The following is an article from Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.

(Image credit: Frode Inge Helland)

One measure of the desirability of a sports car is whether or not it has teenagers drooling over it before they’re even old enough to drive. Here’s the story of one of the most drool-worthy cars in auto history. (See how long it takes you to guess which car we’re talking about.)

THINKING SMALL

In the early 1950s, Harley Earl, the legendary head of General Motors’ Styling department, began to notice an uptick in interest in small, imported sports cars. The soldiers who fought in World War II had taken a liking to the Fiats, Triumphs, Jaguars, Morgans, and other convertible roadsters they had seen in Europe, and they’d been buying modest numbers of them from import auto dealers ever since. When Earl went to auto races, he was struck by the affection that drivers had for their little sports cars, and now even his own employees were beginning to drive them to work.

Earl had devoted his entire working life to making GM’s cars ever longer, wider, lower, more powerful, more streamlined, and more fanciful, as his automobile designs drew inspiration from everything from locomotives to bombers to rocket ships. He’d worked on plenty of cars that might be considered sporty, but he’d never really designed a sports car, at least not one that had found its way into dealer showrooms. Sports cars may have looked pretty and been fun to drive, but they didn’t sell very well. Of the more than 4.6 million vehicles sold in the U.S. in 1952, barely 11,000 of them were sports cars. That’s less than ¼ of one percent.

(Image credit: John Chapman)

BUY AMERICAN

It had been years since any of the major American auto companies bothered to make any kind of a two-seater, let alone a sports car, and this was undoubtedly one of the things that crossed Earl’s mind. How can consumers be expected to buy many roadsters if there aren’t any on the market? Remember, the auto industry was a lot different in the 1950s: Together, GM’s five automobile divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac) manufactured roughly half of all the automobiles sold in the United States each year. Ford, Chrysler, and a handful of other small U.S. companies sold nearly all the rest. Few Americans had ever owned a foreign-made car or would have considered making such a purchase—the image and perceived superiority of the American automakers was that dominant in those days. But with no domestic sports cars available, customers who wanted to buy one had to get it from a foreign automaker or go without.

Earl didn’t know if sports cars would ever be a major segment of the U.S. auto industry, but he did understand that they had a great deal of appeal with young people. GM was a big company and made big profits year after year. Why not spend a tiny fraction of that money on an American sports car that would appeal to the kids who bought MGs and Triumphs? Once they were in the GM fold, Earl figured, when the time came for them to trade up to a four-seater, they’d be much more likely to buy it from GM.

A confusing traffic detour leads to the entrance of Rosslare Harbour ferry port, in County Wexford, Ireland. Or at least it did when this sequence was recorded. There should have been warning signs posted further back, but if there were, no one read them. At 1:45 a car stops for a reason other than confusion.

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The YouTube description says that this junction has been changed since the video was recorded. That's a good thing. A more recent video shows that all the traffic is coming directly off a roundabout, so there really was no way to warn these drivers before having to suddenly make their decision.  -via reddit  

This past Wednesday and Thursday, Boeing made an 18-hour endurance test flight of their 787-8 over 22 states. The route they selected was designed to draw the outline of a Boeing jet in the skies! The live flight tracking app Flight Aware caught the entire outline. Notice that the nose of the plane is pointing toward Boeing's headquarters in Seattle. Why would they do this? Because they could. Oh, then there's the publicity, of course. -via Atlas Obscura

Amy Oulton uses a wheelchair due to a connective tissue disorder. After a year-and-a-half of planning, she and her friend Steph backpacked through Asia, visiting Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Japan. Although her experiences would not necessarily hold true for other people who use wheelchairs, she shares some things she learned along the way, including some rather personal travel details.    

1. You can take a wheelchair just about anywhere…although you won’t always be in it.

I took my wheelchair places I never thought I could go, including wheeling into a river to wash an elephant with a tiny bucket. I found that often the only way to accommodate my wheelchair was to separate myself from it; I had to bum-shuffle into and around my chosen method of transportation. By bungee-cording my wheelchair to vehicles, I managed to travel on boats, tuk-tuks, and motorbikes. This did mean I spent most of the trip with a brown-stained bum and quickly realised the flashing hazards of the dresses I had brought.

2. Things can get really personal.

There’s nothing quite like your wheelchair being strapped to the roof of the Mekong boat you’ll be on for two days, weak legs and appalling stability even on steady land, a heavy flow, a Mooncup, a squat toilet, and no running water to bring you closer to the friend you’re travelling with.

