In the year 1569, Jesuit missionary Luís Fróis went to Japan and presented feudal lord Oda Nobunaga with a gift of a clock. Nobunaga admired the clock, but considered it useless. It didn't even tell time! That opinion was repeated in Japan for several hundred years. The Japanese system of timekeeping measured hours in a variable way. A day was divided into 12 hours, but those were six hours of daylight and six hours of night. In the winter, nighttime hours were longer than daytime hours, and vice versa in the summer. Japan was not the only culture to keep time this way, but we have records of how the introduction of Western clocks made no sense to them. A Western clock had the sun coming up at different times on different days, and that was completely nonsensical. Still, Western clocks became popular among wealthier Japanese because it implied a tribute gift from foreigners, raising their perceived status.
Japanese engineers found ways of "fixing" the Western clocks so that the hours varied and made more sense. It wasn't until 1873 that Japan switched over to measuring time with fixed hours. Read about the timekeeping clash at Jstor. -via Strange Company
A charming trail cam sequence from Colorado shows that mountain lions are not all that different from house cats, when they aren't busy hunting or avoiding threats like humans. Thaddeus Wells built a wooden swing in the forest and set a camera nearby, hoping to catch bear cubs in action. But a young cougar chose that area to sleep in. When she touches the swing, she's startled at its movement. But then that movement becomes intriguing to her, and she bats it back and forth like a cat playing with a piece of string. I wonder if she ever knocks objects off a cliff just for the fun of it. Read more about the encounter at Yahoo! News. -via reddit
During the Great Depression, a relatively wealthy hand model named Helen Ressler went to see Alma Nelson, a psychic who had been a co-founder of the First Spiritualist Church of New York, to seek advice on investing in something that would make the world a better place. Nelson went into a trance and channeled the voice of "Sudah," a spirit from Atlantis. Sudah told about his brother, who was a gifted engineer, and had been reincarnated into the bodies of gifted engineers many times over history. The brother had worked on the world's biggest projects, including the building of the Egyptian pyramids. Sudah, speaking through the medium, also confided that his brother's current incarnation was an engineer who just happened to be a friend of Nelson's!
That engineer, Arthur Lingelbach, told Ressler about his many accomplishments and plans for future technological innovations, including television, supersonic planes, and a refrigerator that worked on the principle of perpetual motion. All he needed was investors. Ressler not only invested in Lingelbach's company, but brought in other investors ...until enough time passed that she noticed no progress was being made on those inventions.
Ressler was quite embarrassed about the money she had given Lingelbach, but became a whistleblower anyway. Still, prosecuting Nelson and Lingelbach proved to be much more difficult than she thought it would be. Read the story of the psychic scheme and the trial that followed at Truly Adventurous.
"Financial compensation" never sounded so good. The latest project from There I Ruined It takes the monologue from that ad we've all seen again and again and sets it to the tune of "Galop Infernal" by Jacques Offenbach. We know it as the Can-Can song. It's not so much the quality of the work (which is pretty good), but the very idea of pairing such random things that takes you by surprise. You have to wonder how that concept even entered his brain. -via reddit
The origin of sourdough bread probably contributed to the popularity of Chinese food in America. The use of sourdough as a leavening agent grew up during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Miners and prospectors in the San Francisco area didn't have access to adequate supplies of yeast, but they needed bread to eat when they were working and didn't have time to build a fire to cook each meal. So they baked their own bread using sourdough starter. That doesn't mean they were good at it.
Across the American West, sourdough was considered a food for unmarried men who didn’t know how to cook. These men were like their bread: rough, tough, and they smelled a little bit funny. But the ultra-masculine frontier lifestyle was supposed to be temporary. These men were expected one day to return to civilization and enjoy the “sweet” and “light” bread baked by their mothers or wives.
The miners' sourdough bread could be really nasty and even dangerous. Moldy and contaminated bread caused a lot of upset stomaches and some deaths. So how did sourdough become a hit among tourists traveling to San Francisco? Learn the history of sourdough bread, and don't eat while reading it, at Atlas Obscura.
I can SO relate to this! Today is the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, marking the transition from summer to fall. From this point on, the nights will be longer than the days until next spring. In the Southern Hemisphere, it is the vernal equinox, or the beginning of spring. In the real world, your mileage may vary, as the above video makes clear.
