People have always gambled because the rush of winning is perceived to be worth the risk of losing. In the 1600s, enterprising folks figured out that the real money is in hosting other people's gambling addictions, and they were right, but they didn't understand the odds even then. Meanwhile, mathematicians began studying the science of probability.

The owners of gambling houses sought to increase their profits by guiding patrons to games with long odds, which works because those patrons didn't understand probability, either. But the brothers Johann and Jacob Bernoulli came up with the law of large number or long averages in 1713 (the Golden Theorem), which proved that even with only a very small advantage, the house will always win if people play the games long enough. Abraham De Moivre tried to explain the concept to gambling parlor owners, but they and the gambling public were mostly illiterate and understood numbers in only the simplest terms. It took a long time for operators to realize that they could make plenty of dough even without cheating, and fair games would draw more participants.

History professor John Eglin explains this small advantage using roulette, in which the house has a small chance of winning without risking any money. That small chance will eventually make a casino tons of money, but it took hundreds of years for people to understand that. Read how mathematical laws make money for casinos at The Conversation.  -via Damn Interesting
 
(Image credit: Thomas Rowlandson)

In 1960, an ancient suit of armor was discovered in the Greek village of Dendra. It has been dated to around 1,500 BC, making it a part of the Mycenaean civilization, which ruled Greece at the time. The armor is made of plates of copper alloy, held together by leather strips, and would cover a soldier from face to knees, supplemented with arm and leg pieces and a helmet decorated with pieces of boar tusks. The Dendra specimen was in strangely good shape, and might never have been used in battle. That brought up a question- was this armor designed to be used during warfare, or was it ceremonial? It seemed to be too hot and heavy to be worn by actual warriors.  

To see if this armor could be used in battle, 13 exact replicas were made of the armor, and actual Greek soldiers from the 32nd Marines Brigade of the Hellenic Army were recruited to fight while wearing those replicas. To recreate battle conditions from 3,500 years ago, the soldiers ate a meal typical for the military of that time and were put in a temperature-controlled environment. Fight choreography was taken from Homer's Iliad. They fought for 11 hours with replicas of Mycenaean weaponry. You can see a video from the experiment here. Read about this re-enactment, er, experiment, and what we've learned about the Dendra armor at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Zde)

When you're playing Super Mario Bros. 2, or any other adventure game, you keep your eye out for new challenges. When you see something new or different, you go for it. What's the worst that could happen? You might waste time not getting points. Of course you go for it, and you never stop to think about the implications for anyone else, because you're just thinking about yourself, aren't you? Yeah, I thought so. Maybe before you pull someone's turnips out of the ground, you could stop just a minute and look up what those turnips really mean. Sure, it cost you a few seconds for nothing, but the folks who planted those turnips were counting on them for survival. It's easy to point out Mario as the bad guy, but who's playing this game, anyway? This pixilated cartoon from Dorkly is only two minutes long, the rest is credits and promotional.  

Science fiction and fantasy author Ellen Klages was once asked to fill time during the Nebula Awards ceremony while technical difficulties were worked out. She told a personal story about her father's Smithfield ham. He received it as a gift some time in the 1990s, and knew that Smithfield hams were supposed to improve with age. They have already been aged in a smokehouse before purchase, but he wanted to age it more, so he hung it in their damp basement. For years. When asked, he always had plans for the ham, but never got around to them. Klages' father died in 2008, with the ham still in the basement, permanently covered with a thick layer of mold. Klages and her sister, who had avoided the scary ham as best as they could, had to dispose of it some way. Her sister wanted a Viking funeral, or maybe they could just leave it somewhere, but they were afraid that would get them in trouble.

They put off disposing of the ham until all the other details of her father's estate were taken care of. By then they had arranged an elaborate funeral that you have to read about, accompanied by pictures of the event. Some people just know how to tell a story. -via Metafilter

(Unrelated image credit: Isle of Wight County Museum)

Yes, we manage to blow things up real good. MetaBallStudios (previously at Neatorama) takes us through the power of various explosives starting with a firecracker, which is not supposed to kill anyone but could under the right circumstances. Most of the other devices here were intentionally designed to kill. The comparison moves up through ever-more destructive explosions. Not all bombs are included; the ones they selected have quite enough power, thank you very much.

