In addition to being the strongest material on earth by weight, the cobweb has remarkable healing properties. The web itself is incredibly strong; but, extremely easy to remove when the time comes. According to Penn State News, cobwebs were used to dress wounds since recorded history.
Webs were used several hundred years ago as gauze pads to stop an injured person’s bleeding. Their healing properties made them popular with the Ancient Greeks and Romans due to the many savage wars they waged against their enemies. Their understanding of infections and bacteria was largely nonexistent but trial-and-error showed the miracle of spider web bandages in preventing common infections and reducing casualty rates on the battlefield.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — that claim is so universally accepted that it’s a common truism in contexts from everyday conversations to Top 40 pop charts.
But new research led by a team of Brown University researchers finds that this is false.
In fact, the research suggests the opposite is true: Past stressors sensitize people to future traumas, thereby increasing their chances of developing a mental health disorder.
Upon hearing the name Abraham Lincoln, many images may come to mind: rail-splitter, country lawyer, young congressman, embattled president, Great Emancipator, assassin’s victim, even the colossal face carved into Mount Rushmore. One aspect of this multidimensional man that probably doesn’t occur to anyone other than avid readers of Lincoln biographies (and Smithsonian) is that of inventor. Yet before he became the 16th president of the United States, Lincoln, who had a long fascination with how things worked, invented a flotation system for lifting riverboats stuck on sandbars.
Though his invention was never manufactured, it serves to give Lincoln yet another honor: he remains the only U.S. president to have a patent in his name.
Bees that collect pollen and nectar from grayanotoxin-containing plants often produce honey that also contains grayanotoxins. This so-called “mad honey” is the most common cause of grayanotoxin poisoning in humans. Small-scale producers of mad honey typically harvest honey from a small area or single hive in order to produce a final product containing a significant concentration of grayanotoxin. In contrast, large-scale honey production often mixes honey gathered from different locations, diluting the concentration of any contaminated honey.
Mad honey is deliberately produced in some regions of the world, most notably Nepal and the Black Sea region of Turkey. In Nepal, this type of honey is used by the Gurung people for both its perceived hallucinogenic properties and supposed medicinal benefits. In Turkey, mad honey known as deli bal is also used as a recreational drug and traditional medicine. It is most commonly made from the nectar of Rhododendron luteum and Rhododendron ponticum in the Caucasus region. In the eighteenth century, this honey was exported to Europe to add to alcoholic drinks to give them extra potency. In modern times, it is consumed locally and exported to North America, Europe and Asia.
In addition to various Rhododendron species, mad honey can also be made from several other grayanotoxin-containing plants. Honey produced from the nectar of Andromeda polifolia contains high enough levels of grayanotoxin to cause full body paralysis and potentially fatal breathing difficulties due to diaphragm paralysis. Honey obtained from spoonwood and allied species such as sheep-laurel can also cause illness. The honey from Lestrimelitta limao also produces this paralyzing effect seen in the honey of A. polifolia and is also toxic to humans.
People suffering from schizophrenia may hear “voices” – auditory hallucinations – differently depending on their cultural context, according to new Stanford research.
In the United States, the voices are harsher, and in Africa and India, more benign, said Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford professor of anthropology and first author of the article in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Fast forward to the 1905, when an 11-year-old boy named Frank Epperson of Oakland, California had an accidental epiphany after he inadvertently left a glass—filled with water, powdered soda mix and a wooden stick for stirring—outside overnight. When young Frank found the glass in the morning, the soda mixture was frozen solid, so he ran the glass under hot water and removed the ice pop using the stick as a handle. Frank, who knew he’d stumbled across a great idea, kept making the pops for his friends—and when he became an adult, he made them for his own children.
In 1923, Epperson filed for a patent for his invention. Up until then, he had been calling the frozen treats “Eppsicles,” but his children insisted on calling them “Pop’s ‘sicles.” The latter name stuck and the Popsicle was born.
The frozen treat was an immediate success, especially after Epperson partnered with the Joe Lowe Co., which helped to distribute them at entertainment sites like Brooklyn’s Coney Island amusement park. The first Popsicles sold for just five cents and came in seven flavors (including cherry, which is still the most popular).
Just a few years after the dessert debuted, the double-stick Popsicle was introduced. It was at the height of the Depression, and the single pop with two sticks allowed two hungry children to share a pop easily, for the same price as a single.
