The Isle of Sark is a unique place. One of the Channel Islands situated between Britain and France, it is owned by the British Crown, but is politically independent. Cars are forbidden on the two-square-mile island, and the population remains steady at around 500 people- the number of people who can live comfortably off the land. But it is Sark's ancient system of government that really sets it apart. It is the world's only remaining fief, a feudal state run by a system established by the Normans.  

For the past 400 years, the Isle of Sark had been ruled by a "Lord of the Manor" called a Seigneur or Dame, who pledges allegiance to, and rents the island from, the King or Queen of England. The Seigneur or Dame holds the island in perpetual fief, and rents out 40 parcels, or tenements, to 40 different residents called tenants, who can rent pieces of each parcel to lower-ranked islanders. For centuries, these 40 landowners made up the island’s parliament, called Chief Pleas, with the Seigneur or Dame presiding as a quasi-dictator.

"It may seem undemocratic that most members hold their seats by right of property," Deputy John La Trobe Bateman told National Geographic in 1971, "but we are perhaps the world's best-represented community. With our population of 575, we have one legislator for every 11 people."

During World War II, the ruler of Sark was the aristocratic Dame Sibyl Hathaway. When Germany invaded the Channel Islands, there was no force capable of repelling them. Other islands, including nearby Guernsey and Alderney, evacuated their citizens to Britain. Dame Sibyl instead encouraged her people to stay, and all but 11 did. Read how Dame Sibyl handled the occupation, undermined the Germans, and even forced them to repair the island when the war was over, at Mental Floss.  

Every new study about Neanderthals make them appear less like the proverbial "missing link" and more like just another species of homo. For decades, scientists assumed that Neanderthals faced brutal dangers, whether from hunting or warfare or violence in their communities. This was thought to be a given, because so many Neanderthal skulls showed evidence of injury. In other words, their heads were bashed in.  

Decades ago, Neanderthals were depicted as club-carrying, dim-witted brutes who spent their days clobbering each other with reckless abandon. The modern vision of Neanderthals, while vastly improved, continues to perpetuate the idea that these now-extinct hominids lead dangerous and violent lives—an assumption based on early descriptions of individual skeletons.

New research published today in Nature is finally setting the record straight, showing that Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic modern humans experienced similar levels of head trauma. Yes, life was tough for Neanderthals—but the new research suggests life wasn’t any less tougher or violent for contemporaneous Homo sapiens.

The study compared remains of Neanderthals and prehistoric but modern humans with and without skull trauma (including skull injuries that healed) to find the ratio of injured individuals, sorted by sex, age, and location. While the rate of skull injury was not significantly different between Neanderthals and homo sapiens, there were some interesting differences found, which you can read about at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: James Gordon)

Have you ever watched a movie that made you think for days? The more you thought about it, the more nuanced and meaningful it became. And then, years later, you read an interview with the director and found that nothing you perceived was intentional on their part. Those clever layers of subtext were all in your head. Jack Nugent uses this episode of his series Now You See It (previously at Neatorama)  to explain how this disconnect between the artist and the audience happens. -via Laughing Squid

Anna Trupiano teaches in a school where deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing students are mixed together in class. She tells a great story about one of the facets of life that can get overlooked when educating children who are deaf.   

Today in 1st grade one of my Deaf students farted loudly in class and other students turned to look at them. The following is a snippet of a 15 minute conversation that happened entirely in American Sign Language among the group of Deaf students and I.

Kid 1: Why are they looking at me?
Me: Because they heard you fart.
Kid 1: Whhhhat do you mean?!?!
Me: Hearing people can hear farts.
Kid 2: Totally horrified Wait, they can hear all farts?!?!
Me: Well no. Not all farts but some of them yes.
Kid 3: How do you know which farts they can hear and which farts they can’t?

There's a lot more to the conversation you can read at Facebook, and it gets funnier as it goes. Trupiano talked to Good magazine about the incident as an example of the isolation kids experience when their families aren't fluent in American Sign Language.

Tupiano hopes her funny story about bodily functions will inspire others to become more involved with the deaf community by learning sign language.

“I would love to see a world where my students can learn about anything from anyone they interact with during their day,” she told GOOD. “Whether that means learning about the solar system, the candy options at a store, or even farts, it would be so great for them to have that language access anywhere they go.”

-via Metafilter

(Image credit: Towsonu2003~commonswiki)

Why is the haunted house in the movie always a Victorian mansion? First, you have to admit that they are creepy looking. They are old, which means they come with an extensive history. But there are other reasons that tales of murder, mayhem, and hauntings go well in such a setting. After all, no one expects a ghost in a suburban ranch house. Vox explains the history of how our classic tales came to be set in Victorian mansions.

Roman Fedortsov is a Russian deep-sea fisherman who photographs his more unusual catches, and shares them at Twitter and Instagram. Many of them he can't even identify himself. Continue for more, if you dare.

Witness the insanity of a multiplayer flight simulator. The air traffic controller resigns himself to the fact that no one knows what they are doing. He trolls a young kid by sending him back to the terminal to load cookies. A 747 keeps trying to crash into the tower. Then a guy shows up in a kite. This is supposed to be the airport in Atlanta, but the pilots just want to show off their moves like they're in an airshow.  -via Metafilter

In 1843, Texas was a country unto itself, although it was pressured on both sides: the United States wanted to annex it, and Mexico wanted to conquer it. But a lawyer from New England considered a third option- selling Texas to the British. The plan was, at its heart, a scheme to free Texas' slaves.

