Chris Poole brings us a cute Fathers Day greeting in which his cat Marmalade expresses his thoughts. Say it with me now: "Awww." See more of Marmalade and his buddy Cole in previous videos. -via Laughing Squid
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It seems like I spent the entire decade of the 1980s sitting in a movie theater. Even if you weren't born then, you've probably figured out from watching movies on TV that the '80s were a golden age for comedy, action, and science fiction movies for young adults. Illustrator Scott Park (previously at Neatorama) has designed a poster he calls EIGHTY2, or "80s", with 80 characters from 57 different movies from that decade. You'll recognize them all, even if you can't quite name them all. You can see a larger version of the image here, and buy a print here. -via Geeks Are Sexy
When the new Iroquois Theater in Chicago opened in November of 1903, it was advertised as "absolutely fireproof." On December 30th, between 1700 and 2,000 people, mostly mothers and children on holiday break, attended a performance of the comedy Mr. Blubeard, starring Eddie Foy. There were only 1600 seats, but tickets were sold for others to stand during the play.
As the show began its second act at 3:15 that afternoon, a spark from a stage light ignited nearby drapery. Attempts to stamp out the fire with a primitive retardant did nothing to halt its spread across the flammable decorative backdrops. Foy, dressed in drag for his next scene, attempted to calm the increasingly agitated audience. He ordered the orchestra to continue playing as stagehands made futile attempts to lower a supposedly flame-retardant curtain, but it snagged.
It was soon apparent that the fire could not be contained. Audience members bolted from their seats toward what few exit doors they could find, but most were obscured by curtains. They were further stymied by metal accordion gates, firmly locked to keep those in upper levels from sneaking down to pricier seats during intermissions. The terrified patrons – an estimated 1,700 with many more standing ticket holders clogging the aisles - were funneling through scant few chokepoints. Quickly the scene had changed “from mimicry to tragedy,” as one survivor said. Watching from the stage, Foy wrote in his memoirs, he saw in the upper levels a “mad, animal-like stampede – their screams, groans and snarls, the scuffle of thousands of feet and bodies grinding against bodies merging into a crescendo half-wail, half-roar.”
More than 600 people died in the stampede and conflagration. An investigation showed that required safety features were either nonexistent or non-functioning, and the overall design of the building impeded escape. The scandal of the Iroquois Theater fire led to the development of independently-powered exit signs and doors that open from the inside only. Read about the disaster and its aftermath at Smithsonian.
If you're stressing out about something specific, you know what's causing you to lose sleep. When you don't know what's causing it, the stress only increases like a snowball rolling downhill. This TED-Ed lesson from Dan Kwartler goes into the mechanisms that disrupt your normal sleep cycle. -via Digg
The question was, "Professors of Reddit, who was the dumbest student you ever had and what was so dumb about them?" It was followed by almost 6,000 comments. Some of them are unforgettable.
One of my students told me he was going to be 21 when he graduated high school. I asked him why. He explained that he ages TWO YEARS every year. He is 15 turning 16 so that is 2 years. He is probably right that he will not graduate HS til age 21, but not for the reason he mentioned lol -soulsista12
I didn’t believe any student was dumb - he/she may only have needed the right motivation.
Until I met RJ. RJ was dumb. RJ didn’t realize that the chicken we eat was the same as the animal. RJ was 21 at the time. -tapehead4
Happened in the first week of a college anthropology course:
Prof: "Let's list a few basic differences between modern humans and animals"
Student: "We have a heart beat" -PubScrubRedemption
You can read a ranked list of some of the stories at Bored Panda, or read them all at reddit.
(Image credit: Flickr user duluoz cats)
You might not know the name George Wythe, but he was one of the 56 delegates that signed the Declaration of Independence. He was the first American law professor, and the school of law at the College of William & Mary is named for him. Wythe is also notable for the mysterious way he died.
Many believe Wythe was murdered by his no-good, addicted-to-gambling grand-nephew George Wythe Sweeney (who stood to inherit). One morning in 1806, Wythe fell violently and inexplicably ill. So, too, did Lydia Broadnax and Michael Brown, both of whom had had breakfast at Wythe's home. Broadnax was his long-time cook (and his wife's slave before being manumitted by Wythe following his wife's death). Brown was a free mixed-race teen, who lived in the Wythe household. Wythe had been tutoring him in Greek.
