We've been posting videos from Tom Scott for twelve years now. Personally, my favorite is still this one. They have become so familiar that Matt Colbo made one, too. While the information about the subject is perfectly useless, his impression is amazing. -via Laughing Squid
Meanwhile, the real Tom is overdue for a haircut.
Ora Lee was a young woman who worked in a match factory in Ohio. In 1908, she discovered she was pregnant, and begged her boyfriend Guy Rasor to marry her. Rasor purchased a marriage license, but the next day, Ora Lee was found dead, shot through the head and dumped on the side of the road. Rasor was arrested, but the only evidence linking him to the crime were some bloodstains on his coat. He said it was pig's blood. Could anyone prove otherwise? Immunologist Paul Uhlenhuth had developed a technique for distinguishing human from animal blood, but that was in Germany, and the research wasn't well known in the US. However, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence Dr. John Spenzer of Ohio Wesleyan University's medical school had studied in Germany. Spenzer was contacted about the case. After conducting several tests of the blood, he proceeded with Uhlenhuth’s “precipitin reaction.”
Precipitin tests rely on an unusual property in blood serum that “repels” any foreign substances. When a foreign body like a protein is introduced, the antibodies in the blood form a cloud of precipitated substance. Immunologists were interested because antigens—proteins that produce antibodies—would lead to better vaccines and blood typing. For Spenzer, how and when (and if) the reaction occurred would allow him to determine what sort of animal the blood came from. The original procedure involved a great deal of effort, however, and a strong stomach, because the chemist must first prepare the antibody serum in a process that reads more like witch-doctoring than scientific method.
Warning: the 1908 test described involves animal cruelty. The results were introduced into the murder trial of Guy Rasor, and it is anyone's guess whether the jury understood any of it. But the Orc Lee case introduced blood expertise into American crime investigation, and you can read the entire story at Crime Reads. -via Damn Interesting
(Unrelated image credit: SpicyMilkBoy)
When a man marries three women and they all die, one starts to question the circumstances. Was it really spinal meningitis, or something more nefarious? Still, you would think that anyone with a lick of sense would space the murders out so that they didn't form an obvious pattern. The third death occurred in 1907.
Poseyville, Ind, April 1. Zack Watson, of Wadesville, has undergone a peculiar experience. On March 15, two years ago, his wife was seized with convulsions and died in a few hours. He soon remarried and last March, a year almost to a day from the death of the first, Mrs. Watson, the second wife, died of the same disease. Then he married the third time and yesterday his wife died of the same illness and almost in the same manner.
However, it wasn't all that long after the third Mrs. Watson died that the true cause of death was determined. The answer to this real-life riddle is even stranger than murder. See if you can guess what happened before you read the conclusion to the story at Strange Company. You'll find further information in the comments.
Kurtis Baute set up thousands of dominoes in order to tell the story of the universe. The more you watch this, the crazier you realize it is. Not only does he set up and topple 13,799 dominoes, he also narrates a timeline of the universe as it happens, with each domino representing a million years. The timing had to be precise, the props along the way had to work without disturbing the dominoes, and a screwup would come with a high price -that's a lot of dominoes to reset! I believe the sparkler didn't work right, but he didn't stop, and they edited it nicely. Just designing this idea had to be a ton of work! But don't get distracted by overthinking all that, or by his obvious nervousness and heavy breathing. The story Baute is telling is fascinating in itself. -via Geekologie
While online classes are the safest way to get an education in 2020, it's not like being there. Administration and faculty members at colleges and universities have their hands full trying to deliver online classes, so it falls to students to deal with a social life -or lack thereof- during a virtual school year. One team at the Stanford Women in Computer Science Innovation Challenge jumped at the opportunity to create Club Cardinal, an online version of the Stanford University campus that students can inhabit online and meet up with each other through both avatars and video chat.
“We made Club Cardinal as a project to allow students to experience university life again when so many campuses were shutting down and sending us home due to Covid,” says Allison Zhang, one of Club Cardinal’s creators and a sophomore at Stanford.