But autumn is often just a state of mind. Above you see the decorations I laid out before Labor Day. Having been through a few equinoxes in the South, I knew that the day would be just another day as far as the weather goes, but I was surprised this year. On Wednesday, the high temperature was 90°F (32°C). But where I am, the high temp today was 75°F (24°C) and I need to bring in the porch plants tonight. The weather is always surprising; this year I am surprised it followed the calendar. Again, your mileage may vary. -via Digg
The 1904 Summer Olympics were held in St. Louis, Missouri, because the city wanted the games to be part of the St. Louis World’s Fair. But there were no airports in 1904, and St. Louis is a long way from any sea port, so there were few athletes from outside North America. The marathon was particularly affected, as most of the participants had never run a marathon before. An athlete from Cuba lost all his money on the way gambling in New Orleans and didn't even have shorts, much less running shoes. Two experienced but barefoot runners from South Africa were there, but only because they were already working at the World's Fair. The race organizer limited the runners to only two water breaks because he was running a personal experiment, unbeknownst to the athletes. The route was not cleared for the race. It began in 90 degree weather. You can see how things might go wrong.
Only 14 runners completed the 1904 Olympic marathon. The stories of the race that day involved cheating, illness, theft, injury, performance-enhancing drugs, hallucinations, and one runner being chased off course by dogs. Read what happened at the race that came close to being the last Olympic marathon at Amusing Planet.
Brick Experiment Channel shows us a LEGO machine that combines 20 different mechanical principles. Shown to us one-by-one, it's quite enlightening, although it gets more complicated as the numbers go up. If that were all this video had, it would be simply fascinating. You have to have a little awe for the engineers who came up with all these different ways of controlling movement. But these mechanism are all eventually combined into one LEGO device powered by one motor. Seeing them all work at once is glorious! They labeled the video as a "useless machine," but it is anything but useless as it demonstrates how all these moving parts work, and brings us joy to see the finished product. And besides, it rotates a Viking. How cool is that? You'll say "I want one!" and then realize the work that went into the hand-made project and decide maybe not. -via Boing Boing
Just when you thought air travel couldn't get any worse.
We teamed up with @guitarcenter to surprise a flight full of Customers flying out of Long Beach with a ukulele and a lesson. By the time they arrived in Honolulu they were pros. pic.twitter.com/XsEx10sRJK
Southwest Airlines recently staged a surprise promotion for a planeload of people traveling from California to Hawaii. In a collaboration with Guitar Center, they provided a travel-size ukulele for every passenger, plus an in-flight ukulele lesson from Guitar Center's educational affairs specialist Alexandra Windsor. The passengers seem to have loved it, and the stunt got plenty of positive reaction online, but it made many folks think about the implications of a 6-hour flight with a plane load of ukuleles.
"Southwest Forced To Divert Landing As Passengers Bludgeon Flight Crew With Ukuleles"
In their defense, Southwest said everyone put their ukuleles away after the 20-minute lesson. It could have been worse. It could have been banjos, accordions, or bagpipes. And I say that as someone who likes to listen to bagpipe music occasionally ...on YouTube. -via Fark
America's newest military branch, Space Force, has unveiled their official song. The title is "Semper Sutra," meaning "always above." That is also the US Space Force motto. It sounds as if John Philip Souza had written a TV sitcom theme. It turns out that I am not the only one who thinks so.
Semper Supra is set to a jaunty tune reminiscent of The Liberty Bell, another Sousa march, from 1893 but now widely known as the theme to the British comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
My daughter expressed frustration over constantly battling ants in her house. I told her even if you destroy a colony, there are always more. How many? I said, I don't know, maybe a billion on your small lot. I was totally making that up. But now there's a real study on how many ants there are in the world. Mark Wong had a goal to count all the ants, but he didn't do it by himself. He surveyed 489 studies of ant populations from around the world, and extrapolating the information he came up with 20 quadrillion, give or take a few. That's 20,000,000,000,000,000.
"We further estimate that the world's ants collectively constitute about 12 megatons of dry carbon," said Wong, an ecologist at the University of Western Australia's School of Biological Sciences. "Impressively, this exceeds the biomass of all the world's wild birds and mammals combined."
Look at this cake! How did the baker get a red flannel shirt inside it? Professional cake artist Liz Marek of Sugar Geek Show shows us how she makes a lumberjack cake. Not that any of us are willing to put this much work into a cake. Even if we did, it wouldn't go this smoothly, nor end up as nice.
