A long, soaking bath is nice, but it often seems not worth the trouble, since you can't immerse your whole body in that short tub. (The other reason is the prospect of having to clean it, but that's another subject.) Why are our bathtubs too small?

In order to fully understand the reason why bathtubs aren't comfortably human-sized, it's important to consider how the world was different when plumbing first made its way into our homes. "Indoor plumbing came into the United States in the late 1880s," Jeremy Cressman, a veteran of the residential and commercial bath industry who currently serves as the vice president of sales and marketing at BLANCO America, tells Mental Floss. In the late 19th century it was difficult to make large bathtubs because of the expense involved—though cost wasn't the only thing governing typical tub size. People were a little smaller, too. And baths tended to be made with cast iron, so they were heavy and difficult to move. (Contemporary bathtubs are often made from fiber-reinforced plastic.)

Ahem, although indoor plumbing "came into the United States in the late 1880s," it took at least a century to become almost universal. It's much harder to run water lines than it is to string wire along poles. But to answer the question of why your tub is so short, you have to run through the history of American bathtubs, which you can read at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Doug Coldwell)

O no. Netflix doing the purge?!? pic.twitter.com/XXlHtfgfsy

— chante most (@DOP3Sweet) March 9, 2021

Netflix is testing ways to keep people from using other people's accounts. They are being somewhat soft about it as you can see from the screenshot above. This verification screen comes up randomly for an "unspecified number of users."

"This test is designed to help ensure that people using Netflix accounts are authorized to do so," a Netflix spokesperson told the Hollywood Reporter.

As the photo demonstrates, users are also being given the option to "verify later." At present, according to Netflix, the number of times a user is able to click "Verify Later" before being forced to verify is not set in stone.

While this new verification effort may boot unwanted piggybackers, as presented it fails to stop one key demographic: people intentionally sharing their passwords with friends and family. After all, if you gave your Netflix password to someone, why wouldn't you also share a Netflix verification code?

So far, this is just a test. They may well come up with something more draconian in the future. This test may signal a shift away from the company's previous tendency to encourage password sharing, which it has done to entice new customers. Read more at Gammawire.

Kung Fu Panda hit theaters in 2008, and it may have been the last animated movie I saw in a theater. It was full of overdone tropes and fat jokes, but it was darned funny and exquisitely animated. Screen Junkies goes over all that in this Honest Trailer.

We all know about corsets for women, once a part of everyday life for certain social classes, and now representative of the struggle to appear attractive. But they weren't just for women. Men wore them as well in different places at different times; they just tried to keep their corset use discreet. It wouldn't do to admit that their exceptional bodies needed help to look that way!

The corset has endured hundreds of iterations from its induction into fashion by Catherine de Medici in the 1500s up until its usage diminished as a result of rations for the second World War. But men have been involved in corsets since corsets were invented. One of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Paine, was a corset maker by family trade. According to research, “Stays or corsets were used in the army (especially among the cavalry), for hunting, and for strenuous exercise, not unlike a weight lifter’s belt today”. Purser Thomas Chew, a 30-year career Naval officer, who fought in the War of 1812 wore his corset to sea. But as history has shown, sometimes function becomes fashion…

Messy Nessy Chic has a brief history of men's fashions of the 18th and 19th centuries and how a corset could help them achieve the stylish look of their day.

Auralnauts has completed their project to bring us the Star Wars original trilogy retrofitted with all the stuff we've learned in the 40 years since then. There are old deceptions revealed, new Force powers, and for some reason, dinosaurs.   

The third and final installment of the Reimagined series, where we take narrative developments from newer Star Wars media and forcefully jam it back into the original trilogy. World building isn't easy, and we love Star Wars, but it's still funny to imagine how awkward things could have been between Vader and Palpatine after Luke arrived on the scene.

The first installment was posted almost two years ago, but you may have missed The Empire Strikes Back Reimagined only six months ago, so continue reading to see it.

Once a book goes into the public domain, publishers everywhere are in a hurry to print copies or make them available as digital works. The cover art can be an afterthought, maybe an assignment for an intern. How else could you explain such bad covers as Mary Shelley with her hand on the knee of Frankenstein's monster, and Jane Austin's British love story emblazoned with a picture of an American flag?