United States Department of Agriculture standards for processed, packaged “Salisbury steak” require a minimum content of 65% meat, of which up to 25% can be pork, except if de-fatted beef or pork is used, the limit is 12% combined. No more than 30% may be fat. Meat byproducts are not permitted; however, beef heart meat is allowed. Extender (bread crumbs, flour, oat flakes, etc.) content is limited to 12%, except isolated soy protein at 6.8% is considered equivalent to 12% of the others. The remainder consists of seasonings, fungi or vegetables (onion, bell pepper, mushroom or the like), binders (can include egg) and liquids (such as water, milk, cream, skim milk, buttermilk, brine, vinegar etc.). The product must be fully cooked, or else labeled “Patties for Salisbury Steak”.
After World War I, veterans who had left high school to enlist in the armed services were awarded diplomas in exchange for their service to the nation. After World War II, however, returning soldiers were required to pass a test before being given their high school equivalency certificates. The U.S. Armed Forces Institute examination staff first constructed the GED test in 1942. In 1945 ACE established the Veterans’ Testing Service (VTS), and beginning in 1947 tests were distributed to civilian institutions where veterans were applying for employment or college admission. By 1959 more civilians than veterans were being given the GED test, and in 1963 the VTS changed its name to the General Educational Development Testing Service to reflect this shift in test-taking populations. Early tests were designed so that most veterans would pass, and more than 90 percent did.
The first woman to earn a law degree in New Brunswick, Mabel Priscilla Penery French applied for admittance to the bar in 1905. She was told under existing Canadian law that a woman was not a person, and only a person could practice. She went to court. Six judges agreed that, indeed, whatever she was, she wasn’t a person. The chief justice huffed that if women could become lawyers, why, they might next become soldiers, police or even judges! Society, he said, didn’t need women competing with men in all branches of life. “Better let them attend to their own legitimate business.”
She responded by refusing to pay her bills. Her defence was that since she wasn’t a person, she couldn’t be sued for debt. The court had a dilemma. Money trumped exclusivity. It ruled she could be sued, but that reversed the earlier decision. So, in 1907, she became the first woman lawyer in New Brunswick.
The elephant’s penis is not only massive but prehensile. As we watched in baffled amusement (and the faintest tinge of inadequacy), he used his penis to prop himself up (as in the photo), swat flies from his side and scratch himself on his stomach.
Pineapple is one of the most pungent fruits to snack on. Sure, lemons probably have them beat in the bitter and tart categories, but pineapples are the cause of sore tongues and lips everywhere.
The irritation is caused by a combination of enzymes in pineapples called bromelian, which break down proteins and essentially attack your tongue, cheeks, and lips on contact. But once you chew and swallow it, both your saliva and stomach acids overtake them. So if your mouth hurts after eating raw pineapple, you’re not alone—it happens to virtually everyone. The good news is that your tongue rebuilds those proteins and amino acids, so it won’t be sore for long.
Between 1915 and 1926, an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica spread around the world. The exact number of people infected is unknown, but it is estimated that more than one million people contracted the disease during the epidemic, which directly caused more than 500,000 deaths. Many of those who survived never returned to their pre-morbid vigour.
“They would be conscious and aware – yet not fully awake; they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect or desire; they registered what went on about them without active attention, and with profound indifference. They neither conveyed nor felt the feeling of life; they were as insubstantial as ghosts, and as passive as zombies.”
No recurrence of the epidemic has since been reported, though isolated cases continue to occur.
The Decade Volcanoes are 16 volcanoes identified by the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior (IAVCEI) as being worthy of particular study in light of their history of large, destructive eruptions and proximity to densely populated areas. The Decade Volcanoes project encourages studies and public-awareness activities at these volcanoes, with the aim of achieving a better understanding of the volcanoes and the dangers they present, and thus being able to reduce the severity of natural disasters.
A new study into the social dynamics of 2,000 Americans revealed that the average American hasn’t made a new friend in five years. In fact, it seems for many that popularity hits its peak at age 23, and for thirty-six percent, it peaks even before age 21.
Between Barden Tower and Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, England, lies one of nature’s most dangerous booby traps. It’s a small innocuous-looking mountain stream, about six feet across, known as Bolton Strid, or simply the Strid. But below the water’s surface is a deep chasm with powerful undercurrents that pulls anybody that falls into it to certain death. It is believed that not a single person who has fallen into the Strid has ever come out of it alive. Not even their bodies.
