World War I ended on November 11, 1918. Since then, November 11 has been a holiday around the world, called Remembrance Day, Armistice Day, or Memorial Day. But the United States already had a Memorial Day to honor those who died in war, established after the Civil War. Nevertheless, Armistice Day was commemorated in the US ...until after World War II, when veteran Raymond Weeks began a campaign to include living veterans of war in the holiday. In 1954, Veterans Day was established as a holiday.

But back in 1921, it was Armistice Day, and the first War to End All Wars was a fresh wound. That was the year that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was established at Arlington National Cemetery. An unidentified American serviceman who died in combat in France was brought back to the states and given a funeral on November 11, 100 years ago today.



The National Archives has partnered with Google Arts & Culture to create an online exhibit commemorating the 100th anniversary if you want to explore further. -via Metafilter

Introducing rocks, it's just rockshttps://t.co/Gh0jgjMDNe pic.twitter.com/2Vi4Iarsw8

— Neal Agarwal (@nealagarwal) November 3, 2021

Neal Agarwal made us a web toy that's relaxing and frustrating at the same time. Just go and stack some rocks. It's nothing but rocks, and you can stack them. Unless you can't. Because they have no straight edges, and they tend to fall. At the same time, there are no rules to follow, and the sounds of the ocean are quite soothing. I found out something by accident- since there are no rules, no scoring, and no finish line, you don't have to stack them all vertically. This is the best I have done so far.

Agarwal offers other web toys if you want to do some exploring.  -via Metafilter

I don't know why this little boy is blue and his mother is purple, but it really doesn't matter as his mom makes curry for dinner and explains how variety is the spice of life. Eventually we see how the curry is a metaphor for the earth. Everyone is different and they like different things, but it takes all those things to make the world go around. This pleasant and colorful animated short was made by an international team of directors at the French animation school Gobelins for their graduation project. You can read the story behind the film at the school's website. -via The Kid Should See This

The USSR had quite a few notable "firsts" in the space race. They were the first to put a satellite into space in 1957 and the first to put a man into orbit in 1961. By 1967, they were ready to be the first country to stage a docking maneuver in orbit. The plan was to launch two spacecraft, Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 2, line them up in orbit, and have two of the cosmonauts swap capsules via spacewalk.

But there were problems with the spacecraft. The launch was rushed in order to have it occur during the Soviet Union's 50th anniversary celebrations. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was to pilot Soyuz 1, and he knew the spacecraft had at least 203 structural problems, any of which could be catastrophic. The only person in the USSR who had the power to cancel the launch was Leonid Brezhnev. But who would tell him? Komarov enlisted his best friend, backup pilot, and national hero Yuri Gagarin to get word to the Soviet leader. Gagarin approached everyone he could, but the only help he got was from a spy who was punished for even suggesting telling Brezhnev such a thing.

Soyuz 1 launched on April 23, 1967. The Soviet Union achieved another first with the mission: the first man to die in space. Vladimir Komarov and his capsule became a fireball as it plunged to earth. He had known it would happen, but if he had backed out of the launch, Yuri Gagarin would have taken his place. Read what happened to Soyuz 1 at Amusing Planet. The account, and one picture, may be disturbing.

In 1920, Harvard University was the site of a process so scandalous that it wasn't made public until records were revealed in 2002. At the time it happened, the school considered the scandal to be the students' behavior, but in the 21st century we know the real scandal was the university's response and the cover up of their actions.

It began when a Harvard student suddenly dropped out, went home to his parents, and committed suicide. It came out that he was having an affair with an older man. Letters he left behind named other students at Harvard who were also homosexual. School officials wanted to keep the matter quiet, in order to preserve the school's reputation, and besides, one of the named students was the son of a former congressman. But they wanted those students out.

The results of the "Secret Court," as it was actually called, were that eight students were expelled for no stated reason, and they were given negative recommendations if they applied to another school. One committed suicide soon afterward, and another a few years later. Read about Harvard's Secret Court of 1920 at Messy Nessy Chic.

Mountains are a literary metaphor for something that is eternal and immovable, but that's not always so in the real world. Mountains are subject to both gravity and entropy. The village of Brienz/Brinzauls in Switzerland is itself moving downhill as the ground shifts underneath, but the mountain above the village is falling apart, sending boulders rolling into the valley. How do these people live with the danger? The highway that runs across the foot of the mountain is in even more danger from falling rocks, but Swiss engineering is on it. No, they cannot stop the rocks, but they can make the road safer. Tom Scott has the story.  

