Giant Mine near Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories, extracted a lot of gold in its time. Then the gold ran out, and the company went bankrupt in 2004. They left behind 237,000 metric tons of arsenic trioxide as a side effect of the mining operation, although that amount does not include the arsenic that has escaped into the environment. You can read more about Giant Mine's history here. The Canadian government was left to deal with the arsenic. Tom Scott introduces us to the technology that won't destroy the arsenic, but will keep the dust from seeping into the air and water. Read more about the Giant Mine Remediation Project at its website. -via Digg
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Vacationing in the Poconos Mountains goes way back into the early part of the 20th century. But in 1945, as soldiers returned from the war and got married, Farm on the Hill became the first "honeymoon resort" in the Poconos, and others soon followed. There were plenty of honeymoon accommodations to select from, like the "honeymoon mansionette" pictured above, complete with fireplace, plastic flowers, sky-blue decor, and a TV with a matching blue screen of death. There were plenty of recreational opportunities, like archery, swimming, golf, canoeing, and table tennis, as well as lounges and restaurants.
Some hotels went all in on the honeymoon idea as the 1960s progressed, with heart-shaped bathtubs during the era of "affluent vulgarity," which extended the potential clientele to unmarried couples ready to pay for a getaway. See a roundup of postcards from the Poconos during its honeymoon heyday at Flashbak. -via Everlasting Blort
Lucas the adorable young spider (previously at Neatorama) is looking for a place to nap. It has to be perfect: private and cozy and away from distractions. When you are a tiny spider, there are a lot of spots to choose from! Spoiler- he finds a good place. -via Laughing Squid
While news spread through the rest of the country that the Civil War was over, Confederates in Texas fought on for another six weeks until June 19, 1865, when General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston that slaves were now free. That date has been commemorated in Texas and elsewhere ever since as Juneteenth. But it didn't mean that the enslaved people of Texas were actually free from that day.
5. NOT ALL SLAVES WERE FREED INSTANTLY.
Texas is a large state, and General Granger's order (and troops to enforce it) were slow to spread. According to historian James Smallwood, many enslavers deliberately suppressed the information until after the harvest, and some beyond that. In July 1867 there were two separate reports of slaves being freed, and one report of a Texas horse thief named Alex Simpson whose slaves were only freed after his hanging in 1868.
6. FREEDOM CREATED OTHER PROBLEMS.
Despite the announcement, Texas slave owners weren't too eager to part with what they felt was their property. When legally freed slaves tried to leave, many of them were beaten, lynched, or murdered. "They would catch [freed slaves] swimming across [the] Sabine River and shoot them," a former slave named Susan Merritt recalled.
Read more facts about Juneteenth, its origins and annual celebration, at Mental Floss.
T.J. was a 14-year-old who ate gummy vitamins as if they were candy. It was a language problem- he thought they were candy. While he ate too many every day, the day he consumed an entire bottle (150 gummies), he landed in the hospital with strange symptoms. YouTuber Chubbyemu (previously at Neatorama) takes us through the process of diagnosis and treatment, and explains in detail what a vitamin overdose does to one's body. It's not pretty. Chubbyemu has a series of horrific medical stories in his YouTube channel. -via reddit
In June of 1959, the US Postal Service, in conjunction with the US military, shot 3,000 letters from a submarine across 200 miles to a Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Florida. The letters were all the same, since this was a demonstration intended to show the Soviet Union how accurate American missiles were. But it was far from the first time folks attempted to deliver mail by rocket.
For example, in the late 19th century in Tonga, residents of the island of Niuafo’ou decided to try using Congreve rockets to send and receive mail. You see, the island’s lack of beaches and harbour, as well as the presence of the second deepest oceanic trench in the world, the Tonga Trench, right next to it (making it impossible to anchor), meant getting mail from ship to land wasn’t something regularly done, despite ships frequently passing by.
The ultimate solution to leverage the existing ship traffic here for sending and receiving mail was simply to have ships drop cans containing mail into the water and then blast their horns as they passed by. Strong swimmers would then swim out to try to collect the cans before the current did. Likewise, the swimmers would carry messages from the island out to the shipping lane to drop off, with the canned letters picked up when the ships passed. This all eventually earned Niuafo’ou the nickname of Tin Can Island.
