Before smartphones took over the world, you would often see a magazine rack in someone's bathroom. Magazine articles are short or long, and you selected what to read by how long you thought you'd be in there. That's exactly the idea that John Javna had while sitting on the toilet one day in 1987. The first Uncle John's Bathroom Reader was published in 1988, which makes the series 30 years old now.

“John created it … based on the tradition that the whole family read a lot in the bathroom, and so did the whole world,” Gordon Javna told an Oregon newspaper in 2016. “I cracked up when I heard the idea from him, but it made a lot of sense.”

The first edition of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, released in 1988, was a collection of short articles, like brief histories of various subjects and origins of words or phrases. Credited to the Bathroom Readers Institute, the books were a success. Sequels were released the following years until the brothers, along with a team of freelancers, were producing 10 titles a year.

How did the Bathroom Readers become so successful? We'd like to think that Neatorama helped, but a lot of it was the Bathroom Reader's Institute's work with price clubs. Read about the rise of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader at Tedium.

(Image credit: Flickr user Britt Reints)

Ruth Bader Ginsberg is the longest-serving woman justice on the US Supreme Court, and only the second woman ever appoint to the Court. But she had quite a distinguished career even before that. She was already a wife and mother when she graduated, tied for first in her class, from Columbia Law School in 1959, and spent the next several decades having to prove she was as good as any male lawyer. Ginsberg worked for the ACLU and took on gender discrimination cases all over the country. She was appointed to the US Court of Appeals in 1976, and to the Supreme Court in 1993.     

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Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a real-life superhero. And now the notorious RBG has her own superhero movie, titled simply RBG, a documentary set for limited release on May 4. May the fourth be with her. -via Uproxx

Dolph C. Volker, the Cheeta Whisperer (previously at Neatorama), shows us the difference between big cats that are "ambush predators" and those that aren't. Cheetahs chase their prey; that's what they are built for. But leopards are very likely to sneak up on you.  

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The sequence between 2:30 and 3:30 reminds me of a house cat video we are all familiar with. The big difference is that you can virtually see the leopard dreaming of dinner when its eyes focus on Volker's back. But is it okay to turn your back on a cheetah? I'll never try it. How about you? Volker himself recommends against acting like he does. -via Digg

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the premiere of a radio series called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Written by Douglas Adams, it first aired on March 8, 1978 on BBC Radio 4. In an era when radio plays were long gone, it became an enduring hit. Adams soon wrote a best-selling novel based on the radio series, and it eventually became a TV series -plus comics, video games, and stage productions. In honor of the anniversary, LEGO artist Ochre Jelly (Iain Heath) built a LEGO tribute featuring Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and various memorable icons of the series.

This LEGO diorama was unveiled at Emerald City Comic Con last week, and will be presented at various LEGO conventions this year including Bricks Cascade in Portland and BrickCan in Vancouver.    

This diorama includes the briefly-existent whale, petunias, Deep Thought, and more. See all the images in a larger size in Ochre Jelly's Flickr album. -Thanks, Iain!

These star-crossed lovers of the feline variety are not pussyfooting around! What will their families think? Cactussa took this picture in Chefchaouen, Morocco. Chefchaouen is renowned for its buildings washed in various shades of blue. Read more about Chefchaoen in a previous post. -via reddit

We have skeletal evidence of human brain surgery going back 12,000 years, but since there was no written language to accompany those early cases, the reasons for trepanation in ancient cultures is a matter of conjecture. Later medical accounts say that skulls were drilled open to treat fractures, epilepsy, or paralysis, or for experiments. Some patients even survived the procedure. A tale arose that trepanation in ancient cultures was to "let the migraines out," but there is no evidence for this in either skulls or ancient literature. Where did that idea come from?

The real source of the myth seems to have come much later. In 1902, the Journal of Mental Science published a lecture by Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton, a London physician well-known for his work on pharmacology and ideas about migraine pathology. The lecture mixed neurological theory and armchair anthropology, and ranged over subjects including premonitions, telepathy, hypnotism, hallucinations, and epileptic and migrainous aura. In one notable passage, Brunton proposed that visions of fairies and the sound of their jingling bells were “nothing more” than the zigzags of migraine aura, and the aural results of nerve centre stimulation.

Brunton proposed that openings bored into ancient Stone Age skulls during life had been made to cure migraine. His suggestion followed considerable excitement during the 1870s when the French physician and anthropologist Paul Broca claimed that ancient skulls discovered in Peru and France had not only been opened surgically during life in order to release evil spirits, but that the patients had survived. To Brunton, it seemed obvious that the holes would have been made at the request of migraine sufferers in order to “let the headache out”.

