The Matrix is a classic science fiction action film, made on a budget of $63 million, which was astronomical in 1999. Studio 188 goes out of their way to prove you can recreate the special effects, props, and settings of The Matrix without spending a lot of money. -via reddit

Real estate and home renovation TV shows have pushed the benefits of the open plan home for years. They are big and airy and make the whole family seem like they're together even when everyone is doing their own thing. Some people thrive in a "great room" that includes living room, dining room, and kitchen all-in-one, while others grow to hate it. But you've bought the house. What can you do about it? You could put the walls back in, but if that's beyond your budget, Lifehacker has a few ideas you can try to reduce the noise and the exposure.

(Image credit: Milly Eaton)

The rest of the world wonders why the US doesn't use the metric system of measurement. The easy answer is our resistance to change, but that's not the entire picture. There have been various plans to change America over to metric since we broke away from the British Empire. In 1793, French scientist Joseph Dombey set out on a mission to discuss metric measurements with Thomas Jefferson. He never made it, which set the tone for conversion schemes ever since, including the 1975 Metric Conversion Act.    

Nevertheless, contrary to popular belief, in the decades since, the United States actually has largely switched to the metric system, just the general public (both domestic and international) seem largely ignorant of this. The U.S. military almost exclusively uses the metric system. Since the early 1990s, the Federal government has largely been converted, and the majority of big businesses have made the switch in one form or another wherever possible. In fact, with the passage of the Metric Conversion Act of 1988, the metric system became the “preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce”.

In the medical field and pharmaceuticals. the metric system is also used almost exclusively. In fact, since the Mendenhall Order of 1893, even the units of measure used by the layperson in the U.S., the yard, foot, inch, and pound, have all been officially defined by the meter and kilogram.

Schoolchildren learn more about the metric system than ever before, and even change-resistant folks know what a 5K run, a 2-liter bottle, or a gram of weed is.  Read the history of the metric system in the United States at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Scott Brody)

A couple of the stereotypes about Germany are efficiency and engineering, but this story shows the opposite. Construction began on the new Berlin Brandenburg Airport in 2006, but it has yet to land a plane. Half As Interesting tells the Story.

Even thought measles was considered eradicated in the US in 2000, there have been 695 cases reported this year. How immune are you? If you received a measles vaccination many years ago, you might need a booster shot. Children who received the vaccine between 1963 (when it was first available) and 1989 got one measles shot. After 1989, two shots were recommended to confer maximum immunity.

CDC guidelines for measles vaccines haven't changed since the current outbreak began. The department says that anyone born after 1957 should have received at least one dose of the vaccine, which is 93 percent effective against the disease. But if Gen Xers want to be extra cautious, they can ask their doctor to test their antibody levels to see if they're immune. If they're still vulnerable to measles, they can get a second booster shot, which together with the initial vaccination is about 97 percent effective.

But the CDC's current priority is children who haven't been vaccinated at all. Thanks to the misinformation around vaccines, a growing number of parents have opted not to get their kids vaccinated, which has fueled the current health crisis in the U.S. According to a 2016 review of measles studies, out of 970 measles cases, almost 42 percent of patients had skipped the vaccine for non-medical reasons.

And that's why we have a nationwide measles outbreak now. If you don't have vaccination records or a way to get them, you can have your antibodies tested. But if you've actually had measles, your immunity is considered to be high. Read more about the CDC guidelines at Mental Floss.

Fans of Breaking Bad are familiar with the origin of the story: Vince Gilligan was commiserating with a writer friend about the lack of work during the writer's strike, and the friend suggested making meth in an RV. They didn't so that, but the idea became Breaking Bad. There's certainly more to the story than that. Behind the Curtain compiled various interviews to produce an oral history of sorts that explores how Walter White evolved from a normal science teacher to a man addicted to money, risk, and power. It was a radical idea for TV, which turned into a devastating character study over the years. -via Laughing Squid   

Potoooooooo was a thoroughbred racehorse that won 30 races between 1776 and 1783. He was sired by the undefeated Eclipse. However, his long-lived fame mostly comes from his name. You can better understand the name if you see it written Pot-8-Os. This newspaper clipping from The Washburn Leader in North Dakota was published in 1915. -via Strange Company

You recall how the cat named Pusic is very affectionate and very much spoiled by his family. Like many cats, he loves to play with toilet paper. So his humans lined an entire room with toilet paper for Pusic to play in!

When you visit a public restroom, do you prefer to dry your hands with paper towels or an air dryer? Each has their drawbacks. Paper towels run out, and fill up waste baskets as well as landfills. Air dryers are loud, take too long, and sometimes don't work. Some studies show that they blow bacteria around. And for a lot of folks, public restrooms are all about the germs.

The holy grail for such phobists is the contactless restroom. In the industry, people speak with shining eyes about this ideal chamber, where our hands need not touch anything that other hands have defiled. Already, we enter some airport bathrooms through a brief switchback of walls, so that we don’t ever grasp a door handle. Once inside, sensors can eliminate the need to yank the flush, turn the tap, jab at the soap dispenser or pull a paper towel from the dispenser. The modern hand dryer, with no buttons to push, ought to fit neatly into this fantasy of the zero-contact loo. Instead, towel companies are convinced that dryers are the filthy exception to the rule, and that the singular safe item to touch in a public restroom is an old-school leaf of rough, thick paper.

