Taking a tip from the gritters of Scotland, the Minnesota Department of Transportation ran an online poll to name eight of their snowplows. The winning names are shown above, and all the names in the running can be seen at the competition site. There were more than 122,000 votes cast, and many of those who voted will now have some intangible connection with their local snowplow. I'm just surprised that Tator Tot Hotdish didn't rank among the winners. -via Laughing Squid

The "Best in Show" award in the Ocean Art 2020 Underwater Photo Competition has been announced. Photographer Gaetano Dario Gargiulo won a trip to the Solomon Islands for the above image of an octopus in a tide pool. According to the story of the shot, the octopus itself snapped the photo!

On the day of the photo, I remained in the tide pool as the tide was too low to venture outside of its boundaries. In one of the shallowest parts of the pool I noticed an octopus. I placed my camera near its den and the octopus started interacting with it. It came completely out of the den and to our amazement it started shooting pictures! My son (3 y.o. in the background) was very curious about the octopus.

The image, titled "Day of the Tentacle," also won in the wide angle category. You can see all the winners in this gallery. -via Boing Boing

The stories that are handed down from ancient times can seem infinitely weird to us, because we are familiar with the scientific method and modern technology that allows us to explore the nature of things. That doesn't mean there weren't smart people around way back then, but even those who figured there was a logical explanation somewhere had to find a way to explain the world to the uneducated masses. Imagine you were a person of some education and experience in the Dark Ages, and so were considered a medicine man or a wizard. You had to find a way to explain why this place wasn't good for castle construction to an illiterate king, so fire-breathing dragons it was.

Well, it's hypothesized that, back in the Iron Age, people would seal up treasure in the tombs of kings and rich people. The thing is, they would seal these tombs with a ton of things that decomposed: people, animals, vegetables, etc. The buried flesh would emit gasses as they decomposed, and with nowhere to go, they would create pressurized gas pockets. Try to open the tombs with a torch so you could see, or cause a spark with an iron spade, and BOOM!: big, firey oblivion in a world where Michael Bay wouldn't be around for thousands of years.

In Wales, there was a king who was trying to make his walls impenetrable. The only thing is, the walls kept falling down. A young real-life Merlin told the king that it was dragons fighting underground, possibly because he believed it, possibly because when a king asks you a question, you give him an answer even if it's nonsense. Instead of underground lizards, it was more likely gas pockets buried in the vast Welsh coal deposits underground.  

Read more about fire-breathing dragons, plus the likely real-life explanations for witches, vampires, and more at Cracked.

We learned about the historical practice of letterlocking some years ago. Then we learned about a trove of 17th-century undelivered mail discovered in the estate of postmasters Simon de Brienne and Marie Germain. Some of the mail was eventually opened and read, and some remained letterlocked to preserve its historical significance. Now a team of scientists and engineers from MIT have figured out how to read those letters without unfolding them!

“We’re X-raying history,” says team member David Mills, X-ray microtomography facilities manager at Queen Mary University of London. Mills, together with Graham Davis, professor of 3D X-ray imaging at Queen Mary, used machines specially designed for use in dentistry to scan unopened “locked” letters from the 17th century. This resulted in high-resolution volumetric scans, produced by high-contrast time delay integration X-ray microtomography.

“Who would have thought that a scanner designed to look at teeth would take us so far?” says Davis.

The technology had to be adapted to the project in order to separate the different layers of handwriting on paper. On the one hand, this could be a real breakthrough for deciphering writing on fragile ancient materials such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. On the other hand, it could enable nefarious organizations to read our contemporary correspondence. Read about the project at MIT News.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: MIT Libraries)

Have you ever heard of a bongo? According to Wikipedia, the bongo is the third-largest antelope in the world, and comes in two species: the western bongo is a near-threatened species, and the eastern bongo has a native habitat that consists of only a few mountains in Kenya. It is critically endangered, and there are more in zoos than in the wild. The Naples Zoo welcomed the birth of a new eastern bongo in January. The female calf's name is Amali, which means "hope" in Swahili. Read about bongos and the breeding program trying to save them from extinction at ZooBorns.

Karagöz, or shadow puppetry, is a Turkish art form going back hundreds of years. The plays performed this way center around two main characters, Karagöz and Hacivat, who worked together to build a mosque, despite coming from different social classes. They were both charming and witty, and their shenanigans led to their execution, yet they live on in shadow plays. These characters lend themselves to both drama and comedy.

