For hundreds of years before we learned to treat communicable diseases with antibiotics, the most effective treatment was quarantine. Oh, it wasn’t a great treatment for a sick patient, but it helped protect a community from contagion. And you didn’t have to be sick to be quarantined. Travelers often had to sit out some time on an island before their ship was admitted to the mainland in order to catch disease entering a country.
Hakai magazine tell us the stories of five quarantine islands in Italy, Canada, Uruguay, American Samoa, and South Korea; why they came about and what happened to them. -via Digg
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Over the past few years, you’ve probably heard about houses in Detroit selling for $10 and up. You’ve also seen pictures of houses that were abandoned during the ciry’s decline into bankruptcy. Now Detroit is slowly recovering, but you can still buy a house, even historic houses, for a pittance. It’s not a simple transaction. The public agencies that sell homes at auction for as little as $500 or $1,000 require you to pay property taxes, which may be years overdue, and you may be required to repair and live in it.
8. If you buy a house from the Detroit Land Bank, you have six months to get it up to code and occupied.
For historic homes you get nine months. Otherwise you risk losing the property and the money you paid for it. That means you’ll need to have the cash to fix up your fixer-upper ASAP. If you show a good-faith effort toward renovation, they will consider giving extensions, but they want legitimate landlords or homeowners, not absentee investors.
This rule is the biggest difference between the DLB and other auctions. “We’re trying to discount the speculators and the people just buying up properties and sitting on them to wait for them to go up in value,” Craig Fahle, director of public affairs for the Detroit Land Bank, told BuzzFeed Life. “We actually want someone to fix it up and rebuild the value of the neighborhood.”
This is a great deal for someone who is looking for a home instead of a property investment, if you are willing to put in the cash and the work. And people from Detroit will tell you that it’s a great place to live and getting better. Read the particulars about buying a house in Detroit at Buzzfeed.
(Image credit: Jessica Probus/Buzzfeed)
This marble run is awesome! How many should we send down this time? All of them! Well, actually they had 13,000 marbles, but only used 11,000. Did someone really count them? The action is hypnotizing.
Jelle Bakker has been building this marble run at Monkey Town, an entertainment center in Gouda, Netherlands, for a couple of months now. It just needs a little fine-tuning and it will ready for the public. (via Digg)
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader.
“Okay” is one of the most commonly used words in the world. But who came up with it?
WORLD WORD
Whether you spell it “okay,” “o.k.,” or “OK,” it is so universal in both its meaning and sound that linguists say it’s the most recognized word on the planet. (Second-most recognized: Coke.) It’s as close as anything we’ve got to a “universal language.”
But where the word actually came from is a bit of a mystery. Here are a few theories of how it started— and because they all developed in different parts of the world and spread, it’s possible that more than one or even all of them could be true.
• Okay is a derivative of the Old Scottish expression “och aye,” which means “oh, yes.”
• The Choctaw people (who once lived in modern-day Oklahoma) had a word oke, which means “it is so.”
• It comes from a Greek phrase, ola kala, which roughly translates to “everything’s good.”
• Les Cayes is a port city in Haiti, and the center of the 18th-century rum trade. Aux cayes (pronounced “oh-kay”) means “from Cayes” and was an expression used by French soldiers to describe the rum they were shipping (or drinking).
• A Chicago baker named Orrin Kendall provided hardtack biscuits to the Union Army during the Civil War and stamped his initials into every one.
• It came from an abbreviation used by telegraph operators, short for “open key,” meaning “ready to receive.”
THE OKAY CORRAL
Here’s a video that puts the “men” in menstruation! If men had periods, they’d treat it as a challenge, to be faced with manly courage and hi-tech solutions. Something to brag about, even!
This video is from WaterAid, an organization dedicated to bringing clean water and sanitary facilities to the world.
We've launched our ‘If Men Had Periods’ campaign to raise awareness of the 1.25 billion women around the world who do not have access to a toilet during their periods. We are calling on people to sign our ‘Make it Happen’ petition to help get women the dignity they deserve.
You’ll find the petition here. -via Time
It’s no secret that cats are biding their time, waiting for just the right moment to take over. However, the fact that we are onto their machinations makes them no less adorable. Cole and Marmalade don’t even bother to hide their intentions.
