From NASA’s always-amazing Astronomy Picture of the Day:
Now, as part of the planned upgrade of the International Space Station, an Expedition 18 astronaut has upgraded her own head. The Human Extended Analog Device 9000 was attached with only minor delays, making the astronaut’s remaining spacewalks over 40 percent more efficient. With the HEAD 9000 attached, an astronaut can now directly access 4 Gigabytes of computer flash memory with their own brain, perform complex mathematics by “directed thinking”, and play a pre-installed game of Tetris at no additional charge.
Hey, Michael Jordan, just because you're good at basketball doesn't mean you can swing a bat. And a syrupy sweet voice doesn't make you a poet, Jewel. Oh, and Paul Newman, you're a fine actor, but your salsa is ... well, it's really good, actually, but you're the exception.
Sometimes, the talented and famous begin to experience delusions of multi-famed grandeur. For all those tilting at windmills, mental_floss is here to provide the ridicule and reality check.
Prose and Cons: Mussolini's Writer's Block
While noted fascist Benito Mussolini eventually found a fulfilling career as a tyrannical dictator, his earlier ambitions were literary. Fourteen years before taking power in Italy, Mussolini penned a serial novel titled The Cardinal's Mistress for a weekly supplement in an Italian newspaper. Apparently, it was quite the bodice-ripping romance. You know, the kind filled with lines such as, "The common brutes of the market-place satiate their idle lusts on your sinful body." It goes without saying, but the book didn't do much to secure Mussolini's reputation as a writer.
Curiously, Mussolini isn't the only dictator with a weakness for romance novels. Saddam Hussein has anonymously published three, and another is purportedly on the way. None of them have been translated into English, though we hear they make Mussolini's stuff read like Proust.
Cantor Battles Shakespeare: Left Brain Takes a Right
Georg Cantor is widely regarded as the most important mathematician of the 19th century. He invented "set theory," which - in addition to making life miserable for Calculus II students everywhere - proved that some infinities are (prepare to have your mind blown) bigger than others. That's the sort of realization that can make your head hurt. And sure enough, Cantor eventually went bonkers.
But even before then, he wasn't exactly a picture of mental health. Toward the end of his life, he became obsessed with proving that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's plays via complicated schema and hidden codes the likes of which haven't been seen outside "A Beautiful Mind."
Cantor's extensive writings on the subject aside, nearly all Shakespearean scholars agree on two things: William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote the plays attributed to him, and Cantor should have stuck to math.
Isaac Newton: Putting the Pseudo in Science
Forget Isaac Newton's famous falling apple. (For starters, that story was quite possibly made up by Enlightenment stalwart Voltaire.) Many scholars argue that Newton's theory of gravity was the product of his obsessive fascination with what was, at the time, the decidedly unenlightened science of alchemy. Newton spent more of his life studying alchemy than "real" math and science. And without his beliefs about occult forces operating in a vacuum, he might never have understood gravity. So when Newton famously said, "If I have seen further than others, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants," many of the giants to whom he was referring were probably cranks, pseudo-scientists, and alchemists.
Paige Compositor - via Scientific American issue March 9, 1901 at Twain Quotes
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the first novel composed on a typewriter. Yet, ironically enough, the author formerly known as Samuel Clemens was nearly driven into bankruptcy by the Paige Compositor.
A massive typesetting machine with 18,000 moving parts, the Compositor was a complete commercial failure. Twain invested at least $190,000 and 14 years worth of anxiety into the invention and came away with two prototypes, neither of which worked for very long.
All was not lost, though. One of those prototypes was willed to Columbia University, which donated it to a scrap metal drive during World War I. That means the Compositor became bullets ... and finally served a purpose.
The article above appeared in the Scatterbrained section of the Sept - Oct 2005 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.
I know most people love Peeps or hate them - no grey area. I’m one that loves them, but I like to cut a little slit in the package and let them get stale for a few days. Mmm, crunchy Peeps. For those of you that like a pure shot of sugar in the shape of a chick, here’s a way to step up the game: chocolate. Craftster user notyourstar has a good tutorial on how to do it. Seems self-explanatory, but she has a few good tips (freeze your Peeps first, otherwise they will melt when they hit the hot chocolate).
