Box Butte County, Nebraska, was born in 1886 when it separated from Dawes County. Its first county seat was the village of Nonpareil, then Hemingford, then Alliance, all moves that county residents voted for. But when Alliance became the county seat, there was some question of what to do with the courthouse that had been built in Hemingford. It was less than ten years old, and quite substantial.
As you know the building is fifty feet long by forty wide[,] two full stories in height with a heavy truss roof and constructed with a heavy hard pine frame. As there were two cuts to pass through the building was raised on timbers high enough to clear the banks and when ready to start it was fifty feet from the railroad track to the top of the deck on the building. The weight of the building was estimated at 100 tons.
The decision was made in 1899 to move the courthouse. The first attempt was a disaster, moving the building only 15 feet in ten days. Then the railroad was mentioned. Read the story of moving the Box Butte courthouse at Amusing Planet.
Alas, one has to wonder how much stress the move put on the building, since they built a new Box Butte County courthouse in 1913.
Archaeologists unearthed a couple dozen burials in a Bronze Age cemetery found near Budapest, Hungary. Most of them were urns filled with cremated remains, one of which stood out from the rest: the urn contained the cremains of three people! One was a woman of high status who had died in her 20s, and the other two were her twin fetuses.
Skeletal analysis confirmed that the woman was originally born outside the community, possibly in central Slovenia or Lake Balaton in western Hungary, per Live Science. The researchers came to this conclusion by scrutinizing the strontium signatures in her bones and teeth. Comparing strontium isotope ratios found in enamel, which forms in one’s youth, with those present in a specific region can help scholars determine where an individual grew up.
The woman’s isotope ratios indicate that she was born elsewhere but moved to the region between the ages of 8 and 13, likely to be married into a noble Vatya family. She eventually became pregnant with twins, only to die between the ages of 25 and 35. Researchers are unsure whether the mother died before or during childbirth, but the fetuses’ gestational age was about 28 to 32 weeks.
You may find it astonishing that scientists could determine all that from cremated remains. The methods described in the original science paper go into much more detail on strontium levels across Europe 4,00 years ago, the parts of the teeth and bones that pick up those isotopes at what age, and how they extracted that information from bone fragments. Or you can read the short version at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting
How does juggling work in space? The main thing you have to remember is that a ball thrown in the absence of gravity will not fall- it just goes in a straight line until something stops it. Physicist Adam Dipert is the Space Juggler. He explains how the idea came about.
The picture above shows a Japanese delegation who visited America in 1860 to confirm a treaty with the United States. Sadly, we do not have a photograph of the delegation who visited Danville, Pennsylvania, on July 4 of that year. That group consisted of completely different people.
On Independence Day of 1860, one of the most notable events in the history of Montour County took place-- a visit from Japanese royalty! Why Japanese royalty should want to pay a visit to the sleepy seat of Pennsylvania's smallest county never exactly crossed the minds of the excited local residents, and perhaps that is how one of the greatest and most elaborate hoaxes in Pennsylvania history came to fruition.
The story of the great Japanese Embassy hoax might have remained forgotten in the dustbin of history had it not been for a New Yorker-- and former Danville resident named W.A.M. Grier-- who came across letters and documents pertaining to the "royal visit" while cleaning out his Brooklyn home decades later. In 1910, the Danville Morning News published Grier's account of the outrageous hoax for the benefit of those who had never heard about it. Apparently, most of the older residents had either forgotten about it, or were simply too embarrassed to admit that it had ever happened.
Apparently, a group of the town's movers and shakers thought it would be fun to impersonate the Japanese delegation. The arrival of the "ambassadors" and their entourage meant a huge crowd at the train station, a parade, and an address to the townspeople through an interpreter at the courthouse square. Read how they did it and how well they pulled it off at Pennsylvania Oddities. -via Strange Company
A bike race in Colorado saw a moose join in! The moose stayed ahead of the pack for a good five minutes, but eventually tired a little. He finally realized that this mad gang wasn't pursuing him when they began to overtake him. That gave him enough confidence to stop. Or maybe he was just having fun, we don't know. -via Digg
English, as she is spoken, is as simple or difficult to learn as most other languages. But English as she is written is really weird. We've seen many examples of strange English spelling, such as "ough," used in thought, drought, tough, cough, through, and though, which are all pronounced differently. How did English spelling become so disengaged from pronunciation? Linguist Arika Orent (previously at Neatorama) takes us through a history of written English to explain how it happened. There was a period of several hundred years after the Norman Conquest when English wasn't written down much at all. And as England was struggling out of that confusion, the movable type printing press came along. Typesetters had plenty of choices, but no strict guides.
