It's one thing to collect a particular kind of pottery, but quite another when those pottery pieces were manufactured by one's own ancestors. Tony Patterson's brother discovered that their great-great-grandfather made pottery in the north of England. In fact, there were quite a few Pattersons involved in the business in the 18th and 19th centuries. But those pottery pieces were hard to find and/or hard to identify. They weren't mentioned in Geoffrey A. Godden's An Illustrated Encyclopedia of British Pottery and Porcelain, so the family pottery must have been a cottage industry. Or was it? Further research revealed that the Pattersons had rather large pottery manufacturing operations.

For a while, there were plenty of “capital clay pits” to keep the Gateshead area potteries supplied with the raw materials needed for their exports to Norway and customers in the British Isles. Eventually, though, business was good enough for the extended Patterson family that clay had to be brought in from Cornwall, which had been supplying Staffordshire potteries with white clay for porcelain since the end of the 18th century. “In the course of my research,” Patterson says, “I found a bill for clay that was transported from Cornwall up to Gateshead.” A second piece of evidence indicating the size of the Gateshead ceramics industry was a newspaper advertisement placed by George Patterson, in which he expressed his interest in purchasing 200 tons of clay to keep the 60 men, 26 women, 32 boys, and 15 girls working at his earthenware pottery on Sheriff Hill productively occupied.

The potteries in and around Gateshead, then, represented far more than a minor cottage industry. Geography aside, how could the Geoffrey Goddens of the ceramics world have missed them? In the end, it may have been nothing more than a routine case of ingrown conventional wisdom. “I wrote Godden when I was beginning my research,” Patterson says. In his book, Patterson describes Godden’s response as “far from enthusiastic.” “It motivated me to prove him wrong,” Patterson says. “Perhaps if he’d let me down in a gentler fashion, I might not have proceeded.”

Tony Patterson wrote his own book, 19th Century Patterson Potters and Pottery, to chronicle his family's surprisingly prominent place in England's pottery manufacturing history. Read how all that came about at Collectors Weekly. 

Tombstone, Arizona, is the epitome of a Wild West town, at least as far as the pop culture lore of the Western genre goes. What made Tombstone stand out among other Western boomtowns? For one, it was the site of the famous gunfight at the O.K. corral. It was also a relatively large mining town at its height in the mid-1880s. And the characters of Tombstone were well documented in photographs, thanks to Fly's Photography, the studio founded by C.S. "Buck" Fly and his wife Mollie, who were both photographers. They set up shop in a tent in Tombstone in 1879, but soon built a sturdy wooden building.    

Even though he now had a more professional studio, Buck Fly spent much of his time out in the field, mostly focused on outdoor photography. While he was often absent and searched the countryside for potential photographic motifs such as mills, soldiers, ranchers, and picturesque panoramas, his wife Mollie ran both the pension and the studio. At a time where female photographers were extremely rare, newspaper reports claim that Mollie actively participated in her husband’s business and that she operated Fly’s Gallery when Buck was away. She handled the indoor portraits, charging 35 cents for cabinet cards. All of the studio portraits however are credited to her husband C.S. Fly. Almost everyone in Tombstone at the time Fly’s studio was open had their picture taken.

Both the portraits and the outdoor photography give us a look into the history of Tombstone. Fly combined the two techniques in his images of Geronimo and his men, which are the only photographs ever taken of Native Americans still at war with US forces. Read about C.S. and Molli Fly and see a collection of their Tombstone photographs at Messy Nessy Chic.

We knew that Boston Dynamics' quadruped robot Spot can dance, but we didn't know it could make such a nice chorus line! Here you see seven of them dancing to BTS's "IONIQ: I'm On It." Read more about this performance here. -via Geeks Are Sexy

ive just been informed that round hot dog burgers exist and i am LOSING IT pic.twitter.com/mQHXZO6nEv

— maria yagoda (@mariayagoda) June 15, 2021

Have you ever bought the wrong buns and then wished that you could make hot dogs fit on the hamburger buns you bought by mistake? This product wouldn't help with that, since it's mail order, but you get the idea. And calling it a round hot dog is a little confusing, because hot dogs are already round. This is more of a flat hot dog. Rastelli's sells their round hot dogs at eight for $18 plus shipping. But wait- isn't a round hot dog the same as a slice of boloney?   

