In pirate society, everyone got their fair share of stolen loot, Kinkor said. Two shares typically went to the captain, 1 1/2 shares to the quartermaster and one share to each crew member. By comparison, captains of merchant ships often got 15 times more than the crew, who at times were left with almost nothing.
Pirates had a form of disability insurance centuries before it became standard. They were paid handsomely if they lost an arm or a leg in battle. If they were killed, their families sometimes received payments.
Up to a third of many crews were black, most of them former slaves, Kinkor said. They had the same right as white pirates to booty and the vote, and some were even elected captains by predominantly white crews.
That’s because owls don’t have eyeballs at all. Instead, their eyes are shaped like tubes, held rigidly in place by bones called sclerotic rings. (Human eye sockets, which hold spherical eyes, do not have sclerotic rings.)
Because owls can’t roll their eyes around the way we do, they have to move their entire head to get a good look around. They frequently twist their head and “bob and weave” to expand their field of view. Owls can turn their necks about 270° in either direction, and 90° up-and-down, without moving their shoulders!
The Ebola virus can turn a person’s blue eyes green, according to a study about an American physician who contracted the virus in Sierra Leone and then watched his eye color change.
As battery technology changed and improved and new sizes of batteries were made, they were added to the naming system. When smaller batteries came along, they were designated AA and AAA. These newer batteries were the right size for the growing consumer electronics industry, so they caught on. C and D batteries also found a niche in medium- and high-drain applications. The mid-size A and B batteries simply didn’t have a market and more or less disappeared in the U.S.
Emerging research suggests catch and release does not work very well with fish caught when deep sea fishing.
Most deep sea fish species suffer from the sudden pressure change when wound to the surface from great depths; these species cannot adjust their body’s physiology quickly enough to follow the pressure change. The result is called “barotrauma”. Fish with barotrauma will have their enormously swollen swim-bladder protruding from their mouth, bulging eyeballs, and often sustain other, more subtle but still very serious injuries. Upon release, fish with barotrauma will be unable to swim or dive due to the swollen swim-bladder. The common practice has been to deflate the swim bladder by pricking it with a thin sharp object before attempting to release the fish.
Pando (Latin for “I spread”), also known as the trembling giant, is a clonal colony of an individual male quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) determined to be a single living organism by identical genetic markers and assumed to have one massive underground root system. The plant is located in the Fremont River Ranger District of the Fishlake National Forest at the western edge of the Colorado Plateau in south-central Utah, United States, around 1 mile (1.6 km) southwest of Fish Lake. Pando occupies 43.6 hectares (108 acres) and is estimated to weigh collectively 6,000,000 kilograms (6,600 short tons), making it the heaviest known organism. The root system of Pando is estimated to be several thousand years old, placing Pando among the oldest known living organisms.
The Namahage (生剥) are demonlike beings portrayed by men wearing hefty oni (ogre) masks and traditional straw capes (mino) during a New Year’s ritual, in local northern Japanese folklore of the Oga Peninsula area of Akita Prefecture.
The frightfully dressed men impersonating the oni-demons wearing masks, dressed in long straw coats or mino, locally called kede or kende. They are armed with deba knives (albeit wooden fakes or made of papier-mâché) and toting a teoke (手桶, “hand pail” made of wood), march in pairs or threes going door-to-door making rounds of people’s homes, admonishing children who may be guilty of laziness or bad behavior, yelling phrases like “Are there any crybabies around?” (泣く子はいねがぁ, Nakuko wa inee gā?) or “Are naughty kids around?” (悪い子はいねえか, Waruiko wa inee ka?) in the pronunciation and accent of the local dialect.
Great Horned Owls often kill more than they can eat at one time, and cache the extra food for later consumption, when food is scarce. Needless to say, during winter months the cached prey freezes, and if the prey is large, its consumption is challenging for a bird with a bill that’s designed for shredding and tearing. To solve this dilemma, Great Horned Owls sit on their frozen prey until it thaws, and then proceed to tear it into bite-size pieces.
