Peary, left, and Cook

If you had to name the first person to reach the North Pole, you would probably say Robert Peary. But we may never know for sure, as Peary was in a race against Frederick A. Cook. Both men set out on their respective expeditions in 1908, long before modern communications could track them. And there may have been some sabotage involved.

On his return trip, Cook had stopped in Annoatok, Greenland, and ran into an American hunter named Harry Whitney. Looking to offload some weight for the next leg of his journey, Cook entrusted Whitney with his supplies—including his navigational records and sextant—under the impression that Whitney would safely take them to New York City. They would meet later.

Months later, Robert Peary—fresh from his own expedition north—would appear in Annoatok with a boat. Whitney was thirsty to leave Greenland, and Peary agreed to help take Whitney home under one condition: That he leave all of Cook’s supplies behind. Whitney accepted. Cook, with his equipment lost somewhere in Greenland, would never be able to defend his claim. The New York Times, which had helped sponsor Peary’s trip, would say that Cook's claim was “The most astonishing imposture since the human race came on earth.”

Savage. Whether or not that story is "hilarious," it is one of eight rather interesting rivalries that took a strange turn in a list at Mental Floss. Others include Mark Twain's vendetta against the postal service, the fight over how vultures smell, and a dinosaur built all wrong.

Josh Gibbs of Frog Forest Designs built a custom vivarium for a client who wanted to surprise her Star Wars fan husband. He recreated the look of the environment on Dagobah, where Yoda trained Luke Skywalker to become a Jedi, right down to Luke's crashed X-Wing starfighter!   

This tank was truly a delight to plan and build with a singular direction in mind. We tried to make the hardscape look as true to the theme as possible, while still functioning as a bioactive vivarium capable of housing live plants and animals – which was no easy feat! This 20 gallon vivarium includes an external fogger drilled and installed seamlessly hidden into the hardscape, a daylight LED light with a blue night time setting, natural California manzanita wood to form the “trees”, a hand built and painted model X-Wing, custom cut glass lid, printed concept art background, custom hand carved coco hut with Star Wars emblem, and “Zebra” isopods scurrying around. We are very happy with how this tank turned out, and even more happy about how excited the surprised husband was upon seeing it!”

See a gallery of pictures of the vivarium, including daytime, nighttime, and fog mode, at the artist's website. -via Geeks Are Sexy

This is why computers are no substitute for human experience. Humans are pretty good a deciphering rather fractured grammar from, say, a writer working in their second or third language. Computers work from rules, while people can take intuitive leaps based on a range of experience that may have little to do with the task at hand. Tom Scott breaks that down for us.    

Sixty years ago this month, four Black college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and did not leave after they were refused service. The next day, more students participated in the protest against segregation, and the sit-in grew and continued for weeks. Charles Bess worked at Woolworth as a busboy, and was caught in a news photograph of the protest. Sixty years later, he tells the story of that protest from his point of view.

After his shift was over, the four had gone, and he had finished his closing duties, Bess caught a cab home and remembers telling the driver all about the young men who came into the store that day. As soon as he got home, he told his sister, and then his brother-in-law.

“I felt like I wanted to tell everybody,” he says as he waves his arms up and down. “I was excited about it. It was a very exciting week.”

Bess says that working for a company that kept whites and black separated — not only behind the scenes, but publicly — felt complicated at times.

“I did have to wrestle with it,” he says. “I was on the other side, being paid by a company that was keeping me going, but all the same time, I was kind of on their side. I was on this side, but I was rejoiced by the people on the other side. I felt like there needed to be a change.”

On July 25th, 1960, Bess was one of four Black Woolworth employees who were invited to sit down at the store's lunch counter and enjoy a meal, ushering in the store's new desegregated policy. Read his story at The Bitter Southerner. -via Metafilter 

If you were reading Neatorama in 2012, you no doubt heard plenty about Ecce Homo, the Spanish artwork that was the victim of a botched restoration and became the biggest meme of the year. Cecilia Giménez, the amateur artist who "touched up" the original painting, was quite traumatized at the notoriety the story brought, but plenty has happened in the eight years since then. Solar Sands updates her story, and those of a couple of other unfortunate art restoration attempts in this video. -via reddit

1. Three weeks ago, I ordered a box of boxes from @PkgWholesalers, via @amazonca. Specifically, I ordered a package of 25 boxes, each 6x9x6: https://t.co/My0zSBmYyD

— dave meslin (@meslin) February 7, 2020

Dave Meslin just wanted to order boxes from Amazon. He received some granola instead. That was the beginning of an adventure in which he felt stuck in an endless loop of ever-more-bizarre deliveries and order corrections. At one point they figured out what the problem was, but they still couldn't fix it.

