It’s time to make your predictions for the men's NCAA basketball tournament! You can get a bracket to fill out here. The tournament bracket is handy for keeping up with games, and for understanding how teams are eliminated along the way. But when did this kind of bracket come about? The first one was organized in the 19th century by chess master Howard Staunton.  

For a chess tournament in 1851, Staunton had 16 players draw lots for random pairings, called brackets because they resembled the punctuation marks of the same name. The eight winners would then draw lots for pairings, and the four winners from that round would do the same, leaving two finalists. The idea, Staunton said, was “to bring the two best players in the Tournament into collision for the chief prize.” The reality, however, fell short: Random drawing after every round led to complaints that some players had easier matches. As a result, chess tournaments shifted to a round-robin format.

Brackets were used again—and have been ever since—for the Wimbledon tennis tournament in 1877, and they found a home in college basketball in 1939, when the National Association of Basketball Coaches had an eight-team tournament. The University of Oregon beat The Ohio State in what is regarded as the first NCAA Tournament.

The science of constructing a tournament bracket has evolved quite a bit. The NCAA ranks teams for seeding to make sure the top teams don’t meet each other in the early rounds, and in most years, there are geographic considerations (but not this year). Read about how the tournament bracket came about and how March Madness took over the country, at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Pete Souza)

The Arby's Meat Mountain Sandwich is a stunt offering that contains chicken, turkey, ham, corned beef, brisket, steak, roast beef, pepper bacon, and two kinds of cheese. It is a challenge for those who want to prove how carnivorous they are. This sandwich has an estimated 1,275 calories and 3,536 milligrams of sodium. So what other ingredients are in a Meat Mountain? Mel magazine looked them up and decided to lay them out for you. There are 120 entries, with explanations of their nature and effect on the human body, but that doesn't mean 120 different ingredients. The components are listed separately, starting with the bun, and they all list salt, sodium chloride, or both. Still, it's an obscene amount of food, so the article might put you in the mood for a small salad and some unsweetened tea.

Here's a cautionary tale about traveling alone to a country where you don't speak the language. What could possibly go wrong? But it's not a horror story, because instead of laughing at Erwin Kreuz, Americans were so charmed by his good-natured naivety that they made him famous.  

In 1977, 49-year-old German brewery worker Erwin Kreuz blew his life savings on his first flight — a once-in-a-lifetime birthday trip to San Francisco. He’d seen it on TV, and he wanted to visit the Wild West. As the World Airways flight from Frankfurt stopped to refuel in a small airport in Bangor, Maine, before continuing on to California, an air stewardess who had finished her shift told Kreuz to “have a nice time in San Francisco.” Her choice of words would change Kreuz’s life.

Kreuz, who typically enjoyed drinking 17 beers a day, was a little groggy, and on hearing this, grabbed his suitcase, got off the plane, went through customs, jumped in a cab and asked the driver to take him to the city. He wandered Bangor for three days enjoying the sights and sounds that Maine had to offer. Unfortunately, Kreuz thought he was in San Francisco.

When the mixup was eventually uncovered, that's when Kreuz's adventures really began. Read his story at SFgate.  -via Digg

The Malpasset Dam in France was built in the 1950s to regulate the Reyran River, which was dry most of the year, but carried torrents of water in the winter and spring. Experienced dam builder André Coyne was in charge of the project, which was completed in 1954. It took five years for the reservoir behind the dam to fill, but on December 2, 1959, the last few meters filled quickly. Officials decided not to open the spillways because that would interfere with a nearby road-building project.

Later that night, the thin walls of the dam collapsed under the massive weight of the water and a huge wave swept through the valley, destroying all structures including houses, roads, railway lines, telephone and electricity network all the way to Fréjus. Large chunks of concrete, from the breached dam, some weighing up to 600 tons, were found more than a mile away. Over 400 people perished and 7,000 were left homeless. André Coyne, the dam’s chief engineer, was deeply affected by the tragedy. He died less than a year later.

The major takeaway from the disaster was that it was important to adequately understand the geology of the rocks over which a dam was to be constructed. But the most immediate consequence of the dam failure was the laying down of a law that legalized marriage with a dead partner.

