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Big Baby Posted: 31 Aug 2008 08:10 AM CDT An 11-month-old baby in Colombia weighs over 61 pounds! The child can no longer wear his big brother’s clothing. His mother, Milena Orosco de Agudelo, said the boy was born at a normal size and began growing rapidly at two months of age. Medical tests indicate he has an endocrine disorder, but further tests are needed to pinpoint the cause. Link (with video) -via Fark

Six More Hoaxes That Fooled the World Posted: 30 Aug 2008 10:38 PM CDT The Five Hoaxes That Fooled the World post from a couple of weeks ago was pretty popular and lots of people had interesting suggestions for a follow up, so I thought I would do just that. Here are six more for your reading pleasure. The Cardiff Giant, 1869. Like one of our hoaxes from last week, this one was pretty much conceived of just to prove someone else wrong. George Hill had an argument with a minister about whether or not giants had ever existed on earth - supposedly, a passage in Genesis said they once did. So, to prove a point, Hull had a huge chunk of gypsum unearthed in Fort Dodge, Iowa. He had the gypsum sent to a stonecutter in Chicago, who carved it into the shape of a 10-foot-tall man and “aged” it using acid, stain, and knitting needles (to make the gypsum look porous). Once the masterpiece was completed, it was shipped to Hull’s cousin in Cardiff, New York. The “giant” was buried on his farm for a year before some workers who were hired to dig a well “discovered” it. People were charged 50 cents to see the phony giant even though scholars had already called the bluff. It became such an attraction that P.T. Barnum wanted to lease it for three months for $60,000. When he was turned down, he simply created his own and put it on display instead, then claimed that his was the real one and the giant found in Cardiff was the fraud. The hoopla was short-lived - in 1870, court testimony revealed that neither one of the giants were real. But people still flock to see it. After a brief stint as a coffee table in an Iowan’s basement, the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., bought it. It’s kind of an odd choice for it - the rest of the museum is largely displays of textiles, crafts, and farming implements. The Great Moon Hoax, 1835 Any newspaper that purposely published a hoax just to increase their circulation numbers would immediately be put of out business the minute they were discovered in this day and age. Or not… I guess that’s why the Weekly World News was so popular for so long. But the New York Sun predates the WWN by 150 years or so. (Not the 2005 startup.) In 1835, the Sun published a series about the recent discovery of life on the moon. They made their claims sound factual by attributing the info to Sir John Herschel, one of the greatest astronomers of the day. There were all kinds of interesting creatures on the moon, according to the Sun: unicorns, beavers, human-like beings with bat-like wings and even the mundane - goats. The article may also have been to poke fun at some “discoveries” that had recently made news - one professor in Munich published a paper about the evidence of life on the moon, including buildings. Another man, Thomas Dick, claimed that the moon probably had more than 4,200,000,000 citizens. Despite being outed as a hoax a few weeks after publication, the Sun never did retract their story. But then again, it didn’t have too long (by newspaper standards) to prove how trustworthy they were: they ceased publication in 1850. The Bathtub Hoax, 1917 Journalist H.L. Mencken was tired of all of the war-talk and death toll counts of WWI, so he decided to publish something a little more light-hearted: the history of the bathtub in the United States. Well, the fictional version. The problem? No one else realized it was a joke. His article, “A Neglected Anniversary”, appeared in the New York Evening Mail on December 28, 1917. In it, he said that the bathtub had only been in the U.S. since about 1842, and that taking baths wasn’t a wide-spread practice until then-president Millard Fillmore had one installed in the White House in 1850. The article has been quoted as fact ever since, even though Mencken wrote another article several years later exposing his hoax and explaining that it was just supposed to be a bit of fun. Even as recently as 2004, the Washington Post ran a snippet of trivia that said something to the effect of, “Bet you didn’t know that Millard Fillmore was the first president to install a bathtub in the White House!” They retracted it a couple of days later. Woman Impregnated by Bullet, 1874 This one might be my favorite. In 1874, The American Medical Weekly ran an article by a Dr. LeGrand Capers (that’s him in the picture) who claimed he witnessed this very thing on a Civil War battlefield. Apparently there was a house very close to the Confederate lines, and a bullet (a “minnie ball”) hit a soldier, “carrying away the left testicle”, and then continued its course toward the house. One of the daughters in the house had also been hit by a stray bullet, which was lost in the abdominal cavity somewhere. Because the doctor was stationed with the army nearby, he continued to check on the wounded girl over the next several months. Around the six-month mark, he discovered that the girl was pregnant. Around the nine-month mark, she gave birth to a nine-pound baby boy. The family was beyond embarrassed that their unmarried daughter was apparently having “indiscretions”, but the girl swore that she was a virgin. The doctor examined her and said it was true - she had never had sex. Meanwhile, the little boy was very sick and he had some incredible swelling in the groin area. The doctor decided to operate, and when he did, he pulled out a minnie ball. He put two and two together and figured out that the bullet must have picked up some semen went it ripped through the soldier’s testicle, and managed to impregnate the girl when it lodged inside of her stomach. Supposedly, the girl and the soldier ended up getting married and having two more kids. The problem? The doctor had invented the whole story in order to mock the ridiculous stories that were coming out of the battlefield. But it was taken as fact, and was even reprinted in 1959 in the New York State Journal of Medicine. The Linnaeus Butterflies, 1763 This is another one that would probably be easily seen through today, but it wasn’t so easily seen through at the time. In 1763, Carl Linnaeus published the 12th edition of Systema Naturae with these images of three different butterflies from the Papilio species. Except… they’re not. The middle butterfly was real, but it had already been discovered in Europe and was well-known as the Brimstone butterfly. The other two were Brimstone butterflies as well, but with painted spots on them to make them appear different. The hoax wasn’t discovered until the 19th century, when an insect expert saw the images and exposed the “mistake”. Photo from the Museum of Hoaxes The Time-Traveling Man In 1950, a guy popped up out of nowhere in Times Square. He had mutton-chop sideburns and horribly old-fashioned clothes. Witnesses said that he looked surprised, and then horrified, and then he was hit by a car and killed immediately. Of course the police came; they found nineteenth-century money on him, and business cards with his name - Rudolph Fentz. Apparently, though, the man didn’t exist - no records of him could be found anywhere. They did find a Mrs. Rudolph Fentz, and when they went to talk to her, they discovered that she was the widow of Rudolph Fentz, Jr. Apparently Junior’s dad disappeared out of the blue in 1876 with no clues whatsoever as to where he might have gone. Suspicious, no? Yeah, with good reason. Although the story was accepted as fact years, a researcher eventually discovered that the story was written by Jack Finney and was originally published in a sci-fi anthology in 1951. The story was reprinted a couple of years later, but without permission from Mr. Finney and without any disclaimer whatsoever that the story was fiction. It’s thought that the man who reprinted the story was trying to make the public believe in a fourth dimension and time travel - concepts he wholeheartedly believed in.

