In the 19th century, there was a race between various explorers and their nations to be the first to reach the North Pole. That quest was finally accomplished by Robert Peary in 1909, or possibly it was Matthew Henson, or even Frederick Cook in 1908. Those expeditions followed many others that were unsuccessful. The luckier of those failed expeditions turned back at some point. In 1897, S. A. Andrée had the bright idea to just fly to the North Pole using the only available air vehicle of the time, a balloon. What could possibly go wrong? Andrée was not a seasoned explorer of the Arctic or anywhere else. He was a balloonist, and was very enthusiastic (and naive) about the possibilities of flight. The three-man Arctic balloon expedition set off from Svalbard in July of that year, determined to bring glory to Sweden by reaching the North Pole. They were not seen again until 1930.

32. Franklin D. Roosevelt pic.twitter.com/TfUJhpVh02

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 21, 2023

If you got a kick out of Cam Harless' Gallery of US Presidents with Mullets, you're going to love his latest project. Presumably with the help of an artificial intelligence image generator, he has made comic book characters out of our presidents. Supervillains, to be exact. You'll love seeing Barack Obama as the Joker, Abraham Lincoln as a zombie, and others as various mad scientists, robots, aliens, warlocks, demons, butchers, and clowns. Since Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, he gets to be both Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. I love how Franklin Roosevelt's wheelchair was incorporated into his supervillain persona. And although I never thought Calvin Coolidge looked anything like Edgar Allan Poe, it works in a comic book universe. It's still impossible to make Jimmy Carter look evil.   

Thanks!

— Miss Cellania (@misscellania) March 21, 2023

See all 46 presidents plus a bonus Ben Franklin as comic book villains at Twitter. Or at Threadreader, if you prefer. -via Fark

You probably knew that the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once won almost all the Oscars at this year's Academy Awards (seven major awards). If you haven't seen the movie, you might be wondering what all the hoopla is about. Screen Junkies has you covered with this Honest Trailer. Just kidding; you will probably be just as confused after you watch this video. Is EEAAO a comedy, science fiction, action-adventure, a superhero film, a martial arts movie, or a family drama? All of those, actually. Any selection of clips they could have possibly shown us would be altogether nonsensical, but ask anyone who has seen the movie, and they will tell you that it really all comes together in a way that wins Oscars. This Honest Trailer pokes fun at how ridiculous the visuals are, but even they agree that Everything Everywhere All At Once is a surprisingly good film. 

When tiling a floor, most folks want to see a repeating pattern that shows attention to detail and pleasant symmetry. But in geometry, experts explore patterns that do not repeat. This is called aperiodic tiling. The Wikipedia entry on aperiodic tiling is flagged as "too technical for most readers to understand," and they are right. A challenge in geometry has been to find the lowest number of tile shapes that will produce a non-repeating pattern. Up until now, Penrose tiling, discovered by Roger Penrose, has been the lowest, with two tiles, shown above. It looks pretty symmetrical to me, but the caveat is that while these tiles don't have translation symmetry, they may have reflection symmetry and rotational symmetry. Penrose tiles look really nice on the floor of a round room. The search for a single tile shape that produces aperiodic tiling is called the Einstein problem, because the German words "ein stein" mean "one tile."

However, just yesterday a new science paper was submitted claiming an aperiodic tiling shape that uses only one tile! They call the shape of this tile "the hat." It looks more like a shirt to me, but how cool is this floor pattern?

Please visit https://t.co/MXh2q8k1I9 for more information. There you'll find an interactive, browser-based application for constructing your own patches of hats. 5/6

— Craig S. Kaplan (@cs_kaplan) March 21, 2023

The paper is awaiting peer review before publication. There's a lot to unpack here for geometry geeks, but for the rest of us, can you imagine trying to lay a floor with the hat? It would be like putting a chaotic jigsaw puzzle together with grout. -via Metafilter

(Top image credit: Parcly Taxel)

