Believe it or not, LEGO blocks weren't the first toy that consisted of small interlocking plastic building blocks. That was Kiddicraft blocks, patented by British toymaker Hilary Page in 1947. Over in Denmark, toymaker Ole Kirk Christiansen switched from wood to plastic toys and started making similar bricks in 1949. You might think that a legal war would have ensued, but Page died in 1957, reportedly unaware of the Danish toy, and Christiansen died in 1958. However, the most important part of the story is the patent that Christiansen's son Godtfred filed in January of 1958 that made LEGO blocks a better product.

In the video above, Phil Edwards explains the crucial design innovation that made LEGO the better toy. That's the first four minutes. The rest of the video is about the marketing juggernaut that brought LEGO bricks to the world. 

You have to wonder if any of the original Kiddicraft blocks are still around, and whether they are valuable. I couldn't find any for sale online, but I did find a 3D printing pattern. -via Digg  

The leading causes of death in the US are, as always, heart disease and cancer. COVID-19 is third. Accidental death is scarier, because that could happen at any age. People are afraid of sharks and plane crashes, but the most likely accidental death is traffic accidents. After all, we get in our cars almost every day, but fly only occasionally and rarely see a shark. Visual Capitalist took data from the National Safety Council to compile your lifetime odds of dying by the most common accidental causes. There are other factors that feed into these odds, like your age. Drowning is the leading cause of accidental death for children ages one to four. Accidental firearm discharge makes up only 1% of gun deaths; the rest are suicide and homicide. Remember, the stats are for the US only. Read more on the statistics pertaining to accidental deaths at Visual Capitalist. Anything you find hard to read on the graphic will be in text there. -via Boing Boing

Considering the way we've been treating our planet, testing air quality is crucial. That doesn't mean just testing for pollutants, but also the basic components of the atmosphere that can change over time. At Kennaook/Cape Grim in Australia, the cleanest air in the world blows in from the Southern Ocean. The Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station is constantly testing this air, but they also keep samples in the Cape Grim Air Archive. Every few months a new tank is added to the collection. Sure, we have air testing results for the last 50 years, but what if, sometime in the future, we need to test for something we never tested before? The archive means this historic air will be available for new tests. Tom Scott gives us a look at the archives and explains how these samples are bottled, stored, and used.

Tom also added a link at the video page to give us some background on Cape Grim, particularly the massacre of 1828. It is indeed grim.

Neuroscientists, and people in general, have noticed a disturbing phenomena in that many folks have trouble recalling what they did during the pandemic. It's not widespread amnesia, but individual, day-to-day things like who came to Christmas dinner last year or whether you took your books back to the library. It can't be blamed on COVID-19 specifically, because this lack of memory can occur before infection and in people who never caught the disease.

Speculation from brain researchers tells us that two factors will do this: monotony and stress. Many people went home and stayed there, working online, taking classes from home, or supervising children 24/7 (or all three). Long-term memories are formed by the outlines of how different an event is from life around it. When every day is the same, it's difficult to form new memories. Then there was the stress of lifestyle changes, new safety protocols, social upheavals, and fear of the disease. This reminds me of what's colloquially known as "mommy brain" or "widow brain," in which focusing on new priorities makes previously-important parts of your life fade into oblivion.

Read about the factors that may contribute to the impairment of making new memories during the pandemic, whether it's just inconsequential forgetting or full-blown brain fog, at the Walrus. -via Damn Interesting

Our hero is on a quest to fulfill his destiny, but first he must uncover the foretold knowledge of what that destiny is. The secret is in the hands of a wise mountain hermit. This is a scenario you'll find in countless fantasy books, movies, and video games, but you've never seen it unfold as realistically as it does in this animated video by Joel Haver (previously at Neatorama). While it's no Lord of the Rings, it is long enough to get the point across. But it still leaves us with lingering questions, like what was the wooden triangle supposed to do? And did they ever kick it? -via reddit

Have you ever pulled that trick where you made a perfect snowman that's around ten inches tall and took a close-up picture to post on social media? That's why redditors demand a "banana for scale" whenever the size of something is questionable. That wasn't required for this snowman, because they already have a house for scale!