In a majority of cases, upon scientific investigation, alternative causes to supernatural phenomenon are found to be at fault, such as hoaxes, environmental effects, hallucinations or confirmation biases. Common symptoms of hauntings, like cold spots and creaking or knocking sounds, can be found in most homes regardless of suspected paranormal presences. People are more likely to experience a haunting when they are about to fall asleep, when waking, if they are intoxicated or sleep deprived. Carbon monoxide poisoning has been cited as a cause of suspected hauntings. If there is an expectation of a preternatural encounter, it is more likely that one will be perceived or reported.
Scientists have found that naked mole rats have unique chirps and squeals specific to the colony that is determined by their queen, reports Sofia Moutinho for Science magazine.
Study author Alison J. Baker, a neuroscientist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, and her team found naked mole rats use a vocalization called “the soft chirp” to determine who belongs within the colony and who might be a foe.
They’re very xenophobic, so they want to make sure that they stay within their own tribe, having a dialect is a way to keep the social bond alive,” says senior author Gary Lewin, a neurobiologist at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, to Science.
The mole rat colonies’ dialect, while uniform, is not constant and can change as soon as a monarch is overthrown. In two instances, when a queen was killed, the colony lost its unique sound, reports Science. When a new queen sat on the throne, the community began adopting the new dialect, which could mean that the queen somehows controls the colony’s sound, reports Science News.
In 1919, the US Army organized a convoy of 81 vehicles from Washington DC to San Francisco, CA. The trip took 56 days, 9 vehicles broke down, and 21 people died. Dwight Eisenhower was part of the trip and it convinced him to champion the Interstate Highway System, which he signed into law 37 years later.
The Fermilab used to clean it’s particle accelerators with a ferret named Felicia, who would run through the tubes with cleaning supplies attached and be rewarded with hamburger meat.
The Red Delicious boomed in popularity. By the 1940s it was the best-selling apple in the United States. Soon, however, selective breeding took its toll.
“It was kind of this ‘gold-rush mentality’ with apples where if you found a really good one, you could market it,” says Yankee’s Amy Traverso, author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook. “The [Red Delicious] was a chance seedling, and I like to imagine what a revelation it was to come across this apple tree that you hadn’t even planted. To taste the fruit for the first time and realize it was just incredible.”
Traverso explains that on any apple tree you have what are called “sports,” which are apples that might have a slightly different genetic expression than the rest. When Red Delicious apples mutated toward more consistent coloring — i.e., brighter reds, less striping — farmers favored them, because this was a marketable quality. And therein lies the problem.
“It turns out that a lot of the genes that coded for the flavor-producing compounds were on the same chromosomes as the genes for the yellow striped skin,” Traverso explains, “so as you favored the more consistently colored apples, you were essentially disfavoring the same genes that coded for great flavor.”
Traverso adds that as the Red Delicious was being bred to have more uniformity, it was also being bred to have thicker skin — “which was great when you were shipping things on trains,” she says, “but now you’re getting this mouthful of thick skin.”
By prioritizing aesthetics, apple growers were slowly destroying the Red Delicious’s deliciousness. As Traverso says: “They literally bred the flavor out of the apple.”
In 2009, Icelandic engineers accidentally drilled into a magma chamber with temperatures up to 1000°c. The engineers decided to harness the heat into geothermal energy.
The other time this happened was in Hawaii and the hole was filled with cement.
The team trained people to use a robotic extra thumb and found they could effectively carry out dextrous tasks, like building a tower of blocks, with one hand (now with two thumbs). The researchers report in the journal Science Robotics that participants trained to use the thumb also increasingly felt like it was a part of their body.
Pieter Kroonenberg, an emeritus professor of statistics at Leiden University in The Netherlands, was puzzled when he tried to locate a paper about academic writing and discovered the article didn’t exist. In fact, the journal—Journal of Science Communications—also didn’t exist.
Perhaps Kroonenberg’s most bizarre discovery was that this made-up paper, “The art of writing a scientific article,” had somehow been cited almost 400 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Anne-Wil Harzing, a professor of International Management at at Middlesex University in London, who recounted Kroonenberg’s discovery in her blog, wrote:
To cut a long story short, the article appeared to be completely made up and did not in fact exist. It was a “phantom reference” that had been created merely to illustrate Elsevier’s desired reference format.
Here’s the reference from Elsevier’s reference style section, part of its author guidelines (we’ve seen examples that cite the paper as from 2000 as well):
Van der Geer, J., Hanraads, J.A.J., Lupton, R.A., 2010. The art of writing a scientific article. J Sci. Commun. 163 (2) 51-59.
