Back in 1989, the B52s gave us a summer party anthem that took us to the "Love Shack." Thirty years later, we all remember it well. The song was bouncy and happy and fun. But it could have been very different. What if H.P. Lovecraft had written the song "Love Shack"?

That morning, I had set out with Cedric (a fellow medical student at Miskatonka State) with the intention of putting to rest a ludicrously backwoods Southern legend. We had set off in a massive horse-carriage, a true leviathan capable of holding twenty souls, which bore the chrome mark of its maker: Chrysler Manufactory, Detroit.

As we left Atlanta, we gave the horses free rein, and our great carriage set sail down the broad, cypress-lined highways. Our easy progress, however, was not to last. As the hours stretched on, an oppressive mist began to rise from the accursed marshes that surrounded us. Cedric and I spent uncountable hours peering into the gloom, and just as I was about to lose all hope, at the side of the road, a faded sign shewed forth:

SHACK OF INDULGENCE
15 MILES

It gets better from there. So come along, and bring your juke box money! The horror edition of "Love Shack" is at McSweeney's. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: "Forgotin"by Martin Eckles is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The editors of Polygon have dared to compare all 22 movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe against each other and have published a ranked list. I can't complain about their choices because I've only seen four of them. The mini-reviews that accompany the entries have something good to say about each movie, and they do contain spoilers, just in case you haven't seen Avengers: Endgame yet. Check it out and see if you agree with their assessments. -via Digg

(Image credit: Marvel Studios/James Bareham/Polygon)

Tang Chang of Jiangsu, China, adopted a stray cat and named him Ah Fei, which means fat. The cat turned out to be very playful and has become popular on Instagram for his wonderfully expressive face.

Whether he is happy, sad, startled, excited, disappointed, puzzled, or just hungry, Ah Fei does not hide his feelings!

Read about Ah Fei at Bored Panda, and see lots of goofy pictures of him at Instagram.

Quentin Smirhes plays Erik Satie's Gnossienne No. 1 on a recorder-music box combination, with a little help from his "18th Century hand teacher." This new video is a throwback to the days when making a video for the internet meant being as weird as you can be. -via Metafilter

These three cats are understandably curious when a plush puppy shows up in their back yard. But they are completely bumfuzzled when it starts to mew like a litter of kittens! Well, you have to admit, it doesn't make any sense. -via Laughing Squid

People put a lot of thought into whether to have children at all, but then there's the next question of whether to have another -and another. The best answer for an individual is that they should have the number of children they want, but not so many as to damage the family's ability to nurture them. However, if you frame the question differently as "What is the optimal number of children for the greatest number of families?" then you get into some serious sociological research. And the answer depends on many factors.  

One recent paper suggested that becoming a parent does indeed make people happier, as long as they can afford it. And a 2014 review of existing research, whose authors were skeptical of “overgeneralizations that most parents are miserable or that most parents are joyful,” detected other broad patterns: Being a parent tends to be a less positive experience for mothers and people who are young, single, or have young children. And it tends to be more positive for fathers and people who are married or who became parents later in life.

What’s optimal, then, depends on age, life stage, and family makeup—in other words, things that are subject to change. While being the parent of a young child may not seem to maximize happiness, parenthood may be more enjoyable years down the line.

Indeed, Bryan Caplan believes that when people think about having children, they tend to dwell on the early years of parenting—the stress and the sleep deprivation—but undervalue what family life will be like when their children are, say, 25 or 50. His advice to those who suspect they might be unhappy without grandchildren someday: “Well, there’s something you can do right now in order to reduce the risk of that, which is just have more kids.”

The answer also varies by gender and culture, with mothers being happier in countries with generous parental leave and subsidized daycare, for example. Read about the different variables that affect the number of children that make parents happiest at the Atlantic.  

(Image credit: C. M. Bell/Library of Congress/Katie Martin/The Atlantic)

Thomas Edison recorded sound on tinfoil and played it back in 1877. That doesn't mean he was the first person to record sound, because that had already been done. But the first sound recordings couldn't be played back because there was no technology for doing so at the time. In the 1850s, French printer and bookseller Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created sound recordings by causing a stylus to transmit patterns of sound vibrations on soot-covered paper.

