The United States Postal Service has just released a commemorative stamp that will please both philatelists and astronomers alike. Called the Total Eclipse of the Sun, the new stamp celebrates the upcoming August 21 total solar eclipse.
This eclipse is going to be a huge deal: it will be the first such event to be visible from anywhere inside the continental United States since 1979, but it will also span the entire country, with a path of totality that stretches from Oregon to South Carolina, which has not occurred since all the way back in 1918.
While the eclipse itself will by definition be fleeting, the stamp is a Forever stamp.
What makes the stamp itself special is that it's the first in U.S. history to be printed using thermochromic ink, which means it responds to changes in temperature. As you press your finger on the stamp, the image of a solar eclipse—based on a photograph from March 29, 2006, shot in Libya—becomes an image of the moon. It reverts to the original image as it cools back down.
The USPS isn't the only one who's celebrating this year's big solar eclipse. Atlas Obscura is hosting a festival of science, music, and celestial wonder in Eastern Oregon, a prime viewing spot for the astronomical event, and tickets are still available!
Legends of giant squid attacking vessels on the open ocean are great nightmare fuel, even if they never truly occurred. But the sight of a real-life giant squid wrapping its tentacles around a man’s paddleboard, as seen in a recent video that’s been making the rounds, makes those old myths certainly seem plausible.
In the video, originally shared on Instagram by a South African paddleboarder named James Taylor, the creature can be seen slowly laying its tentacles across the board from beneath. Taylor does not seem overly concerned with the tentacles grabbing his board, even if it seems like something out of a sea monster movie. And as it turned out, things were not nearly as sinister as they seemed.
According to Taylor’s description posted with the video, pointed out by Earth Touch News, when he first caught sight of the large squid, he noticed it was injured. As he later explained on Facebook, the squid was covered in wounds and missing a number of tentacles. Taylor went back to shore, and got a rope so that he could take it to land for potential research, reasoning that the creature would have died from its injuries and be lost or damaged to other predators.
Taylor and his friends took the squid back to the shore, killed it, and contacted the local aquarium to come check out the specimen. The aquarium proved unavailable, so he said that he “dissected” it and sent pictures and videos of the find, from which a researcher was able to identify it as an actual giant squid (genus Architeuthis).
The video has since received some backlash from those who think Taylor may have acted too rashly. Regardless of the rightness of Taylor’s decision, the short video offers a rare glimpse of the elusive giant squid in action, and a good example of what may have inspired the more outlandish legends of yesteryear.
In July of 1844, a pod of bottlenose dolphins showed up in the Potomac River. Surprised, a group of men grabbed their guns and hopped into some boats. They followed the dolphins past the future home of Arlington National Cemetery, past John Tyler's White House, and all the way upriver to Aqueduct Bridge, at which point they finally let them be.
Fast forward to 2017. The White House has a new occupant, but there are still dolphins in the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River.
Ongoing research by the Potomac-Cheseapeake Dolphin Project—the first of its kind, headed up by the bottlenose expert Janet Mann of Georgetown University—has counted around 500, and the numbers keep climbing. They've even named one of them after John Tyler.
"Not many people know that there are dolphins in the Potomac River," says Anne-Marie Jacoby, a field investigator with the PCDP. "Nobody has really studied them until recently... That came as sort of a shock to us." Initial research suggests that the dolphins don't live there full-time, instead moving in and out as the seasons change, perhaps splitting off from a massive migratory group that swims down the East Coast. Certain individuals also return year after year, like re-elected senators.
Mann herself learned about the Potomac dolphins by accident, after she and her husband, Tom, bought a vacation cottage in Northern Virginia. The idea was to have a place where she could take her mind off work, but the day they closed on the house, Tom spotted dolphins swimming right by their backyard. Mann, who normally works in Shark Bay, Australia, couldn't resist starting up a whole new study. "She'd been flying thousands of miles away to study dolphins," says Jacoby. "But there were dolphins here this whole time."
The PCDP started recording dolphin data in the spring of 2015. Since then, the researchers have focused on getting a solid handle on the population: how many dolphins traverse the Potomac-Chesapeake system, where they're coming from, and what sorts of relationships they have with one another. To do this, they are creating an identification catalog, which contains photographs of each dolphin's unique dorsal fin along with a name the researchers have chosen for that dolphin.
Due to their environs, Mann decided to name all of the Potomac-Chesapeake dolphins after American political figures. "We started with what we considered the most iconic, the presidents and vice presidents and some family members," says Jacoby. "We're now moving on to Supreme Court justices." They also have some catchup work to do: "Now that we have a new president, we're naming a dolphin after [him]," says Jacoby. "We're not leaving anybody out."
Student researchers are currently using the catalog to match the Potomac dolphins with those found in other locations along the Mid-Atlantic coast. "We can figure out things like, 'I saw Zachary Taylor here, but someone also saw him off the coast of North Carolina,'" says Jacoby. "That gives us information on what stocks are using the Chesapeake and Potomac." Jacoby, who will begin her Ph.D. research at Duke University in the fall, plans to fill in gaps in the historical record by interviewing fishermen and recreational boaters about their past dolphin experiences.
They may be named after presidents and justices, but Jacoby and her fellow researchers are hoping the dolphins will act as something else: ambassadors. "Bottlenose dolphins provide a really great conservation opportunity," says Jacoby.
The Chesapeake Bay is in the thick of restoration efforts—now in danger from proposed budget cuts—that seek to reverse decades of pollution from agricultural runoff and urban waste. Climate change promises to keep throwing its own curveballs, from rising water levels to low-oxygen "dead zones." "You can use [dolphins] to promote conservation of the Potomac and Chesapeake overall," says Jacoby. Because they're top predators, most provisions put in place specifically to protect dolphins tend to necessarily help the ecosystem as a whole.