Listen. There are key differences between round dogs and thick-cut slabs of bologna. While hot dogs and bologna are often made of the same stuff, squished into different forms (and different types of casing), there can be more qualities that differentiate them besides their shape. I spoke to a Rastelli's spokesperson who refuted claims that their round dogs are just "thicc bologna," as one tweeter put it to me.

In a patented process, Rastelli's chops black angus beef and premium pork, rather than fully emulsifying or liquifying the mixture like what's done for many traditional bolognas. "We then wrap our meat mixture in a collagen casing, followed by a netting to help hold shape," a spokesperson told me. "The product is then smoked, similar to an Old World-style hot dog, with a proprietary blend of woods, such as chicory, and later finished in the oven. Before slicing into rounds, we remove the casing." They remove the casing so the meat becomes more permeable, allowing the flavor of the condiments to "really sink into the round dog," and to help reduce the chances of choking.

This still sounds like baloney, just high-quality baloney. Anyway, Food & Wine gave it a try, and posted a good review of the results. The argument about whether round dogs are baloney will continue, as will the argument over whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Either way, it appears that a round hot dog is a sandwich. -via Metafilter

How many times has something happened that made national news, and someone said "Simpsons did it!" immediately? It's uncanny how The Simpsons made so many gags that ended up happening in the real world years later. Were the writers so in tune with trends that they could predict the future? Is it all coincidence? Is this phenomenon an illusion of our perception? Or are they time travelers? Maybe our world is turning into a sitcom! Buzzfeed Unsolved goes through these theories, and then takes a look at what's really happening. -via Digg

What is this crowd chanting? TikToker Kegan Stiles gives us nine options; which do you hear? What's really weird is that you can read down the list while listening to the audio, and it sounds like every one of them... except there are nine options, and only eight lines to the chant. When you hear the line you are reading, it's an example of the McGurk Effect. Once you've decided what you are hearing, you can go to the original video to find out what they are really saying. There is a parental warning for explicit lyrics on that one, although I don't understand why. This audio clip illustrates how we often hear what we are primed to hear.  -via Boing Boing

Hear more examples of the McGurk effect here and here.

Every parent is concerned about their kids getting proper nutrition. Vegetables are packed with nutrients, but how can they possibly compete for your child's palate when the competition is breakfast cereals, chicken nuggets, and chips? Food scientists have tackled this problem in many ways, and one experiment may be promising.

Researchers have come up with a new way of getting kids to follow a healthy diet: putting more vegetables on their plate.

Larger portions of veggies resulted in kids chomping down 68 percent more of them on average (an extra 21 grams, or 0.74 ounces per day), in a 4-week experiment involving 67 children aged from 3 to 5.

The research team used broccoli and corn as their test vegetables, doubling the amount served – from 60 grams to 120 grams – to see how this would change the eating behavior of the children.

Of course, there's more involved, including what other foods are served and the proportions on the plate. You can read more about this experiment at Science Alert. In my opinion, anyone will eat vegetables if you sauté them with onions, garlic, and spices, but that's setting them up to never eat vegetables from a school cafeteria. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Angela Sevin)

Shmorby attempts to introduce newbies (meaning children) to the internet. While he wants to paint the web as a fun, useful place, alas, the real internet keeps butting in. Oh yeah, and don't beat yourself up over missing "the internet mascot everyone knows and loves," because the only people who knew Schmorby before last fall were his creators. -via Metafilter

The French have a reputation for romance. While it is a stereotype, it is one that the people of France rarely deny. So it might surprise you to learn that French lovers don't often say "I love you" ("je t'aime"). Oh yeah, they communicate the sentiment in a lot of other ways, but those words don't come easy.

