Randall Munroe of xkcd spends an awful lot of time and brain power answering theoretical questions in his What If? series (previously at Neatorama). For example, one question is "If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time?" The answer is Australia, not because it's the largest country (it is 6th), but because it's the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, which tends to point more to the center of the Milky Way.

Dumb questions can lead to a lot of learning. In the video above, the question is "If all the lightning strikes happening in the world on any given day all happened in the same place at once, what would happen to that place?" My first thought was that everyone would avoid that place, and that is certainly one of the consequences. But to understand the implications, we must first learn a few things about lightning, which is well worth the time it takes for Munroe to get to the actual question in this video. Spoiler alert: if it happened, it would look awesome. From a distance.

An extremely rare chunk of Tyrian purple dye has been found in England, in the archaeological dig on the grounds of the Carlisle Cricket Club. The dye was found in the drainage area of the remnants of a Roman bathhouse dating back to the third century CE, during the reign of Roman emperor Septimius Severus. It is a rare find because Tyrian purple, also called imperial purple, was such an expensive dye that it was restricted to royalty, and someone lost it in the bathhouse drain. You can imagine the uproar that must have caused. It is also rare to find Tyrian purple in a solid form, as it was used mostly for paint and for dying fabric. Also, the specimen is still quite colorful after 1800 years!  

Tyrian purple was so expensive in its day because it was made from the glands of murex snails, the most productive being the species Hexaplex trunculus. It took about a quarter million snails to produce one ounce of dye. These sea snails live in shallow water and die when exposed to air. Yet the dye gland can only be extracted from a living snail (which causes its death), or the dye will deteriorate immediately, so each snail must be kept alive until the glands can be harvested, one by one. The process for doing all this is explained in this post. The smell of the dye was remarkably bad, as you would imagine the smell of rotting sea creatures to be, and would not yield to washing the fabric. Emperors who wore Tyrian purple had to be heavily perfumed to disguise it.

The name Tyrian purple came from the Phoenician city of Tyre, which, along with the city of Sidon, was a center of the dying industry. In fact, the word Phoenicia came from the Greek word Phoinkes, which means "the purple people." Both cities were wealthy from Tyrian purple, and both cities were known to smell awful. There is no mention of whether the chunk recovered in England still smells. You'll find even more links about Tyrian purple at Metafilter.     

(Image credit: Wardell Armstrong)

Yesterday I drove through Atlanta as the construction season is starting to ramp up, so I am very impressed with this pavement replacement project in Switzerland. They simply erect a bridge over a section of the road so that cars can drive right across while work is going on underneath! The crew carves up the old pavement, repairs and prepares the sub-pavement, lays new asphalt, steamrolls it smooth, and cleans up the mess, before moving the bridge to a new repair section. Here's a machine translation of the YouTube description:

The mobile ASTRA Bridge construction site bridge has been in use again on the A1 in the direction of Zurich since the beginning of April 2024. The decking work under the ASTRA Bridge is progressing according to plan. While work is going on under the bridge, traffic above is moving in two lanes at 60 km/h.

You have to wonder how long it takes to move the bridge, because they probably do have to divert traffic for that part- or do they? Here's another video from the Swiss Federal Roads Office showing how the ASTRA Bridge is erected.



So yes, they close lanes to put the bridge up, but even so, it is a minimal closure compared to the weeks that lanes are closed in the US while miles of highway are repaved at a time.  -via Boing Boing

We tend to take it for granted that blue jeans were invented by Levi Strauss, who made work pants for the miners of the California Gold Rush. It's true that Strauss designed tough work pants with rivets, but the blue denim they were made of had already been worn by working class people in Italy for at least a couple of hundred years! We know this because of ten paintings by an unidentified Renaissance painter known only as the “Master of the Blue Jeans.” This painter depicted a family of working class people clad in denim, with a white weft and blue warp, the same as the jeans we wear today. The warp threads were dyed with indigo, which brought the price of blue fabric down considerably after it began to be imported from India.

The Master of the Blue Jeans is the subject of a new exhibition at Galerie Cenesso in Paris opening May 16. Read up on the history of blue denim and see two of the paintings from the mysterious Master of the Blue Jeans at Smithsonian.

