The ESA spacecraft carrying the James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas morning 2021 from the Centre Spatial Guyanais in the city of Kourou in French Guiana. You may wonder what a European spaceport is doing in South America. The French space agency CNES was established in 1961 with a spaceport in Algeria, which was then part of the French empire. Algeria fought and won their independence in 1962, and the space agency had to start all over. They selected French Guiana because it was already a French territory and had good conditions for space launches. They built Kourou specifically for the space center, evicting around 600 villagers to do so.

But French Guiana, and particularly the Salvation Islands off its coast, has a sordid history. Until the mid-20th century, it was France's penal colony. After slavery was abolished in France, the country sent prisoners to South America to serve out their sentences- and to harvest crops and build infrastructure. Of the 80,000 or so prisoners sent to French Guiana, the majority never made it back to France even after their sentences were up. This was the setting of the book and movie Papillon. Read about the space centre built overtop a notorious penal colony at Supercluster. -via Smithsonian

(Image credit: Adèle Roncey)

Fathers Day would not be complete without Darth Vader jokes. Star Wars fans of a certain age still haven't gotten over the twist in The Empire Strikes Back, the one that turned a single space adventure into an epic family saga. Too bad that was the peak of the series. (Dragging Leia into the family didn't happen until The Return of the Jedi, and never made much sense anyway. I think Lucas just did that solely so we wouldn't feel bad for the hero who didn't get the girl in the end. But I digress.) You'll have to recall what was said during that battle, because this video only has grunts, but I suspect you know what happened.

In this holiday vignette from LEGO, we finally see what caused Darth Vader to do a sudden turnaround and decide his loyalties were with his son instead of the Emperor. A simple gift causes Vader to think about all the things that might have been if he had spent his time as a dad instead of a Sith Lord. Send this post to your Dad to give him a smile for Fathers Day. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The 2009 Disney Princess movie The Princess and the Frog is loosely based on the Grimm's fairy tale The Frog Prince. But the character of Tiana, the "princess," was inspired by a real person. Disney wanted to place a fairy tale in the United States with a Black protagonist, and after a lot of changes to the project, focused on the real-life story of Leah Chase of New Orleans, “the Queen of Creole Cuisine.” The parts of the story that were not from The Frog Prince are Chase's.

According to Leah Chase's daughter Stella Chase, it was always her mother's dream to open a restaurant. She fell in love with a New Orleans musician whose parents owned a po-boy stand. They married, and Chase worked in the kitchen, honing the cooking skills she brought from her large family. When she and her husband Edgar inherited the restaurant, she expanded it and introduced an extensive menu of Creole cuisine. Now named Dooky Chase's Restaurant, the establishment became a meeting place and a refuge during the Civil Rights Movement. Read about Leah Chase and how her legacy figures into The Princess and the Frog at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Disney Parks/Sabina Graves/Gizmodo)

The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has been mapping Mars for twenty years now. In honor of the occasion, the space agency has released a global color mosaic of the red planet that's more than just red. The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) science team has stitched together 90 images taken from 4000 to 10,000 kilometers above the surface to show the features of Mars in the clearest detail yet.

Mars look pretty much all red in the images we've seen before, because the planet has so much iron oxide. That's what we call rust. But Mars also has more dense, dark bluish-gray sand made of volcanic basalt that formed enormous dunes across the center of the planet from this angle. It also has clay and sulphates that formed from the contact of water with volcanic materials that show up as lighter colors. Read more about the image and how it was made at the German Aerospace Center.  -via Kottke

(Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Michael))

When you think of Nevada's Clown Motel, you think of it as one of the few surviving examples of American tourist kitsch. Or you may know its reputation for being haunted. How could you think otherwise, when you are surrounded by clowns? There are 2,000 of them in the lobby alone! But if you are staying overnight in the town of Tonopah, you won't have anything else to do but learn some of its history, and that can be rather frightening.

Tonopah was a silver mining boom town that sprung up out of nothing around 1900, with about 3,000 people. But in 1905, the miners began dying quickly and horrifically from a malady that made their necks swell up and their bodies turn black. This "Death Harvest" killed so many men that quite a few other miners fled the town. Then in 1911, a fire in the mine killed another 17 workers. One of them was Clarence David, who collected clowns. His children grew up and opened the Clown Motel in 1985. Tonopah's cemetery is right next to the Clown Motel, and holds around 300 graves dated between 1901 and 1911. Those buried there include victims of the Death Harvest, the mine fire, childhood disease, and murder. Read about the gruesome history of Tonopah and the Clown Hotel at New Lines Magazine. You can also listen to the article. -via Strange Company

PS: Chloe Moriondo's music video mentioned in the article is not out yet, but it will appear at her YouTube channel when it's available.