The French don't say, "I love you" because they don't have a verb to express heartfelt sentiments for the people they care about. There is only the verb "aimer", which means both "to like" and "to love". As a result, a French person is not exaggerating when they conjugate "aimer" to explain their relationship to rugby, a warm baguette or the smell of lilacs. Naturally, then, it feels trite and rather mundane to use the same word when describing intense feelings of love for one's newborn baby, a childhood friend or a life partner.

The upshot is that the language is insufficient to express the true depths of love. That sounds sweet, but why don't they come up with words that are sufficient? Maybe because the French know that actions speak louder than words. And there are still plenty of other words that hint at true love, too. Read more at BBC Travel.

When news outlets try to distill a complex story into a short blurb or a 30-second news bite, the details often get distorted. It doesn't help that so many people only read the headlines. The 1994 lawsuit against McDonald's over hot coffee became the ultimate example of a frivolous lawsuit, but when you dig into the details, it is revealed to have been anything but frivolous. LegalEagle explains what really happened. The McDonald's case takes only the first six minutes; afterward there are other cases of "frivolous" lawsuits that were more substantial than they appeared at first glance. -via Digg

Some time in the distant past, African straight-tusked elephants (which were larger than existing elephants) traveled to Sicily when the Mediterranean sea level was low, and then got stranded there. They somehow evolved into dwarf elephants. The first dwarf species on the island was around the size of a Shetland pony! But it went extinct, and then came a slighter larger species which, at 1000 kilograms, was still quite small for an elephant. Fossils from Puntali cave in Sicily give a somewhat confusing timeline for Sicil's elephants, but now mitochondrial DNA has been extracted from a fossil, and its sequencing may yield answers.

It shows that the Puntali elephants were isolated on Sicily at least 175,500 years ago, but potentially as recently as 50,000 years ago.

This then allowed the team to estimate that the elephants shrank in size by up to 200kg per generation, shedding 8,000kg to reach just 15% the size of the straight-tusked elephant within 40 generations.

'We have produced a range of realistic evolutionary scenarios,' explains Victoria. 'I would not be surprised if evolutionary rates were even higher than our highest estimate, but only new data on Sicilian and other southern European material will refine this further.'

Read more about the research on dwarf elephant DNA at the British Natural History Museum. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: James St. John)

Victory in warfare often goes to the entity that develops the most horrendous weapons, as we all learned in 1945. But mysterious but horrifying weapons that you wouldn't expect abound in history. In the 7th century, Byzantine warfare included the use of what appears to be a flamethrower! This weapon was called Greek fire.

The chief method of deploying Greek fire was by projection through a tube called a siphōn, which was placed aboard ships or on siege engines called cheirosiphōnes. A handheld portable siphōn was also invented that is the earliest analogue to a modern flamethrower. Byzantine military manuals also give mention of Greek fire filled jars, caltrops wrapped with tow soaked in the substance, and cranes called gerania that would pour Greek fire onto enemy ships.

The Byzantines ascribed the discovery of Greek fire to “divine intervention”, for which the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogennetos (AD 945–959) would later account in his book De Administrando Imperio to never reveal the secrets of its composition, as it was “shown and revealed by an angel to the great and holy first Christian emperor Constantine” and that the angel bound him “not to prepare this fire but for Christians, and only in the imperial city.”

There are accounts of what went into Greek fire, but they must have not been too helpful, because the technology was eventually lost. Read about Geek fire at Heritage Daily. -via Strange Company

This chart is a work of art. I hope multiple people got paid well to make it and I hope they get hit by a bus pic.twitter.com/XS6aWwwj7P

— Katelyn Gadd (@antumbral) June 24, 2021

Charts and graphs can be wonderful for breaking down information and showing trends over time, but only if they are constructed in a way that people can understand. On TV, the viewer only has a short period of time to grab that information, but when you take a screenshot, you see that there are many things wrong with this graph. Mefite Stark takes a stab at listing them.

