Atlantic puffins once nested up and down the coast of Maine, but hunting and egg-collecting reduced their numbers to, well, hardly any. Puffins instead nested in Canada. That is, until one guy decided he could bring some of them back to the U.S.

In 1969, a young biologist and birding enthusiast named Stephen Kress moved to Maine to teach at the Hog Island Audubon Camp on the coast. He learned that puffins had once been common on the coastal islands but had been hunted relentlessly. By 1901, a single pair was left in the state, and only a few pairs had been seen since. Unlike many people in Maine at the time, Kress had a visceral sense of what had been lost: He had recently worked in eastern Canada, which has some of the largest puffin colonies in the world. He started to wonder if Atlantic puffin chicks could be transplanted from Canada to Maine and used to re-establish the population south of the border.

More experienced seabird biologists shook their heads. Puffins, like many seabirds, return to their natal islands to breed. If puffin chicks were transplanted to new islands, they wouldn’t breed there; they would simply head back to the islands where they’d been born. The biologists said Kress’ notion was an idealistic waste of time or, worse, an arrogant effort to manipulate nature.

So Kress was not only motivated by a desire to see the puffins return, he also was inspired to prove the experts wrong. It took years of work and changing tactics, but the puffins eventually returned to Maine. Read about how Kress and his colleagues achieved their goal at Slate. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

(Image credit: Flickr user Martha de Jong-Lantink)

A reader wrote to Jen at Cake Wrecks that the bakery at her local supermarket has a new policy prohibiting photography. She heard that it was because the management was afraid the cakes would show up on "that bad cake site." In fact, store employees said it was because their cake designs were copyrighted. That does seem like a logical response; far more logical than hiring professionals or training cake decorators.

Of course this bakery isn't the only chain to ban photos; fact is, most stores now have similar rules. I hear from readers every week who are harassed, shooed away, and even outright kicked out of stores for whipping out their cellphones in the bakery.

Now, far be it from me to criticize rules (even ones I find really, REALLY stupid) but I don't see how harassing your own customers  - and ones who often buy your wrecks because Cake Wrecks has made them a world-wide inside joke - is good for business.

Then again, I also thought it would make more sense to train your bakers not to make wrecks instead of trying to prevent people from seeing them, so what do I know?

There are more photographic examples in the post at Cake Wrecks. Link

Stephen Schochet compiled a list to illustrate that even very successful people have unexpected setbacks. He listed ten that befell Walt Disney, who learned from his mistakes and went on to great success. Some of those setbacks are hilarious, such as the publicity stunt that backfired big time.

For the premiere of Pinocchio Walt hired 11 midgets, dressed them up like the little puppet and put them on top of Radio City Music Hall in New York with a full day's supply of food and wine. The idea was they would wave hello to the little children entering into the theater. By the middle of the hot afternoon, there were 11 drunken naked midgets running around the top of the marquee, screaming obscenities at the crowd below. The most embarrassed people were the police who had to climb up ladders and take the little fellows off in pillowcases.

Here's a picture of the event. The story of the premiere of Bambi is funny as well. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

Is it November 10th already? Tomorrow is Veterans Day, Remembrance Day, or Armistice Day, depending on where you live. Whichever you call it, it's a day to recognize this who have served their country in times of war, a date chosen because the first "war to end all wars" ended on November 11, 1918. There may be some public observances in your area, and I'll include a Veterans Day reading list at the end of this post.

Junst in case you've missed any of our exclusive features from the past week, we'll make it easy for you to catch up.

Eddie Deezen gave us The Only Mother and Son to Each Have #1 Records and 12 Things You Might Not Know About Wyatt Earp.

“Toll House” Recipe Cookies Do Not Maintain Their Morphology Under Heat Stress Conditions came from the Annals of Improbable Research.

Mental_floss magazine contributed America! Meet Your Puppet Master, subtitled How Eddie Bernays got you to buy books, wear hairnets, and eat bacon for breakfast.

We learned about the about the man who inspired the character of Ebenezer Scrooge in the post The Real Scrooge, from the newest edition of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. We also gave away five copies of the book, Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, courtesy of the very un-miserly folks at the Bathroom Reader Institute. Congratulations to the winners, JoJofries, rccola20, Hannah Creque, James Race, and Kevin Beeson!

In the What Is It? game this week, the pictured object is a vintage brass trigger guard for a gun. The first comment, from Anker, had the correct answer, which is good for a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer came from The Professor, who gave an explanation of how to "point Percy at the Porcelain," which may be a little racy for delicate sensibilities, so you can go read it for yourself, and maybe even give it a ♥. So he wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop as well! Find the answers to all this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.