13. I've now received a total of 12 bags of granola + 4 Harry Potter coasters. I've reached out to @PkgWholesalers, but they brushed me off. I think I'm gonna take @m_layton's advice and just go to a damn store. You know, a physical place, with things in it. Things you can see.

— dave meslin (@meslin) February 9, 2020

People had plenty of suggestions for what to do with the stuff he didn't want, and tales of their own Amazon snafus. You can read the story in the original Twitter thread, or all that plus the resulting memes and reactions at Bored Panda.

Comedian Bec Hill shares a collection of misheard lyrics that arise from hunger. This funny project was a promotion for the BBC One show The Hit List. -via Laughing Squid

Don't let the headline fool you. These 14 facts about sex among different species range from sad or mildly gross to truly horrifying. Mating can often mean death, but if it's required for the species to remain extant, they consider it worth the risk. For example, the cute little guy pictured here is an antechinus. He's probably only got one shot at a sex life.

For a two- or three-week stretch in early spring, Australian forests reverberate with the sexual shenanigans of the male antechinus. These tiny, tireless marsupials can engage in a single intimate encounter for 14 hours straight. Desperate, virile and indefatigable, each of these bitty boys will mate with as many females as possible, plugging away until the fur sloughs off his skin, his immune system fails and blood pools around his organs. In a grand culmination of this fornication feat, the male antechinus physically disintegrates: He quite literally boinks himself to death, usually just shy of his first birthday.

So-called suicidal reproduction might sound absurd, but vigorous, organ-shredding sex is the antechinus males’ way of outcompeting each other in the reproductive race to father the most young.

Read about traumatic insemination, urine tasting, penis fencing, and other mating habits in the animal kingdom at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Mel Williams)

Simon de Brienne and Marie Germain were longtime postmasters of The Hague, Netherlands, in the late 17th century. When they died with no heirs, they left their estate to an orphanage. Among those treasures was a sealed trunk containing around 2600 letters that were never delivered for one reason or another, which was acquired by the Dutch postal museum in 1926. Those letters give us a rare glimpse into the world of everyday communications from 300 years ago. Some of the letters are heartbreaking, like Leendert van Muers' 1694 letter to his wife, informing her that he'd been captured by the French army.

    “I wished with God’s help that I were with you again, because my heart is aching to be separated from you, in a country and under a people whose language I nor my fathers ever knew.”

He was eventually forced to enlist in the French army for two years, and is hoping it will soon be peace again, allowing him to return home. He closes the letter by wishing his wife, kids and family “a hundred thousand good nights, and a happy new year.”

But alas, the letter never arrived.

Other letters are businesslike, prurient, mundane, or sweet. They were mailed in many languages, on bespoke paper or pages torn from books, some letterlocked or coded, written with a variety of inks. Researchers began opening, analyzing, and translating those letters in 2015, and now have launched a fascinating online exhibit to reveal what they've learned. Begin the exhibition tour here. -via Metafilter

(Image and text credit: Rebekah Ahrendt, Nadine Akkerman, Jana Dambrogio, Daniel Starza Smith, David van der Linden, Sound and Vision The Hague, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T). CC BY-NC 4.0)

"Hey! What if we made Jurassic Park into a war movie? No, we don't have any money for special effects, but maybe people will buy it as a comedy!" That seems to be the thinking behind Jurassic Thunder, a real movie, in a sense, that isn't even plausible enough for TV. High Octane Pictures is going for the Sharknado crowd with a film that will be available on DVD and digital download March 10. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

There is a legend in Ohio that a hidden cave a few miles from Middletown contains many skeletons of people who died there, 21 of them enslaved people traveling the Underground Railroad. The cave produced poison gas, and was eventually sealed up so that no one else would enter. The origin of the legend was a series of newspaper articles that appeared in 1892, written by a man simply named John. No one today know who he really was.

