The Ringer came in just under the wire to launch a March Madness tournament, before having to call it an April Madness tournament. This one pits 64 television characters against each other for the title of Best TV Character of the Century. That means the 21st century, so it therefore only covers the past twenty years. Read an introduction for each of the characters in contention here, and vote in the first round today. The second round of voting will be Tuesday, up until the finals on Friday at the Ringer. -via Digg

Have you ever wanted to collaborate with other people to write poetry? If not, you might want to start thinking about it now. The Global Haiku Project invites you to write the first line of a haiku (five syllables), then the second line (seven syllables) to someone else's first line, and then the final line (five syllables) to complete a haiku in progress. When three strangers write a poem together the results can be beautiful, strangely disjointed, or downright funny, as you can see in the gallery.

The things you tell me
I’ve hidden in dreams and hopes
Will you choose to stay?

When things fall apart
I think about my mother
Also, Post Malone.

My nickname is Beans
They say I’m good for the heart
That smell is fine art

I just remembered
There's no T P in the house
Someone please help me

Can you do better? There's only one way to find out. Get started here. You can leave your email to be notified when your poems are completed. -via Metafilter

Sometimes it takes a while for the significance of data we already have to become clear. Scientists analyzing data from the Voyager 2 probe, received 34 years ago, found that Uranus has a plasmoid.

Plasmoids are globs of ionized gases pulled from a celestial body’s atmosphere. These bursts of atmospheric material are flung away from a planet by its magnetic field. This is the first time a plasmoid has been recorded at Uranus, though, and the discovery has revealed a lot about the mysterious planet.

Space physicists Gina DiBraccio and Dan Gershman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center were poring over Voyager data when they discovered an ionized hydrogen-filled plasmoid measuring roughly 127,000 miles by 250,000 miles. The scientists published their findings last year in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Other planets have plasmoids, but Uranus is unique. Read about the discovery at Popular Mechanics.

(Image credit: Mungany)

The Dating Game was a Chuck Barris game show that began in 1965 and ran in various versions up through 1999. Like The Newlywed Game, it owed its popularity to sexual innuendo that produced giggles at the time, but just seems creepy now. Adding to the cringe factor is the fact that a convicted sex offender on parole managed to become a contestant. And he later turned out to be a prolific serial killer.

The man born as Rodney James Alcala is maybe not as well known as some of the more notorious serial killers such as Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, but he is certainly just as bad. Throughout the course of his grim killing spree he would ruthlessly rape, torture, and murder at least seven young women in California and New York under the guise of being a professional photographer, quite possibly dozens more. He was known as being particularly sadistic in his killings, often strangling a woman until she passed out, reviving her, and then starting the process over again, until she was dead. He was a cold hearted monster, but by all accounts a very personable and charming fellow to those who had no idea of his secret life, and this is probably best illustrated by the time he turned up on an episode of The Dating Game.

Alcala appeared on The Dating Game in 1978 as one of three bachelors to compete for a date with a young woman named Cheryl Bradshaw. Alcala won that competition. Read about Rodney Alcala and his TV victory at Mysterious Universe. See clips from the show here. -via Strange Company

I can’t believe this actually worked and yes this is a real story pic.twitter.com/X5KbBl0qIe

— Jeremy Cohen (@jerm_cohen) March 22, 2020

Jeremy Cohen, a New York City photographer, spotted a woman dancing on a rooftop across the street. He sent a message to her by drone, with his phone number. She texted him! Then he and Tori had a video chat, and he set up a date. For dinner. On separate rooftops. They had identical food and watched each other from their respective buildings. You can read the entire story at Bored Panda.

But wait! That's not the entire story, because since that account was published, Jeremy and Tori met in person, up close and almost personal. You can see a video of that over-the-top yet safe encounter here. What are the odds that this story will be a Hallmark movie before it's all over? -via Fark

Before Serena Williams, before Althea Gibson, there was Ora Washington, an athlete you probably have never heard of. Born around the turn of the 20th century, Washington worked as a maid in Philadelphia. She honed her tennis skills at the Germantown YWCA in Philadelphia, a facility reserved for Black residents, and played in the American Tennis Association (ATA), which was also the result of segregation.     

Washington’s natural athleticism was apparent from the beginning of her training at the Y. In 1925, her second year of tournament play, she captured the women’s doubles title at the ATA nationals. She went on to win eight singles championships, 12 consecutive doubles titles and three mixed doubles titles.