Cake Wrecks causes me to cringe all of the time, usually at gross spelling errors and colors that should never be used on a cake. But when one actually makes me laugh out loud, I know I have to share it with you guys.
It’s bad, right? And the one paw appears to have six digits on it. In case you don’t know what the UK logo looks like, click the link. You’ll be stunned at the similarity.
To be fair, there may be other ways to explain their conclusions - and you might not need the clamps, harnesses and whips to replicate that kind of closeness (simply cooking a meal together might do the trick as well). Still, there is a stigma associated with S&M that critics are calling into question.
SPANKING is stressful at first, but it could bring consenting couples closer together. That’s the implication of two studies of hormonal changes associated with sadomasochistic (S&M)activities including spanking, bondage and flogging.
A short film by Atom Films user The555 about a man who decides to bring along his dungeon master to mediate a blind date. Clearly, he botched an intelligence check. 2.5 minutes long.
To be fair, the Russians aren’t attacking. In fact, the US military knew this was coming and expected it. Debris from launched spacecraft and rocketry regularly fall back into the atmosphere. Stilll, residents who didn’t know that might well have thought that the Russians were invading when they dialed 911. Things might have gone rather differently a few decades ago.
The mysterious boom and flash of light seen over parts of Virginia Sunday night was not a meteor, but actually exploding space junk from the second stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket falling back to Earth, according to an official with the U.S. Naval Observatory.
The Russian-built Soyuz rocket lifted off Thursday from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to launch a new crew and American billionaire Charles Simonyi — the world’s first two-time space tourist — to the International Space Station. The spaceflyers arrived at the space station on Saturday.
A rattleback or wobblestone is an object with a smooth bottom that can be spun like a top. Unlike conventional tops, however, the rattleback has an asymmetry which gives it a preferred direction of spin. If spun in the opposite direction, it will begin to wobble, and then change the direction of its spin.
It would seem that if a spinning object changes the direction of its spin, it is defying the law of conservation of angular momentum, but apparently it is the rocking/wobbling motion that is converted into counter-rotational motion, not the initial rotation.
In his art series Family Tree, photographer Bobby Neel Adams take portraits of family members (father/son, mother/daughter and so on) tear them down the middle and gluing them back together (no photoshop manipulation is involved).
The result reveals a fascinating "visual DNA" or facial similarities between the two generations of people.
To protest the hyperinflation that has rendered the Zimbabwe currency worthless and to raise awareness of the dire economic situation there, the Zimbabwean Newspaper created an ad campaign featuring huge posters, wall murals, flyers, and even billboards all made out of trillions of Zimbabwean dollars. Check out the photos from the newspaper’s Flickr photostream.
The Mugabe regime has destroyed Zimbabwe. It has presided over the brutal oppression of the opposition, a cholera crises, massive food shortages and the total collapse of their economy. Furthermore anyone brave enough to report this has been bullied, beaten and driven into exile. One such group is 'the Zimbabwean Newspaper'. However, not content with having hounded these journalists out, the regime has slapped an import 'luxury' duty of over 55% on them which makes the paper unaffordable for the average Zimbabwean. In order to subsidize the paper they need to sell it in England and South Africa, to raise the foreign currency.
A unique campaign was devised to promote the paper to raise awareness and increase readership. One of the most eloquent symbols of Zimbabwe's collapse is the Z$100 trillion dollar note, a symptom of their world record inflation. This note cannot buy anything, not even a loaf of bread and certainly not any advertising, but it can become the advertising, it can be a powerful reminder about Zimbabwe's plight and the need to hold someone accountable.
Our pal AskMen has a neat (and somewhat controversial) list of the 29 Best Cities to Live In (if you’re a guy), based on various criteria such as sports & entertainment, power & money, dating & sex, fashion and so forth (all things important to guys, I suppose).
