How many generations must pass before an American is considered to be American? That often depends on one's appearance or name. After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor which drew the US into World War II, people with Japanese ancestry were looked upon with suspicion, whether they were recent immigrants or were descended from immigrants of several generations before. Those of Japanese descent were rounded up from the West Coast and interned in camps. Volunteer fighters were eventually granted the opportunity to serve, although in segregated units. And then there was Ben Kuroki.  

After Pearl Harbor, a Nebraska farm boy named Ben Kuroki volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Corps. He could not have been more American: born in the breadbasket of America, one of ten children, growing up in a small town of with a population of about 500, vice-president of his high school senior class. His parents had come to the United States from Japan, started a family, and settled into a happy life in their adopted country. Outraged as an American when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Ben Kuroki and his brother Fred enlisted in the U.S. Army.

Kuroki somehow slipped through the filter that placed all Japanese American enlistees in segregated units and he became a gunner in a B-24 squadron based in Europe. He served with distinction and completed 30 combat missions, more than the standard full tour of 25. He returned to the United States for rest and recuperation, and as a war hero made appearances to engender support for the war. In particular, he was toured through the Japanese American incarceration camps to garner support and recruitment of other Japanese Americans to fight. He quickly found himself at the center of a firestorm of controversy—exploited by the government and distrusted by his fellow Japanese Americans wrongfully imprisoned in camps.

Read the story of Ben Kuroki and what he was willing to give for America at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: San Diego Air & Space Museum)

Getting lost in a city is no reason for a freakout, since you can ask for directions or help. Getting lost in the woods or some other wilderness area can lead to death, often because of panic that overwhelms not only our sense of direction, but our ability to think of alternate plans.

The fear runs deep in the culture. Children lost in the woods is as common a motif in modern fairy tales as in ancient mythology. Usually in fiction there is some kind of redemption: Romulus and Remus are saved by a she-wolf; Snow White is rescued by dwarfs; and even Hansel and Gretel, facing certain doom in the gingerbread house, find their way home. Reality is often more grim: During the 18th and 19th centuries, getting lost was one of the most common causes of death among the children of European settlers in the North American wilderness. "Scarcely a summer passes over the colonists in Canada without losses of children from the families of settlers occurring in the vast forests of the backwoods," the Canadian writer Susanna Moodie noted in 1852. Moodie’s sister, Catharine Parr Traill, another pioneer and writer, based her own novel Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains on real-life stories of children who walked into the woods and couldn’t find their way home.

It's one thing to know the best course when one is lost; it's another thing to actually remember and do it. Read about the process of getting lost and how you might raise your chance of survival under such conditions at Wired. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Shenandoah National Park)

In 1892, back when New York City had several daily papers, some that ran two editions a day, a cat could be featured in newspaper stories for being stuck up in a tree. One of those was a black-and-white cat later named Signorita Succi. The cat was far enough up the tree to be level with the third floor of Mrs. King's house. Mrs. King fed the cat with two laundry poles tied together, but Signorita Succi would not approach her. Then on the third day, a new plan was hatched.  

On May 14, a parade of SPCA agents, police officers (including a police van) and three news reporters made their way to the walnut tree on West 11th Street. According to the New York World newspaper, the policeman formed a cordon around the tree to keep spectators away.

Seems to have been a slow news day for both the papers and the authorities. Read how they got the cat out of the tree and the history of the neighborhood at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

The Getty Museum's art challenge has everyone trying to recreate famous works of art at home, using only what's available. Bel and Steph took on a unique challenge, to recreate a scene from the Bayeaux Tapestry. There was no horse available, but they had plenty of tinfoil and garbage bags. They did an excellent job with a difficult subject! -via Everlasting Blort

(Image credit: Steph Finnola Reed)

When we think of "twenty twenty," the current year and its events are the first thing we think of. Then there's the news show 20/20, which is still airing. But it also means how well you see. If the eye doc says you have 20/20 vision, that's good, but it doesn't mean "perfect," and it doesn't even mean "average." It supposedly means "normal," but what does that really mean? The vision scale was developed by 19th century Dutch doctor Herman Snellen and published in 1862. It's been confusing people ever since.   

