Bored Panda unearthed an AskReddit post about the "most interesting, bizarre, offensive, surprising" things contains in wills. The original thread contained many stories about petty and vindictive wills and family secrets revealed, but also some rather funny bequests that are worth sharing. I got a laugh out of this one:
Not a Lawyer, but an aging woman my family knew left her house(large, and in a very affluent neighborhood) and estate to family friends for so long as her cats were alive and taken care of in said house. After they died, the house was to be sold and the remaining estate donated.
The weird thing is, it's been like 20 years and the cats are still alive.
Also, they've changed color.
Ahem. While there are still some entries that smack of revenge beyond the grave or just don't make any sense at all, the funniest replies managed to float to the top in a ranked list of weird bequests you'll surely get a kick out of.
In 1964, three Polish women in Tel Aviv approached acclaimed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal about a particularly sadistic concentration camp guard they had encountered during World War II. Hermine Braunsteiner, also known as Kobyla, worked at Majdanek and would kill children on the spot. After hearing their stories, Wiesenthal vowed to find Braunsteiner. The trail was twenty years old, but over the course of time, Wiesenthal traced Kobyla from Poland to Austria to Canada to the United States. That was a problem, because the US did not extradite Nazi war criminals.
Twenty years and several thousand miles removed from the post-war tribunals overseen by the Allied powers, the U.S. legal code contained no laws that covered Braunsteiner’s actions. Heinous as the allegations might be, the U.S. government had no way to sentence her in an American court for her crimes, which had been committed neither on American soil nor as an American citizen. If Europe wanted to hold the ex-Nazi accountable, that was Europe’s business. The only thing the U.S. could do would be to kick her out of the country, and even that seemingly straightforward matter was sneakily complex. Braunsteiner wasn’t a fugitive or an undocumented alien. No one—save for Simon Wiesenthal—was on the hunt for her. And then there was the minor matter of her American citizenship.
It was only in 1973 that Braunsteiner became the first Nazi extradited from the US, and her trial in Germany lasted until 1981. Read what happened during those long years as the wheels of justice turned slowly in a new longform article at Damn Interesting. Or you can listen to the story in podcast form at the same link.
The Harry Potter movies are beloved, but they do seem quite 20th century. This original fake trailer brings the franchise into the world of virtual reality and The Matrix! The magic is still there, but it comes in a form that's quite familiar to those who grew up on the internet. In this version, 11-year-old Harry Potter enrolls at the Hogwarts School of Hackercraft and Coding, where he learns the secrets of the deep web. The video editing and special effect are so seamless that you might be convinced that this is a real movie possibility, until you stop and realize that Daniel Radcliffe is 32 years old now. -via reddit
The United States had a spate of airline hijackings in the 1960s that gave us the term "skyjacking." They were mostly perpetrated by people who wanted to go somewhere specific, and relatively few people were hurt or killed before 2001. Norway had no such incidents before 1985, and therefore used no security measures for those boarding planes.
On June 21, 1985, Stein Arvid Huseby boarded a flight from Trondheim to Oslo with an agenda. He wanted to protest the way Norway treated ex-cons like him. He pulled a gun during the flight and warned the crew of bombs placed in the restrooms. The plane was allowed to land at Oslo, but then Huseby kept the crew and passengers hostage while he negotiated with authorities. He wanted to speak to the prime minister, the press, and various other officials about his grievances. The glitch in his cunning plan was the decent supply of beer aboard the plane. Read how that figured into the ending of the hostage crisis in Oslo at Cracked.
The internet introduced us all to historic photographs that we wouldn't have seen otherwise, like this image of Theodore Roosevelt riding a moose in the water. We all know he was an avid outdoorsman, but when you see this, you automatically think "Photoshop!" Still, it's just appropriate enough to be intriguing. After all, we've seen some really wild photos of President Roosevelt in his younger days. The truth is, this wasn't Photoshopped. And it is historic. But it's not real. It was manipulated in the old fashioned way, with scissors and tape.
The picture first appeared in the New York Tribune in September of 1912. It wasn't meant to fool anyone; it was an illustration of the top three presidential candidates all riding the animal mascot of their parties: William Howard Taft on an elephant, Woodrow Wilson on a donkey, and Teddy Roosevelt on a bull moose, which was the nickname for his new Progressive Party. Yes, all three men held the office at one time or another.
This story is just one of six presidential myths debunked at Mental Floss, to get you ready for small talk on Presidents Day on February 21st.
Turbatrix aceti is a microscopic nematode that is also called the vinegar eel. They tolerate a wide range of acidity and alkalinity, so they can live on the microbes that turn juice into vinegar. An article at LiveScience shows us how they move inside a drop of water.
After roaming the droplet randomly for the better part of an hour, some nematodes began to cluster at the center, while others swarmed to the water's edge, racing around the rim like cars in a roundabout. Soon, individual nematodes began undulating their bodies — then, others nearby started to undulate in sync.
