Saratoga Springs, New York, is famous as the birthplace of the potato chip. The story goes that in 1853, railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt dined at at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs and sent back his fried potatoes because they weren't thin enough. Chef George Crum maliciously compiled with Vanderbilt's demand, and fried up super-thin potato slices until they were extra crispy. But Vanderbilt loved them, and the potato chip was born. Crum opened his own restaurant, and became famous for his chips.

Since then, earlier recipes for the same dish were found, but Crum's chips caused people to make the pilgrimage to Sarasota Springs to try them. That was just the beginning of the story, as other people made the snack accessible to all, from the Ohio man who got them into grocery stores, to the California woman who bagged them for freshness, to the movie star who dared us to try to eat just one. Read the history of the potato chip -or chips, since you can't eat just one- at Smithsonian.

This is a restored Lamborghini 5C TL tractor that was built in the 1960s. Owning this would make you the envy of all the guys down at the co-op! If you're not a gearhead, you might be surprised to know that Lambourgini built tractors before the company ever built cars.

Ferruccio Lamborghini grew up on the family vineyard and was always fascinated by farm machinery. After World War II he designed tractors that would get Italy back in its feet again. He became so wealthy that he could afford nice sports cars, which eventually included Ferraris. But as an engineer, he wasn't happy with his Ferrari, and let the company founder, Enzo Ferrari, know about it.

He took his grievances to Enzo Ferrari and the two famously head-strong men had a wild argument over it – the result being that Ferruccio started his own car company to show Enzo how it should be done.

The two companies remain each other’s greatest rivals to this day.  

While Lamborghini's name became forever associated with luxury sports cars, he continued to build tractors into the 1970s. Read about Lambourgini and his tractors at Silodrome. -via Fark  

Get the details of this particular model at the auction listing. Bidding will close on January 10.

Yeah, we know there was a Terminator 3, but even if we consider it canon, there's room for further adventures anywhere in that messed-up timeline, as we've seen from the many other forgettable Terminator sequels, and you can improve upon them as you will.

After the events of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Sarah Connor and her son John took on new identities. But now there are several terminators (model T-800) sent back to find them. Fabrice Mathieu (previously at Neatorama) edited together more than a dozen movies to create this clever dialogue-free action sequence. -Thanks Fabrice!

Now that we're about done with the year-end "best of" lists, we can look to the very worst. Uswitch has combed through IMDb reviews, searching for negative phrases, to compile lists of the most boring TV show and movies from the last couple of decades. Here are the movies.

1    The Last Airbender
2    Annabelle
3    Suicide Squad
4    Total Recall
5    Battle Los Angeles
6    Justice League
7    Green Lantern
8    Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
9    Alice in Wonderland    
10    Clash of the Titans    
11    The Wolfman
12    Ice Age: Continental Drift    
13    White House Down
14    X-Men: Apocalypse
15    Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

I've only seen two of these movies, and I can't argue about them. Still, any list of "worst" guided by viewer opinions needs a caveat in that the movies that no one bothered to go see were probably even more boring.

They also have a rundown of the most boring TV shows, and since the list was compiled in November, a look at the worst Christmas movies and TV specials as well. See all the boring media listed, with discussion about some of them, at Uswitch. -via Mental Floss

In the 21st century, Americans mostly buy and drive cars with automatic transmissions. That's not the case in the United Kingdom, where more cars with manual transmissions were bought every year up until 2020. And even today, automatics are barely ahead in sales. That's because in the UK, everyone, or let's say almost everyone, learns to drive using a manual transmission.

See, when a teenager goes to take the test for a driver's license, the car they use for the test determines what kind of license they receive (if they pass the test). If you use an automatic vehicle, you get a license to drive automatic vehicles only. If you use a car with a manual transmission and pass, you get a license for either kind of car. If you get a restricted license for automatic only and then decide later that you want an unrestricted license, you have to take the test over again with a manual transmission.

The UK has a bit fewer than a million people with automatic-only licenses, and almost 40 million with licenses for both types of transmissions. There is a bit of a stigma attached to the automatic-only license. Read more about the way the UK drives at Jalopnik.

It's a special kind of heartbreak when you come up with a great idea for a story, incubate it in your mind, write it down, polish it, and convince yourself it's worthy of a Hollywood movie, then ...you see a trailer for that movie. This isn't about plagiarism, but about convergent ideas. You can't sue for plagiarism if you've never pitched the script or published the story. Often it's not the exact story, but close enough so that you can give up on the idea of a movie being produced, at least anytime soon. Just ask Liz Smith, who in 1997 imagined a story about a rich young man who falls involve with a poor woman while both are traveling on the Titanic. Inverse has the stories of five screenwriters who were crestfallen when they found out their stories had been beaten to the punch, and how they coped with the disappointment afterward. -via Digg
 

NASA’s Psyche mission is scheduled to launch on August of 2022 and head toward a 140-mile wide asteroid named 16 Psyche. It lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists are interested in the asteroid because they believe it may be a planetesimal, which resembles the earth underneath its mantle and crust. We could learn about how our planet formed. But the asteroid is interesting for something else.

Asteroid 16 Psyche reflects light in a way that lead scientists to believe it is made of metal, or at least contains a lot of iron, nickel, and gold. The resources on the asteroid could be worth as much as $10 quintillion! And now you're thinking of the movies Armageddon, Avatar, Prospect, or Alien, in which earth's biggest corporations send crews to other planets to extract their natural resources. While that may be a long way off, 16 Psyche has captured NASA's imagination for many reasons, which you can read about at Smithsonian. -via Fark

(Image credit: NASA)

Look at this rat. Look at this marvelous rat. Reorganize your brain around this image of a rat.

