We've often posted about medieval art and imagery, particularly illuminations and marginalia that scribes used to decorate manuscripts. We laugh at the ridiculous use of snails and rabbits, but there are oh, so many cats. And they all look goofy, as if they were cartoon drawings plopped down in the middle of careful portraits of people and dogs (and rabbits).

“In the Medieval period, animals were understood to be the mirror of human society,” historian Damien Kempf, who is writing a book on Medieval depictions of animals, told me. “Even though animals were believed to be irrational beings, they were given human traits and characteristics.” Dogs, for example, were lauded for being loyal companions, created to guard the house and assist in the hunt.

Cats? Not so much.

“Sources emphasize the rather unruly nature of cats,” Kempf said. “Unlike dogs, cats cannot be trained to be loyal and obedient. As one author complains, they will go to whoever gives them food.” So that’s one reason cats probably got such an unflattering edit.

But it's not the only reason. Altogether, medieval artists may have something in common with modern meme makers- as funny as cats are, we love to make them funnier. Read more on this subject at Medium, and you'll see some funny cats. -via Digg

Scientists do the most amazing things today. A study on a single specimen of fossil mollusk has determined the length of an each day 70 million years ago. The shell is of the species Torreites sanchezi, described as a rudist clam, which makes one wonder what it did that was so rude.

Like counting the rings of a stump to discern the age of a tree, scientists from the Environmental and Geochemistry Research Group at Brussels University have counted the microscopically thin layers of an extinct mollusk to calculate the length of a Late Cretaceous day. The new paper, published in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, shows that, some 70 million years ago, days were around 23.5 hours long and that the Earth rotated 372 times each year, as opposed to the current 365 days per year.

The overall length of the year hasn’t changed since the Late Cretaceous—a total year consisted of 8,760 hours during the Late Cretaceous, just as a year does today. It’s just that our planet’s spin is getting progressively slower, thanks to the gravitational effects of our Moon. Accordingly, the new research, led by Niels J. de Winter, could improve our understanding of the Earth-Moon relationship over time and even the timing of the origin of the Moon.

Scientists had already figured the length of days back then, but this is another source that confirms their calculations. What's really amazing how they did it. The fossil shell is not particularly big, and the daily "growth rings" are actually layers no more than 40 nanometers thick. They counted these, and compared the number to seasonal changes in the shell to figure out how many days were in a year. In a fossil. Read more on this study that shows what you can learn by taking a very close look at tiny things at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: AGU)

2/ Remember that

Area = Pi r^2

formula for a circle? That’s not really the formula. It should be:

Area = radius x (half circumference),

where circumf=Pi*diameter, so half of that is Pi*radius.

Proof: cut your pizza into small slices and arrange into an r x (C/2) rectangle... pic.twitter.com/VVaj4vWRYb

— Alex Kontorovich (@AlexKontorovich) March 6, 2020

Yeah, Mom always told us not to play with our food, but this Saturday is 3/14, so it's the annual holiday known as Pi Day. Teachers may want to celebrate Friday with this kind of fun demonstration of how pi relates to circles by using pizzas and pizza crust. But anyone can do it, and it's a great excuse to order five pizzas! Alex Kontorovich also invites you to the Pi Party this Friday at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York.  -via Boing Boing

Also: Do you know where your Pi Day shirt is?

Universal gave us many classic monsters in the heyday of the drive-in movie: Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and others. Each horror film that proved popular got sequels and more sequels, until they weren't scary any more. That's the problem with becoming a classic.  

It’s hard to be scared by things you’ve been looking at for 90 or so years, which are so omnipresent in pop culture they’ve inspired dozens upon dozens of copycats, are sometimes turned into laughingstocks, and have generally been neutered to the point where they can safely be put in children’s cartoons and on cereal boxes. The Universal Monsters just aren’t scary anymore, but they can be—and writer/director Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man knows how.

The problem with most recent Universal Monster movies is that they’re usually not even trying to be scary; instead, they’re PG-13 action flicks like Tom Cruise’s Mummy, Dracula Untold, Van Helsing, even the 1999 Mummy film and its sequels. When the movies try for horror (like 2010’s The Wolf Man, starring Benicio del Toro) they fail, mainly because modern audiences don’t have the suspension of disbelief anymore for magic curses, ludicrous science, or creatures that can somehow explode into a bunch of bats. These monsters aren’t monstrous enough to be frightening by themselves—they need something more.