In the first two and half minutes, you'll know how the red flannel is done. She uses two layers of chocolate cake, two layers of red velvet cake, and two layers of yellow cake with some red dye to make the four layers of flannel shirt. Then she models a mostly-edible chocolate axe to go with it, then frosts the outside of the cake to look like a crosscut tree stump! I wouldn't go to this much trouble to make my own wedding cake. But if you have a hankering to try this one yourself, there's a tutorial with words that explains all the steps at Sugar Geek Show. -via Nag on the Lake
You may have never heard of the multiocular O. It is a letter that only appears in literature once, in a Cyrillic manuscript of Psalms dated to around 1429, which was, of course, hand-lettered. It was used in the phrase "many-eyed seraphim," which makes perfect sense. But even though it was used only once, the folks who develop and maintain Unicode are excruciatingly thorough, so in 2008 they made the multiocular O usable in the computer age. It looks like this: ꙮ. They also included the monocular O (ꙩ), the binocular O (Ꙫ), and the double monocular O (ꙭ), which have been used more in history, but are rarely seen today.
Anyway, the multiocular O in type only has seven eyes, while the original from the 1429 manuscript has ten. The Unicode Consortium was notified of this oversight by a Twitter thread. So earlier this month, in the spirit of being excruciatingly thorough, Unicode has updated the multiocular O character to ten eyes, as you see above. Presumably, there will have to be some software updating to Unicode version 15.0 before I can type it that way.
While this is all very interesting, what we really need is the story of how that ten-eyed O came about. In the discussion at Metafilter, Eyebrows McGee gives us a tale of what probably happened. She begins with an explanation of how in addition to singular and plural words, there are some dual word forms that mean exactly two of something. The few English words of this form include "both" and "neither." But other languages have many.
ANYWAY, in some Old Church Slavonic manuscripts, where a dual form was used (most often to say "two"), the scribes would turn "two" -- двое-- into двꚙе with the "double O" glyph.
Some OTHER scribes thought this was amazing, so specifically in the word "eyes" -- "очи" -- which is a dual-form noun because they typically come in twos, they'd use the "double monocular O" (Ꙭ, aka "boobs") to make two Os and turn them into eyes, thus: ꙭчи. See? TWO EYES!
WELL. ANOTHER scribe comes along and says, "two eyes? Seraphim have MANY eyes!" and when he comes to the phrase "many-eyed seraphim (Серафими мн҄оочитїи), he chooses to render it as "Серафими мн҄оꙮ҄читїи҄". CAUSE THEY'VE GOT A LOT OF EYES, y'all.
ONE TIME. This occurs ONE TIME in ONE MANUSCRIPT, but Unicode is dedicated to making sure manuscripts can be replicated accurately in unicode, so in 2008 we get a multiocular O.
BUT IT GETS EVEN MORE AWESOME, because they're updating it to the full 10!. Although do look at the manuscript and note that the original 10-eyed multiocular O has FLAMES LICKING OUT ON THE SIDES, so Unicode should get on that!
Anyway, I 100% approve of literally all of this, because there is nothing I love as much as TAKING A JOKE WAY TOO FAR, especially when the joke is more than 600 years old.
Yes, we all love 600-year-old jokes, even those that were only funny to medieval scribes, especially when those jokes come back to make the internet laugh. You can find more links on this subject at Metafilter.
Even if you never watch sports, you'll love the League of Pigs. One guy in the UK has a lot of adorable young pigs on his farm, and he's set them up to compete in footraces. These pigs are serious about getting to the food trough first! In this video, you'll get to know and love the competitors: Ginger Hamilton, Bear Trotsky, Piggy Smalls, Pepper Sanchez, and Hoshi Oinku. Besides that, the production values are top notch, and the narrator is not only professional, but quite funny. Whaty we learn from all this is that it pays to eat as many dandelions as you can. This is the first race video; if you want to see more, there are other races at YouTube. -via reddit
We have available evidence that cat photo memes are as old as photography itself. Before that, they had to be drawn or painted. Cats of Yore posted a thread of fine art in which a cat is in the corner doing what cats do- taking a bit of food for themselves. This makes the entire painting more relatable. It only makes sense that if an artist were to leave food out for hours at a time to model for a painting, eventually a cat would be drawn to the smell and help himself. The temptation is just too great. The result is a slice of life, whether you live in the 17th century or the 21st.
Yes, not all the original paintings are still lifes, and some of them are cropped details. But this is an important detail! In the replies, people posted images of their own cats stealing food, and they offer the occasional fine art contribution.
The images above are a small sample of the cats in the Twitter thread. Check it out- you might find a work of art you'll want to hang in your own home. -via Everlasting Blort
