While travelers have always been able to get a meal at a pub or an inn in America -as soon as there were pubs and inns- the fine dining restaurant only came into fashion in the 1830s, soon after the French began such businesses. Historian Paul Freedman has been searching and cataloguing the menus of early American restaurants, between 1838 and 1865, to see what kind of food they were serving.

For one thing, it was fashionable for European visitors to complain about American food. Famous visitors like Frances Trollope groused that it was “abundant but not delicate” in 1832. Ten years later, Charles Dickens’s first trip to America was “a culinary disaster.”

Americans were also renowned for eating with great speed: Delmonico’s scheduled an average of eight to ten minutes per course for their fourteen-course meal. Dinner was served from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Food could still be had later in the evening, but choices were more limited.

These restaurants served things like frogs (six different ways), tripe, lamb testicles, and many varieties of macaroni and cheese. Read more about early American restaurant dining at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Albert Edward Sterner)

It appears that everything we know about piranhas is wrong. If you need to swim cross a river filled with piranha fish, first, make sure it's the right month. Then ask the fish to turn over and show you the color of their bellies. There's a lot more involved, spelled out in this video from RealLifeLore. In other words, good luck. However, you will learn a lot about piranhas in the first six minutes. -via Digg

You probably enjoy looking out your window to see the world, but you've seen it a lot from the same viewpoint. Wouldn't it be great to see what someone else sees through their window? Window Swap lets you do just that. It's a never-ending gallery of submitted window views from all over the world. Some are static, others are videos of varying lengths -and the ambient sound is a bonus! Text at the top will tell you whose window it is, and where. You'll see mountains, cityscapes, pastures, industrial yards, gardens, crowds, rooftops, traffic, porches, patios, cats, and a lot of houseplants. Its like traveling the world as you sit in your home! Window Swap is also asking for submissions, so you can share your view with the world. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Harmut in Germany)

What we call intelligence is a set of skills that work together. When you break it down to the basic components, you realize that we set pretty high standards for humans. A slime mold can find its way around, and even bacteria can sense and avoid toxins. If that’s intelligence, why do we accuse people who can’t keep up with a bank account with a lack of it? Because everything is relative, and a lot of people can not only balance a checkbook, but also invest in the future. It’s a good thing we learned to help each other out.

Think that a low-carb diet is a new idea? William Banting was an undertaker well-known for his elaborate funerals for royalty and the upper crust of London. But he struggled most of his adult life with obesity. After trying all kinds of diets, exercise regimens, and odd advice, his ear doctor recommended a diet that limited bread and sweets in 1862. Banting finally lost the extra wright, 46 pounds of it, and in his joy wrote a pamphlet about the diet.

Suddenly you couldn’t turn your head without hearing about this undertaker who wanted to promote longevity. The humor magazine Punch regularly cartooned Banting’s dietary strictures as a gag; an oddball farce called Doing Banting hit the English stage; and a popular song warned men about dieting too enthusiastically, with the narrator’s sweetheart clucking, “I hate thin men, you’re lost to me / if you persist in Banting.” An American paper cheerily proclaimed in the summer of 1864 that two Boston men had tried Banting’s method and lost more than 40 pounds each over the course of a year.

Read the story of the ear doctor's diet and the effect it had on the undertaker, and all of Britain, for that matter. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Ben Nadler)

Since face masks have become the new normal, we've seen specialty masks for weddings, custom-printed masks, high fashion masks, and masks with political statements. Japanese startup Donut Robotics found a hi-tech way to leverage mask sales by making them translate languages!

The white plastic “c-mask” fits over standard face masks and connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone and tablet application that can transcribe speech into text messages, make calls, or amplify the mask wearer’s voice.

“We worked hard for years to develop a robot and we have used that technology to create a product that responds to how the coronavirus has reshaped society,” said Taisuke Ono, the chief executive of Donut Robotics.