By the way, if you listen to the geologist while reading the subtitles, you'll hear Swiss as a fairly close relative of English.

Traveling trash can visits Ireland from Myrtle Beach (3,500+ miles)… We received an email yesterday from a man in Ireland who found one of our bins. Click here to read the full email exchange! https://t.co/83mtGAMrUv pic.twitter.com/TgOrtR2fG7

— City of Myrtle Beach (@MyrtleBeachGov) November 8, 2021

A recycling barrel washed up on the shore in Mulranny, County Mayo, on the west coast of Ireland. Keith McGreal saw it on his local beach and took a closer look. The stickers on the bin clearly showed that it belonged to the city of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina! That's a distance of 5500 kilometers, or 3500 miles. McGreal sent a message to Myrtle Beach via the city's website, telling of the find.

Someone on the town's staff replied and joked that one employee had already volunteered to travel to Ireland to fetch the wayward barrel, but apparently that request will not be honored. They asked that McGreal go ahead and recycle the bin on his side of the Atlantic.

No one knows when the bin started its journey to Ireland, but the barnacles it collected along the way indicate that it has been quite some time. -via Boing Boing

Artisans in Japan have been using lathes to shape wood since the 9th century. Originally pulled by hand, they became pedal-powered in the 1890s, and now are spun by motors. These lathes are what artisans called kojin use to make traditional kokeshi dolls out of well-dried wood. The dolls are durable and sparsely decorated, lending themselves to imaginative play. The Tohoku region of Japan is responsible for the popularity of kokeshi dolls, as they sold them to tourists who came to ski in Tohoku in the mid-19th century. Manami Okazaki fell in love with kokeshi when she visited her mother's family in Tohoku, and has written two books about the dolls. The latest is Japanese Kokeshi Dolls: The Woodcraft and Culture of Japan’s Iconic Dolls. Okazaki gives us a look at how kokeshi dolls charmed those who bought them.    

It didn't hurt that kokeshi were also undeniably cute, defined more precisely by Okazaki as a type of “subdued” cute known as shibu kawaii. “Kawaii, the culture of cuteness, is probably the dominant pop-cultural aesthetic at the moment,” Okazaki tells me. “My bankcard has Hello Kitty on it. You see buses in the shapes of bears or pandas, airplanes in the shapes of dogs. It’s endless. But shibu kawaii is a kind of cute that’s cute in a way that isn’t—a retro or old-school cute.”

In other words, a level of cute that won’t give you diabetes. “I wrote a book on kawaii culture,” Okazaki says. “I spoke with designers from gaming companies whose work is 100-percent maximum cute. They told me that if you really want to see the roots of kawaii, you should check out kokeshi.”

Kokeshi has also been credited (or blamed, depending on how you look at these things) as the template for the mix of uniformity and variation found in everything from Be@rbrick toys to Pokemon. That may seem like a stretch if you are wondering what a kokeshi doll could possibly have in common with Pikachu or Bulbasaur, but the similarities have less to do with the decorations on the forms than the utility of the forms themselves as armatures for myriad variations.

Okazaki tells us more about the history, the craftsmanship, and the appeal of kokeshi dolls at Collectors Weekly.

We've seen animals wander onto the playing field during televised football and baseball games quite a bit, but they are usually dogs or cats or an occasional escaped mascot. You don't expect to see a wild animal invading a game, especially in a packed stadium. When Arizona State played the University of Southern California in Tempe on Saturday, broadcasters were surprised to see a fox on the field! The fox seemed surprised, too, and tried to escape by jumping into the stands.

It was a novel situation for all involved. The crowd, of course, was amused but also concerned with the safety of the fox. If it were a dog or cat, they would try to grab the animal, but it was hands-off all around in the case of a fox. After another trip through the playing field, the fox made its escape, to thunderous applause.

You might wonder why a wild fox would ever approach a crowded stadium. Wild animals have been forced into the proximity of humans by encroaching cities and loss of both habitat and prey, and they've adapted by taking our trash for food. A fox does what a fox gotta do. -via Digg

The town of Casey is near where interstate 70 crosses the Illinois-Indiana border. It has a population of only 2,404 people, but the town has plenty to brag about- like multiple Guinness World records for large items. They have the world's largest wind chimes, rocking chair, knitting needles, mailbox, clogs, pitchfork, and more. The town holds eleven world records as of now, and that draws people off the interstate to come see them.



