We are familiar with the "right to remain silent" from hearing Miranda warnings on TV shows, but the concept goes back much further than the 1966 case of Miranda v. Arizona. Police tactics for extracting confessions landed in the Supreme Court after a 1919 murder case. Three Chinese diplomats were murdered, and Ziang Sung Wan confessed after nine days of brutal police interrogation. He recanted his confession in court, but it was deemed admissible despite his treatment because of an 1897 ruling that the only reason to exclude a confession would be because of "promises or threats" from the police. The interrogators had not used either, but there were plenty of other ways of making Wan talk.

In the quarter-century since the 1897 ruling, the country had been embroiled in a robust national debate about the ethics and efficacy of what had come to be called the “third degree.” Creative detectives had come up with many methods of extracting confessions from unwilling suspects, some of which amounted to nothing short of torture. As techniques like quartering suspects in pitch-dark cells, turning up the heat to “sweat” confessions out of them, and even blowing red pepper or releasing red ants into their cells were exposed, the public reaction was strongly negative. The newspapers began decrying the practices as brutal and un-American.

At the same time, there was a fierce debate going on in the judiciary as to what kinds of interrogations and police conduct actually were prohibited under the law. All of this, on top of the staggering evidence that Wan’s confession had been coerced, provided ample justification for the Supreme Court to bring order to the chaos surrounding confessions.

Read about the court case and its appeals at Smithsonian.

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Avengers: Infinity War had the biggest opening weekend for a film ever, raking in $641 million globally. In North America, the movie made $257,698,183, or ten million more than the previous record-holder, The Force Awakens. In honor of the occasion, Kathleen Kennedy, head of Lucasfilm, sent a graphic greeting to Marvel Studios (which are both owned by Disney). The gesture is a continuation of a tradition made famous by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas in the 1970s and '80s. Continue reading to see some of the previous such congratulatory messages.

We recently posted the story of the Clotilda, a commissioned ship that imported enslaved people from Africa in 1860, long after the practice was outlawed in the US. Acclaimed Harlem Renaissance author and trained cultural anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston interviewed and wrote a book about the last survivor of that journey. Cudjo Lewis, whose original name was Kossula, was 95 years old at the time. He told Hurston about his youth in what is now the country of Benin, his capture and voyage on the Clotilda, the slavery years, and how he built a life in America after the Civil War. Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" was written in 1931, but did not find a publisher.    

One publisher, Viking Press, did say it would be happy to accept the book, on the condition that Hurston rewrote it “in language rather than dialect.” She refused. Boas had impressed upon her the importance of meticulous transcription, and while her contemporaries — and authors of 19th-century slave narratives — believed “you had to strip away all the vernacular to prove black humanity,” says Salamishah Tillet, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Hurston was of the exact opposite opinion.

In any event, a dejected Hurston moved on to other projects, and the manuscript for Barracoon ended up languishing in her archives at Howard University. Until a few years ago, that is, when the Zora Neale Hurston Trust acquired new literary representation: Had any unpublished treasures been left in the vault? the agents wondered.

Barracoon is scheduled for release May 8. You can read a substantial excerpt of Thurston's interviews with Lewis at Vulture. -via Metafilter

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The ball is apparently out of play -some young leagues have different rules. The coach tells the player to run to home base. You might call this "running" if you're being generous. Hey, it's his time to shine! And besides, he's seen a few movies, and knows that the crucial moment happens in slow motion so the audience doesn't miss it. You may as well make your moment of glory last as long as possible. This little boy is going places ...probably not the majors, but maybe Comedy Central. -via Tastefully Offensive  

In the 1980s and '90s, the success of Superman and Batman raised interest in movies from Marvel comic books, but there were multiple factors working against such an idea. Movie studios didn't understand the draw of comic books. Movie rights to Marvel characters were scattered among several studios. Special effects weren't up to the job. And the deals that were required turned out to be quite complicated. A bunch of projects were started, but were never completed.