The Neatoramanauts Facebook page achieved a milestone this week when it hit 25,000 "likes"! Check the post annoucing that achievement for updated information on Facebook changes that may affect your feed. Many thanks to David Israel for his work at all the social networking sites, keeping Neatorama updated at Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Flipboard as well as Facebook!

Not counting the giveaways, the posts that were most-commented-on this week was a three-way tie between I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Turkish Ice Cream, 12 Things You Might Not Know About Wyatt Earp, and Can Sex Help Sell Coffins? Feel free to jump right in to those discussions, or at any post!

Veterans Day Reading
The Lost Battalion
Doolittle's Raid
Five for Fighting
Saving Sergeant Niland
The Past, Present, and Future of Being Called to Duty
Top Ten U.S. Generals
Building the Wall
A Video of the Last Veteran of the American Civil War
The Funeral for the Last American Veteran of the War of 1812

(YouTube link)

Brian Egenriether invented and built a Skittles sorting machine, because he could. It determines the color of each candy and slots it into the appropriate bin.

It uses a BASIC Stamp 2 and 3 servos for actuation. An IR LED and phototransistor are used to stop the turnstile in position. I fabricated may of the parts from epoxy including the body, the turnstile, the chute header, etc. The base is wood and the funnel is from a hummingbird feeder. The rest is made from telescope parts and PVC.

So you are no longer bound to "taste the rainbow" if you really prefer just the yellow ones. -via Laughing Squid

(YouTube link)

Four-week-old chihuahua Willow needs a little work on her balance, but she will get it sooner or later! -via Metafilter

(YouTube link)

He wanted a Star Wars birthday party, so he could be Luke Skywalker and fight Darth Vader. His sister dressed as Princess Leia. Darth showed up, the light sabers were employed, but under that helmet, it was not the cousin that was supposed to play the part, but Daddy! The children hadn't seen him in three months, and didn't expect to see their Navy dad until December, but he got a 96-hour leave to attend his son's birthday party. And the occasion became another entry at The Welcome Home Blog. Link -via Daily of the Day

What's the gadget that automatically plays all kinds of music from different instruments in one package? Today that would be an iPod, or 50 years ago, it would be a jukebox. But before electronics, you'd be talking about an orchestrion, which could be up to twelve feet tall -or wide- and weigh up to two tons! Orchestrions were player pianos with other instruments added on, like bells, drums, pipes, and horns. They were fairly common a hundred years ago, but relatively few survive today. At Collectors Weekly, you can read about the heyday of orchestrions and see quite a few different models -and also hear them play in a few videos. Link

The following is an article from Uncle John's 24-Karat Bathroom Reader.

In 1919 Helen Keller was 39 years old and an international celebrity, but she was having trouble paying the bills. So she took her act on the road.

WHO WAS HELEN KELLER?

Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller was a cheerful, bright baby who was just beginning to learn to talk. Then, at 19 months old, she contracted a high fever that left her blind, deaf, and unable to speak. All of a sudden, Helen's normal development stopped and she became a "wild child" -she ate with her hands, threw food, and broke things. The Keller's relatives urged her affluent parents to send the little girl to an asylum, which was a too-common destination for blind-deaf people in those days. But Mrs. Keller knew that inside her angry daughter was an intelligent girl trying desperately to communicate.

So when Helen was six years old, her parents brought her to the famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who was trying to find a way to cure deafness. Bell was unable to help Helen but recommended the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. The school's headmaster decide that Helen needed constant home care and sent a 20-year-old teacher named Annie Sullivan, a recent graduate of the school, who was herself partially blind. Sullivan had no experience with deaf-blind students, but after a rough start, she had a major breakthrough when she got Helen to understand the connection between actual water and the letters "w-a-t-e-r," which Sullivan spelled using sign language in Helen's hand.

AN UNLIKELY CELEBRITY

After that, a whole new world opened up for Keller. Under Sullivan's tutelage, she excelled at reading and writing, and in 1904 she became the first deaf-blind person in history to graduate from college. Keller had been famous since childhood thanks to a series of article written about her by the headmaster at Perkins, but her celebrity skyrocketed after her first book, The Story of My Life, was published when she was 22 years old. Keller then became an advocate for the deaf-blind, as well as a political activist -touting socialism, worker's rights, and pacifism. But she was most famous for simply being Helen Keller.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

Starting in Keller's teenage years, vaudeville promoters came calling. At Sullivan's urging, Keller always politely declined, explaining that she made her living writing books and giving formal lectures -not by appearing in front of rowdy crowds who paid a nickel each to gawk at (and heckle) jugglers, comedians, and singers, not to mention "freak" acts such as the dog-faced boy or Siamese twins. Even though vaudeville shows were advertised as "family entertainment," audiences could get out of hand.

