The title of the list is "5 Math Battles That Ended in Death," but that is a little misleading. Yes, there were math battles during the 16th century, but the consequences of those were more on the level of betting, they weren't deadly. The accounts of the five deadly incidents include one duel that may or may not have anything to do with math (but left a talented young mathematician dead), one possibly natural death, and three tragic cases of gifted mathematicians who suffered from obvious mental illness. One killed his family because it was the mathematically logical thing to do. One was so paranoid that he wouldn't eat anything unless his wife prepared it, and when she was hospitalized, he starved to death. Another committed suicide because he was afraid he would lose his math abilities due to cancer. Read all these mathematically sad tales from history at Cracked. 

Have you ever been in a discussion, online or in meatspace, when someone makes a pop culture reference and you have no idea why everyone is laughing? Sometimes that's a mention of a fictional company, like when a coworker refers to your own workplace as Dunder Mifflin, or someone says they ate at Los Pollos Hermanos because they couldn't recall the name of the restaurant. Yeah, that happens to me, too. While I am aware of popular movies and TV shows, I don't actually watch them. But you can quickly learn about the fictional businesses and government agencies made up for TV and movies at the Fictional Brands Archive.

It's a database of these companies listed in alphabetical order, with the pop culture world they come from. Click on an entry, and you'll be taken to a page with more information, like a description, logo, backstory, and pictures. Read up on the businesses of your favorite franchise, or bookmark the archive so you can refer to it in the future. -via Kottke

We finally caught him.
by u/Hashira_Oden in funny

What we have here is a dad performing his best dad joke. You can't help but laugh because he's really putting his heart into selling the silly scenario. The fact that he looks so "dad" with his mullet, knee socks, dad shorts, New Balance shoes, and Advil shirt only pushes our appreciation for him to new heights. He has discovered that there is no greater joy than making a baby laugh. That will continue for very young children, then turn into groans for adolescents and eye rolls from teenagers. By then, dad will take great joy in causing his kids embarrassment. That's how dads evolve. Still, even though dad gets the attention in this video, the greatest thrill for us is the baby's laughter. With an audience like that, you are impelled to put on a great show.

Suspension bridges are an engineering marvel, allowing access across water in all parts of the world. But they have their drawbacks. They must be somewhat flexible to avoid breaking apart, but if they move too much, they will break apart anyway. And strangely, a bridge full of pedestrians moving slowly puts more weight on a bridge than normal vehicle traffic. When soldiers march across a suspension bridge in unison, they can cause a bridge to sway rhythmically, called a "mechanical resonance." The Broughton Suspension Bridge in Manchester, England, was built in 1826. But in 1831, a unit of soldiers marched across the bridge in cadence, causing it to sway more than usual. They found this amusing and marched even harder. Then the bridge fell in. No one was killed in that incident, but the British army afterward enacted a policy to break cadence when crossing a bridge. Then in 1850, a French bridge fell under the same circumstances, killing 226 people!

The effect of marching on a suspension bridge became known, but it doesn't have to be a military unit marching in cadence to produce the effect, as other bridges have failed due to the natural cadence of crowds experiencing swaying while crossing a bridge. Read about this effect and the harrowing examples of what can happen at Amusing Planet.

See also: Embarrassing Moments in Engineering.

You probably know the basics of how Anne Sullivan changed an almost feral blind and deaf child into the highly educated Helen Keller, especially if you've seen the movie The Miracle Worker. But the movie (and play) only showed the most dramatic parts of a lifelong story. There's a lot more to learn about it, like how Anne Sullivan came to have the skills she would need to take on such a challenging job. She had overcome her family's poverty, learned how to deal with the world as a blind person, and worked alongside both blind and deaf students at school, including one who was both deaf and blind. Besides the unique experiences that armed Sullivan for the task of educating Helen Keller, she also possessed a combination of stubbornness and patience that led to great things for Keller later in her life. She took a very difficult job and saw it through, because she knew that success would be worth the effort.

