The custom of writing love letters has fallen from an art form to a few scribbled words inside a Valentine's Day card, thanks to instant communication. Once upon a time, a well-written letter could make someone fall in love with you, and even better, letters sometimes survive the ravages of time so that we can all enjoy them. The letters that our nation's leaders wrote are particularly interesting because we know the public facing president, who can be very different from the private man seeking to impress a lady. Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler have written a book called Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?: Letters of Love and Lust from the White House. The title comes from a letter Woodrow Wilson wrote to his wife.

In an excerpt, we find that Lyndon Johnson met Lady Bird in Texas in September of 1934, and when he returned to Washington where he was serving in Congress, he wrote her every day until she agreed to marry him, which happened in November of that year. U.S. Grant's wife Julia had to instruct him on how to write an acceptable letter. And Martha Washington had all her letters from George burned before she died, but a few somehow escaped that fate. Read about the love letters some US presidents sent at Literary Hub.  -via Damn Interesting

Four Italian guitar players, Matteo Brenci, Emanuele Grafitti, Enrico Maria Milanesi, and Andrea Vittori, all from different musical backgrounds, got together and formed a band called 40 Fingers. They don't need any other instruments, because in each song, they split the parts into percussion, bass, melody, and vocals, and play as an orchestra. In this performance, they bring us eight Michael Jackson songs in a medley, or rather, six Michael Jackson songs, plus a Jackson 5 song, and that one from USA for Africa. You have to admit they make beautiful music. If Michael Jackson is not your thing, their website and YouTube channel are full of pop covers, medleys, show tunes, and full concerts that will tickle your fancy. -via Laughing Squid

Fearing a crisis of too many mouths to feed, the government of China instituted the one child policy in 1980. For 35 years, citizens were told that limiting your family to only one child was best, and many came to believe it. Others were subject to forced abortions, fines, and loss of jobs and homes for violating the policy. Gradually, as the effects of the policy were realized, the rules were refined in some areas to allow a family with one girl to try once again for a boy. Then in 2015, the policy was changed to two children. Now the Chinese government is encouraging young women to have three children. But it's not working.

For one thing, there are fewer women reaching childbearing age every year, thanks to the original policy. And the current childbearing-age cohort grew up in one-child homes, believing that was best, as the government told them. Economic reforms led to more young people moving to the cities for better jobs, and the cost of living discourages having any children at all. The population crisis was averted, but now China is facing the prospect of too few young people to support a large population of aging grandparents. The country's population began to drop in 2022, and in 2023 there were half a million fewer births than the year before. The same trend is seen in other countries, but in less stark numbers due to the erstwhile policy. How did all this happen? The original policy was a reaction to demographic projections by a missile scientist who used rocket trajectory numbers in his calculations. Maybe sociologists should have been consulted. Read the history of the one child policy and how China is feeling the fallout today.  -via Damn Interesting

Get ready for a slight case of cognitive dissonance as the Caped Crusader strolls down the corridor of the Death Star. It's the dark side vs. the Dark Knight! What's even more amazing is that in this story, Superman with all his powers is being held hostage, and Batman, with only his money, science, and gadgets, must rescue him. We know that Batman has everything he needs in his utility belt, but we never imagined one of those things was a lightsaber! Who will prevail, Batman and his amazing gear, or Vader with his Force powers?

To really cement the crossover, they should have enlisted Mark Hamill. He could have played both Luke Skywalker and The Joker.

The confrontation is neither AI nor animation, but an old-fashioned fan film that's very well produced. We can thank Batinthesun. This is actually a recent edit and re-upload of a longer video from the Super Power Beat Down series. You can see the original episode here, and the alternative ending version here that gave us this cut, which includes an opening crawl with some exposition, although it's not necessary to enjoy the video.  -via Born in Space

The Uros people live on floating islands on Lake Titicaca, high in the Andes on the border of Peru and Bolivia. They have always maintained that they are an ancient and distinct people who have always lived on the shores of -or in- Lake Titicaca. Outsiders are split about this claim. Some consider the Uros indistinguishable from other indigenous South Americans such as the Quechua and Aymara, and think that the people who live there now are staying because they benefit from the lake's resources and the tourist trade. They've even been accused of fabricating their history and customs as a performance. The government of Peru has been planning to turn the area into a national reserve, so the question is important to the people who live there now and demand the right to continue living in their ancestral home.

That's where DNA tests come in. A team of geneticists traveled to Lake Titicaca and had a time convincing the Uros to give swabs of DNA for testing. Julio Vilca, mayor of the floating islands, convinced others that this was the way to prove their lineage and history, and was the first to take the swab. Read about the Uros people of Laka Titicaca and what the genetic tests revealed at Big Think.