Some standards did spread and crystallise over time, as more books were printed and literacy rates climbed. The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had; thankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn’t to faithfully represent the author’s spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of ‘correct’ English – it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy. Habits and tricks became standards, as typesetters learned their trade by apprenticing to other typesetters. They then often moved around as journeymen workers, which entailed dispersing their own habits or picking up those of the printing houses they worked in.
Standard-setting was only partly in the hands of the people setting the type. Even more so, it was down to a growing reading public. The more texts there were, the more reading there was, and the greater the sensibility about what looks right. Once that sense develops, it can be a very powerful enforcer of norms. These norms in the literacy of English speakers today are so well entrenched that simple adjustments are very jarring. If ai trai tu repreezent mai akshuel pronownseeayshun in raiteeng, yu kan reed it, but its difikelt and disterbeeng tu du soh. It just looks wrong, and that feeling of wrongness interrupts the flow of reading. The fluency of reading depends on the speed with which you visually identify the words, and the speed of identification increases with exposure. The more we see a word, the more quickly we recognise it, even if its spelling doesn’t match the sound.
Some spellings got entrenched this way, by being printed over and over again in widely distributed texts, very early on.
Christopher Mah is a marine biologist who works for NOAA and for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. He was aboard NOAAS Okeanos Explorer ship watching a feed from the ROV when he saw a familiar image: Spongebob Squarepants and his best friend Patrick Star! He was quite surprised, as the depictions of the creatures in Spongebob Squarepants aren't realistic.
Very few of them resemble SpongeBob's boxy shape.
But the SpongeBob-like sponge in the image, Mah said, belongs to the genus Hertwigia. He was surprised by its bright yellow color, which is unusual for the deep sea. That far down, most things are orange or white to help them camouflage in the dimly lit environment.
The sea star nearby, known as Chondraster, has five arms covered with tiny suckers. Those allow it to creep across the ocean floor and attach itself to rocks and other organisms. Chondraster stars can be dark pink, light pink, or white.
This star's color "was a bright pink that strongly evoked Patrick," Mah said.
We will never forget Apollo 1, in which three astronauts died during space training, the shuttle Challenger which exploded during launch, and the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry. But of all the fatalities involving space flight, only three people have actually died while in space. In July of 1971, the Soviet mission Soyuz 11 ended when the cosmonauts' capsule deployed its parachute and landed in Kazakhstan.
As the Soviet retrieval team approached the Soyuz 7K-OKS ship on the ground, nothing appeared amiss. They knocked on the side of the capsule; a tradition used to greet the waiting cosmonauts. But there was no reply to the traditional knock.
When they opened up the capsule, they discovered a tragedy. All three crew members were dead. The discovery of the bodies was a surprise as the ship had no external damage, and the reentry went smoothly. Yet, the entire crew appeared to have been killed by asphyxiation.
The crew members were Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev. These are the only three men to ever die in space.
Cassie is a walking and running robot inspired by the biomechanics of the ostrich. The robot from Agility Robotics looks a bit like an ostrich, too, if the bird could operate without a head. Cassie harnesses machine learning to negotiate a route and stay on track. In this video, see how she runs a 5K course in 53 minutes on a single battery charge. She's no Olympic sprinter, but my battery would have run down much sooner. -via Laughing Squid
See also:Digit, the somewhat more human-shaped robot from the same company.
The history of photography goes back almost 200 years now. The earliest photographic images look pretty primitive to us now, but they were surely miracles in their time. As technology advanced, what was considered a "good" picture had a lot to do with the equipment. Eventually, cameras became affordable enough for lots of people to own one. But to get a "good" picture, you needed to take lessons, or learn from your mistakes, which was expensive when film had to be purchased and then processed. Photography, and photo critique, is quite different now that almost everyone has a state-of-the-art digital camera in their pocket. Kim Beil, author of the book Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography, explains how our view of "good" pictures has changed.
A second type of failure concerns effects that largely began as mistakes produced by legions of amateur photographers shooting pictures with their new, boxy, Kodak cameras, which made their debut in 1888. Foremost among these failures were motion blur and lens flare. Once upon a time, both were frowned upon by the authors of the “How to Make Good Pictures” books. Thus, a blurry background while trying to capture a moving object, or a blurry object moving across an in-focus background, were considered mistakes that a few simple techniques could help you correct.