(Image source: Galerie Canesso)

Welcome to Edgewood, BC
byu/robinnuber infunny

Redditor robinnuber make a promotional video for Edgewood, British Columbia. Despite the dry humor, it ends up being a place everyone wants to visit, or even live there. When you have a ribbon factory and more ostriches than people, you've got something to talk about. Edgewood has only a few hundred residents, but it has an extensive Wikipedia entry detailing the history of the town, with no mention of the population. That means that some Wikipedia member is pretty proud of their town. The reach of the internet means that commenters that are familiar with Edgewood came in to note that the general store and the gas station are, in fact, the same place. As if we couldn't tell.  

A noticeable detail is the can-and-string microphone. It makes this video look comically pre-industrial, but it's a genius idea. The phone slipped inside the can records the narrative while being protected from wind noise. -via reddit

The best descriptions always come from the YouTube comments. One said that Trombone Nonsense was his favorite genre of music. Another said the trombone is perfect balance of beauty and comedy. But most lauded this video as a throwback to years ago when videos were clever and silly and original and didn't rely on effects.

Charis Dwire wrote this song, "Tug of War Duet", after her brother Nathan Dwire thought up the idea of trombones having a musical tug-of-war as if their slides had become entangled at the ends. It is performed here by Joseph Greene and Sam Robertson. You can download the sheet music here.

If you are intrigued by the idea of Trombone Nonsense, you should check out more videos: Cattle Call, Trombone Alpine Skiing, Flamethrower Trombone, Trombone Suicide, and This Is What Happens If You Sneeze Into a Trombone.

The Hugo Awards for great science fiction were named for Hugo Gernsback. He founded the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926 and went on to publish and edit several other magazines. Gernsback wrote extensively on technology, imagining the gadgets of the future, many that came to be in one way or another, and many that were possible, but that no one really wanted.

In the above image, Gernsback illustrated long distance medical care, in which the doctor can see and even feel a patient without making a house call. This was in 1925, before we even had television! Today we have telemedicine, in which a patient consults a doctor by internet, and also long-distance surgery in which a surgeon manipulates robotic instruments on a patient in another country. However, Gernsback also imagined devices to get more work out of employees, like a helmet that kept distractions away and an electric cage that would wake an office worker who started to doze off. You have to worry about the poor folks who worked on his magazines. Read about seven of Gernsback's weirdest visions of a technological future at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Science and Invention/Matt Novak)

Odin is a good boy. He's a Swiss shepherd who has learned to carry a camera as he zooms around and explores. This is an Insta360 camera, which gives the effect that Odin is a giant floating dog traipsing around the tiny globe wherever he is. And he's so happy doing it!

If you enjoyed that, there are plenty of videos of Odin and his 360 camera at TikTok. Odin has been to a lot of exotic places -and worn a lot of costumes- for his art. @odinswissshepherd -via Laughing Squid

The phrase "missionary position" refers to a sexual position in which heterosexual partners lie down facing each other, with the man on top. It has also been called the "English-American position" and it has long been considered the most vanilla sexual position of all, so much that it was endorsed by the Catholic church in the medieval period. But where did the "missionary" part come from?

Dr. Alfred Kinsey used the term in his 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He cited research that indigenous communities in Papua New Guinea made fun of missionaries for their sexual practices, and assumed that was where the term came from. When I first heard this story long ago, I couldn't believe that missionaries were trying to teach natives the "correct" way to have sex -and that was a valid question. It turned out that Kinsey had interpreted the research wrong in several ways, and ended up coining the term himself without even realizing it. Read what Kinsey got wrong about the source of this term at Mental Floss.

Ontario horse groomer Autumn Purdy plays music while she works in the stable. One quarterhorse mare really likes the music, and will bob her head and dance -but only to heavy metal tunes. She loves music by Rammstein, Motörhead, Of Virtue, Rob Zombie, Pantera, and Korn, but her absolute favorite music is by Slipknot. Purdy did a little music experiment, and the horse just turned her back when hearing country music! She bobbed a little to Tom Jones, but then soon lost interest. We don't know the horse's real name, but she's become famous as Rock Horse. Some of the bands have actually sent Purdy new songs for the horse to check out and give her opinion. You can see more of her head-banging joy at TikTok. -via Laughing Squid

The most common words to grace a cake are "Happy Birthday." Most people can spell "happy," but when it comes to "birthday," the danger of a brain fart increases. Jen Yates at Cake Wrecks has seen so many cases of bizarre spellings of that one word that she had to split a compilation into two posts, and the misspellings run the gamut of missing letters to completely different words to incoherent jumbles.