The video was taken by physicist Anton Peshkov of the University of Rochester in New York, so of course he is fascinated with the worms' movement and synchronization while the rest of us are thinking that these icky critters are just looking for something to eat, and when they don't find it, they dance. And when they get tired of dancing, they lean on their partners. Kind of like the dance marathons of the Great Depression.
Watching this synchronized movement is all well and good, but seeing it makes me wonder if these vinegar eels are in our water supply, or in our vinegar. According to Wikipedia, they prefer feasting on mother of vinegar to anything else. They are neither parasitic nor dangerous, but American manufacturers of vinegar pasteurize the product and filter out nematodes before the vinegar goes to market. -via Damn Interesting
A quick thread on in the importance of being careful what data you share - even if you're the Queen. Today, Her Maj tweeted this lovely picture, gor bless er, etc. You might think that the contents of the red box would be official business. And you'd be right. 1/6 pic.twitter.com/y1RspNRUzy
Queen Elizabeth is celebrating 70 years on the throne, which is a record for the British monarchy. They call this a platinum jubilee, although they could have called it anything since it's never been done before. There are a lot of celebrations and events planned, and the Queen has released quite a few photographs lately. Adam Kay noticed that there are some documents visible in this one. Can we possibly find out what they are?
A quick click of the Perspective Warp function on Photoshop gets it looking a little bit squarer. 3/6 pic.twitter.com/yWm2L2Ycnn
The rule of thumb is to check the background of any photograph before you post it, because people will pick around in the corners. We really don't expect Her Majesty to use anything vulnerable to national security concerns as a photo prop, but we can't help but be curious. A shopping list? A fan letter? A will? Kay is working with a larger version of the photo, so he was able to enhance quite a bit to reveal the contents of the top document. Artificial intelligence may or may not have been involved. To see what was revealed, you'll need to read the 6-Tweet thread starting here. -via Fark
Ernest Shackleton led a 1914 expedition to Antarctica, but the crew didn't make it back until 1916 after their ship, the Endurance, was trapped in ice and later crushed by it. The ship hasn't been seen since, although there have been several attempts to find it. This weekend, a science crew is sailing from Cape Town to the Weddell Sea armed with robotic submarines, a helicopter, an ice drill, and other hi-tech equipment to find the remains of the Endurance. They don't know whether the shipwreck is in any way identifiable or if it is a scattering of small pieces. Read about the quest at BBC and keep up with the expedition's progress at the Endurance22 Expedition website.
Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy is most famous for leading the first European contact with Australia in 1770 and with Hawaii in 1778. Cook's ship the HMS Endeavour carried him across the Pacific several times, and was then sunk off the coast of Rhode Island in 1778, although without Cook. Fast forward to the 21st century, and a collaboration between two organizations may have found the wreckage of the Endeavour. The Australian Maritime Museum has been working with the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (Rimap) to locate and identify the ship. On Thursday, Kevin Sumption, director of the Australian museum announced that a shipwreck has been identified as the Endeavour. Dr. Kathy Abbass, head of Rimap, said the announcement was premature and that there was no “indisputable data” to prove it. In addition, Rimap accused the museum of breach of contract in making the announcement. You can read about the dispute at the Guardian.
In October of 1944, 300 American warships pretty much destroyed the Japanese navy in the Battle of Leyte. At the same time, in another area off the coast of the Philippines, a smaller American force fought ferociously against a larger Japanese flotilla. In that smaller battle, the Americans lost five of their 13 ships. One that sunk was the USS Johnston. It sank into the Philippine Trench, which is so deep that the fish living at bottom didn't even bother to develop eyes or muscles. It was thought to be impossible to find the wreck of the USS Johnston until wealthy explorer Victor Vescovo became interested. He assembled a team to develop a submarine that could go that deep and be used again. The result was a sub called The Limiting Factor that found the Johnston in 2021- at a depth of 21,180 ft (6,460 m), making it the deepest shipwreck ever found. Read that story at BBC Future.
Janelle Shane at AI Weirdness tested four algorithms to see if neural networks can generate valentines. Sure they can! For this project, she used the simple, hokey type of valentines that children give their classmates. Since the algorithms already knew English and already knew that Valentines Day is a holiday, she only fed ten examples into their training programs.
The original intent was to have the machines generate both a greeting and an image, but Shane knew from experience that even if these algorithms could handle it (which they couldn't), the images would be illegible and creepy. So she asked for a greeting plus a text description of an image to go with it. While the cards she fed into the learning program had images that supported the pun wording in the greeting, these algorithms didn't quite get it. But they generated a greeting and a description of a random image, which Shane illustrated herself. See a bunch more of these neural network-generated valentines at AI Weirdness.
