The roots of the words we use for numbers vary around the world, but they often originated in terms that correspond to our body parts. That shouldn't be surprising, since our base ten (decimal) counting system stems from the fact that we have ten fingers. But there are other number systems that arose naturally, that also relate to parts of our bodies.
Linguist Arika Okrent and illustrator Sean O’Neill tell us about the anatomical origins of number language. -via Laughing Squid
If you're thinking of relocating, maybe you should check out the average commute times for people for who in or around the city you're considering. Just zoom in on the interactive map at Educated Driver and click on the city's dot for more details. People near where I live commute around 40-45 minutes a day, which seems like a big waste of time over a lifetime. However, the average commute time in L.A. or San Francisco is an hour, and 75 minutes in New York City! Now think of this map as a whole, and consider all the lost hours, the gasoline, the pollution, the traffic jams, and the stress that could be avoided if we could just live closer to our workplaces. -via Digg
Being atop a skyscraper when it sways is disconcerting, but not as terrifying as that sway would be if it weren't for mass dampers. This simple but thorough explanation of how they work from Minute Physics uses a LEGO Saturn 5 rocket, or two of them, to show how it works. The video is really only 3:40 long; after that, it's an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy
If you were to name the desires that all people have in common, food would be at the top of the list. And if there was ever a food that people agreed upon, it's pizza. Pizza is the world's most perfect food, containing all the major groups, and the dish people want if they could only eat one thing for the rest of their lives. Add in that someone will make one for you and even bring it to you, and you've got something special. That's true even when we don't eat the pizza ourselves. Andrew Gruttadaro at The Ringer put together a tournament bracket of famous "pizza moments" that penetrated our shared experiences.
As you can see, the pizza moments have been broken up into four regions: In the Movies, On TV, In Sports, and In Life. Each pizza moment was then seeded based on my general opinion of its popularity and recognizability. Because Pizza Day is only 24 hours long, we do not have enough time to stage a popular vote. Instead, I will be deciding the winners of each matchup based on a combination of things: the moment’s popularity and notoriety, the moment’s nostalgia factor, the prominence of the pizza in the moment, how delicious the pizza looks in the moment, and what the moment says about pizza. If you disagree with my pizza moment takes and the outcome of this bracket, then you should make your own. (I genuinely mean this, with no ill will: Pizza is for everyone, and therefore everyone should be allowed to construct their own pizza moments bracket.)
Gruttadaro examines each of the contestants and justifies the matchup winners all the way down to the final championship at The Ringer. -via Digg
Master editor Melodysheep (John Boswell) took a fairly psychedelic movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and remixed it to be even more magically psychedelic. -via Tastefully Offensive
Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson spent much of his time exploring the Arctic. Instead of taking vast stores of food, he ate what the Inuit ate: fish, caribou, walrus, and other meat, with few fruits and vegetables of any kind. This was in the early 20th century, when nutrition experts pushed raw vegetables for health, and encouraged minimal meat eating. Stefansson wrote about the Inuit diet, and encountered skepticism from those who couldn't believe it. To show them, Stefansson and an explorer friend went on a meat-only diet in 1928 -for an entire year. They began the experiment in a hospital where doctors could monitor their health, but that didn't last long.
While doctors condemned the diet as dangerous, Stefansson was defiant, attributing his increased vigor and “ambition” to his all-meat diet. Newspapers and magazines across the country ran stories on his experiment, contrasting it with the vegetable-heavy diets most doctors recommended. Soon, Stefansson left the hospital, having lost a few pounds, and continued his meat-eating endeavor from his New York apartment. Doctors examining the two men during the year-long trial reported that neither had heightened blood pressure or kidney trouble, the expected result of a carnivorous diet. The one thing lacking in their diet, Stefansson noted, was enough calcium.
Another conclusion Stefansson came to was that the protein he was eating wasn’t as important as the fat. He briefly flirted with “rabbit starvation,” a condition named for the fact that eating solely meat without sufficient fat can prove deadly. The human liver can only process so much protein sans fat without kickstarting the symptoms of protein poisoning: nausea, wasting, and death. Fat, and lots of it, is essential to the all-meat diet. Aquatic mammals are especially rich with fat, though. Recent studies point to genetics also playing a role in the Inuit aptitude for fatty, meat-filled diets, but as in Stefansson’s time as well as today, there remain questions about the relative healthiness of fats.