Plus, "they're charismatic mammals—when you tell people about them, they get really excited," says Jacoby. As it's so understudied, this particular population provides a great opportunity for citizens to get not just excited, but involved. The PCDP website encourages dolphin-spotters to send in pictures for identification. An affiliated researcher, Helen Bailey of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, is developing an app called DolphinWatch, which she hopes people will use to report sightings.
Jacoby believes that citizen involvement can lead to a sort of trickle-up effect. "If you can get the general public involved in your science, they're going to care more," she says. "If we have enough people who care, the government will hopefully have to listen." In the meantime, the number of dolphins keeps ticking up, too. By the end of surveying, "I think we'll have more than 1600," Jacoby predicts—a pretty sizable constituency.
Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Sometime about 3,000 years ago, a priest’s daughter in Egypt lost her big toe. After she died, she was buried in a shaft tomb not far from Luxor, in a cemetery reserved for elite members of the community.
For the past year and a half, scientists from the University of Basel, in Switzerland, have been studying this place, and as part of their research, they found the burial place of the priest’s daughter, along with the prosthetic toe that was crafted to replace her missing digit.
This prosthetic device is likely one of the oldest known today. Made of wood, the toe came with panels that could be laced together to keep the device snug to her foot. After studying the device closely, the University of Basel found that it had been refitted more than once to the woman’s foot.
“The fact that the prosthesis was made in such a laborious and meticulous manner indicates that the owner valued a natural look, aesthetics and wearing comfort and that she was able to count on highly qualified specialists to provide this,” according to a University of Basel press release.
The tragic story of a chameleon. He must have remembered drinking water from this pipe a couple of years ago. But we had disconnected it.+ pic.twitter.com/oRJsvFYflF
After the chameleon died, the dry heat quickly mummified its body. Lenin observed small holes on its dried skin and speculated that perhaps the soft tissues of the chameleon's body had been eaten away by local ants.
She writes that, although the lizard's mummification was fascinating on its own, she was more impressed by its memory of the water source that had long since disappeared.
As National Geographic explains, heat stress can kill even creatures that are adapted to live in hot places, and the creeping temperatures of climate change will adversely affect creatures like chameleons that control their body temperature by spending time in the sun or shade. A little bit more heat can spell the end, if there’s no shade or water to relieve it.
At first glance, the Ikea "Blanda blank" bowl looks like a normal piece of tableware. It's stainless steel, and big enough to hold a salad for four—you know, bowl-sized. It's even called the "Blanda blank," for God's sake.
But based on the experiences of a snacker from Sweden, at least one Blanda blank out there has developed an unusual hobby: setting things on fire.
According to Aftonbladet, as translated by the Local, at some point over the unusually hot weekend, Richard Walter put a bunch of grapes into his Ikea bowl and brought it out into the sunshine. He quickly smelled smoke. When he looked down at his grapes, they were aflame.
Walter blamed the mirrored bowl: "There was one intense point where [the sun] hit the twigs," he said. "That's where it started."
He then set a piece of newspaper on fire by putting it in the bowl, as shown in the video above.
Ikea told the Local they will be performing their own tests on the Blanda blank. In the meantime, be careful, everyone.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Thirty-two years ago, while on a Mormon mission in Florida, amateur cryptologist Scott Reynolds was browsing a public library in when he discovered a book with pages printed in a code of symbols he did not recognize. There was no key or explanation, but he copied down the peculiar characters. It would be over a decade until he discovered that the foreign-looking script was a nearly forgotten writing reform experiment called the Deseret Alphabet.
“There was very little information about the DA on the internet back then,” says Reynolds, “but enough that I finally learned what it was and where it came from. I found the first three readers [books of excerpts for language learners] on eBay and purchased them.”
Reynolds decided to create a space for people to learn. He founded a website and multiple online discussion forums.
This alternative alphabet was created more than a century ago and fell into obscurity shortly thereafter, but a modern enthusiast can download several Deseret fonts, translate between Deseret and Standard English directly on the web, or purchase a swath of transliterated paperback classics—from the The Federalist Papers and the U.S. constitution, to works of Shakespeare, P.G. Wodehouse, or Isaac Asimov. Indeed, a far greater number and variety of books are available in the Deseret Alphabet today than ever were in the time its implementation was seriously pursued. Due to its petite renaissance, fans of the popular webcomic XKCD can visit a website dedicated to transliterating each new post. And the alphabet was recently the official written language of the Republic of Molossia, a self-proclaimed micronation in Nevada.
In the summer of 1847, Brigham Young, future governor of Utah, reached the Salt Lake Valley with a portion of the over 70,000 Mormon settlers who would make an arduous trek of 1,300 miles to the arid mountain deserts of the Mexican territory. An open land with few neighbors appealed to the Mormons, many of whom were multinational refugees fleeing a tumultuous relationship with the United States after the murder of Joseph Smith, the founder of their Christian sect, by an angered mob in the state of Illinois.
Young had grand plans for the Mormon settlement. He mapped a proposed state comprising what is now Utah, and Nevada, parts of seven other states, and through to a section of the Pacific Coast. He named the state Deseret—a word from The Book of Mormon meaning “honeybee,” a symbol of community and industry seen on the Utah flag to this day. Before Deseret came under U.S. jurisdiction it had its own legislature, criminal code, tax laws, militia, and a new, alternative system of writing.
Work on the Deseret Alphabet began in the same year of the Mormon migration. The system was to simplify spelling by creating a distinct symbol for each unique sound in the English language. In January of 1854 The Deseret News printed the following:
“The Board of Regents, in company with the Governor and heads of departments, have adopted a new Alphabet, consisting of 38 characters. The Board have had frequent sittings this winter, with the sanguine hope of simplifying the English language, and especially its orthography. After many fruitless attempts to render the common alphabet of the day subservient to their purpose, they found it expedient to invent an entirely new and original set of characters.
These characters are much more simple in their structure than the usual alphabetical characters; every superfluous mark supposable, is wholly excluded from them. The written and printed hand and substantially merged in one.”
