Nathan Yau made an interactive tool that will guess your name. You enter your sex and decade of birth, and then type the first letter. Not only will the tool guess your name, but you also get a percentage of its confidence in the guesses. If the algorithm doesn't guess right, try a second letter to refine the results.
This is based on data from the Social Security Administration, up to 2018. It’s relatively comprehensive, but there are a few limitations. First, it’s data for the United States, so the numbers don’t really apply elsewhere. Second, the SSA doesn’t include names with fewer than five people in a year, so the chart doesn’t cover more unique names. Third, there were no Social Security Numbers before 1935, so the name counts are fuzzier for years before that.
This thing guessed both my first and middle name (which begin with the same letter) on the very first try. So I entered data on my entire family and was astonished at how common our names were for their time, grandparents included. Only when I got to my paternal grandfather, who was born in 1901, did the real name not appear at the very top of the guesses. It was third. Check it out yourself at Flowing Data. -via Digg
The brave hero saving a virtuous woman from an evil villain has forever been a classic story, from ancient mythology to modern Hollywood movies. It sets up the woman as both victim and prize, weak but on a pedestal. The heyday of such stories is set in the medieval period, where chivalrous knights proved themselves by risking their lives for a woman's honor. Knights were real historical figures, and chivalry and honor were important to them, right? And considering we have contemporary accounts of actual events from that time, you'd think we'd find some real stories of knights rescuing damsels in distress. But as Daven Hiskey found in his research, the historical record is pretty dismal for damsels.
On that note, looking at various instances of kidnapped women, we figured surely at least one kidnapped woman of noble birth in history had some officially knighted individual dash off to save her, right? She’s literally surrounded by these sorts of men, some of whom would be relations and presumably interested in her safety and well-being.
Well, it turns out while woman of wealth and nobility were shockingly often abducted throughout Medieval times, it doesn’t seem as if they could rely on knights to come to their rescue, or often anyone at all. In cases where something was done, rather than rushing off swords drawn, it would seem, as would be more likely today, resolving the kidnappings was almost always done through negotiations with the kidnapper or through the court systems and the law, or both.
More specifically, during Medieval times in the Western world, women of means, whether of the nobility or otherwise in possession of not inconsiderable valuables, were in particular danger from a random guy coming along and kidnapping and forcibly marrying her. This might be done by simply raping her, and thus consummating the union, or in some cases to make it all more official, finding a willing priest to marry the couple against the woman’s wishes and then raping her to seal the deal.
In the mid-20th century, rural France had a glut of vintners and a lack of agricultural diversity. Authorities hatched a plan to build a reservoir in the Salagou Valley in southern France, in order to refresh the soil and encourage new crops. The original plan called for the reservoir to inundate the small village of Celles, home to 63 residents whose families had lived there for generations.
Between 1959 and 1968, the inhabitants of Celles were pushed to sell their homes to make way for the reservoir. Those who didn’t were expropriated, their houses left empty.
In 1968, the dam on the Salagou River was finally finished. The water crept up slowly, covering the red clay landscape. But just short of the village, it stopped. In the original plans the water was supposed to rise to the 150-meter altitude mark. But in the end it stopped permanently at 139 meters, 4 meters lower than the village.
By then there were no inhabitants left, and the buildings began to fall into ruin. But some former residents, particularly one family, never gave up on Celles. Fifty years later, read about the effort to rebirth a town killed by good intentions at Atlas Obscura.
The title makes this sound like any silly internet quiz, but this is from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and they know birds. You'll be given 15 questions about your personality, which you can answer along a spectrum. Then your answers will be correlated to one of 22 North American bird species. Here's my result:
Result: You Are a Red-tailed Hawk!
You’re smart and curious, strong and determined. Your voice is so magnificent that you could make a living in Hollywood. You understand strategy, and sometimes work with a partner, but overall most of the time you are happy to be alone.
I guess that's fairly accurate. The results page will also tell you more about the bird itself. Try your hand at the quiz at the Cornell site. Scroll down from your results to see all the other birds you could have been if you had answered differently. -via Metafilter
Snow fell across Canada this past weekend, but Newfoundland got more than their share.
The capital of Newfoundland, St. John’s, was hit with 30 inches of snow in 24 hours, shattering a previous record, the Weather Channel reported. Officials also recorded snowdrifts as high as 15 feet on some highways, more than a few of which required help from Canadian armed forces to clear.