Puzzled, Harzing set out to understand how so many authors could cite this paper.
Harzing found that nearly 90% of the citations were for conference proceedings papers, and nearly two-thirds of these appeared in Procedia conference volumes, which are published by Elsevier.
When examining some of the papers more closely, Harzing found “most citations to the phantom reference occurred in fairly low-quality conference papers,” and were written by authors with poor English. She said she suspects that some authors may not have understood that they were supposed to replace the template text with their own or may have mistakenly left in the Van der Geer reference while using the template to write their paper. There may be minimal quality control for these conference papers, says Harzing; still, she found that the phantom reference did appear in about 40 papers from established journals.
Harzing concluded that the mystery of the phantom reference “ultimately had a very simple explanation: sloppy writing and sloppy quality control.”
The Maasai Cricket Warriors, as they’re called, are the subject of Warriors, a documentary film by British director Barney Douglas. It follows the Maasai players from their village of Il Polei all the way to London for their first cricket championship.
The Warriors also wanted to inspire youth. They taught children how to play cricket and traveled to schools to speak to students about FGM, gender equality and HIV/AIDS, a disease that has affected the Maasai community.
They led by example, vowing not to marry any woman who has undergone the cut.
“If you want to join the team, you have to subscribe to the objective of ending FGM,” says Douglas. “And you have to practice what you preach.”
A parrot has been taken into custody in northern Brazil following a police raid targeting crack dealers.
According to reports in the Brazilian press, the bird had been taught to alert criminals to police operations in Vila Irmã Dulce, a low-income community in the sun-scorched capital of Piauí state, by shouting: “Mum, the police!”
The parrot, who has not been named, was seized on Monday afternoon when officers swooped on a drug den run by a local couple.
“He must have been trained for this,” one officer involved in the operation said of the two-winged wrongdoer. “As soon as the police got close he started shouting.”
A Brazilian journalist who came face to face with the imprisoned parrot on Tuesday described it as a “super obedient” creature – albeit one that had kept its beak firmly shut after being “arrested”.
“So far it hasn’t made a sound … completely silent,” the reporter said.
Alexandre Clark, a local vet, confirmed the parrot had not cooperated: “Lots of police officers have come by and he’s said nothing.”
The Brazilian broadcaster Globo said the “papagaio do tráfico” (drug trafficking parrot) had been handed over to a local zoo where it would spend three months learning to fly before being released.
The bird joins a growing list of animals implicated in Brazil’s drug trade, although most have been reptiles.
In 2008, police seized two small alligators during a raid on a favela in western Rio de Janeiro, claiming local gangsters had fed their enemies to the animals. However, the father of one of the accused gangsters rejected those accusations, alleging his son’s gang had once tried to do so – but the alligator had refused to eat the corpse.
It was in the late 19th century that landscape parks really took root and cities began implementing wide expanses of green space. With an understanding that nature and fresh air were efficacious curatives for the maladies that ailed, “pleasure grounds” and urban parks became a place to enjoy the health-giving effects of nature.
And as parks became more prominent, squirrels became the focus of attention, as Etienne Benson of the University of Pennsylvania writes in the Journal of American History. Urban reformers, who thought of the squirrel as a rural mascot, wanted to bring the animal in to places like Manhattan’s Central Park in order to create “a bucolic atmosphere that was entertaining, enlightening, and salubrious.” In 1847 three squirrels were released in Philadelphia’s Franklin Square and were provided with food and boxes for nesting.
The Fast and Furious franchise has wrecked a total of 1,487 cars from the first movie of the franchise all the way up to Furious 7. That total does not include all the mangled cars from Fast 8 (Fate of the Furious), Fast 9, and the Hobbs & Shaw spin-off movie. Put those together and the vehicular carnage in the franchise probably exceeds 2,000 cars.
United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls, 413 F. Supp. 1281 (D. Wisc. 1976), is a 1976 United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin decision regarding a requested order from the United States government to seize and destroy a shipment of approximately 50,000 sets of clacker balls under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act because children could hit themselves with the balls.
In 1974 in Mequon, Wisconsin, the United States Marshals Service seized a shipment of clacker balls—toys comprising two hard acrylic balls connected by a piece of string—from a dock and published a public notice of the seizure in a local newspaper. Ace Novelty Company in Seattle, Washington, declared an interest in the shipment and filed a complaint against forfeiture. The complaint was that the shipment was not a banned hazard as defined by the Federal Hazardous Substances Act (FHSA).