Ostensibly the alphabet was created as a beneficial reform. Young considered the “English language, in its written and printed form ... one of the most prominent now in use for absurdity.” And he felt it was overly complex and confusing to a population of immigrants with diverse linguistic backgrounds. Young further believed reading and writing could be taught more effectively in schools that used the new alphabet, granting ample time to be devoted to other studies.
Critics (both today and formerly) have protested that the Deseret Alphabet was created as a means of control—keeping the Mormon population from reading outside material and keeping non-Mormon settlers and officials from easily understanding church documents. However, alternative spelling experiments were not uncommon in the English speaking world in the 19th century, and records show that Young and the creators of the alphabet were hopeful its use would spread beyond Utah.
Work on the system continued—at an eventual price near $20,000 (approximately $544,880 adjusted for inflation) to the early church government. Utah became a U.S. territory and the alphabet was taught in some schools, used for road signs, a few books, coinage, on headstones, and even in the creation of an English-Hopi dictionary (Hopi is a Native American nation located primarily in Arizona).
Public interest in the alphabet was less than hoped, however, and use never became widespread. The railroad was soon to reach Utah and with it would come a myriad of settlers and travelers unfamiliar with the alphabet. After escalating cost projections and about a decade of promotion, official attempts to enforce the use of Deseret ceased.
Of course, record of this Mormon alphabet never disappeared completely and in the new millennium, the internet has galvanized the dormant experiment.
Marco Mora-Huizar has a fascination for foreign letters and has dedicated an Instagram account to the Deseret Alphabet.
A post shared by Deseret Alphabet (@deseretalphabet) on
“DA has a very alien feel to it,” he says, “ When I see a design I like, I like to imagine how it would look with DA instead of Roman letters.”
For others the connection is more spiritual. Claire Wilson writes in Deseret as a hobby. She was raised in Utah as a member of the Mormon faith, but no longer practices. “Writing in Deseret feels like one of the few ways I can connect to my ancestry and my cultural history without being directly involved with the church,” she says. “And that's important to me.”
Phonemic English-language alternatives like the Deseret Alphabet still face many of the same challenges they encountered during their height in the 19th century. The characters of the alphabet are sound-based and not classified discretely as vowels or consonants. Since the writing attempts to follow the sound exactly, confusion can result from differing pronunciation. For example, writing the word “Mormon” could be attempted differently by someone who says “mawr-men” versus someone who says “more-mon” and so on. Clarity can be further lost as pronunciation shifts over time.
Regional accents and dialects can also have a marked effect on writing. “I get tripped up all the time because of British pronunciation,” says Wilson, who now lives in London. “I spell things based on an American accent mostly because of the hard ‘R’ sounds which make it easier to read, but there are some sounds that Deseret doesn't have letters for, and some sounds it does have a letter for, but we don't use that sound anymore.”
The Mormons of Deseret were not the first group to attempt spelling reform—and calls for alternative spelling persist today. Advocates from Brigham Young to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens have all decried the perplexing lack of cohesion in English spelling. Renowned wordsmith George Bernard Shaw willed a portion of his life’s estate to fund the Shavian Alphabet. Tools to enact ubiquitous change are more capable ever, but so to has the global standing of English intensified. Reformers continue to plead for consistency and clarity in the face of anglophonic anarchy. Then, as now, the reply seems to be, “Go ghoti.”
Japan’s Tateyama Bay is home to a lifelong friendship—between a local diver and a fish named Yoriko.
The diver, Hiroyuki Arakawa, has long served as the de facto caretaker for an underwater Shinto shrine, and it is through these dives that he met Yoriko, an Asian sheepshead wrasse, over 25 years ago.
The pair's relationship soon blossomed into a full-blown friendship. Now, whenever Arakawa visits the shrine, he need only knock on a piece of a metal, and Yoriko immediately speeds over. In the video, Arakawa can be seen kissing Yoriko. His Facebook page is also full of selfies of the unlikely duo.
These human-fish friendships do not appear to be limited to Arakawa. A group of fisherman has also developed a relationship with local whale sharks.
Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
You hear it often: dating today doesn't work like it used to. Or: apps like Tinder have made flirting more distant.
But the process of staring, judging, and messaging potential suitors from afar—hallmarks of modern dating apps—is not new. Beginning in the 1920s, nightclub-goers in Berlin who feared face-to-face encounters could communicate with beautiful strangers from across the room.
All they needed to do? Turn to the nearest pneumatic tube.
Two nightclubs in particular—the Resi and the Femina—pioneered the trend. At the Resi (also called the Residenz-Casino), a large nightclub with a live band and a dance floor that held 1,000 people, an elaborate system of table phones and pneumatic tubes allowed for anonymous, late-night flirtation between complete strangers.
A Chicago Tribune article describes the Resi's "nightly ‘spectacular’—‘a dancing water ballet’ with jets of water rising and falling to a recorded symphony while colored lights flash.” The water-jet ballet, now known as a “Waltzing Water,” began in 1928 and drew in many visitors.
But the Tribune article refers to the system of phones and pneumatic tubes at each table as the Resi’s “big lure."
Phones were fixed to individual tables, and above many was a lighted number. Singles needed only to look around the room until a fetching stranger caught their eye, note the number, and then direct a message to that table. "Lonesome Americans, and others, can call or send a note to equally lonesome women who look like they would enjoy company," the article noted.
In 1931, during the heyday of this across-the-nightclub flirtation, The Berliner Herold described the process of receiving a call from an amorous stranger: “the tabletop telephones buzzed, and the acquaintance with the blonde, raven-haired or redheaded, monocle-wearing beauty was made, one was no longer alone, and had twice as much fun.” (At the Ballhaus Berlin, this numbered phone system still lives today—check out photos here.)
