Venice is a lovely city in Italy that uses canals instead of roads, which draws tourists from all over the world. At one time it was a trading powerhouse and the center of international finance. But how did this unique city come about? The first inhabitants were refugees fleeing from barbarian attacks on the mainland, who ended up on a group of clay islands out in a lagoon. Why they stayed out there tells us something about the safety of the dark ages.

The residents of Venice figured out how to make those 126 muddy islands stable enough to build a city upon, how to connect the islands with each other, and how to furnish it with fresh water as the population grew. Then there's the sewage system. The engineering marvel that is Venice has stood for more than a thousand years. This video has a one-minute skippable ad at 3:50. -Thanks, Brother Bill!

The latest clicker game from Steam to take the gaming world by surprise is Banana. The name is simple, and so is the game. You click on a picture of a banana. That's it. But you click over and over and over until you start unlocking rewards and advancing to higher levels. You can win a new skin for your banana, trade skins with other players, and buy skins and other enhancements. That's typical of "clicker games" that arose more than ten years ago. Clicker games are very easy to play. You just keep clicking. You don't expect to have fun doing the game itself; that comes with the microtransactions when you unlock the rewards. Yes, some people find the transactions and trading to be fun. You can even automate the clicking, so the game advances while you are doing other stuff. It's estimated that most of the players are bots anyway. 

The success of "Banana" is another example of how much our digital lives have been devoured by automation. It’s also the logical end point of video-game microtransactions. Is engagement with the game authentic or inauthentic? Who cares, so long as people are spending money.

The whole idea of clicker games started out as a joke, but now they are a bona fide thing, and companies are making money off them. Read about Banana and the rise of clicker games at Sherwood. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Titus Tscharntke)

In the days before MRIs, antibiotics, or even germ theory, things regularly happened to human bodies that no one could explain. Even when they could be explained, there are cases that defy imagination and sent shivers down the spines of anyone who heard about them. Some cases worked themselves out, and at least one was a hoax, while others led to death or lifelong disability. As you hear about these very strange medical cases, you should think of how grateful you are that we live in the age of medical science that we do.

You know the cases of Phineas Gage and Mary Toft, which were so weird they had to be included. Dedicated Neatorama readers will also remember the exploding teeth. But that leaves us nine other bizarre tales from the history of medicine that might make you a bit nervous to think about in the latest video from Weird History.

When a "fact" gets repeated often enough, it becomes lore, and sometimes even an idiom. You've heard "blind as a bat" and "the wise owl" so many times it seems natural, but neither is true. Bats aren't blind. Sure, they use echolocation, but that's because they fly in the dark. It's hard to see in the dark no matter how good your eyesight is. Owls may look wise, and they are in many storybooks, but studies show they have more trouble learning a new task than other birds do.

Sometimes even the refutation of an old wive's tale can be inaccurate. The custom of bullfighters waving a red cape was once explained as their way of enraging the bull for a fight. That was later "debunked" by the "fact" that cattle are colorblind. The real story is that bulls can indeed see red, but they have trouble distinguishing blue from green. Whether red actually enrages them is another story. Okay, how many other often-repeated commonsense "facts" about animals can you think of? They may likely be pure myth. Mental Floss has a list of 64 misconceptions about 63* different animals they will happily debunk for you.

* The list says 64 different animals, but both cows and bulls are in there, and they are the same species.

New Zealand filmmaker Éowyn Aldridge filmed a simple, wordless scene of herself entering a room and drinking some water, but did it over and over again to illustrate the various filmmaking styles of ten different accomplished directors. I haven't seen enough Christopher Nolan movies to recognize his style, but as soon as we got the Kubrick stare, I was hooked. In the above video you'll see an interpretation of the work of Christopher Nolan, Stanley Kubrick, Edgar Wright, Quentin Tarantino, Denis Villeneuve, Wes Anderson, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Taika Waititi, and Éowyn Aldridge. Then she did the same with ten more directors! The second video features the styles of Ari Aster, Alfred Hitchcock, Tim Burton, Paul Thomas Anderson, Greta Gerwig, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Jane Campion, Gullimero del Toro, Ridley Scott, and Martin Scorsese. You don't have to guess which is which, as they are all labeled.

