Ron Sveden of Brewster, Massachusetts already suffered from emphysema, and when he took a turn for the worse, he expected he might have cancer. Instead, x-rays showed a pea plant sprout growing in his lung!
For two weeks they ran tests but they all came back negative for cancer, until one doctor found the plant growing in his lung.
“Whether this would have gone full-term and I’d be working for the jolly green giant, I don’t know. I think the thing that finally dawned on me is that it wasn’t the cancer,” said Sveden.
Ron said he never felt anything growing in his chest, just a lot of coughing.
Doctors suspect he had eaten a pea at some point in the last couple of months and it went down the wrong way, and then began to grow.
“One of the first meals I had in the hospital after the surgery had peas for the vegetable. I laughed to myself and ate them,” said Sveden.
If you love Twitter or you love the people you follow on Twitter, you can buy a coffee mug made with your Twitter friends' profile pictures on it! What else is neat is that you don't have to buy one to generate a picture. This one has my contacts on it. Link -via the Presurfer
The sad truth about witches is that you don't have to be one -or even believe in them- to be executed for witchcraft. Read about eight women in history who each paid the price for what others thought she was doing. Some, such as Catherine Monvoisin, may have been guilty of other crimes.
Also known as La Voisin, Catherine Monvoisin was a midwife and French sorceress who was a personage in the Affaire des Poisons, in which several members of the aristocracy were executed for witchcraft and poisoning. She was a well-known practitioner of medicine, provider of abortions and maker of love powders and potions, and she served many famous Parisian women. Monvoisin was burned at the stake in 1680.
The SPCA in Victoria, British Columbia suddenly has 43 chihuahuas. General manager Penny Stone is glad they are small. She took a call from a woman who asked if she could bring in ten dogs to give away.
“When she came in, she kept taking more out of her car saying, ‘Can you take more? Can you take more? Can you take more?’ ” said Stone. “Finally, we went out to her car. She had a Mustang convertible full of chihuahuas.”
The woman dropped off 33 chihuahuas on Wednesday and nine more on Thursday morning. One of the chihuahuas gave birth to a puppy on Thursday, bringing the total to 43. All but six of the dogs are under the age of two.
“I think she was a very nice lady who was in way over her head,” said Stone. “She was probably in a situation where she started with one chihuahua and it had babies. People get attached to them and feel that nobody can do as good a job [caring for them], so they end up keeping them. Then other people find out she is the chihuahua lady — her boss died and gave her 12. Pretty soon, her babies are having babies and it’s out of control.”
The shelter is seeking donations for the dogs' care and looking for adoptive homes as well. http://www.timescolonist.com/life/SPCA+swamped+with+tsunami+chihuahuas/3378590/story.html -via Metafilter
In researching the earlier post A Non-Math Look at Math Objects, I found that there is what a non-math person like me would call an infinite number of strange terms in geometry and topology that refer to shapes, objects, and patterns both imaginary and usable in the real world. Someone who is not used to this kind of higher thinking can only absorb so many of them at a time! Here are seven more.
Hyperboloid
What mathematicians call a hyperboloid of one sheet is a really cool structure that is made up of many (actually an infinite number) of perfectly straight lines that look to us like a curved structure. First, imagine that you have a cube. Stand it on one of its corners and spin it like a top, then look at it from the side -the sides seem to be curved, but you know they aren't. Now, take a handful of uncooked spaghetti noodles. Use two hands, and twist the strands loosely. It forms the shape of a hyperboloid structure, which looks like a cooling tower at a nuclear reactor. All the spaghetti noodles are still straight, but the shape of the handful is curved. In architecture, this idea enables builders to produce curved structures by using straight line supports.
Apollonian Gasket
An Apollonian gasket is a fractal generated when you mash as many round soap bubbles together as you can. At least, that's what it looks like. The pattern is based on threes: every circle touches two other circles. As you add more circles in the smaller spaces, they also touch two existing circles (and eventually many smaller ones). The number of smaller circles that can be added is mathematically infinite. Frothing soap bubbles can help us picture the Appolonian gasket, but the analogy is flawed, because real world soap bubbles do not like empty spaces. There is a limit to the volume of soap, and surface tension will connect round bubbles and flatten them against each other. This fractal is named for the ancient Greek mathematician Apollonius of Perga. The 3-dimensional fractal of this sort is called the Apollonian sphere packing, which is a pretty descriptive name for a math term.