Similar systems thrived at the Femina, the larger of the two nightclubs, which boasted more than 2,000 seats, “two large bars and a smaller one in the vestibule, in addition to three orchestras, a hydraulic dance floor," and over 225 table telephones, which were accompanied by instructions in both German and English.
But for those who were too shy to pick up the phone, the pneumatic tubes offered a perfect alternative. The tubes were built into the handrails, and one was located at each table. The nightclub provided paper on which to scrawl notes. Patrons only had to specify where they wanted their missives sent. Like messaging on a dating app, but with—you know—tubes.
The pneumatic tube system existed for decades, and Americans who visited Berlin after World War II remember it fondly.
Today, many fictionalized accounts memorialize it: Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton describes how visitors could “write a message, stick it in the snake’s head, yank on the handle and the pneumatic tube would whisk it up to the top gallery and they’d redirect it to the right table.” (Cabaret, meanwhile, tributes the table phone system in “The Telephone Song.”) Ian McEwan’s novel The Innocent also offers an evocative tribute. When his main character, Leonard, visits a fictionalized version of the Resi nightclub, the protagonist finds a pamphlet that boasts the establishment’s "Modern Table-Phone-System" and "Pneumatic-Table-Mail-Service,” which sends “every night thousands of letters or little presents from one visitor to another.”
This "table mail service" was real, and allowed patrons to send more than just a handwritten note to that handsome stranger across the way. The Resi offered a long menu of gifts that visitors could dispatch via pneumatic tube—including perfume bottles, cigar cutters, travel plans, and, according to one source, cocaine.
Maine, unlike most states, is a “control state,” meaning the state government maintains some level of monopolistic control over the distribution and/or sale of alcohol. What this also means is that Maine has extremely precise records of exactly what Mainers are drinking. It’s how we know that of the 10 most popular bottles of alcohol sold in the state in 2016, three of them are just different sizes of the same booze.
It would be reasonable to expect that brand to be, say, Jack Daniels or Smirnoff or Bacardi, something like that. It’s not. The most popular liquor in Maine by an extremely large margin—nearly two-and-a-half times as popular as the second-most, in terms of number of cases sold—is a coffee-flavored liqueur called Allen’s Coffee Brandy.
Allen’s is not a brandy, exactly; strictly speaking, a brandy is a spirit made by distilling wine. Allen’s is technically a liqueur, a neutral grain spirit like Everclear that’s been mixed with flavorings and sugar. Coffee-flavored liqueurs are not particularly popular in most of the U.S. In other control states, like Oregon and Pennsylvania, the only liqueur to make the top 10 list during the last two years is Fireball, a cinnamon-whiskey liqueur (it ranks fourth in Maine).
Even weirder, Allen’s isn’t even from Maine—it’s produced in Massachusetts, just outside Boston. And yet, the manufacturer tells me, 85 percent of the Allen’s they produce is sold in Maine. So why is a Massachusetts-produced coffee liqueur more popular in Maine than any vodka or whiskey?
“It very much started, as the lore goes—and there's always stories told about cocktails that aren't really verifiable because people are drinking and not writing stuff down—that Allen's started as something the lobstermen would take out with them and put in their coffee as they went out on the water at three, four in the morning,” says Andrew Volk, the owner of Portland Hunt and Alpine Club, a cocktail bar in Portland, Maine, that uses Allen’s in some of its signature drinks.
M.S. Walker, the parent company of Allen’s, is a wholesale distributor that started making its own liquors shortly after it was founded in 1933. Allen’s, as a brand, was created “in the late 1960s,” according to an email sent to me by an M.S. Walker representative. “Our founder Maurice Walker’s daughter Ruth married Leo Allen—and Allen’s brand was born,” he writes. It’s made of a neutral citrus-based liqueur, mixed with coffee extract.
Allen’s is rarely drunk straight. Much more common is either to pour some into a cup of coffee, or to mix with milk in a pint glass over ice. The latter can be ordered in any of several ways. “Allen’s and milk” would be pretty standard, but other names, like “fat ass in a glass,” “moose milk,” “sombrero,” “leg spreadah,” or any of a dozen more creative options can be heard throughout the state. My favorite is “lily of the tundra,” a riff on the lily-of-the-valley, a flower native to northern Europe. The lily-of-the-valley is pretty and smells intoxicatingly sweet, but it’s also incredibly poisonous.
Allen’s is very sweet and lightly caffeinated, with a bitter taste of burnt coffee. “It's made inexpensively, not made to be consumed on its own,” says Volk. “There's a funny copper edge to it on the finish, but that's why it's something you mix with milk or coffee, something to coat your palate and cover up that funny aftertaste.” Allen’s costs about nine dollars for a 1.75 liter bottle. At 30 percent alcohol by volume, it’s not quite as strong as whiskey or vodka, but it’s not that far off. “Anybody that grew up in Maine knows Allen's, anybody that moves here quickly discovers Allen's. It's a part of the cultural tapestry of Maine,” says Volk.
There are pockets around the world where a particular unusual liqueur, like Vana Tallinn in Estonia, takes the place of dirt-cheap vodka or malt liquor as a go-to cheap buzz. It’s the combination of the low price and the particular sway that coffee has over New England that’s allowed Allen’s to become such a major seller in Maine.
“New England in general I think has a real thing for wonderfully strong, mediocre coffee, and I think the obsession with Dunkin [Donuts] highlights that,” says Volk. A Men’s Health ranking from 2014 measured variables like the amount of money a household spent on coffee, number of coffee shops per capita, and percentage of people who drink more than five cups a day in order to find the most “coffee-obsessed” cities in the U.S. The top three, in ascending order, were Burlington, Vermont; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Portland, Maine. Seattle ranked ninth.
It’s tricky to explain exactly why New Englanders drink so much coffee. One reason might be that winter in Maine lasts about seven months, and it’s nice to have something warm to drink. There’s also the possible influence of a Puritan, blue-collar work ethic. Coffee is a beverage you drink to get things done; it is not, at least in New England, an occasion to sit around and chat, the way tea is in the Commonwealth of Nations. Coffee is an indicator of work.
