Louisiana Representative Robert F. Broussard introduced a bill to the US House of Representative in 1910 that would promote the importation and domestication of hippopotamuses for commercial purposes. Broussard thought he had a great idea for killing two birds with one stone. Hippo meat would help ease the meat shortage the country was experiencing at the time, and hippos could also eat the invasive water hyacinths that had spread across Louisiana's wetlands since it was introduced in 1884.

The idea had some support. Teddy Roosevelt, the big game hunter, was all for it. Broussard also brought in experts to tell how nutritious hippopotamus meat is, how it tasted like a “combination of pork and beef,” and how hippo ranches could be set up on federal land to get the concept started.

Broussard had ideas for importing all kinds of African wildlife to the US, but hippos offered the most bang for the buck. He was mistaken in thinking that it would be easy, though. Hippos are dangerous, and there is no evidence they can ever be domesticated. Also, they wouldn't be able to survive on a diet of water hyacinths. There are many reasons the idea was bad, but Congress didn't know about them at the time. While Broussard's idea for hippo ranching never got out of the starting gate, his campaign for the US to eat hippos is an amusing story you can read at Smithsonian.

(Illustration credit: Meilan Solly)

A "misle" is an unofficial term for a word that you mispronounce because you've only seen it in text. The term came from the story Eric Wolfe posted in 1991 about the way he used to pronounce the word "misled." Instead of mis-led, he saw it as my-zuld. Wolfe's unconcious assumption was that the word was akin to "titled," which you would never pronounce as tit-led if you know what's good for you. The response from his Usenet group had plenty of other examples, because English is weird. Eventually, this kind of mispronunciation based on logic and other English words led to these words being called "misles."

I mispronounced the word "biopic" in my head for years until I heard someone in a YouTube video say bio-pic. I knew what it meant, but I assumed it was pronounced bi-opic. Some misles are pretty funny, like pronouncing "barfly" as barf-ly, or pronouncing "infrared" as if it rhymes with "scared." Someone even admitted to thinking the word "apply" was said like an adjective for something that's like an apple, you know, apple-y. Read about the linguistic phenomenon of misles and laugh at some common ones at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Silar)

Warning: this video may be nightmare-inducing. Or you might just find it hilarious. We know artificial intelligence algorithms are pretty good for writing an essay, or at least ChatGPT is, Midjourney can construct an illustration for you, and some recent videos show that an algorithm can be rather good at dressing movie characters in Balenciaga fashions or mashing up Wes Anderson movies. But it doesn't do all that well recreating real living animals moving as animals should. I don't know what program was used to make this video of dogs, but the producer should ask for his money back.   

From a different YouTuber, here's a cat video generated by an algorithm. It's just as disturbing.



I couldn't post these videos on Supa Fluffy, because people go there to watch real-life cute animals and feel good about it. But you were warned. -via Nag on the Lake

A couple of months ago, we touched on the subject of aperiodic monotiling. A shape called "the hat" was a breakthrough in the quest to find a single tile shape that would produce a non-repeating pattern. This is often called an einstein, because the German words "ein stein" mean "one tile."

But there is a caveat in the hat, in that it requires both left-handed and right-handed hats. In geometry, that's called reflection. The next quest was to find a monotile shape that did not require reflection in producing a non-repeating pattern.

It didn't take long. David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss (the same guys who brought us the hat) present us with "the spectre," a shape that produces a non-repeating pattern and does not require reflection. The term "vampire einstein" comes from the fact that vampires don't produce a reflection in a mirror. But the spectre is real, and makes tiling a bathroom floor in a unique non-repeating manner easier because only one shape needs to milled instead of an unknown proportion of left- and right-handed hats.

The spectre is actually a family of shapes, as the authors have spectre tiles with both straight edges and curved edges. It's a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces are the same shape, but you still have to find how they will fit together. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss/CC BY 4.0)

When we think of time, we think of our daily schedules or maybe a lifetime. But the human mind has a hard time grasping the history of the universe, and the relative blink of an eye that humanity has existed. The 300,000 or so years that homo sapiens has been around is the main focus of what we call history, and that seems like a long time.

Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet built a timeline of the universe out in the Mojave desert, the only place they could build something that big. But the history of mankind had to be built to a different scale than the 13-billion-year history of the universe before we came along; otherwise, all of human history would be too small to even label. This video tries to explain the concept of that long, long stretch of time. It's trippy.  -via Kottke 

See also: A Scale Model of the Solar System.

Redditor ceebasst poured out a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast. Or maybe it was a late-night snack. Either way, this came out with the cereal. No explanation on the box. You can see in the second picture at the reddit post that when you push the button, a red light comes on. But should he have pushed the button? There is speculation that he has initiated a series of events he may come to regret, which read like writing prompts for an international spy thriller or a science fiction adventure. Did a random person die when the button was pushed? But there were also some plausible explanations, none of which have been confirmed. The discussion also had many humorously implausible explanations. All we know is that it's a red light. But it could be something else, too. What do you think it's for, and how did it get into a box of cereal?

You remember the terrifying outbreak of Ebola virus in 2013, but do you recall the Ebola outbreak of 2021? No? That's probably because you were more concerned with COVID-19 by then, but it was also because health care professionals had a plan in place to stop Ebola in its tracks by 2021. While the world was dealing with the massive COVID-19 pandemic, several other epidemics were averted by public health systems and rapid response, and that's worth celebrating. The world has learned a lot about fighting diseases in a population, but it takes political will and government funds to keep those global health initiatives in place and ready to go to work when needed. And kudos to those health care workers who carried out these emergency responses.

This TED-Ed lesson directs you to read more about the efforts to stop epidemics before they get out of control at Resolve to Save Lives. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The live-action version of The Little Mermaid has made $118 Million so far in its opening weekend. It may herald another bump in the popularity of mermaids, joining other periods of mermaid-mania from history, going back thousands of years. In ancient times, it was the allure of the mythological tales of beautiful and magical half-human-half-fish creatures among many terrifying terrifying sea monsters. In the more modern era, it is entertainment, feeding a fantasy of sexy women and the allure of the sea. In 1906, the show Neptune's Daughter debuted at New York's Hippodrome, featuring an 8,000-gallon tank full of underwater dancers, which proved both fascinating and charming to audiences. Mermaid mania got another kick when Champion swimmer Annette Kellerman starred in silent films about mermaids, and brought women's participation in swimming into the modern era. Read about the early entertainment media representations of mermaids at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia)

Hair styles, like clothing, go through trends and fads that sometimes make us look back and say, "What was I thinking?" I've had bangs, mullets, braids, Jheri curls, pixies, and purple hair, but all those pale in comparison to some of the hairstyle fads of history. Some were an attempt at beauty or cutting-edge fashion, while others signified status, either officially or unofficially. Long hair or elaborate 'dos indicated that the person wearing it could employ expert services and had plenty of free time. Short hair or shaved heads made a busy, difficult life more practical for working people, but you could always cut the hassle down by wearing a wig. Some hairstyles seem downright painful, while others were just silly. Weird History takes us on a ride through time by highlighting some of the more memorable or consequential hairstyles of various places and historical eras.  

Norway takes its hot dogs seriously. You can get a great hot dog from restaurants, street vendors, airports, and even gas stations, because Norwegians would expect only the best. Like most European countries, sausages have always been a part of Norway's cuisine, but American hot dogs became extremely popular after World War II, back when anything American was considered chic.