Read the rest of Oulton's list and see pictures of the trip at Buzzfeed.

(Image credit: Amy Oulton)

NASA launched Voyager I and Voyager II in 1977, on a 12-year mission to study and send back data from Jupiter and Saturn. That was the stated mission, as that was all that the U.S. government was willing to fund. However, scientists and engineers at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab had higher hopes for the probes. Forty years later, the two spacecraft are still sending back data, Voyager I from interstellar space, and Voyager II as it is crossing the the boundary of the solar system. Possibly even more surprising is that NASA engineers are still monitoring the mission.

All explorations demand sacrifices in exchange for uncertain outcomes. Some of those sacrifices are social: how many resources we collectively devote to a given pursuit of knowledge. But another portion is borne by the explorer alone, who used to be rewarded with adventure and fame if not fortune. For the foreseeable future, Voyager seems destined to remain in the running for the title of Mankind’s Greatest Journey, which might just make its nine flight-team engineers — most of whom have been with the mission since the Reagan administration — our greatest living explorers. They also may be the last people left on the planet who can operate the spacecraft’s onboard computers, which have 235,000 times less memory and 175,000 times less speed than a 16-gigabyte smartphone. And while it’s true that these pioneers haven’t gone anywhere themselves, they are arguably every bit as dauntless as more celebrated predecessors. Magellan never had to steer a vessel from the confines of a dun-colored rental office, let alone stay at the helm long enough to qualify for a senior discount at the McDonald’s next door.

Read about the engineers who've dedicated their lives to the Voyager mission at the New York Times. You can also keep up with the V-gers themselves by reading NASA's status page on the mission.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: NASA/JPL)

You know what they say, everything in moderation. If a small amount of something is good, that doesn't mean more is better. Many of the things we consume, use, or do in our everyday lives can kill in larger amounts. AsapSCIENCE found out how much.  

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This is actually the second Asap SCIENCE video on this topic. Here's the first one.

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Even something as wholesome and natural as water can be detrimental if you drink enough, but luckily that's an insane amount. It would be a rare case for anyone to eat 25 green potatoes, but there have been cases of folks drinking shots of liquor until they die. -via Geeks Are Sexy

This fantasy quest is not all it's cracked up to be. Clearly, he did not have time to think this scheme through at all. Jumping back in time did not work, but it did set off a never-ending loop of time travel and destruction. That's gotta hurt. This is the latest from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.

The solar eclipse that will cross the U.S. on August 21 will be confined to a 70-mile wide path. Cities and towns inside that path are gearing up for a huge number of visitors, and the chaos that can come with them. City officials, emergency workers, and engineers are making plans to deal with the influx of people and the conditions peculiar to an eclipse. Hospitals are stocking up on medicine to get ahead of delivery problems. Emergency dispatchers are practicing to deal with people who don't know what's happening. And the biggest problem will be traffic.    

Gridlocks are expected across the U.S. for several days before and after the eclipse.

“It is similar to what would happen for an evacuation for a hurricane,” said Howard Duvall, councilman for Columbia, South Carolina.

To help the public grasp the size of these traffic jams, Duvall said it’s easier, and less frightening to compare the impact to a football game, even if no football game aside from the Super Bowl can really get close to the scale of traffic. “This is going to be like having 10 Carolina-Clemson football games on the same day,” Duvall said.

Read more about what to expect if you live in the zone of totality at City Lab. -via Digg

NASA has a job opening for a "planetary protection officer." The job pays well, and applications will be taken through August 14. The competition will be stiff. Nine-year-old Jack Davis was one of the first to go for the job, writing in even before the application period opened. NASA responded with this letter, explaining more about what the position entails.

 
Do you have what it takes to be a planetary protection officer? Read more about the job requirements and duties at NASA. It's the closest you'll ever get to being a Guardian of the Galaxy. -via Nag on the Lake

The latest Simon's Cat cartoon harks back to the original 2007 animation that charmed us so, in which the cat wakes Simon up. This one is a bit more realistic, though, in that the cat does not wield a baseball bat.

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It's not exactly the same story. Still, after ten years, the cat still exhibits typical cat behavior and reminds us of our own cats. They can all be pretty obnoxious when they want to.

