Alfred Percival Maudslay was a British diplomat, archeologist, and explorer who studied Maya ruins in the late 19th century. In other words, he was a real-life Indiana Jones. For 13 years, he traveled through Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico identifying and trying his best to preserve the remains of the ancient Maya civilization.

He pioneered the archaeological practice of working alongside plasterers, technicians and artists to make casts and impressions of the carvings and statues before their inevitable disturbance that would see them end up on display in museums around the world– or worse, destroyed to make gravel fill for roads. In 2015, an ancient Mayan pyramid in Belize that stood for 2300 years, constructed with hand-made limestone bricks, and once the centre of a settlement of 40,000 people, was torn down and turned into gravel used to repair roads. The company responsible was only fined $24,000.

Best of all, Maudslay photographed his work on glass plates. Because of this, ancient carvings that were eventually destroyed could be deciphered many years later. And he took pictures of not only the artifacts and the sites, but also the people who worked on them. See some of those images at Messy Nessy Chic.

Many businesses have symbols that act as advertising for people who don't read, going back to the time when most people couldn't read. The barber pole is one of those symbols that has an interesting history of its own. To explain the evolution of the barber pole, Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out goes through the entire history of the changing occupation of the barber. After a minute-long ad in the middle, we get bonus facts about the meaning of "Rx" as in prescriptions, and how Jack's haircut in Titanic caused a sensation in Afghanistan.

In 1922, several guests at the Loch Maree Hotel in Scotland woke up ill on the same day. Their symptoms began with nausea, dizziness, and double vision, then over several days proceeded to paralysis, inability to breathe, and death. Six guests and two employees were affected.

With the arrival of police, newspaper reporters, four more doctors and several coffins, a shell-shocked Mr. Robertson watched most of his 30-odd healthy guests speedily check out. The stately Loch Maree Hotel, formerly renowned for a brief visit by Queen Victoria in 1877, now faced infamy.

“The spirit of tragedy broods in the glens and haunts the hills,” reported one paper as word spread. Within a day, headlines of the incident were sowing panic across Britain. As the Scotsman delicately put it, “Scotland so rarely experiences so painful a sensation.” Shuddering over the running tally of deaths, near-recoveries, and relapses, readers everywhere agonized over one central question: What or who was responsible?

As you can guess from the title, it was the lunch all eight victims ate, specifically the potted meat. Read how they determined the cause of death and the aftermath of the incident at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Gairloch Heritage Museum)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is just as awesome as it has ever been, but doesn't get the attention or kudos it deserves because of budget cutbacks in the last couple of decades. But NASA employees are still there, still working on space exploration and how to get it done. They've got some really big plans for the future, as you'll see in this promotional video. Warning: may provoke goose bumps.  -via Boing Boing

Here is Washington and his wife "Carol" meeting an extremely youthful Benjamin Franklin, who has an impressive squat.

The Japanese book Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi (童絵解万国噺) was published in 1861. It's a children's book of American history. The author and illustrator used secondary sources, as neither had been to America. East Asian historian Nick Kapur posted the more intriguing images at Twitter, with explanations for what we see.

But then! While John Adams is too obsessed with the food and drink, a huge snake comes along and eats his mom! Maybe the snake was a child of that other snake John Adams killed, or maybe it was sent by Ben Franklin as part of their feud?



Together, John Adams and the eagle kill the enormous snake that ate his Mom. The power of teamwork!!!

That's just a taste of what Kapur has in his Twitter thread. Don't miss George Washington punching a tiger and meeting the goddess of America. You can see all the illustrations from the book (with no translations) at the Waseda University Library.

-Thanks, WTM!

British department store John Lewis puts out an ad campaign to tug at your heartstrings every Christmas. This year, they enlisted Sir Elton John to travel back in time through his life until he reaches that life-changing Christmas when he received his first piano. -via Laughing Squid

LEGO artist Ochre Jelly (Iain Heath) has once again taken a ubiquitous internet meme and rendered it in LEGO. This time, it's the stock image that came to be known as Distracted Boyfriend. Of course you've seen it; it was named 2018 Meme of the Year at the annual Shorty Awards.

Heath has already taken the image and added captions, which you can see in the Flickr album. His original version is licensed for use under Creative Commons, so you can download it and add your own captions, as long as you attribute the image to Ochre Jelly and don't use it for commercial purposes.

Last year, before taking possession of a car with a manual transmission, I took a test drive to see if I remembered the feel of a clutch. It was "just like riding a bicycle," as we say. Or roller skating, for that matter. Why is it that we forget our anniversary or where we left our car keys, but maintain the ability to ride a bicycle after not riding one for many years?

As it turns out, different types of memories are stored in distinct regions of our brains. Long-term memory is divided into two types: declarative and procedural.