I have collected a number of these very fun, very bad covers below. All of these covers are “real,” that is, attached to books that are at least nominally available for purchase, though many are digital covers for digital editions. You’ll find a number of covers from Wordsworth Classics, premier publisher of badly Photoshopped book covers, but many more from the wilds of digital independent publishing. Some are merely ugly; others make it clear that no one involved in the creation of the cover cracked open the book.

Yeah, the best worst ones are those that have nothing to do with the contents. Not reading the book is the only way to explain a cover of Hamlet that's a naked woman with a seashell. See all these covers at LitHub.  -via Digg

In the 1950s and '60s, families gathered around the TV on Sunday nights to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Disney himself would introduce the show, often promoting Disneyland's attractions as he did so. Jack Plotnick has edited himself into those clips, boosting the entertainment value while highlighting the more problematic behavior of that era. SFgate talked to Plotnick about the series.

Plotnick isn't a Disney hater; in fact, he's been a lifelong Disney fan, taking family trips to Walt Disney World starting when he was very young. “I always wanted to be an Imagineer,” he says. “I've always been fascinated with them.”

“I really wanted to see what would happen if I put myself into the videos,” Plotnick says. “People were watching the videos to escape into another world, and that's kind of what I ended up doing.” So, he made himself an Imagineer — several of them, actually, in videos teasing the openings of everything from the Haunted Mansion to the Plaza Inn.

Plotnick's first video in the series has to do with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. The auction scene in the attraction was not changed until 2018. See his videos about the Haunted Mansion, It's a Small World, and the Plaza Restaurant as well. -via Metafilter

Sayaka Mitoh and Yoichi Yusa of Nara Women’s University in Japan have observed whole-body regeneration in sea slugs, specifically the species Elysia cf. marginata. The sea slugs pulled their own heads off, discarded their bodies, and eventually regrew a new body from the head!

On close inspection, the researchers found that sea slugs have a slight groove looped on the back of the head region that seems to work as a break-here zone. The bodies left behind can still move on their own for days or even months. An abandoned body, however, doesn’t regrow its head. The leaf-shaped remnant instead turns pale and weak and eventually dies.

Mitoh and Yusa believe that this extreme behavior is a method of getting rid of parasites, although the phrase "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" may occur to you. You can see a video of a slug's head wandering away from its body in the story at ScienceNews. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: S. Mitoh)

This video of Bryant-Lake Bowl and Theater in Minneapolis makes the place look like a fun place, but to see that, you first have to get over your awe of the cinematography in this video. This is what drones have made possible. (via reddit)

When water was often unsafe to drink, people turned to wine. But beer takes a lot less time to make, and is somewhat nutritious besides. Brewing beer is akin to cooking, so making beer became one of the household chores that women performed.  

From the Stone Age to the 1700s, ale – and, later, beer – was a household staple for most families in England and other parts of Europe. The drink was an inexpensive way to consume and preserve grains. For the working class, beer provided an important source of nutrients, full of carbohydrates and proteins. Because the beverage was such a common part of the average person’s diet, fermenting was, for many women, one of their normal household tasks.

Some enterprising women took this household skill to the marketplace and began selling beer. Widows or unmarried women used their fermentation prowess to earn some extra money, while married women partnered with their husbands to run their beer business.

The difference between making beer at home for the family and selling beer is that one is profitable, so you can see where this is going. Some men thought women should spend their time at home instead of selling beer. Others wanted in on the money to be made. Read how women brewers came to be accused of witchcraft at The Conversation. -via Smithsonian

(Image credit: John William Waterhouse)

The most notable difference between a Hollywood explosion and a real explosion is that a movie explosion does not kill the protagonist. That's a given. We've seen how our heroes can casually walk away from explosions without even feeling the blast force -and it looks good because of the bright flames behind them. And that's the next difference- those colorful flashes do not happen in most real explosions of the same size. Nuclear bombs may be the exception here. Tom Scott shows us what's done to make them look so appealing. -via Digg

The rejected script for episode nine of the Skywalker saga, written by Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, leaked online a year ago. It was an intriguing story, especially considering how poorly the script that replaced it was received. Star Wars fans read it and imagined what might have been if Disney hadn’t fired Trevorrow and enlisted JJ Abrams to do the last film. Imagine a Star Wars universe in which Palpatine is dead, Leia is not, and Luke's Force ghost haunts Kylo Ren.

