The Nez Perce War of 1877 was the last great Indian war in which the US Army, protecting encroaching white settlers, pursued the Nez Perce people from Oregon, through Idaho, and into Montana before finally defeating them. The war began with the Nez Perce having the upper hand in several attacks and battles that gave their few warriors a reputation as terrifying fighters led by the military genius Heinmot Tooyalalkekt, also known as Chief Joseph. When the Nez Perce, represented by Chief Joseph,  surrendered in October of 1877, it was the culmination of a riveting war that people in the eastern US had been following avidly in the papers.

But the newspaper accounts only told one side of the story. The actual war followed decades of negotiations and broken treaties between the US and the Nez Perce. The US had a fundamental and possibly deliberate misunderstanding of the Nez Perce- they weren't one nation, but a network of bands of people, and none of them spoke for all of them. Chief Joseph was one of several chiefs, but it fell to him to communicate their final surrender to the army. The early victories of the Nez Perce had more to do with the US military's ignorance of how their culture worked, plus some major blunders, and the local civilians who did more harm than good. Meanwhile, Chief Joseph was more concerned with the safety of the women and children of his people than with military victories. Read how the war unfolded from the perspective of the Nez Perce in a chronicle at Damn Interesting. You can also listen to it in podcast form.

We live in a world that offers an amazing array of consumer goods. Thanks to the internet, our range of choice is wider than ever before because now we can order consumer goods from not only out-of-town vendors, but from all around the world. That's not always a good thing, because we can become confused or even paralyzed by the prospect of making the wrong selection. It's not only online stores, but online reviews and rankings of goods that can cause confusion -not to mention a serious commitment of time. And who's to say which reviews and rankings are valid?

An article at the New York Times (non-paywalled here) describes the phenomena of people who do endless online research to make sure they are buying the absolute best toaster before making their purchase. These people are called maximizers, as opposed to others who look around for a "good enough" deal on a toaster and are called satisficers (a word that combines satisfy and suffice). Of course, legitimate concerns over what we can afford will impact our decision-making style. I used a toaster as an example, but this phenomenon can apply to everything from groceries to college choice to dating sites to real estate.  

The research tells us that maximizers often do make the best choices, but that doesn't necessarily leave them happy, as they can feel anxiety over possibly making the wrong choice before the purchase. After the purchase that anxiety may continue as regret, because there might have been a better option after all. Satisficers are more likely to buy the first thing that meets all their personal criteria, and will save time and cognitive energy by not worrying about their decision once it's made. People rarely fall completely into one category or the other. Most of us will devote way more time and energy into researching large decisions like a new house than small ones like tonight's restaurant. Yet there are folks who will spend so much time reviewing restaurants that they forget to go to dinner.  

The discussion at Metafilter makes it clear that many of us are checking listicles and reviews mainly to avoid buying crap that will fall apart before the purchase is justified, because there is an awful lot of subpar goods for sale in our modern throwaway society.   

(Image credit: Masod Shahrestani)

A shake table is not where you pick up your milkshake, nor is it furniture for a strip club. The shake table at the University of California San Diego is a stretch of ground intricately engineered to simulate various forms and strengths of earthquakes. Underground pressure pipes are constantly upgraded to cause different kinds of tremors so their effects can be studied. Tom Scott visited the shake table at UCSD to talk to the engineers and find out how it works. Then he went back to witness a test of a ten-story building with innovative architectural features designed to withstand an earthquake. So you can see that it has to be extremely strong, plus it must have plenty of redundant safety features for the sake of the engineers who work there and for the expensive items they test. Not to mention, the shake table itself has to survive the work it does.   

The above picture is from the Instagram account Cooking for Bae, the title of which is a joke about inexperienced young people trying to make impressive meals for someone they love even though they don't know how to cook. The person who drained their macaroni, like it said on the package, obviously never bothered to watch their mother do it when they were a child. Nor did they ever learn about food safety. Macaroni and cheese isn't that difficult to make, but they have examples of inexperienced cooks jazzing it up with strawberries, avocado, and mint-vanillla milk. Those are three different cooks. Other abominations are clearly from school lunch rooms, restaurants, stoned experiments, or even a grocery store.

More macaroni! This person apparently picked up the wrong paper packet when making mac and cheese, and then decided to go ahead and use the cheese packet for a hot drink. The pasta is most likely a loss, but that drink, if made with real milk, might make up for it. Bored Panda has a ranked list of 30 of the best deranged cooking attempts from the Instagram account. Beware, there are some pictures of food that no one can confidently identify.  

