In 1752, Benjamin Franklin famously flew a kite in a thunderstorm and literally caught lightning in his hand. In 1753, Russian physicist Georg Wilhelm Richmann tried to do the same with a metal rod and was killed by lightning. Meanwhile in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), a priest named Prokop Diviš wanted to build a machine to control the weather, specifically the electricity in the atmosphere. In 1754, he erected his weather machine atop a 40-meter pole in order to extract the natural electricity from the air and prevent thunderstorms. Scientists thought he was nuts. The local villagers believed in his machine, and tore it down when there was a drought.  

The "weather machine" worked, but not in the way Diviš wanted, and for reasons he didn't quite anticipate. For a long time, people thought Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, but Diviš' tower preceded Franklin's. Read how Diviš came up with the lightning rod at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Bohemianroots)

Government laboratories run by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) do research on virulent and deadly diseases like smallpox, ebola, and Marburg virus in order to keep us all safe. But what about the people who work in those labs? The safety protocols have to be on the level of The Andromeda Strain. And just like that story, the strictness of the different levels correspond with the danger of the virus being studied. Unlike the movie, the different levels are in different labs in different places. The first level is on par with what hospitals require of visitors to an infectious patient with, say, flesh-eating bacteria. Don't ask me how I know. Above that, the protocols get very serious. The most serious of these virus labs is one that hasn't even been built yet, but will cover a big chunk of ground in Atlanta. This video from Half as Interesting is only seven minutes long; the rest is an ad.  -via Digg

William and Margaret Patterson owned a photo supply shop in El Paso, Texas. There was evidence that their marriage was not always happy, but they were otherwise upstanding and well-liked in the community. Then on March 6, 1957, a store employee was awakened by a call from William Patterson saying the couple were going away. That didn't seem all that suspicious, but later events would. Nine days later, a telegram arrived at the store directing employees to lease out the Patterson's home for nine months and make other odd arrangements. At the home, they found the Pattersons had not taken their luggage, and Margaret's beloved cat was wandering the neighborhood, which was very suspicious. By August, employees involved the police.

While the Pattersons were never seen again in El Paso, a cryptic letter came from Laredo about distributing the Patterson's assets, and witnesses had seen the couple in Valle de Bravo, near Mexico City. As the years passed, the clues became more infrequent, but still stranger than before. Read about the mysterious disappearance of William and Margaret Patterson at Mental Floss.   

(Image credit: WhisperToMe)

While the original Star Wars trilogy left us with the idea that the Jedi were good and the Sith were bad, the prequels made us doubt the Jedi were all that ethical, and the sequel trilogy further tarnished their reputation. However, the Sith remain ridiculously evil. The latest Star Wars TV series, The Acolyte, further muddies the waters with Jedi who have plenty of questionable motivations and deeds. The streaming series concluded a couple of weeks ago, and received generally favorable reviews, after an initial review-bombing. There is no word yet on whether there will be a season two. Meanwhile, Screen Junkies has plenty to say about the series in an Honest Trailer that makes me feel as if I have seen the entire run of Star Wars: The Acolyte, yet I'm still confused as to what it's all about. The whole idea of space witches has me longing for a simple trench run.

behind the scenes of iconic album covers, a thread: pic.twitter.com/KOFKwvltaL

— pop culture (@gagasyuyi) July 16, 2024

Some album covers are works of art, while others are nonsensical, but all are designed to get our attention and a lot of thought goes into them (with some exceptions).

Twitter user @gagasyuyi collected a list of 34 album covers paired with a photo taken during the photoshoot that gives us an idea of what went into designing it. Most are from the 21st century, although they do go back as far as Abbey Road. You might be surprised by the things you thought were Photoshopped that turn out to be real, and the things you thought were real that were anything but. And we find out that they really did set a guy on fire for the cover of the 1975 Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here.