(Image credit: Gillfoto)

Guy tries to break into hotel room while owner is there
by u/OnyxUnix in nope

A woman at the Holiday Inn in San Jose, California, ignored a knock on her door. Not long afterward, she saw a lock monkey snake its way into her room. She called the front desk and then recorded the break-in attempt. Hotel staff came and found a man and a woman who said they were looking for a friend. The couple got away before police arrived. The would-be intruders were obviously looking to rob a supposedly unoccupied room, since they knocked earlier to see if anyone was there. But it could have gone bad if she had confronted them herself. Here is the news report.



Yeah, I don't think switching to Airbnb would be any safer. But there are travel aids you can get that will block a door opening while you are in a hotel room. Something to think about. -via reddit

("Sahara" is Arabic for "desert". "Gobi" is Mongolian for "desert", and "Kalahari" is Tswana for "desert")

— foone🏳️‍⚧️ (@Foone) July 19, 2018

I know a guy from the Gambia, which is a small country surrounded on three sides by Senegal. The Gambia consists of both sides of the Gambia River down to the Atlantic Ocean. I asked him what "Gambia" means. He said, "River." I couldn't help but laugh. @Foone once mused about these confounding names that just happen when translated into other languages as they would apply to a potential universal translator, the kind they use in the Star Trek Universe. Aliens would think us mad.

"Here we are in Chad, looking upon the mighty Lake Chad!"
"Ahh yes, the land of Lake, bordering the Lake Lake. Another fine human name. "

— foone🏳️‍⚧️ (@Foone) July 19, 2018

Thankfully, Bredon Hill in Worcestershire is actually a hill, since it'd be just silly to name anything other than a hill "Hill Hill Hill". pic.twitter.com/6qX8ppAutt

— foone🏳️‍⚧️ (@Foone) July 19, 2018

These are called tautological place names, and Wikipedia has a list of them. It's not exhaustive, because the Gambia is not included. There's a lot more to the discussion in the Twitter thread, much of it laugh-inducing. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Have you ever thought about what archaeologists 1,000 years from now will think when they dig up artifacts of our lives? If civilization, or even mankind itself, can hold out that long, they may be quite confused. Imagine that they dug up a museum and dated the structure to the 21st century. The museum holds artifacts dating to, say, 1,000 BCE, but will the future archaeologists know that? It's happened already that archaeologists find collections of artifacts that are much older than their location would indicate. But one ancient collection stands out because it was a real museum with even more ancient artifacts properly labeled and dated. And it was run by a woman.

Ennigaldi-Nanna was a priestess and a princess of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. She was also an archaeologist and a museum curator, establishing her museum of artifacts around 530 BCE in Ur (modern Iraq). Her displays dated back as far as 2,000 BCE! The museum was discovered in 1925, and has yielded a treasure trove of ancient information. Ennigaldi, who was way ahead of her time, labeled her finds in three languages, including Sumerian, which modern language experts can translate. After the collapse of the Sumerian kingdom, the museum was lost and the practice of labeling artifacts fell out of use for another couple of thousand years. Read about Ennigaldi-Nanna's unique museum at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: M.Lubinski)

Nothing will clear a room of cats faster than a vacuum cleaner. They are large, mysterious, and worst of all, they make an infernal noise. While there are a few outlying exceptions, cats hate vacuum cleaners. Except Roombas, because Roombas don't make that much noise and they are fun to ride around on.

Simon's Cat is a typical cat, and hates the big, noisy vacuum cleaner. So does the kitten. In this video, they team up together to defeat the enemy. It's nice to see them getting along after all these years of jealousy and spite. And it's nice to have a Simon Tofield video in color!

Acronyms are handy for making long names easier to write, like SETI or NASA. There are so many organizations, facilities, and projects in the world of space exploration that acronyms are everywhere, and making them easy to pronounce and remember is important. But some groups go out of their way to come up with a clever acronym that strains credulity. Glen Petitpas collected these into a master list you may find amusing. Some examples:    

ABRACADABRA stands for A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with an Amplifying B-field Ring Apparatus. You get the feeling they could have explained this more simply.

ARMPIT stands for ASKAP Rotation Measure and Polarisation InvestigaTion. Not only is that forced with the T, it's an acronym within an acronym (ASKAP is the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder).

FIREFLY somehow means Fitting IteRativEly For Likelihood analYsis. They had to go really weird to get that one to work.

GADZOOKS! is for Gadolinium Antineutrino Detector Zealously Outperforming Old Kamiokande, Super! The exclamation point is crucial for some reason.  

GANDALF was created from Gas AND Absorption Line Fitting algorithm.

PEPSI means Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument.

SHIT stands for Super Huge Interferometric Telescope.

My favorite is WISEASS, which is the Weizmann Institute of Science Experimental Astrophysics Spectroscopy System. It's not forced at all, and I'll always remember it.