The phrase “420” was almost certainly invented in the Bay Area in the early 1970s. But who said it first? That’s a controversial question.https://t.co/sfoxv6mckr

— SFGATE (@SFGate) April 20, 2023

Today is April 20, or 4/20, as Americans shorten it. That's become somewhat of a stoner holiday, as "420" is a code for smoking marijuana. When I was young, there were an awful lot of euphemisms for smoking pot, but 420 was unknown in my neck of the woods, because in the 1970s we didn't have instant communication via internet. However, today it's pretty much universal. Where did the number come from?

It more than 50 years ago at a high school in San Rafael, California. But there are two stories, from two different groups of high school friends, who both claim to have originated the number. They have been squabbling over it for years, and each has evidence to back up their stories. So was it the Waldos or the Beebs who coined 420? The Waldos have a more exciting story, but the Beebs story is earlier and simpler. Read the accounts of both sides from those who were there at SFGate. -via Boing Boing

The movie Cocaine Bear is fiction, because we know that the real bear the story is based on died pretty quickly from consuming cocaine. But could a bear who drank 69 cans of soda pop go on a caffeine and sugar-fueled rampage? People near Earls Cove, British Columbia, might want to be on the lookout. That's where a bear broke into Sharon Rosel's car and helped himself to a ton of soda while Rosel could do nothing but watch. The bear spent an hour and a half biting off the tops of pop cans and drinking the contents. He started with the Orange Crush and went through them until he came to the diet sodas, then quit. Even wild bears have their standards.

The beast left Rosel's car a mess, tearing up the leather upholstery, breaking off the door handle, and of course, spilling soda all over everything. -via Damn Interesting

Dr. Christina Hartmann, Ph.D. and Dr. Michael Siegrist, Ph.D. of the Technical University of Zurich developed the Food Disgust Scale to study what makes people shy away from certain foods. They've also launched the IDRlabs Food Disgust Sensitivity Test so that you can identify your own triggers for deciding what not to eat. In 32 questions, the test will measure your disgust on the eight parameters seen in the graphic above. These are my test results, which show my food disgust is in the average range at 45.38%. No surprises here. However, I don't really find seafood disgusting as long as it's someone else who eats it. I just don't like fish or seafood. You can see I'll eat fruit no matter how disgusting it is, but that may come from having to wait until it's overripe because of dental problems. (TMI?)

So the short test doesn't control for some foods that you just don't like, or just don't eat because you're vegetarian or follow religious restrictions. And I would agree that there should be some component of texture, since that's a trigger for food disgust among a lot of people. Many of the questions could be answered with "It depends..." and while the desktop version has a slider for the degree of agreement, the mobile version requires a yes or no. But the test may give you an overall look at your own food disgust profile as compared to others. -via Metafilter

Here's something you would probably never notice on your own- soda cans in Hawaii are different from all other soda cans. That may be the case even if you've been to Hawaii a few times and had soda. To find out why, you are going to learn more about soda cans than you ever thought you would, from Half as Interesting. The reasons have to do with the confluence of product design, raw materials, shipping, and most of all economies of scale. Everything in the manufacturing industry has to do with economies of scale, where tiny little tradeoffs are made and the value of long-term investments must be compared to the value of short-term investments. The difference is also because Hawaii is unique, and that's what we love about it, even if you've never noticed the difference in their soda cans.

This video is a minute shorter than its length would indicate. -via Laughing Squid

When Ruth Handler introduced her fashion doll Barbie, she was an instant hit. Barbie was a glamorous young fashion model, and every little girl wanted to be like her. in 1963, she got a best friend named Midge. But Midge wasn't glamorous at all. She seemed to be designed as second best, in order to not steal Barbie's thunder. And she had weird eyes. What little girl would want a Midge doll for a friend when you could just as easily get two Barbies? Midge was discontinued in 1967. But she was brought back again and again, with no better results. Once Midge came back pregnant, with a husband and a son, but her popularity didn't take off no matter what Mattel did to her.

This is all coming back because Midge is a character in the new live-action movie Barbie ready to land in July. She and her husband Allan are the only characters in the film that aren't some iteration of Barbie or Ken. Will Midge finally find her spot in the sun? It's doubtful. Read the tragic history of Midge and her unceasing unpopularity at Buzzfeed News.  -via Digg 

In 1861, 25-year-old Samuel Clemens answered the call of Missouri's governor to step up and defend his home state. This was governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, a Confederate sympathizer who was forced out of office in July of that year. Missouri never officially seceded from the Union, and its men joined both the Union and Confederate armies. The young man who would later become Mark Twain joined a Confederate unit. However, his "unit" was made up of men who didn't really know anything about the military.