1. The y-axis doesn't start at zero
2. The y-axis isn't labelled correctly (it should be % of Adults who report that they think violent crime is a problem)
3. The gaps between the data points on the x-axis are not representative of the gaps between the dates
4. The margin of error is not highlighted on the chart's data points
5. Straight lines between the data points imply a steady trend which may or may not be the case
6. In my opinion the most amazing weirdness is that the x-axis dates go from right to left!

Someone else mentioned that the x-axis is labeled in alphabetical order. Andy Baio took the information and made a much better chart.

Wait so it isn't even for actual violent crime? Just adults who THINK there's a violent crime problem?????

— Crim Lust (@Cr1ms0n_lus7) June 25, 2021

This is far from unique, though, as many media outlets rely on their graphics departments (or maybe an intern) to make charts instead of data scientists. You can go down the rabbit hole and see plenty of confusing or misleading information in charts here, here, and here. In fact, there are so many ways to make a bad chart that several sites are dedicated to explaining and shaming them. See more terrible charts archived at Bad Visualizations, WTF Visualizations, and the subreddit Data Is Ugly.  -via Metafilter

It is commonly thought that Homo sapiens came from Africa and Neanderthals evolved in Europe. However, a discovery in Israel appears to put both human species in the same location in the Levant. An archaeological dig started in 2012 at Nesher Ramla, and has yielded human remain in which a skull fragment appears to be Homo sapiens, while the jawbone sports Neanderthal features. Dental anthropologist Rachel Sarig says the discovery may force us into a new interpretation of human evolution.

Sarig’s paper describes the physical characteristics of the remains from Nesher Ramla, and the other paper describes the stone tools found at the site. The bones were compared to other members of the genus Homo using 3D morphometrics—basically, the researchers created a dataset of points in three dimensions and looked at how similar or dissimilar the skull fragment, jawbone, and teeth were from those of other humans. They also dated the specimen to between 140,000 and 120,000 years old, which would mean it lived at the same time as Homo sapiens in the area.

“The Nesher Ramla fossils certainly complicate a straightforward evolutionary story, which traditionally hinged on exclusive occupation of the Levant by either Neanderthals or Homo sapiens,” said Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History who was unaffiliated with the recent papers. “Instead, there may be multiple species around at the same time, sometimes interbreeding, learning from one another and sharing in their cultural behaviors.”

That would certainly be a new way to look at human history. Read more about the research at Gizmodo.

There is some speculation that the human remains may be a previously unknown species that was a common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, instead of a hybrid of the two. 

(Image credit: Tel Aviv University)

In 1818, a British writer who published under the name "H" wrote an article for The Pocket Magazine in which he predicted the future of the United States. He (assuming it was a man) placed his musings 500 years into the future. It's only been 200 years, but some of them have come strangely true. For instance, Americans traveled to the moon, but some citizens didn't believe it. However, the method of getting there wasn't quite the way it really happened.

Baltimore, December 1, 2318.—“As many of our readers in distant parts of the country have doubted whether the voyage to the moon ever did take place, we do again assure them, upon our veracity, that the information was literally correct. This aerial journey must indeed appear to many who hear of it as a most extraordinary undertaking; particularly when it is recollected, that in the dark ages of English credulity, it was imagined that tubes two hundred and forty thousand miles in length, besides being exposed to many other insuperable objections, would break with their own weight. Yet such were the tubes used by our adventurers, and such were absolutely necessary to supply them with air from the dense atmosphere of our earth. At the period to which we allude, when every science was fettered with the adamantine chains of system, it was also thought impossible for goose-quill, or any other wings, to be of service where the air was so rare as to offer no resistance. This idea the undertaking of now under consideration has fully disproved; for, after the wonders one goose his quill has performed, what must we not expect from the labours of a number united […]

Other predictions in the article referred to automated doctors, the miracle of temperature control in the home, and the discovery of an unlimited liquid fuel coming from the earth. Read these predictions from 200 years ago at Reynolds's News and Miscellany. -via Strange Company