Read more about what we know and what we don't know about trepanation at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Rama)

Movies, TV shows, and advertisements wouldn't reflect real life if they didn't include children and even babies. But children aren't experienced actors- at least most of them aren't. And there are strict labor laws covering how they are used in Hollywood productions. That's where the profession of "child wrangler" comes in. Jody is a child wrangler. Her duties include making sure the rules are followed, ensuring children are properly supervised on set, and doing whatever she can to get a performance out of them within the limitations of their inexperience, their parents, and the laws. She has a few horror stories about stage parents, bad luck, and the vagaries of acting. And a couple of really nice stories.   

Jody worked on a TV pilot about a giant friendly monster, but since the monster was all CGI, its stand-in on set was an eyeless green mess of padding. The horrified parents of the young actress complained to the wardrobe department (wardrobe wasn't responsible and had no power to fix it, but the parents just really wanted to vent, apparently). Jody told the girl, "This is a nice man pretending to be a big kitty, but we haven't put the rest of him on yet ... He doesn't feel good about himself for not looking like the others. Can you make him feel better when you see him?" The girl ran to the homunculus, hugged him, and said, "You're pretty to me." The show never got picked up, but that take was gold.

Read about the work of a Hollywood child wrangler at Cracked.

This is just because you need to watch something totally goofy at least once a day. There was a fad for a while for making blankets without sewing: get two pieces of synthetic fabric -the kind that doesn't unravel, cut a fringe all around, and tie the two pieces together with the fringe. Now you can just buy them sewn together. They can keep you warm while watching TV, or you can use them as a great dance costume!

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The dancers at Merguez Studio rightfully give credit to the inspiration for this nonsense.

Me: “I’m going to bed early tonight”

Me at 3 am: pic.twitter.com/XVpbkGkkkO

— John Olmsted (@JohnnyOohhh) January 29, 2018

-via reddit

Later this year, a new $10 bill design will be put into circulation in Canada. It will feature the image of Viola Desmond, the first Canadian woman to grace Canada's most common currency note. If you've never heard of Viola Desmond, it's not surprising. Americans weren't taught many stories about our own Civil Rights pioneers in school, much less those of Canada's. Desmond was a businesswoman from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who fought against a system of segregation that wasn't covered by Jim Crow laws as it was in the US. But even so, the unwritten rules were enforced in a roundabout way. When she bought a movie ticket, she was sold a balcony ticket because she was black. But she sat on the main floor anyway.   

Desmond was used to finding a way when racially motivated roadblocks were thrown at her. When she was denied entrance to Halifax beauty schools because of her skin color, she trained in Montreal, New York, and New Jersey, then created her own beauty studio and school in Halifax, drawing black women from across Canada's east coast. She also created her own line of black beauty care products. So, being a woman used to making her own path, once Desmond realized she was being discriminated against, she courageously strode back inside the theater to take a seat on the main floor.

She was just settling in to enjoy the movie when she was confronted by the theater manager. Desmond stood her ground, but the police soon arrived and forcibly removed her from the theater, injuring her hip and knee in the process.

She spent the night in jail, though not for disobeying segregation laws; there weren't any. Instead, officials got her on a trumped-up claim of defrauding the Government of Nova Scotia. They alleged that she had failed to pay one cent in amusement tax—that is, the difference in the amount of tax charged on a main floor and balcony seat. Under a 1915 Canadian licensing statute, those who entered a theater without paying the proper amount of amusement tax could be arrested without a warrant and fined.

Read how that turned out for Desmond, and for Canada's history, at Mental Floss.

The premise is right in the title. This is an elaborate cat trap, situated so that the feline stars will be facing the camera. The first cat gets his choice of box, and the rest can select from the leftovers. I like the little glance the sixth cat gave to the camera as he was deciding to double up on the lower tier instead of jumping to the higher tier. The seventh cat, who should be named Groucho, will learn that snoozing means losing.

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The Shironeko cats (previously at Neatorama) are really into boxes as well as baskets. You can see them on the Kagonekoshiro blog or at their YouTube channel. -via Metafilter

How fast can a machine solve a Rubik's cube? The answer is 0.38 seconds. Blink and you'll miss it. But they will show it again in slow motion.