Some of the real historical explosions are shown happening in fictional scenarios so that we can picture in our minds and understand the effects better. For example, the atomic bomb detonated over the city of Nagasaki in 1945 is shown as if it were deployed over modern-day Tokyo, and the 2020 Beirut explosion (which was an industrial accident and not a bomb) is shown happening in New York City. That can be pretty unnerving. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

You may think the paperwork and legal procedures are onerous in buying a home or any kind of real estate, but there are good reasons for this. When you buy something, you want to make darn sure the person you're handing your money to has a legal right to sell it. That wasn't quite the case in 1879 when Stephen D. Richards was a newcomer in Kerney, Nebraska, and managed to sell the farm at which he was boarding. The farm belonged to the Harelson family. Mr. Harelson had been gone for some time, said to be a fugitive from the law. Richards told everyone that Mrs. Harelson and her three children had gone to be with him and had left the farm and all its contents to him. However, the bodies of Mrs. Harelson and her children, who had been bludgeoned to death, were found in a haystack.

An interstate manhunt chased Richards down and the sheriff finally arrested him in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio. It turns out that Richards was a serial killer, and claimed responsibility for at least nine deaths! You can read about that case at Murder by Gaslight, although it never explains what happened to the farm that had been sold through fraud. -via Strange Company

The question is, just how much water is really required to go kayaking? Not much, as a group of adventurous (read: crazy) friends in British Columbia found out. They took their kayaks out after a rain storm in Lion's Bay to slide down a really long drainage ditch into the ocean. Getting their kayaks deployed was a job, but then it's just like a waterslide, right? Not quite. For one thing, there are four of them in boats, so a pileup was inevitable, but not bad enough to stop the fun. For another thing, there are tree branches and other obstructions along a drainage ditch that you wouldn't see anywhere near a waterslide. It's a good thing they were wearing helmets. Notice the blood on one guy's hand when they are through. A good time was had by all. -via Born in Space 

In 1978, I was really put out at having to pay $8 to see the Eagles. Everyone knew that concert tickets were $5 and had been for years. Less than 50 years later, you could easily pay 100 times that much to see your favorite musical artist perform. And there's plenty of blame to go around. For one thing, there are lot more people now, wanting to see a limited number of touring artists. Even at the largest venues, an astonishing number of tickets are reserved for fan clubs, sponsors or their clients, and VIPs, which make retail tickets even more scarce than they appear. Then there are fees added. Then there's the infrastructure that allots tickets, which is expensive even when it works. Buying tickets online with a credit card opens up the system to all sorts of abuses that didn't work so well when you had to visit a box office to buy a paper ticket. Scalpers use the latest tech to bypass the safeguards that make ticket buying difficult for fans. The ease of making tons of money for nothing mean that scalpers are extremely hard to thwart. Read how the modern ticket-selling system works to hoover up your money at Vox.

You will be forgiven if you start watching this video and think it to be a comedy skit. Or a movie trailer. I started reading what I considered to be a serious tech article and then the video came up, and I had to read more carefully to make sure it's not a parody -especially when they went into doing a face transplant to go along with the brain transplant. BrainBridge is a medical engineering startup, and the "head transplant system" you see here is just a concept. It has a long way to go before it can actually be used, or even built. The real hurdle is that we do not know how to successfully attach brains to bodies.

One of the most significant challenges in realizing this ambitious concept is the current inability to fully repair nerve and spinal cord damage. BrainBridge acknowledges this hurdle and is actively recruiting top specialists in various fields to collaborate on finding solutions.

It's no surprise that BrainBridge is actively recruiting investors as well. At least they got a talented graphics company to put the concept video together. It would make a decent movie trailer, but that idea has already been done a few times.  -via Damn Interesting

Mattel continues to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Barbie doll with a new collection of nine dolls celebrating groundbreaking women in sports around the world. These dolls join a continuing lineup of Barbie Role Models. Just last month, Mattel debuted the Kristi Yamaguchi doll, modeled after the American figure skater. The nine new dolls are modeled after:

US tennis champion Venus Williams
Canadian soccer player Christine Sinclair
Australian soccer player Mary Fowler
French boxer Estelle Mossely
Mexican gymnast Alexa Moreno
Brazilian gymnast Rebeca Andrade
Spanish paratriathlete Susana Rodriguez
Retired Italian swimmer Federica Pellegrini
Polish sprinter Ewa Swoboda

Barbie is also partnering with VOICEINSPORT to provide virtual mentoring for young athletes, and with other retailers to produce Barbie books, snacks, gifts, and clothing with a sports theme. They are also offering a variety of Barbie dolls in uniforms of various sports and sports-themed play sets. We don't yet know when these dolls will be available to order or in a store near you. -via Smithsonian

Continue reading to see each athlete with her Barbie doll.