Club Cardinal is a free website designed to look like a game version of “the Farm,” Stanford campus’s affectionate nickname. After registering with a stanford.edu email address, users choose avatars and are assigned dorm rooms, which they can decorate with furniture and other items from a virtual store. They can explore the virtual Stanford campus via a map featuring campus landmarks, such as the Oval, Meyer Green, Main Quad, Green Library and the late-night eatery known as TAP. Each location has its own Zoom room for video chatting with other users whose avatars are nearby. Club Cardinal users accumulate money for decorating dorms by spending time on the platform and can store those savings in a virtual bank.
Students at other schools are setting up virtual campuses in Minecraft and other virtual reality platforms. Read about the new way to wander through a college campus at Smithsonian. Now if they could just do something about the tuition costs...
Vancouver author and Chinese history buff Xiran Jay Zhao introduces us to the poetry of Lu You, who lived 800 years ago. A few of his poems, written over a span of years, tells how he became a cat person simply by getting one cat to protect his books from rats.
decided to do a separate thread for this so here we go: how Song dynasty poet Lu You poem-liveblogged his descent from cat owner to cat slave 800 years ago
— XIRAN, Chinese History Educational Memer (@XiranJayZhao) August 28, 2020
The year is 1183. Down On His Luck scholar-official Lu You gets a cat because rats keep munching on his books. 1/? pic.twitter.com/MdMgVdiY5V
Subsequent poems hint that the cat later gets fish to eat, and then a rug to sleep on, and even catnip. Then come more cats. Eventually (we don't know if it's the same cat) his cat doesn't even bother with rats, and Lu You doesn't mind because he has become a cat person. But that's not the only term that could be used.
thank you for the hella vintage cat content!!!
— isweedan (@isweedan) August 28, 2020
Read the entire sequence (eight poems) in this Twitter thread, or at Threadreader. Those who have cats will understand completely. -via Metafilter
CanyonChasers gets an alert from his security system when someone comes onto his property. A surveillance camera shows who it is. This summer, it went off every evening at about the same time. What is he going to do about it? I think you'll enjoy the scheme he came up with. -via reddit
In the Madonie mountains of Sicily, Giulio Gelardi works to save the manna industry, in which his family and a few other producers have toiled for generations. This manna is the sweet sap of the ash tree Fraxinus angustifolia. Once used as both a sweetener and a laxative, the natural sap was replaced by cheap cane sugar and artificial medications. But Gelardi has spent 40 years growing, perfecting, and promoting manna for a new generation.
When I ask if his manna is the one referenced in the Bible, Giulio laughs. “As you can imagine, it’s a source of much debate in these parts,” he says. However, the biblical descriptions of manna being “like coriander seed, white” with a taste “like wafers made with honey” are consistent with Giulio’s product. Did it come from heaven? If we consider the phrase allegorical, then yes, it comes from up high and drips down onto the ground. Could it have sustained a generation of Israelites for months and helped them survive harsh conditions? Maybe. People have survived on less nutritious foods. By all accounts, if this is not the very same manna described in the Bible, it might as well have been.
Learn about manna's history, production, and future at Atlas Obscura.
In Chicago, the Uptown tunnels connect the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge with several theaters and other businesses underground. Why would tunnels be built connecting unrelated businesses? Stories abound of the 1920s, when Prohibition made the liquor trade illegal, and Al Capone made a fortune supplying the city with booze.
Numerous theories about the tunnels’ purpose abound, largely surrounding the Green Mill, a 1920s speakeasy and now classic jazz club. It was founded as Pop Morse's Roadhouse in 1907, a place for mourners to gather after funerals at the two nearby cemeteries. In 1910, it was sold and renamed the Green Mill Gardens, complete with bathrooms in the basement.
During Prohibition, the bar became a speakeasy with Capone connections, so people theorize the tunnels were used to run alcohol up to the bar, fueled by the fact the trap door is still in use behind the bar and alcohol kept in the basement. Others claim the tunnels were used as escape routes during police raids; folks could scamper underground and emerge elsewhere in Uptown as if nothing happened. Other ideas suggest illicit card games and liquor storage.
But the tunnels were not built with booze running in mind.