This visualization of how deep underground structures go will blow your mind. As you go down as deep as Mammoth Cave, the video pauses and you think it might be over, but oh no. That's when the scale can no longer show the surface of the earth, and they switch to a graphic on the right for scale to go much, much deeper. The caves, of course, were formed by the earth itself. The manmade structures are astonishing. It's nice to know that radioactive waste is buried so deep, but the further you go, the more likely they are to be wartime facilities, and even deeper for pure profit. The newer ones were dug by machines, but the older ones were dug by human labor, maybe slave labor or Stalinist prison labor, and who are the people working at the bottom? I looked up a few of the deeper places.
The Mponeng gold mine in South Africa is so deep that the temperature at the bottom is about 151°F (66°C), and they send ice down the shaft to cool it to bearable working conditions.
The Kola Superdeep Borehole was drilled over a 19-year period by the Soviets, in Russia near the Norwegian border. It was a scientific project to see how deep a hole could be dug.
The game Wordle shows no sign of losing popularity, even as we hear the announcement that it was acquired by the New York Times. The newspaper said the game will still be free ...for now. Better get in the game before it's monetized! And computational biologist Devang Thakkar has developed Wordle Archive so that you can play previous games or more than once a day. But how does one win at Wordle?
The object is to guess the five-letter word of the day. You have six guesses, and each guess will let you know whether a letter is right and if a right letter is in the right place. It would have never occurred to me to develop a strategy, but Minnesotastan did. While some folks begin with ADIEU to find the vowels, he uses words designed to cover the most common consonants. Those words are BRINK, CADGY, WHELM, and POUTS (although he switched to SPOUT upon learning that Wordle disallows a lot of words ending in "s" because they may be plurals). In the example above, he found the vowels in the right place in two guesses, and discovered all the consonants in three guesses. Read his thinking behind this strategy at TYWKIWDBI, and the strategies of others in the comments. This method won't always ensure that you win in fewer guesses than the next person, but it will help you to get the right word more often. Do you have a strategy for playing Wordle?
The New Zealand parrot called a kea has been known to steal interesting objects from humans. In this case, a family visiting Fiordland National Park were recording a kea when the bird decided to take that GoPro camera. It flew off and got some nice footage of the scenery. Away from the people, the kea decided to eat the camera, but had some difficulty snapping off a small piece. It probably didn't like the way the plastic tasted, either. But how was the camera found? The bird's flight was not as far as it appeared to us, and the family followed it visually and then heard the commotion as he tried to tear the GoPro apart. -via Boing Boing
Addison Del Mastro was intrigued by the building you see here. Yes, it's a Pizza Hut, but it is somewhat different from the iconic architectural style of the pizza chain. We've seen plenty of buildings with that style that used to be Pizza Huts, but this is the opposite- a Pizza Hut that apparently used to be something else. So Del Mastro started researching the location's history. It wasn't easy.
While the story behind the building is quite a ride, the greater story is the way record-keeping is changing and and how fragile digital records really are. Digitizing books, photos, historical records, and newspapers seems like a wonderful idea, because it saves physical storage space and makes searching easier, but it also relies on changing technology. Think of all the digital files that are lost when a storage system becomes obsolete. Online digital files depend on servers, which depend on power, which depends on money. Many historic document files will only be kept as long as they are profitable. A lot of what Del Mastro found was crowdsourced from people's memories, and those people and their memories won't be around forever. Read about this particular architectural history project and the roadblocks thrown up at The Deleted Scenes. -via Metafilter
You've heard that goods are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for them. British Airways was getting rid of some of their older planes, and offered a Negus 747 for the low, low price of £1 ($1.30). After all, the pool of potential buyers was limited, because where would you park this plane? Cotswold Airport bought the airliner, as they had a place to put it. But instead of trying to refurbish and fly it, they turned it into an event space.
After 14 months of renovations, the Negus is ready to book parties, weddings, and other events- for £1000 ($1,300) an hour. That's some return on investment! But the makeover was expensive at about £500,000 ($671,000). And that doesn't include upgrading the restrooms, which still hasn't been done. See, toilets for planes are designed to work at altitude, and must be completely replumbed to work on the ground. But at $1300 per hour, they might be able to bring in some porta-potties. Read more about the Negus party plane at CNN, and see more pictures at Instagram. -via Jalopnik
The "adorable blob" above is a White's tree frog named Cousin, in a picture taken around the time Cousin came into the care of Be Wild Reptile Rescue in Durham, North Carolina. He had lived in several homes and weighed 144 grams. A large tree frog should weigh around 40 to 50 grams. Here's a picture of Cousin taken a year later.
As you can see, Cousin has lost weight, but still has to deal with the large amount of skin that comes with obesity. And he has some physical impairments from his former size. But he is much healthier now, at 120 grams. Here's his story.
We don't know how old Cousin is, but we're glad he has a home at the shelter where he will be permanently cared for. -via Laughing Squid