I'm familiar with just enough of these directors to enjoy her interpretations. -via Laughing Squid

The Cold War was cold because the US and the Soviet Union both had nuclear weapons, and neither side wanted to use them. But competition was fierce in other arenas besides the battlefield, the most obvious being the Space Race and the Olympic games. Both were opportunities to to prove which political system was better, but the Olympics were where people from each nation actually got together. There have been quite a few defections from the USSR and communist Eastern Bloc countries during the Olympics, and the US covertly encouraged those as another point for the West in the one-upmanship battle.

The CIA sometimes involved US athletes in engaging Soviet athletes to discuss defecting during the Olympics. We might never know the extent of their efforts, but in 1960, javelin star Al Cantello was approached by a mysterious government agent about arranging the possible defection of Soviet long jumper Igor Ter-Ovanesyan. US sprinter Dave Sime had already been recruited by the CIA to help facilitate such a defection. Cantello, who died earlier this year, told his story decades after the fact, and you can read it at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

The stereotype that other countries have of Americans is that we are all rich, fat, and armed. There are other things the rest of the world finds strange abut Americans, like how loud we speak, how we smile too much, and how we bare our teeth when we smile. British immigrant Laurence Brown looks at another American stereotype- our use of ice cubes. We feel the need to put them in our drinks at all times, even in winter. One reason is because it is much hotter in the US than it ever is in Britain, where it rains a lot and they don't even put screens in their windows because it's too cool for mosquitos. But that isn't the whole story.

The American obsession with ice has to do with our history, from back when ice was one of our biggest exports. It's one of the peculiarities of having a nation that is so big that it covers several climates, and since there was a lot of money to be made, we got used to having ice all the time. But we also need refrigerators and freezers because it's a long way to the supermarket, and we don't want to go there every day. Yes, Laurence gives us a concise history of ice in America in his latest video. There's a 50-second skippable ad at two minutes in.

Heritage Auctions held a two-day auction of Hollywood memorabilia last week and sold that bikini from Return of the Jedi for $175,000. And it wasn't even the costume that was in the final film! This one is authentic from the production, but it was only used for screen tests.

Why did it Princess Leia's bikini fetch such a high price? Because that costume was such a memorable part of the movie series. After two Star Wars films, audiences were shocked at seeing the beloved princess showing so much skin while she was being held in slavery by Jabba the Hut. It was titillating, but also illustrated her humiliation. Viewers were either excited or else scandalized by the costume in a story that was so appealing to children. Actress Carrie Fisher was among those. She didn't feel good about being nearly naked, and counseled Daisy Ridley not to give in if the producers wanted her to wear something she wasn't comfortable with in the sequel series. The upshot is that Star Wars fans have been talking about the bikini for 41 years now. Read more about the impact this costume made at Smithsonian. -via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Michael Barera)

A filmmaker's vision for a movie, the script, the resulting footage, and the finished product are often four very different stories. At any stage of the process, the team may decide that they need to go in a completely different direction.

John Hughes wrote the screenplay for the 1986 movie Ferris Beuller's Day Off in less than a week, and shot the film to follow that first draft. Once the scenes were assembled, the first cut was two hours and 45 minutes long! Even worse, test audiences didn't like it. Enter legendary editor Paul Hirsch to save the movie by re-editing the footage that had been shot. Not only did he shorten it, but most importantly, he rearranged all the sequences. When you see what order they were in originally, you'll see how this made a vast improvement in the pacing and the audience's emotional involvement. CinemaStix fills us in on how that happened to Ferris Beuller's Day Off forty years ago. -via The Awesomer

Let's see how ArtButMakeItSports (previously at Neatorama) is finding the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. We've already seen some wonderful photos, magic moments captured from the athletic competitions, but is it art? It sure is! Let's see US gymnast Frederick Richard on the parallel bars.

Closed by Sorcery, by Luis Felipe Noe, 1963, 📸 by @Dan_Mullan pic.twitter.com/aPudLCtpQA

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) July 31, 2024

The guy who runs the artbutmakeitsports social media accounts does not use AI to find the artworks that match the photographs. It's all from memory, which fuels speculation that he must be an art history professor or possibly a museum curator. Continue reading to see more of his Olympic/art comparisons.