Read about Vilhjalmur Stefansson and his all-meat diet at Atlas Obscura.
There are generally three ways you are familiar with the couch pictured. Maybe you sat on one while watching TV in the 1970s. Maybe your parents or grandparents still have it in their home because why should they change a perfectly good couch? Or maybe you -or someone you know- wouldn't have a couch at all if grandma hadn't decided to finally get rid of a perfectly good couch. This couch has even been made into a meme because it is so ubiquitous in elderly people's homes.
“This couch is a hat tip to Early American or Colonial Revival décor, which was massively popular through most of the 20th century—married to an indestructible, essentially plastic Space Age fabric, which our grandparents would have found appealing because our grandparents didn’t tend to redecorate constantly,” Kueber explains. “They had one sofa. They bought their furniture on a layaway, and by the time they found enough money for a sofa, they wanted it to last forever. So the good news was that fabric was going to last forever—but the bad news was that fabric was going to last forever.
“I say that in a loving way: They got the fashionable look of the day, which was this novelty print on their sofa, and it was made from a fabric that had all the modern qualities that one would want. So, hooray! I’m sure it was a big day when that sofa came home.”
The first iteration of Colonial Revival originated around 1876, when Victorians were celebrating the United States centennial, and the throwback interior style—which sought to shed the frilly excesses of cluttered Victorian neo-Rococo fashion—remained popular up to 1940. It branched off into two larger design subsets: 18th-Century Colonial Revival and Early American. The former embraced the stately, symmetrical style seen in the homes of the Founding Father elite—the exteriors defined by red brick, white shutters, and maybe symmetric neo-Classical columns; the white-walled interiors a combination of elegant, scrolling Georgian and Neo-Classical upholstered wood furnishings and gold-trimmed mirrors. Early American is more about the hard-working pilgrims, farmers, and pioneers in their log cabins and farmhouses with heavy, simple wood furniture.
The Grandma Couch doesn't exactly fit either of those styles, but it was quite popular to accompany the dark wood paneling and the TV that was too big to lift in a home furnished 50 years ago. Read the history of the Grandma Couch and the home decor that went with it at Collectors Weekly, and don't miss the gallery of pictures at the end that will take you back in time.
In the 1950s, a young goatherd named Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja was abandoned in the mountains of southern Spain. He did not want to return to his impoverished and abusive home, so he stayed in the wilderness from the age of seven until he was 19. Rodríguez lived among the wolves, lost his language skills, and never learned to socialize with people. He was eventually found and sent to a convent to be reintegrated with society, but was instead exploited and regarded as an oddity. Then in 2010, his story was made into the movie Entrelobos (Among Wolves), and suddenly everyone wanted to know Rodríguez.
Suddenly, to his shock and dismay, Rodríguez became a celebrity: Spanish TV declared him the “son of wolves”; the BBC dubbed him “the wolf man”. Spanish papers seemed to write about him every other month. At first he was pleased with the attention: after years of rejection and disbelief, his story was being told, and he was finally being accepted. But soon, people wanted more of him than he could give. Journalists were lined up outside his door, and the press wanted to find out everything about his life. Fans wrote him from Germany, America and all over Spain. He was the famous wolf man of the Sierra Morena.
What Rodríguez remembers of his time living wild is that it was “glorious”. When he was found by the police and brought down from the mountains, an untroubled, simple adolescence among animals and birds was cruelly cut short. He had always found it hard to relate to humans, who were baffled by his ignorance and infuriated by his inability to communicate. But now the intensity of their belated fascination was almost as puzzling as their earlier contempt – Rodríguez could never understand what was expected of him.
Fifty years after rejoining civilization, Rodríguez still considers his life among the animals to be preferable to the way he was treated by people. Read the story of Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja at The Guardian. -via Digg
This is Beau Tox, a Labrador who was born with facial deformities. His first Instagram photo explains:
Before I was born, I was so squished in the womb by my puppy siblings that my skull didn’t form as it should have. Although my face may look different, it doesn’t cause any issues with brain function. I was adopted after my previous owner had kept me outside and uncared for. I was so infested with heartworms and ear mites that it wasn’t likely I would survive very long. However, a group of amazing doctors did whatever it took to get me healthy again. Because of my ear mite infestation, I lost hearing in my left ear. I am also partially blind, due to my facial deformity. However, these issues don’t bring me down. I am one of the happiest and most loving dogs you’ll ever meet!
