Jeff Wysaski made pie charts to explain how much time wild animals devote to their daily activities. Besides the jellyfish, you can explore the charts of a lion, elephant, spider, and panda. Link -Thanks, Amanda!

(vimeo link)

Twelve-year-old Joshua Littman, who has Asperger's syndrome, interviewed his mother, Sarah. StoryCorps turned it into their first animated video. This will get you into the mood for Mothers Day. -via Buzzfeed

Update: Here's the original NPR story from 2006. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5285066

I love a good geography quiz! The United States has 23 states that border the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, or the Gulf of Mexico. In this quiz from mental_floss, you are challenged to name all 23 in three minutes. I did it with a half-minute to spare! And I would have done it faster if I could type as well as I read a mental map. Link

Cake Central is having a steampunk cake competition, with three pages of entries you can browse. I love this ornate wedding cake! Link -Thanks, Jackie!

The City of Prague has a system of pneumatic tubes to send mail from one place to another, like New York City and Paris once had. The difference is that Paris discontinued sending mail by tube in 1984, and New York ceased in 1953. People in Prague could send mail across town by tube until 2002!

According to an article published in the Pražský deník newspaper in March 2009, the system was no longer in active use but current owners Telefonica O2 were continuing to maintain it and considering some sort of further use for it.

I hope they will be able to preserve the 55-kilometer system for posterity. Link -Thanks, Jeff!

Almost every aspect of war spawns new words, and, over time, many of them slip into everyday use. Sometimes, they even become downright peaceful in the process. For instance, triumph used to mean a victory ceremony for Roman conquerers, and skedaddle signified retreat during the Civil War. And if you've ever had a snafu ("Situation Normal: All F'ed Up"), then you owe a debt to the WWI soldiers who invented the acronym to describe the trenches. With each passing conflict, the list of pacified war words gets longer and longer.

undermine: If your colleagues constantly undermine you, just be glad they aren't doing so in the traditional sense. Undermine, a word that dates back to the 14th century, was once a military term for digging a clandestine passage under a building to sneak up on the enemy. The term quickly turned metaphorical, but in Shakespeare's day, its literal meaning was still commonly known. He even playe with it in All's Well That Ends Well , when the maiden Helena asks a soldier if there's a way to safeguard her virginity. He replies, "There is none: man, sitting down before you, will undermine you, and blow you up."

fleabag: Starting in the 1830s, a fleabag was a soldier's bed. Although the word fleabag now seems wedded to hotel, it can be applied more broadly, as in the 1958 example for the Oxford English Dictionary, "God, how I hated Paris! Paris was one big flea-bag."

basket case: Today, a basket case is simply a neurotic person, but during WWII, it meant a living soldier who had lost all his limbs and was brought home in a basket. The United States military denies that real baskets were ever used to carry soldiers. Regardless, the original meaning of the word is still gruesome.

(Image credit: Flickr user drakegoodman)

flak:Celebrities catch a lot of flak for idiotic behavior, but contemporary flak isn't what it used to be. When the term originated in the 1930s, it was short for fliegerabwehrkanone, the German word for anti-aircraft guns. After a generation, the meaning shifted so that catching flak now means absorbing criticism instead of cannonfire.

gung ho: You may be gung ho about collecting stamps, playing solitaire, or other individual pursuits, but originally the term was more applicable to teams. The U.S. Marines first used it a as a slogan during World War II, after general Evans Carlson adapted the Chinese kung ho, which means "work in harmony". While the teamwork element of the definition has faded, the enthusiasm bit has certainly remained.



fobbit, hillbilly armor, and IED: The war in Iraq is contributing its own expressions. A popular word on the rise is fobbit, a term that combines FOB (forward operating base) with hobbit. The word is a derogatory term for soldiers who stay too close to base and help themselves to three square meals a day. Another expression gaining steam is hillbilly armor, a term for scraps used to bulletproof vehicles.

Some words have already entered civilian life. IEDS, or improvised explosive devices, refer to the homemade bombs created by terrorists and insurgents. A recent GQ article about inappropriate office-party behavior uses it like this: "The workplace minefield is hard enough to negotiate without planting your own IEDs." So, what are the chances any of these new words will stick around? Who knows? The only thing that's certain is that as long as there are new wars, new words will crop up, too.

___________________________

How Violence Increases Our Vocabulary was written by Mark Peters. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the May/June 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Be sure to visit mental_floss' entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!

(College Humor link)

Colonel Landa has nothing on this guy!

