed fruit bat—which became a Web sensation as "Yoda bat"—is just one of the roughly 200 species encountered during two scientific expeditions to Papua New Guinea in 2009, scientists announced in October.
Though seen on previous expeditions, the bat has yet to be formally documented as a new species, or even named. Like other fruit bats, though, it disperses seeds from the fruit in its diet, perhaps making the flying mammal crucial to its tropical rain forest ecosystem.
In 1966, a beluga whale swam the wrong way up the Rhine -and wound up paving the way for environmental reform in Germany.
When World War II finally came to an end, Germany was in shambles. Its cities had been transformed into forests of twisted steel and broken concrete, and the German people were suffering from food shortages and rampant unemployment. Within a few years, however, things were looking up. Production of steel and coal were fueling remarkable growth in West Germany, and the country was positioning itself as the industrial powerhouse of Europe.
But this "economic miracle" was wreaking havoc on the environment. Careless mining and manufacturing turned the Rhine into what amounted to an open sewer, and soon, the international waterway contained millions of gallons of toxic waste. By the 1960s, the river was striped with red and green steaks of sludge. The water's oxygen level had plummeted, and fish were dying en masse. Germany tolerated the pollution because food, jobs, and a sense of progress came along with it, but everyone knew that something had to change.
The catalyst for that change appeared unexpectedly on the morning of May 18, 1966, when a fisherman on the Rhine spotted a large, white creature swimming alongside his boat. Dr. Wolfgang Gewalt, director of the nearby Duisburg Zoo, was called in to identify the animal, which he recognized as a beluga whale. Intrigued, Dr. Gewalt quickly put together a team of whale hunters to trap the animal and bring it to his aquarium.
That was easier said than done. For all his expertise, Gewalt had little idea how to capture a whale without harming it. He tried trapping the animal using tennis nets, but the whale swam right through them. Several more failed attempts followed, and the whale began to garner more and more attention. Before long, the newspapers had nicknamed him Moby Dick. But as the German people continued to watch Dr. Gewalt's attempts to capture the whale, it became impossible to ignore the unfortunate side effects of post-war progress. As Moby Dick proceeded to swim up the Rhine, journalists noticed that the whale's skin went from soft and white to bumpy and splotchy. Concerned citizens began to fear that the river's water would harm the animal, if not kill it outright.
After a couple of weeks, Moby Dick finally left the Duisburg area and traveled downriver. It was only a few yards from the North Sea when a strange thing happened. The whale suddenly stopped, turned around, and went back upriver. A few days later, Moby Dick appeared outside the German parliament building in Bonn -150 miles south.
This caused quite a scene. Hundreds of onlookers gathered at the river, and a group of nearby politicians even suspended their NATO news conference so they could get a glimpse of the whale. Meanwhile, the press went wild, with newspapers suggesting that Moby Dick's plan all along had been to raise awareness of the environmental plight of the Rhine.
Although the whale eventually escaped to open water, its presence remained. For four weeks in 1966, Moby Dick captured the nation's attention and highlighted the country's ecological desperation. Not coincidentally, environmental politics soon became a pressing national issue. The German people began forming grass roots organizations, and in 1972, the influential Federal Association of Citizen's Initiatives for Environmental Protection was formed. That same year, the German parliament passed the first two laws that effectively regulated waste disposal and emissions in rivers. And in 1979, Germans formed the first successful political party to focus on ecological concerns, Die Grünen Partei, literally "the Green Party." It's from their name that we get the term "green politics."
Today, the Rhine is the cleanest it's been in decades. Germany is still an industrial powerhouse, but it's also one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world. Yet the river might still be a sewer today if it hadn't been for one lost whale that tested the waters.
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The above article by Michael Ward is reprinted with permission from the November-December 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
It is once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is?
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Update: The very first comment had the correct answer! UnderpantsGnome knew this object as a spring winder for making conical bedsprings. The award for the funniest answer goes to lonewolfe13, who gave us this gem:
It is obviously for making giant spaghetti balls. First you take your pot of pasta and you tilt it sideways so you can get the tip if the spiral cone into the pasta. Then a friend of yours would spin the crank until you have a flying spaghetti monster worthy dinner.
Both win T-shirts from the NeatoShop. Congratulations, guys!