As with any cheap, popular alcohol, there are horror stories associated with Allen’s. After the Four Loko controversy in 2010, Allen’s quickly dismissed any accusations that it, too, is a dangerous caffeinated drink—the caffeine level in Allen’s is likely pretty low—but it still pops up in crimes across the state. Most, though, argue that Allen’s simply happens to be popular, that there’s nothing in particular about it that’s dangerous.
Allen’s hasn’t been reclaimed by the new breed of mixologists in any substantial numbers, really. Volk is one of the few using it in modern cocktails in Maine. “From kind of the cocktail geek, cocktail bartender perspective, you can treat it like any other coffee liqueur out there,” he says. “It just has this cultural background to it, this ingrained history in Maine.” The Hunt and Alpine Club serves a version of a revolver, a cocktail consisting of bourbon and coffee liqueur, with Allen’s, as well as a coffee martini (cold brew coffee concentrate from local coffee shop Tandem, run, and Allen’s) that’s always on the menu. “For us it's not like oooh, let's play with this thing—it's not at all a joke,” says Volk. “It's a good product, there's this cool connection to it, we're happy to serve it.”
For better or worse, there is a long list of things that artificial intelligence is still unable to do. But we can finally scratch “naming guinea pigs” off of that list, because an animal shelter in Portland, Oregon recently proved that AI may produce the cutest names of all.
As The Mary Sue is reporting, the Portland Guinea Pig Rescue (PGPR) recently tasked a neural network with naming a group of the little fuzzballs. The organization contacted scientist Janelle Shane, who had worked with teaching neural networks in the past, asking her if she could purpose such computer thinking towards coming up with guinea pig names. As Shane outlined on her blog, she entered in over 600 existing guinea pig names, provided to her by the PGPR, and ran them through an open-source neural network. The new names that the computer produced were truly delightful.
Based on the input names, which were taken from a list of all the names of the guinea pigs the PGPR has ever given over for adoption, as well as some names taken from the internet, the crude AI dreamt up names like Hanger Dan, After Pie, Fuzzable, Stargoon, Stoomy Brown, Princess Pow, and Spockers. Many of the names were immediately given to some of the PGPR’s rescues (which can be adopted here).
But it wasn’t all perfect cuteness forever. Some of the less popular names produced from the experiment include, Pot, Fusty, Fleshy, Butty Brlomy, and Bho8otteeddeeceul.
The hope is that by giving the guinea pigs mathematically cuter names, they will have a higher chance of being adopted, and the PGPR is expected to continue using the algorithm to devise new names. We can only hope.
For decades in the Bering Sea off Alaska, fishermen have been contending with killer whales who stalk their boats and steal their catch. This behavior can amount to thousands of pounds of lost halibut and cod. But in recent years, according to Alaska Dispatch News, the problem has seemingly gotten worse. That's because dozens of killer whales seem to be attacking specific boats, eating their catch and threatening some fishermen's livelihoods.
"It's kind of like a primordial struggle," one fishermen told the Dispatch News, while another compared the whales to a "motorcycle gang" in an interview with the National Post.
The whales have been attacking longliners, fishermen who use one long line with many hooks that's propped up across the water by buoys, a situation that probably represents an inviting buffet for whales. The whales are persistent, surrounding one boat for hours, even after its captain had shut the engine off.
“You’d see two of them show up, and that’s the end of the trip," John McHenry, owner of the F/V Seymour, told the Post (F/V, of course, stands for fishing vessel). "Pretty soon all 40 of them would be around you."
So what to do? Fishermen have tried sonars designed to deter the whales, but those haven't worked. Some have resorted to using pots, or traps, to catch fish, but that approach can be expensive and isn't allowed for some types of fish in certain federal fisheries.
All of which means the longliners, for now, will have to keep trying their luck.
"It’s unfortunate the orcas are putting us out of business," McHenry told the Post, "because they’re really a phenomenal mammal."
A couple weeks ago, some boaters on the Red River near Shreveport, Louisiana, came upon an abandoned dugout canoe just off the shore. It was carved from the trunk of a tree and didn't quite survive the intervening years completely intact, but the outlines of what it once was were clear. Canoes like this one are among the most common types of archaic vessels to be found in modern days, since big hunks of wood tend to age pretty well.
State archaeologists later visited the site and took its measurements. The canoe was 33 feet long and about three feet at its widest, meaning that it was big enough for a sizable crew. Archaeologists are now using radiocarbon dating to determine the boat's age and confirm suspicions that it was built by American Indians.
According to the Louisiana Office of Cultural Development, the canoe has since been given to the state of Louisiana by the owners of the land where it was found. The dugout will now be restored and eventually displayed locally. Authorities were in the process of removing the canoe Wednesday.
As the Office of Cultural Development wrote on Facebook, "That was one big tree!"
Three years after he started to study telepathy, on August 20, 1922, Bernard Bernardovich Kazhinskiy arrived as part of a four-man delegation at the labs of Vladimir L. Durov, Russia’s most famous animal trainer. Durov was almost 60, and he'd spent most of his life in the circus. At first, he had been a trapeze artist and clown, but as the years passed, his act began to focus on animals—dogs, monkeys, ducks, geese, goats, guinea pigs, bears, lions.
Over time, Durov became known for his ability to communicate with trained animals by “mental suggestion,” which was exactly what interested Kazhinskiy. He wanted to unlock the mysteries of what he called “biological radio communications,” and Durov and dogs seemed like the perfect candidates for the animal experiments he wanted to conduct. Under the Soviet government, Durov’s home had become a center for research on animal psychology, and that day, after the head of the delegation kissed Durov in greeting and made introductions, everyone agreed—Kazhinskiy would come work in Durov’s lab.