Möbius Strip
When I was very young, first or second grade, my father told me he could make a piece of paper with only one side. Then he took a strip of paper, gave one end a half-twist, and taped the ends together. Then he showed me how he could draw one line down the strip without stopping and it covered the whole strip, no matter which way you turned it! I couldn't wait to show the Möbius strip to my friends at school. When I did, they just stared at me and told me I was weird.
Maybe "continuous plane" is a better description than "one sided paper". The Möbius strip is named for August Ferdinand Möbius who discovered it in 1858. Johann Benedict Listing also came up with the concept around the same time and actually published his work, but maybe someone thought calling it a "Listing strip" would be confusing. Anyway, the Möbius strip does have some real-world applications. For example, conveyor belts and recording tapes with a half-twist last twice as long as they would otherwise because the entire surface is used instead of just one side of a two-sided strip. It's also an attention-getter in art and even architecture.
Just how well do you think you know the fruits of the world? That's the subject of today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. It's harder than you think! I made several wild guesses, and I ended up with a score of 55%. Link
These scans of an old safety booklet for children called It's Great to be Alive! are full of gruesome injuries that befall careless bicycle riders, pedestrians, and kids at play.
In fairness, adults didn't have a lot of options in those days, so using abject fear was a common parenting tool. There were no reflective bicycle helmets or knee-pads for skateboarders, no designated bicycle lanes, many fewer supervised activities, and we didn't even have seat belts in cars until the mid-1960s. When accidents happened, they were usually pretty grim.
See more mayhem in this article from Gene Gable. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
The new movie The Expendables opens this Friday, starring every action star Hollywood could round up. Sylvester Stallone tried to do an interview on YouTube, but he didn't get to say much before everything went south. Link -via The Litter Box
It's the game that brings the internet into the real world!
This is the best thing since BUMP for the iPhone which allowed you to instantly add friends to Facebook – it’s Social Media Monopoly. Pete Cashmore, Kevin Rose, Tom, Amber MacArthur, Crystal Gibson and Ariana Huffington are fighting for social media dominance. Race around the board picking up smartphones and computers but make sure you don’t get sent to MySpace or you’ll risk losing everything, including your reputation.
Print out the full-size version plus the Mashable and Technorati cards and use your regular Monopoly game money, and you're good to go. Link -via Nag on the Lake
The following article is reprinted from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Treasury.
They're not mad! It's the world that's mad!! Bwa hah hah hah hah!!! Look at it from the mad scientist's point of view. All he wants to do is reanimate the dead, or invent a transporter, or maybe just drink a mind-altering potion in the privacy of his own home. But the rest of the world seems to think that's wrong! What do they know?!? They didn't spend years digging up cadavers, mixing toxic chemicals, or exploring the eighth dimension! They probably didn't have any advanced degrees! Foolish mortals! See? From the scientist's point of view, it makes perfect sense. here are ten films to prove they're not mad-just misunderstood.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension!
Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title. The mad scientist is Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow), who went looking for trouble in the eighth dimension and found it when some goopy-looking alien took over his skull. Now he needs to get back where he once belonged, and the only thing stopping him is Buckaroo Banzai: scientist, rock'n'roll star, and cultural icon. A true cult favorite among the brainy and socially maladapted. (They want to be Buckaroo Banzai, but they smell like Dr. Lizardo.) While it is a little obscure for some, it starts making twisted sense after the fifth or sixth viewing. Stick with it.
Coma
Here's a flick to make you nervous the next time you go in for a tummy tuck. Genevieve Bujold plays a doctor who is investigating a friend's death during minor surgery. One thing leads to another, and the next thing she knows, she's wandering through a big room filled with people hanging from tubes, their organs just waiting to be harvested! Apparently people forget you could just check the "donor" box on your driver's license application. Michael Douglas plays her love interest and Richard Widmark is the doctor who keeps slipping the patients a little too much gas. So remember, the next time you're in, ask for a local.