Plowing the streets is all well and good, but you can't go anywhere when you open the front door to a wall of snow, or your car has completely disappeared underneath it. Now that the plows and snowblowers have been at work, we have plenty of evidence of the unusually massive snowfall.
They may be called century eggs or even 1,000 year eggs, but it only takes between ten and 30 days to preserve them. Great Big Story explains how century eggs are made in the traditional way. The comments at YouTube confirmed that they are delicious, with a salty flavor in the jellied "white" and a creamy yolk. After watching this video, I had a couple of questions, which Wikipedia answered.
Do you need to cook these eggs? No, they can be eaten as is, but many folks cut them up and add them to congee.
If there are so few producers using the traditional process, how are century eggs so widely available? Modern manufacturers get the same effect by soaking the eggs in the "active ingredients" of the traditional preservation method, skipping the clay and reproducing the same chemical reactions.
In 1961, Leonid Rogozov was the only medical doctor at the Soviet Antarctic Station. He was well qualified to take care of everyone else, but it was Rogozov himself who came down with appendicitis. He recognized the symptoms, but was weakening from his condition, and concerned about the decision he would have to make. The pain became so bad that on April 30, he set up the operating room, briefed his terrified assistants, applied local anesthetic, and removed his own appendix. In his own words:
“My poor assistants! At the last minute I looked over at them. They stood there in their surgical whites, whiter than white themselves. I was scared too. But when I picked up the needle with the novocaine and gave myself the first injection, somehow I automatically switched into operating mode, and from that point on I didn’t notice anything else.
“The bleeding is quite heavy, but I take my time… Opening the peritoneum, I injured the blind gut and had to sew it up… I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every four to five minutes I rest for 20 – 25 seconds.
“Finally here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst… My heart seized up and noticeably slowed, my hands felt like rubber. Well, I thought, it’s going to end badly and all that was left was removing the appendix.”
Now that Disney owns both Star Wars and The Simpsons (and almost every other entertainment media in existence), they are proud to compile some Star Wars references from the past 30 years of The Simpsons ...although a few really dedicated geeks are lamenting the omission of their personal favorites. If you prefer Marvel superheroes to Star Wars, well, Disney owns them, too, so here's a supercut of Marvel references in The Simpsons.
But the most appropriate supercut may be the list of the times that The Simpsons made fun of Disney. This particular supercut was NOT released by Disney.
A species name is usually made up of its genus followed by its species, like Homo sapiens. A tautonym is a species name in which the genus and species is the same, like Rattus rattus. To the casual reader, a tautonym implies that this is the first one discovered in a new genus, or else the most common species in that genus. That may or may not be true. When variations of a species are discovered, another name can be appended to designate the subspecies. If that subspecies name is the same as the other two names, you get a triple tautonym, like Bison bison bison. There are more triple tautonyms than you realized. Wikipedia has a list of 21, which may be expanded when others are submitted. The list is likely to lead you down a rabbit hole of looking for these subspecies, some of which have naming controversies, plus the list of "people with reduplicated names." -via Nag on the Lake
The Old Forge in Inverie, Scotland holds the Guinness World Record title of “the most remote pub on mainland Britain.” Inverie is a village of around 100 people on the Knoydart peninsula, accessible by ferry and by hiking through hills and bogs where there are no roads. It has long been the Holy Grail of British hikers. But things are changing in Inverie. A new owner took possession of the Old Forge in 2012, and the changes he is making to turn it into a more upscale destination have the locals rebelling. They've built a second, unofficial pub called The Table, which is little more than a shack with a disco ball.
I talked to locals as the disco ball swung in the breeze. We discussed Brexit, wild-boar populations, that you can pee anywhere in Scotland (unlike England), and the bittersweet work of foresters on the peninsula, planting oaks that will only reach maturity once those same foresters are long dead. It seems that no one who lives on Knoydart today was born here: the majority came as visitors and were caught up in its wild embrace. That night at the Table, it was easy to understand, in the lick of flame, the lap of waves, the drumming of rain on the roof. Lastly, the subject turned to the dispute with the Old Forge.
“What was created before [at the Old Forge] was legendary,” says Patrick. “To shut it down [for the winter], to me, is a two fingers up to the community.”