Sitting at no. 3 is the place I used to live nearby, San Francisco:
Why You Should Live in San Francisco
San Francisco is a cityscape of irresistible drama. Steep hills and skyscrapers overlook a gorgeous bay that changes color with the sky. That drama filters into every aspect of the city’s life, from its topsy-turvy power politics to its go-hard recreation (3,480 acres of parks including three golf courses) and go-harder nightlife (including 2,870 bars). Since the days of the Barbary Coast, San Francisco has boasted one of the great bar and dining cultures, and is home to some of the best restaurants in North America, claiming one restaurant for every 279 people.
The louche life notwithstanding, San Francisco was the healthiest city in the U.S. in 2008, at least according to USA Today. Just outside the city lay miles of vineyards producing some of the world’s great wines. The city abounds with classic men’s stores including local favorites Cable Car Clothiers and The Hound. San Francisco is a creative sector powerhouse, with LucasArts located right in the city’s famed Presidio. The city’s boy-to-girl ratio (male: 51%; female: 49%) doesn’t seem promising at first, but remember this is San Francisco, so you can shave a good 8% to 10% off the competition right there. Be advised that women here are the cream of the brain trust — San Francisco was named one of the top 10 smartest cities by Forbes last year — so the kind of “hey baby” come-on that works in L.A. or Miami Beach ain’t gonna work here.
There’s so much behind-the-scenes info on The Wizard of Oz, I couldn’t possibly touch on all of it in one Neatorama post. I just picked some of my favorites, but if I missed your favorite bit of Oz-related trivia, definitely leave a comment and let all of us know.
Poor Margaret Hamilton (the witch) was really injured in the scene where the Wicked Witch of the West departs Munchkinland in a huff after Dorothy arrives. She was standing on a trap door and was supposed to disappear down into it quickly when the smoke (followed by fire) puffed up, but during the second take of that scene, the fire came too early and her costume started burning. She suffered second and third degree burns and was unable to work for a month. When she came back, she refused to do any more work with fire.
Toto was played by a Cairn Terrier creatively named Terry. Because of her previous experience (she was "Rags" in Shirley Temple's Bright Eyes) Terry got $125 a week for her efforts, which was more than twice what the actors playing the Munchkins got ($50/week). She got her foot broken during filming when an actor playing one of the guards stepped on her.
Margaret Hamilton wasn't the first choice for the Wicked Witch. The iconic role almost went to Gale Sondergaard, who was very pretty and balked at the makeup job that would make her the ugly witch. Maggie Hamilton, however, was used to playing plain-Jane roles and had in fact based her career around it. You're probably so used to the green makeup job that some of her other roles may be totally unfamiliar to you, even if you've seen her in them – she was Morticia's mom in The Addams Family TV show, she portrayed a maid on As the World Turns in the early '70s, and played Cora the Maxwell House coffee lady in commercials in the '70s as well.
Margaret Hamilton's son has said that she loved her "I'll get you my pretty…" line so much, she used it in her personal life on a somewhat frequent basis, just for fun.
The date on the Wicked Witch of the East’s death certificate is actually the date of L. Frank Baum’s death. The 19th anniversary of his death, to be exact. We can’t read it, but this is what the Death Certificate says:
Certificate of Death
Name: The Wicked Witch of the East Residence: The Land of Oz
I HEREBY CERTIFY that I attended deceased from May 6th to May 6th, 1938
I last saw her alive on May 6th 1938:
Death is said to have occurred on the date stated below at 12:30 p.m.
Date of Death: May 6th 1938
Month Day Year
Signature: W.W. Barister, M.D.
Address: Munchkin City
Can you imagine anyone but Judy Garland as Dorothy? How about Shirley Temple? Although producer Mervyn LeRoy had always had Judy in mind for the role, he was being pressured to "borrow" Shirley Temple from Fox. She was only 10 and Judy was 16 at the time; studio executives thought 10 was a much more appropriate age for this particular role. They ended up auditioning Shirley just to say they had, but in the end it didn't matter anyway: Fox refused to loan her out.
The first film version of Dorothy depicted her as a blonde with baby doll-esque makeup because that’s the way Oz illustrator John R. Neill drew her in the books. Well, he was actually the second person to illustrate Dorothy for L. Frank Baum - the first was W.W. Denslow, who drew her the way we know her today: brunette pigtails and the blue-and-white Gingham dress. But Baum had a falling-out with Denslow and John R. Neill took over for the design from then on out, which amounted to more than 40 stories. People who are fans of the book series over the movie say that they usually picture a blonde Dorothy as opposed to the Judy Garland Dorothy.
