In the early 1850s, two brothers left their home in Massachusetts and decided to build a farm on the frontier near Eureka, Wisconsin. They were twins, unusually close twins, who pooled their resources to buy land, and they built a magnificent home together.

Just outside a small, rural Wisconsin farm town, lay the ruins of a grand mansion. In stark contrast to the flat, surrounding fields and scattered barns, was the peculiar sight of a once opulent home that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue during the Gilded Age. For years, mystery surrounded the empty ruin, with local legends spoken of secret stairways and underground tunnels; some suggesting the decaying manse had been used during Prohibition as a hideout for Al Capone. But the real mystery of the crumbling mansion was even more remarkable. For the house was built in two halves, each side a perfect mirror of the other, inside and out. Enter through the front door and you’d discover two kitchens, four parlour rooms, two dining rooms, and nearly a dozen bedrooms, each half designed and decorated as an exact copy of the other.

Built in 1852, virtually in the middle of nowhere, this mansion was an oddity in its own right – and that was before you even saw who lived there. The unusual Victorian mirrored home was built by identical twin brothers, Argalus and Augustus Foote, who were so inseparable in life, they even married women with matching initials in a double wedding, Augustus to Ann, and Argalus to Adelia. The Foote twins set about building a dream home where each family would live parallel lives in their own half of the mansion. But tragedy would soon descend upon the house, leaving it to fall into ruin. This is the story of the mysterious Foote mansion.

The Foote brothers only lived in the mansion a few years, then moved on to Oshkosh. But the mansion stayed, and outlived the brothers by more than 100 years, without residents for most of that time. Read the story of the legendary Foote mansion at Messy Nessy Chic.

No, that crazy price Carvana offered for your car isn't too good to be true. https://t.co/acxaFwjNM5 pic.twitter.com/4xzdKaXVGM

— Road & Track (@RoadandTrack) June 9, 2021

Online car sellers Carvana and Vroom have automatic apps through which you can get an offer on your used car, whether you're serious about selling it or not. Some of those offers have gone viral because people cannot believe how much some cars are worth to them, more than the car was purchased for, and sometimes more than the price of a new model!

The strangeness is most visible on social media, where it’s easy to find reports of online-only retailers like Carvana and Vroom offering stratospheric buyout prices for everyday used cars. Often prices for extra-hot used vehicles, like the Jeep Wrangler and Toyota Tacoma, approach or exceed the suggested retail price for their new counterparts. Clearly, one might naturally assume, someone is losing money here. “Disrupting” the market by burning investor cash is a classic Silicon Valley play, one that defined the rise of Uber. It wouldn’t be surprising to see online retailers using COVID-19-related market shifts and piles of VC money to gobble up market share while taking substantial losses.

Yet that’s not what’s happening. It may defy surface-level logic and stun onlookers, but the trade-in values and used car prices at online retailers aren’t outliers.

“The market is absolutely on fire,” Jonathan Banks, J.D. Power vice president and general manager of vehicle valuations, told Road & Track. “Dealers are going to pay you perhaps even more, depending on where you’re at. Especially if you have a Tacoma. Gosh, if you have a Tacoma it’s like a gold mine. Your Tacoma, your Wrangler, your F-150, dealers are going to pay you top-dollar price as well. So this is not a Carvana phenomenon.”

What's behind these crazy prices? You guessed it: a shortage of new cars. The reasons are a combination of what happened to toilet paper last year and what happened to real estate this year. Read about the factors feeding a red-hot used car market at Road and Track. -via Digg

Let's be honest: ticks are awful. Ze Frank tells us all about ticks, and he doesn't sugarcoat anything, so be warned. That said, there are plenty of things to snicker at in his entertaining explanation if you aren't too squicked out over the subject matter.

Jen Yates introduces us to a new trend in cake decorating that may seem a treat, but one might also suspect it's a shortcut to a "decorated" cake. It's the practice of adding well known candies on top of the iced cake. In their original wrappers. Now, a candy wrapper is useful for identifying the brand and flavor of a candy bar, and to keep the candy clean inside. But you don't expect the outside of the wrapper to be all that clean.  

And digging through icing with your fingers just to unwrap a piece of chocolate that is covered in chocolate and then smooshed into chocolate sounds about as appealing as... ooh, look!

Chocolate!

You can see plenty more examples of this trend at Cake Wrecks.