Claire McFadden brings us a song that you think maybe is trying to teach us something or make a point, but eventually you come to realize, no, it's some kind of art. Or maybe it's just one of those weird things that make the internet an interesting place to be. It gets funnier as it goes along. Contains one NSFW word. (via Metafilter)

The Bosphorus, also known as the Strait of Istanbul, is a waterway that cuts through Istanbul, Turkey, connects the the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, and separates Europe from Asia. That's a lot to ask of a small strait. It forms a historically important trade route for international navigation. But it's not a river. At least, not all of it is. The water flows both north and south, depending on the depth.

...in modern times, local boatmen know that the surface current flows south into the Sea of Marmara and thence into the Aegean/Mediterranean.  If they want to take a boat north, they can lower a bucket of rocks on a long rope to the bottom, where the northward current of seawater is located; it will carry the bucket north and thus tow their boat on the surface.

There's a scientific explanation at Wikipedia. Read how a horrific event in history took advantage of this weird flow at TYWKIWDBI.

(Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

The song "Creep" by Radiohead is a classic, but as far as I know, it's never been done honky-tonk style. The YouTuber we know and love, There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama), has fixed that with a performance by Tommy Yorke and the Radiohead Boys. While the cognitive dissonance might make you laugh, the music is actually quite good. And the best part is the video editing. You may or may not recognize the background singers, but the lip-synching is astonishing; it must have been a lot of work. Don't miss special appearance by Conway Twitty, Loretta Lyn, Buck Owens, Dolly Parton, and some stars that don't sing. Go ahead and listen to it, the F-bomb is censored. -via reddit

Most of the industrial spills we hear about are dangerous because of traffic disruptions or the toxic nature of what was spilled. While floods are dangerous, industrial accidents rarely have enough liquid to drown anyone. But the London beer flood of 1814 not only drowned people, the biggest danger was the sheer explosiveness of the brewery's failure.

The Horse Shoe Brewery was one of London's biggest. It participated in a game of one-upmanship to see who could boast the largest beer fermentation vats. These ever-bigger vats were made of wood held together by iron hoops. The Horse Shoe Brewery's biggest vat held 18,000 barrels of beer. When it suddenly failed on October 17, the force was great enough to wreck the vats beside it. Combined, they sent 323,000 imperial gallons of beer surging, with enough force to break through the brewery's brick wall and into the neighborhood. Eight women and children were killed by the ghastly accident. Read an account of the beer flood at Amusing Planet.

Some cultures tend to celebrate military victories, weddings, holidays, sports victories, and/or random events by firing guns into the air. This includes the United States. These events can be extremely dangerous just because firearms are present, and even more so when the participants are already inebriated, but when someone is just firing towards the sky, what's the harm? As physicists will tell you, what goes up must comes down, even though they weren't all that sure ablout it when firarms were first developed. Those bullets will have to come down somewhere, and it's almost impossible to determine where that will be ahead of time. Debunked explains the physics of shooting into the air and the consequences of falling bullets. The ad in the middle is about 1:15 long, and can be fast-forwarded.  -via Digg

You might have noticed that there are fewer diet sodas in stores. This is not a supply chain issue (at least not in most places) but a production decision. While manufacturers are making and selling less diet soda, they are producing more "zero sugar" sodas. What's the difference? Mainly the words.

The word "diet" technically only means what one consumes, but consumers are used to "diet" meaning fewer calories so that you can lose weight. It has a connotation of a poor self-image and a regimen of deprivation. Who wants that? Younger consumers (i.e. Millennials) prefer to "eat healthier" instead of going on a diet. Less sugar is a draw for them, even if the same artificial sweeteners are used.

So is there a difference between "diet" sodas and "zero sugar" sodas? The ingredients may vary slightly, and some people consider zero sugar brands to more closely resemble the original sugary soda. The actual difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero is explained here. Read about the shift in consumer preferences and the labels that cater to them at All Recipes. -via Digg

(Image credit: Ben Schumin)

Modern hospitals are designed to use the latest technology and systems for providing top-notch health care efficiently to as many people as possible. In the US, those systems assume short stays and unlimited resources. Those assumptions do not always translate well to other parts of the world. The country of Rwanda has been busy growing and modernizing since the genocidal war of 1994, and in 2008 was ready to build new hospitals. However, existing hospitals built with Western architectural designs were not working, and a new approach was needed.

Many hospital patients in Rwanda battle tuberculosis and other highly communicable diseases. They were spreading antibiotic-resistant microbes to each other while waiting to be seen. Ventilation systems used in Western hospitals were prone to breaking down, repairs are hard to come by, and they were often disabled to save power costs. Another problem was isolated inpatients in closed rooms with few staff members and even fewer monitoring devices.

To tackle these problems, architect Michael Murphy looked back in time, to Florence Nightingale's writings on how hospitals should work. He incorporated many of her ideas into the design of a new hospital in Butaro, which is now being copied across the country. Read how hospital design can be adapted for local conditions at Fast Company.

Recycling is good, but re-using items instead of manufacturing new things is even better for the environment. Mannequins are made of fiberglass, which won't decompose and is notoriously difficult to recycle. Roz Edwards sort of fell into the business of putting mannequins back into use in one way or another. The ones that are useable are refurbished and sold or rented. Others go into a mountain of fake body parts where people can take as much as they can in 15 minutes for £75. They not only go back to the fashion industry, but are used in movies and music videos, art projects, and holiday decorations. Oh yeah, and then there are those folks who put one in their car to discourage dangerous people from approaching (which is good) and to use the carpool lane (which is bad). Even totally ruined mannequins are good for a scary Halloween tour! It's creepy and crazy, but Edwards' project Mannakin has turned out to be a viable business. Tom Scott shows us how the weirdness works.