In most small towns that put themselves on the map, so to speak, there is usually one person behind the attractions. In Casey, that would be local business owner Jim Bolin. He built the wind chimes as the first "big thing" for Casey, and then just kept on creating everyday items on a scale that's larger than life. In addition to the record-holders, the town has quite a few other enormous objects to show off. Read about Casey and its big things at Mental Floss.

Vintage postcards are available for locations all over the world, but somehow, they all have the same sky. Or one of three skies, it seems, with recognizable cloud formations if you keep an eye out for them. Vox takes a deep dive into them with James Brouwer, a postcard collector who found this phenomenon in his massive collection. Yes, there is an explanation. We'll learn a lot of about tourism postcards in the process. As soon as I finished watching the video, I went to my envelope of postcards. They aren't vintage, just family souvenirs. Most don't even have clouds, and I saw no duplicates. Then again, they are all from the last 20 years or so.  -via Nag on the Lake

Dr. Katalin Karikó was a biochemist in Hungary who didn't get the respect or funding her research deserved. So she, her husband, and infant daughter made their way out of communist Hungary in 1985 by selling their car, converting the money on the black market, and hiding it inside the baby's toys. She made it to the US and got a research job at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine. While that's quite a story, it was only beginning. Karikó ran into the same problems in the US- supervisors who did not believe in her research and would not go to bat to get the funding she needed.

You see, Karikó was a pioneer working with messenger RNA, or mRNA. She believed it could be made to work against a host of human illnesses, but the substance was a problem to work with in the lab. Her colleagues considered her experiments failures, but Karikó considered them learning experiences. Still, it was hard to get funding without someone higher up to believe in what you're doing. She began to collaborate with immunologist Drew Weissman, who was looking for a vaccine for HIV. They had a breakthrough in 1997, but it still took several years to get a peer-reviewed paper published. By 2013, Karikó was making progress, but she had worked for Penn for almost 30 years, and she'd had enough. She left for a position at a fairly new biomedical startup called BioNTech.

You can see where this story is going. You can read the full version at Glamour magazine. -via Metafilter

Maurice Evans has been collecting fireworks for most of his life, and he's in his 80s now. The gentle author at Spitalfields Life takes us to his home in Shoreham to see the collection and hear his story, with just a bit of trepidation.

My concern about potential explosion was relieved when Maurice confirmed that he has removed the gunpowder from his fireworks, only to be reawakened when his wife Kit helpfully revealed that Catherine Wheels and Bangers were excepted because you cannot extract the gunpowder without ruining them.

This statement prompted Maurice to remember with visible pleasure that he still had a collection of World War II shells in the cellar and, of course, the reinforced steel shed in the garden full of live fireworks. “Let’s just say, if there’s a big bang in the neighbourhood, the police always come here first to see if it’s me,” admitted Maurice with a playful smirk.

But it seemed safe enough, as Maurice still has nine of his ten fingers. The story of his pyromaniacal past and how he developed a fondness for fireworks is more interesting than the collection itself. Read about Maurice Evans and his fantastic fireworks collection at Spitalfields Life. -via Nag on the Lake

Vehicles that run on electricity were around when the first powered vehicles were developed. However, when a new technology comes out in many forms, we usually managed to whittle them down to one type in order to embed the necessary infrastructure, like trained mechanics, factories, and most importantly, fueling stations in all locations. In the case of cars, the gasoline engine won out due to Henry Ford and the abundance of crude oil. But electric power has always been there, mostly in the background, waiting for the right conditions to make a comeback. This TED-Ed animated video explains the history of electric cars. -via Laughing Squid  

As they say, a lie can travel around the world before the truth gets out of bed. I recall telling my Mom that you can't go swimming for an hour after eating. She said, "You're not doing laps for the Olympics. You're just playing in the water. Go on." And she was right, even if that didn't quite debunk the myth. We call them old wives' tales or urban legends, but there are people who will argue with you about these myths today. Some may have once had a reason behind them, or at least faulty reasoning that seemed to make sense at the time, while others are just made up of whole cloth, like eating spiders in your sleep.

You know what can make you feel old? I can remember when some of these untrue "facts" were considered "news" or at least new research findings. See all 14 myths that aren't true at Cracked.