Brown died first. Wythe was ill for many days, during which he insisted that he had been deliberately poisoned, before finally dying on June 8th. Broadnax recovered from her illness. Interestingly, the doctors weren't as sure as Wythe about poison diagnosis.
Read about the investigation and the trial, which may leave you with a bad taste, at Reason. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Billy Hathorn)
Remember New Coke? The reformulation of Coca-Cola in 1985 was a huge disaster for the company, although the controversy itself was advertising. But innovation in soft drinks goes on, and only seven years later, the company's North American president, Doug Ivester, introduced a new product with a large dose of pomp and circumstance. However, this promotion was not all that it appeared.
The product was Tab Clear, a new version of the sugar- and calorie-free diet drink first introduced in 1963. While it retained its bubbles, the liquid was transparent, an obvious nod to rival Pepsi’s introduction of Crystal Pepsi earlier that year.
Publicly, Ivester boasted that Tab Clear would be yet another success in Coca-Cola’s long history of refreshment dominance. But behind the scenes, Ivester and chief marketing officer Sergio Zyman were convinced Tab Clear would be a failure—and that is exactly what they hoped would happen. Flying in the face of convention, the launch of Tab Clear was deliberately designed to self-destruct.
The idea behind Tab Clear was a genius marketing move on many levels, but still reads like a super villain scheme. Read the story of the motivation behind Tab Clear at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Kevin Trotman)
In the latest video from Condé Nast Traveler, we watch people from around the world count the same stack of dollars. On the surface, it looks like most of them are doing it the same way, but when you look closely, there are variations that would be hard to replicate once you've learned your own way to count cash. Too bad we don't get to practice as much as we should. And you have to wonder whether these ingrained habits will fade away as we move closer to a cashless society. -via Boing Boing
Throughout history, there have been outbreaks of strange symptoms or behavior that no one could explain. Or explain adequately, that is. Some of them in the distant past might have a microbial explanation, but they could also be a contagious mental illness. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but you've seen how fads and trends spread through mass communication, so is a mania any less susceptible to spreading? One of the more famous examples is the dancing mania of 1518.
It was the summertime dance that just didn’t stop. Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. One of the first major outbreaks was in the Holy Roman Empire, in 1374, which quickly spread throughout Europe. The most notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in 1518 when one Frau Troffea broke into a jig on a hot summer’s day in July. Pretty soon, dozens of others had joined, then hundreds — mostly female — who couldn’t stop busting a move. In all seriousness, the condition was horrifying, and the afflicted died from exhaustion and heart attacks.
Even weirder are the manias that spread from person to person in more recent times, even in the 21st century. Read about ten of these strange plagues at Messy Nessy Chic.
Do you recall the end of the book Charlotte's Web, when Wilbur was delighted to see hundreds of Charlotte's babies had hatched, but then almost all of them flew away? Flying spiders of all kinds scare people by throwing out silk that carries them on the wind. Aerodynamics engineer Moonsung Cho observed crab spiders to see how they fly.
He gathered 14 of them and placed them on a small, dome-shaped structure in a Berlin park to see how they reacted to natural winds. He also studied them in the lab using controlled wind tunnels. He found that before flying away, the spiders would lay down an anchor silk strand for safety. They would then reach one of their front legs into the air to evaluate how fast the wind was blowing, and from which direction. That’s the spider equivalent of licking your finger and sticking it in the air.
If the wind conditions were just right—which, for these crab spiders, meant less than 7.3 miles per hour (3.3 meters per second) with a nice upward draft—they stood up very straight, stuck their butts in the air, and produced 50 to 60 nanoscale silks that lifted them into the skies. On average, those silks were nearly 10 feet long. Once they let go of their anchor strands, they were gone.
