A guy who goes by the moniker Droogie told a story at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas recently about his license plate. He requested and received a vanity plate that displayed NULL. If you recall the tale of Null Island, you know this can cause some problems. Droogie knew this, too, and expected it. What he expected was that the computerized system of the DMV wouldn't be able to link any parking tickets to his car. But instead, he got his own and everyone else's tickets.

It seemed that a privately operated citation processing center had a database of outstanding tickets, and, for some reason — possibly due to incomplete data on their end — many of those tickets were assigned to the license plate "NULL." In other words, the processing center was likely trying to tell its systems it didn't know the plates of the offending cars. Instead, with Droogie's vanity plate now in play, it pegged all those outstanding tickets on him.

Read the rest of the story at Mashable.

(Image credit: Jack Morse/Mashable)

As a freshman basketball player, Jane Christoffer averaged 35 points per game. This was exceptional even in the days of girls six-on-six basketball, where players were restricted to only half the court. Jane's sophomore year yielded an average of 47 points per game. Then she married Ken Rubel and had a baby, but did not drop out of school. When she was ready to rejoin the basketball team for her senior year in 1971, Rubel ran into a stone wall in the form of E. Wayne Cooley, the head of the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union (IGHSAU).

When Cooley first began at IGHSAU, nearly two decades before Rubel gave birth, he instituted a rule that forbid married women, divorcées, and mothers from playing high school basketball. That regulation expanded to all prep athletics as the IGHSAU added more sports. His reasoning for the restriction? “Husbands and homes were the first obligation of the wives.” He clarified his uber-traditional view of gender roles in a December 1977 womenSports story about the lack of female coaches in Iowa. “Not because women aren’t capable, but because historically and traditionally, a woman will be a professional person for three or four years; then she gets married, has a family, and abandons professional life as a coach,” Cooley told the magazine. “I hope that’ll never change. We’ve got to have some housewives and some mothers or something’s going to happen to this society.”

However, there were no such rules for boys high school athletics in Iowa. A male student who was married had played basketball for the same school the previous year. Jane Rubel didn't take that sitting down. She wanted to play, and she wanted to earn a college athletic scholarship, so she sued. Read the story of Jane Rubel's struggle to play basketball at Longreads. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: J. O. Applegate)

Hong Kong's erstwhile slum called the Kowloon Walled City was the most densely-populated place on earth ...when it existed. That caused a lot of problems, but people who couldn't afford a better living space called it home. RealLifeLore takes a closer look at how that density made it a nightmare. -via Digg

The largest penguin species is the emperor penguin, which can reach 48 inches (122 cm) tall. But 60 million years ago, the monster penguin -yes, that's what they're calling it- of New Zealand would have made the emperor look short. Fossilized leg bones of a penguin found in North Canterbury indicate this bird was about 1.6 meters tall -that's 63 inches, or 5'3"!

"This is one of the largest penguin species ever found," Paul Scofield, the museum's senior curator, told the BBC. It was specific to the waters of the Southern Hemisphere, he added.

Penguins are thought to have become this big because large marine reptiles disappeared from the oceans, around the same time that dinosaurs disappeared.

"Then, for 30 million years, it was the time of the giant penguins," Mr Scofield said.

That's one large woggin. But it's not completely out of character among the many megafauna species of prehistoric New Zealand, including other big penguins. Read about the monster penguin at BBC News.  -via reddit

(Image credit: Canterbury Museum)

The cartoon and its action figures became a live-action movie in 1987, starring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man. It was bonkers. You might have forgotten how weird it was, but Screen Junkies is here to remind you with an Honest Trailer.  

Any meme that goes viral will be followed by people trying to make money from it. The internet joke that turned into a Facebook event called  Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us has now evolved into a music festival called Alienstock. We've seen hastily-organized large music festival go wrong, like the disaster of Fyre Festival and the cancelled Woodstock 50. You don't have to be clairvoyant to see how this could go all kinds of wrong.

The massive UFO-themed festival is slated for September 19th to the 22nd, the same weekend that the original storming of Area 51 was supposed to occur. The festival website makes some big claims, stating that attendees will “witness some incredible performance from headlining artists! Many of whom can't be named due to festival radius clauses.. but we've been contacted by huge names wanting to play for the crowd!”

Everyone loves a good time, and while I personally am down for a UFO party, the “huge names” are perhaps the least of the convener’s concerns. Alienstock will be taking place in Rachel, Nevada. With a population just shy of 100 people. The town, according to its website, is not too thrilled about the event.

The leaders of Rachel warn people that they will be completely on their own, with no food, communication, or emergency services from the town. Read more about Alienstock at Vice.   -via Digg

Norwegian performance artist Jan Hakon Erichsen hates balloons. Here he spends two minutes showing you the many  ways he can destroy balloons. Some are straightforward, some are overcomplicated, but altogether they are satisfyingly destructive. -via Laughing Squid

This bathroom is so upsetting pic.twitter.com/mYbGMQWI9Y

— Helen Rosner (@hels) August 13, 2019

Helen Rosner found a real life bathroom that gets stranger the more you look at it. You can enlarge the picture here. It looks  like someone had all kinds of individual ideas that turned out not to work with the way people use bathrooms in the real world, especially in a limited space. Let's try to list the problems.

1. Never go in this room without the lights on. You'll fall in the tub and break your neck.

2. Don't step an inch backward while using the sink. You'll fall in the tub and break your neck.

3. Never get the floor wet. You'll slip and fall in the tub and break your neck.

4. Even if you get into the tub on purpose, how will you get out?

5. Where would you put a towel while using the tub?

6. There are two closets behind the tub. One looks like the door will not open more than a few inches because of the tub.