Sometimes science just happens when you're not prepared for it. Researchers Delphine Farmer and Mj Riches were in the woods of Colorado studying the leaf-level photosynthesis of Ponderosa pines in 2020. Or as we non-scientists would call it, pine needle-level photosynthesis. The pores in a tree's leaves (or needles) take in carbon dioxide and emit oxygen and other materials. But there was smoke from wildfires in the area, and they found that the trees' pores had essentially shut down and were not doing their usual life-sustaining actions. The trees had detected the smoke.

This defense mechanism led the two scientists to look into the effects of wildfire smoke and other pollutants on a tree's health. There's not much a tree can do to defend itself from fire, but they can reject poor quality air -at least for a short time. Read about how trees breathe, until they refuse to, at the Conversation.

(Image credit: Matt Lavin)

In 1752, Benjamin Franklin famously flew a kite in a thunderstorm and literally caught lightning in his hand. In 1753, Russian physicist Georg Wilhelm Richmann tried to do the same with a metal rod and was killed by lightning. Meanwhile in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), a priest named Prokop Diviš wanted to build a machine to control the weather, specifically the electricity in the atmosphere. In 1754, he erected his weather machine atop a 40-meter pole in order to extract the natural electricity from the air and prevent thunderstorms. Scientists thought he was nuts. The local villagers believed in his machine, and tore it down when there was a drought.  

The "weather machine" worked, but not in the way Diviš wanted, and for reasons he didn't quite anticipate. For a long time, people thought Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, but Diviš' tower preceded Franklin's. Read how Diviš came up with the lightning rod at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Bohemianroots)

Government laboratories run by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) do research on virulent and deadly diseases like smallpox, ebola, and Marburg virus in order to keep us all safe. But what about the people who work in those labs? The safety protocols have to be on the level of The Andromeda Strain. And just like that story, the strictness of the different levels correspond with the danger of the virus being studied. Unlike the movie, the different levels are in different labs in different places. The first level is on par with what hospitals require of visitors to an infectious patient with, say, flesh-eating bacteria. Don't ask me how I know. Above that, the protocols get very serious. The most serious of these virus labs is one that hasn't even been built yet, but will cover a big chunk of ground in Atlanta. This video from Half as Interesting is only seven minutes long; the rest is an ad.  -via Digg

William and Margaret Patterson owned a photo supply shop in El Paso, Texas. There was evidence that their marriage was not always happy, but they were otherwise upstanding and well-liked in the community. Then on March 6, 1957, a store employee was awakened by a call from William Patterson saying the couple were going away. That didn't seem all that suspicious, but later events would. Nine days later, a telegram arrived at the store directing employees to lease out the Patterson's home for nine months and make other odd arrangements. At the home, they found the Pattersons had not taken their luggage, and Margaret's beloved cat was wandering the neighborhood, which was very suspicious. By August, employees involved the police.

While the Pattersons were never seen again in El Paso, a cryptic letter came from Laredo about distributing the Patterson's assets, and witnesses had seen the couple in Valle de Bravo, near Mexico City. As the years passed, the clues became more infrequent, but still stranger than before. Read about the mysterious disappearance of William and Margaret Patterson at Mental Floss.   

(Image credit: WhisperToMe)

While the original Star Wars trilogy left us with the idea that the Jedi were good and the Sith were bad, the prequels made us doubt the Jedi were all that ethical, and the sequel trilogy further tarnished their reputation. However, the Sith remain ridiculously evil. The latest Star Wars TV series, The Acolyte, further muddies the waters with Jedi who have plenty of questionable motivations and deeds. The streaming series concluded a couple of weeks ago, and received generally favorable reviews, after an initial review-bombing. There is no word yet on whether there will be a season two. Meanwhile, Screen Junkies has plenty to say about the series in an Honest Trailer that makes me feel as if I have seen the entire run of Star Wars: The Acolyte, yet I'm still confused as to what it's all about. The whole idea of space witches has me longing for a simple trench run.