(Image credit: BENNY GROSS.1)

It has long been known the J.R.R. Tolkien did not like Disney, since the day he saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with his close friend C.S. Lewis in 1938. But let's set the record straight. First, he didn't hate Walt Disney, the man. Tolkien wasn't that kind of person. But he hated the way The Walt Disney Company changed traditional folklore to appeal to the maximum possible numbers of American children, dumbing them down, so to speak. Second, he felt this way long before he saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Tolkien was an old-fashioned writer even for his time, and he had massive respect for classic fairy tales that went back hundreds of years, if not more. He also had his own particular vision of storytelling as a whole. You know that, but when you contrast it with the way Disney, as a company, works, you can see that the twain would never meet.

In 1531, Francisco Pizarro led 168 Spanish soldiers and two dozen horses inside the city of Cajamarca, then the capital of the Inca Empire, in what is now Peru. The Inca, with a huge army, did not see them as much of a threat, but they didn't know the deadly superiority of steel swords. The monarch of the empire, Atahualpa, was captured and confined to a room in his royal complex. With no way out and his empire at stake, Atahualpa began to offer treasure for his release.

Once he realized what the Spanish were really after, Atahualpa said he would give them enough gold to fill the room he was in up to the point he could reach (which was designated as a red line on the wall), plus enough silver to fill the room twice. The Spanish were very open to the idea, but made sure the gold and silver artworks were crushed and even melted down to maximize the take. The "ransom room" was 22 feet long and 17 feet wide, and the red line was more than eight feet up. It took two months to bring that much gold and silver to the room. The ransom ended up being 6,000 kilograms (13,227 pounds) of gold and twice as much silver, which would be worth almost half a billion dollars today.

How did that turn out for Atahualpa? You can imagine, but it would be better to read the story at Amusing Planet. The Inca Empire is gone, but the ransom room is still there, preserved for posterity.

Marvel has been in a slump the last couple of years, producing more and more TV shows and movies with diminishing returns. Yeah, that's relative. The Marvels was a box-office bomb because it only made $200 million, since the budget was so much higher. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was also a disappointment. Who is going to save Marvel? Why, Deadpool, of course!

In the first teaser trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds takes on the challenge of saving the MCU single-handedly, although we know from the title that he will have some help. This will be the third Deadpool movie and the 34th in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But didn't Wolverine die in the 2017 movie Logan? Yes, but this story takes place before that, so he is not being resurrected from the dead. Marvel did not need "saving" back then, but it's a superhero movie, let's not let details get in the way of a good time. The trailer itself is irreverent, salacious, and self-aware. Will the R-rated superhero series save Marvel? We will find out when Deadpool & Wolverine opens on July 26. -via Fark

Skylab was the United States' first space station, and so far the only space station completely controlled by the US alone. The station was launched in 1973, housed astronauts on three missions, and crash landed across Australia in 1979. Slylab's purpose was to establish the feasibility of a space station and conduct experiments on living in space for extended periods of time. The third crewed mission launched on November 16, 1973, with astronauts Gerald P. Carr, Edward Gibson, and William R. Pogue.

The Skylab 4 crew spent 84 days on the space station, and were tasked with operations that basically had them working around the clock. Their 12-week mission was also longer than any NASA mission at that time. In January of 1974, the crew informed NASA that they were taking a day off. They turned communications off, and there was nothing NASA could do about it. Was it mutiny? It was only one day, and it led to NASA reconsidering how it treated its astronauts. Read about the one-day strike on Skylab at Smithsonian. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: NASA)

Last week, The Beatles won a Grammy award more than 50 years after the band broke up. The award was for Best Music Video, for the song "I'm Only Sleeping," from their 1966 album Revolver (although it was initially on the album Yesterday and Today in the US and Canada, and differed slightly from the UK single). The song, about John Lennon's sleep habits, is notable for a guitar sequence that was recorded backwards.

The music video was created by artist Em Cooper to coincide with the release of the remastered Revolver. Cooper uses an extremely labor-intensive method in work, stop-motion animation on oil paintings. For this video, she painted and then photographed around 1300 oil paintings. Some were painted, photographed, then altered for the next shot, but many were started fresh for a new frame or sequence. The project took months of work, but it paid off well with a Grammy. -via Everlasting Blort

If you think that headline is nonsensical, the original headline of the news story is "Huge goanna winched by crane to safety from Torrumbarry Weir by Goulburn-Murray Water workers." Yes, it's from Australia. A goanna is any of around 70 species of lizard found in Australia. The name came from iguana, which is an unrelated South American lizard. A weir is a short dam that doesn't hold back all the water, but keeps the river above it at a deeper level. The story involves an almost 5-foot goanna who wandered onto a weir, which is not safe. Waterworks employees rescued the goanna by lowering a log by crane down to where the animal sat. The lizard eventually moved into the log, it being the only thing familiar to him. Then they raised the log up with a winch, with the goanna holding on for dear life.