See more from Cole and Marmade. -via Laughing Squid
Construction on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco began on January 5, 1933. It opened for pedestrians on May 27, 1937, and for vehicles the next day, which makes it 78 years old. For most of those years, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Eleven men died during construction, ten of them in one accident when a platform collapsed. CNN has a slideshow of photographs from the building of the bridge and its grand opening ceremonies. -via Daily of the Day
You’d be tempted to pet the kittens by the pool, but look carefully, because mama is always watching. It’s true that bobcats are relatively small wildcats, and would normally avoid humans rather than engaging in violence, but a mother guarding her cubs will do anything to protect them. Redditor NotSure2505 posted this photo taken yesterday at a fenced-in yard in Scottsdale, Arizona. Don’t see the mother? You can enlarge the photo at imgur. He also posted some earlier photos of a bobcat on his fence and a coyote at his child’s school.
We carry our fears around with us everywhere we go. They can hide in the background, then overwhelm us when we least expect it, and they sometimes even comfort us. Occasionally, experience brings us new fears. That’s the subtext of this animated video made by Nata Metlukh as her graduation project at the Vancouver Film School.
So should we fight or ignore the individual fears we carry, or are they something to be embraced? I guess that would depend on how overall useful they are to us. You can see more about the project at Metlukh's Tumblr blog. -via Everlasting Blort
Cooking competition shows are very popular. What could make them even more popular? Have toddlers as contestants! In this cooking show, four kids somewhere between one and two years old try their hand at making cupcakes. Hosts Tobias and Bubber cover the process, which consists mainly of mess making, and judge the final results in an oh-so serious manner.
This is actually a skit from the Danish comedy/talk series The Sofie Linde Show. In Danish with English subtitles. -via Tastefully Offensive
How many different ways have we heard "Bohemian Rhapsody"? All of them? No, you are sadly mistaken. A collaborative online game between Jim Jarmo, Kamran Malik, Woodstock Taylor, and Christophe Gowans grew into this mammoth pun video based on social media accounts. It may take you a little bit of time to get into it, but soon your mouth will hang open at the scope of the project. And I completely lost it when the first guitar solo started. -via b3ta
Inventor Colin Furze, who you might remember from his pneumatic Wolverine claws, jet-powered bike, and many other videos, wanted a special video to celebrate his million YouTube subscribers. So he set of 300 rockets at once in a short but spectacular fireworks display that I hope he warned the neighbors about.
There’s no mention of a visit from the police, so I guess the fallout was benign. You can also see a video about preparations for the stunt. -via Viral Viral Videos
John Marks volunteers with the group Friends of Knight Memorial Library, and found himself pricing donated books for a vintage book sale to benefit Knight Memorial Library in Providence, Rhode Island. Last year he priced a five-volume Torah called The Law of God at $100, since there were no guidelines for the set. Luckily, no one bought it.
Marks: On Saturday, it went out for the live sale. A couple hundred people walked right past it. Doug and I thought it had potential, so we stood off to the side and watched, but nobody even looked at it. So Doug asked me if I would put it up on eBay using my personal account, since I buy and sell stuff all the time. I said, “Sure, but I can’t do it immediately because I’m not going to put something on my own eBay account unless I really know what I’m talking about.”
I must have been having writer’s block or something because I started looking into it that Monday. I started on eBay, looking up the completed sales, but there was nothing. I thought, “This thing didn’t come from a UFO, let’s see what Wikipedia has to say.” And it was there that I learned that “The Law of God” was the first English-Hebrew, facing-page translation by a Jew rather than a Protestant. This was major; this had to be worth something. Since the book had been published in Philadelphia, I did a search of all the Jewish booksellers in Pennsylvania, and sure enough, I found one that had sold a Leeser Pentateuch—for $6,500.
The Law of God is going up for auction in June, and is expected to bring between $4,000 and $6,000. Marks went deeper into the history of the five volumes, printed in both English and Hebrew, and of Isaac Leeser, who wrote the translation. We also get a look at what it was like to be Jewish in America during the Civil War, at Collectors Weekly.
Jonny has a pet duck named Nibbles. But Jonny has to go to school and leave Nibbles at home. When Mom goes to pick Jonny up at the bus stop, Nibbles goes along and is ecstatic to see Jonny get off the bus. That’s a good duck. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab created the Cheetah. Now it has become the first four-legged robot to “see” and jump over hurdles in its path while running. When you think of the many instant calculations that a flesh-and-blood animal must do to accomplish this (even though they do it quickly and constantly), this robot is all the more impressive.
It won’t be so cool when these things are chasing you. Take some comfort in the fact that robotics engineers type in anagrams the way I do and “algorithms” comes out as “algrotihms.” -via reddit
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