Max Headroom was a fictional computer-generated character who was designed for TV hosting and advertising, but was actually pretty subversive underneath because the artificial intelligence program that generated him used the brain of a real (although fictional) person as a model. The character, portrayed by Matt Frewer in prosthetics, first appeared in the British movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future in 1985. He then hosted a TV show called The Max Headroom Show, followed by an American drama titled simply Max Headroom, and also appeared in a series of ads for New Coke, all in the 1980s.   

Now Max Headroom is coming back, to be played once again by Matt Frewer. A new TV series is being developed by AMC around the glitchy TV personality, with Christopher Cantwell of Halt and Catch Fire fame as showrunner. The executive producers will be Frewer, Cantwell, Lisa Whalen, Elijah Wood, and Daniel Noah. There's no word yet on when the series is expected to air.

What's weird is that in 1985, a glitchy, digital talking head seemed like some type of science fiction that was just over the horizon. In 2022, we have talking digital avatars, deep fake videos, and artificial intelligence programs galore. We have to wonder what year the Max Headroom reboot will be set in, and whether it will explore new issues about the nature of AI, or will it be just a nostalgic romp. -via Boing Boing

Did you hear the one about the foot doctor who owed his reputation to Abraham Lincoln? Issachar Zacharie was not trained as a medical doctor, although he used the term throughout his professional life. He was a chiropodist who made a living trimming corns and bunions and cutting toenails in New York City. Zacharie used forged certificates and references to inflate his qualifications. The truth was that he learned his crafts as a child apprenticed to a physician.

Zacharie had one very important client, though. The "doctor" had suggested he be put in charge of a team of podiatrists for the Union Army in the Civil War, but the idea was not taken seriously. However, army officials and senators asked Zacharie to work on their feet. Abraham Lincoln eventually availed himself of Zacharie's services and liked the corn-cutter very much. Lincoln actually sent Zacharie on a couple of spy missions disguised as diplomacy during the war. Once Lincoln was assassinated, Zacharie quickly learned he was a nobody among Washington's elite. Read the story of the fraudulent foot doctor at The London Dead.  -via Strange Company

Oscar is sleeping, and he doesn't want to get up. No noise will disturb his slumber, and Paul makes plenty of noise when he gets home from work. The simulated snoring is funny, but I could have found him a cat that snores loudly for real. While it appears that Oscar is dead to the world, there's a part of his brain that is still working, sorting the sounds around him into important sounds and unimportant sounds. A cat has his priorities.

Paul Klusman, who you know from the Engineer's Guide to Cats and its sequel, titled this video Cat Audio Filtration Technology, as you would expect an engineer to do. Don't miss the bloopers at the end. -via Laughing Squid

We know that most adults in the world are lactose-intolerant. That means they've lost the ability to produce lactase, an enzyme that helps babies digest milk. Those who continue to produce lactase and digest milk into adulthood are overwhelmingly northern Europeans. The conventional wisdom was that Europeans evolved this trait to survive, particularly those in the far north where the growing season is short and people rely on animal fats in milk. There are a couple of problems with this theory, however. First off, there are plenty of people in northern Asia who drink milk all their lives even though they do not produce lactase beyond infancy.  It doesn't bother them nearly as much as you'd think from reading about the subject, and certainly not enough to affect group survival. The second problem is that scientists have determined that European adults drank milk as far back at 9,000 years ago, but the switch to lactose-tolerance only occurred about 5,000 years ago, and quite suddenly for an evolutionary trait.

The answer is that there must have been an environmental stressor that made lactose-intolerant people die off in droves about 5,000 years ago, so that the genes responsible for continued lactase production could reach critical mass in the population. That would be a stressor on top of the inability to digest milk, because people do not die of lactose intolerance. The candidates are famine, drought, and pathogens that would disproportionally affect those who could not digest milk. Read what the research says so far about the evolution of lactose-tolerance at Smithsonian.

How does this optical illusion work? You may think it's simply a matter of filming the video sideways, because it's attached to a wall instead of a table. That would be the easy way. I was convinced of that and therefore couldn't see it any other way until we were shown how it works. You might be surprised as well!