When the song "If I Had a Heart" is playing and a girl speaks the words "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" the voice you're hearing is Adriana Caselotti – Snow White.
The Horse of a Different Color was created by putting Jell-O paste onto a white horse. It was difficult to keep the horse from licking the paste, so the scene had to be shot quickly. If you look closely, you can see the driver of the buggy subtly restraining the horse from licking himself.
Originally, a scene with an insect called the Jitterbug was shot. It involved a dance sequence with our heroes but was ultimately cut due to time constraints. But you can still hear a reference to the scene in the movie when the Wicked Witch of the West sends the flying monkeys after the gang. She says,
“Take your army to the Haunted Forest, and bring me that girl and her dog. Do as you like with the others, but I want her alive and unharmed! They’ll give you no trouble. I promise you that. I’ve sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them. Take special care of those ruby slippers. I want those most of all. Now fly!”
In the book, Glinda is the Good Witch of the South, not the North. The two Good Witches were combined into one character for time's sake in the film. She is, however, restored to her proper direction in The Wiz.
Likewise, Dorothy's slippers were silver in the book. They were changed to the famous ruby red version for film to take full advantage of the new Technicolor technology. There are many authentic versions of the ruby slippers – some counts say at least seven. Among those, one pair is housed at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, Debbie Reynolds owns a never-used pair with curled toes, and one pair was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.
Bert Lahr, AKA the Cowardly Lion, was the first to use the phrase "Heavens to Murgatroyd!" that Snagglepuss later became famous for. Snagglepuss' voice was based on Lahr's. His son, John Lahr, is the senior drama critic at The New Yorker.
As most people know, the Tin Man was originally supposed to be played by Buddy Ebsen, but when Ebsen discovered he was severely allergic to the Tin Man's makeup job, he was forced to drop the role. Jack Haley replaced him, using a voice that he used to tell his son bedtime stories. Somewhat strangely, Jack Haley, Jr., was married to Liza Minelli for about five years in the '70s.
The classic "Over the Rainbow" almost didn't make it into the film. Studio heads thought the black-and-white beginning was too long and wouldn't entertain kids like the Technicolor part would, and they also thought it wasn't appropriate to make Judy Garland sing in a barnyard.
When the witch first tries to take the ruby slippers from Dorothy at the beginning and her hands are zapped with fire, you're actually seeing dark apple juice squirting out of the shoes. The footage was later sped up so the streams of apple juice resembled fire more closely. So says IMDB, anyway – I couldn't verify that through any other source.
This one sounds like a total urban legend, but Snopes says it's true. The costume designers were looking for a very fancy coat for Professor Marvel – the Wizard's Kansas counterpart – but one that had gotten quite shabby. Some of the crew went to a secondhand shop and bought a bunch of coats to go through; Frank Morgan (the actor who played the Wizard), the director and the wardrobe people selected one out of the bunch that seemed perfect. It had a velvet collar but the nap was worn off of the velvet and it was looking a little worse for the wear. It even fit Morgan just right. Morgan was wearing the coat one afternoon and discovered a label that said "L. Frank Baum." The coat had originally been made for Baum in Chicago – the tailor verified it, and Baum's widow did as well. She was given the coat after the movie wrapped.
I loved looking for creepy things in movies when I was in high school, and I totally bought all of them - the "ghost" in Three Men and a Little Baby and the "munchkin suicide" in The Wizard of Oz among them. In case you haven't seen it, it's allegedly at the end of the Tin Man sequence, right before Dorothy and Co. head back down the Yellow Brick Road. I remember very clearly seeing this image back then (the clip below will show you exactly where) and having no doubt that it was clearly a suicide, and how creepy it was. Ever since I've discovered that it was just the wing of an exotic bird, that's all I can see. I can't even fathom how I used to buy that it was a munchkin suicide. Check out the clip below of TV Land's "Myths and Legends" to get the whole scoop.
