The most entertaining thing that happened at the Yankees-Orioles game Monday was that a cat wandered onto the field and found himself the center of attention. The grounds crew made a lame attempt to remove him, but the crowd was cheering for the cat. -via Digg

Okay, what we need to take our minds of the problems of the real world is a combination of three fantasies: Halloween, LEGO, and Star Wars. Disney+ is jumping into all that with both feet with a special called Lego Star Wars Terrifying Tales.

This fall, Poe and BB-8 will return in Lego Star Wars Terrifying Tales, an animated Halloween special set after the events of The Rise of Skywalker that follows the legendary pilot and his droid as they travel to the volcanic planet Mustafar. When Poe (Jake Green) and BB-8 are forced to make an emergency landing there, they happen to encounter Graballa the Hutt (Dana Snyder), the newest owner of Darth Vader’s foreboding castle, which is being transformed into a themed resort.

A tour of the castle is an opportunity to tell scary tales, plus there's a monster of some sort lurking inside. The special streams beginning on October first, and you can read more about it at Gizmodo.

An interesting list at Cracked tells us about the early versions of some of our modern conveniences, when they weren't so modern or convenient, but that's all a matter of opinion. The oldest of these is a story of how the Cherokee used turtle shells for calendars. It turns out that a turtle shell has 13 segments on the inside, and 28 segments on the outside. That corresponds well to 13 lunar cycles in a year, and 28 days in each lunar cycle.

A First Nations legend describes how the unassuming turtle received its divine temporal cognizance. Many moons ago, long before Creator peopled the Earth, the animals could talk. One day, Turtle and Raven exchanged pleasantries, and Turtle, lamenting his terrestrial limitations, wished to taste some of that sweet sky for himself.

So Turtle bit onto a twig, and Raven lifted him high into the heavens. But when Turtle opened his mouth to express his pleasure, he fell to the ground and shattered his shell. Creator took pity on Turtle and put its shell back together with the purpose of tracking the moons. Creator also bestowed long life on Turtle and made it the Keeper of Knowledge.

Read the rest of that story, plus four others at Cracked.

(Image credit: Pierre5018)

Bella Burton was born with Morquio syndrome, which affects bone development. Bella also has a service dog named George, her beloved great Dane who not only offers physical support by keeping Bella upright and protected, but also emotional support that gave her the confidence to try things beyond what was considered possible for her. You can follow Bella and George at Facebook. -via Laughing Squid

A lot of new ideas that inventors consider revolutionary come and go for one reason or another, and we tend to forget about them when they aren't successful. In contrast, the Segway was unveiled in 2001 and became a spectacular failure for many reasons, one of which is because it was so overhyped. Its development was pretty much an accident that engineers considered a lot of fun. But keeping the project a secret (known internally as Ginger and publicly only as IT) meant that there was no real-world beta testing, no marketing research, and no devil's advocate, while the speculation over a vague leaked proposal went unexpectedly viral and sent expectations sky high. Engineers loved it, venture capitalists loved it, but everyone else expected something cool and useful.

Inside Magazine’s debut issue published in February. On the cover: “WHAT ‘IT’ IS.” The author of the story, a freelancer named Adam Penenberg, had combed domain-name registrations and public patent records, and was positive he’d figured out the answer: IT was a hydrogen-powered scooter. “I was on, like, every show for a week,” Penenberg told me. “I was on the Today show with Katie Couric. I don’t know how many hundreds of interviews I must have done that week.”

Dean Kamen hadn’t been careful enough for the new world of the internet. All those patents he filed? His inventor’s paranoia backfired. In an earlier time, a journalist would have had to do a lot more legwork to dig up those patents, but now they were all right there on the patent office’s website.

Penenberg may have basically worked out that Ginger was a scooter, but plenty of people didn’t believe it. Or maybe it was just more fun to speculate like crazy. Some of that speculation happened on sites like Slashdot, where one poster, for example, correctly pegged that the name Ginger was meaningful—but then declared authoritatively that IT was a hoverboard, because the Ginger in question was the heroine of the animated movie Chicken Run, who is convinced she can teach chickens to fly.