The concept of shadow theater came to Turkey during the 16th century, when the Ottomans conquered the sultanate of Egypt. Ottoman sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluk dynasty and attached Egypt to his empire, capturing Tuman bay II, the vanquished sultan, and hanging him in 1517. To win the victor’s favor, a Mamluk puppeteer portrayed the hanging during a shadow theater performance. Selim the Grim, as he was also known, was so pleased by the grisly show that he brought the puppeteer to his court. Soon after, shadow theater became popular throughout the Ottoman Empire, with performances based on social events, daily life, politics, and romance.

But the practice of Karagöz is waning. Master puppeteer Cengiz Özek is one of the few artists working full time to keep the tradition alive. Learn about his work at Atlas Obscura.

Now that we are looking forward to seeing Coming 2 America (the sequel), it's a good time to look back at the original 1988 movie Coming To America. Screen Junkies finds plenty of fun to poke at the Eddie Murphy hit, but none of it makes the movie less enjoyable. While the comparisons between this movie and Black Panther are expected, they could have said more about The Lion King. Not only did James Earl Jones voice Mufasa a few years later, but Madge Sinclair, who played Queen Aoleon, did the voice of the lioness Sarabi. The sequel, Coming 2 America, will be released March 5.

QWOP, arguably the most difficult video game ever, was foisted upon us by Bennett Foddy in 2008. The point of the game is to control a sprinter with four keys that move his thigh and calf muscles. A few seconds in, and you're reduced to trying to control your laughter. Most of us gave up pretty early and decided the value in the game was purely comedy. However, in the years since, some gamers took QWOP as a challenge, and became fairly good at getting the runner through a 100-meter dash. The QWOP record as of now is 48 seconds! Could an algorithm trained to play QWOP do any better? Wesley Liao trained one to find out. While his AI learned to make the QWOP runner perform better than I ever will, it could not outdo the best human gamers. Read more on the experiment at Gizmodo.

THREAD: Lots of us learned classical music from watching old cartoons, so I’m going to identify the pieces that frequently popped up.

One of the most recognizable is Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2,” performed by those great piano virtuosos Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry. pic.twitter.com/SmyKbMpw3e

— Vincent Alexander (@NonsenseIsland) March 1, 2021

How much of your knowledge of classical music came from old cartoons? I thought so. Many of us cannot listen to "Ride of the Valkyries" without hearing "kill the wabbit" in our heads. Vincent Alexander shows us just how many of those classic compositions were used by Warner Bros. and Disney in their animated shorts. With videos! He identifies the original title and composer, and gives further examples of their use in cartoons.

“Dance of the Comedians” by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (from the comic opera THE BARTERED BRIDE) was used as an unofficial musical theme for the Road Runner cartoons. The propulsive energy of the piece matches well with Wile E. Coyote’s various failures. pic.twitter.com/5iHF49P2El

— Vincent Alexander (@NonsenseIsland) March 1, 2021

There are so many examples that you will run across some pieces that you never knew were by classical composers of the past. Or in other words, you know the songs but didn't know who wrote them. Now you can. There are 40, count 'em, 40 videos in the Twitter thread, and at Threadreader. -via Metafilter

By the time bedtime rolls around, parents are exhausted. However, their children do everything in their power to extend the day, which leads to more stress for the entire family. A study involving 59 British experts from a range of disciplines found that there are six key parts of achieving a successful bedtime routine for children between two and eight years old. They are:  

Brushing teeth before bed.

Time consistency for going to bed.

Book reading before bed.

Avoiding food/drinks before bed.

Avoiding use of electronic devices before bed.

Calming activities with the child before bed, including bath, shower and talking.

However, you don’t have to have all six to be successful -if you’re lucky. And from experience, I can tell you that even when you have all six factors consistently, you still won’t have a smooth experience every night. Read more about this research at The Guardian. -via Digg

(Image credit: Ldorfman)

Women around the world suffer from two problems that we don’t think about much in the US. In many parts of the world, menstruation is seen as gross, unclean, or at least something that no one talks about. The other problem is that sanitary pads, tampons, and other supplies are outrageously expensive for too many women. In an article about periods, Messy Nessy Chic looks at how these two things collide in India, leaving women’s health and freedom at risk. It begins with a look at the 2018 Bollywood rom-com Pad Man, about an unlikely but eventually respected superhero.

It’s an unlikely love story about a young husband who will do anything for the comfort and happiness of his new bride, but finds himself unaware of the unhygienic and discriminatory practices she is subjected to when menstruating. In a part of the world where the topic of menstruation was discouraged in households and social circles; considered ‘unclean’; he risks being ridiculed and ostracised to generate awareness for women’s health in rural India.