Andrea Love animated the process of making lemonade with tiny needle-felted miniatures. Cute! You have to love that tiny honey bear. -via reddit

Anthropologists estimate that humans have been around for about 300,000 years. For about 290,000 of those years, there was relative equality in status for everyone. Sure, these small hunter-gatherer groups listened to the wisdom of elders and made allowances for children, but they didn't have chiefs or rulers or wealthy people that bossed the rest around. It didn't take all that long for human society to separate people into the haves and the have-nots, whether we are talking about wealth, power, or status. So what happened?

There are two developments in mobile forager cultures that tend to set the stage for the establishment of inequality. One such scaffold to inequality was the emergence of clan structure. Clans have a strong corporate identity, built around real or mythical genealogical connection, reinforced by demanding initiation rites and intense collective activities. They become central to an individual’s social identity. Individuals see themselves, and are seen by others, primarily through their clan identity. They expect and get social support mostly within their clan, as the anthropologist Raymond C Kelly writes in Warless Societies and the Origin of War (2000). Once storage and farming emerged, incipient elites used clan membership to mobilise social and material support.

The second development was the emergence of a quasi-elite based on the control of information, which created a hierarchy of prestige and esteem, rather than wealth and power. This was originally based on subsistence skills. Forager life depends on very high levels of expertise in navigation, tracking, plant identification, animal behaviour, and artisan skills. The genuinely expert attract deference and respect in return for generously sharing their knowledge, as the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich argues in The Secret of Our Success (2015). As the social anthropologist Jerome Lewis has shown, this economy of information can include story and music, and the same can be true of its ritual and normative life. Indeed, there might be a fusion of ritual with subsistence information, if ritual narratives are used as a vehicle for encoding important but rarely used spatial and navigational information. There’s some suggestion of this fusion in Australian Aboriginal songlines, and the idea is expanded from Australia and defended in detail by the orality scholar Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies (2015). So there can be expertise and deference not just in subsistence skills, but also with regards to religion and ritual.

So the elites tended to rise based on who you know or what you know. But none of that would have led to the world we live in if it weren't for one crucial development: agriculture. Read how these forces came together to produce stratified societies at Aeon. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: David Hawgood)

Whatever you were expecting, this is not it. It's even more surprising. Watch the video before you continue reading. Yeah, it's a glitch, one that hatsuseno explained.

If I had to wager a guess, it's a software encoder with a bug where a b-frame is stuck in a buffer somewhere, the differential is still calculated from an updated one, but the 'stuck' b-frame is getting pushed into the stream. Interesting defect, implies inefficient code too.

And then MagusVulpes translated that into English.

Camera takes two pictures, prepares one while showing the other. The prepared picture is stuck and not taking a new picture, while the shown picture tries to do what it's supposed to.

So, when the camera switches from picture 1 to picture 2, picture 2 forces the background onto the image picture 1 it's trying to show. Kinda like an unintended green screen effect.

The homeowner, oxygn, said that the glitch righted itself when he turned the system off and on again. -via reddit

Circuses featuring trained elephants have been a European tradition for generations, but awareness of how wild animals suffer in captivity has changed the landscape for circus performers. The transition is not simple for an elephant and its keepers who have been together for decades. Such is the case for Dumba the elephant, and the Kludskys, a legacy circus family who has owned her for 41 years. Under pressure from animal rights activists, the Kludskys loaded up their elephant and disappeared -twice.

When Covid-19 broke out across Europe, the Kludskys left a circus in Zaragoza to sit out the pandemic at home. There was no more work but, while Spain was under strict lockdown, at least there was no more scrutiny either. They shielded: Kruse took care of the shopping while George went no further than the nearest farm to fetch Dumba’s hay. Then, in August 2020, Faada changed tack. Instead of focusing on Dumba’s welfare, they turned their attention to the risk Dumba might pose to the public.

The organisation told Spanish authorities that the Kludskys were breaching security regulations. An elephant, being a potentially dangerous animal, had to be enclosed by a thick-barred steel fence. But the local council refused the Kludskys permission to build an unsightly elephant fence in a scenic rural zone. That was the double bind the family found itself in last September. And that’s when they decided that their next act would be to disappear. They stocked up Dumba’s trailer with hay, filled the water tank, loaded her in and heaved up the ramp behind her. Then they nosed the truck slowly out of the gate and travelled north.

