The history of photography goes back almost 200 years now. The earliest  photographic images look pretty primitive to us now, but they were surely miracles in their time. As technology advanced, what was considered a "good" picture had a lot to do with the equipment. Eventually,  cameras became affordable enough for lots of people to own one. But to get a "good" picture, you needed to take lessons, or learn from your mistakes, which was expensive when film had to be purchased and then processed. Photography, and photo critique, is quite different now that almost everyone has a state-of-the-art digital camera in their pocket. Kim Beil, author of the book Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography, explains how our view of "good" pictures has changed.    

A second type of failure concerns effects that largely began as mistakes produced by legions of amateur photographers shooting pictures with their new, boxy, Kodak cameras, which made their debut in 1888. Foremost among these failures were motion blur and lens flare. Once upon a time, both were frowned upon by the authors of the “How to Make Good Pictures” books. Thus, a blurry background while trying to capture a moving object, or a blurry object moving across an in-focus background, were considered mistakes that a few simple techniques could help you correct.

Shooting into a light source and thus drenching precious photographic real estate in overexposed rays of light was also considered a no-no. But just as sports photographers would eventually have a ball with motion blur, fashion and advertising photographers would eventually go crazy for lens flare. Intention created context.

“Intention is central to the way I think about art, and maybe even how we define it,” Beil agrees. “Take lens flare: I think the power of lens flare comes from its initial unintentional use by people who were just taking casual pictures without any premeditation, without much intention.” In these sorts of photographs, Beil says, lens flare was an amateur mistake that conferred “a kind of authenticity to an image.” That’s why advertisers find lens flare so appealing. “Because we still associate it with authenticity,” Beil says, “it makes an advertising photo seem more real, maybe even spontaneous.”

Today, lens flare is so widely used, so intentional, that billions of smartphone cameras offer multiple variations of this former failing in the form of filters, which can be activated with a click or a swipe. “Everything can be achieved and there are no more accidents,” Beil says of photography in the 2020s, “so photographers look to things that happened before to reinsert some kind of authenticity into their pictures.” Thanks to technology, photographers can now pretend to take pictures as if they lacked the tools to make their pictures, well, good.

Beil also explains how we judge the photos of the past without understanding the limitations of the art. Read a history of "good" vs. "bad" photography at Collectors Weekly.

We've seen enough "you had one job" pictures too know what happens when workers start a project on both ends and try to meet in the middle. Honeybees do this all the time when they build hives, and manage to come together, knitting their little hexagon cells quite nicely, even with the difficulty of having to work around corners and curves.   

This happens despite a number of major challenges. To begin with, multiple workers contribute to the constructions of each honeycomb, so the regularity can't just be explained by having a single worker engage in a series of instinctual movements. In addition, nests need two different-sized honeycombs, as they use distinct sizes for workers (most of the nest) and drones (males used for reproduction). Finally, honeycombs are often built as multiple units, starting from different areas of the hive and ultimately meeting in the middle somewhere.

To find out how all these issues are managed, an animal behavior specialist (Auburn's Michael Smith) got together with two computer scientists from Cornell: Nils Napp and Kirstin Petersen, who work on insect-like robots. Combined, they put together image-analysis software that could identify the boundaries of each cell, and they figured out the cells' basic statistics—number of sides, length of each side, etc. These could then be classified based on whether they were the right size for workers or drones or whether there was something unusual about the cell.

What they found out was that bees start diverging from their own plans ahead of time in order to mesh with the workers coming from the other direction. This implies brain power that goes beyond instinct. Read what honeybees do to make it all come together at Ars Technica. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Piscisgate)

At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, the women's all around gymnastics event began with a disaster. The world's greatest gymnasts were falling and crashing at the vault. It was the 19th competitor who insisted that the vault height be checked, and it was two inches (5cm) lower than regulation height! No one had adjusted it after the men's competition the night before. The upshot was that the athletes had the floor come at them much faster than in their years of training. When the error was discovered, competitors were offered a chance to re-do their vault, but it was too late for some. Several were injured, and many were so shaken that it affected their performances in other events. -via reddit

There are various rules and regulations for placing historical markers in places where historic things happened, but anyone can put up a commemorative plaque, as long as it's okay with the landowner. It doesn't even have to be a true story. That why you can see where the first cheeseburger was served, in Pasadena, California.

According to local legend, a teenage cook at Rite Spot by the apt name of Lionel Sternberger was the first person to put cheese on a burger. Some claim it wasn’t an invention so much as a cover-up, as Lionel had burned one side of the patty one fateful day in 1924. To hide his mistake, he slapped a new ingredient on top. Regardless of the circumstances, the cheeseburger was a hit. It later appeared on the menu as “The Aristocratic Burger: The Original Hamburger With Cheese.”