Check out the entire collection at Twitter or at Threadreader. -via Kottke

This shot of Gabriel Medina is ABSOLUTELY UNREAL 🤯 😱

( 📸: Jerome Brouillet) pic.twitter.com/4JQNI4olsi

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) July 29, 2024

Here we see Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina celebrating after riding a perfect wave, scoring a 9.9 during the qualifying round of the 2024 Olympics. The surfing events are happening in Tahiti, 15,700 kilometers (8400 miles) from Paris. Medina is so happy he's levitating above the water, along with his tethered surfboard!

The full, uncropped photo shows even more. This picture has not been Photoshopped. It was taken by surf photographer Jerome Brouillet, who knows how to capture a moment in time, but this borders on magical. To understand how serendipitous this image is, here is the video sequence showing when it was caught.

Now picture where Brouillet had to be positioned to get the picture. The shot is one in a million, or maybe even one in a billion. Medina may well go on to achieve a gold medal, but he is already a star for posing while flying through the air with a surfboard. -via reddit

This story has nothing to do with underwear. Jenny Nguyen envisioned a sports bar that only showed women's sports on the TVs. It would be more of a pub than a bar, welcoming families with children, maybe with some sports memorabilia. She would offer food and drinks from companies run by women. In 2022, she opened The Sports Bra in Portland, Oregon.

On opening night, the line to get in was long. In the first nine months, the bar pulled in a million dollars. Athletes and teams donated memorabilia from women's sports that line the walls. Other people took the idea and ran with it, like Jillian Hiscock, who opened A Bar of Their Own in Minneapolis. And most importantly, young girls saw athletes they could look up to on the TVs and on the walls. Read about the meteoric rise of The Sports Bra and women's sports in general at The 19th. -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Another Believer)

Storm chasing is quite a peculiar occupation, whether one is a professional or a hobbyist. When we first took notice of these folks, they seem tailor-made for exciting action movies and reality TV. The new movie Twisters opened ten days ago and scored a record box office for a natural disaster movie. But is it anything like a real storm chaser's life? Just the more exciting parts. Oh yeah, it takes a special person to even consider heading toward a tornado instead of away from one, but you can't just decide to do it and think you'll be okay. The real labor that storm chasers put in to learn the ropes and find tornados to get relatively intimate with while staying safe is a lot of work, but not all that exciting onscreen. Still, learning the story behind the story is always interesting. Accomplished storm chasers have varied motivations, but some of them have ultimately made the rest of us safer.

The biggest and the best entertainment extravaganzas were staged by Roman emperors who had the power and the wealth to do so. And the audiences were fairly bloodthirsty. The spectacles included chariot races, animal killing, executions, and gladiator fights. For around 200 years, women participated in those fights, and their bouts were often highlighted as the main event.

We don't have a lot of documentation on these female gladiators, and there's not even a Latin word for them, but we know they existed. Most were probably slaves, but there is some evidence that upper class women also participated, which was an even bigger draw. People disapproved of such behavior among higher-status women, but they also went to watch them fight each other. A woman who voluntarily became a gladiator was essentially throwing her reputation away, and that was worth watching, especially since they often fought topless and without a helmet to prove that they were indeed women. Read what little we know about the women gladiators of ancient Rome at Atlas Obscura.

Once upon a time, a bachelor's degree mostly meant that this person has a well-rounded education and can stick with a project for years at a time. That was a leg up in almost any job, no matter what subject the degree was in. Now it's too much of an investment to take any kind of risk. 

In the latest of Cracked's Honest Ads series, we learn the costs and benefits of a college degree. It can be quite a shock to the average 18-year-old to confront the costs and the debt they may have when they graduate. But once the dream is punctured, there are plenty of options for higher education. This scenario is a private college with a good reputation (except for Roger Horton's name on it). Students who are prepared for the college search ahead of time know that community college can get you quite a few credits for much less money, and a public university will cost less than a private school. For most careers, which school you go to matters little as long as it's accredited. But the real difference in a student's ability to pay back a student loan is whether they graduate, and whether the career they study for is something the world really needs.

Pictured above is William E. Dickey, the winner of the 1904 Olympics in the swimming event known as the plunge for distance. He doesn't look like a typical Olympic athlete because the plunge for distance was not a typical Olympic event. In fact, it was called the most boring sport of all time. The 1904 games were the only Olympics that the sport appeared in, and the only competitors were five Americans. But it was part of the competitive swimming scene in the US for decades.