Even the most outlandish legends and cryptids may be traced to real experiences that made a good story for someone somewhere. A good story tends to get larger with each telling, and details are added when different people try to translate them or pass those stories down to younger people who have less context. We are familiar with medieval artists who tried to draw exotic beasts from nothing but an oral description. That same transformation could happen to any strange sighting when the witness and the artist are different people. As we gain more knowledge about the ancient world, we find more analogues to our modern legends, like the drop bear. A string of unreliable narrators can easily transform a natural phenomena that no one understands into a fantastic fairy tale. Weird History take a look at a whole string of mythical creatures, from cyclops to vampires to unicorns, and ties them to plausible natural but misunderstood origins.

Orcas, also called killer whales, have sunk three sailboats off the Iberian coast since 2020, the latest on May 4th. They've also attacked numerous boats without sinking them. Such attacks involve several orcas, and the younger ones appear to be imitating the behavior of older orcas. In many of these attacks, the orcas approach the rudder of the boat, which they bite, bend, or break, and then lose interest when the boat stops moving forward. You could call these interactions rare, as the orcas only attack about 1% of boats in the area, but since 2020, that's 500 cases.

Scientists suspect the behavior started with a female known as White Gladis, who may have had a traumatic experience with a boat. Orcas are very social, and new behaviors can spread quickly among the population. And that population is rather small- the last census of Iberian orcas in 2011 found only 39 individuals. That subpopulation is listed as critically endangered. Five hundred boat attacks by such a small number of orcas is concerning. While the behavior was quickly spread among the orcas, experts don't know if it's just something fun they've learned to do, or if it may be a malicious and deliberate way for sea creatures to inflict harm on the human ocean interlopers. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: NOAA)

A drop bear is a cryptid that Australians love to warn tourists about. They resemble koalas, but are super vicious. A drop bear will hide in a tree until an unsuspecting person walks underneath and then drop onto them and rip them apart. Or at least that's the story. I don't understand why they try to scare tourists like that, since people visiting Australia from elsewhere are all primed to believe every living creature there is trying to kill you already.  

But there were once real drop bears. Like koalas, they were not bears, but marsupials. The genus called Nimbadon roamed the rainforests of southern Australia 15 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene Epoch. Nimbadon looked somewhat like a wombat, but grew to be 70 kilograms (154 pounds)! While they were first considered something like a "marsupial sheep," scientists have determined that these creatures lived in the trees, slung underneath branches like sloths. Occasionally, a Nimbadon would fall out of a tree, just like a drop bear. They know this because some Nimbadons fell out of trees and into caves, where their remains were found 15 million years later.

That's wild enough, but the article about prehistoric drop bears also mentions crocodiles that climbed trees. Now that would make a great legend! -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Peter Schouten)

The Cut staged a speed dating game for older people. It's awkward in places because older people don't really like the pressure of meeting others just for the purpose of evaluating whether to start a romantic relationship. On the other hand, I can tell you from experience that they don't want to waste any time with someone they aren't compatible with in some way. I've found the best relationships start when two people just can't stop talking to each other about anything and everything, whether it's toward a romantic end or not. In this sequence, there's an awful lot of rejection, and they aren't averse to explaining it. Speed dating is all about snap decisions, after all. But we finally get to a meeting between two people and find the one fact that makes them perfect for each other. You may be surprised, but you'll understand when you hear it. -via Digg

MGM made several pairs of ruby red slippers for the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. That wasn't widely known until 1970, when MGM sold one pair at auction and ordered the others destroyed. The pair that was auctioned off was later donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. But the other shoes weren't destroyed. MGM costumes worker Kent Warner took them home, and over the years they were sold and landed in private collections and museums.

One pair of the ruby slippers was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, (Garland's home town) in 2005. They were recovered by the FBI 13 years later in Minneapolis in 2018. The Smithsonian was consulted, and their conservators studied the stolen property and compared them with the cleaned and preserved shoes the museum owned, and determined they were original. But who stole them? Another five years went by as the FBI investigated the case. Now, 76-year-old Terry Jon Martin of Minnesota has been indicted in the theft.

Read what we know about the case so far at Smithsonian. One interesting part of the saga is the values involved. The shoes that MGM auctioned off in 1970 went for $15,000. The collector who owns the stolen shoes bought them from Warner the same year for just $2,000. A woman who won an original pair in a contest in 1940 sold them in 1988 for $165,000. The pair recovered from the FBI is now valued at $3.5 million. Not bad for a $2,000 investment.

(Image credit: National Museum of American History)

A couple of hedgehogs wake up from winter hibernation and find that a city has been built over their burrow! They aren't the only animals who were surprised by the change in their environment. How will they ever survive? But woodland creatures are keen to adapt, and soon learn the ways of the city. They actually learn better than the humans ever did, and manage to get by just fine, thank you. I'm not going to spoil the plot, but it has an unexpected happy ending.  