A list at Atlas Obscura shows you where you can see plaques for the the site of the first kiss between Barack and Michelle Obama, the 7-11 store where the Ouija board was named, and a fight between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs over the Oxford comma, among others.

While enjoying the gorgeous photography of this clip from the BBC series Blue Planet, I kept thinking of the camera operator swimming through the jellies. The Portuguese man o' war is not technically a jellyfish, but it acts in much the same way -only scarier. -via Laughing Squid

A guy in a blue-and-white suit contorts his body to faithfully depict 50 Olympic pictograms that we all know and love. The real fun comes when the pictograms get difficult, and the performers have to get creative, like using just small parts of the body, or turning the camera upside down. Remember, the athletes doing these things in competition have abilities the rest of us don't! -via Everlasting Blort

If you work for a normal company, this is most likely funny and relatable. I can go for the funny, but it doesn't happen to me. I've been with Neatorama for 15 years now, and when you work for a company this small and internet-savvy, you rarely need to communicate at all, and when you do, the email works as it should. This Bingo card is brought to you by Matt Shirley.

The Tokyo Olympics has 33 different sports, most with many events within the sport. Which one is the hardest? That's an impossible question, as you will have various opinions on what  makes a sport "hard." How can one compare the difficulty of withstanding hits to the face (boxing) to split-second timing (gymnastics) to incredible endurance (marathon) to juggling a variety of skills (water polo or decathlon)? It's an impossible question, but Gizmodo asked six sports experts with multidisciplinary practices, and got a variety of answers. Professor of Instruction in Sport Matt Bowers determined his answer by the process of elimination.

If we think in terms of a Venn diagram where we have two circles indicating the two most basic factors that could make a sport hard—physiological exertion and complexity of skill/movement—then the hardest sport would be classified where those two circles overlap. In other words, a sport that is demanding in both the physical and the skill requirements. Can we identify sports of those 33 that clearly do not fall in one category or the other? Since virtually any sport being played at the Olympics requires a high level of respective skill, perhaps it is easiest to make the first cut on the physiological side. Are there sports that do not require maximal exertion during competition? That eliminates, at a minimum, archery or equestrian sports. Next, do we believe it to be harder psychologically to compete solo than to be part of a team? You may disagree, but if so, then we can remove the team sports from contention. Another question to debate is whether we believe that it is harder to be competing against nature (for example, kayaking or sailing) and/or on a course (for example, cycling or golf or skateboarding), or whether it is harder to be competing in a sport where a fellow Olympic-level athlete is physically trying to prevent your success.

There's much more to Bowers' elimination scheme on the way to an answer, which differs from the other five experts. Read all of them at Gizmodo.

TL;DR: The difficulty of defining difficulty.

In October of 1955, the charter vessel MV Joyita set off from Apia in Samoa bound for Tokelau, an island off New Zealand. The boat never arrived. A search effort turned up nothing, but five weeks later, the Joyita was found 600 miles away, listing to the side as you see above. There was no sign of the 16-member crew, nor of the nine passengers aboard when the boat was last seen. The four tons of cargo -medical supplies, food, and timber- were gone.

As the recovery team boarded the boat, things only got more sinister. The radio was tuned to 2182 kilohertz, the international marine distress channel, indicating that they had required help. The port engine clutch and the auxiliary pump were both disassembled and unconnected, meaning the ship had only been running on one engine. The clocks were stopped at 10:25 pm, and the lights were on. The logbook, sextant, and other navigational equipment were gone, along with all three lifeboats. Finally, there were some eerie signs of possible violence. The ship’s bridge had been smashed by something and covered with a canvas awning, moreover, the deckhouse’s windows were broken. On deck, a doctor’s bag was found open containing a scalpel, stethoscope, and lengths of bloody bandages.

No trace of the crew or passengers was ever found. So what happened? There are plenty of theories, cobbled together from clues left on the ship, some more sinister than others. Read the story of the MV Joyita at Cracked.

(Image credit: unknown)

Götz von Berlichingen, born in 1480, was a notable knight and warrior, whether he was fighting for the Holy Roman Emperor, various kings and nobles, as a mercenary, or for his own purposes. He became a soldier as a teenager and continued fighting and leading armies in various forms until his old age, even after his right arm was amputated on the battlefield. Berlichingen commissioned an iron prosthetic hand, the second of which was so elaborately-designed that his fingers could hold a quill. But it was something else that really made Berlichingen a legend.