In 1927, J. Willard Marriott opened the nine-stool root beer stand that grew into the Hot Shoppes Restaurant chain and evolved into today’s Marriott International hotel company.
The London Necropolis Railway was a railway line opened in November 1854 by the London Necropolis Company (LNC), to carry corpses and mourners between London and the LNC’s newly opened Brookwood Cemetery 23 miles (37 km) southwest of London in Brookwood, Surrey. At the time the largest cemetery in the world, Brookwood Cemetery was designed to be large enough to accommodate all the deaths in London for centuries to come, and the LNC hoped to gain a monopoly on London’s burial industry. The cemetery had intentionally been built far enough from London so as never to be affected by urban growth and was dependent on the recently invented railway to connect it to the city.
The railway mostly ran along the existing tracks of the London and South Western Railway (LSWR) but had its own branches from the main line at both London and Brookwood. Trains carried coffins and passengers from a dedicated station in Waterloo, London, onto the LSWR tracks. On reaching the cemetery, the trains reversed down a dedicated branch line to two stations in the cemetery, one for the burial of Anglicans and one for Nonconformists (non-Anglicans) or those who did not want a Church of England funeral. The station waiting rooms and the compartments of the train, both for living and for dead passengers, were partitioned by both religion and class to prevent both mourners and cadavers from different social backgrounds from mixing. As well as the regular funeral traffic, the London Necropolis Railway was used to transport large numbers of exhumed bodies during the mass removal of a number of London graveyards to Brookwood.
How many Lego bricks, stacked one on top of the other, would it take to destroy the bottom brick?
The average maximum force the bricks can stand is 4,240N. That’s equivalent to a mass of 432kg (950lbs). If you divide that by the mass of a single brick, which is 1.152g, then you get the grand total of bricks a single piece of Lego could support: 375,000.
So, 375,000 bricks towering 3.5km (2.17 miles) high is what it would take to break a Lego brick.
“That’s taller than the highest mountain in Spain. It’s significantly higher than Mount Olympus [tallest mountain in Greece], and it’s the typical height at which people ski in the Alps,” Ian Johnston says (though many skiers also ski at lower altitudes).
House Bill No. 302 proposed apple pie as the state pie of Vermont and the apple as the state fruit. It also prescribed a series of conditions for serving apple pie. Governor Howard Dean signed the bill into law on May 10, 1999.
But, back in February, 1999, when State Representative Edward Paquin introduced House Bill No 302 proposing an official state pie and an official state fruit, he neglected to tie the two together with the proper serving etiquette.
The omission did not go unnoticed by Representative Bourdeau however and, before the bill was passed in the House of Representatives, it was amended to prescribe a series of options for enjoying a slice of apple pie.
The final bill offered three options for appropriate enjoyment of a slice of apple pie. Though not written into law, pie lovers were advised to enjoy their pie with one or more of the following:
with a glass of cold milk; with a slice of cheddar cheese weighing a minimum of 1/2 ounce; with a large scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Kayak angst (Danish: kajaksvimmelhed “kayak dizziness” or kajakangst, Greenlandic: nangiarneq) or nangierneq (Inuit) is a condition likened to a panic attack which has historically been associated with the Inuit people of Greenland. It has specifically been described as an episode of intense anxiety amongst seal hunters fishing on one-man boats. It has additionally been associated with the Iglooik Inuit of Northern Canada who are said to suffer wild hallucinations of mythical spirits including visions of a ‘sea ermine’.
A loss of direction, helpless feelings and psychophysiological responsivity are characteristic of kayak angst. A sensation of cold, rising from below, can make the kayaker feel as if the boat is filling with water. The lone hunter may also feel overcome by an intense fear of drowning, although it has been reported that this particular effect may be diminished upon seeing another hunter or by returning to land. Avoidance behaviours (i.e. becoming reluctant to go on future hunting expeditions) are likely to manifest on subsequent hunting expeditions before such behaviour transitions into a total incapability of hunting in the long-term. It has also been hypothesised that sufferers may be predisposed to other conditions, such as mountain dizziness, and their resistance to such related-afflictions becomes somewhat depleted after a bout of kayak angst.
The most successful way for a lone seal hunter to break the effects of kayak angst is reported to be vigorously and strenuously continuing to paddle; this can be initiated by first rocking the boat and then working towards more sizeable thrusts. Those who have survived agree that it is far more beneficial to move than remain stationary if afflicted.
Researchers from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) have 3D printed miniature Lego-style ‘bone bricks,’ which are potentially capable of healing broken skeletal tissue.