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What kind of machine does this? It's called the Rubik's Contraption, and it was built by Ben Katz and Jared Di Carlo. They say it would go much faster if it weren't for the time spent actually moving the mechanical Rubik's cube. They could push it faster but the toy tends to fall apart under the pressure. Ben tells about about the machine and its specs here, and Jared gives an overview of the software here. I don't understand much of it at all, but I am impressed. -via Digg

This story covers almost 14 billion years into one video. Each second represents 22 million years. The formation of the planet we live on is just a tiny part of the story in the vast cosmos, and humans themselves are only in the half half-second of the time scale. Luckily, we have Morgan Freeman, Brian Cox, Carl Sagan, and Sir David Attenborough narrating to keep us in the loop.

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This beautiful video journey was constructed by Melodysheep, who normally brings us lighthearted pop culture tributes. But if you look back further, he was also responsible for the Symphony of Science series. This new video is like a mega-mashup of those gems. Read how he did this at Melodysheep's website.  -via Laughing Squid

Calling your professors names is not considered the best way to get an A in science class, but calling one teacher a slime mold is just a description. Physarum Polycephalum has been named as a visiting scholar at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. It has its own webpage, office (in a dark basement), and office hours. A recent symposium held to present the slime mold's work featured wine and cheese for the humans and oats for the slime mold. From the faculty page:

Physarum Polycephalum, a plasmodial slime mold, researches important problems from a non-human perspective, and enhances intellectual life on campus by helping students and colleagues to think about the world without human biases.

The visiting scholar at Hampshire is not on a tenure track. But the stunt highlights the amazing things that slime molds can do.

Slime molds are not actually molds. They’re much more like amoebas — single-celled microscopic sacs that move around by altering their shape.

Slime molds can exist as free-floating single cells. But when two or more slime mold cells meet, they dissolve the cell membranes that separate each individual and fuse together in one membrane. That means two individuals, with individual genetics, can exist within the same body. And there’s no limit to the number of individuals that can join the collective, called a plasmodium. Each cell of the slime mold is making decisions that ultimately benefit the whole collective.

When slime molds are placed in a new environment, they’ll spread out in every direction in a fractal pattern, assessing the lay of the land. If they find something beneficial to them, like food, they’ll reinforce the pathway. If they find something they don’t like — like direct sunlight — they’ll recoil.

It sounds simple, but through this process, slime molds can solve an impressively complex array of problems.

Slime molds can solve mazes, draw maps, and keep track of time, all without a brain or a nervous system. Read more about the remarkable slime mold at Vox. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Ray Mendel/Hampshire College)

(Image credit: Kjokkenutstyr)

The following is an article from Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader.

Inside that textured green skin, it’s ripe with mystery. It’s an “evolutionary anachronism.” It’s not a vegetable, and not exactly your typical fruit. It’s an acquired taste that most Americans still resist. Meet the avocado.

HAVING A BALL

The avocado came from South America, so it’s not too surprising that the Nahuatl language of the ancient Aztecs gave us its name, derived from ahuacatl. Besides referring to the fruit, the word had another meaning: “testicle,” which also isn’t too surprising, considering the fruit’s shape and texture. Although “guacamole” doesn’t really sound like “avocado,” the two words share a root: Guacamole comes from the Nahuatl ahuacatl-molli, which means “avocado sauce.” (The fact that it also means “testicle sauce” is probably not something we want to dwell on.)

BEEN THERE, DUNG THAT

Biologists suggest that it’s a lucky accident the avocado is still with us, because it evolved to fill a niche in an ecosystem that went extinct eons ago. As with many fruits, the avocado developed as a mutually beneficial trade-off with animals. The tree provides tasty food, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch- the plant’s price for its fruit is mobility for its seeds. How does that work? The seeds of the fruit are typically small enough to pass through the digestive systems of the animals that eat it. The seeds are often bitter, sometimes even toxic enough to cause nausea. So animals rarely chew them more than once, but instead learn to swallow them whole. The seeds exit the digestive system intact, as waste, and end up planted in the animal’s nutrient-rich dung.

There’s no reason to believe that the avocado was an exception to this rule. It’s unlikely that the plant species’ survival was ever meant to depend on humans poking its seed with toothpicks and suspending it in water to get it to sprout. But that begs the question: What animal in South America is big enough to eat a avocado whole and poop out its oversize pit?

How much enlightenment can one person take? The desire for mind-expanding drugs is limited when all those drugs do is strip away the false veneer of reality. That false veneer of reality is the reason we buy the tickets and the popcorn! Not to mention the years we spent practicing our suspension of disbelief so we can overlook the shortcuts in special effects. Nah, I'll just stick with the ibuprofen. I don't want to think about how this fantasy will end in two hours, now that you've talked me into fantasizing about actually going to the movies. This is the latest comic from Tree Lobsters.