There are two types of declarative memory: Recollections of experiences such as the day we started school and our first kiss are called episodic memory. This type of recall is our interpretation of an episode or event that occurred. Factual knowledge, on the other hand, such as the capital of France, is part of semantic memory. These two types of declarative memory content have one thing in common—you are aware of the knowledge and can communicate the memories to others.

Skills such as playing an instrument or riding a bicycle are, however, anchored in a separate system, called procedural memory. As its name implies, this type of memory is responsible for performance.

So, while I retain the procedural memory of riding a bicycle, roller skating, playing piano, and driving a stick shift, my declarative memory of that last injury made me decide to give up roller skating permanently. Read a short overview of procedural memory and how we learned about it at Scientific American. -via Boing Boing

The most popular method of crossing a desert in the 21st century is to fly over it. You can also take a bus or a car, aided by maps, GPS, paved roads, cell phones, and coolers full of ice and water. It was not always so. To get from here to there across the Sahara Desert before modern conveyances involved two months of riding a camel. More importantly, one had to trust locals who knew what they were doing -and one had to pay them well.  

Between mid-February and mid-April 1352, Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan traveler who delighted in exploring the whole of the Islamic world, crossed the Sahara. The Masufa, a tribe of the Sanhaja confederation, controlled the caravan. Let’s be clear: the leader of the caravan, the scouts, the camel drivers, the guards were all from this tribe. It was better to put one’s fate into their hands than to fall into their hands. Anyway, one was forced to trust them: the guide of Ibn Battuta’s caravan was blind in one eye, or at least that’s what the caravan members were led to believe, but he remained the authority on a route that was not easily visible, as a Roman commercial road would be, a route that wound through loose, stony ground and was always susceptible, as they were also led to believe, to being hidden beneath “mountains of sand.”

While desert guides would protect the traveler from bandits and from getting lost, there were other concerns: lack of drinkable water, unbearable heat, fleas, flies, and snakes. Read about the complicated logistics of traveling across the Sahara in the Middle Ages at Lapham's Quarterly. -via Digg

(Image credit: Patricia Ilizaliturri)

IKEA unveiled this award-winning ad in 2002. It grabbed the viewer by the feels because we are familiar with Lampy from The Brave Little Toaster and Luxo, Jr. Then came the twist ending that yanked us back to reality and made us laugh. And now IKEA has returned to the story, 16 years later, for a new ad featuring the same lamp.



Now, that's much better, right? -via Metafilter

You're not going to find a magic formula in this article, because the question could be interpreted as "What defines a hit film?" There are two ways to look at movie success. One is which movies make the most money. We know the answer to that, because we've seen those movies, along with everyone else: Marvel superheroes, Star Wars, and Disney. The other way of looking at a hit film is its rate of return, or how its box office multiplies its production costs. The two methods bring us two completely different sets of movies, but both are successes. You might be surprised at the movies that brought the greatest return on investment, plus you'll see charts and graphs that plot what time of year and what length is best for a successful film at Medium. -via Digg

Sneaky Zebra has brought us cosplay videos from conventions for years. This one is a compilation of marvelous Marvel character cosplayers, illustrating Stan Lee's philosophy of the Marvel universe. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Have you ever eaten chocolate salami? It was featured as a funny at Bad Menu, but it's a real European treat. Chocolate salami is a dessert loaf made of chocolate and broken cookies -and sometimes rum.

Chocolate salami is not a meat product. The appellation "salami" stems from physical resemblance. Like salami, chocolate salami is formed as a long cylinder and is sliced across into discs for serving. These discs are a brown, chocolaty matrix (like the red meat of salami) peppered with bright bits of cookie (like the white flecks of fat in salami). In Portugal, they are typically made using Marie biscuit. [2] Some varieties also contain chopped nuts, such as almonds or hazelnuts and may be shaped like truffles.

You can order chocolate salami from many places online, or make your own. -Thanks, Vireya!

(Image credit: jppaguilar)

A museum in Japan spends most of its day refusing entry to 2 cats trying to get in @bijutsu1 pic.twitter.com/WK4M3Y51hc

— Rajiv (@jiffington) November 13, 2018

The Onomichi City Art Museum in Hiroshima prefecture, Japan, has an ongoing battle with unwelcome visitors. Two of them, to be exact. They are Ken Chan (left) and Gosaku.  

The two cats have spent years trying to visit the museum, but are constantly thwarted by the security guard and other museum staff trying to enforce the museum's "no animals" policy. The standoff may have started off as a mere desire to see what's inside, but over time, both sides see the entry of the cats as a challenge. This is what happens when you tell a cat he/she can't do something. See more of Ken Chan and Gosaku at the museum's Twitter feed.  -via Buzzfeed

Have you ever wanted to express an emotion or reaction but couldn't find the exact emoji for it? Me, neither. Still, you can have fun making your own simple face icon with the emoji builder. Pick a head, then accessorize it with features, expressions, and accessories... or hit the randomize button to get something pretty goofy. The selections are limited, but I managed to quickly create all four of the faces seen here.  -via Nag on the Lake