The United States was anything but united in the years leading up to the Civil War. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 threw the question of state's rights up in the air. The act obligated free states to return escaped slaves to their owners, which meant the federal law favored the rights of slave states over the rights of free states. This led to a battle that some consider to be the first of the American Civil War, which didn't officially begin for another ten years. William and Eliza Parker had escaped slavery in the south and settled in Christiana, Pennsylvania. In 1851, they were approached by four men who had escaped from Maryland. Slave owner Edward Gorsuch went to find them and demand the return of his "property."

Shortly before dawn on September 11, 1851, Gorsuch’s party arrived at the Parker house. They were met with William’s assertion that they would fight to the death before surrendering. When Gorsuch tried entering the home, Eliza repelled him by throwing a fishing spear his way. She then went to the window and blew a horn used to alert their neighbors of such trouble. Gorsuch’s party opened fire to stop her, but she kept up the alarm, encouraging all in the house to stand against recapture, no matter the cost. When one of the men in the Parker home suggested surrender, William replied, “Don’t believe that any living man can take you.”

Neighbors were quick to arrive, many armed for defense. The Gorsuch party thought the white neighbors had arrived to help them, and were shocked to discover their error. William Parker and others tried to persuade Gorsuch and his men to leave without violence, but the latter insisted on having “his property.” Both sides opened fire. Before long, the Gorsuch party was either injured on the ground or fleeing with empty guns. One of the men Gorsuch had tried to recapture beat him with a rifle until he collapsed. As for Gorsuch’s death, per William’s memoir, “The women put an end to him.”

The bigger part of the story is the trial that followed, in which 39 men were charged with treason. Read how that turned out at Mental Floss.

The beginning of the development of plastic was to produce one particular little object that will surprise you, but yes, it did have something to do with the destruction of our natural environment. From there, people developed all kinds of plastic that have taken over the world. Learn about it in this new TED-Ed lesson.  

This charming potato man and his car grace the cover of a 1931 children's book from the Soviet Union. It contains instructions for making people and their accessories from potatoes and other household items.

Pick the right potatoes and wash them well. Cut and hollow them, as shown, with a penknife.

Make arms, legs, necks, tails from matches or from sticks. Twist a paper tube and make a samovar tap and a teapot nose out of it.

Stick potatoes with matches.

Those were the days when children were expected to know how to use a penknife and matches as a matter of course. And lest you think this is indicative of a lack of toys in the Soviet Union, recall that the early Mr. Potato Head sets were just plastic features attached to tacks, and you were supposed to raid the pantry for your own vegetables. See a gallery of images from the book at Puppies and Flowers. -via Everlasting Blort

Registering to be a bone marrow donor means that someday you might possibly be called upon to save the life of someone you don't know, who would otherwise die without your genetic match. Sarah Lazarus registered in 2016. The call came in 2020, after she'd been self-isolating in Los Angeles for months. The proposed recipient was dying of cancer and the procedure had to be soon. However, complication arose that prevented her from donating the necessary blood plasma through apheresis in southern California. the only alternative was for her to board a plane during a pandemic and donate in Boise, Idaho.    

How do you make a call about your personal risk tolerance when it’s also a choice about the course of a stranger’s cancer treatment? If the pandemic had taught us all a valuable lesson about the interconnectedness of our fates, I was now being beaten over the head with it. Stuck without enough facts to make an informed decision, I thought about my dad’s old hospital room in Baltimore, the airlock separating his ward from the rest of the building because any mundane microbe could kill the patients on the other side. I imagined a somber-looking doctor walking through those doors to give my vulnerable recipient the news.

“I’m afraid there’s been a change of plans,” he would say, removing his glasses. “It seems your donor is a pussy-ass bitch.”

I called Heather back and told her to arrange my donation in Boise.

Read the story of Lazarus' donation, along with a thoughtful essay on weighing risk for oneself and others, at Crooked. Although she cannot know the identity of her recipient, she includes a view of the process from her father, which will make you go all verklempt.  -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Waldszenen)

Poetry on the highway? Yes, in the form of senryū, a Japanese variant of haiku referring to humans and human nature. A collection of artists are erecting signs all over the US containing such poems. They resemble regular road signs, but have a thoughtful message in poetry. Have you seen these where you live?



