People look at me like I'm nuts because I turn off my engine while waiting in line at a drive-through. I've been told that if you are going to be still more than 20 seconds, you're better off turning your car off. Yes, we have to wait longer than that at stoplights, but in most places, it is illegal to turn off your engine at an intersection. So I'm saving fuel waiting for Taco Bell to fill the orders in front of me, probably incorrectly, while the SUVs around me are roaring the whole time. This guy explains how the formula is determined, which involves some math, but stick with it. Turns out that 20 seconds was a generous guess.
That title is an awful long way of saying "historical trivia," but that doesn't mean these tidbits from the dustbin of history aren't worth a look. It's true that Joan of Arc was not condemned for a charge of witchcraft, but according to Wikipedia, she was put on trial for heresy. In the end, the only capital crime she could be stuck with was crossdressing, repeat offense, which only happened because the prison guards took her frilly dress away.
The optics of a historical moment were just as important 500 years later, but unlike the trial of Joan of Arc, the transcript of the Apollo moon landing couldn't be fudged afterward, no matter what conspiracy theorists may tell you. See 25 pictofacts of historical trivia that might surprise you at Cracked.
When we aren't feeling well, one of the first things we do is grab a thermometer to see if we have a fever. But does that really tell us? We've been told all our lives that normal body temperature is 98.6, but that was determined from a flawed study done 150 years ago. Now we have new research. Your body temperature could be different in the morning and afternoon and still be quite normal.
The study, published online this month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, refutes the age-old benchmark of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, [rheumatologist Jonathan] Hausmann and his colleagues found an average normal temperature in adults of 97.7 degrees, as measured with an oral thermometer. (The published study uses results from 329 healthy adults.) As for fever, Hausmann found that it begins at 99.5 degrees, on average.
But that doesn’t mean you should shift to a lower benchmark for normal. Hausmann wants body temperature to be a flexible concept, viewed in context with age, gender, time of day, and other factors—much in the way weight is evaluated based on height, and how the thresholds for normal blood pressure differ based on age.
So you could have a fever even if your temperature is under 100 degrees. The important part his knowing what to do about it. Read about body temperature and fever at Wired. -via Metafilter
In the 17th century, the Scottish kilt wasn't the tailored garment we know today. Rather, it was a long piece of tartan that could be worn in a number of ways depending on the weather and activity, yet it was uniquely Scottish. When James II was deposed as the last Catholic king of England (he was King James VII in Scotland) in 1688, Jacobites from the Scottish Highlands fought to restore the Catholic Stuart line to the throne for decades- until the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Afterward, one of the punishments was a ban on kilts as a blow to Scottish identity.
The law worked … mostly. The tartan faded from everyday use, but its significance as a symbol of Scottish identity increased. During the ban, it became fashionable for resistors to wear kilts in protest. As Colonel David Stewart recounted in his 1822 book, many of them worked around the law by wearing non-plaid kilts. Some found another loophole, noting that the law never "specified on what part of the body the breeches were to be worn" and "often suspended [kilts] over their shoulders upon their sticks." Others sewed the center of their kilt between their thighs, creating a baggy trouser that must have resembled an olde tyme predecessor to Hammer pants.
How do you explain professional wrestling to people who don't watch it? Mac Schneider and Dean Peterson do a pretty good job at explaining how it's a combination of athletics and drama, with the simple aim of entertaining an audience. You get a brief history of pro wrestling, and a breakdown of how it works in modern-day shows. -via Tastefully Offensive
We learned the other day that when cats sneer, that doesn't necessarily mean they are disgusted with you. But there are other behaviors that may lead you to think your cat doesn't like you at all. That's because you're not thinking like a cat. Gizmodo asked various cat experts about how cats relate to humans. UC Davis veterinarian Mikel Maria Delgado tells us:
For whatever reason, people seem really obsessed with projecting their own anxieties about their relationship with their cat onto the cats themselves. Maybe that’s because they’re comparing cats do dogs. Cats have fewer facial muscles than dogs, so they have fewer expressions that mimic human ones, whereas dogs have more facial expressions, and these expressions are closer to ours than cats’ are. Cats present a more neutral palette for people, so when someone’s encountering a cat it may not be obvious to them what the cat is feeling just from looking at them.