But the forces of segregation that provided Washington the opportunity to become the first Black female sports star also precluded her from becoming one in American society as a whole. The all-Black ATA formed in 1916 because the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) — which would eventually become the USTA — refused to allow Black athletes to play. Helen Willis Moody, the leading USTA female athlete in the ’20s and ’30s, never played Washington, says Carrington, even though the leading white male player of the era, Grand Slam winner Don Budge, played Jimmie McDaniel, the reigning ATA champ, in a historic match in July 1940.

But that's just tennis. Washington played professional basketball in the off season, starting in 1930, and eventually made the Basketball Hall of Fame. Read about the life of two-sport star Ora Washington at Ozy.

(Image credit: John W. Mosely)

We know that washing our hands is the most powerful thing an individual can do to prevent the spread of pathogens. But it wasn't always that way. Up until close to the end of the 19th century, doctors went from patient to patient without washing their hands. Doctors were from the educated class, and therefore already cleaner than the patients they treated, and they had no reason to think otherwise.

Swimming against the tide, the first advocate of hand-washing, Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis [...] suffered the fate of many a pioneer—he was jeered at, ignored, and, finally, committed to an asylum at age 47, where he died, in a tragic irony, of sepsis in 1865. Before this end, however, Semmelweis, an obstetrician, took a systematic approach to the problem of “childbed fever,” trying to eliminate all of the possible reasons women died at far higher rates when doctors delivered their babies instead of midwives.

In 1848, he hypothesized that doctors, often attending births immediately after conducting autopsies, were transmitting “cadaverous particles” on their hands. Semmelweis had them sterilize their hands and instruments with chlorine, and deaths from childbed fever fell to 1% of cases. But the experiment did not produce a revolution. Semmelweis couldn’t explain his findings, and Miasma theory continued to hold sway, in part, because it did not implicate doctors or others from the higher orders of society in the spread of disease.

Semmelweis was right, but it was decades before doctors started to wash their hands regularly, and even longer before the idea caught on with the general public. Read how that happened at Flashbak.  -Thanks, WTM!

Are these genome sequences? Paint swatches? Part of the fun is figuring out what this puzzle is in the first place -and then figuring out the answers in the second place. Give it a try on your own. I must confess I was clueless when I first scanned this, until I saw the last one. Then it all became clear.

When you have exhausted all possibilities by guess, you can go here and click on the spoiler bars to get answers. If you still haven't figured out what the puzzle is about, just click on one of them to get started. -via reddit

As 1943 dawned, the people of Germany were well aware of setbacks in the war and their military's recent losses. They needed some inspiration, so the Nazis staged a holiday for the tenth anniversary of Hitler's rise to power on January 30. Hermann Göring was to deliver a speech in Berlin, followed by a parade and more speeches. But the celebration didn't go off as planned, as Britain dispatched two squadrons of Mosquito combat aircraft.  

The 400-mph Mosquitos were undertaking the RAF’s first daylight bombing attack on Germany’s largest city. Their target was not the parade route or even the Reichsmarschall himself, but something bigger. It didn’t take a top-level English spy to figure out that Göring’s remarks would be transmitted to the far corners of the Third Reich. The bombers banked and streaked towards Berlin’s Haus des Rundfunks—the headquarters building of the German State broadcasting company.

Göring and the radio building were slightly more than four miles apart—a distance that the Mosquitos could cover, going all-out, in roughly 40 seconds. And the cacophony they brought with them traveled even faster. As the mics went live and Göring began to speak, the roar of impending catastrophe became audible over the radio.

The broadcast engineers faced a terrible choice: They could relay the horrible echoes of the air raid, unfolding live, or they could shut down the transmission. In the Reichsmarschall’s moment of glory, they cut the feed and dove for cover.

The attack was no coincidence. To make sure the Germans knew that, the RAF sent a second attack during Joseph Goebbels' speech later in the day! Read the story of the propaganda attack at Air & Space magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: the United Kingdom Government)

You've been playing Monopoly or Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit all your life, and they may seem boring by now. Instead of buying a new game that you may or may not like, how about combining the games you have into something new? Intriguing idea, but actually coming up with the rules for a board game mashup is a lot of work. Lucky for us, it's already been done. Check out the Board Game Remix Kit.

There are 26 different suggestions for ways to play, plus another four in the Valentine's Day Expansion. The simplest ideas are just tweaks to the original games, to make them differently fun: a more intensely strategic Scrabble, a faster Trivial Pursuit.

Then there are the new games: use lead piping to defend yourself from zombies in the Cluedo mansion; listen to the answer from a Trivial Pursuit card, and compete to come up with the most plausible question.

