A woman called 911 and told Connecticut police she was locked in the luggage compartment of a moving bus. She said the bus was on interstate 84 heading for Boston. Police tracked the bus and pulled it over.
"The female victim was asked if she needed medical attention to which she refused," Hunter wrote. "She further stated that she had been purposefully locked inside by a female driver while attempting to retrieve items from her bag. The female driver was still on the bus as a passenger and was identified as the accused Wendy Alberty."
Usually, when a species goes extinct, we don't know when it happened, only that a creature can no longer be found, and its extinction is recorded long afterward. Occasionally, there are captive specimens that are protected while their populations die out in the wild. The scientists who look after these critically endangered species can sometimes be witness to the very last passenger pigeon, Pinta Island Tortoise, white rhino, Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog, or Achatinella apexfulva snail passing. The snail was named George, and he was under the care of David Sischo for several years.
When animals die out, the last survivor is called an endling. It is a word of soft beauty, heartbreaking solitude, and chilling finality. The title was borne by Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, after which George the snail was named. It unites Martha the passenger pigeon, Benjamin the thylacine, and Booming Ben the heath hen. It will eventually describe either Najin or Fatu, the two last northern white rhinos—both female, neither pregnant.
Endlings are avatars of loss. In the midst of Earth’s sixth mass extinction, these singular creatures embody the crisis facing our dwindling fauna—and our failure to avert it. By the time a species is down to its endling, it is functionally extinct. Caring for an endling can nonetheless serve as a final act of defiance, or perhaps contrition. Small wonder that the custodians of endlings often get very attached to them.
The title of Tom Scott's latest video drew me in because, at my age, I am jarred when someone responds to "Thank you" with "No problem." Wait, you just gave me change for a purchase. Was there ever a question of it being a problem? But then I think, hey, they are just trying to be polite. It's a fairly new "phatic expression," as Scott explains. Phatic expressions are known and understood by people who use them, even though they have no literal meaning at all. Across cultures and age groups, they can be totally confusing or even seem rude. The best thing to do is just go with it.
When you hear someone say "turn it up to eleven," that is likely a reference to the scene in the 1984 movie This Is Spinal Tap in which guitarist Nigel Tufnel shows off his special Marshall amplifier with volume dials that goes to eleven, indicating that it's louder than anyone else's amp. The producers got Marshall to make a custom faceplate for the film.
However they came up with the idea, Marshall reportedly had no intention to mass-produce the plates and in no way anticipated the popularity of the meme, which saw them being caught out when famous and not so famous guitarists across the world began requesting amplifiers that similarly “went up to 11” just like in the film.
According to legend, whether true or not we couldn’t verify, one of the first big name artists to request such an amplifier was Eddie Van Halen who upon seeing the film, immediately called Marshall to request such an amp- a request the company apparently were happy to comply with because, well, Eddie Van Halen.
For the more every day guitarist who couldn’t get a custom-made amplifier from the factory, Marshall did begin making plates similar to the one used in the film so that amp owners themselves could make it look like their amps went to 11.
While it is the most memorable use of the joke in pop culture, a little digging reveals that Spinal Tap wasn't the first example of a dial going to eleven. And the joke itself is related to the use of 110% when bragging about something being bigger, better, or just more. That goes back at least 100 years (or maybe 110) which you can learn about at Today I Found Out.
Kamaka Dias shaved his head before he went to Madagascar for two years with the Peace Corps. He didn't cut his hair at all after that, but he did use his selfie stick to document his downtime. After returning home, he edited together a compilation to show how his hair grew out. Hair normally grows about six inches a year, so this is pretty normal if you never get a haircut. What makes the video is the complete joy of life that it conveys. You can follow Dias' further adventures at Instagram. -via Boing Boing
Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil was born into the French aristocracy in 1706. Her station in life allowed her to be fully educated, but that plus her natural intelligence and curiosity were no match for the 18th-century bias against women in science. Still, the Marquise du Châtelet, as she was titled after her marriage, pursued math and physics with a passion. In 1744, she began a project to translate Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which was a long and complicated tome in three volumes, and was only available in Latin and English. While she completed the French version in a year, she also had some questions about its contents. The book needed to be updated with more data and the advances in science that had occurred since its first publication in 1687. The marquise worked on her commentary daily, but was in no hurry until 1749, when she ran into another hurdle for women scientists: du Châtelet found out she was pregnant. At age 42, aristocrat or not, that might well be a death sentence. She started working on her project almost around the clock, with very little sleep and no socializing at all.