The mask is expected to sell for only about $40. Read about the c-mask rollout at Reuters. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon)

Gerald Selbee and his wife Marge figured out how to leverage the odds of the Massachusetts Lottery. Now, this video from Half as Interesting makes it seem like the math involved is difficult, but it's not, so don't let that scare you. The Massachusetts Lottery was once set up in a way that allowed this scheme to happen, but it's not now, and you won't have that kind of luck anywhere else. You can read a more in-depth account of the Selbee's lottery winnings here. -via Digg

1) A stranger than fiction Roman ring mystery thread: this enigmatic Roman gold ring was found in a ploughed field near Silchester in 1785. The square bezel has a portrait of the pagan goddess Venus, inscribed backwards SUNEV for use as a signet ring by the owner. Curiously... pic.twitter.com/Ls0QcDVNzq

— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) July 10, 2020

Twitter user Gareth Harney brings us a fascinating tale of two artifacts that were only connected to each other many hundreds of years later. A precious gold ring depicts the goddess Venus, but the inscription proclaims it belonged to a Christian.

3)... at a temple to the mysterious British god “Nodens” 80 miles away in Lydney, Gloucestershire, a lead curse tablet (defixio) was later discovered. On the tablet a man named “Silvianus” complains that his gold ring was stolen and he suspects “Senicianus” was the culprit! ... pic.twitter.com/T50LeVRykr

— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) July 10, 2020

It’s a cold case of jewelry theft, possibly signifying the tension between old and new religions. The ring is called the Ring of Silvianus in some sources, and the Ring of Senicianus in others. What is fascinating is the possible connection between this ring and the One Ring to Rule Them All, which you can read about in the full thread at Twitter or at Threadreader. -via Metafilter

Data Broz brings us another moving graph, this time of animated movies from 1926 to 2020. The first half moves fairly slowly, as Disney films dominated the landscape for decades. Then other studios moved in, and finally in 1989, the age of the Disney Renaissance overtook the chart, raking in cash left and right. Things go really fast toward the end, as computer-generated animation, ticket prices, and a rising population made the money making all that much easier. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Being able to outrun an explosion.

You know how you have to be somewhere at a certain time, and you leave early, but then use up all your spare time and more looking for a parking space? Somehow, people in movies manage to always have a parking space waiting for them right in front of their destination, even in cities, even in Manhattan. It's movie logic. While some shortcuts are forgivable (no one wants to watch someone looking for a parking space), other just bend reality for a good visual, like walking or running away from an explosion.

Waking up from a long coma and being able to walk...

People who've had similar real-life experiences can be thoroughly distracted from a movie plot when something is just so wrong. Read a list of 40 things people have noticed in movies that just don't work that way in real life at Bored Panda.

If one wants to go to Mars, there is a launch window that comes around every two years or so when the planets align in a manner that makes the trip to the red planet a lot easier. NASA takes advantage of that launch window every time it comes around, as in this moth. China and the United Arab Emirates are scheduled to also send missions to Mars in July. The planned European-Russian Exomars mission was scrapped, but three missions are still a go as of now. NASA is out in front with an audacious plan to send a lander to Mars and then bring it back with samples of the planet!

In 2011, when U.S. planetary scientists were asked what big-ticket projects should receive federal funding over the next decade, a Mars sample-return mission came out as their top choice. Actually, they needed two missions. The first would collect rocks and soil and cache them on Mars, and the second would retrieve the samples at some later date and return them to Earth where they could be studied in far more detail than they could be on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover constitutes Part One of that plan. Now scheduled for a July 17 launch from Cape Canaveral [Update: Launch is now planned for no earlier than July 30], it’s the most advanced Mars mission yet.

Having established from past investigations that Mars was once a habitable place, scientists now want to know if the planet was, in fact, ever inhabited. That’s a more difficult question, as there currently are no definitive “biosignatures” for identifying life, short of spotting a kangaroo bounding across the Martian surface. More likely, a tentative answer will come from multiple lines of evidence showing that a particular rock’s chemistry and physical characteristics probably resulted from biology. Perseverance’s job is to find the rocks that look most promising for containing that fossil evidence.