Yeah, it's all a matter of perspective. Struck Duck, who made this illusion, has an Etsy store where you can buy this and other illusions. Or if you have a 3D printer, you can buy the STL files and make your own. -via Digg

Edgar Randolph Parker graduated from dental school in 1892 at the age of twenty, even though he wasn't much of a student. When his private practice didn't take off immediately, he decided to advertise, despite advertising being an ethical taboo among dentists at the time. But Parker didn't just advertise- he put on a street show! He promised his tooth extraction would be painless, a claim that was bolstered by the cocaine solution he gave to his patients. Under advice from a former employee of P.T. Barnum, Parker took his show on the road, setting up in small town after small town, offering entertainment by giving lectures on dental hygiene and having his traveling band play. If a volunteer patient screamed and moaned, the band would just play louder.

Parker claimed to have pulled 357 teeth in one day, which he wore on a necklace. Eventually, the dental board of California threatened to pull his license over false advertising for using the "painless" slogan, so Parker had his first name legally changed to Painless! Read about the dentist who found great fame through showmanship at Amusing Planet.

Remember the guy who repurposed his deceased cat by making it into a helicopter? This stunt goes much further in making a dead animal into something useful by using the its anatomy in movement! Spiders move their legs by hydraulic pressure- they pump water into them to make them extend, and then flex them with muscles. Spiders do not have opposing muscles in their legs to extend them. Mechanical engineering professor Daniel Preston and graduate student Faye Yap found a dead spider curled up in the lab and decided to do something with it. They found that they could blow air into the spider corpse and make its legs extend. By releasing the air pressure, the spider legs flexed again. It became a rather hardy gripper tool, good for at least a thousand grips, and able to pick up 130% of its weight.

This seems like a neat thing for mechanical engineers to discover, but is there any use for such a tool? The spider-gripper could be used for collecting fragile biological samples, like insects. Read about this research at Gizmodo, and if you're interested, there's also a slideshow that will show you how it's done.

When we are kids, birthdays are wonderful. Your birthday marks a milestone in the steps of growing up. Your family wants to celebrate the milestone, your friends love the parties, and you like a day when the world revolves around you (not to mention the gifts). However, for many people, the date hits differently as an adult. There are several reasons for the birthday blues, including missing how special birthdays were in your childhood. As an adult, you find that people you know often don't remember and sometimes don't care. It's also a time for taking stock of your life so far, which may be disappointing. And you can't help but ponder getting older and inching toward the end of your life. You're not the only person who feels that way when a birthday rolls around, but there are things you can do to make your birthday less depressing. Read about them at Refinery29. Practice these tips and sooner or later, you'll even forget how old you are! -via Digg

The history of food is as rich and long as the history of language or war, as just as consequential as either. Anything that makes food preparation simpler, safer, or more enjoyable is going to eventually become universal. Mental Floss take us on a tour of some culinary inventions that had a profound impact on people all over the world. You would probably guess that the process of baking food is in there, and microwave ovens, but it turns out that the simple hand-cranked can opener was a game changer, because it was invented long after canned food!  

Preservation is a major theme of food history’s biggest breakthroughs. When modern canning was invented in the early 1800s, eating nutritious meals on long journeys or during hard winters became more feasible. But perhaps just as important as canning is the invention that made cans easier to use. Believe it or not, the can opener came nearly five decades after the first metal cans. Before that, people literally had to chisel away at their containers to get dinner.

One has to wonder why they even bothered to pack food in cans when no plan was in place to open them. Read how the can opener made canned food usable, and the origins of nine other inventions at Mental Floss. Or you can listen to the list in a video at the same link.

(Image credit: Hedwig von Ebbel)

Katherine went to the livestock market in Kashgar, China, to see the big butt sheep she'd heard so much about. She found fat-tailed sheep everywhere. Like camels, they carry a deposit of fat in one place because they live in a desert, where it's too hot to have fat dispersed all along the body. In this ancient market, Katherine also found souvenirs, lamb dishes, rice dishes, ice cream, badly-translated t-shirts, and some disdain for Americans.