“You’ll starve to death if you only eat rabbit meat” is one of those common refrains you learn when getting into survival. It’s a fun fact you might share over a beer or to show off how woodsy you are to your LARPer friends.
Commonly called “rabbit starvation” or “mal de caribou” but officially called “protein poisoning,” it happens when you eat too much protein without enough fat and/or carbohydrates, which leaves your stomach full but your body malnourished. Excessive protein can overwhelm your liver and kidneys, leading to excess ammonia, urea, and amino acids in your blood. It’s a serious condition that can kill you.
Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies was a directory of prostitutes including their addresses and rates which was published yearly between 1757 and 1795, principally examining the upper end of the market. While it was far from being the first catalogue of London prostitutes, it became one of the most notorious and was certainly the longest running. The first version of Harris’s List was probably authored by the struggling poet, hack writer and actor Samuel Derrick. The ‘Harris’ of its title was an infamous pimp, Jack Harris (or John Harrison), who operated from the Shakespear’s Head Tavern in Covent Garden and kept a handwritten compendium of names and addresses on which the first printed List was probably based.1 The list became an enormously successful franchise, surviving Derrick’s death in 1769 and passing through a series of hands disguised behind the pseudonym H. Ranger.
The “Marcha Real” (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈmaɾtʃa reˈal]; “Royal March”) is the national anthem of Spain. It is one of only three national anthems in the world (four if Kosovo is added), along with those of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and San Marino that have no official lyrics, although it had lyrics in the past, they are no longer used.
Pinball was banned beginning in the early 1940s until 1976 in New York City.[43] New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was responsible for the ban, believing that it robbed school children of their hard earned nickels and dimes. La Guardia spearheaded major raids throughout the city, collecting thousands of machines. The mayor participated with police in destroying machines with sledgehammers before dumping the remnants into the city’s rivers.
On May 26, 1947, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a memo stating, “With regard to the picture ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”[56] Film historian Andrew Sarris points out as “curious” that “the censors never noticed that the villainous Mr. Potter gets away with robbery without being caught or punished in any way”.
A womanless wedding is a traditional community “ritual of inversion” performance, popular in the United States in the early 19th century.[1][2] In this comic ritual, the all male cast would act out all roles of a traditional wedding party – including those of bridesmaids, flower girls, and the mother of the bride – while dressed in gowns and dresses.[3] The event often raised money for charities, civic organizations, and churches.
A video by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences tells how the Jurassic Park CGI dinosaurs were created. Featuring interviews with the Industrial Light and Magic staff who worked on the movie, the clip reveals that two artists worked on a CGI T-Rex model in secret. Once done, they filmed a video test using the model and put it on a video screen when producer Kathleen Kennedy visited their offices one day. That test resulted in Kennedy, Spielberg, and the rest of the team deciding to use CGI for the motion scenes, given that it looked more realistic than the clunky old stop-motion effects they had been planning to use.
Snap-dragon (also known as Flap-dragon, Snapdragon, or Flapdragon) was a parlour game popular from about the 16th century. It was played during the winter, particularly on Christmas Eve. Brandy was heated and placed in a wide shallow bowl; raisins were placed in the brandy which was then set alight. Typically, lights were extinguished or dimmed to increase the eerie effect of the blue flames playing across the liquor. The game is described in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as “a play in which they catch raisins out of burning brandy and, extinguishing them by closing the mouth, eat them.” According to an article in Richard Steele’s Tatler magazine, “the wantonness of the thing was to see each other look like a demon, as we burnt ourselves, and snatched out the fruit.”
According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the prevailing origin story of the shaka goes back about a century to Hawaiian plantation worker Hamana Kalili. His job was to feed sugar cane stalks into the rollers of a machine that would squeeze out the cane’s sweet juice. One day, Kalili’s hand got caught in the rollers and he ended up losing his three middle fingers. The company, the Kahuku Sugar Mill, gave him a new job as a security guard; every time he waved, he’d make what’s now known as the shaka hand. From there, local children mimicked and spread the gesture.
