There are 26 letters in the current English alphabet. Some of them could be done away with if we wanted to- there's no real reason to keep a "c" when we have both "k" and "s", and the "q" could be dropped if we were to use "kw" for the sound. But that would be weird. However, plenty of letters have been dropped from the English alphabet. Old English and Middle English had letters we don't use anymore, and each has a story behind it. For example, the letter "yogh" (shown above) looks like a three and was used for several sounds.

Yogh represented quite a few sounds in Middle English. According to English scholar Dennis Freeborn’s From Old English to Standard English, in just the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it could stand for the “y” sound in yet, the “ch” sound in German Bach or Scottish loch, and many more.

You can see how this would be confusing, but yogh only started to die out when it was replaced by "gh", which has just as many varied and confusing pronunciations. And like many letters, its final death knell was the printing press, as typesetters didn't really want to keep up with so many letters. Read about yogh and nine other letters that are no longer used in English at Mental Floss.

(Yogh image credit: Person or Persons Unknown)

What a delightful combination: cats and trains! Katze vs. Gartenbahn is a series of five YouTube videos featuring a giant cat attacking passenger trains. No, that's not it. It's about a model train in a garden that occasionally disturbs the cat who naps there. In video number three, shown above, the cat is occupying a trestle, and has no place to go when the train comes through, except up on top. Continue reading to see more.

Neatorama readers are familiar with Centralia, the town on a Pennsylvania coal seam that's been burning for 60 years. That's nothing compared to Burning Mountain in New South Wales, Australia, where an underground fire has been burning for at least 6,000 years! Like Centralia, it is also a burning coal seam, and it's moving along the seam at a fairly steady rate, which gives away its age.

The fire is estimated to be about 30 meters deep, and moving south at about a meter per year. The smoldering fire leaves the ground above it warm and kills off vegetation as it moves. The difference it leaves in the forest above is the clue to how long it's been burning, although it may be more ancient than we know. As the coal burns, it causes shifts and cracks in the earth above it, which let in just enough oxygen to feed the fire.

The area is a nature reserve, and is far enough away from settlements to pose no threat to people. How long will Burning Mountain continue to burn? No one knows. Read about this astonishing natural phenomenon at ScienceAlert. -via Strange Company 

(Images credit: Beruthiel)

Saratoga Springs, New York, is famous as the birthplace of the potato chip. The story goes that in 1853, railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt dined at at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs and sent back his fried potatoes because they weren't thin enough. Chef George Crum maliciously compiled with Vanderbilt's demand, and fried up super-thin potato slices until they were extra crispy. But Vanderbilt loved them, and the potato chip was born. Crum opened his own restaurant, and became famous for his chips.

Since then, earlier recipes for the same dish were found, but Crum's chips caused people to make the pilgrimage to Sarasota Springs to try them. That was just the beginning of the story, as other people made the snack accessible to all, from the Ohio man who got them into grocery stores, to the California woman who bagged them for freshness, to the movie star who dared us to try to eat just one. Read the history of the potato chip -or chips, since you can't eat just one- at Smithsonian.

This is a restored Lamborghini 5C TL tractor that was built in the 1960s. Owning this would make you the envy of all the guys down at the co-op! If you're not a gearhead, you might be surprised to know that Lambourgini built tractors before the company ever built cars.

Ferruccio Lamborghini grew up on the family vineyard and was always fascinated by farm machinery. After World War II he designed tractors that would get Italy back in its feet again. He became so wealthy that he could afford nice sports cars, which eventually included Ferraris. But as an engineer, he wasn't happy with his Ferrari, and let the company founder, Enzo Ferrari, know about it.

He took his grievances to Enzo Ferrari and the two famously head-strong men had a wild argument over it – the result being that Ferruccio started his own car company to show Enzo how it should be done.

The two companies remain each other’s greatest rivals to this day.  

While Lamborghini's name became forever associated with luxury sports cars, he continued to build tractors into the 1970s. Read about Lambourgini and his tractors at Silodrome. -via Fark  

Get the details of this particular model at the auction listing. Bidding will close on January 10.

Yeah, we know there was a Terminator 3, but even if we consider it canon, there's room for further adventures anywhere in that messed-up timeline, as we've seen from the many other forgettable Terminator sequels, and you can improve upon them as you will.

After the events of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Sarah Connor and her son John took on new identities. But now there are several terminators (model T-800) sent back to find them. Fabrice Mathieu (previously at Neatorama) edited together more than a dozen movies to create this clever dialogue-free action sequence. -Thanks Fabrice!

Now that we're about done with the year-end "best of" lists, we can look to the very worst. Uswitch has combed through IMDb reviews, searching for negative phrases, to compile lists of the most boring TV show and movies from the last couple of decades. Here are the movies.

1    The Last Airbender
2    Annabelle
3    Suicide Squad
4    Total Recall
5    Battle Los Angeles
6    Justice League
7    Green Lantern
8    Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
9    Alice in Wonderland    
10    Clash of the Titans    
11    The Wolfman
12    Ice Age: Continental Drift    
13    White House Down
14    X-Men: Apocalypse
15    Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

I've only seen two of these movies, and I can't argue about them. Still, any list of "worst" guided by viewer opinions needs a caveat in that the movies that no one bothered to go see were probably even more boring.