NASA scientists collected images from the Hubble space telescope and other sources and knitted them together to give us a visual representation of all the known galaxies in the universe, from the perspective of our tiny little spot. Cosmic. Link
YouTube member Sp0ntanius performs the "Song of Healing" from the video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Not only does he play all the parts on wine glasses well, but as you watch the video, weird things start to happen! -via The Daily What
Did you ever own a Magic 8-Ball? Inside the ball, there's a 20-sided die called an icosahedron that displayed one of 20 answers to your questions when it floated into the window. "Yes" is a given, but how many of the other 19 possible answers can you name in ten minutes without pulling your 8-Ball out of the closet? That's the challenge of today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I never owned one, so when I tried the quiz, my first dozen guesses were wrong and I gave up! Link
Carole Anne and Ron caught video of some penguins wandering about in the Falkland Islands. These two seem to have a small conundrum.
Penguin: Ooh, look, the ground is gone here! Penguin: It's water. Penguin: But not deep enough to swim in. Penguin: What will we ever do? Penguin: I'll have to think about that a bit. Penguin: Look, maybe we could ...walk through it! Penguin: I don't know, that doesn't look right. Penguin: Give it a try! Penguin: I believe I will ...jump! Penguin: Now you're just showing off. Penguin: Well, your idea of walking through it may be for the best. Penguin: Hey look! Mud! Whee!
A popular new restaurant in China is staffed by robots!
Located in Jiang, China’s Shandong Province, the Dalu Rebot Restaurant opened on the 5th of December and can cater to about 100 customers, featuring two robot receptionists and a “staff” of six robot-waitresses. Two of them serve drinks, two serve small tables and another two tend to the big one. It seems that more “hiring” well be made in the near future as owners expect the restaurant will become quite a hit.
As all the waiting is done by robots, the tables were set in a circular pattern so that the robots can follow an exact route. Not all the work in the restaurant is done by them though, there are also people working there, especially in the kitchen, but some were also hired to welcome customers into the restaurant.
The biggest rooms in the world are those built to store aircraft. Not only are they huge, but some have interesting stories to go with them. For example, the Arium hangar in Germany was built for the production and operation of a new aircraft called the CL160. However, the aircraft project was abandoned, leaving one of the biggest buildings on earth unused. It was reopened in 2004 with a tropical resort inside! Link
Imagine riding to kindergarten in a bus that looks like Pikachu -you would learn to love school right off the bat! This is just one of the ways the Pokémon character has settled into pop culture all over. Check out the other nine ways, including the USB Head Bobble Pikachu, Pikachu shoes, and the The Pikachu Circuit Bending Orchestra! Link
A tongue-in-cheek opinion piece in the National Post celebrates the return of the octothorpe. Some called it the pound sign, or a "capital 3".
The Big O is a sign with deep historical and cultural roots, part of our heritage. It didn't deserve the neglect it suffered in recent times. It's lived under many names: the hash, the crunch, the hex (that's in Singapore), the flash, the grid. In some circles it's called tic-tactoe, in others pig-pen. From a distance it looks like the sharp sign on a musical score. Whether you call it a pound sign or a number sign or anything else, it retains its identity. It's so majestically simple that it always looks good, even if drawn by someone utterly without graphic talent. Good old #. It can't go wrong.
The octothorpe has enjoyed a resurgence thanks to its use on Twitter, but how much do you really know about this punctuation symbol? This article has the history of the octothorpe and several theories about how it got that name. http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/What+have+here+great+comeback+stories+history+competitive+punctuation/3903206/story.html -via Metafilter
Ah, the memories of a year chock-full of useless and incomprehensible things to occupy your time. These are the internet memes of 2010, causing a laugh or two as they fly around the web. If by chance you've missed any of them, you can become familiar with all 25 before someone calls you out as a n00b. If you are familiar with them, it's a chance to relive the greats, or maybe not-so-greats of the past year. Link-Thanks, Joanne Chu!
Hundred of millions of years ago, sea creatures crawled up on land and started to become mammals. Then much later, a few went back into the sea, but left few fossils to show us how they did it -or at least that's what we used to think.
For more than a century, our knowledge of the whale fossil record was so sparse that no one could be certain what the ancestors of whales looked like. Now the tide has turned. In the space of just three decades, a flood of new fossils has filled in the gaps in our knowledge to turn the origin of whales into one of the best-documented examples of large-scale evolutionary change in the fossil record. These ancestral creatures were stranger than anyone ever expected. There was no straight-line march of terrestrial mammals leading up to fully aquatic whales, but an evolutionary riot of amphibious cetaceans that walked and swam along rivers, estuaries and the coasts of prehistoric Asia. As strange as modern whales are, their fossil predecessors were even stranger.
These fossils raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read more at Smithsonian magazine. Link