Over the course of about two years, Durov and Kazhinskiy would conduct close to 1,300 experiments testing telepathic commands on dogs. This line of research would come to have more importance than most investigations of psychic phenomena: In the decades that followed, it would lead into a Cold War battle to obtain unconventional weapons, during which both sides tried to enhance military parapsychological capabilities and, most famously, America experimented with “men who stared at goats” in order to try to stop their hearts. As Kazhinskiy noted in his 1962 report on his work, the U.S. would eventually become quite interested in telepathy, but "it appears that the main reason... is that the results might be of great military significance."
In the 1920s, though, Kazhinskiy wanted only to see if Durov could psychically communicate simple ideas to his dogs. According to Kazhinskiy’s later report, translated in the 1960s by the U.S. Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division, they succeeded.
Kazhinskiy had started his career as an electrical engineer working in radio research, but he had also been fascinated by the possibility that living creatures could broadcast information by some radio-like means. “I had to find in the human organism the elements that were structurally and functionally similar to the basic components of a transmitting and receiving radio station,” he wrote in his book, Biological Radio Communications. “I had to make a thorough study of the nervous system.”
Kazhinskiy wasn’t the only Soviet scientist interested in this line of research, as Wladimir Veminski writes in Homo Sovieticus, a newly translated exploration of “Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny” in the Soviet era. A few years before Kazhinskiy joined Durov’s lab, another scientist, Vladimir M. Bekhterev, a rival of Ivan Pavlov, had presented Durov’s work at the Institute for Brain Research, describing his technique for transmitting the commands. Nor were the Russians the only ones investigating dogs’ psychic connections: in Germany, around the same time, one wealthy parapsychology enthusiast tried to measure the psychic bond between man and dog.
To use his mind to give a command to a dog, Durov would start by looking deeply into the dog’s eyes. He would direct all his mental powers toward imagining the exact task the dog was to perform, as if he were looking through the dog’s own eyes. After implanting the idea in the dog’s brain, Durov would give the order to act it out.
Here’s how he described giving a telepathic command to a dog named Mars: “I look into Mars’ eyes or, rather, very deep into his eyes and beyond them. I make passes at the dog, stroking him slightly on the sides of his head, above the mouth, the shoulders, barely touching his fur… The dog points his nose almost vertically, as if it were falling into a trance. My movements deprive the dog of all his will, and he remains in such a state as if he were part of my internal ‘ego.’ A communication or ‘psychic contact’ has thus been established between my thoughts and Mars’ subconsciousness.”
According to his memoir, Durov first experienced his power to affect dogs this way under dramatic circumstances. When he was young, he bet his friends that he could go into an abandoned house where a dangerous dog was kept locked up and the dog would not touch him. When he entered the dog rushed at him, but Durov caught his eye and kept it. The dog slowed, stopped, and retreated, as Durov mentally compelled him to stay back. Durov left the house safe, untouched by the dog, and immediately passed out. (It's possible, of course, that Durov managed to influence the dog with his body language, not with telepathic powers. In his book, Kazhinskiy does mention that telepathy has skeptics, but he doesn't seem to consider any other possible explanations for the phenomena he's observing. Those skeptics, too, are often convinced to Kazhinskiy's side after seeing the results of his experiments.)
In his time with the animal trainer, Kazhinskiy documented 1,278 experiments on telepathic dog training over 20 months.
In one experiment, on November 17, 1922, Durov and another experimenter choose an object for a dog (Mars, again) to fetch—a telephone book in a room down the hall from the lab. The first time Durov tried to tell Mars to get the book, the dog ran from the armchair where he was seated to the middle of the room. The second time, the dog tried to close the room’s door. The third time, though, he went through the door, into the hallway, into the other room, and searched about. When he found the telephone book, he grabbed it in his mouth and brought it back to the original room. “Despite the first two unsuccessful attempts, the experiment must be considered as highly successful,” Kazhinskiy writes.
In another set of experiments with a different dog, Pikki, the researchers brought the animal to an unfamiliar apartment and gave him a series of telepathic commands. Following Durov’s mental instructions, he performed a series of tasks; for instance, he “jumped off the chair, ran to the chair near the wall and just as quickly jumped up on the round table and, standing on his hind legs, reached the lower part of the portrait and began to scratch it with his paws.”
Kazhinskiy also built a Faraday cage, which interrupts the transmission of electrical signals, to test his theory about how Durov was communicating telepathically with the dogs. He had the trainer try his mental command strategy while sitting inside the shut cage and with the door open. “The very first trial tests revealed that my assumptions had been correct,” Kazhinskiy writes. “When the cage door was closed, V.L. Durov sitting inside was unable to transmit to the test animal (the dog Mars) outside a mental assignment. But as soon as the door was opened, Mars carried out every order with precision.”
Overall, Kazhinsky reports, 696 of their experiments with mental suggestions to dogs were successful; 582 were not. According to a zoologist/statistician at Moscow State University, an analysis of the results showed that “the dogs’ responses were not accidental but produced under the influence of the experimenters.” Telepathy apparently worked. With dogs, at least.
In one experiment, though, Kazhinskiy had Durov experiment on him.
“Compel me mentally to make some movement, I am curious to know what I will think in the process,” Kazhinskiy told Durov. “Can you do it?”
“Easily,” Durov said. “You just sit quietly.”
They were sitting alone, across from each other at a table, and Durov wrote down a command on a piece of paper. The two men locked eyes.
“I didn’t feel anything in particular, but suddenly and automatically I touched the skin behind my ear with the fingers of my right hand,” Kazhinskiy writes.
Immediately Durov handed him the piece of paper, on which he had written, “Scratch behind your right ear.”