The most well-known—and perplexing—scrapped Marvel movie remains James Cameron’s attempt at Spider-Man in the years after Terminator 2 was released. This one was pretty far along at Carolco Pictures, with Cameron writing an extensive treatment focusing on Peter Parker developing his super powers, falling in love with Mary Jane Watson, and taking on villains like Electro and Sandman.

Though those sound like the pillars for any Spidey origin story, there were plenty of off-brand moments in the film, such as its heavy profanity and the infamous sex scene between Peter and Mary Jane atop a bridge tower. This take on the Wall Crawler probably wouldn't have found its way into your Happy Meal. The whole project fell apart when Carolco went under, which gave way to Sam Raimi's mega successful 2002 Spider-Man.

Other projects included Tom Cruise as Iron Man and Wesley Snipes as Black Panther. Read about those and more Marvel movies that weren't made at Mental Floss.

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Jordan Watson is famous for his How To Dad series. His daughters are growing up, though, and the oldest is learning to read. There is nothing that makes you question the universe more than helping a child with homework. That's what it took for Watson to realize how weird our language and spelling conventions are. -via Tastefully Offensive

We've seen an awful lot of cheap bootleg movie merchandise, often badly done in far-off countries to get around copyright laws, with different names that suffer in translation. If there aren't enough humorous knockoffs, how about some made just for us to laugh at? Jeff Wysaski at Obvious Plant made up a bunch of "fake fakes," based on the Avengers and the marvel Cinematic Universe. They are just weird enough to be believable. After all the trouble he went to in order to manufacture these for the photos, Wysaski offered the props for purchase. He could have charged a lot more money, because they sold out in no time. See the entire collection here. -via Boing Boing

Hanna Puacz was a Polish teenager when Russia's tsar made her into a star. With her new name Madame Ganna Walska, she became a celebrity in Europe known for her marriages, her love of plants, and her Sisyphean pursuit of a career in opera.

Madame accepted numerous marriage proposals and in total had six husbands, including a Russian count, a yogi, a playboy conman and the inventor of an electromagnetic “death ray”.

When she wasn’t playing ‘femme fatale’ and enjoying the high life that her first marriage had introduced her to, a good chunk of her time was spent in pursuit of a career as an opera singer.

The only problem was– Madame Walska couldn’t sing– or at least, if she could, no one was aware of her talent due to a crippling case of stage fright.

Madame Walska moved to the United States to avoid World War I, and in 1941 started building her legacy in the form of a garden in California known as Lotusland. Home to 3,000 plant species, Lotusland features Walska's extravagant sense of design, combining French statuary, Buddhist temples, discarded glass, giant clams, and topiary. She dedicated her life to the garden until her death at age 96. Read about Madame Ganna Walska and Lotusland at Messy Nessy Chic.

pic.twitter.com/B9Xw0kB6GZ

— barbro (@BarbroFarbror) April 29, 2018

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Here we have a throwback to the early days of internet animation technology, in which an artist takes a painful amount of time and effort to produce something clever, but the result is comically horrible due to the limits of the software. It appears that this is exactly the effect the artist was going for, and she achieved it brilliantly. The technical part is not as difficult as it looks, in 2018. @BarbroFarbror took a single image meme and made a music video out of it. She says the whole thing took about two hours, and then explains how she did it. -via reddit

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A giant duck was spotted rolling down the street on Thursday in Des Moines. His name is Quacky.

Quacky, owned by Youth Emergency Shelter and Services, became untethered from his temporary home at Two Rivers Marketing, 106 E 6th St. in Des Moines, around 7 p.m. and rolled approximately two blocks before coming to a halt.

"I am happy to report the duck is back home in its nest and very safe and undamaged," said Stephen Quirk, CEO of YESS.

No foul play is suspected. Quirk blamed the windy weather for the loose duck.

Quacky had been working to promote the organization's annual duck derby, to be held May 5. -via Dave Barry

In the 10th century, Vikings sailed from Norway to Greenland, but the ancient accounts of the voyage don't give us much technical information about how they found their way. That's a long trip if you don't have navigational aids.