Eric Fobbe of Buffalo, Minnesota, built a snowman that's 30 feet tall and 20 feet across. He gathered up snow from all around the neighborhood and used a snowblower to pile it up. Fobbe says the snowman needs daily maintenance, with extra snow added anytime he starts to shrink. This is not Fobbe's first giant snowman. He's been building them for four years, and every year the snowman is larger. This year's snowman is so big he has a traffic cone for a nose! See a video report on the snowman from the local news station. -via TYWKIWDBI

Jun Ono, Akiyasu Tomoeda, and Kokichi Sugihara developed this illusion that shows us how pixelated pigeons and worms move. When they move across a grid of stripes, the worms appear to stretch and compress, while the pigeons begin to waddle. The movement of the figures is actually smooth, as you can see at the top where pigeons move across a bare background. This is also shown later with UFOs. But the effect is much stronger at this interactive page, where the colors are bolder. The pixelated pigeons appear to be stretching their necks out as they move forward, but that's an illusion. Uncheck the "grid" box underneath the graphic to remove the background stripes. You can also adjust the speed and colors to see how that affects the illusion. The movement we see in the figures comes from the low contrast when the edges of the figures move across the stripes, as we have a hard time seeing that part of the movement. You can see another version of the same affect in the Stepping Feet illusion. -via Boing Boing 

Is there anyone who doesn't like fettuccine Alfredo? You may look at it as a fancy Italian version of macaroni and cheese, but it sure is tasty. Like spaghetti and meatballs, or carbonara, it's a dish better known in the US than in Italy. But is certainly originated in Italy, made by chef Alfredo di Lelio in 1908 for his wife. It was a simple combination of handmade fettuccine pasta, butter, and Parmesan cheese.

What made fettuccine Alfredo the popular dish it is today (in America) is the way Alfredo presented it at his restaurant in Rome. He would personally mix the cheese with the buttered pasta at the table until it was silky smooth, and foreign visitors would go home and rave about it. Since 1933, the dish has appeared in more than 800 American cookbooks. Yet it's still not all that well known in Italy. Italian food historian Luca Cesari explains how and why Alfredo developed his recipe and how it became a sensation everywhere except his native land, at Literary Hub. -via Damn Interesting

Stumpy Lake Golf Course is right on the banks of Stumpy Lake in Virginia Beach, Virginia. You can imagine how many golf balls are at the bottom of the lake. It's not any easier retrieving a lake ball when the surface is frozen, because I wouldn't ever trust a frozen lake in Virginia to hold a person's weight. But this video is not about people.

Just a couple of days after Christmas, a couple of guys were out birdwatching near frozen Stumpy Lake. There were two bald eagles out on the ice playing with a golf ball! One guy took still pictures while the other ran video. The game started out as soccer (even though the narration is golf), but it turned into a game of keepaway once the birds noticed they were being watched. Who knew that bald eagles could be so playful? I guess they just don't want to play with humans. -via Everlasting Blort

We've all been put into the position of having to guess how old a photograph is. There was a time when you could get pretty close by looking at the tint and the quality. Now those things can be manipulated, so instead we look for clues in the image itself, like fashions or cars or written words on signs and newspapers. Now here's a game that puts your chronological sleuthing skills to the test! Chronophoto gives you a photograph taken between 1900 and 2020, and you adjust a slider to indicate what year you think it was taken. It's harder than you might think. You'll be given points based on how close you are. Each game consists of five photos, and a perfect score is 5000. My best score was little more than halfway there, but I was in more of a hurry than I should have been. You will do better! -via Metafilter

An island named T-3, informally called called Fletcher's Ice Island, is an anomaly because it was never an island at all. It was an iceberg that had calved off an Arctic glacier in the 1950s. Since it was so big -11 kilometers long and five kilometers wide- the US Air Force put an airstrip and a research station on it. The station was manned by mostly civilian contractors, who lived in trailers and huts and whiled away the long Arctic winters by drinking and fighting. It was in this strange environment that Mario Escamilla shot station director Bennie Lightsy under stressful circumstances in 1970. Was it murder or manslaughter or an accident? Before that could be determined, the question of jurisdiction had to be settled.

