Throughout history, many leaders were given lofty nicknames- Catherine the Great or Richard the Lionhearted, for example. But not everyone could be Great or Magnificent. Some rulers got strange, and strangely specific, nicknames.
ALFONSO THE SLOBBERER
King Alfonso IX (pictured above) ruled Leon (now part of France) from 1188 to 1230. He was prone to fits of rage, and anytime he got especially angry, especially while in battle, he drooled uncontrollably, sometimes to the point of foaming at the mouth.
This family managed to keep their opinions to themselves until someone asked for them. Then it became a pile-on session! Dumb hair can be fixed, but his neediness and credit score are red flags. And grandma doesn't like his taste in music. Come on, it's just a standard part of a formal wedding, and rarely even used these days. So what's next? Are the vows going to be contingent on his contrition for these sins? And what's his family thinking when all this happens? I hope the photographer captures his expression for posterity. This nonsense is the latest comic from John McNamee at Pie Comic.
Robert Friedland graduated from college in 1974 and took over the supervision of an apple orchard his uncle owned. Friedland turned the farm into a spiritual utopian community, where hippies, Hari Krishnas, and Hindus could come together and grow apples. Steve Jobs, who had been a friend of Friedlands for a few years, often stayed there and worked to boost apple production.
Jobs lived in a renovated chicken coop whenever he was around. His residency was episodic, and his recurring task was to whip the Gravenstein apple trees back into shape upon his arrival, pruning, raking, and patching up the trellises. According to legions of Jobs fanatics, All One Farm is where he acquired what his admirers call his “reality distortion field,” a special charisma that caused others to suspend belief in the impossible. Jobs said later that the name for his company, Apple, was inspired by Friedland’s farm. “I was on one of my fruitarian diets,” Jobs told Isaacson. “I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating.”
Would you have the nerve to try setting up a domino fall while your dog watches? I think I'd put the puppy outside, or at least in another room. The temptation to play is so strong! Haru the Shiba Inu can barely contain herself as her humans set up a thousand dominoes.
But Haru was a good dog most of the time, and she was rewarded with the honor of knocking down the first domino when the setup was all ready. You can see more of Haru at Instagram. -via Tastefully Offensive
Winter storm Grayson is moving up the east cost of the US, and has already brought snow to parts of Florida that haven't seen snow in decades. Savannah and Charleston are facing ice storms today. The storm is expected to travel up through Maine, bringing ice, snow, and hurricane-force winds to New England this weekend. Forecasters are calling it a "bomb cyclone."
The phrase doesn’t refer to the storm itself. (The storm’s name is Grayson and you will refer to him as such.) Instead, 'bomb cyclone' refers to a phenomenon expected to occur as this weather event unfolds. The official term is explosive cyclogenesis, or bombogenesis which—in addition to being my new favorite word—is actually really common.
The 'bombing' occurs when a low pressure system’s central pressure falls 24 millibars in 24 hours or less. Say what now?
Popular Science has a thorough but easy-to-read explanation of a bomb cyclone. Winter storm warnings are out for the east cost, with a blizzard warning for parts of New Hampshire and Maine. Read more about this particular storm in a link roundup at Digg.
“Addicted to Love” was a great dance song, but I was still surprised that it was such a monster hit in 1986. That's because I didn't have cable, and it was a while before I saw the video. Since then, it's become a classic, and has been used in many movies and TV shows. Like Tom Cruise's Cocktail.
Most everyone can remember this from the days when Tom Cruise was still a young man and still able to wow people with his abilities. Nowadays he’s an action star whose continual goal, which he has met quite often, is to amaze people with his onscreen stunts and acting. But back in the day he knew how to live it up.
Slenderman is an urban legend that was born from internet creepypasta. He invaded the real world a few years ago when two 12-year-old girls stabbed their friend and said that Slenderman made them do it. Now the legend is coming to theaters. We don't get a good look at Slenderman from the trailer for Slender Man (just his victims) but it appears to be pretty scary. You've been warned.
Slenderman has already been the subject of one movie, HBO’s Beware the Slenderman, and a couple of TV shows. The feature film will be in theaters this coming May.
