There are several services available today that let you know when someone opens an email message you sent. That way, you know they got the message. If you’re trying to keep track of a bunch of things to tell a bunch of people, like during wedding planning, that can be a great help. It can also be a blow to your ego to find out how many people are getting your messages but choosing not to respond. And it can cause trouble, as in the case of Jenny, who continued to email Steve after they broke up. When he got a new girlfriend, he quit responding, but she knew he read her friendly emails anyway, because she had a tracker that notified her when they were opened.   

One Tuesday in the summer of 2015, Jenny got a flurry of read receipts. Steve had just re-read all of the emails she had sent him the year before in rapid succession. This struck Jenny as strange, especially when she looked at the time. It was 10 a.m.; Steve was likely at work. So she sent him a text message, “Did you just open a bunch of old emails from me?” He said he hadn’t and wanted to know why she thought he had. She told him about the tracking. He called her a creep (mostly kiddingly), but also revealed that he’d gotten back together with the restrictive girlfriend. Apparently, after he’d left for work that day, she had hopped on his home computer and snooped through his email.

“They had a huge fight,” Jenny told me.

There are also enhanced trackers that can geolocate an email recipient. That’s problematic when a stalker uses it. Bosses use it to track employees. But the biggest group that uses email trackers is marketers. Read about email trackers and what they can do at Fusion.

(Image credit: Erendira Mancias/FUSION)

(Image credit: Keli Ciesemier)

Dickens fans have long wondered which real-life spinster inspired Miss Havisham of Great Expectations. Does a haunted house hold a shocking new clue?

It starts with the house. Long before it inspired one of London’s most popular haunted house rides, the building at 50 Berkeley Square inspired fear. The dark and dilapidated structure sat ignored, caked in decades of soot and grime. Handbills and loose straw accumulated in the yard. In the words of Charles G. Harper, author of the 1907 book Haunted Houses, the four-story manse was “the very picture of misery.”

A spectacle of decay in an otherwise respectable central London neighborhood, the house became a magnet for ghost stories. One magazine claimed: “When touched, [the walls] are found saturated with electric horror.” Those foolhardy enough to spend the night inside, it was whispered, were found dead in the morning, their faces contorted with terror.

In the 1860s and 1870s, the few who dared knock at the door were waved off by a tight-lipped servant. One would-be investigator, fortifying his courage with drink, was promptly arrested and fined 10 shillings—though he never managed to get inside. The local Spiritualist Society had no better luck contacting the owner, leaving the Victorian poet Frederick Doveton to muse:

The cobwebs in the windows lie,
And dirt and dust are there;
What is the unknown history
Of 50, Berkeley-square?

In 1880, the disappointingly mundane answer emerged in Notes & Queries magazine. Despite its vacant appearance, 50 Berkeley Square had been occupied by a Mr. Myers since 1859—unlisted and unseen but brought to light in 1873 by a tax summons. The “ghost” was simply a recluse who had let the place decay. But like the best haunted houses, 50 Berkeley Square had juicier secrets tucked beneath its floorboards. In fact, the home’s true legacy may be more fantastic than any ghost story and may hold the key to unlocking one of literature’s greatest puzzles.

How many ways are there to die in space? Way more than we really want to think about. This animation by Thomas Lucas has quite a few of them, crammed into a very short amount of time.

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If you’re going to die at the hands of a space alien, better do it within two seconds! Am I horrible for laughing at these? It is a cartoon, and we've seen a lot of these scenes in movies already. -via Everlasting Blort

Coyote Peterson was wandering through the Costa Rican rainforest at night -which doesn’t seem all that safe- when he encountered an ocelot. Luckily, this was a half-grown cat that was somewhat used to people. Still, how strange is it that a wildcat will let you pet her?

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She also wants to play, and you know how cats play, by attacking! Peterson gets his ear chewed on and a few scratches. Don’t try this at home. As if you could! Let’s just hope that this ocelot’s ease around humans doesn’t lead her to a bad end someday.  -via Viral Viral Videos

A home theater is the best of both worlds: the privacy and flexibility of watching home video, plus the immersive experience of a theater. If you have the room and some money, you can get a lot of bang for your buck. But if money is no object, there are new advances in home theater equipment and design that could be your dream come true! Check out this relatively tame design called The Traditional:

This Future Home Traditional design won the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Award (CEDIA) for 2004 Best Home Theater (Level VII) $600,000 – $800,000 for the 2004 EXPO. Located in Southwest Arizona, the wide screen image was “so brilliant” that the company pictured it on its website rather than using a standard image to replicate it. The theater features an ISP calibrated video capable of exceeding the standards normal for a professional theater. It also has a twelve-foot screen for optimal viewing, within the luxurious theater interior.