The research station on T-3 was run by the Air Force, but the men involved were civilians. The place where it happened wasn't claimed by any nation, because it wasn't land. The Arctic Ocean isn't the property of any country. Canada didn't want the case. Escamilla was seized by going through the US airbase at Thule, in Greenland, which is owned by Denmark, who didn't want the case either. Would maritime laws apply? T-3 wasn't an island, but it wasn't a ship, either. Read about the many problems of jurisdiction for this case, and how it was eventually resolved, at Today I Found Out.

This is a photograph of a rock formation in the Hingol National Park in Pakistan. What does it look like to you? Take a minute and decide. Now, when you learn that this is sometimes called the Balochistan Sphinx, you will see its resemblance to the Great Sphinx of Giza. It has the face of a man, the body of lion with paws and everything, and a Nemes headdress worn by Egyptian pharaohs. This rock stands atop another formation that appears to have the columns of a Hindu temple. Who carved this?

Mother Nature carved it. There have been some articles and videos proposing a theory about an ancient civilization that for some reason carved a giant Egyptian sculpture and a Hindu temple in Pakistan so very long ago that it has been worn down by erosion. But that theory doesn't stand up at all, especially when you see the formation from different angles. This is an example of pareidolia, the tendency to see familiar shapes, particularly faces, in random objects. Read about the Balochistan Sphinx at Historic Mysteries.  -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Bilal Mirza)

British folks have blood pudding or black pudding, and they also have Christmas pudding, which are nothing like each other, and nothing like what Americans put into a chocolate pie. So why are they all called pudding?

Adam Ragusea explains the different kinds of puddings. Beware, the European pudding began as a sausage, and that is explained in a way that... well, let's refer to the saying "If you love sausage and you love the law, you don't want to see either being made." Then eventually pudding became more than just sausage, and the word was highjacked to mean a sweet soft dessert with all manner of things in it. Ragusea even makes one from a 17th century recipe. But the evolution continued in a different way in the United States, where our pudding eventually became more liquid with fewer things in it.

The video has a skippable ad from 3:00 to 4:20. -via Digg

Josh Jacobs, also known as Slinky Josh, is the world's premiere expert in slinky manipulation, or slinking, as he calls it. He came by the art honestly, by seeing someone on the internet do it. He was so impressed that he got a slinky and started practicing. The slinkys that Jacobs uses are a far cry from the original metal slinkys, which got bent before you could ever do fancy tricks with them. He uses tough, colorful slinkys that he sells along with slinky manipulation lessons. In this video, Jacobs shows us a couple of the basic moves that anyone can do, but you can only get really good at it with practice. -via Digg

It's been 30 years now since the last Sears catalog was printed. By then, the company had spent more than 100 years as the king of mail order. Does anyone else remember when you could order a gun through the Sears catalog? Sears would mail some items that would be unthinkable today, like heroin, back when it was offered as a non-addicting alternative to morphine. Sears offered a whole line of drugs, many that would be categorized as "snake oil" today.

You could order an entire house delivered from Sears, although it would come in many separate packages that you put together yourself. Plans were included that gave you step-by-step directions for buildings your own house from a kit. For an additional charge, you could even get one designed to include a bathroom.

Smithsonian gives us the origin story of the company founded by 22-year-old Richard W. Sears in 1886, including the short appearance of Alvah C. Roebuck. And we get a taste of some of the weirder things that were once sold by mail order through the Sears catalog.

(Image credit: Mike Mozart)