Around the age of 30, James Naismith left his athletics director position at McGill University in Montreal to teach physical education at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Upon the request of his boss, Naismith was tasked to create an indoor sports game to help athletes keep in shape as they endured the cold New England winters. Naismith’s boss also stipulated that this new game should be “fair for all players and not too rough.”
The result was the game of basketball. Invented in 1891, Naismith created 13 basic rules and started out using 10-foot high peach baskets as the goals for each 9-player team.
By 1893, the game had become so popular that the YMCA began promoting it internationally and, in 1904, it served as a demonstration sport at the Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri. By 1936, the sport became an official event at the Summer Olympics in Berlin. Naismith lived long enough to see not only these honors but also the beginnings of the National Invitation Tournament (1938) and the NCAA Tournament (1939).
Linear A is one of two currently undeciphered writing systems used in ancient Greece. Cretan hieroglyphic is the other. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It was discovered by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. It is the origin of the Linear B 10000–1007F script, which was later used by the Mycenaean civilization.
In the 1950s, Linear B 10000–1007F was largely deciphered and found to encode an early form of Greek. Although the two systems share many symbols, this did not lead to a subsequent decipherment of Linear A. Using the values associated with Linear B in Linear A mainly produces unintelligible words. If it uses the same or similar syllabic values as Linear B, then its underlying language appears unrelated to any known language. This has been dubbed the Minoan language.
A new technique to control the wandering of dementia patients involves placing black floor mats in front of unsafe areas, such as outside exits. Due to a fear of falling, persons with dementia will not walk on dark spaces on the floor (they tend to see them as holes). This is an alternative to antipsychotic drugs and lockdown units.
During the 1940s, whenever Hollywood celebrities with vocal talents attended parties, they were expected to perform songs. In 1944, Loesser wrote “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to sing with his wife, Lynn Garland, at their housewarming party in New York City at the Navarro Hotel. They sang the song to indicate to guests that it was time to leave. Garland has written that after the first performance, “We became instant parlor room stars. We got invited to all the best parties for years on the basis of ‘Baby.’ It was our ticket to caviar and truffles. Parties were built around our being the closing act.”
In Los Angeles in the early 1950s, Ray Bradbury went in search of a peaceful place to work. “I had a large family at home,” he said five decades later. They must have been a particularly lively bunch, because at the time it was just Ray, his wife Marguerite and two young children.
The writing refuge Bradbury found was in the basement of the Lawrence Clark Powell Library at UCLA — and in fact, it wasn’t all that quiet. “I heard this typing,” he explained. “I went down in the basement of the UCLA library and by God there was a room with 12 typewriters in it that you could rent for 10 cents a half-hour. And there were eight or nine students in there working away like crazy.”
So he went to the bank and returned with a bag of dimes. He plugged a dime into the machine, typed fast for 30 minutes, and then dropped another. When he took breaks, he went upstairs to the library, soaking in a book-loving ambience he was making forbidden in the fiction he was writing below. He took books off the shelves, finding quotes, then ran downstairs to write some more. Nine days — and $9.80 in dimes later — he’d written “Fahrenheit 451.” Almost.
Luke Perry was always a fan of nature — and his family made sure to honor that after he passed away this year. According to a new Instagram post by the actor’s daughter, Sophie Perry, her father was buried in the Infinity Burial Suit, a biodegradable mushroom burial suit that allows bodies to rejoin nature.
Ketchup, in addition to being an exceptionally popular condiment, is also a non-Newtonian fluid. This is the key to its curious behavior. As a non-Newtonian fluid, ketchup’s viscosity — and consequently its ability to flow — varies with the velocity gradient across the fluid or the shear rate. When you first turn the ketchup bottle upside down, it’s probable that you will get only very minimal flow, if any at all, due to its high initial viscosity. Fortunately, ketchup also has an interesting shear thinning property. When an external force is applied in addition to gravity, the increased shear will result in decreasing the ketchup’s viscosity, allowing the product to flow more readily. This is why we sometimes must tap or shake the bottle to enjoy ketchup with our fries.