You've seen awesome panoramas of landscapes, now see something truly different: a panoramic photograph of the inside of a washing machine! Jump inside and take a look around. Try it full-screen for the best experience. And marvel at the socks that will go as matching, but will never be seen together again! Link

San Antonio, Texas was the site of a jalapeño-eating competition this past weekend. It wasn't easy to determine the winner, as Pat “Deep Dish” Bertoletti and last year's champion Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas were neck and neck. A a double overtime one-on-one challenge made Bertoletti the winner at 275 pickled jalapeño peppers consumed in ten minutes, to Thomas' 274. Both competitors breezed by the previous record in this four-year-old competition. Link -Thanks, Brent!

That's today! Americans, and especially those of us on the internet, never pass up a chance to celebrate a holiday. However, you might not know these 13 Surprising Facts about Cinco de Mayo. But now you can. For example:

5. Cinco de Mayo must be HUGE in Mexico! Not really. While the Batalla de Puebla helped to unify Mexico around one event, the major celebrations of Cinco de Mayo has largely been contained to the village of Puebla, about 100 miles east of Mexico City, where the original battle took place. In reality, Cinco de Mayo is much more popular in America, where citizens of Mexican descent (and those who just like a good margarita) hold festivals from sea to shining sea.

Happy Cinco de Mayo! http://blog.starcostumes.com/cinco-de-mayo.html -via the Presurfer

Castle restorer Michel Guyot (previously at Neatorama) is heading a project to build a medieval fortress in ... Arkansas!

Thirty masons, carpenters and stone carvers authentically dressed, will work all year round for twenty years, the time required to build a fortress in the Middle Ages. Imagine a place where you leave behind our technically advanced society to hear the clang of hammers on chisels as stones are being carved, and to hear snorting cart-horses pulling heavy stones on creaking wooden wagons. The blacksmith, the rope maker, the woodcutter will work right in front of you as they practise medieval techniques of construction.

The Ozark Medieval Fortress is now open for tours. Groups rates are available. Link -via Metafilter

Speech recognition technology reached 80% accuracy in 2001, then leveled off. The human ear has about 98% accuracy. Why haven't computers improved in this area? Robert Fortner looks at several reasons.

Many spoken words sound the same. Saying “recognize speech” makes a sound that can be indistinguishable from “wreck a nice beach.” Other laughers include “wreck an eyes peach” and “recondite speech.” But with a little knowledge of word meaning and grammar, it seems like a computer ought to be able to puzzle it out. Ironically, however, much of the progress in speech recognition came from a conscious rejection of the deeper dimensions of language. As an IBM researcher famously put it: “Every time I fire a linguist my system improves.” But pink-slipping all the linguistics PhDs only gets you 80% accuracy, at best.

We can take comfort in knowing that the human brain is still way ahead of machines. Link -via Metafilter

(image source: Creative Coffins)

Randall Munroe of xkcd conducted an online color survey, the results from 222,500 user sessions are ready. The aim of the survey was to find what names people associate with colors. As you can see, no one knows how to spell fuchsia. I had to stop and roll in the floor at the "disproportionally popular" color names by gender section. Link -via reddit

Don't even think about shoplifting in a comic book store when Spider-Man, The Flash, and some Jedi Knights are present. The super heroes, dressed for International Free Comics Day, detained a man who tried to make off with $160 book at Comic Centre in Adelaide, Australia. Store owner Michael Baulderstone, who was attired as Spider-Man, explains what happened.

"We had about 40 people dressed up as their favourite superheroes to celebrate International Free Comic Day, so he didn't have much of a choice but to hand the X-Men Omnibus back after a little bit of a scuffle," he said.

"I've had a look at the security footage and it shows Spider-Man running down the corridor of the shop, grabbing this guy, hauling him off.

"Everyone in the store thought it was a play, that it was street theatre of some sort. It wasn't until I said `Call the police' that people started to realise."

Comic Centre and another bookstore encouraged patrons to dress as characters for the event.

"One of the funniest things about the incident was that I called for people to stand near the door and it just so happened we had people dressed as Jedi knights there blocking the exit, the Flash was there at some point too," Mr Baulderstone said.

Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

Is it graduation time again already? Scholars, politicians, and celebrities will soon travel to various colleges and universities to address the class of 2010. Some will make more of an impression than others. In today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, see how well you can identify commencement speakers of the past by a quote from their speeches. I scored 70%, not because I recall the speeches, but because I recognized the style. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/54590