And, note here, going back to the irony of naming a news show 20/20, first, it turns out what’s actually average is not exactly what Snelling came up with here (he explicitly was going for, to quote him, “easily recognized by normal eyes”, with emphases on “easily”) and thus around 6/5 (20/15) to 6/4 (20/12) would more accurately be the real “normal”, at least until we get particularly close to being worm food.

As you might have guessed from all of this, 20/20 or 6/6 does NOT mean you have “perfect” vision or see things perfectly clearly, as many people say. It simply means you perform in the ballpark of what Snellen considered normal visual acuity, but actually are kind of below average… Which I guess is sort of fitting when talking accuracy and news.

To add to the confusion, eye test results are sometimes given in smaller numbers, like 6/6. Read about the development of vision measurement and what it means at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Openclipart)

The scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum) lives in deep hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean. It has its own suit of armor made of iron! That's a great way to protect yourself from predators, but as far as we know, this snail is the only animal that can do it. -via Boing Boing

Noor Inayat Khan was a Muslim Sufi with Indian royalty in her heritage. She was also a young woman in Paris when World War II broke out. She fled with her family to England, and despite her pacifist religion, wanted to do what she could to stop Hitler in his deadly rampage across Europe. So she trained as a radio operator for the WAAF and then as a spy for the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Khan was sent back to France as part of a spy network in 1943, but her group of contacts fell apart. Nevertheless, she was determined to stay, because the next round of spies sent would need a radio operator.

In the following months, Khan relayed data back to SOE regarding the remnants of spy circuits, and locations for where to drop supplies for the resistance. She provided information to rescue two American airmen hiding in Paris. In the same way, she also assisted in the escape of 30 other Allied airmen who had survived being shot down over France.

All this time, Khan stayed one step ahead of the Gestapo by constantly moving from place to place to transmit. She dyed her hair various colors and used assorted disguises. Once, she was cornered by two German officers on the metro. They noticed her suitcase, which carried her secret transmitter. They asked her what was in the case. “A cinematograph projector,” Khan replied. She opened the case slightly, allowing the officers to peer inside. “There are the little bulbs. Haven’t you seen one before?” Apparently, her confidence and boldness embarrassed the Germans so much that they accepted her story, and did not detain her.

But Khan’s capture was only a matter of time.

Read the story of Noor Khan at Damn Interesting. -via Digg

The title has nothing to do with the famous Brady Bunch house, which was remodeled. It's about the family itself, fictional as it is, because The Brady Bunch keeps coming back. The show wasn't all that big of a hit when it originally aired, beginning in 1969. But in syndication, it found new life and new fans, and eventually new adventures and new media.  

In a half-century, The Brady Bunch has evolved from sitcom to cartoon to variety show to drama to parody to reality series, molding and re-molding itself to fit the prevailing styles, tastes, and sensibilities of multiple eras. It all began in the late 1960s, when Gilligan’s Island producer Sherwood Schwartz wanted to capitalize on the different types of families that were following in the wake of a relatively new wave of no-fault divorce, the sort seen in big-screen comedies like Yours, Mine, And Ours and With Six You Get Eggroll. This was the zeitgeist that produced Schwartz’s famously blended Bradys, even if their show never mentioned the “d” word: a widower with three sons marrying a widow—or is she a divorcée?—with three daughters

The story of a lovely lady (Florence Henderson) bringing up three very lovely girls (Maureen McCormick, Eve Plumb, and Susan Olsen) and forming a family with a man named Brady (Robert Reed), who was busy with three boys of his own (Barry Williams, Christopher Knight, and Mike Lookinland), wasn’t much of a hit in its original broadcast run. The Brady Bunch aired on ABC for five seasons, beginning in 1969, yet never cracked the Nielsen Top 30. But other factors helped sustain the Bradys’ longevity. Previous sitcoms like Family Affair and The Courtship Of Eddie’s Father also had school-aged characters, but this one was primarily focused on the kids’ viewpoints, not the parents’. The younger Bradys had the adults greatly outnumbered, leading to a plethora of plots involving sibling rivalry, school, dating, and other topics that their peers watching at home could relate to.