That said, cats will often have preferred people in the home, and some of that is likely due to socialization. A cat whose exposed to many different types of people when they’re young will be more adaptable to different types of people when they get older. A kitten who is fostered in a quiet home with only one very quiet woman will probably be more comfortable with women later.
All but three of the world's countries have rectangular flags. Switzerland and Vatican City have square flags. Then there's Nepal. The flag of Nepal has five sides made up of two triangles of different sizes. They have every right to design their flag as they see fit; after all, there is no international governing board for flag design. Maybe a better question is why all the other flags are rectangular.
Aside from the royal families, the only time one would really need to identify as part of a larger whole was in battle. Flags and banners were used to identify military units, but they were usually specific to the regiment or group of soldiers rather than the country as a whole. This all started to change during the Age of Sail, especially around the late 18th century. “It comes from trade on ships, which were moving between different places with the beginnings of globalization,” says Scot Guenter, a professor at San Jose State University, senior fellow at the Flag Research Center, and avowed vexillologist (that’s someone who studies flags).
The vast majority of national flags began to appear in the mid-1800s, along with the emergence of the nation as a concept rather than just the place one’s king ruled. This was the first time national flags were flown outside of war settings, and within a hundred years or so, flags became strangely homogenized in shape. They were simply tools to recognize a ship’s origin at a distance, and a rectangular flag is an ideal shape to catch wind and appear taut, allowing those far away to understand it.
An article at Atlas Obscura gives us a brief history of national flags, and then a look at why Nepal's flag is different.
When Joe Gold was young, weightlifting wasn't much of a thing, so he and his friends made their own weights and lifted in Joe's family garage. Later, he hung out at Muscle Beach, where fitness fans worked out. In 1965, he opened Gold's Gym in Venice Beach. It became the ultimate training ground for serious bodybuilders.
Today, we take for granted that high school, collegiate and professional athletes—not to mention Hollywood stars and weekend warriors—lift weights. And yet, when Gold’s first opened that practice was frowned upon, or even considered taboo, by most every doctor, trainer, and coach. The few men (and they were pretty much all men back then) who called themselves bodybuilders were ridiculed as narcissistic freaks and taunted with not-so-subtle innuendoes of homosexuality. They were outliers, but they did not care. They lived for The Pump.
Joe Gold changed that perception. Though Gold sold his eponymous gym and the rights to his name in 1970 (a move he regretted for the rest of his life), by the time of his death in 2004, the place known as “The Mecca” by generations of bodybuilders and their fans had become a cultural touchstone in the modern fitness movement that now encompasses activities like yoga, meditation, and mountain biking.
Colorado State University biologist Joel Berger's new book Extreme Conservation tells about the many projects he's worked on to study the habits and habitats of wildlife all over the world. Learning how to save the world's species often involves trauma to individual animals with the aim of saving the species as a whole. This bothered Berger so much that he goes to extremes to limit the damage done in research. Instead of equipping musk oxen in the Arctic with radio collars, he will locate a herd by plane, and then spend weeks tracking them with an expedition equipped with snow machines, and finally approaching them by foot.
Zhang: One thing you study is how musk oxen react to bears. Obviously you can’t let loose a wild bear yourself, so you have decided to be the bear.
Berger: [laughs] So the quick elevator-pitch context: With less ice, we’re finding more polar bears on [continental] land or on Wrangel Island, which is this Russian island that I had the privilege to work on. We also find more grizzly bears going further north. We’re trying to figure out if musk ox can figure out how dangerous bears are. Polar bear and grizzly interactions are so rare. So when I put on my science hat, I needed a decent sample size, and the best way to garner a decent sample size is to do what’s called an experiment. I become the bear. I don a cape, a bear head, and I approach on all fours.
Zhang: Wait, what is your bear costume made of?
Berger: I try to make it lightweight, so it’s a styrofoam head covered in white fur or brown fur, depending on if it’s a polar bear or a grizzly bear. The Russians gave me a Russian sniper suit so I’m dressed in white with a bear head. In the U.S., I have a brown cape. I use ski poles as my front legs and my legs are the rears. It’s pretty exhausting. It sounds fun and crazy. It’s probably crazy. It’s not so much fun. There are tense moments, but we do get the data and our sample size is decent at this point.