Science is the most interesting part of the school day, and it's the easiest way to get a child interested in their own education. That's one reason we encourage in interest in science among children, but it's not the only reason. At different times in our history, we've become very excited about the idea of our kids growing up to eventually make the world a better place. Historian Rebecca Onion, author of Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States, tells us about how our changing views of science affect how we encourage our children to learn about it. Wartime particularly shaped public opinion, because great innovations come from wartime research, for good or evil.

After World War II, Americans embraced the bounty of wartime scientific advances and a thriving economy: They now had cheap goods made out of high-tech plastic, streamlined appliances, and home TV sets. But they were also haunted by the specters of the A-bomb and the H-bomb. The burgeoning Cold War with the U.S.S.R. raised fears that workaholic Soviet scientists, laboring relentlessly under Communism, were making progress faster than American scientists, a competition that played out in the Space Race. Mainstream American pop culture attempted to assure people with images of the perfect suburban family defeating Communism through consumerism. However, American B-movies, comics, and pulp fiction were overrun with evil robots, monsters from space, radioactive mutants—and “mad scientists.” All of this affected how Americans regarded scientific education.

“The fears spiked in Postwar America at particular moments,” Onion says. “When Sputnik became the first spacecraft launched into orbit in 1957, Americans panicked, like, ‘Oh my God, the Soviets have it over us. Whatever the great powers of science and technology are, they’re better at them.’ That launch created a lot of apprehension and fear that kids absorbed and processed. Tons of postwar popular culture addressed that combination of wonder and fear, especially about nuclear technology and space travel.”

But the pendulum swings both ways, and not always in a straight line. Girls and minority children were left out of the public push for science education until recently. Science fiction and horror movies gave us reason to fear science. And when a child reaches a certain age, an interest in science can brand them as nerdy. Read an overview of how our culture had shaped science education for kids over time at Collectors Weekly.

Zuri is a young African elephant living at the Hogle Zoo in Utah. His nemesis is a Canada goose that acts like a goose will, bullying and menacing every creature around like he owns the place. Zuri does not like the goose, and lets him know in no uncertain terms. You get him, Zuri!  

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You just know these two have a history of conflict. Canada geese are naturally hostile. There's a bunch of them in my neighborhood, and they were hateful for years until the city installed a duck chow vending machine. Now they are as nice as can be. -via Tastefully Offensive

Turtle soup was a high-class delicacy for special occasions in the 1860s, like President Lincoln's second inaugural banquet. When one couldn't afford turtle soup, there was an alternative: mock turtle soup. So what was mock turtle soup made of? Believe it or not, beef was the substitute.

Mock turtle soup, on the other hand, was made with a whole calf’s head, which allegedly mimicked the flavor and texture of real turtle soup. Despite being made with a comparatively inexpensive cut that might have been discarded, it was still considered high-end, and was even erroneously described on menus as being French. It was priced accordingly: On Manhattan restaurant Sullivan’s 1900 menu, for instance, it is one-and-a-half times as expensive as any other soup. It was offered on upmarket tables at the Waldorf-Astoria, The Plaza, and the St. Regis, and in the pages of the White House’s 1887 cookbook, flavored with a medley of sherry, cayenne pepper, lemon, sugar, salt, and mace. There, it appeared right next to the recipe for actual turtle soup.

It seems hard to believe that people valued a soup made of turtle meat over a soup made of calf, but that was a different time. Eventually, people began to prefer mock turtle soup to the original -as they should. Of course, neither is popular today, because we can make soup without butchering our own meat now. Learn more about turtle soup and its alternative, mock turtle soup, at Atlas Obscura.

First off, this video is about physical pain to your body, so heartbreak and psychological distress aren't considered, even though they can be pretty painful. What is the most physically painful thing that might happen to you? Scientists have been trying to figure that one out, and some of the conditions they study will make you cringe. In fact, watching this video may cause a little cognitive pain.  

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Many years ago, someone (who had never spent time in a burn ward) told me the most painful things were childbirth, a spinal tap, and a root canal. I asked my mother about that, because she's had all three, and she told me none of them were painful thanks to drugs. The worst pain I can recall was when I was stung in more than a dozen places by wasps. That was only last month. -via Sploid

Look at the smile on this little dog! Eurosaurus is a white Jack Russell with an "unusual bite pattern." That's a euphemism for what we once called "snaggle teeth." But Euro looks like she's smiling even when her teeth don't show at all. She lives a dog's life in Thailand with her owner Sumitra Jiawiphat and three other Jack Russell terriers. That smile has made Eurosaurus an Instagram star. See a selection of her best photos at Buzzfeed and follow her Instagram feed. -via Metafilter