Shooting into a light source and thus drenching precious photographic real estate in overexposed rays of light was also considered a no-no. But just as sports photographers would eventually have a ball with motion blur, fashion and advertising photographers would eventually go crazy for lens flare. Intention created context.
“Intention is central to the way I think about art, and maybe even how we define it,” Beil agrees. “Take lens flare: I think the power of lens flare comes from its initial unintentional use by people who were just taking casual pictures without any premeditation, without much intention.” In these sorts of photographs, Beil says, lens flare was an amateur mistake that conferred “a kind of authenticity to an image.” That’s why advertisers find lens flare so appealing. “Because we still associate it with authenticity,” Beil says, “it makes an advertising photo seem more real, maybe even spontaneous.”
Today, lens flare is so widely used, so intentional, that billions of smartphone cameras offer multiple variations of this former failing in the form of filters, which can be activated with a click or a swipe. “Everything can be achieved and there are no more accidents,” Beil says of photography in the 2020s, “so photographers look to things that happened before to reinsert some kind of authenticity into their pictures.” Thanks to technology, photographers can now pretend to take pictures as if they lacked the tools to make their pictures, well, good.
Beil also explains how we judge the photos of the past without understanding the limitations of the art. Read a history of "good" vs. "bad" photography at Collectors Weekly.
We've seen enough "you had one job" pictures too know what happens when workers start a project on both ends and try to meet in the middle. Honeybees do this all the time when they build hives, and manage to come together, knitting their little hexagon cells quite nicely, even with the difficulty of having to work around corners and curves.
This happens despite a number of major challenges. To begin with, multiple workers contribute to the constructions of each honeycomb, so the regularity can't just be explained by having a single worker engage in a series of instinctual movements. In addition, nests need two different-sized honeycombs, as they use distinct sizes for workers (most of the nest) and drones (males used for reproduction). Finally, honeycombs are often built as multiple units, starting from different areas of the hive and ultimately meeting in the middle somewhere.
To find out how all these issues are managed, an animal behavior specialist (Auburn's Michael Smith) got together with two computer scientists from Cornell: Nils Napp and Kirstin Petersen, who work on insect-like robots. Combined, they put together image-analysis software that could identify the boundaries of each cell, and they figured out the cells' basic statistics—number of sides, length of each side, etc. These could then be classified based on whether they were the right size for workers or drones or whether there was something unusual about the cell.
What they found out was that bees start diverging from their own plans ahead of time in order to mesh with the workers coming from the other direction. This implies brain power that goes beyond instinct. Read what honeybees do to make it all come together at Ars Technica. -via Damn Interesting
At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, the women's all around gymnastics event began with a disaster. The world's greatest gymnasts were falling and crashing at the vault. It was the 19th competitor who insisted that the vault height be checked, and it was two inches (5cm) lower than regulation height! No one had adjusted it after the men's competition the night before. The upshot was that the athletes had the floor come at them much faster than in their years of training. When the error was discovered, competitors were offered a chance to re-do their vault, but it was too late for some. Several were injured, and many were so shaken that it affected their performances in other events. -via reddit
There are various rules and regulations for placing historical markers in places where historic things happened, but anyone can put up a commemorative plaque, as long as it's okay with the landowner. It doesn't even have to be a true story. That why you can see where the first cheeseburger was served, in Pasadena, California.
According to local legend, a teenage cook at Rite Spot by the apt name of Lionel Sternberger was the first person to put cheese on a burger. Some claim it wasn’t an invention so much as a cover-up, as Lionel had burned one side of the patty one fateful day in 1924. To hide his mistake, he slapped a new ingredient on top. Regardless of the circumstances, the cheeseburger was a hit. It later appeared on the menu as “The Aristocratic Burger: The Original Hamburger With Cheese.”
A list at Atlas Obscura shows you where you can see plaques for the the site of the first kiss between Barack and Michelle Obama, the 7-11 store where the Ouija board was named, and a fight between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs over the Oxford comma, among others.
While enjoying the gorgeous photography of this clip from the BBC series Blue Planet, I kept thinking of the camera operator swimming through the jellies. The Portuguese man o' war is not technically a jellyfish, but it acts in much the same way -only scarier. -via Laughing Squid
A guy in a blue-and-white suit contorts his body to faithfully depict 50 Olympic pictograms that we all know and love. The real fun comes when the pictograms get difficult, and the performers have to get creative, like using just small parts of the body, or turning the camera upside down. Remember, the athletes doing these things in competition have abilities the rest of us don't! -via Everlasting Blort