The researchers’ tiny hollow blocks, which are only the size of a small flea, serve as scaffolding onto which both hard and soft tissue can regrow. Moreover, the stackable nature of the modules enables them to be interlocked like toy bricks, offering scalability along with thousands of potential geometric configurations. Eventually, the Oregon team aims to scale the technology, and use the microcages to produce laboratory-made organs for human transplant instead.
Louis II (Czech: Ludvík, Croatian: Ludovik, Hungarian: Lajos, Slovak: Ľudovít; 1 July 1506 – 29 August 1526) was King of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia from 1516 to 1526.
At his premature birth in Buda on 1 July 1506, the court doctors kept him alive by slaying animals and wrapping him in their warm carcasses as a primitive incubator. He was the only son of Vladislaus II Jagiellon and his third wife, Anne of Foix-Candale.
The great auk (Pinguinus impennis) is a species of flightless alcid that became extinct in the mid-19th century. It was the only modern species in the genus Pinguinus. It is not closely related to the birds now known as penguins, which were discovered later and so named by sailors because of their physical resemblance to the great auk.
The United States Congress passed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 after an investigation found that the poor health of men rejected for the World War II draft was associated with poor nutrition in their childhood.
The Batman Effect refers to the finding that children perform better on a challenging task if they pretend to be someone else, such as Batman, who would be good at the task. Previous studies have shown that children who pretend to be a competent media character persist longer on boring tasks and perform better on executive function (EF) tasks than children who think about themselves from a first-person perspective. Taking the perspective of a person more competent than themselves allows children to reflect on the problem and think about it from different angles. It creates “psychological distance” or mental space between themselves and the challenging task and helps them imagine a role model.
Highway hypnosis, also known as white line fever, is an altered mental state in which a person can drive a car, truck, or other automobile great distances, responding to external events in the expected, safe, and correct manner with no recollection of having consciously done so. In this state, the driver’s conscious mind is apparently fully focused elsewhere, while seemingly still processing the information needed to drive safely. Highway hypnosis is a manifestation of the common process of automaticity.
The geographic center of the contiguous United States as located in a 1918 survey is located at 39°50′N 98°35′W, about 2.6 miles (4.2 km) northwest of the center of Lebanon, Kansas, approximately 12 miles (19 km) south of the Kansas–Nebraska border.
The Coast and Geodetic Survey found this location by balancing on a point a cardboard cutout shaped like the U.S.[9] This method was accurate to within 20 miles, but while the Geodetic Survey no longer endorses any location as the center of the U.S., the identification of Lebanon, Kansas, has remained.
The London taxicab driver is required to be able to decide routes immediately in response to a passenger’s request or traffic conditions, rather than stopping to look at a map, relying on satellite navigation or asking a controller by radio. Consequently, the “Knowledge of London” is the in-depth study of a number of pre-set London street routes and all places of interest that taxicab drivers in that city must complete to obtain a licence to operate a black cab. It was initiated in 1865, and has changed little since.
It is the world’s most demanding training course for taxicab drivers, and applicants will usually need to pass at least twelve “appearances” (periodical one-on-one oral examinations undertaken throughout the qualification process), with the whole process usually averaging 34 months, to pass.
The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (Latin: Agnus scythicus or Planta Tartarica Barometz) is a legendary zoophyte of Central Asia, once believed to grow sheep as its fruit. It was believed the sheep were connected to the plant by an umbilical cord and grazed the land around the plant. When all accessible foliage was gone, both the plant and sheep died.
Underlying the legend is the cotton plant, which was unknown in Northern Europe before the Norman conquest of Sicily.
“Who Let The Dogs Out” is a cover of the 1998 song “Doggie” (or “Dogie”) by Trinidadian Calypso/Soca/Junkanoo artist Anslem Douglas. Douglas himself admitted that the song has nothing to do with dogs and actually has a feminist theme. In an interview that was published on his website, he said:
“It’s a man-bashing song. I’ll tell you why. The lyric of the song says, ‘The party was nice, the party was pumpin’.’ When I said the word ‘party’ I was being metaphorical. It really means things were going great. The ‘Yippie-Yi-Yo,’ that’s everybody’s happy, right? ‘And everybody was having a ball.’ Life was going great. ‘Until the men start the name-callin’ / And then the girls respond to the call.’ So the men started calling the women ‘skank’ and ‘skettel,’ every dirty word you can think of. The men started the name-calling and then the girls respond to the call. And then a woman shouts out, ‘Who let the dogs out?’ And we start calling men dogs. It was really a man-bashing song.”