Shark found in Lake Michigan Posted: 30 Aug 2008 03:07 PM CDT Rich Fasi was boating in West Grand Traverse Bay, Lake Michigan near Traverse City, Michigan on Wednesday. He saw some tangled fishing equipment floating by and started pulling it from the water: “I could see a fish down there about three feet down, but the last thing I expected was a shark on the end,” Fasi said. There aren’t any witnesses, but Fasi, of Traverse City, said he pulled the roughly 2-foot shark from the bay about 100 yards west of Clinch Park Marina at about 5 p.m. He found the shark in about 25 feet of water, he said. It was dead, but wasn’t frozen. “I could wiggle its tail, pry open its mouth, look at its teeth,” he said. “It didn’t look like it had any decomposition.” Fasi threw the fish in his freezer and called the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. It appears that Fasi’s catch was a blacktip shark. Michigan Department of Natural Resources biologist Mark Tonello says that Fasi is likely the victim of a hoax. A saltwater dependent creature so far inland in freshwater sounds like an impossibility: “We don’t believe there was ever a live shark swimming around Grand Traverse Bay … my guess is somebody caught it out east, put it on ice, brought it back here and decided to have a little fun,” he said. The shark appears to be a juvenile blacktip shark, said George Burgess, director of the Florida Program For Shark Research at the University of Florida. The species ranges from New York south to the Caribbean, said Burgess, who viewed e-mail photos of the fish. “This isn’t the first time we’ve seen hoaxes like this,” he said. It’s also possible the shark was a local resident’s pet, Tonello said. The shark wouldn’t have lived long if placed in the bay while alive, Tonello said, and would have deteriorated very quickly in the bay’s warm water. See the Traverse City Record-Eagle for the complete story.

MySpace co-founder Tom “Lord Flathead” Anderson: 80s teenage hacker? Posted: 30 Aug 2008 02:29 PM CDT MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson isn’t just everybody’s “friend.” He is also a 1980s teenage “WarGames” style computer hacker! TechCrunch: In 1985, when he was fourteen and in high school in Escondido, California, Anderson was subject to one of the largest FBI raids in California history after hacking into a Chase Manhattan Bank computer system and subsequently showing his friends how to do it. He was never arrested because he was a minor, but the FBI confiscated all of his computer equipment and some newspaper accounts of the incident stated incorrectly (see image below from a 1986 LA Times story) that he was "convicted in federal court of computer hacking and placed on probation" (the statements were corrected in subsequent articles). Anderson used the hacker name "Lord Flathead." What a great story - Matthew Broderick, eat your heart out! [TechCrunch]

