July 11 marks twenty years since the release of the movie Contact. Based on the bestselling novel by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, the story follows Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) as she searches for evidence of intelligent life in radio signals from the cosmos. The movie was a long time in the making.

Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan, originally envisioned Contact as a feature film. In 1980, they co-wrote the project’s first treatment. Frustrated with Hollywood’s glacial development process, the couple eventually chose to turn their story into a novel. Sagan hadn’t even begun working on the book when Simon & Schuster gave him a whopping $2 million advance for it. An instant hit, Contact sold almost 1.75 million copies within two years of its 1985 release. Sadly, we’ll never know what Sagan thought of Warner Bros.’ subsequent movie adaptation as he passed away several months before its release.

That's one thing. You'll learn nine other interesting facts about Contact in a list at Mental Floss.  

In 15th-century Europe, hazing new students wasn't just a custom, it was mandatory and inflicted by the administration. The purpose was to rid new students of their "their pride, gluttony, and other sins." In other words, to take them down a notch. Only then were they deemed ready to learn. One of the worst hazing rituals took place in Germany in Sweden during the late 1400s. It was called Deposition, and applicants had to go through it before they were even admitted to the university.

Once everyone was ready, the Depositor passed around odd items with which the students needed to adorn themselves: hats, looking-glasses, saws, razors, combs, shears, and clothes “of various patterns and colors.” Fake horns and fake donkey ears were attached to their heads.

The Depositor also asked students to open wide—and he inserted a boar tusk on each side of their mouths. They were expected to hold the tusks in place for the duration of the ceremony. The Depositor then marched them down the hall into a cavernous lecture room—though calling it “marching” is generous. The Depositor, in reality, spurned them forward with a stick as if they were “a herd of oxen or asses.”

Oh, that's just the beginning. The rituals that followed were designed to frighten and humiliate the students, and eliminate those who weren't truly dedicated to their education. Read what happened during the rest of Deposition at Atlas Obscura.

One of the things that makes us human is the ability to find a reason, or an excuse, to do what we wanted to do in the first place. We can rationalize any decision if we try hard enough. See, if she needed the sink for something she really wanted to do, she'd find a way to clear the glass out of it. Glass shards don't become invisible just because they're wet, and even if they did, you have a hair dryer around somewhere. But as it is, she's not going to get any argument from her husband, who clearly prefers pizza over salad and dishwashing. The is the latest comic from MegaCynics.

When world leaders get together, they have plenty to discuss, yet they are often operating in different languages. We get news reports of the high-profile politicians present at such meetings, but the unsung, often anonymous heroes of the session are the interpreters. They are expected to be not only highly skilled at languages, but also intuitive, trustworthy, dedicated, and knowledgable in other  areas. Harry Obst has translated for seven U.S. presidents, and tells us about the job requirements.

“To work at the very top, you have to have an incredible arsenal of general knowledge, because the president will get into every damn topic you can imagine, from nuclear submarines to agriculture to treaty problems to labor problems to God knows what, jellyfish in the sea,” Obst says. “If you don’t know how an airplane flies, if you don’t know how a nuclear reactor works, you’re going to make mistakes.”

Like anyone else in a sensitive meeting, an interpreter must have high security clearance. He or she will also have received all the same briefing books as the president. That’s essential so that the interpreter can understand the nuances of the information discussed and knows the vocabulary. But it also means that the interpreter can serve as a crutch for the president, catching minor factual errors or slips of the tongue.

Translators smooth out cultural differences and often are relied upon to correct what the principle has said. But woe unto the high-level translator who makes their own errors. Read about the strange world of presidential interpreters at the Atlantic.  

(Image credit: The Kremlin)

Did you know that the Lionel Richie song "Hello" has been used in a dozen movies, five TV shows, and several ads, too? That's how a hit song avoids obsolescence and becomes a classic. Young movie fans probably don't even realize the song is 33 years old. But it is the perfect tune to denote love at first sight or unrequited love, because so many viewers know the lyrics and what they mean that you only need the first few notes to set the scene. Check out six of the more unlikely movies that use "Hello" and re-watch the scenes at TVOM.

