Alfred Hitchcock seemed to have had an obsession with stairs. Staircases are featured prominently in many of his films, which stands out because a person going upstairs or downstairs, or just generally moving from one place to another, is the kind of thing that most filmmakers would skip to save time. For Hitchcock, it may have been an excuse to film actors from strange angles. Or maybe it represents the character's journey. Or maybe it was a way to build tension. When asked about those scenes, Hitch said, "Stairs are very photogenic."

Max Tohline compiled 39 staircase sequences from 39 Hitchcock films and named it Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Stairs. Yes, the movie The 39 Steps is in there. The films used in this supercut are listed at the vimeo page. This video is less than three minutes long, because the compilation is shown twice.

Tohline points out that Hitchcock's very first film, The Pleasure Garden from 1925, opened with a staircase scene, and his final film, Family Plot from 1976, ends with a shot of a staircase.  -via Kottke

Before the 20th century, some scientists thought that humans arrived in the New World around 1000 BCE or so. It was only when the Folsom Site near Folsom, New Mexico, was excavated that evidence of Native Americans were found that confirmed they were here during the last Ice Age. That might never have happened without George McJunkin.  

George McJunkin was born enslaved in Texas and became a cowboy after the Civil War. He was also a self-taught archaeologist and naturalist who was always on the lookout for bones and artifacts in the scrublands of New Mexico, where he managed a ranch. In 1908, a heavy rain flooded the arroyos. Surveying the damage, McJunkin noticed bones that had been unearthed by floodwaters washing away the soil. They were bison bones, much larger than any existing bison. He took some samples of what turned out to be an extinct species that died out at the end of the last Ice Age. McJunkin died in January 1922. He didn't live to see the Folsom site excavated and studied, but he spent the last 14 years of his life trying to convince others of its importance. There is some question about exactly who found the arrowhead embedded in the bison bones of the extinct species, but that discovery reset the narrative over the historical timeline, showing that humans were in New Mexico at least 11,000 years ago.

Read about the life and discoveries of George McJunkin at Sapiens. -via Atlas Obscura

A well-trained Jedi is supposed to master all his Force powers, but when you've learned workarounds to stumble your way through life, isn't that considered a success? Jake Groundsaunter isn't much of a Jedi. He can't fight his way out of a paper bag. The only danger from his lightsaber is to himself. And his diplomatic skills are nil. But he has mastered one important Force power, and that's all he needs. This video contains NSFW language, and an ad that you won't even see coming. The consensus is that we need a series to keep track of Jake Groundsaunter's mishaps. Apparently his real power is making us laugh just enough to want to see more.  -via reddit

Every year, there is one name that breaks out for new babies that was either never used before or extremely rare and becomes the thing for that year, for both boy and girl babies. Nathan Yau at Flowing Data dug up those unique names that became trendy for either sex in each year since 1930 in the US. Some of those trendy names grew in popularity over the years, but the longer they stay around, the less "trendy" they are. You can look at the year and figure out why for a lot of them. Delano is obviously for president Roosevelt, Jermaine came along with the Jackson Five (because the name Michael was too established to be trendy). Lavar trended the year Roots debuted. Leonidas wasn't a thing until the 2007 movie 300 was, and no one named a baby Kylo before 2016. What I don't understand is how Tammy, Denise, and Hazel made the chart for boy's names.  

I love how the girls chart begins with Marlene, Harlene, and Sharleen. Scarlett (1939) and Sabrina (1954) were from movies. Samantha and Tabitha trended with the series Bewitched. Coretta, which trended in 1968, is the name of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s widow. Rhiannon, Evita, Alanis, Charlize, and Coraline are right where you'd expect. See both charts and read about the trends at Flowing Data.  

(Image credit: Tamaki Sono)

If your education is anything like mine, you learned a lot more about ancient Egypt from movies and Sunday school than you ever learned in history class. Along the way, you may have picked up some lore about the pharaohs and the fabulous artifactual legacy they left behind that just isn't true. Mental Floss is here to set us straight on some common misconceptions about Egypt. For example, there is a story handed down that Napoleon Bonaparte shot off the Sphinx's nose. Or ordered cannon fire to that end, anyway. I'd never heard that one, but it's not true. We do have other, more plausible explanations for the missing nose.

Another misconception about the Sphinx is that its body has always been visible. Not so. The body was actually covered in sand for an indeterminate period of time—likely thousands of years—until the 1800s. Despite attempts, it wasn’t until archeologist Selim Hassan dug it out in the 1930s that it was fully visible in modern times.

The painting above is from 1801, which shows the Sphinx buried in sand, but the appearance of the nose is based on speculation. Read more on the Sphinx, and five other debunked myths about ancient Egypt at Mental Floss. You can also see the list in a video if you prefer.

In a previous post, we learned the difference between a "town" and "not a town" in the United States. England was only mentioned briefly, in that there is no unincorporated land there, meaning every place is already a town or a city. So what's the difference between a town and a city? Yeah, once again the answer depends on where you are. Each nation has their own way of distinguishing a town from a city -or else they don't even bother. In the US, it's usually a size thing, which is only legally defined in 20 states. I had heard that in England, you had to have a cathedral to be designated as a city, but according to Tom Scott, that is no longer true, if it ever was.

