Dutch coffee company Man Met Bril Koffie (Man with Coffee Glasses) is building a hotel in Rotterdam. The hotel isn't quite finished yet, but they have big plans for the Coffee Hotel. One of those plans is a residency program, in which baristas and other hospitality pros are invited to come work for a few months at a time. It's not like an American internship, as they will pay you, and also put you up in the hotel for free. It's not clear whether Americans are invited; the website offers several languages, none of which is English, but the residency program page is in English. It's an opportunity to spend a few months in the Netherlands without spending like a tourist. The program is kicking off with a residency roadtrip through Europe, so they can recruit coffee enthusiasts from all over. Read more about the Koffie Hotel and the residency program at Sprudge. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Man Met Bril Koffie)

In 1924, Fritz Heinrich Angerstein was arrested for eight murders in Germany. His wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and several household employees were all dead. Angerstein blamed bandits for the carnage, but the police told him there was evidence against him. He was told an expert had photographed the retinas of the victims, and his image had been preserved as their last sight before death. Angerstein then confessed to the murders. It was a risky move, but the police never had to actually produce those photos, which probably didn't exist.

However, the idea that the last thing one sees before death becomes imprinted on the retina at the back of the eyeball had been around a long time, and became a scientific pursuit with the rise of photography. Serious and often gruesome experiments were done to find images recorded by the eye itself, most notably by German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne. He even achieved some success- in rabbits. Read about the study of optography, as it was called, at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Aravind Sivaraj)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both Florida and California were desperate for new people to come and put down roots. Both states had to battle deeply-ingrained Puritan beliefs that the comfort of year-round warm weather wasn't good for a person. Besides, California was a desert and Florida was a swamp. State boosters and land developers spent decades convincing people that their state was a paradise. California rerouted rivers and built aqueducts to bring water to Los Angeles and San Diego. Florida drained swamps and concentrated on beach access. Both states also pitched the wonders of healthy and delicious fresh oranges and other citrus fruit. And neither state was above criticizing the other.

Both campaigns worked well over the long term. California and Florid are high-population states- ranking first and third among the 50 states. Both became tourist meccas, even before the Disney theme parks. But now that warm semitropical climate is threatened by change. California is dealing with chronic drought, wildfire, and landslides. Florida is increasingly a hurricane magnet, and the rising sea level threatens its most costly real estate. Read about the campaign to settle Florida and California and their precarious status as paradise at the Conversation. -via Smithsonian

(Image source: Covina Public Library)

The Jewish high holidays wouldn't be the same without a new song from a cappella group Six13 (previously at Neatorama). Rosh Hashanah, the New Year celebration, began Friday evening and will continue through sunset on Sunday. By the Hebrew calendar, we have reached the year 5784. The guys in Six13 have been waiting years to bring you this song, a Rosh Hashanah anthem that uses the tune of the 1970 Chicago song "25 or 6 to 4." The time has finally come. Honestly, they've probably been working on this recording for years, with its many-layered voice orchestra. No instruments were used; even the drums are voices. The lyrics are at the YouTube page, although you will have to click "more" to see them. They make more sense than the original lyrics. L'Shanah Tovah!

There are people who love J.R.R. Tolkien's books about Middle-earth, and there are fanatics who study their history, origins, and inspirations. Sometimes these people are also geography geeks and love studying maps of Tolkien's imaginative universe. Then there's Mohammad Reza Kamali, an Iranian Tolkien fan who spent years comparing Middle-earth to real maps of the real world. He noticed an uncanny similarity between Mordor and the Himalayan mountain range.

Now, Tolkien himself said that the Shire was based on rural England, and that action of the story takes place in a part of Middle-earth that is "equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean.” Many fans took that simply as meaning Europe. But "equivalent in latitude" doesn't mean Europe. Kamali was very familiar with Tolkien's maps, and recognized their lines and shapes when he saw the real-world topography of Pakistan's mountains. Furthermore, the Indus River shares many similarities to Anduin, the Great River of Middle-earth, where the One Ring was lost. Read Kamali's theories about Tolkien's maps and the reasoning behind them at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: Ian Alexander)

The TV series M*A*S*H introduced us to the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, an innovation of the Korean War. Studies from World War II led authorities to determine that wounded soldiers who received immediate care near the front lines were much more likely to survive, so medical teams were mobilized to be there. You can't argue with the results: a 30% drop in fatalities among wounded front line soldiers. The difference between the MASH units and the M*A*S*H TV show was that in the real world, there wasn't much comedy, and that almost all the round-the-clock work was done by nurses. And they were all women, as men could not serve in the military as nurses until 1956!