See all the signs with locations, including coordinates, at Roadside Senryū. -via Boing Boing

Intergenerational wealth is the best kind of wealth to have, as you only have to be lucky enough to be born into it, while building great wealth from lesser wealth requires luck plus talent, ambition, and effort. Still, there is no shortage of wealthy heirs who are convinced they deserve everything they have. Visual Capitalist compiled a list of the 25 currently wealthiest families in the world, shown in both graphic and chart form.    

The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t stopped the world’s wealthiest families from growing their fortunes. Over the past year, the richest family—the Waltons—grew their wealth by $25 billion, or almost $3 million per hour.

This graphic, using data from Bloomberg, ranks the 25 most wealthy families in the world. The data excludes first-generation wealth and wealth controlled by a single heir, which is why you don’t see Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates on the list. Families whose source of wealth is too diffused or opaque to be valued are also excluded.

What's left is a glimpse into more money than you and I could ever imagine having. For example, while the Koch family lost billions in the oil crash this year, they still came in at #3 and will never worry about making rent. See the list, graphic, and more information here. -via Digg

The perfect Tik Tok exists... pic.twitter.com/D1isi9dZPT

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) September 4, 2020

Here is an astonishing moment from nature, when Donatello meets a swamp kitten. The music only enhances the exceptional video, and it all happens within seven seconds. Nice. Incidentally, if the perfect TikTok actually existed, it wouldn't be so difficult to embed. -via Nag on the Lake

As The Walking Dead universe expands, its flagship series has aged unevenly. The current story left us hanging, waiting for the final episode of season ten back in March. And now AMC has announced the end of the series, although it will take a while.

“The Walking Dead” will end after the upcoming Season 11 on AMC, with the network also ordering a spinoff series built around the characters Daryl Dixon and Carol Peletier, Variety has learned.

Season 11 of AMC’s flagship show, which was originally meant to air this year but was delayed due to the pandemic, will air over two years and consist of 24 episodes in total beginning in late 2021. It was previously announced six additional episodes that will be considered part of Season 10 will be shot and aired in early 2021, meaning 30 additional episodes of “The Walking Dead” remain to be filmed and aired through late 2022. The episode originally intended to be the Season 10 finale is set to air on Oct. 4 after being delayed in April, also due to the pandemic.

Okay, so The Walking Dead has two more years, but then will continue under a different name with the two most popular characters. So is it really ending? Meanwhile, there's Fear the Walking Dead, which changed into a whole different show last year, and the two-season limited series The Walking Dead: The World Beyond, and the planned trio of movies featuring the former main character Rick Grimes. There are also discussions of an anthology series for the future. And then there's The Talking Dead, of course. It appears that in a world where the dead rule, nothing really dies. -via Uproxx

Smartphones have capabilities that replaced an entire store full of electronic equipment, but who knew that they might someday replace the standard breathalyzer? In addition to multimedia equipment and everyday tools, there's also an accelerometer in there.  

No matter how well you think you’re walking when you’re intoxicated—especially if you compare yourself to your friend in the gutter—subtle and not-so-subtle changes in your gait could betray your alcohol level. And if you’re carrying a smartphone, its onboard accelerometer can pick up those changes. In fact, scientists from University of Pittsburgh just published research showing that, in the lab at least, they can use smartphone motion data to detect if a subject is intoxicated, with an average accuracy of 93 percent. It sounds like fun and games—getting people loaded and watching them stumble around for science—but the work could have some serious utility.

While this use of technology may raise some legal and ethical questions, it may also have useful applications for treating problem drinking. Read about the experiment and what it could mean at Wired.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Carol VanHook)

You've been wearing a mask anytime you go out, right? You probably encounter other people who are wearing masks, some of which are cooler than yours. You've also seen people in public not wearing masks, so is it really worth the hassle? Yes. Minute Physics crunched the numbers for us and explain how masks are actually more effective than you might think. Of course, there are plenty of variables, which they go over at the end of the video, and there's a lot more information in this essay by Aatish Bhatia. Oh yeah, and don't forget to wash your hands. -via reddit

Now we know where Sam-I-Am found green eggs to go with his ham -from a cassowary! Cassowary eggs come in several shades of green and blue-green, and this cassowary hen is quite proud of her lime-tinted eggs. I wouldn't get too close, as cassowaries are known to be aggressive and fairly dangerous, and a mother guarding her eggs is not to be trifled with. However, according to Wikipedia, cassowaries that have been raised by humans are semi-docile, and have been used as poultry. -via TYWKIWDBI

David Klein was the founder of the Jelly Belly jellybeans, although he parted ways with the company in 1980. Now he has launched a contest, actually a treasure hunt, in which he plans to give away a 4,000-square-foot property containing a candy factory in Florida. Yes, it sounds like the plot of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but this is real. Fast Company has more details.