Once the goanna was safe on the riverbank, the workers gave him a large snack of carp, which he finished before wandering off. All's well that ends well, right? While that's where the news story ends, in our imaginations we can see the goanna telling his goanna friends about his epic adventure in which he flies through the air on a log. They don't believe him, but then the part about getting a bucket of carp handed to him gets their attention. The next day, waterworks employees arrive to find three goannas have climbed onto the weir. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Goulburn-Murray Water)

Before the Panama Canal was built, ship captains dreaded passing around the southern tip of South America to go from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, or vice versa. The Drake Passage is the spot where the Antarctic Peninsula comes closest to Chile and Argentina, and the sea here can be terrifyingly turbulent. See, air currents travel west to east, and in the Drake Passage, there's no land mass to slow the wind as it travels completely around the world around Antarctica. Ocean currents also travel east, and the Drake Passage is a chokepoint where a lot of water tries to squeeze through a relatively small opening 600 miles wide and 6,000 feet deep. The deceptively calm surface is very different from the rapidly-moving deeper current until conditions change. Waves can be 50 feet high during storms, tossing boats around like so much flotsam. It has been estimated that more than 10,000 sailors have lost their lives in the Drake Passage.

Commercial ships now go through the Panama Canal, but ships regularly take tourists to the Antarctic Peninsula through the Drake Passage. This route is shorter than those of ships traveling from ocean to ocean. We have modern boats that are built for the conditions, and voyages can be scheduled around the weather forecast. The biggest danger these days is seasickness, because ship captains take the Drake Passage very seriously. Read about the Drake Passage and why it's so dangerous at CNN. -via Damn Interesting

We've seen people juggle in real life, but we've seen it done in cartoons a lot more. Which is more impressive? I've always admired people who could juggle because I could never stay with it long enough to succeed, but I know how hard it is. But in animated scenes, you see amazing feats and beautiful patterns that could never be done in the real world. Jasper Juggles took a deep dive into juggling in animation, and brings us hundreds of examples, from the ridiculously poor attempts to the sublime, in different kinds of animated cartoons, video games, and virtual reality. We who don't juggle rarely notice whether the depiction is realistic or not. The accuracy of animated juggling varies by the method used to create it, whether it's simple drawing, layered animation, rotoscoping, stop motion, or computer-controlled physics. He started this project to call out unrealistic juggling in cartoons, but came to admire the artistry of a good-looking or interesting sequence even if it could never be accomplished in real life. Jasper is collecting more examples of animated juggling all the time, and has made his research available in a spreadsheet plus a growing archive in a gallery of YouTube shorts. -via Metafilter

 

The world's oldest artworks that are familiar to a great number of people are the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux in France. They are thought to be around 17,000 years old. But examples of art have been found that go much further back. The problem with pinpointing the oldest art is the definition of art itself. Deliberate marking patterns in objects that have survived many thousands of years could have a practical purpose, or they could be a form of decoration or communication, either of which could be thought of as art. Archaeologists consider early art to be markings as a symbol representing something else. The problem is how we interpret what was symbolic and what had a practical use.  

The question arose with the discovery of a toe bone from a giant deer found in a German cave. The bone has deliberate parallel and perpendicular markings, which appear to be an attempt at artistic expression. However, the bone was dated to 51,000 years ago, before Homo sapiens moved into Europe. The residents of the cave were known to be Neanderthals. It's not the first Neanderthal art discovered, but it does push the timeline back.

There is other evidence that art predates modern man all over the world, including some markings attributed to Homo erectus. But are they art? The problem is interpreting the meaning of these markings. We may never know for sure what those ancient marks were really for. Read about where we are in determining how old art is at LiveScience. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: John Strike for Live Science)

A word to the wise: although I can understand how it would be tempting, if your last name is Bond, do NOT name your son James. But people still do it, and that spells trouble any time your son encounters the police, particularly that one time he neglects to carry an official ID. Hear the stories of several men who learned the hard way that cops do not find it funny that you were named after a fictional British super spy, even when it's the truth.

You can imagine these poor guys have trouble any time they tell anyone their last name, and that's the subject of the award-winning documentary The Other Fellow. Australian filmmaker Matthew Bauer tracked down men from all over the world who share the name James Bond and found out how that name affected their lives for better and for worse. You can see more clips at the film's website, and catch the full documentary on several streaming services.  -via Laughing Squid