I cover a plate of glass with an exceedingly thin stratum of lampblack. Above I fix an acoustic trumpet with a membrane the diameter of a five franc coin at its small end—the physiological tympanum (eardrum). At its center I affix a stylus—a boar’s bristle a centimeter or more in length, fine but suitably rigid. I carefully adjust the trumpet so the stylus barely grazes the lampblack. Then, as the glass plate slides horizontally in a well formed groove at a speed of one meter per second, one speaks in the vicinity of the trumpet’s opening, causing the membranes to vibrate and the stylus to trace figures.

In the 21st century, specialists at First Sounds harnessed computers to digitize those "phonautographs" and decipher the sounds that created them. You can hear recordings going back as far as 1853, and listen to a podcast about the process of retrieving sounds recorded 166 years ago, at Kottke.

The movie won't be out until December, but we have a trailer, and that's enough for the remixes, parodies, and alternate versions. John Stratman took the trailer for Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker and made a pixelated version that would look right at home on an arcade video game console of the 1980s. Even the sound is deliciously retro.  -via Mashable

Redundancy is when you realize that ATM already has the word "machine" in the acronym, but people say "machine" anyway, as you see in this comic from Zack Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast cereal. PIN works the same way. But those are far from the only misused acronyms. Check out the list compiled at Redundant Acronym Phrases.

A Redundant Acronym Phrase (RAP) is a phrase containing an acronym plus a word or phrase such that, when the acronym is expanded, the phrase would contain a redundancy. This is best illustrated by an example: ATM machine. ATM is an acronym for automated teller machine. Thus, ATM machine really means Automated Teller Machine machine. Similarly, RAP phrase means Redundant Acronym Phrase phrase.

The term RAP phrase was coined in 1985 and first appeared on the Internet in 1995 as a category in the IRC game Chaos. This phenomenon was later described using other terms, such as RAS syndrome (Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome), coined in 2001, or PNS syndrome (PIN Number Syndrome syndrome).

Check through them and you'll start to recognize them more and more in everyday life and media. But try to resist the urge to point every one of them out to those around you ...because you may start to sound redundant. -Thanks, Spellucci!

When fire broke out at Notre Dame cathedral last month, we learned it was being remodeled and repaired -as it had been on and off for hundreds of years. Many Gothic cathedrals in Europe spent centuries under construction, and quite a few are still not completed. You can be sure that as soon as they are, there will be remodels and repairs planned. Cathedral construction has always been a quest to be the biggest and the best, which undercuts any plan to get it done quickly and/or economically. An American example is the cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, which is still incomplete more than 100 years after breaking ground. Breaking ground itself was a bigger project than was planned.

Ground broke on December 27, 1892, and almost immediately it became clear just how many unknowns the project would hold. Workers discovered that – unlike at St. Luke’s across the street - there was nothing solid to build on. Excavation revealed loose rock, compressible earth, and underground springs. Workers had to dig 72 feet down before they hit bedrock, by which point said springs had turned the hole into a lake. It would take ten years before they drained the hole and built back up the foundation.

The choir called for eight massive granite columns: each 54 feet tall, six feet in diameter, and weighing 160 tons. To cut the 310 ton blanks down to size, the church commissioned Philadelphia Roll and Machine Works to build a custom 135 ton, 86-foot-long lathe at the cost of $50,000 (in today’s dollars, $1.5 million). To transport them from Vinalhaven Maine required a specially built barge.

The rule of the iron triangle is that adjustments in one leg affects the other two. A larger budget may shorten the timeline, but a larger scope almost always means a ballooning schedule and budget. For St. John the Divine, the property cost $850,000 (today, $24 million). The extra foundation work then required a $500,000 ($15 million) gift from J.P. Morgan, “to get us out of the hole.” As a fundraiser, each column was dedicated to a sponsor for $20,000 ($610,000), but their unit cost ended up being $25,000 ($761,000). By 1900 the cathedral had spent more than $2 million ($60 million), and all they had was a single stark crossing arch.