Do you recall cloth towels in public restrooms? They came in a roll, and you pulled down a clean section to use. Those went away when industrial linen services faded. Now paper manufacturers have a lot of clout, but so do air dryer manufacturers, and Dyson went big when they introduced the Airblade hand dryer. They are locked in a battle for supremacy in public restrooms. The Guardian has a deep dive into the history of hand-drying, and the battle between paper towels and air dryers. -via Digg 

Believe it or not, the video series called Autotune the News is ten years old. To celebrate the occasion, Andrew Gregory of the Gregory Brothers went back to Autotune the News #2 and expanded on the segment with Kate Couric that includes the phrase "very thin ice," and made an entire song about it. Ten years later, we are on even thinner ice. -via Metafilter

You might recall seeing a woman bursting out of a cake in old movies, or more likely, old cartoons. It was a trope reserved for truly lavish and hedonistic occasions. If you've ever wondered how that idea got started, it was a party in 1895, ostensibly to celebrate Ellliot Cowdin’s 10th wedding anniversary, but since there were no women invited, it was more of a stag party. The dessert was a huge pie, from which 16-year-old Susie Johnson emerged, to the surprise and delight of the guests.

For the posh set of late-19th century New York City—a coterie as obsessed with public prudery as with private adultery—the “Pie-Girl” dinner was a sensation. “The ‘Girl in the Pie’ at the Three Thousand Five Hundred Dollar Dinner in Artist Breese’s New York Studio,” declared the New York World, above an illustration of Johnson thronged by besuited men, spread like a Venus in pastry. The picture was as scandalous as the dinner’s cost: more than 2,300 times the daily wage of a day laborer.

In the New York World illustration, architect Stanford White stands to Susie Johnson’s left, wielding a large kitchen knife as though about to carve her. According to the article, shortly after the party, Susie Johnson posed “by electric light” at an artist’s studio, a euphemism for sex work, and went missing soon after. “Poor Susie Johnson, dazzled by the lavish compliments and surprised by the liberality of her distinguished patrons,” reported the World. “Perhaps this article will bring Susie Johnson home to her parents and put a stop to the midnight revels in New York’s fashionable studios.”

The guests at the notorious party included Nicola Tesla and Stanford White, who later made the papers for raping Evelyn Nesbit and then being murdered. Read about the girl in the pie at Atlas Obscura.

What if the new movie Avengers: Endgame came out forty years ago? Darth Blender took existing footage and the narration style of yesteryear to imagine what it could have been like. And if we were actually watching this in the 1970s, we would have liked it! The latest edition of Marvel's Avengers have plenty of precursors from movies and TV, but they don't quite resemble what we've grown accustomed to from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. -via Digg

You've heard of Stockholm syndrome, when a captive or an abuse victim starts to sympathize with their abuser. It came from the 1973 Norrmalmstorg robbery in Sweden, in which four bank employees felt no ill will toward Jan-Erik Olsson, who had held them as hostages for six days. They even refused to testify against him. But what you might not recall is how very American the bank robbery seemed at the time.

Olsson was born and raised in Sweden. When he arrived at the Kreditbank on August 23, however, he didn’t speak in his native tongue. He barked orders in English, obscuring his identity. According to Daniel Lang’s New Yorker report on the robbery, he also donned “a pair of toy-store spectacles and a thick brown wig; his cheeks were rouged; and his reddish-brown mustache and eyebrows were dyed jet black.”

But the American accent proved to be perhaps the most crucial piece of his cartoonish disguise. He announced his presence to the customers and tellers at the bank with a round of fire, directed at the ceiling, and a shout: “The party has just begun!” This was a line Olsson had lifted from “an American movie about a convict on the loose,” as Lang wrote, though the exact film was never specified. It wasn’t the only bizarre allusion to U.S. pop culture that day. When a plainclothes police sergeant arrived on the scene, Olsson threatened him at gunpoint, teasing him to sing a song. The sergeant chose Elvis Presley’s “Lonesome Cowboy,” assuming the (seemingly) American man before him would enjoy a familiar tune.

Through this assumed identity, Olsson was telegraphing a propensity for violence—one that was largely foreign to Sweden.

Read more about the robbery and its American veneer at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting

The movie Stockholm, a slightly fictionalized account of the Norrmalmstorg robbery starring Ethan Hawke, is in theaters now. The image is from the film.  

The Idaho Potato Commission used a six-ton, 28-foot-long manufactured potato to promote their 75th anniversary. The big potato went on tour for six years, and now has been replaced with a new model. Instead of destroying the original, tiny house developer Kristie Wolfe turned it into an Airbnb rental!      

The Big Idaho Potato Hotel, which will cost $200 a night plus $42 in taxes and fees, is for couples. With 336 square feet, it includes a queen-size bed, two easy chairs, an elk antler chandelier, a small sink, lights, heating and air conditioning, and a beverage cooler. There’s a separate bathroom that looks like a miniature steel silo with a round corrugated steel tub, a walk-in shower and sink and toilet.

The hollow interior of the Big Idaho Potato was used to store supplies and T-shirts, Spuddy Buddy stuffed animals and other promotional items during the cross-country tours. Wolfe added 8 inches of spray foam insulation to hide the frame, hooked the potato up to well water and a septic tank, and is readying it for electricity. She carved out two nooks next to the head of the bed and space for the sink and beverage cooler near the door at one end. She installed a wood floor.

The potato will be rented out beginning at the end of May. Read the story of the Big Idaho Potato Hotel at the Idaho Statesman. -via Thrillist

My dad tends to hold the cat's hands when he nods off. (Image credit: rupinjapan)

A dog may be man's best friend, but there's nothing cuter than a bond between a man and his cat. Even men who tell you they don't like cats can be wrapped around a little furry paw.

My dad fixing the pool. His cat likes to help. He would tell you otherwise, but he loves that cat! (Image credit: jchristena)

A ranked gallery at Bored Panda shows us 30 men with their beloved cats. Some are really attractive, and the cats are adorable, too. In between the images is an interview with Chris Poole, who Neatorama readers are familiar with through his cats Cole and Marmalade. I didn't use the number one picture here because it may cause you to go into emotional overload.