We see beautiful and creative chess sets on the internet, and then we go home to use a plastic set with abstract pieces that are as simple as they can be. But through the history of the game, there have been many chess sets made purely as works of art, with actual playability a low priority. The history of chess is even more complicated than the rules of the game. Of course, that game has changed over time, and is even played differently from place to place.  

As the game moved across the globe, different patterns and rules became popular in different regions. “The Chinese version of chess is called xiangqi and there is sittuyin in Burma,” Crumiller says. “In Thailand and in Cambodia, there’s makruk. You can use those sets to play a game of chess, but those games are played with different rules.”

While some of these varieties included detailed figural chess pieces, so-called “Muslim sets” relied on more abstracted, geometric pieces whose size and shape indicate their roles. Crumiller explains that despite the name, scholars have found evidence that the style predates the existence of Islam in Persia. Regardless, the religion and popular game became linked, and chess often spread to new areas hand-in-hand with Islam.

In Persia, a piece known as the king’s advisor or “vizier” was also incorporated, which would later morph into the more powerful queen. “In 1283 there was a book published in Spain by Alfonso El Sabio, or Alfonso the Wise, called The Book of Games,” Crumiller explains. “The book still used the old chess rules, where bishops can only move every other square along the diagonal, or two squares, period. The queens were the weakest pieces—they had to stay near the king and could only move one square at a time.

“At the end of the 15th century, the rules changed dramatically. That’s when the queen became ‘La Rabiosa,’ or the Mad Queen, and the rules for bishops changed, too. At that point, it became more recognizable as our modern game, and several books were published that included both the old rules and the new rules, so clearly it was in a transition state.”

You'll see a wide variety of lovely historical chess sets, and get an overview of the game's history, at Collectors Weekly.

If you do a Google search for "uromycitisis," the results make it clear that this "disease" only happens on TV, specifically on the sitcom Seinfeld. Soon, those search results will include a scientific paper written by John McCool. McCool is not a medical doctor. He owns a freelance scientific editing company, and is very concerned about "predatory scientific journals," the kind that will publish your paper if you pay them. Since published papers are the real currency of one's reputation as a scientist, these journals are flourishing. So McCool wrote a paper about uromycitisis for The Urology & Nephrology Open Access Journal.

This was inspired by the classic 1991 episode, “The Parking Garage,” in which Jerry Seinfeld can’t find his car in a mall lot, has to urinate, does so against a garage wall, is caught by a security guard, and tries to get out of a citation by claiming that he suffers from a condition called uromycitisis. Seinfeld argued that, due to his illness, he could die if he doesn’t relieve himself whenever he needs to.

I went all out. I wrote my report as “Dr. Martin van Nostrand,” the physician-alter ego of another Seinfeld character, and listed more show-inspired names as bogus coauthors. I made an email account for “Dr. van Nostrand” and created a fake institution where the authors worked: the Arthur Vandelay Urological Research Institute. In the acknowledgements section of my report, I thanked phony physicians including Tor Eckman, the bizarre holistic healer from “The Heart Attack,” giving him a “Doctor of Holistic Medicine (HMD)” degree. Basically, I wrote the manuscript in a style as close to a real case report as I could, except that it was 100 percent fake.

The journal accepted his article, then asked for $799. McCool didn't pay, but they published the article, which you can read here. Get more details about predatory journals at Retraction Watch. -via Metafilter

The folks at the Bad Lip Reading channel give us the video we didn't realize we were waiting for: a nonsense interpretation of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The new dialogue goes from almost-makes-sense to make-no-sense-at-all at whiplash speeds. And this one comes with a celebrity guest voice: renowned voiceover artist Mark Hamill as Han Solo!

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We also get Chewbacca the pickup artist, Finn the whiner, and Admiral Ackbar's language barrier. -via Uproxx

Update: the Bad Lip Reading channel was hit with a bogus takedown order, but that's been sorted out now. We are reposting this because I'd hate for anyone to miss out.