According to John’s account, one summer night in 1849, a group of escapees took shelter in the home of a Hamilton, Ohio, abolitionist and physician, about 10 miles south of Middletown. As the night wore on, the physician grew nervous that bounty hunters were approaching. He loaded his guests into two wagons and headed north, following an empty road that wound along Elk Creek. John claimed that the doctor ushered the group into a little-known cave, where they’d be cramped and cold but safe and unseen. The cave was on the property of an abolitionist sympathizer—John’s father.

In the newspaper story, the doctor runs to the farmhouse and knocks. It is well after midnight. “I told him what I knew of the cave, that it was a deathtrap and that I was sure not one of the twenty-one would emerge alive,” John’s father says. He tells the doctor that geologists from the “Department of Washington City, DC” had also visited the cave, several years before, and had never returned.

People have been searching for the cave ever since the story resurfaced in the 1980s, yet it has not been found. After all, those who found it died, and if it was sealed up, it is no longer a visible cave, right? But on the other hand, the entire story could be fiction. Read about the enduring mystery of the deadly hidden cave at Atlas Obscura.

A giant extinct turtle was discovered in the tropical regions of South America in the 1970s. It was given the painfully generic name of Stupendemys geographicus. The turtle lived five to ten million years ago, but only recently have fossils been found that are intact enough to give us a real vision of its size. The S. geographicus fossil shown above is accompanied by a paleontologist for scale.  

Researchers of the University of Zurich (UZH) and fellow researchers from Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil have now reported exceptional specimens of the extinct turtle recently found in new locations across Venezuela and Colombia. “The carapace of some Stupendemys individuals reached almost three meters, making it one of the largest, if not the largest turtle that ever existed,” says Marcelo Sánchez, director of the Paleontological Institute and Museum of UZH and head of the study. The turtle had an estimated body mass of 1,145 kg (~2,500 pounds) — almost one hundred times that of its closest living relative, the big-headed Amazon river turtle.

Believe it or not, this turtle had to worry about predators. Read about the largest turtle ever at SciTechDaily.

(Image credit: Edwin Cadena)

You know what Barenaked Ladies really needs? A mass choir explaining how to pronounce "sorry." The band collaborated with 500 singers from Choir! Choir! Choir! for a fundraiser for Covenant House Toronto, and the result is a real hoot. -via Metafilter

Four of America's first five presidents wrote autobiographies, but only John Adams included details of his private life. Some those details are fascinating, particularly the story of how he sailed across the Atlantic, which gives modern audiences a taste of how hazardous such journeys were. In 1778, he became America's ambassador to France, and set out on the trip with his 10-year-old son (and another future president) John Quincy on the ship Boston. First, everyone got sick. Then they were spotted by three ships.

The ships turned out to be British. The Boston outran two of them, but the third one stayed close. The chase stretched on for days. At dawn, Adams would climb on the deck and scan the horizon—at first it would look like they had escaped, until he spotted a stubborn sail. “Sometimes she gained upon us,” he wrote, “and sometimes we gained in our distance from her.” Tucker and Barron ordered their crew to keep the Boston’s cannons rolled out and ready, their barrels jutting from the sides of the ship, their powder and shot piled beside them.

The Boston escaped its pursuer on the 21st, but it soon ran into a new problem. The wind was picking up; dark clouds were filling the sky. That night, a terrible storm hit. The Boston, with its guns still rolled out, was not prepared, and everyone rushed to store the weaponry. A dazzling bolt of lightning struck the main mast. Somehow it missed the casks of gunpowder still strewn across the ship. But it hit a sailor, leaving a scorched divot in his shoulder, a nasty wound that would eventually kill him.

That was only the beginning of the death and destruction and encounters with enemy ships on that voyage. You can read the whole story at outside Online. -via Digg

The slate operator is crucial to filmmaking. They make sure each piece of film is labeled with the scene and take number, plus codes for different camera angles. The loud clap is a marker to synchronize sound. A good slate operator will make each take easy to find for editing. A great one will make it memorable.

Argentinian slate operator Geraldine Brezca has worked with Quentin Tarantino many times, and this compilation shows how she made each snippet of the raw film on Inglourious Basterds memorable. Notice how she uses a word to correspond with the board information. Some of those words are NSFW. -via Kottke