Navigation, however, was no easy task. There was no map or chart to rely on, no sextant for celestial navigation, and no magnetic compass to help with dead reckoning. (That was how Columbus did it 500 years later.) The Norse sagas offer a few hints about how Vikings rowed and sailed along—but they are vague and incomplete. Close to shore, Viking mariners relied on coastal landmarks, such as how the sun seemed to hang between two particular mountains. Out at sea, when they were lucky, they had the sun and the predictable movements of migratory birds. But the sagas shed little light on how they managed during cloudy or stormy days, common occurrences in the North Atlantic.

One theory is that they used "sunstones," or crystals, which can reveal the position of the sun on a cloudy day if you know how to use one. But the evidence for this is scant. Read about the use of crystals for ocean navigation at Atlas Obscura.

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Speaking seems like a pretty straightforward and natural activity to those of us who do it, but have you ever wondered what it looks like from the inside? It can be unsettling to watch. That tongue that we use and misuse every minute of the day looks totally foreign when we see the muscle at work in an MRI video.

The European Patent Office nominated physicist and MRI pioneer Jens Frahm at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry as one of the three finalists for its European Inventor award, in the field of research. In the mid-1980’s, over a decade after the MRI was developed, Frahm invented FLASH MRI, a faster way to view what’s going on inside our bodies. In 2010, he and his team developed FLASH2, speeding the imaging up to real-time.

To celebrate their recognition, the institute released a handful of real-time MRI films of people speaking and singing. You can see the lips, tongue, soft palate, and larynx moving together to form words, all in German. It’s weird!

There's another video of a man singing at Motherboard. -via Digg

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It's about time we had a roundup of stupidity to make ourselves feel smart in comparison. Well, we all know that a brain cramp can happen any time, even to people who are usually fairly well together, and we are just lucky that our screwups aren't enshrined in photographs. That said, no one reading this at Neatorama would ever tie a load down like the folks in the above picture. And the delivery below requires a vicious streak, unless it's just cluelessness.    

Hey @UPS, your driver left this package under our door knob like this and trapped us in our apartment. Had to call maintenance to get out. pic.twitter.com/AsFRMv9f6g

— Danny Phantom (@uhhDanny) September 4, 2017

 
There are twelve pages of submitted stupidity in a gallery at Bored Panda, ranked by reader votes.

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A crew from BBC Earth left a camera out in the midst of a group of baboons. A pretty large camera, with a lens that acted as a mirror. Instead of wrecking the camera out of curiosity, the baboons wanted to examine their own reflections. What the camera recorded was a wide variety of reactions and facial expressions among the troop, not unlike what you'd expect from humans in front of a mirror. This clip is from the show The Secret Life Of Primates: Baboons. -via Laughing Squid

In the era of sailing ships, the 16th through the 19th centuries, ships couldn't recruit enough men to stay at sea for months earning low wages and eating hardtack, so they shanghaied them. That was the term for kidnapping sailors, possibly because Shanghai was the destination for many of them. Agents called "crimps" in America could make good money providing hands for ships, whether they were willing or not.      

The most straightforward method for a crimp to shanghai a victim is to render him unconscious, often by drugging his drink but a blow to the head works equally well, then forge his signature on the ship's articles during the time of delivery to the ship’s captain. If the unconscious victim is not known to the crimp, a name would be invented. It was not uncommon for an unwilling sailor to wake up at sea and find himself with a new name.

The crimps made good money from shanghaiing. A well-run operation could fetch as much as $9,500 per year in 1890s dollars, equivalent to about a quarter million dollars in today’s money. Aside from the fee, the crimp also collected, on behalf of the men he shanghaied, the two months advance pay that was allowed before a trip so that sailors could pay off debts and prepare themselves for the trip. It was a very lucrative enterprise.

Read about several crimps and their notorious methods of shanghaiing sailors, including one incident where money was collected for sailors that were actually delivered dead, at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company