If you're the star of a one-man specialty act, particularly in the traveling show days before TV, you have to be a little ruthless to remain number one. So it was with magicians who competed for audiences, or who just didn't like each other for one reason or another. Some of these rivalries went down in history, although it's a somewhat obscure history. For example, Ching Ling Foo was enraged that an imposter was trying to steal his thunder.

Renowned Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo had success traveling the world with his act, but was surprised to find that his arrival in England in 1904 had been preceded by an imposter: "Chung Ling Soo" was the stage name of William Robinson, an American who had audaciously pretended to be Asian. While both were performing in London, Foo challenged Soo to a magic duel where Soo would have to successfully perform at least 10 of 20 chosen tricks. Soo (a.k.a. Robinson) performed the following day for newspapermen, but Foo declined to appear, insisting Soo first provide proof of his Chinese heritage. Most of Foo’s protests went unheard: Soo had been there first, and his persona was so convincing that many believed it was Foo who was the inauthentic one.

The American upstart’s career was derailed for good in 1918, when he died while unsuccessfully performing the “bullet catch” trick on stage.

Read about six other rivalries between magicians at mental_floss.

On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on the German Empire. For Americans, that was the beginning of World War I, even though the war had been going on for years in Europe. That set up a dichotomy in how Americans treat the history of that war, reflected in how it's taught in history classes. Michigan State University professor Kyle Greenwalt looks at the differences.

In an academic sense, history is not simply the past, but the tools we use to study it – it is the process of historical inquiry. Over the course of the discipline’s development, the study of history became deeply entangled with the study of nations. It became “partitioned”: American history, French history, Chinese history.

This way of dividing the past reinforces ideas of who a people are and what they stand for. In the U.S., our national historical narrative has often been taught to schoolchildren as one where more and more Americans gain more and more rights and opportunities. The goal of teaching American history has long been the creation of citizens who are loyal to this narrative and are willing to take action to support it.

Meanwhile, the map of Europe has changed many times in the last hundred years. The story of World War I as a world history subject has a different focus.

World history curricula do not deny the importance of nations, but neither do they assume that nation-states are the primary actors on the historical stage. Rather, it is the processes themselves – trade, war, cultural diffusion – that often take center stage in the story. The line between “domestic” and “foreign” – “us” and “them” – is blurred in such examples.

There's a lot more to the subject. Read an overview at Smithsonian.

We've featured the Boston Typewriter Orchestra before, but it was over ten years ago! Time to check in with the guys who make beautiful music with vintage technology.

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You don't know how much energy those old manual typewriters took unless you've tried it yourself. Listening to them makes my fingers hurt, too, just like in the olden days before word proccessors. -via Tastefully Offensive  

The Shawshank Redemption did not do well at the box office when it was released in 1994, but is now ranked as "one of the greatest films of the 1990s." Yeah, you can blame the title. If you love the movie as much as its many fans, you'll want to check out a large collection of photographs taken during the filming of The Shawshank Redemption at TVOM.

Americans are now spending more at restaurants than they spend at grocery stores. We know that's more expensive, but eating at a restaurant means you save time, don't have to shop, cook, or clean up, and you can eat things that are difficult to prepare at home. Meanwhile, restaurant operators must carefully calculate the price of their meals to cover costs while still attracting diners.

The restaurant business is notoriously tough, and owners have a myriad of costs ranging from health permits to commercial rent. On average, 30% of a restaurants revenues go to labor costs, 30% goes to general overhead, and 30–33% is spent on ingredients. Making a decent profit in the restaurant industry is a high hurdle. As a consumer, when eating out you’re paying for a lot more than just the food; it’s the excellent waitstaff, unique ambiance, convenient location, in addition to the delicious dish that makes for a memorable experience. In order to cover all of these costs and still make a slim profit (generally 3–5%), restaurants need to mark up ingredients on average 300%.