But before they earned that moniker, they decided to go with the Congreve rockets, which is definitely a missed opportunity here in terms of a more badass nickname.
Mail delivery by those Congreve rockets was discontinued for the same reason other plans failed- the rockets were unreliable and not all that accurate. By the time missiles were accurate enough to do the job, we had planes going to all parts of the world anyway. Read about the many plans and projects to deliver mail by missile at Today I Found Out.
Milo the Quaker parrot sings along with his human, Erica Croke. The song is a classic, "Bacon Pancakes" from the TV show Adventure Time. Milo must watch the show a lot, or he sings it a lot, or he just loves making -or eating- pancakes. You can see more of Milo at his Facebook page. -via Tastefully Offensive
Are people in Finland happy or not? They have beautiful scenery, world-class schools, Santa Claus, weird sports such as wife-carrying and phone throwing, a robust social safety net, Northern Lights, and the government gives every new baby a box of supplies just for being born. Yet Finns are renowned for their dour, sometimes fatalistic outlook on life. And now there's a survey that proclaims how happy they are.
According to the 2018 World Happiness Report, based on research conducted by Gallup, Finland is the happiest country in the world. The Finns are not so sure about the result, though – being, as they are, a typically stoic sort of people.
“Nordic people, and the Finns in particular, are emotionally introverted,” explained Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute, an independent think tank in Denmark that studies happiness and wellbeing. “They rarely rank highly on expressions of joy or anger – they are very different in that way from people from Latin America, for example, who have a more exuberant emotional expression as a people. For [the Finns], happiness is more about living a reserved, balanced and resilient life.”
The seeming contradiction is in how you define your terms. The survey measured quality of life, which many people would assume leads to happiness. The word "happy" itself brings up a picture of people expressing joy, as in that song by Pharrell Williams. In Finland, the two don't quite meet, as you can read about at BBC Travel. They also explain kalsarikänni, or the tradition of getting drunk at home in your underwear. -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Mariano Mantel)
The worst tourist mosquito experience I know is Roanoke Island in North Carolina, and the best is at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. But when you go to Walt Disney World in Orlando, you're too busy having fun to notice the lack of mosquitos. The theme park is built on a swamp in Florida, so what gives? The truth is that Disney goes to great lengths to control the mosquito population. Rob Plays explains how that happens.
Francis (franktasia 2000) discovered that his potted plant had sprouted legs! Is it getting ready to run away from home? Is it Groot? Audrey 2? In case you're wondering, this is a dragon tree, or Dracaena marginata. Among the jokes, gifs, and advice in the comments are some adorable drawings of the plant, which were all done in a hurry since this picture was only posted yesterday.
Cannot reiterate enough how proud I am of my son, whomst has defied the restrictions placed on him as a plant pic.twitter.com/zAfRpbirP3
— franktasia 2000 (@tytonidaeus) June 17, 2018
Hope this hasn't been done yet! pic.twitter.com/hUu0CSZT1C
— Gojee (@GojiraSenpai) June 17, 2018
WHAT A GOOD SON YOU HAVE I hope he has many adventures!!!! pic.twitter.com/PrR1q4lTQb
— sana ˎ (@ilLuciinati) June 17, 2018
Continue reading for more.
YouTube has only been around for 13 years, but in that time has hosted some of the funniest, weirdest, most interesting short subjects you'll ever see. The ones that went wildly viral will be familiar to you, maybe all 100 of the ranked videos at Thrillist, which has embedded all 100 YouTube videos for your viewing pleasure. Stroll down memory lane with Charlie The Unicorn (99), Dramatic Chipmunk (84), Miss Teen USA 2007 (76), Trololo (68), Boom Goes the Dynamite (18), and many other viral videos you've forgotten about by now, but will make you laugh all over again. Then you can commence arguing about the ones they left off the list.