The landscapes are gorgeous, and change completely every day. You can almost feel the temperatures changing as they make their way across up the Rockies through five states. The music is "Paper Tiger" by Javier Dunn. -via Digg
The mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity is still a mystery, although many, many men have been named as suspects at one time or another. One of the more far-fetched was Lewis Carroll, who published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. The Ripper murders took place more than twenty years later, beginning in 1888. The connection between Carroll and the Ripper wasn't made until 1996, when author Richard Wallace wrote about the possibility.
Of the names discussed, few would be more surprising than Carroll's. Born in 1832, he was sent to a boarding school at the age of 12 and sometimes wrote home expressing despondence over the nighttime racket. In Wallace’s book, Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend, he seizes this declaration to be a hint that Carroll was being physically abused by the older boys at the school, suffering a psychotic break that would plague him for the rest of his life.
Wallace’s theory requires a large and ambitious leap to a conclusion: that Carroll, famously fond of wordplay and anagrams, kept sneaking hidden messages into his correspondences and his published works that provided insight into his state of mind.
It took humans no time to crack into a skull. Cracking the art of neurosurgery? That’s a different story.
2ND CENTURY
Greek physician and philosopher Galen performs the first experimental studies on the brain. He wants to find out whether an animating life force, known as the “psychic pneuma,” exists in the brain’s ventricles. Since human dissection is taboo, he focuses on goats.
900
Western knowledge goes dark, but progress continues in the Islamic world, thanks to star surgeons, like Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi. He emphasizes that locating pressure on the brain is important for making head injury prognoses.
The funniest thing to arise in the wake of The Force Awakens in 2015 was the SNL skit Undercover Boss: Starkiller Base, in which Kylo Ren disguised himself as a radar technician named Matt to find out what the crew of his First Order ship thought of him. Two years later, you can play Star Wars: Battlefront II as Matt the Radar Technician.
A cluster of links about the mod can be found at the YouTube page. Matt the Radar Technician isn't the only new mod that's cropped up in Battlefront II. When EA CFO Blake Jorgensen had this to say,
One way EA isn't considering is leaning in too heavily on character-based cosmetic items, since it could interfere with the canon of a renowned franchise like Star Wars. "If you did a bunch of cosmetic things, you might start to violate the canon," the CFO said. "Darth Vader in white probably doesn't make sense, versus in black. Not to mention you probably don't want Darth Vader in pink. No offense to pink, but I don't think that's right in the canon."
A viral image of a home decor idea encourages us to display our books with the page edges out, to produce a uniform neutral-color look. What? How would we ever find the book we're looking for? Apparently this has been a decorating trend for at least a year. While some think it's ridiculous, others will take the time to explain why they do it.
The library at El Escorial in Spain shelved books with the spines to the wall, in order to protect the leather bindings. But the page edges were gilded, and the book titles were written on the gilding. It wasn't the only place books were displayed that way. But the recent decor idea displays no titles. What do you think? What would be you impression if you went to someone's house and saw all their books displayed this way? -via Metafilter
We don't build robots to be killers. We just treat our existing robots badly enough to make them homicidal. Anyone who's worked under a boss with a profound empathy deficit can relate. This fairly disgusting story is brought to you by Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
Thomas Edison held over a thousand patents for gadgets that changed the world. Many he invented, and the ones that he appropriated from other people still found success by being associated with Edison. You might not know that Edison started working on a science fiction novel he called Progress in 1890. But Edison had little formal education, and struggled with putting his ideas on paper. The author George Parsons Lathrop approached the inventor about writing his biography, Edison didn't like that, but proposed a collaboration on the novel.
Edison, probably the most celebrated American scientist of the day, and Lathrop, considered an author of the first rank by contemporary critics, must have seemed like an unbeatable combination; press from around the world published news reports of their project.
By late 1892, though, the project seemed to be in trouble. “The electric novel which Mr. Edison was said to be writing is ‘off,’” The Australian Star, a Sydney newspaper, announced.
“Edison was all enthusiasm at first, and Lathrop had five or six interviews with him, in which Edison poured out suggestions faster than Lathrop could assimilate them.” the account went on to explain. “Then Edison’s enthusiasm cooled. He tired of the whole thing and would have nothing more to do with it, leaving Lathrop in the lurch with a novel about half done.”
The story was eventually published, but Lathrop, while acknowledging Edison's contribution took credit for the story. Who was really responsible for the story? And what was it about? Learn about Edison's science fiction story and how its publication played out at Smithsonian.