That does not mean that every ingredient has an equal markup. Matt Hawkins did the math to show us the different markups on ingredients that go into foods such as hamburgers, omelets, burritos, pizzas, and other meals we get from restaurants quite often. Note that he uses West Coast prices. See the various comparisons at Plate IQ. -via Metafilter

"We need a new display here, something with a theme, can you get that done right away?" Obviously not, but the library employee or volunteer charged with the task did a fantastic job in creating a thought-provoking workaround. Well, maybe not so much "thought-provoking," but more "guaranteed to become a viral image." -via Boing Boing

The school board in Pittsburg, Kansas, hired a new principal for Pittsburg High School. Amy Robertson had a stellar resume, with a PhD in education and decades of experience, many of which were as an educational consultant in Dubai. As soon as the hiring was announced, students who worked on the school newspaper, the Booster Redux, wanted to find out more about their new principal. What they found was disturbing.

The student journalists had begun researching Robertson, and quickly found some discrepancies in her education credentials. For one, when they researched Corllins University, the private university where Robertson said she got her master’s and doctorate degrees years ago, the website didn’t work. They found no evidence that it was an accredited university.

“There were some things that just didn’t quite add up,” Balthazor told The Washington Post.

The students began digging into a weeks-long investigation that would result in an article published Friday questioning the legitimacy of the principal’s degrees and of her work as an education consultant.

They couldn't even find evidence that Robertson had a bachelor's degree. Less than a week after the school paper published its story, Robertson resigned the position. But questions remain as to why the school board did not look into Robertson's qualifications. Its a good thing the student journalists did. Read the account of how the teenagers uncovered the story at the Washington Post. -via Metafilter

If you didn't watch The Tonight Show last night, you  missed Jimmy Fallon performing with his barbershop quartet The Ragtime Gals. They sang Alex's favorite song, Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back."

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It went about as you'd expect, right down to Fallon losing his composure. -via Tastefully Offensive

Family sitcoms were wholesome entertainment for decades. Dad knew best, Mom took care of everyone, and the kids made mistakes and then learned a lesson from them. You could make them funny in different ways, but in the end, they showed you a happy family. By the '80s, Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt wanted to write about something different- an unhappy family. The result was Married… with Children, which debuted in 1987.

When the show was first pitched, Moye and Leavitt envisioned Sam Kinison as Al Bundy, the unsuccessful shoe salesman whose high school football glory is never far from his mind. The series creators had also hoped to snag Roseanne Barr for the role of Peggy, a stay-at-home mom who rarely left the couch. The producers reportedly modeled the characters after Kinison’s and Barr’s stand-up personas, which were popular but not exactly lovable. The two stand-ups passed on the show, with the latter debuting her own series about a less-than-perfect family just a year later on ABC. Kinison would later guest star in the season-four episode “It’s A Bundyful Life.”

Married… with Children became a hit, and ran ten years. The A.V. Club gives us a history of the program as an intro to a list (with video evidence) of the ten most essential episodes of Married… with Children. Or, as they say, "10 episodes that saw the Bundys at their best, which was the same as their worst."

This is a one-of-a-kind handmade chess set. Game designer KnowNothing_JonSnoo received it as a birthday gift from his father, a stained glass artist.

You can just imagine a game of chess where the only light source in the room is the board itself. For now, it stays on a high shelf when he's not playing with it. He says it will have its own dedicated table when his sons grow up enough not to wreck it.

It should be obvious that actors will look different in news items than they did when they starred in your favorite movie twenty or thirty years ago, yet we often seemed surprised. We are also surprised when we look in the mirror and realize we don't look the same as we did thirty years ago. However, the most interesting thing about "now and then" galleries of famous actors is seeing that many of them appeared in movies as children, long before they were household names. Or, as we might say, before they achieved their final form. Check out a gallery of actors in their early roles and how they look today, at TVOM.

A baker in Jakarta, Indonesia, has carved out a distinct place in cake artistry. Ivenoven started baking for other people only three years ago, and now has a bakery business with 12 employees. Although she does make standard cakes with beautiful flowers and other designs, her cakes featuring succulent plants really stand out. They feature a garden of agave, cactus, aloe, hen-n-chicks, and more, all made of buttercream frosting!

 

See more pictures of Ivenonven's creations at Instagram. -via Metafilter