(Image credit: The NeatoShop)

Did you know that you might be able to tell when a movie was made by the costumes? Contemporary movies, set in the time the film was made, tend to use generic fashions so they don't become outdated quickly. Movies set in the past can pinpoint the fashions of the time, so they are more "retro-trendy" to specify the era. That's just one of many new things we'll learn about the art of movie costuming in this video.

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What a character wears can explain what we need to know about them without a word being said. Jack Nugent from Now You See It explains how costuming adds so much to a movie, or a particular scene, without us realizing it. -via Tastefully Offensive 

(Image credit: Judd Jasper)

Judd Jasper and his girlfriend are vacationing in Budapest. He has a Samsung Galaxy S7 phone with a wide selfie feature that he says is "similar to a panorama." So this is what happened when his girlfriend sneezed while posing for a selfie in front of the Danube River. Of course, commenters asked him what it was like dating conjoined twins. A few mentioned Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed character from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But this picture reminded me of something else.

(Image credit: The NeatoShop)

That's it! That's exactly it. And comedy and tragedy is an apt metaphor for the picture that tragically became comedy gold. -via reddit

Have you ever heard of the Boswell Sisters? They were a sensation in the 1930s, bringing the popularity of vocal groups into the mainstream. 

As jazz took hold in the 20s, there was a dip in the popularity of vocal groups, but waiting in the wings were The Boswell Sisters, a group who changed the face of modern music in the 30s after they emerged from the vaudeville houses of New Orleans. They were true innovators and can easily claim to be one of the all-time greatest jazz vocal groups.

The sisters were talented musicians. Martha played piano; Vet played violin, banjo and guitar; and Connee (who had been left paralysed from the waist down by a childhood accident, and always performed sitting down) played cello, saxophone and guitar. The turning point in their career came when a radio station gave them a daily singing programme.

The Andrews Sisters acknowledged that the Boswell Sisters opened doors for them. Ella Fitzgerald cited Connee Boswell as her inspiration. Read about them, and quite a few other vocal groups that set the stage for the music we listen to today, in a historical overview of vocal groups. Yes, there are videos. -via Everlasting Blort

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Research results for specialists
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

(Image credit: Flickr user Mike Kline)

In 1968 Anthony Doob and Alan Gross, of the University of Toronto and the University of Wisconsin, published a response-to-horn- honking study that triggered an expanded study, seven years later, by a team at the University of Utah.

Doob and Gross: Honking
"Status of Frustrator as an Inhibitor of Horn-Honking Responses," Anthony N. Doob and Alan Gross, Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 76, 1968, pp. 213--8. The authors explain:

One of two automobiles, a new luxury model or an older car, was driven up to a signal controlled intersection and stopped. The driver was instructed to remain stopped after the signal had changed to green until 15 seconds had elapsed, or until the driver of the car immediately behind honked his horn twice. Subjects were the 82 drivers, 26 women and 56 men, whose progress was blocked by the experimental car. The experiment was run from 10:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. on a Sunday, in order to avoid heavy weekday traffic....

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Weird, Weird World: EPIC.

A small British company put tracks on a tractor and changed agriculture—and war—forever.

MAKING TRACKS

In 1903 the British War Office offered £1,000 to the maker of a tractor that could haul 25 tons for 40 miles without stopping for fuel or water. The tiny agricultural manufacturer Hornsby & Sons (est. 1815) won with a tractor that went 58 miles. Chief engineer and manager David Roberts realized that if the British Army wanted to make full use of his 80-hp, 12-ton tractor, the machine could not get stuck in mud. By 1906 Roberts had come up with a novel chain track that he fitted onto the tractor. When British soldiers saw this rolling track in action, they dubbed the machine a “caterpillar.” Two years later, the War Office purchased four chain-track tractors to tow artillery pieces. Encouraged, Roberts worked to expand the caterpillar tractor’s working applications, fitting it with wooden wheels for desert travel and boosting its top speed to 25 mph.