The 1992 movie Encino Man could have been a lot different. Ben Stiller was in the lead to get the role of the caveman unearthed in Encino, and made this screen test with Keith Coogan (Adventures in Babysitting) and Jeff Maynard (of the Ferris Bueller TV series) playing the teenagers who dug him up. So why didn't Stiller get the role? The filmmakers started to explain that Stiller didn't appear in the movie because of a scheduling conflict, but then went all in on how they just really wanted Brendan Fraser after seeing his screen test. Pauly Shore found this sequence in his archives just a few days ago and decided to let us all in on what might have been. I cannot find the corresponding clip online (without posting the entire film) from the finished movie starring Fraser, Shore, and Sean Astin. -via Cracked

People who care about proper use of the English language find themselves aghast on a daily basis when they hang out on the internet. They are astounded at how many people don't know the difference between there, their, and they're. I used to be bothered by "crutch" words, as in too many "likes" between other words, or when people start every sentence with the words "basically" or "actually," although the latest incarnation is when people start talking by saying "I mean..." when that should be a reframing of a previous statement, and never be the first thing you say. Although the older I get, the less I am bothered by how other people use or misuse words.

Another thing that annoys some people is when someone says "literally" when they mean "figuratively." Maybe we should calm down about that because it's nothing new. In fact, dictionaries have added second definitions of "literally" to acknowledge its use as an intensifier. Authors such as Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens have used it in this way in some classic novels. Read eight literally literary examples of this use of "literally" at Mental Floss. Maybe it will lower your blood pressure about the subject.

The Slow Mo Guys, Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy, have been bringing us fascinating videos for years. The BBC brings us a retrospective of some of their wildest stunts captured on their high-speed cameras. Some of these clips will bring back memories, while others will be new to you. We also learn a bit about how they do it, which is more complicated than you might think on a digital high-speed camera. We also get to meet their newest toy, a high-speed robotic camera arm. As to why they do it, well, it's fun, and 14 million YouTube subscribers is nothing to sneeze at. That's just a bit more than the BBC! -via Damn Interesting

The person who coined the name "walkie-talkie" must've been a fan of baby talk. He is unknown, but it was either the US military or one of their contractors who developed the transceiver during World War II. Walkie-talkie is descriptive, and so much better than "hand-held portable two-way radio transceiver," but if they wanted to be adult about it, they would have named it "walk 'n' talk," which is just as descriptive, still rhymes, and has fewer syllables. But walkie-talkie it is.

What if other things got their names in this cutesy manner? A fork would be a stabby-grabby.  A spoon would be a soupy-scoopy. A microwave would be a heaty-eatie. All very descriptive, but cute. There are plenty of renamed objects that follow this format that you can read at Reader's Digest. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Erkaha)

DebonairHeads is an artist in Texas who makes action figures, Polly Pocket type dolls, and other toys resembling pop culture folks you would never expect to see in a toy shop. My Little Danny comes in packaging that will remind you of My Little Pony, but the doll is Danny Trejo! Well, the star of many action films, including several directed by his second cousin Robert Rodriguez, deserves his own action figure, even if it is little.

The crowd at reddit wants one of these for their own, but alas, they are not for sale. My Little Danny is a work of art. DebonairHeads hand-sculpted the face and rooted all the hair. We will never find out if it really smells like tacos. Continue reading to see more of DebonairHeads' work.

Josef Mencik, sometimes spelled Josef Menšík, was a real-life Don Quixote. We don't know much about his background, but he was born in 1911 in what is now Czechia. As a young man, Mencik bought Strakonicku castle in the village of Dobrs and lived there as if he were a medieval knight. He didn't use electricity or plumbing, nor a car, but he had a full suit of armor. By all accounts, he was what we would call "a local character" today.

He even had a suit of armour made in France.
Local school classes were invited to visit the castle and see his huge collection and learn about history.
Josef became a bit of a local celebrity. pic.twitter.com/XRogxpY9KS

— Fake History Hunter (@fakehistoryhunt) November 18, 2021

In 1938, the Nazis were eager to take what was then Czechoslovakia, which they considered historically their own. Mencik was 27 years old at the time, and fiercely patriotic. On September 30, 1938, a line of German tanks approached Mencik's village and his castle. Seating on his warhorse in full medieval armor, he stood bravely against the 20th-century army to defend his home and village all alone. Read the story of Josef Mencik, the knight of World War II, at Creative History. -via Strange Company

You are no doubt familiar with the iconic image of a cow being pulled up by a tractor beam into a flying saucer. You have to be a certain age to recall how this idea came about. In 1973, the first reports of mysterious cattle mutilations came in from ranches in the western US. Cattle were found dead, with their mouths, genitals, and anuses cut away, reportedly "with surgical precision." Other ranchers checked and found the same thing. By the end of the 1970s, around 10,000 such incidents were reported. Law enforcement agencies investigated, and found no evidence of human activity. So it had to be aliens, right?