Read about all three Mars missions launching this summer at Air&Space magazine. 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Dr. Benjamin Rush was an intellectual who influenced George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Paine, among others. He was one of the youngest men to sign the Declaration of Independence, and became the young country's most famous doctor afterward. Rush was an advocate for many social causes, including humane treatment of the mentally ill.

Rush was a founder of American psychiatry. As a scientist, he was fascinated by mental illness; as a doctor, he was horrified by its treatment. Where most saw the workings of God or demons in the manners of the mentally ill, Rush saw malfunctioning parts. It was no sin to be deranged. The mentally afflicted deserved sympathy and sophisticated care. They had “diseases of the brain,” he said, not character flaws of failures of will. Rush was a pioneer in removing psychiatric patients from prison conditions. He unchained them, gave them proper lighting, and had them exercise in the hospital gardens.

While he was a brilliant thinker, he wasn't right about everything. Read about Rush and his views on all sorts of subjects at Nautilus. -via Strange Company

YouTuber walter santi (previously at Neatorama) surprised his two cats with a ball pits and 500 plastic balls! Santi and Indy had a ball, so to speak, playing in it. However, Indy kept losing his favorite ball amongst all the new ones. -via Metafilter

Journalist Juliette Bretan is not musically-inclined, but as she was researching her roots, particularly the lives of her Eastern European grandparents, she was captured by the sounds of an obscure musical genre. Interwar Polish tango combined Argentine tango, Jewish klezmer, and Polish folk music to produce sad, sentimental, and strangely patriotic songs. The heyday of Polish tango was 1918 to 1939, so it was both birthed and killed by war. You can hear some examples here, here, and here.   

Bretan fell hard for Polish tango, which, in an article for culture.pl, she described as “merging pinches of the age-old Polish romantic and sentimental melodies with Jewish inflections and a more modern, brassy sound, dripping in glissandos and vibrato.”

The Jewishness of Polish tango is essential to understanding the source of these sounds, which means it’s important for those of us in 2020 to understand what it must have been like to be Jewish in Poland during the interwar years. Briefly put, it was no picnic, in particular because of the overt antisemitism of the popular National Democratic Party, which organized successful boycotts against Jewish-owned businesses. For the fascists and racists who waved the banner of the NDP, antisemitism was nothing less than a prerequisite to Polish patriotism.

Even so, being a Jewish composer, musician, or performer in Warsaw, whose population between the wars was roughly one-third Jewish, offered Jews a rare measure of personal and professional freedom. That’s because many interwar Poles, whose country’s borders had been erased from maps by Russia, Germany, and Austria in the late 18th century, were ready to celebrate their nation’s newfound independence. Thus, for large swaths of the Polish population, especially those in Warsaw, Jewish composers, musicians, and performers were tolerated, and even welcomed, to the extent, that is, that they were entertaining.

Read about the rise and fall of the unique interwar Polish tango at Collectors Weekly.

What do you know about the Falkland Islands? The British territory off the coast of Argentina was difficult to cultivate, and was only good for raising sheep. It was so far away from Britain that only people with little other choice went there, and they lived an almost-medieval existence. Then in 1982, the world learned of the Falkland Islands when Argentina invaded, ostensibly to "liberate" the islands. The war made the islands' declining economy worse, but it made the British pay attention to them.  

After the war, the wretched condition of the Falklands attracted international attention, and Britain allotted the islands more aid money than it ever had before. It passed a nationality bill that granted Falkland Islanders full British citizenship, and it gave the islands independence in all matters except foreign policy and defense. The islands would be run not by the governor but by their legislative council; this would consist of eight elected members, though there would be no political parties—there was no need, since most people had known one another all their lives. There was already a local court, and since it was difficult to assemble a jury in which no one was related to the defendant, the bailiff was empowered to step outside and collar more potential jurors literally off the street.

But the turning point that changed everything was Britain’s decision, in 1986, to permit the Falklands to claim fishing rights to the waters for a hundred and fifty miles offshore, which it had not allowed before for fear of antagonizing Argentina.

The prosperity that resulted from fishing led to prosperity from tourism, and new immigrants came to settle in the Falklands. Read a short but fascinating history of the Falkland Islands at The New Yorker. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: amanderson2)