Götz von Berlichingen is perhaps best remembered for one of his witty catchphrases. In 1516, during the above-mentioned feud with Mainz, he was laying siege to a castle, attempting to lure the bailiff out on the ramparts. When the bailiff finally appeared, Götz famously said to him after an altercation: “Er solte mich hinden lecken!” or “Er kann mich im Arsche lecken!” Both phrases can be translated to “He can kiss my ass!” Saying this, he defiantly rode away. The phrases remained as an iconic symbol of his willful defiance and became known as the “Swabian greeting.” Today it is used throughout Germany as a witty and light comeback.

Read about the military leader with an iron hand and a witty tongue at Historic Mysteries. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Immanuel Giel)

Winning a gold medal at the Olympics is a great honor, but an even greater honor is to be featured on a box of Wheaties. General Mills is celebrating 100 years of Wheaties cereal with a series they call Century Boxes, featuring the last century's greatest athletes. First in the series was Muhammad Ali. But how did Wheaties become so closely associated with the world's greatest sports figures? It makes sense, as the cereal was developed to be a health food, a more nutritious whole-grain alternative to refined white flour.    

At first, Wheaties wasn’t much of a hit in the market. However, the company came up with a novel concept to market the new cereal. It created a fictional character—Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy, an athlete and all-around good guy—to promote the product. He starred on a national radio program, and the new hero was featured on the cereal box.

Washburn Crosby tried one more thing to sell the cereal: a singing jingle. Sales soared after a barbershop quartet belted out the first-ever song in a radio commercial—with the simple lyrics: “Have you tried Wheaties? They're whole wheat with all of the bran. Won't you try Wheaties?” After that, the cereal became the most popular in America.

But the athletic run of the Wheaties box arose in 1934, when a picture of Lou Gehrig appeared on the back of the cereal box. Read how Wheaties has paid tribute to sports stars through the years at Smithsonian.

The coelacanth is a fish known for its fossils, and was thought to have died out about 66 million years ago. That is, until 1938, when they were discovered to be still around and reproducing in deep waters. Coelacanths became known as "living fossils" since the species goes back so far. But were they really ever lost at all?

And while science only recognized that these critters were not actually extinct as of 1938, it seems fisherman local to their habitats were abundantly familiar with them.  So familiar, in fact, that they knew how to make a meal out of them. Pre-eminent cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson, in reference to ichthyologist James Smith’s 1938 coelacanth-hunting in South Africa, once observed, “There were indications that the native population in this part of the world had fished for and eaten these ‘living fossils’ for several generations. Although not a common item in native diets, there is no doubt that, while Professor Smith dreamed of finding a second coelacanth, a dozen or more had probably been served and eaten” (Sanderson, 1961, p15).  Fisherman off the Comoro Islands, Madagascar, and Mozambique colloquially referred to coelacanth as gombessa (“worthless”) due to the fact that it secreted gallons of oily mucous, and would often ruin the rest of the catch, which makes it even more puzzling that it’s 1938 rediscovery happened when it was found in a pile of other fish headed for the market.

This shouldn't surprise you, as we've posted many stories about rare or even unique animals that were eaten. You might be interested in how one prepares a coelacanth dinner, which you can learn about at Esoterx. Once you do, you probably will swear them off for good. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Dean Falk Schnabel)

Binky Dinky's best bud left for work, so he was already sad. He decided to take a nap, and that's when the nightmare started. Warning: if you are a dog, this may be terrifying. -via reddit

Farms sell produce directly to consumers in farmer's markets and right on the farm during harvest season. Vineyards do that, too, although the laws about selling alcohol are usually more stringent. In Germany, there's a traditional way around those regulations of who can sell alcohol where.

Here in southern Germany’s wine regions, a besen, or a broomstick, signifies something special. For up to 16 weeks, local laws permit winemakers to set up temporary restaurants to serve their latest harvest. So each year, typically in spring and fall, they sweep out their family room or barn, drag tables out from the garage, and recruit family members as servers. Then, they hang a broomstick outside to indicate they’re open.

These broomsticks inspired the name of these pop-up establishments: besenwirtschaften, or simply besens. The limited season creates demand, as does the feeling of being welcomed into a stranger’s home for a rowdy dinner party. As customers sidle up to each other at long communal tables, three-piece brass bands play catchy folk songs and wine is poured by the same hands that picked the grapes. It’s no wonder besen season is a local favorite.

While the pop-up restaurants are in themselves a loophole in the laws, there are strict regulations about them. But why a broom? Read about traditional besenwirtschaften at Atlas Obscura.

Why do people live in Yakutsk? Some are native to the region, some are descendants of Stalin-era exiles, but many are there to make a lot of money in resource extraction industries, from gas and oil to metals to diamonds to mammoth carcasses. When it's this cold, you have to learn an entirely new lifestyle. -via reddit