The Table “is in protest to what we’ve lost,” said one local who asked not to be named. “A lot of folks who walked in every two years stopped coming, because they remember the pub how it was. If the pub was the beating heart of the community, this is the new left ventricle. We’re trying to fill the gap. It keeps us sane.”
It is easy to see how tempers flare when pubs are concerned. The pub is part of the soul of Scotland and the United Kingdom as a whole. Its meaning transcends a tavern or bar. Pub is an abbreviation of public house—a meeting place for all comers (children and dogs are admitted, too). In the Scottish climate, pubs were a place of shelter for wayfarers on the open road. For some hikers, the walk-in to Knoydart is a reenactment of this memory: of people coming in from the cold in an age before mechanized transport, when walking was a necessity. Or even an echo of an old story from a faraway land—of some people tired and lost in the wilderness, looking for a room at the inn.
Getting straight hair to curl is easier now than it has ever been thanks to modern electric curling irons, although the occasional disaster is still possible. Women also had curling irons in the 1800s, which were were not safe at all. Those curling irons were simple metal tongs that had been heated in a fire.
Nevertheless, ladies continued to use hot tongs and crimping irons throughout the nineteenth century. According to Sylvia’s Book of the Toilet (1881), the safest method for using curling tongs was to wrap slightly dampened hair around a pair of hot tongs that had been wrapped in “thin brown paper.” Alternatively, paper could be wrapped directly around the hair before application of the tongs—as Jo wrapped Meg’s hair.
A paper barrier was meant to help protect the hair from being scorched. However, it was no protection against a pair of hot tongs that had been applied too long, or to hair that was fine and brittle.
Enterprising hair stylists came up with alternative methods, involving setting lotions and curlers to sleep in, which was an improvement in safety, but certainly not in convenience. Read about 19th-century curlers at Mimi Matthews' blog. -via Strange Company
We've all have this experience on a road trip: you see some nice blooming flowers on the side of the highway, and you wonder what kind of flowers they are. But you don't have the time, or the authority, to pull over and get a leisurely look. You might have a field guide with you, but the plants in it do not look like what you see out the window. Chris Helzer of The Prairie Ecologist understands that experience, and has therefore written a book to remedy the situation. His new ebook, A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers at Full Speed is available for free.
The wildflowers in the book are arranged by both color and blooming date (within color classes), just as you’ll see in other field guides. However, in this guide, the flowers appear as they actually look when you see them from the road. This much more realistic portrayal of wildflowers will prevent the frustration that comes from staring bleakly at field guide photos that bear little resemblance to what you see out your car window.
The United States Space Force is the newest branch of the armed forces. On Friday, they posted a picture of a uniform to show off the nametape and patches. Notice anything strange about the uniform? Plenty of Twitter users did. The woodland camouflage just seems a little unnecessary for troops who will be working on, and operating in, space. The jokes and questions rolled in so hard and fast that the USSF had to issue a clarification.
USSF is utilizing current Army/Air Force uniforms, saving costs of designing/producing a new one.
Members will look like their joint counterparts they’ll be working with, on the ground.
While we've posted about quite a few secret societies, the Odd Fellows doesn't appear to be one of them. That's odd, because Neatorama looks for "odd" things to post. This fraternal organization has been around a long time, and embraces the concepts of “Friendship, Love and Truth.” What's odd about that?
In the 18th century, with the beginning of industrialization, it was indeed considered “odd” to commit oneself to the principals of charity and communal welfare. It’s been suggested that founding members might have been branded as odd due to the apparent strangeness of following noble values such as fraternalism, benevolence and charity.
Another theory proposes that the order was formed by individuals who had “odd” careers or exercised unusual trades, and naturally gravitated towards each other socially and professionally, likely evolving from Medieval guilds to form an “odd fellowship”.
Considering the Masons began as a guild of stonemasons, that explanation makes sense. But the history of the Odd Fellows goes back so far that we're not completely sure. Read what we do know about the Odd Fellows, including mysterious skeletons found in their halls, at Messy Nessy Chic.
The Dane County Humane Society in Madison, Wisconsin, named this cat Lady in a Fur Coat, or Lady for short. She suffered from hematomas and chronic infections which led to her ear flaps being removed. Lady kept her sweet demeanor, however. Shelter staff member Ash Collins took pity on the cat and crocheted her a new set of ears. Lady looked so cute in the new bonnet that within a day of posting the pictures on Facebook, she found her new forever family. -via Fark