A convinced abolitionist practicing law in what was then the independent Republic of Texas, Stephen Pearl Andrews got it into his head that, in an attempt to free Texas’s slaves, he would invite a foreign power into North America and hand over a massive chunk of it. Andrews’s attempt to free Texas’s slaves by way of an invitation to foreign interference illustrates the strange bedfellows created by “the slavery question” in the nineteenth century. Andrews, in his quixotic vision, in his idealism, ambition, and occasional crankery, was an exemplary nineteenth-century American figure.

Andrews had been living in Texas for quite a few years by then, and owned a large amount of land himself. His plan pitted abolitionism against America's lingering distaste for the British Empire. And Andrews was not even part of the Texas government! Read about his plan to sell Texas to the British, which Texans either enthusiastically loved or vehemently hated, at Jstor. -via Digg

"Rule the World" in the title can be taken with a grain of salt. A few people end up becoming very powerful in a tiny niche of modern life because someone's gotta do it. The Unicode Consortium is a private non-profit company that sets standards so that programming languages and software can communicate with each other. It's an important job, and no doubt the work is hard. You could try to get a job there if you wanted to.

Other "powerful groups" are businesses that became so successful they overwhelmed any competition. If those companies didn't fulfill a need, or if they turned evil, they could lose their power because they can't exist without users or customers. But remember, if you're not paying for the service, you are the product.

I thought this one was quite odd, so I looked it up. The sentence would be more clear if it said, "They now manufacture all US money paper," instead of "paper money." American currency is still printed by the US Mint, on paper supplied by Crane Currency. The company does print money for other nations.

Then there are the quirks that come with small governments who see a way to become powerful by being different, like a tiny island nation that makes bank by selling their top level domain names or collectible postage stamps. Delaware's lack of usury laws mean that your credit card company is most likely headquartered there (or in South Dakota), and apparently they have other laws to attract business.    

That said, most of the "pictofacts" in the list at Cracked will not shock you (they don't promote scary conspiracy theories), but you'll learn something new.

We all know how the Grinch tried to steal Christmas, but for some reason, there's a third version of the Dr. Seuss story in theaters now. You're also familiar with Ebenezer Scrooge, but there have been many non-fictional people who wanted to take the joy out of Christmas.  

1. Brock Chisholm was a distinguished Canadian psychiatrist who, as the first director-general of the World Health Organization, came to be called the “doctor to the human race.” But he was also known for telling an Ottawa home-and-school association in 1945: “Any child who believes in Santa Claus has had his ability to think permanently destroyed. … Can you imagine a child of 4 being led to believe that a man of grown stature is able to climb down a chimney…. That Santa Claus can cover the entire world in one night distributing presents to everyone! He will become a man who has ulcers at 40, develops a sore back when there is a tough job to do, and refuses to think realistically when war threatens.” When a reporter gave him a chance to clarify his remarks, Chisholm said that “Santa Claus was one of the worst offenders against clear thinking, and so an offense against peace.”

Chisholm was just one of the ten real-life Grinches profiled in an article at Smithsonian.  

At first glance, I didn't even want to watch this trailer for a CGI movie based on Pokemon. But when I read that the voice of Pikachu was Ryan Reynolds, I had to have a look. He's not just squeaking "Pika pika!" and they explain that. This looks like a pretty cool movie, if you're into this kind of thing. The premier date for Detective Pikachu is May 11, 2019.

As more people fly, planes get bigger, and then they start charging extra for checked luggage, so everyone has a carry-on suitcase. The process of boarding a plane has become slower and more complicated, which prompted airlines to develop new processes to make it faster, or at least more bearable. Strangely, no airline uses the most efficient methods. Or maybe that's not so strange, because if the process was efficient, people wouldn't pay extra to be in the first boarding group. Anyway, you can learn about five different boarding procedures and how well they work at Thrillist.

(Image credit: Jnpet)

Backyard gardeners and birdwatchers have gone to great lengths to keep squirrels from raiding the crop or the bird feeder, but squirrels will not be deterred when they know there's something to eat at the end. This clip from the upcoming show A Squirrel's Guide to Success features an experiment that looks into the squirrel's learning process. They harness practice, memory, and logic to learn how to negotiate the weirdest of barriers we place on them. -via Laughing Squid

A Squirrel’s Guide to Success premieres Wednesday, November 14 at 8 PM on PBS.

Roxi Santamaria's Eurasier puppy Ender does a tippy-tap dance when he's excited or happy. It's so cute she felt obligated to make a video. Then she selected the perfect soundtrack, so this is pure gold. That's a good dog. -via reddit

Edgar Allan Poe dropped out of college and joined the army in 1827, when the US military was small and composed mostly of poor immigrants. Enlisted men were not highly regarded, and that might be the reason Poe changed his name to Edgar A. Perry during his service. Within two years, he rose to the rank of Sergeant Major, and then made the leap to West Point.

The evidence indicates he toed the line as an enlisted man. The same cannot be said of his time at the service academy. He entered West Point in 1830 and was court-martialed and discharged the next year. Numerous tall tales have circulated about his misdeeds as a cadet: that he often passed out drunk on campus after visits to a local tavern; that he was known to start food fights with baked potatoes lobbed in the mess hall; that he showed up to drill naked except for a hat and a cartridge belt; and most outrageously, that he murdered his tactical officer by throwing him into the Hudson River.

The real story was not quite as outrageous, but Poe was court-martialed for his behavior at West Point. What caused the budding author to join the army, excel for a time, and then flame out so suddenly? Read what we know about Poe's military career at The Daily Beast. -via Metafilter