“Man Drought” in Australia Posted: 30 Aug 2008 02:19 PM CDT There’s a crisis of sort in Australia: because of a "man drought," today’s Australian women are hard pressed to find mates. Where have all the men gone? Turns out they’re hiding in the boonies: There’s a "man drought" on the Australian coast, and a "man dam" in the country’s remote bush. Though the nation was flush with men some 30 years ago, due to immigration policies that favored males, today’s Australian women have it harder than their baby boomer sisters did 30 years ago. Demographer Bernard Salt’s book "Man Drought," which was released this week, reveals that love is really where you look for it in Australia, and that it pays to go the distance. [...] At the age of 25, women have the best odds of finding a partner as there are 23 percent more single men than women. But the odds shorten after 30, and by 34 there are more single women than unattached men. By age 40, single women outnumber single men by 9 percent and that divide lifts to 17 percent by age 50. At 80, it’s a dramatic 66 percent, Salt said. Salt’s solution: move to a place like Nar Nar Goon town in Victoria state, where its population of 600 has 12 single men in their 30s and one single woman. “It’s a man dam there. A reservoir of men,” he said. “You find this right across Australia, little reservoirs of untapped men.” Link - Thanks McKenzie Kerman! In a twist of irony, the mayor of the remote Australian mining town of Mount Isa, implored "ugly duckling" women to come out to reverse the shortage of eligible women there: Link

The Secret of Raising Smart Children: Don’t Tell Them How Smart They Are! Posted: 30 Aug 2008 01:35 PM CDT Every parent wants their children to be smart, but how exactly should one raise a smart kid? Carol S. Dweck wrote an interesting (though a little long) article for the Scientific American on the secret of raising smart kids: don’t tell them how smart they are! Effort, not intelligence or ability, is the key to success in school and life: In studies involving several hundred fifth graders published in 1998, for example, Columbia psychologist Claudia M. Mueller and I gave children questions from a nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” We commended others for their effort: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.” We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed mind-set more often than did pats on the back for effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for example, shied away from a challenging assignment—they wanted an easy one instead—far more often than the kids applauded for their effort. (Most of those lauded for their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard problems anyway, those praised for being smart became discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores, even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward, declined as compared with their previous results on equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for their effort did not lose confidence when faced with the harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the easier problems that followed. Link - via I Knew That

The Snail Car Posted: 30 Aug 2008 01:34 PM CDT Photo: Emily Lang Behold The Golden Mean, a "snail car" created by blacksmith John Sarriugarte and his wife Krysten Mate of Form & Reform shop from a 1966 Volkswagen Bug: "I woke up and said, ‘We have to build this giant snail,’" she said. "It totally wasn’t planned. This whole project has been weird coincidences and math." The visually stunning vehicle takes its name from the golden ratio, a mathematical proportion that’s said to produce aesthetically pleasing art and architecture. The spiral in the snail’s shell is shockingly close to the ratio. Other inspirations for the project include the giant pink snail from Doctor Dolittle, giant mechanical elephant puppets by Royal de Luxe and Jules Verne’s imaginative creations. Emily Lang of Wired has the neat story: Link

Was this Man the Zodiac Killer? Posted: 30 Aug 2008 01:34 PM CDT The Zodiac Killer terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60’s and 70’s and was never caught. Some 5 decades later, his identity may be coming to light: "The identity of the Zodiac Killer is Jack Tarrance. He’s my stepfather," says Dennis Kaufman. [...] Jack Tarrance died in 2006. Dennis claims that while going through Tarrance’s belongings, there were disturbing findings including a knife still covered with what could possibly be dried blood. "It could be a knife he barbecued with or a knife he murdered someone with," says Kaufman. Jack also left behind rolls of undeveloped film. Dennis plans to hand over the film to the FBI. On one of the rolls Dennis did develop, there were numerous gruesome images. "Appeared to be people who were murdered," explains Dennis. Link - via digg

Christian Bale and Kermit the Frog: Separated at Birth? Posted: 30 Aug 2008 01:33 PM CDT What do Christian Bale and Kermit the Frog have in common? Surprisingly, a lot more than you’d realize! Link - Thanks DB!

Thief Stole a Roomful of Parking Meters Posted: 30 Aug 2008 01:32 PM CDT There are money sitting out on the streets for the takin’. Or so thought 34-year-old Maurice Mizrahi, a desperate drug addict who got money for his fix by stealing … parking meter! Mizrahi has been seen wandering Brooklyn streets, smacking meters to hear how much change they contained. When he found one full of quarters, he would knock off the head by grabbing it and spinning it away from its base. Then he’d run home for a shopping cart to carry it away. It was the same crime that Paul Newman’s character went to prison for in the 1967 film "Cool Hand Luke." "We have to figure out how the hell he did it," a Department of Transportation source said. "This is crazy. He was doing some major work." A full meter can hold up to $70 in change, and they cost up to $700 to replace. Kerry Burke, et al. of The Daily News has the story: Link (Photo: Showalter / Daily News)

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