Her new regimen was grueling but effective, and she blamed herself for not adopting it sooner. “Had I led this life since I came to Paris, I would have finished by now,” she wrote Saint-Lambert. “But I began by having many engagements; I gave myself up to society in the evenings. I believed that the day would suffice.”
As her pregnancy continued, however, du Châtelet became increasingly aware that she was running out of time. “I felt that the only way to avoid all these intersecting inconveniences and to make the most of my trip to Paris…was to sequester myself absolutely, to stake my all, and to devote all my time to my book.”
Her commitment eventually paid off. Sometime in the first three days of September, du Châtelet finished her commentary. On September 4, she gave birth to a daughter. Six days later, du Châtelet was dead.
Emilie du Châtelet led a fascinating life both in her devotion to science and mathematics and in her personal life. For example, when she gave birth to her fourth child, her husband, her longtime lover Voltaire, and the father of her child were all three in attendance. Find out why she was so determined to finish her commentary on Newton's work at Narratively. -via Digg
my grandparents came to look after me after my surgery and my grandad told me he wanted to make me feel better, he told me he’s been painting my nan’s nails for 30 years and that he wanted to paint mine and I needed to share this. “How many coats do you have on?” pic.twitter.com/P0VJjZsHzn
A Twitter video from Ayla Winter-White has gone viral and received over a million likes so far because it's a pure expression of love.
Winter-White told the Daily Dot that her grandfather started painting her grandmother’s nails after she developed severe arthritis and couldn’t do it herself. After Winter-White ended up getting pelvic reconstruction surgery and couldn’t walk anywhere to get them done, grandpa Keith put the nail painting skills he’s acquired to action.
“I didn’t even have to ask,” Winter-White said. “Bless him.”
Emily Post became famous for her newspaper column and books on etiquette. In fact, she was the main authority on manners in the 20th century. Lizzie Post is the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, and is now co-president of the Emily Post Institute. She is therefore an expert in etiquette, and is also a rather well-known cannabis user. Now that eleven states have legalized recreational weed, it was time for her to publish a guide to marijuana manners. That book is called Higher Etiquette.
As a longtime cannabis consumer, and being an expert in etiquette, people would always joke about me writing a book about cannabis.
Eventually, I got an email from a woman who was an agent connected to a friend of mine, and she had a publisher who wanted to do a book on weed etiquette. She said, “I don’t think this is right for your brand,” but I raised my hand and said, “Right here!” I was off to Colorado to research and write the book.
The fun thing is that the etiquette in the cannabis community existed for years and years. This is nothing the Emily Post Institute is declaring or making prescriptions about. This is exploring and celebrating a culture that’s finally able to talk about their courtesies legally and openly and without shame.
Read about the basic rules of cannabis etiquette and how it has changed with legalization in an interview with Post at Vox. -via Metafilter
The Son of Sam murders had New York City on edge in 1976 and 1977. David Berkowitz killed six people and injured seven more, but no one could identify him. Eventually, police connected the dots that led to the Berkowitz's arrest and the end of the killings. -via Buzzfeed
In 1948, there was a demonstration of two competing techniques for severing the prefrontal cortex in the human brain. In other words, lobotomies. The participants were two of the more prolific lobotomists of the day: William Beecher Scoville, who opened the skull to access the brain, and Walter Freeman, who developed the method of going through the eye socket with an ice pick. Dr. Scoville's grandson Luke Dittrich later published a book that examined the case of Scoville's most famous patient (known as H.M.), and along the way divulged some family secrets. Scoville's wife, Emily Barrett Learned, discovered her husband was having an affair, and was so distraught that she became a psychiatric patient and underwent a series of horrific treatments common at the time.
Emily received many of these so-called treatments, to little effect. Her unsympathetic psychiatrist commented that her husband’s infidelity “has upset her to an unusual degree,” and her case notes reveal someone frightened of the ECT and still in the grip of psychotic ideation. Her subsequent release seems a bit mysterious. She was henceforth withdrawn and rather lacking initiative, a pattern that makes more sense when we learn, in the book’s closing pages, that Dr. Scoville had personally lobotomized her. One of the many poignant scenes in Dittrich’s book is his recital of a Thanksgiving dinner at his grandparents’ house, during which Emily sat silently amid her family while her ex-husband and his new wife (a younger, more attractive model) presided over the proceedings.