The Bellagio fountains are set in an 8-acre (3.2 ha) manmade lake. Contrary to urban myth, the lake is not filled with treated greywater from the hotel. The lake is actually serviced by a freshwater well that was drilled decades prior to irrigate a golf course that previously existed on the site. The fountains actually use less water than irrigating the golf course did. They incorporate a network of pipes with more than 1,200 nozzles that make it possible to stage fountain displays coordinated with more than 4,500 lights. It is estimated that the fountains cost $40 million to build. The fountains were created by WET, a design firm specializing in inventive fountains and architectural water features.
During the American Recy, the failed months-long siege of Quebec City was possibly one of the first instances of biological warfare successfully being used by a besieged army. The British intentionally sent out smallpox-infected civilians and prostitutes to the American lines, killing or wounding 5,000 American soldiers with this method, which included the death of Major General John Thomas.
There is enough gold at the core of the earth to cover the planet’s surface is 13 inches of the stuff, but it’s 1,800 miles below our feet and at many thousands of degrees.
Over the years, patents have issued on numerous games, including iconic favorites such as Monopoly® (1935), Battleship® (1935), Rubik’s Cube® (1983), Rock’em Sock’em Robots® (1966), Twister® (1969), and Simon® (1979). Although there is no per se rule under current U.S. patent law against the patenting of games, it may be more challenging today to obtain patents on certain games due to the patent eligibility requirements of 35 U.S.C. § 101.
For example, the Federal Circuit recently affirmed a final decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) holding a claimed method of playing a dice game using dice having non-conventional markings to be patent ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. See In Re: Marco Guldenaar Holding B.V. (Fed. Cir. 2018). Specifically, the court agreed with the Board that the claimed method recites the abstract idea of “rules for playing a game” and lacked an inventive concept sufficient to transform the claim into patent eligible subject matter.
The claimed method involves providing a set of dice with each die having identical markings on one, two, or three faces of the die, placing a wager that a specific combination of die markings will appear face up, rolling the dice, and paying a payout amount if the wager occurs. In its appeal, the applicant argued that the use of dice having identical markings on one, two, or three die faces is not conventional, and thus the claim recites significantly more than an abstract idea.
Speaking to a packed hall, Gaiman unwound a string of anecdotes in practiced style. His explanation of how his fantastically creepy children’s book Coraline came to be started with a line as sinister as any he’s written: “Because Morgan DeFoire lied.” DeFoire, the daughter of Gaiman’s longtime agent Merrilee Heifetz, acted as a litmus test back when the manuscript was still thought unpublishable for a young audience. It was decided that if Morgan and her sister Emily could stand the book without being “traumatized,” as Gaiman put it, Heifetz would reconsider consigning Coraline to the adult bin with all the other horror novels. The girls proved Gaiman right, listening with faces more eager than petrified, and the book went on to claim the loyalty of children around the world, winning two awards (a Hugo and Nebula) and a movie contract, before becoming a musical. At the off-Broadway premiere of the show, Gaiman learned what Morgan DeFoire, seated beside him, had really thought of Coraline.
“I told her, ‘You know, we kind of have you to thank for all this, because you weren’t scared by it. And she said, ‘Actually, I was terrified. But I wanted to know what happened next. I knew if I let anybody know I was scared, I wouldn’t find out.’”
What’s up with Oklahoma’s salient? More popularly known as the Panhandle, the three counties extending in a row west of the rest of the “pan” of the state are one of those geographical quirks of history that really jump off of the map. The Panhandle is also the location of the only county in the country with four states on its borders: Cimarron County, the westernmost part of the state, borders Colorado, Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico.
Today fewer than 1% of Oklahomans live in the 168 x 34 mile-wide strip. It was Spanish territory until 1821, when it became part of independent Mexico. The Republic of Texas claimed it when declaring independence. But then, upon entering the Union as a slave state in 1845, Texas surrendered its claim to the region because slavery was prohibited north of 36°30′ latitude by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. 36°30′ became the Panhandle’s southern boundary. Its northern border at 37° was set in 1854 by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves if they would be slave or free.