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde
Long before Anthony Hopkins got an Oscar for playing a doctor gone bad in Silence of the Lambs, Frederick March copped one in 1932 for this baby. You know how it works: Mild mannered doctor by day goes drinking and then becomes an evil criminal jerk by night. Yes, it sounds no different than what happens at any convention-but in this case, Dr. Jeckyll isn't tossing back frilly drinks with umbrellas in them. This one's been remade a few times (including as a stoner comedy in the early 80s, for which karmic punishment will certainly apply), but the Frederick March version is still the best.
Since his death in 1977, Elvis's popularity has grown. Once he was just a singer. Now he's an icon with his own church (The Church of Elvis), and his own holy site (Graceland), It's an amazing phenomenon-but it hasn't been entirely accidental. Behind the scenes, a handful of people have orchestrated Elvis's return from the dead for their own benefit. Here's part of the inside story. For a more complete story, we recommend Elvis, Inc. by Sean O'Neal. It's entertaining bathroom reading.
BACK FROM THE DEAD
Ironically, the tale of Elvis's resurrection begins with the story of a vampire.
In 1960 Universal Studios dusted off a number of its classic horror films and released them for TV broadcast. It was the first time baby boom kids had ever seen the original Frankenstein (starring Boris Karloff), The Wolfman (starring Lon Chaney), or Dracula (starring Bela Lugosi)-and the films were phenomenally popular. In fact, a huge "monster" fad swept America... and Universal cashed in by licensing its characters for t-shirts, posters, lunch boxes, etc. One of the most popular images was Bela Lugosi in his Count Dracula costume.
Courting Universal
When Lugosi's widow and son found out about the merchandising deals, they filed suit to block them. Their argument: Lugosi's name and likeness should be passed on to his family, as his worldly assets had been. At the very least, they had a right to share in the profits.
The Lugosis won their lawsuit. But Universal appealed the decision.The second time around, the appellate judges reasoned that if the name and likeness of famous people could be inherited, the relative of all public figures-past and present-could sue for royalties. Even George Washington's descendants could charge the federal government for the right to use his image on the $1 bill. The judges ruled in favor of Universal.
Laurel and Hardy
In 1975, after Laurel and Hardy's old films became popular on TV, the heirs of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy filed a similar lawsuit against Hal Roach Studios. This time, the heirs won, throwing the entire issue of posthumous "intellectual property" into chaos.
Based on legal decisions, it was impossible to tell who owned the rights to a dead celebrity's image-the public... or the celebrity's family.
ELVIS PRESLEY
That was the situation when Elvis died from a drug overdose on August 16, 1977. His death was announced at 3:30 that afternoon; within a few hours, newspapers were speculating about his estate's value.
The media figured the King had to be worth a bundle: in his more than 20 years as a performer, he'd recorded 144 Top 40 songs, starred in more than 30 films, (at one point he was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood), performed in hundreds of sold-out concerts, and sold more than 600 million records. No other recording artist had ever even come close to his accomplishments.
Estimates of Elvis Presley's fortune were as high as $150 million. (When John Lennon was assassinated three years later, he left an estate valued at more than $200 million). But they were way off.
I have four teenagers who each have various small rechargeable gadgets. The chargers are hooked up all over the house, which means cords go everywhere. This little project might make things easier for parents and dogs who tend to trip over cords. It's a pocket to hold your device as it's recharging -made out of a shampoo bottle! Find the instruction at Make. Link -via Unique Daily
This vehicle is called Leach's Garbage Getter, a state-of-the-art sanitation truck built between 1932 and 1949. You can see many garbage truck designs from different eras and different parts of the world in a roundup at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
Paleontologist Philip Gingerich looks for sea monsters in the Egyptian desert. He assembles fossils of ancient whales that died there when it was covered by an ocean. One such whale is the Basilosaurus, which had small hind legs.
"Complete specimens like that Basilosaurus are Rosetta stones," Gingerich told me as we drove back to his field camp. "They tell us vastly more about how the animal lived than fragmentary remains."
Wadi Hitan—literally "valley of whales"—has proved phenomenally rich in such Rosetta stones. Over the past 27 years Gingerich and his colleagues have located the remains of more than a thousand whales here, and countless more are left to be discovered.
Researchers hope that whale fossils can help them understand how a land mammal evolved into an aquatic form that became our modern whales. Link
(Image credit: Richard Barnes/National Geographic)