These experiments had an innocence and exuberance to them: Kazhinskiy seems to be motivated by the pure spirit of scientific industry. But as conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union arose following World War II, both sides would try to harness this type of telepathic power for more nefarious means, including long-distance psychic spying and the aforementioned goat assassinations. None were as successful as a Durov’s dog experiments were reported to be, though. Since the 1920s, there has been no revolution in telepathic dog training; later investigations have come up short. Perhaps Durov had some special mental powers; perhaps he was a very, very good animal trainer. These experiments do seem easily replicable, though. If you succeed in transmitting a telepathic command to a dog... let us know?
Recently, a team for Scottish Water Horizons was installing a field of solar panels at a former military site, one of 12 air stations of the Royal Flying Corps. The station had been moved to this location in 1913 and was meant to protect nearby Navy bases. It’s said to be haunted by Lieutenant Desmond Arthur, who died here in a plane crash in 1913.
The local council had warned that there might be munitions or radioactive material on the side. But as they cut back the overgrowth, the crew was surprised to find a hidden air raid shelter, which no one knew was there. They cleared the area around the shelter and reconfigured their solar panel plan to accommodate this surprise structure.
That was the only surprise, though; despite the warnings of the site’s haunted past, Lt. Arthur never showed up.
People really love their Genovese pesto. And after hundreds of jars have been confiscated at Genoa's Cristoforo Colombo Airport security checkpoint, the airport has decided to amend its 100ml liquid carry-on limit to exclude the pesto jars.
Now travelers can bring aboard any amount of pesto under 500 grams, just as long as they make a donation to the Flying Angels charity, which helps fund the air transportation of sick children. The pesto may also undergo an X-ray for extra security.
The airport launched the new program, appropriately entitled "Il pesto è buono" (Pesto is good), on June 1. Already, more than 500 people have had their pesto dreams fulfilled.
The one catch? The airport's waiver only applies to pesto that is Genovese.
Plenty of people sing the praises of old homes—they're better-constructed, they're hand-crafted, they've weathered storm after storm. If you want a house that has truly stood the test of time, though, try 406 Swedesboro Road in Gibbstown, New Jersey.
There, surrounded by decidedly younger homes, stands what is largely considered to be the oldest log cabin in the United States—a one-room structure built by Finnish immigrants sometime around 1638. And for the first time in centuries, it's for sale.
Since 1968, the cabin has been stewarded by Doris and Harry Rink, who live in an 18th-century house attached to it. The Rinks restored much of the cabin to near-original condition—when they took it over, someone had plastered the interior walls, and "you couldn't see any of the original logs," Harry told the New York Times in 2000.
They have set up the cabin as a small museum, and give regular tours to visitors. When necessary, they make historically accurate repairs, filling cracks in the wood with special clay that they bring in from a farm 20 miles away.
Although no one is quite sure exactly who first made the cabin, they clearly did a bang-up job—"the person who built it was an artist," Rink told the Times. Even after it is sold, the Rinks will continue to take care of the cabin, and to give tours.
Besides its sheer longevity, the cabin has a number of clever features, including "double-dovetail" construction that eliminated the need for nails, and a sleeping nook for children accessible by ladder. They even built in a sort of 17th-century air conditioning: two removable logs in one side wall, which can be taken out on hot days to let a breeze through.
They were also likely rich, as the cabin measures 16 by 22 feet, much larger than the 12x12 size standard for families at the time. They might be glad to know that their investment has appreciated greatly—the cabin is currently for sale for $2.9 million.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
On Tuesday, crews removed a Confederate statue known as "Johnny Reb" from a park in Orlando, Florida. It had stood there for 100 years in honor of the soldiers who fought for slavery and the confederacy.
What they didn't expect to find was a time capsule, also thought to be around the same age, in the statue's base. And while the statue will be moved to a nearby cemetery, officials are still trying to figure out what to do with the time capsule, even as a local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy told WKMG on Wednesday that it should be theirs.
The capsule was likely placed in the statue's base in 1911 when Johnny Reb was erected on Magnolia Avenue. The statue was moved to nearby Lake Eola Park in 1917.
"We're saying that we paid for everything so we have a right to get/have the box back, regardless of what's in it," Patricia Schnurr, a United Daughters of the Confederacy member, told WKMG.
The dispute has meant that no one has opened the time capsule, but Schnurr said she's knows what's in it, based on organizational records. There's a Confederate battle flag (likely similar to this one, if you're curious) in addition to some Confederate money and a framed picture of General Robert E. Lee, Schnurr said.
The city of Orlando, for its part, said they will take their time deciding ownership, meaning we may not know exactly what's inside the capsule for awhile.
"While there isn't an official blueprint that exists for opening a time capsule, what we do know is that this is not a process we are going to rush," a spokeswoman for the Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer told Orlando Weekly.
Scattered across the United States are the remnants of a great battle that started over a century ago. Dozens of towns and cities joined the fray, duking it out for an honor like no other: to be the home of the largest chair in the world.
The first of these giant American seats was built in 1905 by the town of Gardner, Massachusetts. It was erected to showcase the town’s chair-making prowess and attract more tourists and furniture shoppers. Its title was eventually challenged, and the race really kicked into gear with the road transportation boom of the 1930s and after Guinness started recording incredible feats around the world in the 1950s.
Though the Guinness title was for the biggest chair in the world (determined by height—from the ground to the top of the back rest), the race particularly took hold in America, where the super-sized roadside attractions were a surefire way to catch the attention of drivers cruising by on the new highways that criss-crossed the country.
The mid-20th century saw the baton being passed around from chair to chair. Towns and businesses built taller and taller chairs with the express purpose of defeating the previous title holder by a foot or two. It was not enough to have a giant chair, it had to be the largest, and this became a point of local pride—not to mention a great tourism ploy.
The race eventually diversified into biggest chairs of different categories: There's now an official Guinness designation for folding chairs, rocking chairs, Duncan Phyfe chairs, upholstered chairs, jiaoyi chairs, camping chairs, beach/deck chairs, and so on. (Not all of these have current title holders.)