In the comments under the video, we get a clarification on the "pillows" being sold. They aren't for slapping, but more like an oven mitt used to bake naan without getting burned. -via Digg

Baking soda, or bicarbonate of soda, has multiple uses, like making your cake rise, killing odors in your laundry, alleviating stomach acid pains, or removing rust. Oh yeah, and that grade school volcano. And it has many other uses you might not have ever heard of. Nik Sharma is a molecular biologist who is also a cook. Along with writing recipes, he's got plenty of things to tell us about baking soda, which he believes should be used in the kitchen for a lot more than making cakes rise.

Drink a mixture of baking soda and water, and you can neutralize excess stomach acid. But you'll also belch when it's working. That's the same mechanism that works to make a cake rise. The soda neutralizes an acid, like buttermilk, and produces gas bubbles that lift the cake to lofty deliciousness. But you might not know how soda works on beans and potatoes. And coffee. Learn about those, as well as the history of baking soda, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Willis Lam)

Almost every town has a festival, and its theme is important to drawing tourists. Who wouldn't want to attend a dragon-slaying festival? It happens every August in the town of Furth im Wald, Germany, for more than 400 years now. They re-enact a classical dragon tale, with a huge dragon, once operated by people, although it eventually became mechanical. Now they have an 11-ton remote-control robot dragon! The dragon is named Tradinno, and for a while it held the record for the world's largest robot. Tom Scott gets a look at the dragon ahead of the festival. Want to go? Check out the festival site, which is in German.

The Barbie doll was introduced in 1959. That's a run of 63 years so far, and plenty of time for a massively popular toy to have some ups and downs. Indeed, the doll and her marketing changed with the times, often in misguided ways. The bigger Barbie became, the more opportunities there were for marketing mistakes as the Barbie brand moved into books, movies, and video games. And Barbie embraced new technology, often awkwardly. In 1992, Teen Talk Barbie put her ditziness into words, saying phrases like “Will we ever have enough clothes?” and "Math class is hard!" which sparked quite a backlash.

The Teen Talk Barbie was the last straw for a group of people who called themselves the Barbie Liberation Organization. They bought a bunch of Teen Talk Barbies, swapped their voice boxes with those of talking G.I. Joes that were unfortunately produced at the same time, and put them back on store shelves just in time for Christmas. Around 300 Barbies in at least two states were opened on Christmas morning only to announce “Vengeance is mine!” and “Eat lead, Cobra,” definitely radicalizing at least a few second-graders.

Can you imagine what those dolls are worth on the open market today? Anyway, there are plenty of other missteps in the long history of Barbie dolls that you can read at Cracked.

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— バーチャル高校野球 (@asahi_koshien) July 23, 2022

Baseball has a lot of rules because otherwise there would be chaos. Players do their best to exploit existing rules whenever they can, and flagrantly pushing the envelope will eventually lead to new rules. Observe Japanese high school batter Ko Yamaguchi playing in their national tournament. He makes no effort to swing at the ball, but does everything possible to draw a pitching violation. He crouches to shrink the strike zone, he moves back and forth to destabilize the zone, and he changes hands for each pitch. Yamaguchi eventually gets on base by being hit by pitch, which we suspect was his goal all along. You have to wonder what his batting average is. These shenanigans led sportswriter Larry Brown to dub Yamaguchi "the most annoying batter of all time." If someone else can beat this performance, I'd like to see it. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Charles Davis Photography)

The subreddit Confusing Perspectives collects images that are accidental illusions. Most are just everyday snapshots that make your brain think something really weird is happening. No, it's a matter of matching colors, strange angles, or something going on behind the subject you don't know about. The picture above looks like a nice normal tree until you are told that the tree is dead and there are no leaves on it. Those are all Australian budgerigars, which the British call budgies and Americans call parakeets. They are having a meetup. At least they are actually sitting in the tree, while this cat is levitating.   

(Image credit: Flamind666)

You'll find 50 pictures that are photographic illusions at Bored Panda. Make that 49 accidental illusions and one at the very bottom that is a real deliberate illusion.