Once upon a time, when people smoked everywhere, you could smoke on airline flights. The back of the plane was designated as a smoking section, but then so was the First Class section in the front. And everyone breathed the same recirculated air anyway. Smoking on planes was phased out by the end of the 20th century, but planes still have ashtrays. Yes, they do. They're found in the bathroom doors. And it's not just because the planes are old -ashtrays are required in planes.   

According to the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) list of “minimum equipment” for aircraft, an ashtray in the plane toilet is still a legal requirement.

Yes, despite nobody smoking on a plane, bar a few belligerent celebrities and louts, the FAA says that lavatory doors must still be fitted with ashtrays because if someone were to have, illegally, a cheeky fag, they still need to stub it out, and it's best they have somewhere to do that rather than cause a fire by dropping it in the bin.

In 2009, a plane was delayed because an ashtray had to be replaced. Read more about this strange requirement and the history of smoking on planes at the Telegraph. -via TYWKIWDBI  

The staff of the New York Times taste-tested ten hot dogs, most of which are available at your local grocery store. The ten were all-beef franks, so they will cost a little more than average, but you should get some idea of what you're looking for from their descriptions, in case you're hosting a picnic for the Fourth of July.

First, the hot dogs would be cooked on a gas grill until well browned.

Next, each would be tasted plain to evaluate the intrinsic qualities of the hot dog: seasoning, beefiness, snap, texture.

Last, each would be eaten in a bun with the judge’s preordained condiments — the same for each dog, to keep the flavor profile consistent.

This important final step would allow us to assess the melding of meat and bread, sweetness and spice, salt and juice that makes up a perfect hot dog. The bun should hug the hot dog closely; there should be enough juice in the hot dog to keep the whole package together; condiments should complement the hot dog, not overwhelm it.  

If you ask my opinion, any hot dog is great when it's cooked on a grill outdoors in summertime, served with mustard and some potato salad (or even just chips) while you eat outside. I guess that's why they didn't ask me to be a judge. Read the results of the taste-test here.  -via Digg

(Image credit: jeffreyw)

The YouTuber who goes by the name "walter santi" (Walter is his/her dog, and Santi is a cat) tells the story of an injured stray cat who came to their house and asked for help. The video shows his wounds and may be disturbing for sensitive souls.

(YouTube link)

You'll be glad to know the cat is fine now. Here's an update video taken 40 days later, showing him chasing around like he was never hurt. -via Laughing Squid

Once you got all dressed in the 1700s, you needed to have some place to go! You might even go to the library for a book club meeting, although that could cause people to talk.

These libraries weren’t just places to find books, but social institutions as well. One famous library also had a billiard room, a public exhibition room, and a music library. “They were not the hushed environments that we now associated with libraries, but, at their best, elegant spaces full of people to converse with,” Williams writes. Libraries even had a touch of controversy, as they gave people of different social classes access to books and offered women a place to congregate outside the home.

As books became more available to everyday people, they gathered to share them with each other, and even to discuss them, in bars and public houses as well as libraries. Of course, when people get together to talk, the subject cannot be limited to one subject, and a social gathering needs refreshments, right? Read about those early, rowdy book clubs at Atlas Obscura.

At the point where belief in supernatural forest monsters overlapped the new era of newspaper distribution lies the story of the Beast of Gévaudan. Beginning in 1764, the people of the French region of Gévaudan suffered 100 deaths and nearly 300 injuries attributed to a unknown beast. The country was entranced by the press accounts of the attacks, and eyewitness descriptions from those who survived.   

Individuals may have had some success defending themselves, but official hunters had none. In February 1765, the d’Ennevals, a father-son hunter duo from Normandy, announced they would travel to Gévaudan to eliminate the beast. Jean-Charles, the father, boasted he’d already killed 1,200 wolves, relevant information assuming the predator was, in fact, a wolf. But no one was sure of that. “It is much bigger than a wolf,” wrote Lafont in an early report. “It has a snout somewhat like a calf’s and very long hair, which would seem to indicate a hyena.”

Duhamel described the animal as even more fantastical. In his words, it had a “breast as wide as a horse,” “a body as long as a leopard’s,” and fur that’s that was “red with a black stripe.” Duhamel concluded, “You will undoubtedly think, like I do, that this is a monster [hybrid], the father of which is a lion. What its mother was remains to be seen.”

Other witnesses claimed the beast had supernatural abilities. “It could walk on its hind feet and its hide could repel bullets and it had fire in its eyes and it came back from the dead more than once and had amazing leaping ability,” Smith says.

While the animal could have been a lion or other escaped exotic creature, many modern-day researchers believe the Beast of Gévaudan was an particularly large wolf, or wolves. After the newspaper accounts died down, the beast attacks continued until 1767, although normal wolf encounters remained. Read the saga of Beast of Gévaudan at Smithsonian.

There have been ten X-Men films released since the year 2000. Unless you're a comic book fan from way back, it's hard to keep up with which ones you've seen, much less who is in them all. And considering the film series is 17 years old, some of the actors who appeared in the earlier films went from unknown to well-known in that time. Check out five of those actors and relive some of the "aha" moments from the X-Men series at TVOM. 

Great apes include gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans. While chimpanzees are the smallest, humans are the weakest. Chimps are much stronger than humans, even accounting for physical condition, meaning they are stronger than our top athletes.

Pound-for-pound, chimpanzees are 1.5 times stronger than humans at pulling and jumping tasks, according to new research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This strength is not the result of the chimpanzee’s physical form, its range of motion, or a newly-discovered dedication to bench presses and deadlifts, but instead, the product of how the fibers in chimp muscles are distributed. Because chimpanzees are our closest-living primate relative, these findings are offering new insights into human evolution—and why’re we’re such weaklings.