Here's another myth, sort of. I tried this one in high school too – matching up Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon with the movie. And it works! It really does. But various members of Pink Floyd have denied that they wrote the album while watching The Wizard of Oz or that they were inspired by the movie or anything of that sort at all. But it does eerily match up. It gives the whole thing a very spooky vibe. If you don't want to rely on YouTube and have both the album and the movie, here’s how to do it: start the album at the third lion's roar in the MGM movie title right before the film starts. Otherwise, here's the YouTube version. I suggest also checking out "The Great Gig in the Sky" which coincides with the tornado scene – it's kind of amazing.
These ten different timelines, which are all affected whenever someone uses a time machine, can be confusing (as all time travel stories are), but reading them may help you prepare for the new movie Terminator: Salvation.
I’ve mulled it over some more, and I still believe there has to be a timeline where someone other than Kyle Reese is John Connor’s father. When The Terminator was a standalone movie, you could read it either way. Either there’s a circular causality, where Kyle is “always” John Connor’s father, or Kyle’s time travel creates a new branch. But Terminator 2 pretty much establishes that time travel always creates new branches, because there’s no fate but what we make. And the Connors, with their friendly T-800, are able to stop or at least delay Skynet. But of course, your mileage, even backwards and forwards through time, may vary.
The Melvins were named after a much-despised Thriftway supervisor of band member Buzz Osborne. The group started in the early 80's by the members who attended school together in Montesano, Washington.
Throughout the years, the group has had trouble finding and keeping a permanent bass player. As a result, Buzz Ozborne and Dale Crover have been the only consistent members. Least you worry though, the bass players do not spontaneously combust like the drummers in Spinal Tap.
Many people have heard the group being credited as a huge influence of the Seattle grunge scene, but fewer people know that Kurt Cobain actually tried out to play bass in the group but he failed after forgetting all the songs because he was so nervous.
Kurt stayed good friends with the group, particularly drummer Dale Crover, and even worked as a roadie for them at a few shows. Later, he produced and played on two songs on the group's album Houdini.
Aside from bands in the grunge scene, The Melvins have influenced a lot of other bands, including Tool, Crowbar, Mastodon, Eyehategod and Boris, the last of which were named after a Melvin's song.
Dale Crover helped out Kurt Cobain in 1988, by playing drums for Nirvana on their ten song demo. Later this demo became part of their first album, Bleach. Dale later introduced Kurt to Dave Grohl, who would become the group's long-term drummer.
Also in '88, Osborne and Crover moved to San Francisco. This is when they lost their first bass player, Matt Lukin, who decided to stay in Washington. Matt later formed the band Mudhoney.
In 1992, The Melvins released three EPs based on the idea of the four Kiss albums each featuring a member of the group. Later in the year, the group tried to release a full-length album called Lysol, but the album had to be renamed Melvins because "Lysol" was trademarked.
The group was always a big fan of Kiss, so they were honored when Gene Simons played bass with them at Lollapalooza in '93 and '94. He also played on the song “Goin' Blind” with them at a Primus concert in 1993. This track was a Kiss song that The Melvins covered on Houdini.
Atlantic refused to release the group's highly experimental album Prick, so they released it under Amphetamine Reptile Records. Because they were still limited to releases under Atlantic, Prick was released with the band's name in reverse.
A picture on the Tool website shows The Melvins in an image covered by lunchmeat that spells out "Melvins say…Tool Sux!"
In 1999, the group released three new albums and one of the highlights of these albums was a cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," sung by Leif Garrett.
There was originally going to be a European tour supporting the group’s album with Dead Kennedy’s singer Jello Biafra, Never Breathe What You Can't See, but it was canceled due to some problems with bassist-of-the-time, Kevin Rutmanis. Later, Dale Crover and Buzz Osborne admitted that their bassist had "disappeared." He returned for a short time in 2005, but then officially quit the band.
In 2006, The Melvins became a four piece by adding a second drummer, Coady Willis, from the band Big Business. Dale Crover said, “we want to do this ‘mirror image’ type of thing. We’ve kind of fused our two drum sets together, and we’re going to try and do some crazy thing with it.”
Throughout history there have been a few lost souls who have taken the beauty of science and instead of honoring it, twisted it and contorted it into something evil.