Why that happened is a story you’ll need to read at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Eolefr)

In the early part of the 20th century, soda fountains were all the rage. In addition to a place to get tasty refreshments while shopping, a store's soda fountain was a novelty and a meeting place. Carbonated drinks were mixed up fresh behind the counter, and all kinds of innovative recipes were promoted. But soda pop and ice cream floats weren't as popular in cold weather, so soda fountains came up with creative hot drinks. Oh sure, there was coffee, tea, and hot cocoa, but also soup and proprietary recipes with ingredients like eggs and clam juice.   

The popularity of hot drinks didn’t happen on its own. Trade magazines and books not only published recipes, which they often called formulas, for everything from hot pineapple juice to hot malted orange, but they also offered promotional ideas and sales tips. An issue of The Soda Fountain, for example, suggested staging a “Hot Soda Pageant This Winter.” The editors proposed selecting different drinks each month and promoting them with window displays. One month would promote hot milk and egg drinks; another bouillons, broths, and soups; another coffee, tea, and chocolate drinks; another hot fruit drinks. During malted-milk-drinks months, they recommended a “peaceful scene with cows grazing, milkmaids, great pails of foaming milk and happy, healthy youngsters in the foreground.”

Read about the era of "hot sodas," and find recipes for Hot Cherry Egg Bounce, Hot Egg Lime Juice Fizz, and Reeking Smatch at Atlas Obscura.

Once upon a time, we often heard the slogan "M&Ms melt in your mouth; not in your hand!" But we all knew from experience that if you held them in your hand too long, the candy coating would shed color all over your skin, especially on a hot day. The YouTube channel Another Perspective used water to dissolve the candy coating just to see what it would look like. They used different angles and different  rates and directions of water flow to create these effects, which look pretty neat. I'm just glad I don't have to clean up after this. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A long, soaking bath is nice, but it often seems not worth the trouble, since you can't immerse your whole body in that short tub. (The other reason is the prospect of having to clean it, but that's another subject.) Why are our bathtubs too small?

In order to fully understand the reason why bathtubs aren't comfortably human-sized, it's important to consider how the world was different when plumbing first made its way into our homes. "Indoor plumbing came into the United States in the late 1880s," Jeremy Cressman, a veteran of the residential and commercial bath industry who currently serves as the vice president of sales and marketing at BLANCO America, tells Mental Floss. In the late 19th century it was difficult to make large bathtubs because of the expense involved—though cost wasn't the only thing governing typical tub size. People were a little smaller, too. And baths tended to be made with cast iron, so they were heavy and difficult to move. (Contemporary bathtubs are often made from fiber-reinforced plastic.)

Ahem, although indoor plumbing "came into the United States in the late 1880s," it took at least a century to become almost universal. It's much harder to run water lines than it is to string wire along poles. But to answer the question of why your tub is so short, you have to run through the history of American bathtubs, which you can read at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Doug Coldwell)

O no. Netflix doing the purge?!? pic.twitter.com/XXlHtfgfsy

— chante most (@DOP3Sweet) March 9, 2021

Netflix is testing ways to keep people from using other people's accounts. They are being somewhat soft about it as you can see from the screenshot above. This verification screen comes up randomly for an "unspecified number of users."

"This test is designed to help ensure that people using Netflix accounts are authorized to do so," a Netflix spokesperson told the Hollywood Reporter.

As the photo demonstrates, users are also being given the option to "verify later." At present, according to Netflix, the number of times a user is able to click "Verify Later" before being forced to verify is not set in stone.

While this new verification effort may boot unwanted piggybackers, as presented it fails to stop one key demographic: people intentionally sharing their passwords with friends and family. After all, if you gave your Netflix password to someone, why wouldn't you also share a Netflix verification code?

So far, this is just a test. They may well come up with something more draconian in the future. This test may signal a shift away from the company's previous tendency to encourage password sharing, which it has done to entice new customers. Read more at Gammawire.

Kung Fu Panda hit theaters in 2008, and it may have been the last animated movie I saw in a theater. It was full of overdone tropes and fat jokes, but it was darned funny and exquisitely animated. Screen Junkies goes over all that in this Honest Trailer.

We all know about corsets for women, once a part of everyday life for certain social classes, and now representative of the struggle to appear attractive. But they weren't just for women. Men wore them as well in different places at different times; they just tried to keep their corset use discreet. It wouldn't do to admit that their exceptional bodies needed help to look that way!