They also have a rundown of the most boring TV shows, and since the list was compiled in November, a look at the worst Christmas movies and TV specials as well. See all the boring media listed, with discussion about some of them, at Uswitch. -via Mental Floss

In the 21st century, Americans mostly buy and drive cars with automatic transmissions. That's not the case in the United Kingdom, where more cars with manual transmissions were bought every year up until 2020. And even today, automatics are barely ahead in sales. That's because in the UK, everyone, or let's say almost everyone, learns to drive using a manual transmission.

See, when a teenager goes to take the test for a driver's license, the car they use for the test determines what kind of license they receive (if they pass the test). If you use an automatic vehicle, you get a license to drive automatic vehicles only. If you use a car with a manual transmission and pass, you get a license for either kind of car. If you get a restricted license for automatic only and then decide later that you want an unrestricted license, you have to take the test over again with a manual transmission.

The UK has a bit fewer than a million people with automatic-only licenses, and almost 40 million with licenses for both types of transmissions. There is a bit of a stigma attached to the automatic-only license. Read more about the way the UK drives at Jalopnik.

It's a special kind of heartbreak when you come up with a great idea for a story, incubate it in your mind, write it down, polish it, and convince yourself it's worthy of a Hollywood movie, then ...you see a trailer for that movie. This isn't about plagiarism, but about convergent ideas. You can't sue for plagiarism if you've never pitched the script or published the story. Often it's not the exact story, but close enough so that you can give up on the idea of a movie being produced, at least anytime soon. Just ask Liz Smith, who in 1997 imagined a story about a rich young man who falls involve with a poor woman while both are traveling on the Titanic. Inverse has the stories of five screenwriters who were crestfallen when they found out their stories had been beaten to the punch, and how they coped with the disappointment afterward. -via Digg
 

NASA’s Psyche mission is scheduled to launch on August of 2022 and head toward a 140-mile wide asteroid named 16 Psyche. It lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists are interested in the asteroid because they believe it may be a planetesimal, which resembles the earth underneath its mantle and crust. We could learn about how our planet formed. But the asteroid is interesting for something else.

Asteroid 16 Psyche reflects light in a way that lead scientists to believe it is made of metal, or at least contains a lot of iron, nickel, and gold. The resources on the asteroid could be worth as much as $10 quintillion! And now you're thinking of the movies Armageddon, Avatar, Prospect, or Alien, in which earth's biggest corporations send crews to other planets to extract their natural resources. While that may be a long way off, 16 Psyche has captured NASA's imagination for many reasons, which you can read about at Smithsonian. -via Fark

(Image credit: NASA)

Look at this rat. Look at this marvelous rat. Reorganize your brain around this image of a rat.

Claire McFadden brings us a song that you think maybe is trying to teach us something or make a point, but eventually you come to realize, no, it's some kind of art. Or maybe it's just one of those weird things that make the internet an interesting place to be. It gets funnier as it goes along. Contains one NSFW word. (via Metafilter)

The Bosphorus, also known as the Strait of Istanbul, is a waterway that cuts through Istanbul, Turkey, connects the the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, and separates Europe from Asia. That's a lot to ask of a small strait. It forms a historically important trade route for international navigation. But it's not a river. At least, not all of it is. The water flows both north and south, depending on the depth.

...in modern times, local boatmen know that the surface current flows south into the Sea of Marmara and thence into the Aegean/Mediterranean.  If they want to take a boat north, they can lower a bucket of rocks on a long rope to the bottom, where the northward current of seawater is located; it will carry the bucket north and thus tow their boat on the surface.

There's a scientific explanation at Wikipedia. Read how a horrific event in history took advantage of this weird flow at TYWKIWDBI.

(Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

The song "Creep" by Radiohead is a classic, but as far as I know, it's never been done honky-tonk style. The YouTuber we know and love, There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama), has fixed that with a performance by Tommy Yorke and the Radiohead Boys. While the cognitive dissonance might make you laugh, the music is actually quite good. And the best part is the video editing. You may or may not recognize the background singers, but the lip-synching is astonishing; it must have been a lot of work. Don't miss special appearance by Conway Twitty, Loretta Lyn, Buck Owens, Dolly Parton, and some stars that don't sing. Go ahead and listen to it, the F-bomb is censored. -via reddit

Most of the industrial spills we hear about are dangerous because of traffic disruptions or the toxic nature of what was spilled. While floods are dangerous, industrial accidents rarely have enough liquid to drown anyone. But the London beer flood of 1814 not only drowned people, the biggest danger was the sheer explosiveness of the brewery's failure.

The Horse Shoe Brewery was one of London's biggest. It participated in a game of one-upmanship to see who could boast the largest beer fermentation vats. These ever-bigger vats were made of wood held together by iron hoops. The Horse Shoe Brewery's biggest vat held 18,000 barrels of beer. When it suddenly failed on October 17, the force was great enough to wreck the vats beside it. Combined, they sent 323,000 imperial gallons of beer surging, with enough force to break through the brewery's brick wall and into the neighborhood. Eight women and children were killed by the ghastly accident. Read an account of the beer flood at Amusing Planet.

Some cultures tend to celebrate military victories, weddings, holidays, sports victories, and/or random events by firing guns into the air. This includes the United States. These events can be extremely dangerous just because firearms are present, and even more so when the participants are already inebriated, but when someone is just firing towards the sky, what's the harm? As physicists will tell you, what goes up must comes down, even though they weren't all that sure ablout it when firarms were first developed. Those bullets will have to come down somewhere, and it's almost impossible to determine where that will be ahead of time. Debunked explains the physics of shooting into the air and the consequences of falling bullets. The ad in the middle is about 1:15 long, and can be fast-forwarded.  -via Digg