Still, it's not a great leap to think that these shenanigans may have happened. Read the real story behind the tunnels under Chicago, particularly the Uptown tunnels, at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Keith Cooper)
Why do salt and pepper always go together, and why are they the only two additives found on all restaurant tables in Western nations? It wasn't always this way, and to find out how it happened, BBC Ideas gives us a short history of both salt and pepper. -via Laughing Squid
If you grew up watching classic Disney movies or Warner Bros. cartoons from the Golden Age, you've no doubt encountered "facts" about the animal kingdom that are totally wrong. Some of these myths were continuations of misguided common knowledge from an earlier era, while others were supposed to apply to just one character. But children don't know that Bugs Bunny's carrot-chomping habit was a family-friendly substitute for Groucho Marx's ubiquitous cigar. And some things we learned about animals were just made up of whole cloth to make an interesting story.
See 18 pictofacts containing totally wrong information about animals from TV and movies at Cracked.
A lion named Frasier managed to sire 35 cubs in an 18-month period, despite the fact that he was an elderly cat, 19 years old when that particular adventure started. Frazier became famous for his feat, and even starred in a movie- although he was less successful as an actor than as a leonine sex symbol. Learn Frasier's story in the above video from Popular Science. -via Digg
The International Garden Photographer of the Year has several competitions every year focusing on garden, plant, flower and botanical photography. Their main competition is open for entries until October 31. Other contests are held throughout the year, and recently they announced the winners of their macrophotography competition. First Place went to Bruno Militelli of São Paulo, Brazil. The picture of a rainbow lily above taken by Ecaterina Leonte was selected as a finalist. The tiny frog below was taken by Barbora Polivkova and won a commendation.
See all the stunning winners and finalists at the competition's website. -via Kottke
In normal times, we are amused at the phenomenon in which people have a nagging question in their everyday lives which they try to solve in the geekiest manner possible. We call that "overthinking." In 2020, people have more time to indulge in those personal missions. Ethan Rosenthal is a physicist and a data scientist in New York City, so he's had plenty of time to think about his favorite sandwich, made with peanut butter and bananas.
I start a peanut butter and banana sandwich by spreading peanut butter on two slices of bread. I then slice circular slices of the banana, starting at the end of the banana, and place each slice on one of the pieces of bread until I have a single layer of banana slices. Every time I do this, the former condensed matter physicist in me starts to twitch his eye. You see, I have this urge, this desire, this need to maximize the packing fraction of the banana slices. That is, I want to maximize the coverage of the banana slices on the bread. Just as bowl-form food is perfect because you get every ingredient in every bite, each bite of my sandwich should yield the same golden ratio of bread, peanut butter, and banana.
If you were a machine learning model (or my wife), then you would tell me to just cut long rectangular strips along the long axis of the banana, but I’m not a sociopath. If life were simple, then the banana slices would be perfect circles of equal diameter, and we could coast along looking up optimal configurations on packomania. But alas, life is not simple. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, and banana slices are elliptical with varying size.
So, how do we make optimal peanut butter and banana sandwiches? It’s really quite simple. You take a picture of your banana and bread, pass the image through a deep learning model to locate said items, do some nonlinear curve fitting to the banana, transform to polar coordinates and “slice” the banana along the fitted curve, turn those slices into elliptical polygons, and feed the polygons and bread “box” into a 2D nesting algorithm.
Read how he did exactly that, in excruciating detail, in a study of the optimal way to make a peanut butter and banana sandwich. You could say it's bananas. -via Metafilter
Alan Bellows of Damn Interesting is offering up a browser game that may drive you crazy. The object is to diffuse a bomb by flipping levers in a certain order, but there are 28 levers and if you make one wrong move, the whole building explodes. I don't know what happens if you win, because I've blown up the building every time so far.
The occasion for the game launch is to commemorate an article published exactly five years ago about an incident that occurred exactly 40 years ago. In August of 1980, a mysterious machine appeared in the back area of Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. It was a metal box with 28 toggle switches on its face. A nearby note explained that it was a bomb. The writer demanded three million dollars to be delivered in an extremely convoluted way, or the bomb would be detonated. Examination proved the device to be quite complex, and unable to be moved safely. Before long, authorities involved included the bomb squad from the local sheriff's office, plus "FBI Special Agents, the local Fire Chief, the state Fire Marshal, a military bomb disposal squad, representatives from the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, and scientists from both the Naval Surface Warfare Center and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory." As far as the delivery of the ransom, well, the very complexity of the instructions caused that operation to go awry. The Zero-Armed Bandit is a fascinating true story that would make a good movie.
