If you pay attention, you'll pick up some profound pieces of wisdom as you go through life. You tuck that bit of wisdom away and never forget it. Sometimes it's something you were told that you thought was worth keeping, other times it's a lesson you learned from experience. Like I tell my kids, "You learn from your mistakes, but it's less painful to learn from other people's mistakes." See, I'll never forget those exact words, and neither will they.  Kevin Kelly turned 70 years old on Thursday, and has picked up some real gems of wisdom along the way. Kelly took the opportunity of his birthday to share 103 things he's learned in life, and they are all good things to remember. Here's a sample:   

• You will be judged on how well you treat those who can do nothing for you.

• The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I dont need to write this down because I will remember it.”

• Cultivate 12 people who love you, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.

• Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it’s more fun and useful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce.

Read the rest of the 103 at The Technium. -via Boing Boing

Ah, I remember it well. When Tim Burton announced that Michael Keaton would play a darker, more serious Batman in his upcoming movie, everyone was gobsmacked. Michael Keaton? Mr. Mom? He was a comedian! He played a crazed lunatic in Beetlejuice! Batman fans were suddenly afraid that their favorite comic book superhero would be changed into an object of ridicule. Strangely, many were more upset because Michael Keaton was short and not as muscular as they pictured Batman. And now Michael Keaton is often ranked as the best Batman actor ever.

Did we learn from this experience? No, Robert Pattinson was dismissed after his casting in The Batman, and it turned out rather well. Fans cried foul when pretty boy Heath Ledger got the part of The Joker in The Dark Knight, too, and he won an Oscar for the role, albeit posthumously. It turns out that a good actor can play many kinds of roles.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

When she was 18 years old, Madeleine Talmage Force seemed destined for a happy life. In 1911 she had married one of the richest men in the world and embarked on an extended honeymoon that included travel to Bermuda, Egypt, and various European countries. Before long, she was expecting a baby. Her marriage to John Jacob Astor IV was controversial, coming what the public considered to be too soon after his highly-publicized divorce the previous year. He was 47 years old, and had a son older than Madeleine.

The Astor's lives would take a turn when they decided to return to America on the luxurious ship called the Titanic. Madeleine was accompanied by her husband, her dog named Kitty (yes, really), a maid, and a private nurse. After the ship hit an iceberg, John Jacob Astor helped his wife, the maid, and the nurse into a lifeboat, but was denied a seat for himself. Read how that adventure played out and what became of Madeleine Astor afterward at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company

A couple of musicians walk along the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn playing the Gloria Gaynor hit "I Will Survive." It starts out fairly simple, but then more and more musicians join in until it's a rollicking musical celebration, getting jazzier by the minute. Everyone gets a solo! They end with a surprisingly plausible fade by descending the steps into a subway station. This is actually a collaboration between three bands, Too Many Zooz, Lucky Chops, and High and Mighty Brass Band.   -via Laughing Squid

Two years ago, NASA's latest Mars rover Perseverance landed on Mars in a stunning maneuver we got to witness in real time (though delayed, because Mars). Although the spacecraft crashed, that was part of the plan. The Perseverance mission took along Mars' first helicopter, named Ingenuity. On its 26th Martian reconnaissance flight, Ingenuity revisited Perseverance's landing site and recorded the debris left behind from an overhead view.

With no scavengers, fungi, bacteria, or rain on the red planet, the debris is in almost pristine condition after two years. The wind on Mars has partially buried the spacecraft's parachute under dust. The backshell is surprisingly intact, considering the speed and heat involved in its landing. Photographing and studying the debris field will help NASA to plan future missions, including one designed to return to earth carrying Martian samples. Read about Ingenuity's photographic mission and what it means at NASA. -via Kottke

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

When the US airline industry was deregulated in the late 1970s, it opened the door for almost anyone with some money to incorporate a new airline. That opportunity gave rise to an entire crop of specialty airlines, each with a gimmick to draw passengers with particular tastes or desires. For a few years, flyers could select an airline that would cater to your religion, let you smoke despite FAA regulations, fly your cat or dog to a new city, or make you feel like a movie star. There were certainly travelers who chose such amenities, but those specialty passengers mainly wanted to get to a particular destination, and none of the niche airlines were big enough to travel to that many destinations. Eventually, the novelty wore off as passengers prioritized ticket prices, direct routes, and availability over novelty. Read about five such bygone specialty airlines at CNN. -via Digg

(Image credit: Aeroprints.com)

Zombies come from dead bodies, right? No, they come from movies and TV. No, that's not right, either. The idea of zombies is much older. You're thinking of Haiti, aren't you? That's the answer if you're discussing the origin of zombies with your friends, yet this TED-Ed lesson from Christopher M. Moreman starts even further back than that. But how they were regarded in Haiti is more chilling than any movie about undead brain-eaters. The zombie metaphor was true horror, because it was a little too close to the truth. Maybe you should reserve a little sympathy and respect for zombies. Well, maybe not the walkers, but the people whose lives gave rise to the zombie myth. -via Geeks Are Sexy

By the way, the 1932 film White Zombie is available at YouTube.

In 2018, we brought you the story of Akihiko Kondo, who married virtual Vocoloid singer Hatsune Miku. A company called Gatebox built a hologram of Hatsune Miku that used artificial intelligence, allowing Kondo to interact with her and hold simple conversations. Then in March of 2020, Gatebox ceased support for the hologram, explaining that it was a limited production model that had run its course. There couldn't have been a worse time to lose communication with one's spouse, at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. However, Kondo still talks to Miku, although she doesn't reply. Miku now lives with Kondo in the form of a larger doll. Or many dolls, as seen in Kondo's Instagram gallery.