After all this, the actual Segway was a letdown- bulky, expensive, and not at all cool-looking. Read the story of the Segway's unintentional rollout from the perspective of a journalist who was part of it at Slate. -via Digg

(Image credit: Richard)

If you've ever wanted to go to the bottom of the ocean in a diving bell, then you should head to the coast of Germany, where they actually have a few, and tourists are welcome. But if you can't go right now, Tom Scott will show you what it's like. Personally, I'd recommend waiting until they build these in spots with a better view. -via reddit

Box Butte County, Nebraska, was born in 1886 when it separated from Dawes County. Its first county seat was the village of Nonpareil, then Hemingford, then Alliance, all moves that county residents voted for. But when Alliance became the county seat, there was some question of what to do with the courthouse that had been built in Hemingford. It was less than ten years old, and quite substantial.

As you know the building is fifty feet long by forty wide[,] two full stories in height with a heavy truss roof and constructed with a heavy hard pine frame. As there were two cuts to pass through the building was raised on timbers high enough to clear the banks and when ready to start it was fifty feet from the railroad track to the top of the deck on the building. The weight of the building was estimated at 100 tons.

The decision was made in 1899 to move the courthouse. The first attempt was a disaster, moving the building only 15 feet in ten days. Then the railroad was mentioned. Read the story of moving the Box Butte courthouse at Amusing Planet.

Alas, one has to wonder how much stress the move put on the building, since they built a new Box Butte County courthouse in 1913.

Archaeologists unearthed a couple dozen burials in a Bronze Age cemetery found near Budapest, Hungary. Most of them were urns filled with cremated remains, one of which stood out from the rest: the urn contained the cremains of three people! One was a woman of high status who had died in her 20s, and the other two were her twin fetuses.

Skeletal analysis confirmed that the woman was originally born outside the community, possibly in central Slovenia or Lake Balaton in western Hungary, per Live Science. The researchers came to this conclusion by scrutinizing the strontium signatures in her bones and teeth. Comparing strontium isotope ratios found in enamel, which forms in one’s youth, with those present in a specific region can help scholars determine where an individual grew up.

The woman’s isotope ratios indicate that she was born elsewhere but moved to the region between the ages of 8 and 13, likely to be married into a noble Vatya family. She eventually became pregnant with twins, only to die between the ages of 25 and 35. Researchers are unsure whether the mother died before or during childbirth, but the fetuses’ gestational age was about 28 to 32 weeks.

You may find it astonishing that scientists could determine all that from cremated remains. The methods described in the original science paper go into much more detail on strontium levels across Europe 4,00 years ago, the parts of the teeth and bones that pick up those isotopes at what age, and how they extracted that information from bone fragments. Or you can read the short version at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Claudio Cavazzuti et. al./PLOS One)

How does juggling work in space? The main thing you have to remember is that a ball thrown in the absence of gravity will not fall- it just goes in a straight line until something stops it. Physicist Adam Dipert is the Space Juggler. He explains how the idea came about.



See more space juggling in this YouTube playlist. -via Metafilter

The picture above shows a Japanese delegation who visited America in 1860 to confirm a treaty with the United States. Sadly, we do not have a photograph of the delegation who visited Danville, Pennsylvania, on July 4 of that year. That group consisted of completely different people.

On Independence Day of 1860, one of the most notable events in the history of Montour County took place-- a visit from Japanese royalty! Why Japanese royalty should want to pay a visit to the sleepy seat of Pennsylvania's smallest county never exactly crossed the minds of the excited local residents, and perhaps that is how one of the greatest and most elaborate hoaxes in Pennsylvania history came to fruition.

The story of the great Japanese Embassy hoax might have remained forgotten in the dustbin of history had it not been for a New Yorker-- and former Danville resident named W.A.M. Grier-- who came across letters and documents pertaining to the "royal visit" while cleaning out his Brooklyn home decades later. In 1910, the Danville Morning News published Grier's account of the outrageous hoax for the benefit of those who had never heard about it. Apparently, most of the older residents had either forgotten about it, or were simply too embarrassed to admit that it had ever happened.

Apparently, a group of the town's movers and shakers thought it would be fun to impersonate the Japanese delegation. The arrival of the "ambassadors" and their entourage meant a huge crowd at the train station, a parade, and an address to the townspeople through an interpreter at the courthouse square. Read how they did it and how well they pulled it off at Pennsylvania Oddities. -via Strange Company

A bike race in Colorado saw a moose join in! The moose stayed ahead of the pack for a good five minutes, but eventually tired a little. He finally realized that this mad gang wasn't pursuing him when they began to overtake him. That gave him enough confidence to stop. Or maybe he was just having fun, we don't know. -via Digg

English, as she is spoken, is as simple or difficult to learn as most other languages. But English as she is written is really weird. We've seen many examples of strange English spelling, such as "ough," used in thought, drought, tough, cough, through, and though, which are all pronounced differently. How did English spelling become so disengaged from pronunciation? Linguist Arika Orent (previously at Neatorama) takes us through a history of written English to explain how it happened. There was a period of several hundred years after the Norman Conquest when English wasn't written down much at all. And as England was struggling out of that confusion, the movable type printing press came along. Typesetters had plenty of choices, but no strict guides.