Construction continued through wars, recessions, and the deaths of those responsible for both financing and building the cathedral. Read the saga of St. John the Divine cathedral at The Prepared. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Olivier Perrin)

For far too long, people believed that Theodore Roosevelt once rode a moose across a river. It was just the kind of thing he would do, after all -and we have a photograph! Alas, the photo is not real, but the story behind it is rather interesting. It was part of a newspaper illustration that featured three of the four candidates running for president in 1912. William Howard Taft was shown riding an elephant, Woodrow Wilson was on a donkey, and Roosevelt was placed on a moose. Yep, each candidate was astride the symbol of their political party. Strangely, all three men served in the office: Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909, Taft was running as the incumbent, and Wilson won the election. Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party also ran, but did not make the cut for the illustration. That's one fake historical picture; read about four others at Cracked.

If you were to be pulled over while driving and then approached by a robot cop, you'd probably wonder if you really are too drunk to drive (even if you don't drink). This video from SRI International introduces their robotic police officer, who is actually an extension of a human cop who stays in the police car during the traffic stop. Through the robot, he can video chat with the driver, examine documents, and print out a ticket. It's not quite the badass Peter Weller cyborg we've come to expect from movies.  -via Digg

What color do you see here- is the shoe gray with teal laces, or is it pink with white laces? People are pretty well split on the answer.

OK, what do you guys see? For picture 1, I see gray and teal, my husband sees pink and white. BUT if I add a filter to it I can actually see the pink and white (picture 2). pic.twitter.com/OVesggOr7Z

— Heather Macht (@AuthorHMacht) May 3, 2019

Does it help when you notice there's a hand in the picture, and it's not the right color? Why did she have to apply filters to get the colors to look true? It might be a matter of color consistency. Or it might just be the bad lighting, which is really the same thing. How do people see the first picture as pink and white, when I can only see gray and teal? On the other hand, when I enlarged the photo on Twitter to download it, I saw the pink and white. Aaaagh!

-via Metafilter

In 1989, 22-year-old Tracy Edwards organized an all-woman team to enter the Whitbread Race to sail around the world. It had never been done before, and when Edwards served as a cook in her first Whitbread experience, there were only four women among the 230 crew members in the race. But she didn't put together the Maiden team as a stunt, or to prove they could do it. Edwards figured that in an all-female crew, none of the sailors could be singled out as "the woman" on board to be taken less than seriously, as was her personal experience. However, their goals evolved.  

Maiden struggled to find financial backing, with executives either disdainful of the endeavor or terrified that their names would forever be attached to a fatal disaster. As Edwards fought to keep the project on track, she was met with a chorus of discouragement and doubt. The sailing world treated Maiden like a foolish pipe dream, and the media covered it like a stunt.

“It just became a battle of wills,” Edwards recalled, positing that if her efforts hadn’t faced such resounding, sexist backlash, she might not have seen the project through: “Yeah, that helped.”

In interview clips from the time, questions range from patronizing to all-out sexist. Edwards and her crew were rarely asked about sailing, underlining the fact that the world didn’t see them as sailors at all—more like an all-female sideshow act. “It gave us great direction, if nothing else. It really focused our minds. Whereas before we were a bit like, you know, let’s just give it a go. This sounds so weird, but it wasn't about women sailing. We just wanted to race around the world on an equal playing field. Then it became about women.”

Read Edwards' story, which is told in the documentary Maiden thirty years after the race.

One of the differences between the American and Soviet space programs was that the US launched rockets over water and landed capsules into the ocean, while the Soviets did so over land. The result was a widely-spread junkyard of rocket boosters and fuel tanks in Russian forests. All that tempting scrap metal among poor country folk, and the eyes of the Communist Party everywhere.

They never dared scavenge the junk for scrap until the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union began to fall. At first, they told Tereshin, they hacked the metal with axes. Then someone got the bright idea to use a circular saw. Still, it could take more than a week to dismantle a single booster, sometimes sleeping inside for warmth. They sold the metal—aluminum, gold, silver, copper, and titanium—for cash in the capital Arkhangelsk and also hammered it into whatever they happened to need: flat-bottomed boats (dubbed "ракетаs" or rockets), hunting sleds, fencing, gutters, and even saunas—infusing a region otherwise known for its traditional Russian culture and folklore with a touch of space punk.

The 1990s were the heyday of scrap metal for a wide area of Russia. Read about those metal recovery efforts at Wired. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Flickr user Clare Wilkinson)