Gwen Ihnat looks at the various incarnations of The Brady Bunch, but more importantly, delves into why the family became such a comfort to viewers that it never goes away, at the A.V. Club. -via Metafilter

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his first opera in 1927-28. It was called The Nose, based on an 1836 story by Nikolai Gogol.  

Shostakovich was only 20 when he began writing The Nose, his operatic debut. He turned to a tiny short story by Gogol: an absurdist satire, where a civil servant’s errant nose launches its owner on a ludicrous battle against both nose and the authorities, as bureaucratic processes break down in the face of so unusual a problem. Gogol’s surrealist fable fired Shostakovich’s imagination, and he responded with a work of exuberant energy, full of musical jokes and grotesque parody…

You can read the story at Wikipedia. This performance is from the  Royal Opera House's 2016 performance of The Nose. -via The Kid Should See This

Here's a great idea for family fun, at least for IKEA customers. The furniture company has released plans for converting their furniture into indoor forts! The instructions take you step-by-step in turning a vattviken into a cåve, a few stefans into a cåstle, a landskrona into a förtress, an ölmstad into a höuse, a mulig into a cåmpingtent, and a tjusig into a wigwåm. If that make no sense to you, it will all be clear when you see the diagrams at Bored Panda.

The next Mad Max movie won't have Mad Max at all. George Miller's next film will center around Furiosa's backstory, starring an actress who is younger than Charlize Theron.

Speaking to the New York Times, Miller confirmed that he has begun the casting process to find a younger actress to play Furiosa, working from a script that he’s had written since the production of Mad Max: Fury Road. He wrote the script so that Theron and the other characters would have knowledge of their backstories.

“It was purely a way of helping Charlize and explaining it to ourselves,” Miller said.

Miller had hoped that he’d be able to get Theron to reprise the role, using de-aging technology that has become prevalent in Hollywood, but in the end, he decided against it.

A prequel will probably mean that whoever plays Furiosa may be able to retain both arms for the film. Read more about the plans for Miller's next apocalyptic film at io9.

YouTuber Funk Turkey (previously at Neatorama) fed lyrics from AC/DC songs into a Markov chain and generated a new AC/DC song. The lyrics make about as much sense as you'd expect, but this is definitely an AC/DC song. The real test would be to drop this into a playlist of a fan and see how they react. You can do that, because the song is on Spotify. He's going to try this with Metallica next. -via reddit

We've seen time and time again how famous people are either related to or friends with other famous people. Even more interesting are the stories of how those people crossed paths before either found fame, such as Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve being college roommates. Here's another of those stories, which is told in a fascinating way that blurs their true identities until later in the tale, although you might be able to guess along the way.

The two men in the coach were both 28 years old, born within a few months of each other in 1571. Frederik was Danish and Johannes was German, and for different reasons they now found themselves jostled together, in early June of 1600, traveling from Prague to Vienna.

Frederik had been deeply shaken by recent events that had sentenced him to exile and the mother of his child to be walled up for life in her father’s moated castle. Whirling through Johannes’s head were mathematical formulas he was convinced would prove God’s ultimate intention for a six-planet universe. Unknown to either of the travelers, a man in London was working on a text that would make one of them famous. The other’s hopes would be dashed, though he would also become famous—more so, indeed, than his traveling companion—but for reasons that would surprise him.

The travelers did not know each other before that trip, nor did they ever meet again. But they were both immortalized, in very different ways. Read that story at Nautilus. -via Damn Interesting

You know what bats are, and you know about fish. Then there's the batfish, which is not at all like a bat, and not much like a fish, either. The batfish walks around (yes) and breathes through what look like eyes or mouths in its armpits. Armpits? On a Fish? Let Ze Frank explain the batfish to you in his own inimitable way.

Last month, we saw a filmmaker use a facehugger as a mask. Now, you can, too! Order this facehugger mask with or without a tail, cat not included, from Well Done Goods. They also have face masks featuring the visage of Cthulhu and the hotel carpet from The Shining. That's the way to wear your geekness! -via Geeks Are Sexy