In the three years of the Korean War, around 1500 women were put on the front lines to care for wounded soldiers, often stepping up to act in capacities beyond their training. Mike Weedall, the author of the new novel War Angel: Korea 1950, gives us an overview of the life of an army nurse of the real MASH units in Korea at Military History Now.   -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Stewart/U.S. Army)

Science can be weird. Your goal may be to unlock the mysteries of how the human body develops, but you find yourself counting nose hairs in dead bodies to see if there are more hairs in the left or right nostrils. How does one obtain a grant for that?

The annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded last night in an online ceremony to researchers who published studies concerning the sexual activities of anchovies, hi-tech toilets, people who talk backwards, and other science that makes you laugh, and then makes you think. These prizes are sponsored by The Annals of Improbable Research, and co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.

Each winner this year received a .pdf document that can be printed and assembled to make a three-dimensional trophy, and a ten-trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. The prizes were bestowed by a line-up of real Nobel Prize winners: Frances Arnold (chemistry 2018), Marty Chalfie (chemistry 2008), Peter Doherty (physiology or medicine 1996), Esther Duflo (economics 2019), Jerry Friedman (physics 1990), Wolfgang Ketterle (physics 2001), Eric Maskin (economics 2007), Ardem Patapoutian (physiology or medicine 2021), Al Roth (economics 2012), Rich Roberts (physiology or medicine 1993), and Barry Sharpless (chemistry 2001 and chemistry 2022). Continue reading for all the winners.

Prohibition left lasting effects on the US still felt today, like organized crime, NASCAR, and state liquor control. Fortunes were made providing illegal booze to a thirsty nation, and not all by men. Women were just as likely to jump at the chance to get rich in the underground liquor trade.

Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan knew an opportunity when she saw it. She had already made a name for herself under the name "Texas" Guinan in vaudeville and silent movies where she played a rough and tumble Western gunslinger. In the 1920s, her fame got her gigs as a celebrity hostess in speakeasies, where she provided entertainment and became quite a draw. Guinan invested her earnings in her own nightclubs scattered throughout New York City, where she hosted celebrities, sold illegal liquor, and staved off police raids as best she could.

Then there was “Moonshine Mary” Wazeniak, who re-purified methanol to make liquor, with deadly results, and “Spanish Marie” Waite, who operated a fleet of boats running rum from Havana to Miami, even after her husband was imprisoned. And Elise Olmstead, an FBI agent assigned to keep an eye on a suspected liquor smuggler, who instead married him and joined his business. Read about these women and others who became notorious for their Prohibition exploits at Mental Floss.

If you were to fall into the Amazon River, are you doomed to be torn apart and eaten by piranhas? Piranhas can be pretty ferocious, and we've all seen those demonstrations where a meaty bone is offered to a school of piranhas and they go to town, churning the water until it's bloody. Teddy Roosevelt wrote about piranhas in his 1914 book Through the Brazilian Wilderness, describing how they consumed an entire cow before his eyes during his South American safari, and would likely do the same to a human. That's how the idea of piranhas as dangerous man-eaters got started, and we have plenty of gory movies to show for it. A century of research has raised questions about that demonstration, but the piranha became a terrifying symbol of the dangers of the Amazon just the same. Learn about piranhas and the danger they pose in this this TED-Ed lesson.   

A notorious tale in aviation circles involves a Michigan pilot who bought a plane in California sight unseen and had some trouble getting it home in 2021. These seven incidents from the trip are described as "crashes," which may be technically correct, but no one was killed, and the pilot was flying alone. Also technically they occurred over nine days. Sixty-year-old Dennis Collier sold his house to buy a Seawind 3000, an experimental amphibious homemade plane. He was so excited about the plane that he didn't get a pre-buy inspection. When he picked up the plane, he found its history to be pretty sketchy, but he had already sunk $100K into it and the seller was in a hurry to leave.

The story reads like a comedy of errors, and it is, but it should also reassure us that many things can go wrong with a plane without dooming us to die in a fiery crash. Not that we should push our luck like Collier did. After reading the account at General Aviation News, you might want to also read an interview with Collier for a taste of the saga from his perspective. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: AirplaneHub.com)

We know the term the Gilded Age as a time of rapid industrialization, massive immigration the the US, and technical innovations that caused a few people to accumulate astounding wealth. In Europe, the period was called the Belle Époque. But the period between roughly 1870 to 1914 was also referred to as the Great Binge, because the industrial and economic boom was accompanied by an awful lot of drug use.