There are a lot more, and you will probably find funnier ones in there somewhere. The list is called Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronyms Site, which of course lends itself to the acronym DOOFAAS. -via Kottke

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Cincinnati, Ohio, has always had beer breweries, but in the 1840s, there was an influx of German immigrants who brought lager with them, while existing breweries specialized in port or ale. They aged their lager at cooler temperatures. To achieve the required conditions, they built huge facilities underneath the surface of the city, which got larger and larger as the demand for their product increased. But it wasn't a perfect system, and innovations had to be made over time to make them safe- not from collapse, because they are pretty strong, but from carbon dioxide and ammonia, in addition to industrial accidents. The brewers dealt with all that, but they couldn't withstand the forces of discrimination against German descendants that came with World War I and with Prohibition that soon followed. These underground factories, warehouses, and tunnels are now close to 200 years old, and mostly empty. But Cincinnati is starting to regain its reputation for beer. -via Laughing Squid

Can a band produce a new song when they broke up more than 50 years ago and half of the band members are dead? In an interview with the BBC, Paul McCartney announced that a new Beatles song, which he referred to as a "final Beatles record" will be released later this year. There have been plenty of Beatles songs released since the band went their separate ways, but the catalog of previously unreleased recordings from rehearsals, concerts, and demos surely has a limit.

McCartney did not identify the song, but speculation is that it will be "Now and Then," which John Lennon wrote in 1978. He recorded it as a demo on a tape that was given to McCartney sometime after Lennon died in 1980. The three surviving Beatles worked on the song in 1995, but abandoned the effort because there was an annoying buzzing on Lennon's tape recording. And George Harrison didn't like the song. Harrison died in 2001.

But now we have artificial intelligence programs that can clean up the noise and distortion from an old cassette tape, and there are recordings of the 1995 session, so we can soon hear all four Beatles performing together on a song that was written after they broke up. But will it really be a Beatles song? The discussion at Metafilter brings up all sorts of questions, not only about the authenticity of this project, but the ethics involved. After all, half of the Beatles cannot approve of the release, nor even register an opinion on their own art. We haven't heard from Ringo Starr on the project, or how involved he is with it. What you you think?  

(Image credit: Henry Grossman)

Sir Isaac Newton's laws of gravity had profound meaning for astronomers, because the mass of the planets around us, their distance, and their orbits followed these laws and made sense of what they observed. But at the time, there were only six known planets besides earth, from Mercury to Uranus. Most of them followed Newton's laws to a T., as calculated by astronomer Alexis Bouvard in 1821. But then there was Uranus, which progressed more slowly than Newton's laws would predict. Were those laws of gravitation flawed? Or was there something different about Uranus? An assistant astronomer at the Paris Observatory, Urbain Le Verrier, recorded variations in the orbits of both Uranus and Mercury. Le Verrier figured there might be another planet on the other side of Uranus, which would explain those variations. Using his hypothesis and the Uranus's orbit to chart the position of the unseen planet, Le Verrier knew where it should be, but couldn't get permission to use Paris's biggest telescopes to take a look. A colleague he knew in Berlin had access to an observatory, though, and that's how Neptune was discovered.

Le Verrier was rightfully honored for his discovery of Neptune, the first planet to be tracked by indirect information before it was observed. So then he turned his attention to the variations in Mercury's orbit and the idea that there could be another planet beyond Mercury even closer to the sun. When amateur astronomer Dr. Edmond Lescarbault observed a disc racing across the surface of the sun, Le Verrier announced another discovery- the planet Vulcan.

Now, you probably only know the planet Vulcan from Star Trek, and not from your science classes. You know what happened to Neptune (it's still there), but what about Vulcan? Read that story at Damn Interesting.

The earth has about 36 billion acres of dry land. Who owns those acres? Madison Trust Company put together a list of who owns the most land of anyone on earth. You may have your own little acre, or part of one, but that's nothing compared to what the British royal family owns- 6,600,000,000 acres! That puts them at the top of the biggest landowners on earth. And we thought the British Empire was a thing of the past. What's really impressive is that, of the top 19 landowners, only one is an individual person. That is Gina Rinehart of Australia, who personally owns 23,969,000 acres, putting her at #4 on the list. The next individual landowner is at #20. The rest are families, corporations, or communities. An awful lot of them are in Australia, which is a big country with a small population concentrated in the eastern cities.

Did you guess the #2 landowner in the world? It is the Catholic Church. You might feel better about #3, which is the Inuit People of Nunavut, who own 87,500,000 acres in Northern Canada. You can see the list in both infographic and text form, plus more information about what they are using their land for, in this post.

-via Digg

Eleven-year-old Georgiana Crimsworth experiences some abdominal pain before bed and then finds blood on her sheets. Her worst nightmare is coming true- she's dying! Of course, Georgiana's imagination took off to envision the absolute worst outcome. And even when her mother tries to explain, her presumptions only get worse. The horror! You might find it amusing (I did), but this happens all too often. As adults, we forget what it's like to be a child with no experience or context. Pain and blood equal dying if you don't know any other reason for it, so what Georgiana thought was perfectly reasonable. And that's why parents must think ahead and prepare children with what they need to know. The comments at YouTube are full of similar stories because girls weren't prepared early enough.

This award-winning student film was produced by Lauryn Anthony and Anushka Tina Nair at the Ringling College of Art and Design.