Hey, Star Wars fans. I've been working the past year on a comic book adaptation of Colin Trevorrow's Star Wars Episode IX script "Duel of the Fates" and I'd like you to check it out! (It will be 7 issues total when completed.)
Hope you enjoy it!https://t.co/XfrNX5wHvQ pic.twitter.com/2Ay070L9oS

— Andrew Winegarner (@AndyWinegarner) March 4, 2021

And now Andrew Winegarner has taken that script and rendered it in webcomic form! Read Duel of the Fates online, at least in part. It’s a work in progress, which explains why only part of it is in color. Bookmark the link so you can read the whole thing as it is drawn. -via Boing Boing

Lent is the 40-day period, not including Sundays, leading up to Easter. It is a time of fasting and reflection, and in the Catholic church, part of that fasting means no meat on Fridays. However, fish is not considered meat, so the Friday fish fry has become traditional. But fish is still animal flesh, so why is it not considered to be meat?    

Legend has it that centuries ago a medieval pope with connections to Europe's fishing business banned red meat on Fridays to give his buddies' industry a boost. But that story isn't true. Sunday school teachers have a more theological answer: Jesus fasted for 40 days and died on a Friday. Catholics honor both occasions by making a small sacrifice: avoiding animal flesh one day out of the week. That explanation is dandy for a homily, but it doesn't explain why only red meat and poultry are targeted and seafood is fine.

For centuries, the reason evolved with the fast. In the beginning, some worshippers only ate bread. But by the Middle Ages, they were avoiding meat, eggs, and dairy. By the 13th century, the meat-fish divide was firmly established—and Saint Thomas Aquinas gave a lovely answer explaining why: sex, simplicity, and farts.

To make sense of all that, you’ll need to read the article at Mental Floss. Of course, the difference between fish and other meats is subject to change- at different times in different places, beavers, capybaras, muskrats, and alligators have been classified as fish.   

A Japanese research team drilled into the sea floor under 6,000 feet of ocean in the South Pacific Gyre and pulled up sludge that had been sitting there for 100 million years. Could anything survive in it? Well, consider this:

The gyre is a marine desert more barren than all but the aridest places on Earth. Ocean currents swirl around it, but within the gyre, the water stills and life struggles because few nutrients enter. Near the center is both the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility (made famous by H.P. Lovecraft as the home of the be-tentacled Cthulhu) and the South Pacific garbage patch.  At times the closest people are astronauts passing above on the International Space Station.

The sea here is so miserly that it takes one million years for a meter of marine “snow”—corpses, poo and dust—to accumulate on the bottom. The tale of all that time can total as little as 10 centimeters. It is the least productive patch of water on the planet.

Against all odds, bacteria cells from the retrieved cores came alive in the presence of nutrients -and started reproducing! Some types of bacteria produce spores that encase the cell to protect it, but this bacteria was not that sort. What kind of bacteria can lay dormant for 100 million years and come to life? And how afraid of it should we be? Read about this experiment at Scientific American. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Arito Sakaguchi & IODP/TAMU)

Queen Victoria, monarch of the British Empire, had nine children, and would have had more if her husband Prince Albert hadn't died in 1861. Those children had varying personalities and relationships with their mother. All nine married into European royal families, even the youngest, who married a prince against her mother's wishes.

The last of Victoria’s children, Beatrice—known as “Baby”—was her mother’s constant companion. Victoria’s affection toward Beatrice meant she was resented by her siblings. From an early age, Beatrice said “I shall never get married. I will stay with mother.” If anyone mentioned the word marriage in front of her, they would be strictly reprimanded by Victoria.

Despite her previous views on the matter, in 1884, Beatrice fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenburg and became determined to marry him. Victoria refused to speak to Beatrice for over six months, but eventually she relented, on the condition that the couple lived with her.

Read a short biography of each of Victoria's children at Mental Floss.