In the pantheon of tricks that advertisers use, the confusion between the terms "orange" and "oranges" is subtle and maliciously genius. What better way to confuse the viewer? Orange, as in the fruit, comes in discrete units and therefore takes a plural form with an "s." Orange, as in the color, is a continuous quality and has no plural form. This poor spokesperson, er, orange, doesn't see the distinction until she is corrected on it. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The manufacturers of the "orange" drink are counting on no one else catching the difference, either. That's why it's important to have an educated public. Despite schools' best efforts, most kids aren't listening during this lesson because they don't realize that it may be important to their lives later, and they end up believing they are really drinking orange juice. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The best neighbors are the ones who have something interesting going on that makes you smile, or at least doesn't adversely affect anyone around them. You know, the kind who make sure there's no HOA in the neighborhood before buying a home. I say this as the only homeowner in my neighborhood with a brightly-colored house. But even without the expensive but interesting constructions or decorations, they draw your attention for just being their own quirky selves. The fellow above told the guy who snapped the picture that he was taking his mother-in-law for a ride.

Someone in Lakewood dons a unicorn costume while snow blowing and this is the kind of community I want. pic.twitter.com/yYlfH42jAG

— SuzyLeeInCLE (@WeThePeopleCLE) January 23, 2022

What would you think if you saw a Dalek in someone's window? Or a Batmobile in the driveway? Or when someone does something as nice as staging a drive-in theater for the neighborhood kids? You'd get out your phone and snap a picture of course, because those things are worth sharing. See a ranked gallery of 50 pictures taken of wonderful scenes from the neighborhood at Bored Panda.

(Top image credit: rustede30)

We always loved the fascinating look under the hood that Bill Hammack, the Engineer Guy gave us over the years, but we haven't heard from him in a long time. Bill is back! Once again, he takes a mundane subject and makes it way too interesting. Duct tape (or Duck™ tape) is something everyone has, and everyone uses, but what makes it work so well? Hammack dissolved the tape into its component parts: The plastic backing, the cloth reinforcement, and the adhesive. The adhesive is key, because it has so many qualities that make it useful. It sticks things together effectively, but it's not permanent. Most of the time, it can be removed without leaving residue. We get an explanation of exactly how the adhesive behaves to give us the tape we want, and how adhesives in other kinds of tape differ. But the silver backing and the fabric reinforcement have important roles, too. Yes, there are many kinds of tape that vary in their components, making them useful for various applications, but duct tape is useful for almost everything in the world -except ducts.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the sequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, opens this weekend. While we were all astonished by the magnificent full length chase scene that was Fury Road in 2015, Furiosa is said to be even better.  In honor of the occasion, Screen Junkies is paying tribute to the man behind all the Mad Max films, George Miller, by looking at the first three of these movies.  

First, there was Mad Max in 1979, in which a cop named Max Rockatansky tries to keep order as society is collapsing in Australia. He was played by a 21-year-old American-born newcomer named Mel Gibson. The 1981 sequel was titled Mad Max 2 in Australia, and The Road Warrior in the US because so few Americans had seen the original that they did not want it to appear to be a sequel. The world had gone full dystopian by then, but fashion and car chases were paramount. The third movie in 1985 was Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, which was supremely silly but starred Tina Turner, so we all went to see it. It is considered the weakest of all the franchise's movies. This Honest Trailer looks back at all three movies of the Mad Max Mel Gibson era. And now we look forward to the Max-less Furiosa.    

🎓✨ At 98, WWII veteran and Poolesville resident Richard Remp received the high school diploma he forfeited to serve our country. Hand-delivered to his hospice bedside, this diploma marks a heartfelt tribute to his lifetime of bravery and service.

📰 https://t.co/lPqfoBEbM4 pic.twitter.com/TG3bb8EuMV

— Montgomery County MD (@MontgomeryCoMD) May 20, 2024

This story could be framed as a joke: "How long does it take a Marine to graduate from high school?" But it's actually a bittersweet story. Richard Remp of Poolesville, Maryland, is known as Gunny to his friends because he was a decorated gunnery sergeant in Vietnam. Remp did not graduate from high school because he dropped out at age 17 in order to serve in World War II. He stayed in the Marines and also served in Korea, and then in Vietnam. Now 98, Remp is in hospice care due to stage four cancer.

Remp's family, American Legion Post 247, and a caring school superintendent joined forces to issue Remp a diploma from Sharon High School in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Remp did not attend Sharon High School, but the nearby high school he attended could not pull off issuing a diploma in time. Sharon school Superintendent Justi Glaros rallied her school board to approve the diploma, and then drove 4.5 hours to hand-deliver it (along with a Sharon tigers t-shirt) to Remp on Friday. A video of Remp's acceptance speech will bring a tear to your eye. -via Fark