But Norway had advanced the art of the hot dog and Norwegians put their own spin on it. They are often served wrapped in flatbread made of potato flour, and slathered with a wide variety of toppings, including potato salad or shrimp salad. The hot dogs themselves can be made from anything, from traditional pork to crocodile meat to vegan sausage. As the hot dog traveled from the US to Norway, their hot dog traditions have traveled back to America as well. Read how hot dogs became Norway's national snack at Atlas Obscura.  -via Strange Company

In World War II, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops had a series of missions that were kept top secret for decades. They specialized in decoy operations, namely, fooling the Axis powers into thinking they knew what was going on when they didn't. We covered one aspect of the "Ghost Army's" activities, in constructing fake tanks, ships, and artillery to distract from the real troop movements in a previous post. But the Ghost Army involved a lot more.

While the artists in the unit built realistic but fake props for the enemy to see, 288 radio operators carried out communications in both English and in easily-cracked codes. The Germans who intercepted these transmissions sent reconnaissance to find the fake equipment. But that fake equipment would fool nobody without the sound designers who blasted recordings that sounded exactly like thousands of troops were on the way to battle. Some of the troops even impersonated officers to carry out these missions. As we head into Memorial Day, read about some of these decoy operations, the men who participated, and what happened to them after the war, at Find-a-Grave.  -Thanks, WTM!

Every year, the Best Illusion of the Year contest blows our minds. The video above by Matt Pritchard is one of the finalists for 2023. You've seen this kind of illusion before, but this construction is very well done. It was clever to base it on Platform 9¾ from the Harry Potter stories. Is it the best? That's for you to decide. The competition is pretty stiff.

The ten finalists for the Best Illusion of the Year Contest have been selected by a panel of experts. Take a look at all ten of them. You can vote for your favorite, or rather, you are invited to rate each illusion on a scale from one to five stars, like a product review. The top three will be determined by these ratings. If history is any indicator, we will find out who will win the 2023 competition some time in the last three months of this year. -via Boing Boing

Be sure to check out some of the past winners, too.

The oldest recorded joke we've found so far was common enough that it was recorded twice on ancient Sumerian tablets, going back 4,000 years. It's a real knee-slapper.

a dog walks into a bar, but he doesn’t see anything. And so he asks: shall I open one?

Yeah, I don't get it, either. I guess you had to be there. Or maybe jokes were invented before humor was. Some of the world's greatest minds have been working on this one. Has it been correctly translated? What was the context in the Sumerian culture? Can the "walks into a bar" structure really be that old? The joke has been interpreted several different ways, because language and cultural context was way different 4,000 years ago, but it's not something experts agree on. The joke possibly depends on assumptions that ancient Sumerians would have lived with, but we don't. Then again, maybe it really wasn't that funny back then, either. It was recorded in collections of proverbs and advice, although it really doesn't work in that context, either. Read the various explanations for the dog joke at Historic Mysteries. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Applejuice)

Matt Wilson of Perry Township, Indiana, has made it a habit over the years to prank his son into embarrassment when he gets off the bus on the last day of school each year. For Liam's last day in eighth grade, Wilson went all out. He arranged for his band, Union Suit Rally, to perform the Alice Cooper song "School's Out" as the bus pulled onto their street. It was a challenge to outdo last year's stunt, in which he greeted the bus wearing Speedos, flippers, and a snorkel mask.

Liam, however, is less embarrassed now than in previous years. He's now finished with eighth grade, and will no longer ride the bus next year when he's in high school. He also probably knows it's pretty cool to have an involved dad who's in a band. I would have loved coming home to such a concert. -via Fark

The image above looks as if it could be an advertisement for the contest, but this tasty spread is from contestant Keiron George of the United Kingdom, the winner of the Food Stylist category of the Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year competition. The overall winner is Jon Enoch for the photo below, titled The Candy Man.



The Candy Man, which also won the Street Food category,  is part of a series taken in Mumbai. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners plus honorable mentions in each category are presented in a gallery here. Want to see more winning food photography from all over the world? Take a look at some of the winning photographs and meet the photographers behind them at Design Milk. See the all finalists in the many categories, such as Food for Sale, Wedding Food, Moments of Joy, Innovation, Bring Home the Harvest, categories for younger photographers, and even videos, in this gallery. -via Nag on the Lake