The corset has endured hundreds of iterations from its induction into fashion by Catherine de Medici in the 1500s up until its usage diminished as a result of rations for the second World War. But men have been involved in corsets since corsets were invented. One of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Paine, was a corset maker by family trade. According to research, “Stays or corsets were used in the army (especially among the cavalry), for hunting, and for strenuous exercise, not unlike a weight lifter’s belt today”. Purser Thomas Chew, a 30-year career Naval officer, who fought in the War of 1812 wore his corset to sea. But as history has shown, sometimes function becomes fashion…

Messy Nessy Chic has a brief history of men's fashions of the 18th and 19th centuries and how a corset could help them achieve the stylish look of their day.

Auralnauts has completed their project to bring us the Star Wars original trilogy retrofitted with all the stuff we've learned in the 40 years since then. There are old deceptions revealed, new Force powers, and for some reason, dinosaurs.   

The third and final installment of the Reimagined series, where we take narrative developments from newer Star Wars media and forcefully jam it back into the original trilogy. World building isn't easy, and we love Star Wars, but it's still funny to imagine how awkward things could have been between Vader and Palpatine after Luke arrived on the scene.

The first installment was posted almost two years ago, but you may have missed The Empire Strikes Back Reimagined only six months ago, so continue reading to see it.

Once a book goes into the public domain, publishers everywhere are in a hurry to print copies or make them available as digital works. The cover art can be an afterthought, maybe an assignment for an intern. How else could you explain such bad covers as Mary Shelley with her hand on the knee of Frankenstein's monster, and Jane Austin's British love story emblazoned with a picture of an American flag?

I have collected a number of these very fun, very bad covers below. All of these covers are “real,” that is, attached to books that are at least nominally available for purchase, though many are digital covers for digital editions. You’ll find a number of covers from Wordsworth Classics, premier publisher of badly Photoshopped book covers, but many more from the wilds of digital independent publishing. Some are merely ugly; others make it clear that no one involved in the creation of the cover cracked open the book.

Yeah, the best worst ones are those that have nothing to do with the contents. Not reading the book is the only way to explain a cover of Hamlet that's a naked woman with a seashell. See all these covers at LitHub.  -via Digg

In the 1950s and '60s, families gathered around the TV on Sunday nights to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Disney himself would introduce the show, often promoting Disneyland's attractions as he did so. Jack Plotnick has edited himself into those clips, boosting the entertainment value while highlighting the more problematic behavior of that era. SFgate talked to Plotnick about the series.

Plotnick isn't a Disney hater; in fact, he's been a lifelong Disney fan, taking family trips to Walt Disney World starting when he was very young. “I always wanted to be an Imagineer,” he says. “I've always been fascinated with them.”

“I really wanted to see what would happen if I put myself into the videos,” Plotnick says. “People were watching the videos to escape into another world, and that's kind of what I ended up doing.” So, he made himself an Imagineer — several of them, actually, in videos teasing the openings of everything from the Haunted Mansion to the Plaza Inn.

Plotnick's first video in the series has to do with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. The auction scene in the attraction was not changed until 2018. See his videos about the Haunted Mansion, It's a Small World, and the Plaza Restaurant as well. -via Metafilter

Sayaka Mitoh and Yoichi Yusa of Nara Women’s University in Japan have observed whole-body regeneration in sea slugs, specifically the species Elysia cf. marginata. The sea slugs pulled their own heads off, discarded their bodies, and eventually regrew a new body from the head!

On close inspection, the researchers found that sea slugs have a slight groove looped on the back of the head region that seems to work as a break-here zone. The bodies left behind can still move on their own for days or even months. An abandoned body, however, doesn’t regrow its head. The leaf-shaped remnant instead turns pale and weak and eventually dies.

Mitoh and Yusa believe that this extreme behavior is a method of getting rid of parasites, although the phrase "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" may occur to you. You can see a video of a slug's head wandering away from its body in the story at ScienceNews. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: S. Mitoh)

This video of Bryant-Lake Bowl and Theater in Minneapolis makes the place look like a fun place, but to see that, you first have to get over your awe of the cinematography in this video. This is what drones have made possible. (via reddit)