The movie was inspired by the true story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, who indeed fought cultural taboos to bring affordable menstrual products to rural areas of India. He was also the subject of two documentaries and an earlier feature film. Arunachalam tells his own story in a 2012 Ted talk. You can find Pad Man on Netflix and other movie sources.

In 2004, the sandwich chain Quiznos enlisted Joel Veitch’s Spongmonkeys for their TV advertisements. What happened then illustrates the great divide at the time between those who were connected with internet culture and those who were not. Before the rise of social media, that was a large chasm. Vetch was a British animator popular among internet insiders for presenting oddball videos. He didn’t even know what Quiznos was when he agreed to the ad campaign using his bizarre characters.   

Months later, Veitch was back in the U.K., working as an animator on a late-night TV show, and not really thinking much about the ads when they first began airing in the U.S. His email blew up immediately. “Nobody around me had a clue what was happening, it was all in another country for a brand they’d never heard of,” he says. Still, the reaction resulted in his website crashing when over a quarter of a million people went to check out his work.

Unfortunately, the backlash was just as swift. Within the first week of the campaign, Quiznos corporate received more than 30,000 calls complaining about the Spongmonkeys. Per a 2004 article from the Denver Business Times, an Alabama Quiznos franchisee even put up signs in his windows saying he wasn’t responsible for the ads, as they were turning away customers and making children cry.

Quiznos wanted to be noticed. The ads delivered, but not in a way that led to people buying more sandwiches. Read how the Quiznos Spongmonkeys came about at Mel magazine.

You've read plenty about COVID-19 and what it did to New York City in early 2020. We've also posted quite a bit about the 1918 influenza pandemic and the Black Death. But disease epidemics strike somewhere in every era. New York was the scene of a yellow fever outbreak in 1795 and again in 1798. Alexander Anderson was a 20-year-old medical student from Manhattan who was drafted into the fight against the fever in its first wave, and came to be the first doctor at Bellevue Hospital. Anderson kept a diary of his work, when around 700 New York City residents died. His diary continued into the second wave, when he was a certified physician and a family man.  

Anderson abandoned that record-keeping on September 4 when a friend arrived at Bellevue to tell him that his wife was sick with the fever; on the following day, his father came to the hospital to say that Sandy’s brother John had fallen ill as well.

For a few days Anderson tried to care for everyone—his wife in Bushwick and the rest of his relations downtown, plus dozens of Bellevue patients. Then, on September 8: “A heavy blow!—I saw my Brother this morning and entertain’d hopes of his recovery. In the afternoon I found him dead!” Yet he could not rest to grieve. “I left my poor parents struggling with their fate and return’d to Belle-vue.” Before setting aside the diary that day, he paused to sketch a small coffin next to the entry.

His father died on September 12. Anderson sketched another coffin next to the entry. In Bushwick, he found his wife in a shocking condition: “The sight of my wife ghastly and emaciated, constantly coughing & spitting struck me with horror.” She died on September 13; he drew another coffin. His mother, the final member of his immediate family, took ill on the 16th and died on the 21st; another coffin. “I never shall look upon her like again,” he wrote.

Get a glimpse of the yellow fever epidemic that caused Anderson to give up medicine for good at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Alexander Anderson Papers/New-York Historical Society Library)

They say the animals of Australia all want to kill us, but even when they don't they can be pretty creepy. It's not so bad when they are cartoons. In a backyard in Tasmania, there are plenty of creatures who have plenty to do in the middle of the night. Throat Notes actually has a plot, involving a possum, a star, and a hapless frog. This trippy animation is from Felix Colgrave, who we've featured before.  -via The Awesomer

Conveyor belt sushi restaurants have been around since 1958, but the concept goes back much further. In 1923, John Moses Baitinger of Minnesota received a patent for a restaurant system that brought food to diners on a sort-of conveyor belt. This would allow the proprietor to do away with servers completely. We assume the diner paid for an all-you-can-eat experience, since they didn’t order, but instead grabbed food off tiny railroad cars that passed by them. Baitinger took his setup to the Minnesota State Fair, where he reportedly made quite a profit.  

Baitinger's Eater was, in many ways, a perfect expression of the mentality of the automation-mad 1920s, obsessed with speed, technology, and efficiency. There were minor drawbacks to the system, however. Diners seated near the end of the line sometimes found that the only cargo left for the eating was boiled cabbage.

Talk about disappointment! That cabbage would be cold, too, by the time you decided to settle for it. Read more about Baitinger’s Automatic Eater at Weird Universe.