See, the human world never really had a chance against Caesar and his followers. Read more about this research at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Sam Woolley)

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

"It was a bright cold day in April, as the clocks were striking thirteen." Thus begins one of the most chilling, haunting, amazing, and many say prophetic, novels ever written. George Orwell's 1984 (henceforth written here in this more brief form for the sake of brevity) is also one of the most popular and beloved novels of all-time, selling over 30 million copies to date. By 1989, the book had been translated into 65 different languages, the most ever for a novel in English up to that point in time. Besides its many other influences, 1984 has also added several new words and terms into the english lexicon, including Big Brother, thought police, doublespeak, thought crime, newspeak, and 2 + 2 = 5.

As a young man, George Orwell (born Eric Blair) spent four and a half years working for the imperial police in Burma. In his position, Orwell had over people, their lives, their circumstances, and their very person.

A Burma imperial policeman was required to witness hangings. Orwell witnessed first hand what it was like to execute a man in cold blood and what it was like to have total power over a fellow human being. He viewed the scarred buttocks of people who had been caned, as well as caged prisoners. He grew to hate the regime. Orwell was to recall: "I have been part of an oppressive system and it has left me with a bad conscience... I was conscious of an immense weight that I had got to expiate."

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!

Glimpses at some of the relevant papers
compiled by Bertha Vanatian,
Improbable Research staff

BonDurant’s Better Plane

“Folded Paper Airplane,” U.S. Patent #4377052, issued March 22, 1983 to James BonDurant for:

A folded paper airplane formed of a blank of sheet material having a downfold line extending along an axis of the sheet, a pair of transverse cuts near a rear edge and forming a tail piece, a pair of fuselage forming upfold lines extending from the midpoints of segments of the forward edge to a point adjacent the intersection of the downfold line and the transverse cuts, a pair of cockpit forming downfold lines extending from the midpoints, a pair of set of at least two successive upfold lines extending from the same midpoints, and a pair of wing forming downfold lines extending from the leading edges of the resulting wing surfaces near the cockpit to terminate at the other distal ends of the transverse cuts.

Paper Airplanes in Water

Detail from Feng et al.’s study of paper airplanes in flowing water.

“On the Aerodynamics of Paper Airplanes,” Ng Bing Feng, Kng Qiao Mei, Pey Yin Yin, and Jörg U.
Schlüter, 27th American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Applied Aerodynamics Conference, June 2009, San Antonio, Texas. The authors, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, report:

It's not easy to grow a pineapple. It's more difficult in some places than others, but redditor vlone17's dad finally harvested one of his own. He was so proud, he had a portrait made with it. Without his shoes on. The original thread at reddit had a lot of information about growing pineapples, but people had fun with the portrait, too. JimRug thought he'd look good as a Snapchat sticker.

Then aledlewis gave it the old switcheroo.

Bahet went meta with it.

Which Daxter614 took even further.

An entire string of Photoshoppers piled on to give us this silliness.

All the fuss made Dad's day, and is enshrined at their home for posterity. 

When you think of autonomous cars, you think of Google and Elon Musk and the idea of trucks with no drivers hauling loads down the highway. But why not think of the fun these cars can have?

(vimeo link)

Oh hello lovely machine, emancipating yourself from function... You look adorable, you know? Yes dear, you were built to be autonomous, it said so in the campaign brief.
No rush – getting from A to B was never an exciting idea to begin with, for your kind. Dance yourself clean, pull your metal frame apart and let the sun burn through your circuits. Ride your autobiography, guided by the beauty of your code.

Director Julius Steinhauser of f°am Studio in Germany brings us Autonomous Rolf, a Mercedes Benz with a mind of its own, and a sense of fun that even the laws of physics cannot stop! -via Nag on the Lake 

Italian photographer and conservationist Bruno D'Amicis set a camera up in a forest in the Apennine Mountains, trained it on one beech tree, and let it record for an entire year. This video contains clips of that recording that show the diversity of wildlife that passed by, stopped to mark their territory, scratch their back, or take a bite.

(YouTube link)

The song is "Have You Ever" by Brandi Carlile. You can see D'Amicis wildlife photography at Instagram. -via Tastefully Offensive   

We were in an antique store when my kid runs up to me and says, "They have one of those phones with the round thing on it! Show me how it works!" I suddenly felt ancient. Those moments happen more and more often these days. My dentist, with his white hair and his decades of experience, mentioned how old he was when Star Wars first came out and revealed he is much younger than I am.

Cracked collected image macros from their readers that illustrate 26 of those moments that remind you of how much time has passed since you were young. I'm sure you'll relate to at least a couple of them.

Here's a tip: just because you are proud of the lush, green lawn you worked hard to achieve, doesn't mean the neighbors feel the same way. They could be totally oblivious to the bare spots in their yard. I know I would be. I think have a nice lawn (through no effort of my own), but certain neighbors might disagree. I never put down seed or fertilizer, because that would just mean mowing more often. And the only part of my lawn that gets sprinkled is right around the vegetable plot. Every neighborhood has at least one guy like this one in the latest comic from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble. 

If you've ever wondered what the sensitive task of disarming a bomb would be like, it's probably nothing at all like action movies depict it. That said, there's little else that will get an audience's adrenaline going. In movies, there's almost always a timer attached, which adds considerably to the tension. It's life and death at stake! Relive those intense bomb scenes with videos from movies you may or may not have seen at TVOM.