In 1966, as the war in Vietnam was intensifying, CIA operative Jon Wiant took over an operation running North Vietnamese agents into the field to gather information on enemy troops and the Viet Cong. He compensated them with items from the Sears catalog, including “six boys’ size … red velvet blazer vests with brass buttons,” he described in Studies in Intelligence, a trade journal for spies.
CIA operatives like Wiant sometimes pay their agents through a barter system, because cash payments run the risk of attracting too much unwanted attention. Instead of cash, they might, for instance, give their agents guns or prescription drugs. North Vietnamese agents, with whom the agency was working in 1966 near the border with Laos, had little need for money and local leaders were taking portions of the rice they had been giving these agents.
Beavers are best known for their dam-building. They maintain their pond-habitat by reacting quickly to the sound of running water, and damming it up with tree branches and mud. Early ecologists believed that this dam-building was an amazing feat of architectural planning, indicative of the beaver’s high intellect. This theory was tested when a recording of running water was played in a field near a beaver pond. Although it was on dry land, the beaver covered the tape player with branches and mud.
Poinsettias were introduced to the United States by Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first appointed U.S. ambassador to Mexico. In 1825 while visiting Taxco he became enchanted with the red blooms and sent some plants to his home in Greenville, South Carolina. Poinsett, a skilled botanist, propagated the plants and began distributing the plants to friends and various botanical gardens. Within a few years, plants eventually reached Robert Buist, a nurseryman, who is believed to be the first person to sell the plant in the United States. In 1833, the plant was given the common name poinsettia, the name-sake of Joel Poinsett.
The poinsettia industry was pioneered and developed by the Ecke family. In the 1920’s, Albert and Paul Ecke began field growing poinsettias in the Hollywood and Beverly Hills area. Today the Paul Ecke Ranch located in Encinitas, California is the major producer of poinsettia mother plants used for cuttings by commercial growers.
The U.S. state of Alaska is divided into 19 organized boroughs and one Unorganized Borough. Alaska and Louisiana are the only states that do not call their first-order administrative subdivisions counties (Louisiana uses parishes instead). Delegates to the Alaska Constitutional Convention wanted to avoid the traditional county system and adopted their own unique model with different classes of boroughs varying in powers and duties.
Cow Tools is a cartoon from Gary Larson’s The Far Side, published in October of 1982. It depicts a cow standing in front of a table of bizarre, misshapen implements with the caption “Cow tools.” The cartoon confused many readers, who wrote or phoned in seeking an explanation of the joke. In response to the controversy, Larson issued a press release clarifying that the thrust of the cartoon was simply that, if a cow were to make tools, they would “lack something in sophistication.” It has been described as “arguably the most loathed Far Side strip ever.
Sitting by a fire can reduce your blood pressure and help you relax, suggests a new study from the University of Alabama.
When people spent 15 minutes watching a video of a crackling blaze, complete with sound, their systolic blood pressure dropped by 6 points and their diastolic BP dropped by 3, on average.
V-mail, short for Victory Mail, was a hybrid mail process used by the United States during the Second World War as the primary and secure method to correspond with soldiers stationed abroad. To reduce the cost of transferring an original letter through the military postal system, a V-mail letter would be censored, copied to film, and printed back to paper upon arrival at its destination. The V-mail process is based on the earlier British Airgraph process.
Since Trans-Siberian Orchestra began touring, the band has donated over $16 million to a combination of local and national charities. At every tour stop, the group donates one dollar or more from each ticket sold to a local charity in the city where they are performing.
Time in Ethiopia is counted differently from most countries. The Ethiopian day is reckoned as beginning at 06:00 as opposed to 00:00, coinciding with sunrise throughout the year. To convert between the Ethiopian clock and Western clocks, one must add (or subtract) six hours to the Western time. For example, 02:00 local Addis Ababa time is called “8 at night” in Ethiopia, while 20:00 is called “2 in the evening”.