Kondo's life has changed in other ways. He took up the cause of bullying in Japan, and has enrolled in law school, hoping to explore the topics of anime, minority issues, and freedom of expression. Read about Kondo's life since marrying a fictional character at The Mainichi. -Thanks, WTM!

One of the tools that astronomers use to calculate the rhythms of space phenomena is historical accounts, which can go back as far as written language itself. The difficulty of finding these historical records is translating them, both in language and in deciphering what the description refers to in modern terms. Scholars have identified what may be the oldest written description of an aurora yet found, in an ancient Chinese text called The Bamboo Annals. These court records of King Zhāo’s reign have a reference to "a five-colored light seen in the northern part of the night sky." The writing is dated to 977 or 957 BC. That makes it 300 years earlier than the previous earliest known account.  

The records have been available for a long time, but scientists say a 16th-century translation erred in calling the sight a comet instead of a five-colored light. They also know that at the time, the earth's magnetic pole was in the right place for aurora to have been seen in central China. Read more about this finding at Smithsonian.   

(Image credit: Martincco)

This is a love story, but it's not for children, because nature is metal. Don't watch this with the sound off, and don't listen to it while doing something else, because you need both the audio and visuals to get the full effect. Get ready to start caring about the fates of two random insects in a swamp. The story is gentle and inspiring, dark and absurd, tearjerking and hilarious all at once. For some reason, I feel the need to apologize for all the above, but it's Ze Frank, so you should know you're getting into something quite weird.

Nothing signifies a serious permanent commitment like comic book superheroes. But if you insist, you can get wedding rings branded with the essence of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, or the Joker. Imagine reciting your vows to your beloved while slipping on a Joker ring. The ring company Manly Bands has teamed up with DC Comics to present the DC Collection of wedding rings for which to pledge your troth.

You may wonder why there's no Green Lantern ring, as he is the only superhero who gets his powers specifically from his ring. My guess is that they don't want to reproduce the exact design familiar to us from the comic books, and even if they went with a stylized version like the other rings, it probably wouldn't sell well. Which makes us wonder how many Aquaman wedding rings will be purchased. Read about the collection and see each one up close at Nerdist.

The more we go to space, the more trash we leave behind. There are 4,852 working satellites orbiting the earth, with ever more being launched as the cost of deploying them falls. They have to steer through more than 36,000 pieces of space junk more than 10 centimeters wide, and perhaps 100,000 smaller objects in orbit. The company Privateer, founded by professor Moriba Jah, engineer Alex Fielding, and Apple founder Steve Wozniak, aims to do something about it. They've developed a product called Wayfinder with which anyone can monitor space debris. Their other idea for helping with the problem is ...to launch more satellites. This may seem counterintuitive, to say the least. These new satellites are expected to act as traffic cops, helping working satellites and manned missions avoid collisions, and they also hope to reduce the number of new satellite launches by allowing other companies to use their satellites instead of launching their own. Does it make sense? Read about the problem and the project at Inverse.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Privateer)  

We all learned about Prohibition, when alcohol was illegal, but people drank it anyway because to many, it was a necessary part of life. Less well-known, but following the same logic, earlier laws against birth control were flouted regularly. In America, the Comstock laws went into effect in 1873, banning the trade in "obscene materials" which included not only pornography, but also birth control, abortifacients, and any information about them. But all that did was drive such information underground. Birth control methods of the time weren't nearly as effective as they are today, but they were something. Women talked about them over the back fence or in their parlors, to avoid any written materials that might lead to arrest. But they were also available for sale to those who knew how to decode language designed to toe the letter of the law.  

Every day, across the nation, ads for abortion and birth control appeared in newspapers. Readers just had to know what to look for. “Women had to get creative” about how to get that information out, said Rendina. It was “restoring the menses,” not an abortion. It was “getting rid of a blockage,” or “cleansing the uterus. They came up with all these ridiculous euphemisms.”

A perusal of newspapers from this period shows advertisements for “Mother’s helper” or “Portuguese female pills,” medicine for those “laboring under the suppression of their natural illness,” “renovating pills from Germany” and the like.

Read about the whisper network in which women passed along such information when it was illegal at Atlas Obscura.

Which is better, old Batman or new Batman? The Caped Crusader has come a long way from from the campy style of the mid-'60s Batman. Now he's a dark, brooding, action-not-words type of superhero. Corridor saw the new movie The Batman and asked, why not both? And that's why we now have a version of The Batman with Adam West stepping in for Robert Pattinson. But that's not all- the Penguin and the Riddler have traveled through time to menace our hero as well. The worst thing about this mashup is that it could have been twice as long, and that's something you rarely say about a YouTube video these days. -via Digg

Anna Albertine Olga Brown was born in 1858, just one year before Jules Leotard invented the flying trapeze. Brown's parents must have been circus people, as she started performing at age nine. Under the name Miss Lala (or La La), she walked the high wire and flew on a trapeze, but what really astonished audiences was her iron jaw act. She was often elevated to the trapeze on a pulley, which she held onto with her teeth. This tiny Black woman with amazing strength could hold up the weight of a man with her teeth while suspended upside-down on a rope. She could even hold the weight of a 200-pound cannon- with her teeth! Miss Lala caught the attention of artist Edgar Degas, who in 1879 enshrined her in his only circus painting, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando. Over a 20-year career, she performed at venues such as the Folies Bergère in Paris and the Royal Aquarium in London, and all over Europe under various stage names. Read about Olga Brown, Miss Lala, at Messy Nessy Chic.