That how the story was often framed in the media, and that's the story that stuck around long enough for the idea of cows being abducted and/or experimented on by aliens to become a permanent meme. Some speculated the cattle mutilations were the work of satanic cults. But cattle ranchers themselves blamed the federal government, citing covert biological weapons testing. It got to the point where ranchers were shooting at helicopters flying over their land. The story eventually died down in the national media, and the actual cause of the mutilations wasn't widely reported, or else we all forgot that part. But there's a perfectly reasonable explanation you can read at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: The NeatoShop)

We've seen plenty of clever song edits in which clips of words were selected from movies or speeches to recreate a song. Those are fun, but we've seen it a lot. The next step in this technology is here. Auralnauts has the characters of The Matrix singing the song "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice, but it's not a rapid-fire editing of clips. It honestly appears that the cast of The Matrix was reassembled to sing the song. You can believe that, or if you select the other pill, you'll find it's deepfake technology with artificial intelligence voice training, and it's really eerie how well it can put words in characters' mouths. The better you know The Matrix, the more impressed you'll be with the song. Oh yeah, there's a special guest artist in the middle who will surprise you. For the moment, we can put the implications of this video technique aside and enjoy the performance, if you can call it a performance at all.  -via Boing Boing

March 17 is celebrated as St. Patrick's Day, the feast day of the priest who converted Ireland to Christianity. The feast day of a saint is often on the date of that person's death, particularly those dating back before birth dates of non-famous babies were well documented. Patrick died on March 17, 461. But March 17 is also the death date and feast day of a lesser-known saint of the seventh century, Gertrude of Nivelles.

Gertrude was born around the year 628 in the Kingdom of Austrasia. Having a prominent family, she was considered to be a good marriage match for various royalty, but Gertrude refused all offers. After her father died, her mother Itta of Metz founded an abbey so that Gertrude could live under protection from an arranged marriage. Gertrude took over the administration of the Abbey of Nivelles in what is now Belgium after her mother's death.

Gertrude died at the age of 33 the day after receiving a premonition from an Irish priest that she would die on St. Patrick's Day. And she did, in the year 659. St. Gertrude is the patron saint of several places in the region of the abbey, and the patron saint of travelers. She is also known as the patron saint of gardeners, as she was an avid gardener and was particularly successful in protecting the abbey's gardens from rats and mice. Gertrude's talent in that area led her to become known as the patron saint of cats in the modern era, starting around 1980 and propagated by the internet.  -via She Who Seeks

Dustin Ballard, known on the Internet as There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama), occasionally comes up with something sublime and improved instead of ruined. He scraped the word "Yeah" out of a bunch of different songs you will recognized and strung them together in a really catchy tune. I saw this elsewhere a few days ago, but it was not in an embeddable format. Now it's hit YouTube, and there's a bonus song! He also collected a bunch of "No" clips (or "Nein" in the case of Rammstein) and made another song, although that's more of a comedy than a symphony. I think you will like it. -via reddit

Gustav Hogan became enthralled with Star Wars as a 6-year-old kid in the Netherlands watching Return of the Jedi. His fascination with the production of Star Wars movies stayed with him and inspired his life's work. Hogan grew up to excel in animatronics, and as creative director at Biomimic Studio in London, he has spent 30 years designing and giving life to Star Wars characters like Admiral Ackbar, Maz Kanata, the Crystal Foxes, and Babu Frik. Hogan has a long portfolio of creatures for other movies, too, from cute animated animals to horrific monsters. In this video from Great Big Story, you can see the enthusiasm and perfectionism he puts into his work. -via Laughing Squid