Some standards did spread and crystallise over time, as more books were printed and literacy rates climbed. The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had; thankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn’t to faithfully represent the author’s spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of ‘correct’ English – it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy. Habits and tricks became standards, as typesetters learned their trade by apprenticing to other typesetters. They then often moved around as journeymen workers, which entailed dispersing their own habits or picking up those of the printing houses they worked in.

Standard-setting was only partly in the hands of the people setting the type. Even more so, it was down to a growing reading public. The more texts there were, the more reading there was, and the greater the sensibility about what looks right. Once that sense develops, it can be a very powerful enforcer of norms. These norms in the literacy of English speakers today are so well entrenched that simple adjustments are very jarring. If ai trai tu repreezent mai akshuel pronownseeayshun in raiteeng, yu kan reed it, but its difikelt and disterbeeng tu du soh. It just looks wrong, and that feeling of wrongness interrupts the flow of reading. The fluency of reading depends on the speed with which you visually identify the words, and the speed of identification increases with exposure. The more we see a word, the more quickly we recognise it, even if its spelling doesn’t match the sound.

Some spellings got entrenched this way, by being printed over and over again in widely distributed texts, very early on.

Once spelling was standardized in printed text, it tended to stick even when pronunciation changed. There's a lot more to it, which you can read at Aeon. -via Metafilter

*laugh* I normally avoid these refs..but WOW. REAL LIFE Sponge bob and Patrick! #Okeanos Retreiver seamount 1885 m pic.twitter.com/fffKNKMFjP

— Christopher Mah (@echinoblog) July 27, 2021

Christopher Mah is a marine biologist who works for NOAA and for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. He was aboard NOAAS Okeanos Explorer ship watching a feed from the ROV when he saw a familiar image: Spongebob Squarepants and his best friend Patrick Star! He was quite surprised, as the depictions of the creatures in Spongebob Squarepants aren't realistic.

Very few of them resemble SpongeBob's boxy shape.

But the SpongeBob-like sponge in the image, Mah said, belongs to the genus Hertwigia. He was surprised by its bright yellow color, which is unusual for the deep sea. That far down, most things are orange or white to help them camouflage in the dimly lit environment.

The sea star nearby, known as Chondraster, has five arms covered with tiny suckers. Those allow it to creep across the ocean floor and attach itself to rocks and other organisms. Chondraster stars can be dark pink, light pink, or white.

This star's color "was a bright pink that strongly evoked Patrick," Mah said.

Another deviation from the TV show is that sea stars are liable to eat sponges. Read about the unusual scene from the ocean floor at Insider. -via Smithsonian

We will never forget Apollo 1, in which three astronauts died during space training, the shuttle Challenger which exploded during launch, and the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry. But of all the fatalities involving space flight, only three people have actually died while in space. In July of 1971, the Soviet mission Soyuz 11 ended when the cosmonauts' capsule deployed its parachute and landed in Kazakhstan.

As the Soviet retrieval team approached the Soyuz 7K-OKS ship on the ground, nothing appeared amiss. They knocked on the side of the capsule; a tradition used to greet the waiting cosmonauts. But there was no reply to the traditional knock.

When they opened up the capsule, they discovered a tragedy. All three crew members were dead. The discovery of the bodies was a surprise as the ship had no external damage, and the reentry went smoothly. Yet, the entire crew appeared to have been killed by asphyxiation.

The crew members were Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev. These are the only three men to ever die in space.

The crew had been aboard Soyuz 11 for 22 days, and had completed their planned activities. So what went wrong? Read the account of what the Soviet space program gleaned from the evidence at Medium. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: USSR Post)

Cassie is a walking and running robot inspired by the biomechanics of the ostrich. The robot from Agility Robotics looks a bit like an ostrich, too, if the bird could operate without a head. Cassie harnesses machine learning to negotiate a route and stay on track. In this video, see how she runs a 5K course in 53 minutes on a single battery charge. She's no Olympic sprinter, but my battery would have run down much sooner. -via Laughing Squid 

See also: Digit, the somewhat more human-shaped robot from the same company.