The struggle between the Kludskys and animal rights activists over Dumba is a part of the larger story. There is an elephant sanctuary in France, the only one in Europe, eager to take in elderly circus elephants to give them space and companionship in retirement. But it has yet to welcome its first elephant, due to the reluctance of circus people to surrender their animals. Read about Dumba and other circus elephants at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting 

Grant Woolard gave us lovely mashups of classical music in 2016, 2017, and 2019. Now he's back with the fourth in his series of classical music mashups. You didn't know how well diverse composers' music goes together until you've heard Woolard's clever arrangements. This one has 70 musical pieces! Even if you can't name them, you'll recognize them, but if you must know, the top comment at YouTube is a list of them. -via Laughing Squid

(Image credit: Flickr user Bob Larrick)

The Hobbits of the Shire had charming homes. They were small, to match their inhabitants' dimensions, with round doors and windows, as well as round roofs. They were environmentally-friendly, often built partially underground with grass on top. Kuriositas puts forth the theory that the Hobbits all left the Shire at some point and settled elsewhere around the world, recreating their traditional architecture.

(Image credit: Flickr user William Bereza)

To be sure, many of these homes predate Tolkien's saga, and are presumed to be the inspiration for Hobbit houses. Others are relatively new, inspired by The Lord of the Rings. See a variety of Hobbit houses that stand in countries far and wide at Kuriositas.

A ferry is how you get a car across water if you don't have a bridge. Usually it's a matter-of-fact process: drive your car onto a boat, move across the water, drive your car off the boat. Putting a turntable onto a boat to move cars seems like more trouble than it's worth, but in one place it's a genius solution to a specific set of conditions. That's why Glenelg, Scotland, has the last turntable ferry in the world. -via TYWKIWDBI

People who read the works of contemporary scientists online have probably run into a few archaeologists who were inspired to go into the field by Indiana Jones. I know I have. Real life archaeology turns out to be quite different from the adventures onscreen. Yeah, we've read biographies of quite a few men who were said to be "the inspiration for Indiana Jones," and Harrison Ford's portrayal may have been relatively accurate for the time period, but what went on before and what came after are different worlds.

Forty years after Raiders of the Lost Ark premiered to the public on June 12, 1981, the outsized shadow of Indy still looms large over the field he ostensibly represented. Over three movies in the 1980s, plus a prequel television series and a fourth film that came out in 2008, Harrison Ford’s portrayal of Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr., became indelibly tied to American archaeology. Despite it being set in the 1930s, an homage to the popcorn serials of the 1940s, and a cinematic blockbuster of the 1980s, Raiders of the Lost Ark is still influential to aspiring and veteran archaeologists alike. Even in the 21st century, several outdated myths about archaeological practice have endured thanks to the “Indiana Jones effect.” And contemporary archaeologists, many of whom harbor a love/hate relationship with the films, would like to set the record straight.

Even though the real work is not an Indiana Jones movie, the archaeologists who were inspired by the character enjoy their work, or they wouldn't still be doing it. Read about the work of modern archaeologists and how they compare to the cinematic version at Smithsonian.

YouTuber Creezy designed a "Squirrel Feeding Machine" for squirrels, of course, but he had to defend the loaded Rube Goldberg contraption from other critters. To get it started, he glued nuts to a domino, but then had to wait 14 hours for a squirrel to trip it. What follows is glorious, ending in a bountiful meal for the squirrel, plus a chipmunk, blue jay, and a raccoon. -via Boing Boing

Svend the Viking doesn't want to wear a helmet as he loots and pillages England. It makes his scalp itch and messes up his braids. But Hjalmar knows better. This delicious vignette is from the Danish Road Safety Council. -via Digg

Last week, America commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, in which hundreds of people were killed and the entire Greenwood District of Tulsa was burned to the ground. What is often left out of the story is what happened to Greenwood in the years afterward. The popular notion is that Greenwood never recovered from the riot, which it did, and that the riot occurred on "Black Wall Street," which is a name that was only used after the 1921 massacre.

“They just were not going to be kept down. They were determined not to give up,” recalled Eunice Jackson, a survivor of the massacre, in an interview for Eddie Faye Gates’ 1997 book, They Came Searching. “So they rebuilt Greenwood and it was just wonderful. It became known as The Black Wall Street of America.”

Another survivor, Juanita Alexander Lewis Hopkins, told Gates, “The North Tulsa after the [massacre] was even more impressive than before...That is when Greenwood became known as ‘The Black Wall Street of America.’”

Film footage shot by Reverend Solomon Sir Jones from 1925-1928 shows a bustling, thriving Greenwood, confirming recent data collected by the Tulsa Historical Society showing that a few short years after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Greenwood’s homes and businesses came back. It’s difficult to understate the scale of Greenwood’s recovery; unlike other disasters like the 1889 Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania or San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, Greenwood was left to rebuild entirely on its own.

However, the Greenwood neighborhood no longer exists in Tulsa. Read what eventually happened to it at Smithsonian.