 

Having once worked in a supermarket, I know how this happens. Someone buys a blank cake and requests an inscription in icing. The bakery/deli department has as few people on duty as possible, and half of them are new, and the other half have avoided ever learning how to use icing. So a request goes out to the entire store for someone who's done it before, or is at least willing to try. Bob in the loading dock sees a chance to spend a few minutes in the air conditioning with no heavy lifting, and volunteers. And if any volunteer sees a misspelling, it is way easier to pretend not to see it than to fix it. The customer? They have a ready-made submission to Cake Wrecks.

See how people can can misspell "birthday" in ten ways here and eight more ways here.

The legendary Paris cafés where intellectuals met and tourists now flock haven't been there all that long in the grand scheme of things. There weren't many restaurants at all in Paris 150 years ago. But there were migrants from rural France who came to the city to make a living during the industrial revolution. When a railway was built, many of these migrants moved in from the Auvergne region. They settled in a small area of Paris together and were called Auvergnats. They got jobs doing the hard labor Parisians didn't want to do, but eventually settled on the coal and charcoal business. Auvergnats imported coal by rivers and canals and delivered it to city dwellers who increasingly lived in buildings that were heated.

To store the coal before it was sold to individuals, they had to have space, and they put up warehouses for that purpose. But the coal business was slow in summer, so the Auvergnats began to sell refreshments out of their warehouses during warm weather, which customers could enjoy at tables outside. In this roundabout way, the Paris café was invented. But there's a lot more to the story, which you can read at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: MARQUE FRANÇAISE)

An airline for dogs? It sounds like an April Fool joke, and the video makes the whole idea seem like a parody, but Bark Air is real. It was launched by the folks who bring us Bark Toys in Bark Boxes. For those who need to travel with their beloved dog, this is the ultimate in customer service. The dogs are treated better than any economy class passenger on a major airline.

But there are caveats. Bark Air does not operate its own planes. They use planes and pilots from other carriers, and take off from private airports. So far, there are only two routes, New York to London, and New York to Los Angeles. The London route costs $8,000 one way for one person and one dog. The LA route is $6,000. Still, it's a start, and Bark Air hopes to expand service and bring the cost down as they grow. That is, if there's enough demand for them to stay in business long enough to grow.  -via Nag on the Lake

Believe it or not, Cabbage Patch Kids, the dolls that took the world by storm when they became the Christmas gift of 1983, are still a thing. One of their draws is that these dolls have a magical backstory. Each one is "born" at Babyland General Hospital, and the owner "adopts" the doll, with certificates and everything. Furthermore, Babyland General Hospital is a real place, and you can visit it in Cleveland, Georgia. Take a tour, visit the gift shop, and if you have the bucks, you can buy a doll that you can witness being born. If you don't have the bucks, you can watch someone else's doll being born.

The dolls are born from Mother Cabbage with the help of a costumed nurse who engages the crowd to help her through her labor pains. It's not clear whether Mother cabbage is a tree, a mound, or something hidden behind those things, but the ritual is the ultimate in kitsch, meant to engage a five-year-old but still a little beyond their understanding. Joshua Rigsby took his family to Babyland General Hospital and got to witness the birth of a Cabbage Patch Kid. His description of the bizarre ritual at Thrillist will make you want to visit just for the giggles. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Kelly Verdeck)

Every detail of Boba Fett's getup is perfect as he sets out on his adventure. Everyone knows who he is supposed to be, but once he makes it to a galaxy far, far away, he kind of blends in a little too well. There are Wookiees and Cereans and Biths and Jawas everywhere. Where are all his Mandalorian friends?  

This is an ad for Apple's new app called Precision Finding, available for iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro. I don't know anyone who has a 15, or can afford one, but the skit is pretty cool. The music will be stuck in my head for a while. May the fourth be with you. -via Boing Boing