Each of the monsters in the Universal horror universe has some quality that caused dread in their original audiences. It's not in the way they looked, although that's what they became known for. It's the way they affected the world around them that reflected real fears people had at the time. If monsters harnessed more modern fears, like the new movie Invisible Man, they could find new cinematic life. A list at io9 goes through what made the original idea of each monster frightening before they were turned into cartoon characters.

Neatorama readers know that pizza originated in Naples, Italy. It was an evolutionary step in the "flatbread plus other stuff" tradition that was thousands of years old, but Naples made it famous in the 18th century as the city grew. But while pizza was well-known, it wasn't all that well-regarded. It was considered cheap food for the poor.  

For a long time, pizzas were scorned by food writers. Associated with the crushing poverty of the lazzaroni, they were frequently denigrated as ‘disgusting’, especially by foreign visitors. In 1831, Samuel Morse – inventor of the telegraph – described pizza as a ‘species of the most nauseating cake … covered over with slices of pomodoro or tomatoes, and sprinkled with little fish and black pepper and I know not what other ingredients, it altogether looks like a piece of bread that has been taken reeking out of the sewer’.

When the first cookbooks appeared in the late 19th century, they pointedly ignored pizza. Even those dedicated to Neapolitan cuisine disdained to mention it – despite the fact that the gradual improvement in the lazzaroni’s status had prompted the appearance of the first pizza restaurants.

So how did pizza go from such disdain to what it is today? For that you can thank Margherita of Savoy. Read that story at History Today.  -via Damn Interesting

The old car goes a mile up the hill, and then a mile down the hill. It can only go 15 miles an hour up the hill. How fast must the car go down the hill in order to average 30 miles per hour for the entire two-mile trip? Duh, 45 miles per hour. But the explanation in this video went right over my head. Why does it matter how much time the trip takes? Why bring time into it at all? They lost me completely. Can you explain it any simpler than this guy does? -via Digg

We are supposed to wash our hands for at least twenty seconds, but singing "Happy Birthday" to ourselves twice each wash can get tedious. How much of your favorite song would work? UK teenager William Gibson has launched a generator that will put the lyrics of any tune to the National Health Service hand-washing poster illustrations. It's called Wash Your Lyrics. Just enter a song title and the artist, and it will generate a poster you can print out and display in your bathroom or workplace to remind you of how much you need to sing to reach the required 20 seconds for proper hand washing. The first song I thought of was "Yoda" by Weird Al Yankovic, because I'm just weird. Others had better ideas.



 -via Mashable

Seventy years ago, on March 8, 1950, Volkswagen started producing the Type 2, which came to be the first van. We called it the microbus. Like the Type 1 (the Beetle), it slowly made its way across the Atlantic and began to compete with both the family station wagon and work trucks. But it really caught on with younger people.  

As the Microbus became more accepted in America, it began to take on a cult status with fringe groups. Its boxy appearance—so unlike anything the major auto manufacturers in Detroit were producing—became a symbol for counterculture types, who wanted to stand out from the rest of crowd. Some owners painted peace signs on the Microbus, earning it the nickname “hippie bus.”

“It became popular with people who were rejecting mainstream American culture,” White says. “It was their way of saying, ‘We don’t need your big V8 cars.’”

The VW Microbus was also a favorite of marginalized members of society, who could use the versatile vehicle to transport people to rallies, polling stations, protests and more during the political and cultural upheaval that laced the 1960s.

The microbus also became a symbol for the road trip. While the underpowered engine could fail, the multiple people inside knew they were in this together. Read about the Volkswagen microbus and its effect on America at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Bernard Spragg)

It's that time of year! Time to announce the 11th annual Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team. The YouTuber known as Game On! Minnesota considered retiring from making the list, but the hair pulled him back in. Minnesota high school hockey players had worked too hard on their flow. There were ramen noodles, dirty mullets, and many teenage attempts at mustaches, and the top ten players have truly magnificent salad. We also get a look at some spectators and coaches with notable hair.     

See the Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team from previous years.

please tell me about an extremely niche section of twitter that you never knew existed until you made them angry. one time i made Feed Swans Bread Twitter angry after i suggested food alternatives. FOR MONTHS I got angry tweets, until I finally deleted it. YOUR TURN.

— Elizabeth May (@_ElizabethMay) March 6, 2020

There are hundreds of millions of Twitter users, so you know that whatever you say, someone somewhere will have a problem with it. And they will find you and make your life miserable. Elizabeth May asked for stories of obscure Twitter communities that people have discovered by offending them. Her example confused me, because I tried to recall if I was familiar with Swan's brand bread. It turns out there are people who have strong opinions both for and against tossing leftover bread to waterfowl. Metafilter has a sampling of the best responses to May's query.