There are nine basic things that a cat needs to live a happy life. Each one of them is illustrated by a Simon's Cat vignette of him being his usual self. Personally, I would have lumped "hunting" and "entertainment" together. Strangely, sex is not one of the nine, but if a cat is fixed before puberty, he or she will never know what he/she is missing.
Gertrud Gunther was born into a normal Prussian middle class family in 1881, but she made good when she married Baron Heinrich von Puttkamer and ascended to a life of high society and wealth. She took to it well, from entertaining royalty to doting on her much older husband. But she had a secret identity. The baroness wrote lesbian-themed poetry and novels, which she published under the name Marie-Madeleine. It is possible that the baron never knew about her writings in all the years they were married before he died in 1914.
In the following 14 years, the baroness published another 28 books, including novels. Just as lesbian love dominated her works at first, morphine started appearing in her writing beginning in 1910. It became the dominant theme after the baron’s death and for the rest of her literary career. “Her work was particularly appreciated during the decadent, dissolute years of the Weimar Republic when alternative sexual behavior and drug use were tolerated — and often celebrated,” says Gertz.
If anything, her writing became even more ecstatic and rapturous after her husband’s death. “She traveled around Europe with a male companion and fellow morphine enthusiast, living in villas in Germany and France,” says Gertz, “completely unknown as the notorious Marie-Madeleine.”
The baroness had maintained her secret identity for more than three decades, but Hitler’s Nazis eventually ferreted her out. The Third Reich wasn’t too keen on Jewish lesbian poets addicted to morphine, and despite her nobility, they wanted to erase her from history. When the Nazis starting burning books, Marie-Madeleine’s were among the first to go into the flames. Her books sold more than 1 million copies during her career, but it’s extremely hard to come by a copy of one today.
Sima the raccoon just wants to fit in. He is the only raccoon in the family, and he has to deal with humans, cats, and dogs. The cats seem the closest to what he'd want in a companion, but they aren't too happy with his un-catlike overtures. They won't let Sima forget that he's the oddball of the household. The language you hear is Russian, so this might be in Ukraine, where raccoons are becoming more common. -via Boing Boing
If you wish to renounce your citizenship, most countries will allow this only if you hold citizenship in another country. The United States is not one of those countries. In America, it's mainly a matter of paying for the paperwork, which is quite expensive. But then what happens?
You see, should they do this without being a citizen of another nation, they will become what is known as stateless. While difficulties vary for stateless people depending on the country they currently reside in, in general, many otherwise commonplace things can potentially become very problematic for these people- things like getting a job, getting access to education for their kids or themselves, getting citizenship for their potential future children, ability to get married, get a driver’s license, rent or buy a house, travel across borders, or even just getting a bank account. A bigger problem for some is the loss of certain legal protections they’d otherwise be granted.
On this note, in the United States, the over four million stateless people residing in America can potentially be arrested without having committed any crime and jailed for many months, generally while the the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tries to find a country to deport them to, if possible.
You can see a big can of worms being opened. There are around 12 million stateless people around the world, although most are stateless through no fault of their own. Depending on the country, you can be stateless because your nation collapsed, or you were born in a refugee camp, or even because your parents weren't married. Read about stateless people, by choice or by circumstance, at Today I Found Out.
If you've seen your cat give you "that face," you probably felt bad about it, because the same sneering expression on a human indicates disgust, horror, or at least a hateful thought of some kind. But that's not what's happening from the cat's point of view. Hank Green of SciShow is here to explain. -via Geeks Are Sexy
You may have spent all day Friday watching Aretha Franklin's star-studded funeral service on TV, but even so, you didn't get to see the procession outside. More than 100 pink Cadillacs were there to escort the hearse from the funeral home to Greater Grace Temple in Detroit on Friday morning.
The cars are a reference to her song, "Freeway of Love," in which she sings: "We goin' ridin' on the freeway of love in my pink Cadillac."
The turnout is all thanks to Mary Kay national sales director Crisette Ellis asked that any employee who owns a pink Cadillac show up for Franklin's funeral service, according to the Detroit Free Press. (Sales representatives for the cosmetics company famously drive pink cars.)
Per the paper, many of the Cadillacs that turned up to the service were driven by Mary Kay employees, though other pink Cadillac owners also turned up to pay homage to the Queen of Soul.