See others that will help your imagination run wild at Housely. Besides the quality screens and sound, many are modeled after real theaters or designed around your favorite film.

Hitchcock meets Lucas in a mashup by Fabrice Mathieu. Cary Grant is dropped off at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere ...on Tatooine. The countryside is infested with Sarlaccs. Can things get worse? Of course they can!

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Don’t fret too much -this short film has a relatively happy ending. Enjoy the terror of North by Northwest with the cool spaceships of Star Wars. -via Gamma Squad

Need some ideas to write your crimefighting buddy story? Try out the generator They Fight Crime. You can select the names and genders of your duo (or not), and the generator picks the relevant characteristics from columns A, B, and C. Many hit TV series have been built with this kind of  method. When yours is picked up by a network, let them know you heard about the sure-fire formula right here! See other examples at Twitter. -via Metafilter

Trust me, this isn't unusual, even in humans. You might think you're testing intelligence, but some subjects just don't care. Therefore, you're actually testing how much they care. I have a child going off to college like this: she's smart, but only about things she cares about. So I worry. This is the latest comic from Megacynics.

When someone of a royal family is born, the name they are given has already been vetted many times over. But if they eventually become the monarch, they can decide to take a different name. How common or simple that is depends on the country. But keeping up with monarchs and their names over thousands of years can be daunting.  

Pop quiz, hotshot. The last King of England who went by the name of Edward was Edward VIII (1936). So, how many King Edwards has England had?

Show Answer

Ha. Fooled you. It's eleven.

That came about because early kings of Britain were called by some sort of modifier: Edward the Elder, Edward the Martyr, Edward the Confessor… you get the idea. When they ran out of descriptive terms, they started using numbers. But there are cases of royalty elsewhere where the numbers get skipped, which will cause future historians no small amount of anguish, especially when the digital records crash. Read about some of the weird things that happen when we try to keep track of monarchs using common family names at NewStatesman. -via Metafilter

Imagine that your job is to straighten up the panda yard. You’re trying to remove the dried leaves, but all the two juvenile giant pandas see is an opportunity to play. It's like trying to do housework around a bunch of toddlers, except these youngsters are big, strong bears!

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This happened at a panda breeding facility in Sichuan, China. You have to wonder how many people were watching at the time. The worker gets frustrated at first, then she giggles (because who wouldn’t), and finally appears to enjoy putting on a show for the onlookers. Maybe they do this routine every day! -via Viral Viral Videos 

Elmo the Irish setter belongs to a music store owner in Finland. When he gets the chance to check out the piano display room, he knows just what to do!  

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One dog, three pianos. My husband yelled from the other room, “Who’s hurting that dog?” I replied that he’s just suffering from the noise. Elmo may not yet be ready for Carnegie Hall, but he’s got the drive and enthusiasm to get there someday. -via Tastefully Offensive

Krystel Ciocon and Earle Doudera not only fell in love, they share a deep love of all things Star Wars. That included their wedding, which featured a Star Wars photo shoot, a lightsaber battle between the bride and groom performed for the guests, a Death Star wedding cake, and more. See more pictures and read the story of Krystel and Earle’s Star Wars romance at Buzzfeed.  

(Image credit: Bryan Giardinelli)

Today is the final day of New York Design Week, which was really two weeks. There were hundreds of beautiful products, technologies, and architectural masterpieces showcased. Housefly collected some of the best to show us, like The Impossible Project.

For those who have a tendency toward the nostalgia for physical photography, The Impossible Project will include a special product launch. This collection showcases the heroes of Polaroid instant film which boasts an I-1 Camera to pay homage to the Polaroid camera while simultaneously integrating digital controls allowing for functionality such as aperture remove triggering and shutter speed control via an app.

That sounds intriguing. See nine more projects from New York Design Week at Housely.

This chart shows where U.S. immigrants came from over the past 200 years, measured as a percentage of the U.S. population at the time. Max Galka crunched the numbers and made an interactive map showing the places U.S. immigrants have come from between 1820 and 2013. At Metrocosm, you can adjust the slider to check out different years or just let it play, like this video.

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Each dot represents 10,000 people. The 79 million people who immigrated to the U.S. during that period only include those who became permanent legal residents. -via Boing Boing

A goat (described as a lamb in the video description) was born in December in China's Yunnan Province without its back legs. The female kid was seen standing only a day after its birth. She also tried to walk, and within a week had figured out how to get around on two forelegs.

(YouTube link)

Now almost five months old, the two-legged goat is not exactly keeping up with the other goats, but appears to be accepted by them. -via Arbroath