A laugh track (or laughter track) is a separate soundtrack for a recorded comedy show containing the sound of audience laughter. In some productions, the laughter is a live audience response instead; in the United States, where it is most commonly used, the term usually implies artificial laughter (canned laughter or fake laughter) made to be inserted into the show. This was invented by American sound engineer Charles “Charley” Douglass.
An example laugh track recorded in 2009 The Douglass laugh track became a standard in mainstream television in the U.S., dominating most prime-time sitcoms from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. Usage of the Douglass laughter decreased by the 1980s when stereophonic laughter was provided by rival sound companies as well as the overall practice of single-camera sitcoms eliminating audiences altogether.
From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Charley Douglass had a monopoly on the expensive and painstaking laugh business. By 1960, nearly every prime time show in the U.S. was sweetened by Douglass. When it came time to “lay in the laughs”, the producer directed Douglass where and when to insert the type of laugh requested. Inevitably, disagreements arose between Douglass and the producer, but the producer had final say. After taking his directive, Douglass went to work at creating the audience, out of sight from the producer or anyone else present at the studio.
Critic Dick Hobson commented in a July 1966 TV Guide article that the Douglass family were “the only laugh game in town.” Very few in the industry ever witnessed Douglass using his invention, as he was notoriously secretive about his work,[14] and was one of the most talked-about men in the television industry.
Douglass formed Northridge Electronics in August 1960, named after the Los Angeles suburb in the San Fernando Valley where the Douglass family resided and operated their business in a padlocked garage. When their services were needed, they wheeled the device into the editing room, plugged it in, and went to work. Production studios became accustomed to seeing Douglass shuttling from studio to studio to mix in his manufactured laughs during post-production.
The sophisticated one-of-a-kind device — affectionately known in the industry as the “laff box” — was tightly secured with padlocks, stood more than two feet tall, and operated like an organ. Only immediate members of the family knew what the inside actually looked like (at one time, the “laff box” was called “the most sought after but well-concealed box in the world”). Since more than one member of the Douglass family was involved in the editing process, it was natural for one member to react to a joke differently from another. Charley Douglass was the most conservative of all, so producers often put in bids for Charley’s son Bob, who was more liberal in his choice of laughter. Subtle textural changes could have enormous consequences for the ethical situation suggested by a laugh track.
Douglass used a keyboard to select the style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the machine was a wide array of recorded chuckles, yocks and belly laughs; exactly 320 laughs on 32 tape loops, 10 to a loop. Each loop contained 10 individual audience laughs spliced end-to-end, whirling around simultaneously waiting to be cued up. Since the tapes were looped, laughs were played in the same order repeatedly. Sound engineers could watch sitcoms and knew exactly which recurrent guffaws were next, even if they were viewing an episode for the first time. Douglass frequently combined different laughs, either long or short in length. Attentive viewers could spot when he decided to mix chuckles together to give the effect of a more diverse audience. Rather than being simple recordings of a laughing audience, Douglass’s laughs were carefully generated and mixed, giving some laughs detailed identities such as “the guy who gets the joke early” and “housewife giggles” and “the one who didn’t get the joke but is laughing anyway” all blended and layered to create the illusion of a real audience responding to the show in question. A man’s deep laugh would be switched for a new woman’s laugh, or a high-pitched woman’s giggle would be replaced with a man’s snicker. One producer noticed a recurrent laugh of a woman whom he called “the jungle lady” because of her high-pitched shriek. After regularly complaining to Douglass, the laugh was retired from the regular lineup.
There was also a 30-second “titter” track in the loop, which consisted of individual people laughing quietly. This “titter” track was used to quiet down a laugh and was always playing in the background. When Douglass inserted a hearty laugh, he increased the volume of the titter track to smooth out the final mix. This titter track was expanded to 45 seconds in 1967, later to 60 seconds in 1970, and received overhauls in 1964, 1967 and 1970. Douglass kept recordings fresh, making minor changes every few months, believing that the viewing audience evolved over time. Douglass also had an array of audience clapping, “oohs” and “ahhhs,” as well as people moving in their seats (which many producers insisted be constantly audible).