There doesn't seem to be any real world difference between town and a city in England, anyway. In this video, Tom chronicles a comedy of errors that caused Rochester's accidental decline from a city, which it had been for 800 years, to not even a town anymore. The place itself has not changed. It's just bureaucracy, but the loss in status seems to be rather embarrassing.  

Every city must balance the time and effort of a snow-removal system with the odds of ever having to use it. Montréal gets an average of 82 inches (208 cm) of snow every year. In a city of four million people, that means a lot of street plowing. But Montréal isn't like other cities that plow the streets and push the snow up in big banks on the sidewalk and across driveways to linger for months. Here, snow removal is serious business.

In Montreal, a blizzard is a call to action. With a budget of nearly $180 million and a staff of over 3,000 workers, the city is poised and prepared to manage and remove it all. Once snow begins accumulating, a multiphase operation begins to unfold across the city’s 19 boroughs. Between roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks, the city clears over 10,000 km - roughly the distance between Montreal and Beijing.

Montreal doesn’t just push snow to the curb with plows - instead, snow is picked up by a fleet of trucks and transported up to one of 28 snow dump sites across the city. Throughout a typical winter, roughly 300,000 truckloads of snow are transported - a volume of about 12 million cubic meters.

The city even has a complex system for dealing with the snow it gathers up- it is treated as wastewater to avoid polluting the water supply with salt and road grime. And there's another system for removing parked cars from the streets before plowing. Read a surprisingly interesting writeup on how a city that prioritizes snow removal has perfected its protocols at The Prepared. -via Metafilter

I got a 1947 recipe for "Spice Cookies" (that turned out to be gingersnaps) from a screenshot on reddit. It called for a half cup of spry, which confounded me until I searched around and found that Spry was once a popular brand of shortening. If anyone in my family had written that recipe down, it would have said Crisco. But that's not the only danger in using vintage recipes. An inordinate number of grandmas jotted down recipes for people who know how to cook, and don't bother mentioning you need to refrigerate cookie dough because everyone knows that!

If you're using a recipe from a hundred years ago, you may see confusing fractions without a slash. If you see "1-2 cup of water," you should know that is very different from "1-2 cups of water." You might also see the terms gill, saleratus, slow oven, or butter the size of an egg. These are translated for you, along with other tips on how to read obsolete directions in heirloom recipes at Newpapers.com. Now imagine a hundred years from now that someone found a recipe you jotted down, and they cannot figure out why you wrote "click here." -via Strange Company 

"Why'd you even tell me that? I don't wanna know that kind of stuff."

Network cameras can zoom in from the stands and see football players talking on the field as clearly as if we were right in front of them, but we can't hear what they are saying from that distance. So we may as well make something up, something that has nothing at all to do with football. No one is better at that than the folks at Bad Lip Reading, who have been watching NFL games very closely for about ten years now. Those amazing long-distance shots with assumed conversation are interspersed here with a takeoff on Key & Peele's classic East/West College Bowl sketches. Now that football is gone for at least a few months, this nonsense can remind us not to take professional sports too seriously. -via Digg

See more Bad Lip Reading NFL collections from previous years.

The title of this post is the caption beneath the Instagram picture of two boys who look very much alike. Are they twins? Sort of. Mirriam-Webster defines "quaternary" as "of, relating to, or consisting of four units or members." Which brings us to an explanation of these's babies' relationship.

Identical twins Brittany and Briana met identical twins Josh and Jeremy at a twin festival in 2017. A year later, Brittany married Josh and Briana married Jeremy in a double wedding ceremony. Now they are all named Salyers. The sisters became pregnant a couple of months apart. Jett Salyers was born to Brittany and Josh in January of 2021. Jax Salyers was born to Briana and Jeremy in April of 2021. The two boys were produced by different couples, but each couple has DNA identical to the other couple.



So the two boys are listed as cousins on the family tree. Double cousins, to be precise. But since their parent are identical twins on both sides, any genetic analysis would identify the boys as siblings. Their closeness in age, and the fact that they all live in the same house, would lead any future classmates who see them to consider them as twins. Read more about the four Salyers twins and their sons at the New York Post. -via Boing Boing

How towns are founded depends on when and where they started. Many communities in the US were just neighborhoods, and when enough people were clustered there to need a post office, the USPS named the post office, which became the town name. Then city limits, governance, and services grew up around the community as needed. But today, the process is way more formalized. It's almost impossible to start a new town outside the US, and within the US, it depends greatly on which state laws govern the land. Half as Interesting explains how those laws vary.

But why in the world would you want to start a town? Towns are still subject to state and federal laws, and if you want to establish city services (utilities, policing, schools, etc.), you have to tax people and raise money to get those projects off the ground. It's much easier to just join an already-established town nearby instead of starting from scratch, as they can just expand their existing services instead. This video is not as long as you'd think, because the last two minutes are an ad.