I recently found out that people in France do not hug people they've just met. Or even people they know, unless they are very close. That made me cringe, thinking of how the family all hugged a young man from France the first time he visited. He's here again, and actually gave me a hug on arrival -trying to be like the Americans. But I still cringe when he meets new people and they want to hug him. He hides any discomfort well. In this video, we learn more greeting customs from around the world.

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Remember, proper etiquette is simply the art of making other people feel comfortable. We can do this by learning their customs, and also by not making a big deal out of other people not knowing our customs. -via Tastefully Offensive

Across the country, enclosed malls are going out of business or else struggling. The huge food courts that have a variety of familiar fast food chains are struggling or dying along with them. A new generation of foodies is rejecting the cookie-cutter recipe for eating on the run, but a new style of cluster dining choices is taking its place: the food hall.   

What makes something a food court, and what makes it a food hall? One is the most discredited concept in 20th-century dining, while the other is the hottest new idea of the 21st: an open floor plan; fresh food prepared in front of your eyes; a post-industrial space, or at least one with high ceilings, exposed wiring, and hanging air ducts. Good-looking people hunched on long benches over small plates or perched on stools around dozens of tiny countertops. The accidental flash of a bad Instagram. The places brim with noise—perhaps even a kind of working sound, an occasional butcher’s chop, something left over from a more utilitarian period, or at least the roar of an espresso machine.

Reduce this concept to the basics—a dozen quick-service restaurants sharing a space, a landlord, and maybe a seating area—and you have a food court. A food hall, in contrast, is a drafty and austere moniker for an age of raw interior design. No pleather or plastic here. What separates the former from the latter is “authenticity,” according to Matthew Fainchtein, a senior director for real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield in Los Angeles and a guy who makes food halls, not courts.

While it seems the food hall is a completely hipster concept, it is actually a resurgence of the traditional public market. For example, they are not limited to malls, but are catering to neighborhoods by opening in office buildings and residential buildings in addition to shopping centers. Read about the development of the food hall at Slate. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Shinya Suzuki)

Some 3,000 years ago, the people of what is now Oxfordshire, England, carved a pictogram of a horse on a hillside made of chalk. You can't see the entire horse at the site, but from the valley below, it's quite impressive. All these years later, no one knows exactly why the Uffington White Horse was carved, but they still maintain it, as their ancestors have done for thousands of years.

It’s chalking day, a cleaning ritual that has happened here regularly for three millennia. Hammers, buckets of chalk and kneepads are handed out and everyone is allocated an area. The chalkers kneel and smash the chalk to a paste, whitening the stony pathways in the grass inch by inch. “It’s the world’s largest coloring between the lines,” says George Buce, one of the participants.

Chalking or “scouring” the horse was already an ancient custom when antiquarian Francis Wise wrote about it in 1736. “The ceremony of scouring the Horse, from time immemorial, has been solemnized by a numerous concourse of people from all the villages roundabout,” he wrote.

In the past, thousands of people would come for the scouring, holding a fair in the circle of a prehistoric fort nearby. These days it’s a quieter event. The only sounds are the wind, distant birdsong and the thumping of hammers on the chalk that can be felt through the feet.

In modern times, the National Trust oversees the volunteers who clean the lines that make up the horse. But it's always been a community event. Read about the horse and the people who maintain it at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: NASA)

Montreal Comiccon is going on this weekend at the Palais des congrès. Of course, our Québécois friends from Geeks Are Sexy were there to document the most impressive cosplayers attending. The costumes ranged from the super elaborate (above) to the simple yet completely recognizable (below).

You can see the first of three daily photo galleries, and check back for the rest as they are posted at Geeks Are Sexy.

Denise Wade is the volunteer flying fox coordinator at Bat Conservation and Rescue QLD. She takes in injured or orphaned flying foxes that need care until they can be released. Wade posts videos under the YouTube name Batzilla the Bat. Here she feeds a banana to Miss Alicia, a young rescue bat named for the woman who found her on the road.  

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She loves that banana! Since Miss Alicia was not injured by her traffic experience, she was examined, fed, and given a chance to rest before being released. Oh yeah, and recorded on video for our continued entertainment. -via Metafilter