Douglass knew his material well, as he had compiled it himself. He had dozens of reactions, and he knew where to find each one. Douglass regularly slightly sped up the laughter to heighten the effect. His work was well-appreciated by many in the television industry. Over the years, Douglass added new recordings and revived old ones that had been retired and then retired the newer tracks. Laughter heard in sitcoms of the early 1960s resurfaced years later in the late 1970s. Up to 40 different laugh clips could be combined and layered at one time, creating the effect of a larger, louder reaction when in fact the same laughs were later heard individually. Douglass also included examples of laughter of people from other cultures, whose sounds were noticeably different from Americans.
Douglass’s “laff box” was purchased, unseen, at auction in 2010 when its owner failed to pay rent on the storage locker where it was housed. It was later discussed, and demonstrated in a June 2010 episode of Antiques Roadshow from San Diego, California, where its value was appraised at $10,000.
Danny Trejo has died 65 times onscreen, putting him ahead of the #2 most killable man in cinema history, Christopher Lee, who has died 60 times. The oft-murdered Lance Henriksen came in third place with 51 deaths. Among women, the champion supreme is Shelley Winters, who died onscreen 20 times.
More than 6 million people, most of them Jews, died in the Holocaust, but their music did not, thanks in part to the extraordinary work of Francesco Lotoro. An Italian composer and pianist, Lotoro has spent 30 years recovering, performing, and in some cases, finishing pieces of work composed in captivity. Nearly 75 years after the camps were liberated, Francesco Lotoro is on a remarkable rescue mission, reviving music like this piece created by a young Jewish woman in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944.
Jozef Kropinski, a Roman Catholic, was 26 when he was caught working for the Polish resistance and sent to Auschwitz, where he became first violinist in the men’s orchestra and started secretly composing, first for himself, and then for other prisoners. In 1942, he wrote this piece that he titled “Resignation”.
Kropinski wrote hundreds of pieces of music during his four years of imprisonment, at Auschwitz and later at Buchenwald, including tangos, waltzes, love songs, even an opera in two parts.
Still more astonishing, he composed most of them at night, by candlelight, in a tiny room the Nazis diabolically called a pathology lab, where during the day, bodies were dismembered. Other prisoners had secured the space for kropinski so he could have a quiet place to compose.
In April 1945, as the Allies approached Buchenwald, the camp was evacuated and inmates were forced on a death march. Kropinski was able to smuggle out his violin and hundreds of pieces of music, some hidden in his violin case and others in a secret coat pocket, but only 117 survive today. On the march, he sacrificed the rest to build a fire for his fellow prisoners.
Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a Pole imprisoned by the Gestapo for anti-fascist writings and deported to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in 1939.
During more than five years of imprisonment, Kulisiewicz became something of a “camp troubadour,” helping inmates cope with their hunger and despair, and performing songs like this at secret gatherings. But he didn’t just compose and sing. He also used his extraordinary powers of recall, memorizing hundreds of songs by other prisoners, which he dictated to a nurse after the war, so they could be recorded.
In the Palatine museum in Rome there is a collection of ancient graffiti etched on slabs of marble and limestone that once defaced the walls of palaces and public buildings across the Roman Empire. Among these is one that historians call “Alexamenos graffito”. It depicts a roughly drawn figure of a man with the head of an ass crucified on a cross. Next to the crucified figure is a smaller figure with one arm extended towards the former. Underneath the figures is a caption, written in equally crude letters, that reads “ΑΛΕ ξΑΜΕΝΟϹ ϹΕΒΕΤΕ ϑΕΟΝ”, meaning “Alexamenos worshipping his God.”
In 1929, the Empire State Building was proclaimed to be the tallest building in the world, topped with a dirigible mooring mast that could ‘accommodate passengers for the already existing transatlantic routes, and for the routes planned to South America, the West Coast, and across the Pacific’ (Tauranac). The mooring mast was installed to provide unprecedented, accessible air travel, on top of one of the world’s most recognisable landmarks. New York would therefore become the epicentre of modern aerospace technology in the United States. However, an obvious drawback to this mooring site is the lack of adequate terminal facilities, with passengers expected to walk down a plank extended from the blimp to the platform on the 102nd floor. It was proposed that buildings were to be knocked down to allow for a “sky terminal” but the costs to this were far too great, so it was dropped. John Tuaranac discusses how only one dirigible ever made contact with the Empire State Building in 1931, and it was “brief at best”:
Scientists used X-rays to film frogs while they were chowing down on crickets. It turns out that while swallowing, a frog’s eyes actually retract down towards its esophagus. Not only that, but eliminating the ability of the frog to retract its eyes nearly doubles the number of swallows it takes to choke down a single cricket.