Disney theme park cast members deserve awards for the work they do. They are acting for hours at a time, in full costume outdoors, never break character, and get paid pennies. It might beat waiting tables while you are waiting for your big break, but it's still a lot of work. -via Digg
Venessa Van Winkle is a real estate agent who has encountered many weird home designs, both in her listings and shared by fellow real estate agents. She posted 25 pictures of those crazy designs at Facebook. The winner by a landslide is the bathtub above with quick access to a broken neck. If you wanted to be safer, I guess you could put the bathtub in the kitchen.
That harks back to the old days when Mom brought the #2 washtub into the kitchen so she could heat water on the stove for the kids' Saturday night bath. There's lots more weirdness where that came from. Some of the rooms are just ugly, but many will make you wonder what they were thinking. You can see them all in a ranked gallery at Bored Panda.
Most historians would agree that pirate food was pretty miserable most of the time, ranging from simple ship's provisions to nothing at all. But when among friendly cultures, a willing and adventurous appetite could unearth the world's treasures. William Dampier became a pirate in 1679, and sailed around the world three times. He kept a diary of his adventures, with meticulous notes on food from exotic places. While serving a year in prison in 1694, he turned those notes into a book.
Parts of A New Voyage Around the World read like a 17th-century episode of No Reservations, with Dampier playing a high-stakes version of Anthony Bourdain. Aside from writing groundbreaking observations on previously un-researched subjects in meteorology, maritime navigation, and zoology, food was a constant throughout his work. He ate with the locals, observing and employing their practices not only to feed himself and his crew but to amass a body of knowledge that would expand European understanding of non-Western cuisine. In Panama, Dampier traveled with men of the Miskito tribe, hunting and eating manatee. “Their flesh is … [extraordinarily] sweet, wholesome meat,” he wrote. “The tail of a young cow is most esteemed. A calf that sucks is the most delicate meat.” His crew took to roasting filleted bellies over open flames.
Dampier also introduced the literary world to the tastes of flamingos, penguins, turtles, breadfruit, cashews, and more, including an early version of guacamole. The book had influence beyond its food, though, as you can read at Atlas Obscura. -via Strange Company
Humanity has always searched for a magic pill to relieve pain and illness, and many folks have taken advantage of that desire to make lots of money. During the golden age of quackery, there were cure-alls for everything from flat feet to cancer, most of which did little besides make you feel like you were doing something. Among the most curious were cigarettes fo asthma. Really.
Well, it’s actually not as crazy as it sounds. Here us out: smoking to relieve what we now understand as “Asthma” is a practice that can be traced back thousands of years, when Ayurevedic medicine called for the smoking of a plant with atropine, Atropa belladonna, to heal throat and chest ailments. “The ancient Greeks,” says Gerald C. Smaldone in Drug Delivery to the Lung, even “sent consumptive patients to the pine forests of Libya to benefit from volatile gases released there.” Air was for inhaling – and infusing – to heal. For the most part, the asthmatic cigarettes that arose in the early 19th century, and declined in the 1950s, didn’t include tobacco.
But they did contain a cocktail of herbs and narcotics that almost always included atropine, which diluted the airways of the lungs to temporarily relieve symptoms, while simultaneously rendering the smoker lightheaded, nausious, hallucinegic, and a victim to a rapid heart-rate increase. Regardless, Potter’s Asthma Cigarettes, Himrod’s Cure for Asthma, Dr. Kellogg’s Asthma Remedy – you name it – soared in popularity…
Narcotics played a big role in such cures before they were regulated. Regulations also went after the poisons in these medicines. Read about snake oil, cocaine wine, radium cream, arsenic wafers, orthopedic high heels, and more at Messy Nessy Chic.
DoodleChaos used 213 ping pong balls to play the xylophone. The song is Jacques Offenbach's "Galop Infernal" from the operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, which most of us call "the Can-can." You can hear it better if you run the video at double speed (under settings). How the balls were tossed into the cups so precisely has me skeptical that there aren't any video shenanigans going on here, but he says,
I underestimated how random ping pong ball bounces are. Even on a perfectly flat tile, there can be over a foot diameter where the final bounce ends up. My first design for this contraption included 3 bounces, but I ended up redesigning it to be more reliable. I’m thankful for this decision because it meant less time tracking the ball paths in Premiere. If you’re curious how I achieved this effect, I moved a mask to cover every single movement of every ball’s path by hand. Repeating and overlapping multiple layers became very complicated because the balls would cross paths. Once I learned tracks could be nested together I became more organized.