Sabbath mode is a feature on many modern appliances that allows the appliance to be used for certain religious observances during specific holidays. The main function of Sabbath mode is to not let the operator accidentally use a feature such as a digital temperature readout, or ice maker on a refrigerator. The Whirlpool Corporation first came up with this concept in 1997, and worked with a Star-K kosher certification agency to create “Sabbath mode”. This feature has since been mimicked by other appliance manufacturers. VIsit our website or chat with one of our online chat associates to learn more about Sabbath Mode on your appliances.
Oyster mushrooms, P. ostreatus, are a carnivorous fungus, preying on nematodes by using a calcium-dependent toxin that paralyzes the prey within minutes of contact, causing necrosis and formation of a slurry to facilitate ingestion as a protein-rich food source.
The first pies, called “coffins” or “coffyns” (the word actually meant a basket or box) were savory meat pies with the crusts or pastry being tall, straight-sided with sealed-on floors and lids. Open-crust pastry (not tops or lids) were known as “traps.” These pies held assorted meats and sauce components and were baked more like a modern casserole with no pan (the crust itself was the pan, its pastry tough and inedible). These crust were often made several inches thick to withstand many hours of baking.
This Korean folk tale narrates the origin of the common cold (gamgi, or gobbul), which is believed to be caused by the ghost of a man with two genitals, who died after a futile search for a wife and fulfilled his lust in death by releasing himself in people’s nostrils.
There lived a prince with two genitals, and when it came time for him to marry the king ordered his subjects to find a maiden with two genitals. But they were not able to find such a maiden, and in the end the prince died. When he turned into a ghost, he sought relief for his unfulfilled desires by releasing himself in people’s nostrils, which in people manifests as symptoms of sinus congestion in the early stages of a cold and progresses into a runny nose.
Indonesia, a nation that has been the world’s largest fishery for sharks and rays for nearly three decades, announced today legislation that will fully protect all manta rays within its nearly 6 million square kilometer exclusive economic zone (EEZ), making it the largest sanctuary for both species of manta rays in the world. Conservation International (CI) and its partners welcomed the bold legislation, which has come at a crucial time for mantas, whose global populations have declined precipitously over the past decade and are now considered “Vulnerable to Extinction” by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
The decision was influenced by a review conducted by Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF), the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, CI and coalition of conservation organizations. The review included findings from a recent study, led by WildAid, The Manta Trust and Shark Savers, that reveal a single manta ray is worth an estimated US$1 million in tourism revenue over the course of its lifetime versus its value of $40-$500 if caught and killed.
The United States has sold the only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to an anonymous buyer. The price of the sale was also kept confidential.
The album was previously owned by Martin Shkreli, the infamous “Pharma Bro” who raised the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000 percent and was later convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison. He was forced to hand it over to the United States in 2018 as a part of a $7.4 million forfeiture judgement.
The announcement was made today by Jacquelyn M. Kasulis, the Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “Shkreli has been held accountable and paid the price for lying and stealing from investors to enrich himself,” said Kasulis. “With today’s sale of this one-of-a-kind album, his payment of the forfeiture is now complete.”
Shkreli purchased the 31-track album at auction in 2015 for a reported $2 million. It was promoted as a “unique work of art” with no physical or digital duplicate in existence, and included appearances from the wider Wu-Tang family from Redman to Killarmy. Upon learning that it was Shkreli who bought the album, Wu-Tang member RZA told Bloomberg that the group decided to give “a significant portion of the proceeds to charity.”
Charles Richard Drew (June 3, 1904 – April 1, 1950) was an American surgeon and medical researcher. He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge to developing large-scale blood banks early in World War II. This allowed medics to save thousands of Allied forces’ lives during the war. As the most prominent African American in the field, Drew protested against the practice of racial segregation in the donation of blood, as it lacked scientific foundation, and resigned his position with the American Red Cross, which maintained the policy until 1950.