Penny restaurants were diners where you could get a decent meal without spending hardly any money. You could find them in some cities as far back as the turn of the 20th century, and they spread tremendously during the Great Depression. Penny restaurants were mostly run by charities, but the food wasn't free, because that would rob the transaction of its dignity.
T.M. Finney, who managed a St. Louis penny restaurant run by the local Provident Association, laid out the enduring modus operandi of charitable restaurants. “The aim of the scheme is to afford poor people to maintain their self-respect and reduce the number of beggars,” Finney stated.
At his establishment, every item cost a penny: A meal of half a pound of bread, soup, potatoes, pork and beans, and coffee only cost hungry customers five cents. Breadlines, where miserable hundreds waited hours for free food, were an all-too-common sight during the Depression. Penny restaurants were the dignified alternative.
Penny restaurants always appeared during times of financial trouble, but they reached their greatest prominence during the Great Depression. In 1933, unemployment was at 25 percent nationwide. A whole new cuisine of make-do was developing across the country, from starchy slugburgers to pork masquerading as higher-end chicken. At penny restaurants, food was simple and often meatless.
Some existing eateries got into the penny restaurant business as a hybrid, adding a section to their existing restaurant to serve the indigent. And at least one businessman could afford to give away free meals along with paid meals because the volume was so high. Clifford Clinton was some restauranteur, as one of his dining spots is still in business, although you can no longer get a free meal. Read about the rise and fall of penny restaurants at Atlas Obscura.
Two hundred years ago, Mary Shelley published a book that she'd been working on since she took up a challenge among friends to write a scary story. Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus was much more than a horror novel. It illustrated the march of science and the responsibility, ethics, and hubris of those who would dare create life, ideas that have resonated with readers for two centuries so far, even as science itself has changed greatly.
Two hundred years later, Arizona State University launched The Frankenstein Bicentennial Project — a cross-disciplinary, multimedia endeavor to engage the people of today with the timeless issues of science, technology, and creative responsibility posed by Shelley’s searching intellect and imagination. As part of the celebration, MIT Press published Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (public library) — Shelley’s original 1818 manuscript, line-edited by the world’s leading expert on the text and accompanied by annotations and essays by prominent contemporary thinkers across science, technology, philosophy, ethics, feminism, and speculative fiction. What emerges is the most thrilling science-lensed reading of a literary classic since Lord Byron’s Don Juan annotated by Isaac Asimov.
Reanimation! is a seven-part video series from Massive that features conversations with scientists about Frankenstein and the issues it addresses, produced as a companion piece to the annotated book. The first episode, A Bolt of Lightning, is an overview of the impact of Shelley's novel and the questions it raises for the philosophy of science.
Further episodes deal with the line between chaos and organization, the nature of life, the definition of consciousness and intelligence, the ethics of intervening in nature, and more. You can see all seven videos in the series at Brain Pickings. -Thanks, WTM!
The marketing has begun for the sequel to Wonder Woman. The title is Wonder Woman 1984, which tells us that the movie is set in that year, approximately 70 years after the first film, and well before Batman v Superman and Justice League. Gal Gadot Tweeted the picture above, showing us how the Amazon character's new costume will look. The basic design is the same as the leather she wore in the previous movie, with the metallic glitter of Lynda Carter's version. Chris Pine will return as Steve Trevor, shown here in his 1980s fashions.
Welcome to WONDER WOMAN 1984, Steve Trevor! #WW84 pic.twitter.com/BCLARdVuTu
— Patty Jenkins (@PattyJenks) June 13, 2018
Pine's casting would have been difficult to maintain as a secret, so they made Trevor's return into a marketing tool. The big question is how they will explain it. Wonder Woman 1984 is now in production and is scheduled to hit theaters on November 1, 2019.
The Wild Canadian Year is a five-part TV series about Canadian wildlife. Sam Ellis' assignment for the show was to film a Canada lynx in its natural habitat. Not an easy task, as remaining invisible is a big part of a lynx's lifestyle. But over time, Sam tracked and got to know a cat he called Mad Max. He spent 76 days trying to get some good footage of Max hunting. So here we have a videographer following a cameraman following a lynx following rabbits for more than two months, so let's appreciate the result.
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