The cute stop-motion animation Ezi un lielpilseta is from Latvian filmmaker Evalds Lacis. -via Nag on the Lake

There are basically two kinds of kisses: the social kiss between friends and family that is just a pressing of lips against skin, and the open-mouth sexual kissing between lovers. This research involves the latter.

The oldest kisses documented in text has been pushed back to 4,500 years ago, found in Mesopotamian cuneiform writing. That's a thousand years earlier than previously known documentation. But human writing only goes back so far, and since kissing has been found in such ancient documents, it may well have been an established custom before writing existed at all. Evidence of kissing before that relies heavily on how we interpret the clues.

We know that humans interbred with Neanderthals, but did they kiss? A DNA study of Neanderthal  tooth plaque found a 48,000-year-old microorganism that was rare in Neanderthals but common in human remains. While that could be evidence of kissing, there are other ways it could have leapt from one species to the other.

However, bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, kiss as a precursor to sexual behavior, while chimpanzees only employ social kisses. That may lead us to believe both kinds of kisses were already present when homo sapiens emerged. But it's not conclusive evidence.

These questions come from an article about a study that looked for a correlation between ancient text references to kissing and the spread of disease. You can read about that study, and the history of kissing, at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Francisco Osorio)

I always had a problem with the message in Disney's version of The Little Mermaid. A young girl completely changes herself to please a guy she only knows from afar, and then has to seduce him with just her looks. Somehow, that leads to a happy ending. Yeah, there are plenty of other things wrong with the fairy tale, as in all the Disney Princess films, at least the classic ones I have seen. But the folks at How It Should Have Ended just target the most obvious flaw, so it's a short video. There's a post-credit scene that has nothing to do with the fixed ending, but it's funny. The new live-action version of The Little Mermaid opens nationwide next weekend, presumably with the same ending as the 1989 animated version. -via Geeks Are Sexy

An F-5 tornado passed through the village of Woldegk in Saxony (now Germany) on June 29, 1764. An F5 is the most powerful category on the Fujita scale. In fact, the Woldegk tornado, with winds speeds of 300 mph (480 km/h), is estimated to have been the most powerful recorded tornado in history! It flattened a path 30 kilometers long and was estimated to be 900 meters wide at its maximum. It pulled up mighty oaks, flattened houses, ripped up cobblestones, and even unearthed a skeleton from a grave.

But how do we know the power of that tornado? There were no modern meteorological devices in Woldegk, nor anywhere near. German scientist Gottlob Burchard Genzmer visited the area soon after the tornado and made an excruciatingly detailed survey of the damage, from the place where the tornado touched down to the point it fizzled out, including illustrations like the one above. Comparing the book Genzmer published to better-recorded tornados of later centuries allowed scientists to determine the twister's strength.

But the real kicker is that only one person died in that disaster. June 29 was Buß- und Bettag, a day of prayer and repentance, and almost everyone in town was inside the massive stone church, the only building that was safe from the storm. Read about the historic devastation of the Woldegk tornado at Amusing Planet.    

(Image credit: Gottlob Burchard Genzmer)

Every once in a great while, you learn about a person you've never heard of before just to find out they have more than one claim to fame. Jack Parsons had way more than that. Parsons developed an interest in rocketry in the 1920s. In the 1930s, he dropped out of college. In the 1940s, he became an explosives expert, co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory along with other institutions, dabbled in communism, joined a religious cult founded by Alistair Crowley named Thelema, lost his adulterous lover to his housemate L. Ron Hubbard, tried to conjure up a goddess to re-order the world, and lost his security clearance due to his advocacy of "sexual perversion." In the 1950s, Parsons managed to kill himself.

Jstor Daily has an overview of Jack Parsons and his short but incredibly eventful life. Then you'll want to read a more detailed account at Wikipedia.  -via Damn Interesting

In 2003, Walt Disney Pictures released Haunted Mansion, a movie based on their theme park ride, starring Eddie Murphy. It was released just a few months after the mega-hit Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, also based on a Disney theme park ride. While Haunted Mansion made some money, it did not live up to expectations, either financially or by the reaction from audiences and critics. So Disney just waited twenty years, and is doing it again. Well, to be honest, they didn't wait that long. This reboot has been in development for more than a decade. Let's hope they get it right this time.  

The 2023 movie Haunted Mansion seems to be straight up scary in its supernatural scenes, while putting all the comedy into the normal humans' interactions with each other. As far as we can tell, it's more in line with the theme park ride than the 2003 film. It will star LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Dan Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jared Leto, Hasan Minhaj , Dan Levy, and Winona Ryder.

If Haunted Mansion is a hit this time, it might make up for the so-so performance of Jungle Cruise in 2021. The Space Mountain movie is still in production with no release date set. We can't think of any other Disney theme park rides that aren't already based on a movie. Haunted Mansion will hit theaters July 28.  -via Boing Boing