You have to pay $49.99 to enter the statewide treasure hunts, and each one is limited to 1,000 participants. As the news release describes it, “David and his partner have started going across the USA hiding gold style tickets in the form of necklaces in places they come across with an interesting story. Plans are to have multiple treasure hunts for these gold tickets in each state.”

Those who pay will get clues on Facebook as to the location of the golden ticket (worth $5,000) in their state, but it's not clear what will happen when someone who did not enter the contest finds one of the hidden gold dog tags. State winners will compete in some fashion for the grand prize.   

As of now, some of the pages at the contest site are returning errors, possibly because of too much traffic. There is a Facebook group where people can ask questions, but it seems to be mostly complaints about the website not working and the difficulty of buying tickets. -via Boing Boing

A couple of minutes of "All Star" sung by the movies. Which movies? There's a list in this comment. Mashups like this where the movies sing a song once took an enormous amount of work because the editor had to find clips where the lip synching matched the song. Now, deep fake technology does a lot of that work. The results are still intriguing, even if you hate the song by now. -via Metafilter

I tried zooming in and turning up the in-game gamma a bit, so you can see what's going on slightly better.
(It's a 128x32 pixel monochrome display, it's never gonna be great) pic.twitter.com/dAU7LZ1pkT

— foone (@Foone) September 7, 2020

Geeks love to hack into all kinds of devices and enable them to play the first-person-shooter game Doom. You may have seen it played on a microwave, an ATM, or piano. But programmer Foone Turing has taken his miniaturization experiments to the max by playing Doom in the tiny display of a digital pregnancy test!

How is that possible, you ask? Well, it’s not, technically. As Foone explained, they had to completely replace the device’s existing CPU, which can’t be reprogrammed, and switch out its LCD screen for an OLED display capable of showing more than a few lines for “pregnant” or “not pregnant.”

In short, Foone isn’t playing Doom on an electronic pregnancy test per se, rather they’re playing Doom on the disemboweled husk of one—a fact they made clear early on:

“To clarify what I’m doing here: this is a replacement display AND a replacement micro-controller. I’m not using any of the original tester other than the shell,” Foone wrote Saturday.

Of course, people are still impressed. The first joke is "What happens when you pee on it?" Foone has spent the last day experimenting with just that, as you can see at his Twitter account.

WRR in Dallas is Texas' oldest radio station. It was the first station licensed in Texas and the second one licensed in the US, so the fact that it is still in business is a wonder. And it all started in 1921 as a response to a disaster. After a fire destroyed the telephone lines that the city relied on to dispatch police and firefighters, Henry “Dad” Garrett (who had quite an amazing history himself) had the bright idea to launch a wireless radio system to do the job.  

In theory, you could have sat in your living room, listening to the soothing sounds of urgent crises on your radio. In practice, however, you didn’t have a radio unless you made it yourself. The golden age of radio, which by 1947 would turn 82 percent of Americans into broadcast listeners, wouldn’t really take off until the 1930s; WRR was a decade ahead of its time.

“There were only amateur radio stations up at the time,” Slate explains. “There were also no commercially produced receivers, so people were making radios out of anything you can find. There are accounts in the Dallas Morning News of people using things like old box springs, mattress springs, as antennas.”

There was ample free time between dispatch calls, so Dallas’s firefighters started to air their own banter. Garrett spun his classical records and even lugged a piano to the station so his teenage daughter, Letitia, could give a live concert.

“The dispatchers were almost like the original disc jockeys,” says Amy Bishop, host of WRR’s midday show. “During the time when they didn’t have emergency communication, someone said, ‘Why don’t we start playing music?’ People started coming on telling jokes. Some enterprising person thought ‘Hey, we’re starting to reach more people, what if we could sell this time?’”

That was the beginning of the long and colorful history of WRR, which is still owned by the city of Dallas almost 100 years later. You can read some of the highlights of that story at Texas Monthly. -Thanks, WTM!

(Image credit: Michael Barera)