In all, the famed author’s two-week stint as a soldier in the Civil War largely amounted to him larping as a Confederate.

Twain didn't see much action before he gave up and went to stay with his sister in St. Louis, and then headed off to Nevada. But the experience gave him something to write about later as a comedy of errors. His unit tried to retreat once and realized they didn't even know how to do that. Read about Twain's short but comical military service at Historynet.  -via Damn Interesting

Once upon a time, the Cook pine tree (Araucaria columnaris) was only found on New Caledonia in the Pacific. But over the last couple of hundred years, they were imported and cultivated in far-flung parts of the globe. As they grew tall, a peculiar behavior was noticed among these trees. They have a tendency to lean. It's not just because they are tall, as other, much taller pines manage to grow completely upright. Cook pine trees have their own agenda.

All the Cook pines that grow in the Northern Hemisphere lean to the south, and all that grow in the Southern Hemisphere lean to the north. Those that grow near the equator manage to stand up straight. What's more, the angle of the tilt also depends on location- trees that are further from the equator lean more. The reason for the tilt has not been scientifically proven, but common sense would tell us that the tree is looking for optimized sunlight. However, other pine trees prioritize standing straight for longevity. Something about Cook pine trees makes leaning toward the sun more important than balancing its weight. -via Nag on the Lake

When Abraham Lincoln was a presidential candidate in 1860, it had been more than ten years since he served in the House of Representatives, so he had to be introduced to the national electorate. His campaign staffers were afraid that voters would find him just too ugly to vote for. His opponents had indeed spread talk of Lincoln's looks, calling him grotesque and worse. Photography was fairly new at the time, and Lincoln's advisors raced to get ahead of the game before the other side did.

Lincoln turned to the most famous photographer of the era, Matthew Brady, for a portrait that could be disseminated. Brady took the image above, but there were some tweaks made. While it didn't make Lincoln look like a movie star (it couldn't, because there were no movies then), it did improve upon his actual appearance, and staved off the rumors of his hideousness. It wasn't the last time photo manipulation was used on Abraham Lincoln.  

Read the entire story of Lincoln's portrait and the stories behind a dozen other iconic historical photographs at History Collection. -via Nag on the Lake 

The University of Konstanz in Germany has created a virtual world- for insects! They study locusts' movements and brains at the same time by attaching scanners to their heads while they walk about on a movable sphere, following the virtual locusts projected on the walls. They also study these insects in crowds, using little tags they've glued onto thousands of bugs. It does seem like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel, but don't feel too bad for these locusts. They were bred to be eaten, so working in a virtual lab is probably the best life they could hope for. Who knows? Maybe these bugs think they're playing the coolest video game ever. They still give Tom Scott the heebie-jeebies. But maybe you could think about these locusts the next time you put on your virtual reality headset and step into another world.  

Read more about these experiments at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour.

Redditor ikedness found a kitten yesterday that was a complete mess. A woman told him that some kids had glued the kitten to an object a couple of days earlier! He turned to reddit for advice on removing the glue. Redditor Com_Trad_IsTime recommended using coconut oil, which worked, so the kitten, a female, was named Coco.



The glue was only one of her problems. Coco weighs less than a pound, although she appears to be about two months old. And soon she started showing symptoms of respiratory distress. She was taken to the veterinarian, where she tested positive for feline calicivirus (FCV), a common but dangerous infection.



She was prescribed a slew of medicines, but Coco again showed signs of difficulty breathing, and was taken to the vet again. This time, she got a nebulizer treatment and snot removal. Since then, Coco seems to be doing better, and even purring.  



Several redditors have reached out to help with the vet bills. Coco still has a long way to go to gain weight and be considered healthy, but she is on her way. The crucial part was finding a loving home.

(All images credit to ikedness)

Update: The latest on Coco. You can follow her progress here.