The idea that the Bermuda Triangle is a supernaturally dangerous area for ships and aircraft began in the 1950s. It has been reported that the area between Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico had an anomalous number of shipwrecks or disappearances without any explanation that could be gleaned from the evidence. There are plenty of natural reasons for the area's reputation offered- the triangle has an inordinate amount of boat traffic, it has unique and dangerous weather, and some stories are inaccurate in their details, their location, or in their mysteriousness. Some are pretty well documented, though, like the 1921 case of the Carroll A. Deering.

Maybe this vessel was doomed from the start. The captain got sick and had to abandon ship at a port in Delaware. This was apparently considered a bad omen. After delivering its cargo to Rio, the ship started to turn home and stopped in Barbados for supplies. Afterward, it was sighted near North Carolina, and observers noted that the crew was acting strange; the ship wasn't seen again until its wreckage washed up off the coast of Cape Hatteras. The ship's log, navigation equipment, the crew's personal belongings, and lifeboats were gone.

Read more stories of unexplained transportation tragedies in the Bermuda Triangle in a list at Mental Floss.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Ashley Montagu once said, “The idea is to die young as late as possible.” Rocketman Robert Maddox built a go-kart with a triple valveless pulsejet engine. He named this vehicle the Beast. Then he took it for a ride out in the desert, at speeds up to 90 miles per hour. Okay, what about this video is the scariest? Would it be the red-hot jet engines or the propane tank between Maddox and the engines? How about the fact that he's driving with one hand, so he can record himself with the other? Or could it be the absence of goggles, where one insect could blind him? Well, maybe there aren't too many bugs in the desert in February. Despite all this, it's great to see the sheer joy of a wild man in his 70s getting his speed fix on. If you like this go-kart (and have the bucks), he will build one for you. -via Jalopnik

A webcomic led me down an internet rabbit hole, to an article about the world's deadliest disease: malaria. The mosquito-borne disease is estimated to have killed half the people who ever lived, although that flies under the radar for most of us because 1. It's been around for thousands of years, and 2. Most of the fatalities are in young children. I learned about malaria's role in the rise of sickle-cell anemia, a far-from-perfect evolutionary adaptation to malaria. Malaria had a role in establishing slavery in colonial America. And in 1943, it was the agent of biological warfare. The Pontine Marshes outside of Rome were a historical hotbed of malaria until 1922, when the new prime minister Benito Mussolini ordered a plan to drain the marshes.  

That reduced Italian malarial fatalities by 99.8 per cent between 1932 and 1939, and inspired the occupying Germans to carry out the only known example of biological warfare in 20th-century Europe: in late 1943, the Nazis seized supplies of the anti-malarial medicine quinine, reversed the draining pumps and opened the dikes. Anopheles mosquitoes returned, Allied (and German) soldiers became sick, and Italian civilians began dying. Malarial deaths spiked from 33 in 1939 to 55,000 in 1944.

I had to know more about that, so I went to Wikipedia.

The Battle of Anzio left the marsh in state of devastation; nearly everything Mussolini had accomplished was reversed. The cities were in ruins, the houses blown up, the marshes full of brackish water, the channels filled in, the plain depopulated, the mosquitos flourishing, and malaria on the rise. The major structures for water control survived, and in a few years, the Agro Pontino was restored. In 1947, the province of Littoria, created by Mussolini, was renamed to Latina. The last of the malaria was conquered in the 1950s, with the aid of DDT.

Today, the land is managed by the drainage system without DDT. There are towns, farms, and tourist attractions as well as lakes and canals.

#lesEnquêtesANFR 🕵️‍♂️
« Les dents, le brouilleur et au lit ! », c’est la nouvelle enquête de l'@anfr sur un brouillage qui affectait les services de téléphonie et d’internet dans toutes les bandes de fréquences mobiles, mais uniquement la nuit 🌙… https://t.co/Jqpg5YKjBp pic.twitter.com/RLmOV7iMG5

— ANFR (@anfr) February 10, 2022

What do you do when your children stay on social media all night long? You could take their devices, but that's a fight, and there are always more devices. You could try parental controls, but they are often limited and/or confusing, and children find their way around them. And many places have multiple sources for internet- wifi, the neighbor's wifi, the phone company, etc. To boot his teenagers offline, one man went for the nuclear option.

A mobile phone company in Messanges, France, was getting daily complaints about an outage between midnight and 3 AM. They enlisted the National Frequency Agency to investigate, which sent out a mobile lab truck out to investigate and found the problem was coming from one house. A father was using a multi-band wave jammer to interrupt his children's internet use at midnight so they would go to sleep. He was unaware that he had disrupted all telecommunications in an area that covered two towns!

The use of wave jammers is illegal in France (and the US). The agency put a notice on their website that the range of such devices often far exceeds their claims. The man who used the jammer could get a fine of €30,000 and six months in jail. He will also have to pay the agency €450 for the investigation. Jail time is unlikely in this case, but be warned: trying this can come back to bite you. -via Gizmodo