Science, we are informed by conscientious historians of the discipline, is something that comes to us without anything we might call a "moral imperative" as to what we should or should not be doing with the knowledge. In fact, science has often been described as an "amoral" enterprise, which can be put to evil uses just as easily as good ones. Scientists themselves bear no responsibility to ensure how their discoveries are used by others.
But what if the scientist himself is a diabolical mad man?
While noted fascist Benito Mussolini eventually found a fulfilling career as a tyrannical dictator, his earlier ambitions were literary. Fourteen years before taking power in Italy, Mussolini penned a serial novel titled The Cardinal's Mistress for a weekly supplement in an Italian newspaper. Apparently, it was quite the bodice-ripping romance. You know, the kind filled with lines such as, "The common brutes of the market-place satiate their idle lusts on your sinful body." It goes without saying, but the book didn't do much to secure Mussolini's reputation as a writer.
Georg Cantor is widely regarded as the most important mathematician of the 19th century. He invented "set theory," which - in addition to making life miserable for Calculus II students everywhere - proved that some infinities are (prepare to have your mind blown) bigger than others. That's the sort of realization that can make your head hurt. And sure enough, Cantor eventually went bonkers. 
Forget Isaac Newton's famous falling apple. (For starters, that story was quite possibly made up by Enlightenment stalwart Voltaire.) Many scholars argue that Newton's theory of gravity was the product of his obsessive fascination with what was, at the time, the decidedly unenlightened science of alchemy. Newton spent more of his life studying alchemy than "real" math and science. And without his beliefs about occult forces operating in a vacuum, he might never have understood gravity. So when Newton famously said, "If I have seen further than others, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants," many of the giants to whom he was referring were probably cranks, pseudo-scientists, and alchemists.
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the first novel composed on a typewriter. Yet, ironically enough, the author formerly known as Samuel Clemens was nearly driven into bankruptcy by the Paige Compositor. 
I know most people love Peeps or hate them - no grey area. I’m one that loves them, but I like to cut a little slit in the package and let them get stale for a few days. Mmm, crunchy Peeps. For those of you that like a pure shot of sugar in the shape of a chick, here’s a way to step up the game: chocolate. Craftster user notyourstar has a good tutorial on how to do it. Seems self-explanatory, but she has a few good tips (freeze your Peeps first, otherwise they will melt when they hit the hot chocolate).
To be fair, there may be other ways to explain their conclusions - and you might not need the clamps, harnesses and whips to replicate that kind of closeness (simply cooking a meal together might do the trick as well). Still, there is a stigma associated with S&M that critics are calling into question.
To be fair, the Russians aren’t attacking. In fact, the US military knew this was coming and expected it. Debris from launched spacecraft and rocketry regularly fall back into the atmosphere. Stilll, residents who didn’t know that might well have thought that the Russians were invading when they dialed 911. Things might have gone rather differently a few decades ago.
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To protest the hyperinflation that has rendered the Zimbabwe currency worthless and to raise awareness of the dire economic situation there, the Zimbabwean Newspaper created an ad campaign featuring huge posters, wall murals, flyers, and even billboards all made out of trillions of Zimbabwean dollars. Check out the photos from the newspaper’s 
Our pal AskMen has a neat (and somewhat controversial) list of the 29 Best Cities to Live In (if you’re a guy), based on various criteria such as sports & entertainment, power & money, dating & sex, fashion and so forth (all things important to guys, I suppose).
The first film version of Dorothy depicted her as a blonde with baby doll-esque makeup because that’s the way Oz illustrator John R. Neill drew her in the books. Well, he was actually the second person to illustrate Dorothy for L. Frank Baum - the first was W.W. Denslow, who drew her the way we know her today: brunette pigtails and the blue-and-white Gingham dress. But Baum had a falling-out with Denslow and John R. Neill took over for the design from then on out, which amounted to more than 40 stories. People who are fans of the book series over the movie say that they usually picture a blonde Dorothy as opposed to the Judy Garland Dorothy.
These ten different timelines, which are all affected whenever someone uses a time machine, can be confusing (as all time travel stories are), but reading them may help you prepare for the new movie Terminator: Salvation. 
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