Finally there are mash-ups, combining pieces from more than one game: auction off individual Scrabble tiles with your Monopoly money; solve a murder mystery with Scrabble tile anagrams.

The Board Game Remix Kit has been released free online. You can download the kit here. -via Metafilter

The ability to easily produce fire was a wildly successful development for mankind. But for a large part of the 19th century, working in a match factory could lead to illness, bone loss, and even death. Occupational safety has come a long way since then. Eventually a less toxic form of match was developed, and in this video, you'll also find why "safety matches" are called that.

Source: CandyStore.com

People buy as much candy for Easter as they do for Halloween, and like Halloween, there are traditional candies you only find this time of year. She are pretty good, while some of the others ...well, you wonder why they are still around. Tradition, I guess. CandyStore.com conducts a poll every year to determine the best and worst Easter candies. Let's take a look at #1 for this year, Cadbury Creme Eggs. 

The chocolate shell is a problem. The thing is hard enough to eat without making a mess, but god forbid the egg has gotten a tiny bit warm and the outer shell has softened. Then you’re in for a sloppy mess with this awkwardly shaped candy whose liquid filling does nothing to support its shape. It falls apart into goo.

Speaking of the shell, its ingredients have recently gone through some changes. Cadbury Creme Eggs’ shell used to be made of Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate. But Cadbury was bought by Kraft in 2010, and that was an ominous event. Five years later, they announced the change to a “standard chocolate mix.”

Read about the other Easter candies that made the worst list, and check out the best list, too! -via Mental Floss

Europe has bounty of history, of kingdoms and nations large and small, with castles built for the ruling class as a symbol of their wealth as well as fortification against enemies. Many of those older castles are now in ruins, but a team of designers, architects, and digital artists have collaborated to show us how they once looked. Above is a recreation of Poenari Castle in Romania.  

Legendary Poenari Castle is so adorned with inspiring details that it feels like it came from a storybook. Indeed, it once belonged to Vlad the Impaler, the Voivode (Duke) of Wallachia, who inspired Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. Climbing the 1,480 concrete stairs to the clifftop castle’s eagle nest position creates an uneasy sense of isolation. And it is easy to get giddy at such a height, especially in the knowledge that the ruins are partly due to a landslide that dragged the towers down to the river 400 metres below.

But Poenari needn’t be where visitors meet their doom. Vlad himself escaped attack through a secret passageway and into the Carpathian Mountains. The fortress itself was originally built directly into the rock and fortified with earth or lime, and Vlad rebuilt it with extra towers for defence. As a final fearsome detail, the castle is currently closed because of local bears – but it will re-open soon, possibly with a crémaillère tram to lift visitors up from the valley.

See six other ruins restored to their former glory with the magic of digital art. -Thanks, Luke!

Here we see video footage of a grizzly bear emerging from his winter hibernation, or more accurately, dormancy. Boo Grizzly was orphaned as a cub in 2002. He lives at the Kicking Horse Grizzly Bear Refuge in Golden, British Columbia, a facility created for Boo and his brother when they were rescued.

Among other things, the refuge permits a rare in-depth analysis of grizzly bear hibernation. A log den was constructed within the refuge for the cubs to use in the winter. This custom-built den includes a motion-activated camera in the roof that allows continuous monitoring of activity inside. As a result, we now know that grizzly bears engage in limited activity during the winter, unlike true hibernators. For that reason we now use the more accurate term winter dormancy rather than hibernation when referring to a bear’s winter slumber.

Boo's caretaker Nicole Marie caught footage of him coming back from his months of dormancy, and she's quite delighted. -via Geekologie

There are plenty of lists of good cars and beautiful cars, but what fun are those? Instead, let's be glad we never bought one of the truly ugly cars the automotive industry tried out. Often that was because they sold so poorly that few were made. And you can see why. Shown above is the 1951 Allard P2 Safari.

There are a few things in life we simply cannot wrap our heads around, and this is one of them: Who thought it was a good idea to graft the front of a sports car onto the back of a woody wagon? British automaker Allard did, and the results are every bit as revolting as one might expect. Production estimates for this Ford-powered eyesore range between 10 and 13, some five of which are known to exist. We imagine the rest were destroyed by mobs with torches and pitchforks.

As in any list, you may not agree with some of the choices -some of the newer cars don't really stand out in ugliness the way old ones do. But you might get a kick out of reading what made these cars ugly at Automobile magazine. -via Digg