Industrialists and other businessmen raised capital by importing opium and cocaine. Politicians leveraged the trade to gain power over supplying nations and those trading with them. Authors, artists, inventors, and other celebrities indulged regularly. College students navigated a world soaked with dangerous but still legal drugs. Everyday people relied on opium and laudanum to ease the pain of conditions we couldn't fix, even for children. Heroin was developed as a "less addicting" pharmaceutical alternative to morphine. Coca-Cola got its name from the cocaine it contained.   

We've covered a lot of those turn-of-the-20th century drugs individually, but when you consider them all together in one historic period, it's a wonder anyone survived long enough to deal with World War I. Read about the Great Binge at Messy Nessy Chic.   

A long time ago, in a country far, far away... specifically in 1987 and '88, George Lucas did six ads for Panasonic, shown on Japanese television. Sure, he had plenty of money from the first three Star Wars movies and the first two Indiana Jones movies, but was also dealing with the disaster that was Howard the Duck and didn't know how long his charmed film career would last. Neil Cicierega used those six ads and some extra Star Wars clips and related material to construct a surreal, seomwhat psychedelic trip back in time and space to the "George Lucas Eggsperience." Levitate an egg, learn to load a VHS tape, and ponder the importance of the color red in this video. Meet Lucas' favorite droid, Sparky, but don't tell R2D2 or C3PO.

If you want to see the original ads, there's a source list at the YouTube page. -via Metafilter

The scariest, and most dangerous, hotel is the Frying Pan Hotel, 32 miles off the coast of North Carolina atop the Frying Pan Tower. The tower was built in 1964 with a lighthouse to warn approaching ships of the shallow Frying Pan Shoals. Since new technology made the lighthouse obsolete, the tower was sold to Richard Neil in 2010. Now it is a research station and marine wildlife refuge, but it also has an eight-room bed and breakfast.

The location is Spartan, but this hotel has amenities for those looking for adventure. There are boat and helicopter shuttles, a hoist to and from the water's surface, high-speed internet, scuba diving, snorkeling, fishing, shooting, golf, games, and a full kitchen. There's even an underwater camera so you can schedule your snorkeling around the sharks.

Book your adventure at the Frying Pan Hotel here. No pets, no children under ten, and guests over 300 pounds must travel by boat. All guests must undergo a safety briefing and sign a liability waiver. -via Everlasting Blort

The Prime Meridian is an arbitrary line drawn from the North Pole to the South Pole as a starting point for us to measure longitude. It was decided to place the meridian in a line going through Greenwich, UK, at the  International Meridian Conference in 1884. Before that, different countries used their own meridians as a starting point. The Prime Meridian is said to be the line between the Western Hemisphere and the Eastern Hemisphere, but as you can see, that doesn't make sense because then a big chunk of Africa, plus Spain and Britain, would be in the Western Hemisphere. Still, Britain held a lot of power in the 1880s. The equator is not arbitrary, because it's the midpoint between the poles, which are designated by the earth's rotation.

(Image credit: Graham Curran)

The point where the Prime Meridian crosses the equator is 0° longitude and 0° latitude. That place is hundreds of miles off the coast of Ghana, with no islands nearby. The numbers were just a point on a map before satellites and digital geolocation, but in the modern era, errors in geolocation will default to 0°,0°. In the internet age, this point on earth has come to be called Null Island. Redditors have designed flags for Null Island, and you can buy souvenir t-shirts. Only there is no island there. But there is a scientific buoy, named Soul Buoy, installed in 1997. Read about the imaginary Null Island at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura

My sleep habits are very consistent. I crash quickly at 11 PM and at 2 PM. Seriously, I can tell what time it is by how my brain feels. That 2 PM part makes it hard to think about getting a real job, but it helps me skip the hottest part of the day in summer. There was a time when I could work way into the wee hours of the morning, but I probably didn't get enough sleep overall. Each person has their own natural rhythms, developed over a lifetime. Our bodies set our sleep schedules by releasing hormones. Can we change that? Yes, up to a point. The secret is to make sure we get enough sleep overall. Sunlight is a great help. But when those hormones start flowing, it's not easy to fight against them. If we only had the freedom to work with our bodies' natural circadian rhythms, harnessing the time of day we can be most productive, we could enjoy our free time and our sleep time more. The TED-Ed lesson explains circadian rhythms and what we can do about them.