Jamie Hulit adopted Beau and makes the many ties you'll see him wearing. Beau now works to promote the adoption of shelter animals. Some have noticed his resemblance to Dug from the movie Up.
The first picture of Beau Tox that I saw reminded me of something else. Remember the Lion of Gripsholm Castle? You can see more of Beau at his Instagram feed. After you look at his many pictures, he starts to look completely normal. -via reddit
The Dover Boys at Pimento University is a classic Merrie Melodies cartoon from 1942. We've posted it here a couple of times. We now have a remake of sorts, a collaboration of more than 90 animators who got together to put their personal spin on the Chuck Jones story. The linked credits are in a spreadsheet used for the project. While the cartoon is still funny as ever, the extra fun is in finding the modern easter eggs many of the reanimators slipped in. -via Metafilter
One of the more horrifying disorders one can experience is locked-in syndrome, in which a person is conscious, but cannot move or cannot communicate. Because of the lack of communication, caregivers often don't know the patient is conscious. Doctors are now more awareness of the possibility that completely paralyzed patients may retain consciousness, so they consult with neurologist Steven Laureys of the University of Lige in Belgium, who has developed testing methods for reaching conscious but uncommunicative patients.
Patients are brought to Lige from all over Europe to undergo testing. How do you determine whether they are conscious?
Well, of course, the physician will say, “Squeeze my hand”—but this time while the patient is in a brain scanner. If the motor cortex is activated, we know that the patient heard and understood and therefore is conscious. We also want to determine the chances of recovery and what the physician or the patient’s family can do. With different brain scanners, I can find out where brain damage is located and which connections are still intact. This information tells family members what the chances of recovery are. If the results show that there is no hope whatsoever, we then discuss difficult topics with the family, such as end-of-life options. Occasionally we see much more brain activity than anticipated, and then we can initiate treatment aimed at rehabilitation.
Once the possibility of consciousness is determined, medical science has ways of stimulating the brain if necessary, and facilitating communication by whatever means the patient has available, for example, a computer that scans eye movement. Read the rest of the interview with Dr. Laureys at Scientific American. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: HannahDoverty)
Zephyr is a four-year-old golden retriever witnessing the "What the Fluff Challenge." We don't know what Zephyr was expecting (he's certainly very attentive), but we were expecting the young man holding the blanket up to disappear. Instead, he changed into Kevin, Zephyr's favorite person, who has been gone for nine months doing Army training at Ft. Bragg. Zephyr was pretty happy with the trick! -via Digg
Unless a band is named after the most prominent member (Bon Jovi) or an obvious fact about them (The Philadelphia Orchestra), there's probably a great story behind how the name was selected. Some of them may even be true.
Check out a pictofacts post that tells the stories of how 25 bands got their unique names at Cracked.
In 1917, a group of 450 bilingual women were sent to the front lines with the U.S. Army Signal Corps as telephone operators for the American Expeditionary Forces in France. Telephone communication was still fairly new, and the women dubbed the "Hello Girls" connected 26 million communications between forces to facilitate U.S. efforts. They deciphered secret codes, checked for wiretapping, and facilitated emergency communications.
The telephone was this very specialized department that in retrospect seems kind of simple but was at the time a very high paced, high-pressure kind of occupation. You had to multitask. You had someone yelling at you in one ear, you’re writing down notes about where the connection is going, you’re looking for other lines that are flashing because other calls are coming in, you’re trying to see which calls have switched off — and they were doing this all at once. They found that women were better at it. Before the Hello Girls were recruited, the average male Army recruit could connect a call in 60 seconds. It took the average woman ten seconds. In wartime, the difference between 10 and 60 seconds is life and death.
The Hello Girls had taken military oaths and were told they were in the army, yet when they came home they were treated as civilian contractors. They were given no discharge papers, no military records, and no veterans benefits. It was only in 1977 that their military service was recognized, and just this year, the Hello Girls Congressional Gold Medal Act was introduced in Congress. If the act is passed, 101 years later, all the Congressional Gold Medals will be awarded posthumously. Read about the Hello Girls at Task and Purpose. -via Metafilter
Here's a cute and catchy song from Clare and Si Bennett, also known as Planet Custard, about the planets of the solar system. It's set to an animated video that is cute, funny, and artistic at the same time. Each planet gets a verse about what makes it unique, and even Pluto makes a cameo appearance. And now I can't get the tune out of my head. -via Geeks Are Sexy