7. The other closet has shorter doors to clear the tub, but you have to stand in the tub to use it.

8. If the toilet overflows, your tub will be the receptacle.

Other folks see a problem with the heat vent in the floor, the lack of baseboards, no toilet paper holder, distance to the shower, that metal thing attached to the tub, and the large bay window.

i broke an ankle just looking at it

— bax (@baxbooksdeux) August 13, 2019

-via Metafilter

The video posted the other day reminded us of the salmon cannon. You have to imagine what could possibly go wrong. Josh Hara (@Yoyoha) came up with a not-so-obvious scenario. -via reddit

A few years ago, my family took a once-in-a-lifetime road trip across the country. A week of driving, a week of seeing relatives, and a week to get back. It was memorable, but we went through all our savings and arrived home with our credit cards maxed out, having spent more time in Montana with a broken-down truck than we planned. How do the Instagram #vanlife people do it, when you need to rearrange your jobs and give up your home base to live in your vehicle permanently? Chris Wright and his wife Rachel tried it, after dreaming of life on the open road for years. They saved up bought a van they could afford, which was their first mistake. They also decided not to monetize their adventure on Instagram in order to actually live in the moment, which was another mistake. Every mechanical problem that followed raised the stress level.

If I was obsessing about a breakdown, I was also fixated on money and the way it seemed to flow through our wallets like water through a sieve. Living out of a van can be surprisingly expensive, especially if you’re burning through gas on long drives every couple of days. I had underestimated our costs. Working would mean stopping, extending the trip, spending even more money. I kept thinking about the saying “so poor you can’t keep mosquitoes in underpants.” I only had three pairs. We didn’t need much to survive. But the list of things we could afford was shrinking fast. I was sinking into despair: over van noises, over dollar signs, over anything and everything.

Read about the realities of trying to live a nomadic van life at Outside Online.

(Image credit: Jack Richardson)

A 72-year-old man in the UK underwent surgery to remove a benign tumor in his chest. The surgery was successful, but the patient soon began to experience other problems: throat pain, bleeding from his mouth, and trouble swallowing. Doctors treated him with antibiotics, assuming it was an infection. That didn't help, and he was eventually readmitted to the hospital for treatment of pneumonia.  

But when a new set of doctors actually looked inside the man’s throat, after the man again complained about his symptoms, they quickly spotted something lodged across his larynx. And that’s when the man revealed that his partial dentures had mysteriously gotten lost about a week earlier. The most likely scenario is that the man had inhaled them when he was intubated.

Keeping people’s dentures in is thought to make it easier for anesthesia to be given to them through a bag-mask, but they should obviously be taken out immediately before any intubation starts, the report noted.

If you ever have surgery, make a note to tell your surgical team about any dentures or non-permanent oral prosthetics before they put you under. The kicker is that the patient's problems continued for a long time after the dentures were removed from his throat. Learn the details of this story at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Harriet A Cunniffe/BMJ)

Before home video, when you watched a movie once and then maybe again ten years later on TV, and there weren't a hundred TV channels showing reruns, producers didn't bother throwing in subtle jokes much at all. But now, if you watch a movie or TV show a few times, and can rewind when necessary, you'll find plenty of easter eggs put there for the amusement of the producers and the eventual treasure hunt for the viewer.

We don't even have to watch carefully, because someone else somewhere will, and let us know on the internet. See 28 such background jokes exposed at Cracked.

Tom Scott tells a story of ordering a meal from a delivery service and seamlessly connects it to a riddle that illustrates a computer loop problem. You don't have to know a thing about computer logic or programming to understand exactly what happened. That's the magic of a competent storyteller. The actual video is only six minutes long, the rest is an ad. -via reddit

Simone Biles won the all-around title at the U.S. Gymnastics Championship Sunday, her sixth. In the floor exercise, she performed a triple-double: two flips and three twists in one jump, the first ever perfected in competition. The day before, she dismounted from the beam with a double-double, the first gymnast ever to do so. She came in first in all the competition components except the uneven bars, where she came in third.  -via Deadspin

As late as the 1980s, half the vacuum cleaners sold in the UK were Hoovers. The Hoover company then saw their sales dwindle under recession and competition. In 1991, a travel agency approached Hoover about a sales promotion in which people who bought Hoover vacuums could get free airline flights. It seemed like a solid idea, so Hoover offered flights to Europe for people who spent £100 or more on their products.  

On November 1, 1992, Hoover expanded its free ticket offer to include flights to America.

Under a new promotion, that same £100 Hoover purchase could net a UK-based customer two free round-trip flights to New York or Orlando — a package worth £600+ (£1200, or $1,460 USD, today).

When Hoover ran this plan by risk management professionals, the company was warned that it would be an absolute disaster.

“To me it made no logical sense,”  recalled Mark Kimber, one of the consultants. “Having looked at the details of the promotion [and] attempting to calculate how it would actually work I declined to even offer risk management coverage,” recalled Mark Kimber.

Unfortunately, Hoover chose to ignore this advice.

The promotion was a success in one way, as people flocked to buy vacuum cleaners from Hoover, but it ended up angering so many customers that Hoover Europe's reputation was shattered. One customer went so far as a to hold a delivery van hostage for 13 days! The firm went deep into the red and was sold off to an Italian company only a couple of years later. Read how the promotion went completely off the rails at The Hustle. -via Digg

(Image credit: INTV1980)