But in 1919 Keller convinced Sullivan to let her take the job. The pros just outweighed the cons. For one, Keller's two previous books hadn't sold well, and the money she was making on the Chautauqua adult-education lecture circuit wasn't enough to sustain her. And because they had to travel to a new town for each lecture, the daily schedule was becoming too hectic for Sullivan, whose eyesight and health were growing worse. Doing vaudeville shows would allow them to stay in the same town for a week at a time, rather than traveling nearly every day.

In a series leading up to Veterans Day, D.B. Grady tells us about the five branches of the U.S. military. The first post contains interesting facts about the U.S. Air Force. For example, the Air Force has an elite commando force of weathermen who must be trained in not only meteorology, but flying, spying, combat, and endurance.

Before the Air Force sends squadrons of $150 million aircraft into areas, it likes to know what kind of environmental conditions are waiting for them. But the kinds of places where it sends such aircraft aren’t exactly friendly or hospitable to U.S. military operations. To gather meteorological and geological intelligence, the Air Force sends in Special Operations Weather Teams—commando forces with special training to read the environment and report back. To join such an elite fighting force, these men endure a punishing training pipeline that tests their mental and physical limits. The airmen who make it through earn the coveted gray beret and crest, and are trained to jump out of airplanes, climb mountains, snake through jungles, blow things up, and use small unit tactics in hostile territory.

And that's just the beginning -read the rest at mental_floss. Link

(Image credit: US Air Force/Staff Sgt. Jeremy Wilson)

Wu Conghan and Wu Songshi got married in 1924 in Nanchong, Sichuan province, China. There were no local photographers then, so there were no wedding photos taken. The couple are still married 88 years later, and they recently posed in wedding finery for the pictures they didn't have on their wedding day. A local photography company volunteered to snap the pictures as part of an city initiative to give older people wedding portraits, according to another story. Conghan is 101 years old, and Sognshi is 103. See more pictures of the at the Daily Mail. Link -via reddit

(Image source: HAP/Quirky China News/Rex)

(vimeo link)

This dance sequence was filmed by the slit-scan method by French artists Adrien M / Claire B. The camera is doing more work than the dancers! The effect is weird, but oddly mesmerizing. -via Laughing Squid

Bobby McDonald ran for a seat on the city council in Walton, Kentucky. The vote Tuesday ended up in a tie between McDonald and Olivia Ballou for the final slot on the six-person council.

Each candidate captured 669 votes, but one ballot McDonald is sure would have gone his way was never cast. His wife, Katie, who works nights as a patient care assistant at Christ Hospital and is finishing nurse’s training at Gateway Community and Technical College, didn’t make it to the polls yesterday.

“If she had just been able to get in to vote, we wouldn’t be going through any of this,” McDonald said. “You never think it will come down to one vote, but I’m here to tell you that it does.”

McDonald, 27, said his wife did not want to talk about not voting.

“She feels bad enough,” McDonald said.

The winner of the seat will most likely be determined by a coin toss. Link -via New York Magazine

(Image credit: Dwight Burdette)

The Occupy Wall Street movement is trying a new tactic to help folks struggling with debt burdens. Banks and other financial traders buy debts from each other for pennies on the dollar, but still try to collect every bit of it plus interest from the debtor. There's no reason that those debts can't be bought up by someone who doesn't expect to profit from them.

Now OWS is launching the ROLLING JUBILEE, a program that has been in development for months. OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT. (If you’re a debt broker, once you own someone’s debt you can do whatever you want with it — traditionally, you hound debtors to their grave trying to collect. We’re playing a different game. A MORE AWESOME GAME.)

This is a simple, powerful way to help folks in need — to free them from heavy debt loads so they can focus on being productive, happy and healthy. As you can see from our test run, the return on investment approaches 30:1. That’s a crazy bargain!

Now, after many consultations with attorneys, the IRS, and our moles in the debt-brokerage world, we are ready to take the Rolling Jubilee program LIVE and NATIONWIDE, buying debt in communities that have been struggling during the recession.

The project will officially kick off with a benefit variety show November 15th in New York City. Link to story. Link to website. -via Jason Kottke

Which American president has been portrayed on film the most? Slate combed through IMDb to provide this list, which only counts actors playing the role of a president -no cameos or archival footage. However, several presidents are played as they were at a time before reaching the White House. Washington and Lincoln are no surprises, but George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been characters in way more films than you'd expect in the short amount of time since their inaugurations! Link -via mental_floss