The plunge for distance was a kind of competitive floating, to see how far an athlete could drift without any exertion after diving into a body of water. This particular act was made easier by extra body weight, as fat makes one more buoyant. It was taken seriously by those who competed, but for spectators, it was exceedingly dull, and the sport died out in the 1920s. Frank Parrington holds the world record in the plunge for distance at 86 feet 8 inches, a record that will stand forever. BBC Future talked to Parrington's grandson, Dave Parrington, head diving coach at the University of Tennessee, about the erstwhile sport of the plunge for distance.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image source: Missouri History Museum)

I once knew someone who had a screened-in party room at their house, and behind it was another screened-in room with a bed! It was a sleeping porch, used when it was too hot inside. This one caught breezes from three sides. Sleeping porches are one of many methods people used to keep cool before air conditioning became common. Pictured above is the freestanding sleeping porch President Taft had installed on the roof of the White House in 1910.

Evaporating water has been used for cooling for thousands of years, especially in dry areas. But it was used in the swampy city of Washington DC in 1881 after President Garfield was shot. His room in the White House was rigged with a device that blew air through wet fabric cooled with ice, and lowered the temperature by 20 degrees. It went through half a million pounds of ice over two months until Garfield died of his wounds.

Read about these and other clever methods that people used to keep cool in hot weather at Smithsonian.

You take all the standard tropes of a space adventure movie and put them together to make a parody. You shoot it in your apartment with a budget of zero and a cast of one playing all the parts. How good could it possibly be? In this one, it all comes down to the acting, and the zero-gravity effects, which were done only through acting. Oh yeah, there's one video effect, an illustration of product placement with a candy bar.

I saw a three-minute video on reddit and thought it was was quite good, and in fact was posted on the subreddit Best of the Internet. But I didn't post it here because I didn't know who made it. Then a friend pointed me in the right direction, and it turns out the full movie is nine minutes long and had a different ending. It was made by writer and actress Caroline Klidonas. Klidonas started posting vignettes on on TikTok during the pandemic lockdown that became full-blown productions. You can find quite a few of Klidones' full-length parodies at YouTube. -Thanks, Carol!   

If you were to tell a story about a late partygoer, you could mean someone who arrived long after the party started, or you might mean someone who died at a party. These very disparate uses of the word "late" can be confusing without the proper context. The reason that the word has two meanings goes back to the early use of "late" (pun intended). In the 15th century, the word was used to mean "recently." You can understand that by the phrase "of late." There are many examples that are now considered archaic, but we still use a form of it in phrases like "the latest comic from Randall Munroe." When referring to someone who died, the term "late" was originally only used for someone who passed away so recently that it might be news. But we strayed from that, and now say "the late Richard Harris," even though he died more than twenty years ago.

So the "behind schedule" definition has survived, and the "dead" meaning has been altered, but the in-between definition that meant "recently" has mostly fallen away. Read a rundown of how the word "late" has evolved over time at Mental Floss. Now, as far as the use of the phrase "the late, great..," that seems to have come about just because it rhymes and is therefore fun to say. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Roman Eisele)

With today's all-volunteer armed forces, we might forget how common military service once was. Throughout most of the 20th century, young men could expect to be called up for World War I, World War II, the Korean War, or the Vietnam War. In between wars, service was seen as a useful bridge to manhood, or to see the world, or to learn job skills. So it wasn't odd to see half the houses in your neighborhood occupied by a veteran and his family. The language they brought back from their service could be colorful, but even when it wasn't, these veterans retained a lot of jargon that fellow veterans would understand, and soon those terms were used by everyone. We know what these terms mean, but we don't know how they came about. Weird History looks at a whole bunch of everyday phrases and idioms we use that you might not know came from the military, as far back as the Revolutionary War.   

I can't vouch for how accurate these stories are. Commenters at YouTube are especially upset about "balls to the wall," which they contend predates aviation.