Elle Maruska: "Outdoor Cat Twitter has been more violently aggressive in my mentions than Literal Nazi Twitter tbh"

Charlotte Grubbs: "The most vitriolic replies I ever got were in response to a tweet about how it's fine for adults to read children's books."

Dr Philip Lee: "Oh there was one time, there is a subset of people who don't believe in the legitimacy of the French Government, because they believe the revolution was illegal, and they still have a pretender to the crown of France and everything."

Gretchen: "I found out Bee Movie Twitter exists by once randomly tweeting that the Bee Movie is nonsensical since all worker bees are female. Furious responses for days"

Kelsey Lewis: "I tweeted some joke once about how the new guy at work was always leaving the office toilet seat up. And wouldn’t ya know there are a handful of people who use Twitter dot com as a platform to tell the world that actually women should be putting the seat UP for men."

Not sure if the original thread is online but I found a screenshot I took pic.twitter.com/l4DW6ACwES

— Byron C Clark 🍠 (@byroncclark) March 8, 2020

While I do not doubt that some people actually have strong feelings about these subjects, you have to wonder about the people who scan Twitter looking for something, anything, to argue about, or are else ready to tell you are doing it wrong. You can read a collection of the best responses at Metafilter, or peruse the entire thread at Twitter.

Here is a glorious example from 1941 of how to name a club. You can imagine what their meetings are like, but experience shows that a meeting of like-minded people does not necessarily have to stick to the subject. You'll find an even earlier clip along the same lines at Weird Universe.

Many times we've heard about personal injury lawsuits as examples of overreaction and entitlement, with the most famous example being the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit. Often the facts behind these "frivolous lawsuit" cases are very different from what the public story becomes. Way back in 1928, May Donoghue found a decomposing snail in her ginger beer at a cafe in Scotland. Her complaint brought a shrug from the cafe owner. Donoghue got sick. Then she went after the manufacturer of the soda.  

By the time the case arrived in court, people in Glasgow had already started to talk about it. Many questioned Donoghue’s motives and attacked her character: Some said that she was doing it for the money, while others claimed she merely wanted attention. Donoghue’s separation from her husband, whom she had recently left after he’d had several affairs, was also wielded against her and used as evidence of her untrustworthiness.

“Mrs. Donoghue was a married woman, but in the case, she is portrayed as going out with a ‘friend’ for ice cream and ginger beer,” says Erika Chamberlain, the dean of the law faculty at the University of Western Ontario. Chamberlain wrote her doctoral dissertation on the case, which went down in legal history as Donoghue v. Stevenson. “There was a lot of speculation as to whether the ‘friend’ was in fact a lover.”

Details about Donoghue’s personal life — her working-class childhood, her unhappy marriage to Henry Donoghue — were dissected in the press. She was often portrayed as crazy or a liar. According to Chamberlain, one defense lawyer tried to claim that the snail never even existed.

Nonetheless, Donoghue pressed on.

The lawsuit was long and complicated, but eventually established that manufacturers have some responsibility for the quality of their products. Read what happened at Narratively. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Min Heo)

In early Arthurian legend, Merlin was the product of a conception between a demon and a virtuous sleeping woman. This idea was apparently popular, as it made its way into a lot of medieval art. The devil could be blamed for all kinds of things, like an unexpected pregnancy, a child's death, a child who who did not resemble his father, or one who grew to be evil or strangely gifted. See a roundup of art illustrating such stories at Flashbak. -via Everlasting Blort

When Tracey McNamara was a veterinarian at the Bronx Zoo, she was part of the team that discovered West Nile Virus. Later, she was tapped as a science advisor for the 2011 movie Contagion. McNamara, now a professor and veterinary pathologist, is one of the reasons that the movie came so close to describing what the world is like today as the COVID-19 illness, caused by a coronavirus, spreads.

“The movie really rang true, and now that we’re dealing with coronavirus, it really captured when you're dealing with something unknown,” McNamara said. “Just like with the West Nile virus, you're going to hear a lot of people making all sorts of proclamations and announcements, and whenever someone says something about a brand-new, previously unknown virus, I think, You should choose your words carefully. You may have to eat them.”

The realism in Contagion is why so many people are seeking out and re-watching the movie now. Read more of what McNamara has to say at Buzzfeed.

Oh man, they sent a camera-equipped robot otter out into a river to film a colony of real otters! The otters are kind of baffled, but soon get used to the weird stranger. The BBC TV series Spy in the Wild got some really neat otter footage this way. Or, maybe I should say, "otterly neat." -via Boing Boing