Cho studied the silk and determined that these strands are so fine that they are thinner than the air they float on. Read more about the research, and see a crab spider take off, at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Moonsung Cho)
While at the (@TulsaDrillers) game .. dog night at the park .. one dog saw a ball .. and go figure. #Dogs pic.twitter.com/6ws99cEQqR
— Harold R. Kuntz (@HaroldRKuntz3) June 14, 2018
The Double-A Tulsa Drillers celebrated Bark in the Park last night, and welcomed fans with their dogs. A group of dogs and their humans were down by the field before the game doing a media appearance, when one doggo noticed the players warming up. Well, not so much the players but THE BALL! That was his cue for fetch, and no one was going to stop him! He chased that ball around the field, caught it, and dutifully brought it back to the shortstop. That's a good dog. -via Deadspin
The Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, DC, is responsible for the health and happiness of more than 1,800 animals from all over the world. The nutritional requirements and the preferences of each species is studied and catered to. Some of those preferences may be surprising. Who knew that lions love pumpkin spice?
“The lions take a long time rolling around in that scent and getting it all over themselves,” says Hilary Colton, animal keeper and vice chair of the National Zoo’s Enrichment and Training Committee.
Zoo staff scatter a range of spices, extracts, fur and other scents around the Zoo’s many animal habitats, encouraging animals to sniff and explore. Pumpkin spice is a favorite of the lions, sending them into a flurry of activity—rolling, rubbing and scent marking.
“The lions will scent mark the same way our cats do at home in that space,” says Colton. “We get a lot of behavior from using smell. We don’t have to use a lot because humans don’t have the entire spectrum of scent receptors that some of our animals do.”
The zoo also makes food into an adventure, enrichment, or learning experience for some animals, and that's on top of dealing with odd deliveries, like a truckload of crickets. Read how the National Zoo feeds its residents at Smithsonian Insider. -via Metafilter
See a video of the zoo's scent-enrichment program for cats.
(Image credit: Flickr user Smithsonian's National Zoo)
Ze Frank tells us about anteaters, tamanduas, numbats, echidnas, pangolins, and other mammals that eat insects. They are a funny-looking group that have nothing else to do with each other, which makes them the perfect subject for the True Facts series. Warning: contains a brief shot of an echidna penis. -via Laughing Squid
The famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by a team led by Philip Zimbardo is a classic, taught in introductory psychology classes and referred to by laymen all over. Student volunteers were divided into the roles of prison guards and prisoners, and those assigned as guards became cruelly abusive as they explored their power over their fellow students. But more recent research and interviews with the participants revealed that things were not exactly as published. The "guards" were coached in their cruelty, and the students considered the experiment to be a performance.
Though most guards gave lackluster performances, some even going out of their way to do small favors for the prisoners, one in particular rose to the challenge: Dave Eshelman, whom prisoners nicknamed “John Wayne” for his Southern accent and inventive cruelty. But Eshelman, who had studied acting throughout high school and college, has always admitted that his accent was just as fake as Korpi’s breakdown. His overarching goal, as he told me in an interview, was simply to help the experiment succeed.
“I took it as a kind of an improv exercise,” Eshelman said. “I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do, and I thought I’d do it better than anybody else by creating this despicable guard persona. I’d never been to the South, but I used a southern accent, which I got from Cool Hand Luke.”
Eshelman expressed regret to me for the way he mistreated prisoners, adding that at times he was calling on his own experience undergoing a brutal fraternity hazing a few months earlier. “I took it just way over the top,” he said. But Zimbardo and his staff seemed to approve. After the experiment ended, Zimbardo singled him out and thanked him.
Some of the "prisoners" also admitted to role-playing during the experiment. Others attempted to replicate Zimbardo's study, and achieved different results. Those studies didn't get the press that the original experiment got -and some say that's because Zimbardo interfered with their publication. The Stanford Prison Experiment isn't the only psychological experiment that doesn't hold up over time. We recently posted about how the Robber's Cave Experiment was retooled to attain the desired results. The same investigator found irregularities in Stanley Milgram's experiments in the willingness of subjects to obey authority even when that means harming others. Even the famous Marshmallow Experiment has been discredited by replication studies. Vox has an overview of famous but discredited psychology experiments, and the difficulty of correcting textbooks and the popular image of these studies. -via Digg
(Image credit: Eric. E. Castro)
Summer officially starts next week with the solstice, even though school is already out, and the temperatures have been high for months. But we've got a lot of summer ahead of us, so we may as well learn something new from Mental Floss about our favorite summer activities. This episode of Scatterbrained has trivia about ice cream, summer travel, iced tea, and more. John Green has some handy tips to make summer easier. Learn the history of the state fair. And don't forget your sunscreen!
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