But in recent years, many of the erstwhile American contenders for the throne have been bested by towering furniture creations in other countries, especially in Europe. The current Guinness record has been held for more than three years by a bright red chair in St. Florian, Austria. It stands at a whopping 98.5 feet—more than 40 feet taller than the largest in the States, a 56-foot rocking chair in Casey, Illinois. Before that, the title was clinched by an 85-foot chair in Spain and a 65-foot chair in Italy, both in the early 2000s.
Despite America's dethronement on the world stage, you can still see dozens of these once record-breaking and otherwise giant chairs at their original sites, with plaques celebrating their days of glory. Here are five places where you can spot these remarkably large seats on your next U.S. road trip.
Gardner has, for over a century, always had a giant chair on display. The current chair, measuring 20 feet and 6 inches tall, was constructed in 1976 for the city’s bicentennial. The mahogany chair briefly brought the world title back to the "Chair City," though for the final time. The chair was afflicted with rot in the 1990s but was saved from destruction, and is still a local landmark.
The honor of the largest chair on Earth may have slipped out of American hands, but the largest rocker still rules on in the Midwest. Casey, which has created a reputation for its "Big Things in a Small Town," holds the current Guinness record for the world's largest rocking chair (among several other world records). For the chair to claim the title, it had to be proven to actually rock, and it took 10 people to move the mammoth piece of furniture. At over 56 feet tall, the super-sized rocker is also the largest chair in the U.S.
When Casey's record was awarded, it was bad news for another giant rocking chair, located off the iconic Route 66 in the town of Cuba. This one stands next to a Fanning Outpost complex with an archery range, a taxidermy shop, and a general store (with no apparent furniture connections). It was built in 2008 at a height of 42 feet, in order break the world record and drum up more traffic. It is only open for people to sit one day a year, known obviously as “Picture on Rocker Day.” A lift is hired to raise people up onto the seat.
In 1981, facing a crowded race for the world's largest chair, the folks at Miller’s Office Furniture in Anniston made a strategic decision. They put up a giant version of one of their office chairs, super-sized by simply converting inches to feet, in an empty lot next to the showroom. At 33 feet tall, it was declared the world’s largest office chair by Guinness. After a brief move, the chair is now back to its original location, and its owners say it is there to stay.
The Washington, D.C. furniture company Curtis Brothers Furniture built The Big Chair of Anacostia in 1959 to advertise the neighborhood business. Calling it the "World’s Largest Chair," they also took the structure's fame to the next level by getting a local artist to live on the chair for 42 straight days without ever coming down. The chair was originally made out of wood but after years of being battered by the elements, the monument became unstable and had to be deconstructed for repairs. It was rebuilt with aluminum so that the oversized piece would last for future generations to enjoy.
In the beginning there was a pile of leaves and a cave floor. Sleep was punctured by an orchestra of nocturnal sounds: the murmuring, snoring, farting, rustling, and heavy-breathing of many bodies packed together in slumber. They emanated equal parts warmth and stench. But together they passed another night in safety. And it was good.
Sleep has been a communal activity for millennia. In the days before central heating and alarm systems, bedmates were a necessity. Entire families would pack together on a single mattress (plus guests), servants often slept alongside their mistresses, and strangers frequently shared a bed while traveling.
While people have always needed a place to sleep, beds themselves are a relatively new concept. Beds remained glorified piles of leaves for a shockingly long period of time. The wheel was invented, animals were domesticated, societies were founded, and still, for most people, a bed was some meager bit of cloth providing the most basic level of separation between them and the cold, hard ground. In the grand houses of medieval Europe, much of the household gathered in the great hall to pass the night on blankets or cloaks. If they were lucky, they literally hit the hay—which they stuffed into a sack and used as a mattress.
By the 15th century, beds in affluent homes were beginning to take on their modern form. They had wooden frames and other sleeping accoutrements, like pillows, sheets, blankets, and even a mattress. As historian Lucy Worsley points out in her book If Walls Could Talk, sleeping alone in a grand 16th-century English bed would have been a rather lonely experience. The wealthy had acquired a taste for beds, and they built them big, elevated, canopied, and curtained. In fact, the bed was often the most expensive item in the home—therefore few but the richest could afford more than one. This meant that entire families sometimes shared one bed, as well as the covers. People were not discomfited by this, especially not in poor households where the communal bed offered families a rare place to gather and bond.
Communal sleeping was not restricted to the nuclear family. Mistresses sometimes shared their beds with female servants to protect them from the unwanted advances of male members of the household. Many servants slept at the foot of their master's beds (no matter what bedtime activity was happening in that bed).
But if anyone were to get any kind of rest while sleeping next to others, lines had to be drawn and rules applied. Large families assigned spots to each member according to age and gender. The British called this “to pig.” In his book, At Day’s Close, historian A. Roger Ekirch recounts how one 19th-century Irish family slept in birth order with the mother and sisters on one side of the bed and father and brothers on the other, followed by the odd guest or traveling peddler.
It was not uncommon for strangers and traveling companions to share a bed while on the road. Etiquette dictated that to ensure relative tranquility when sharing a bed with strangers, a bedmate was to lie still, not hog the blankets, and generally keep to one’s self. But that didn’t always work. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams spent a night sharing a bed at a New Jersey inn which was largely passed bickering over whether to keep the window open or closed.
Clearly, privacy in pre-industrial America and Europe was in short supply. Most people did everything under the gaze of others. They slept, ate, and attended to personal matters, all in the presence of their family members, servants, and farm animals.
Private moments were snatched whenever and wherever they could be. And that often happened in bed. Away from the prying eyes of servants and neighbors, siblings whispered secrets in each other’s ears and husbands and wives engaged in candid conversation. The bed acted as a kind of neutral territory between couples. Ekirch writes that it was a place where women found rare moments of autonomy within the patriarchal household. “Sexual boundaries were redrawn. Lying abed in the dark encouraged wives to express concerns unsuited to other hours.”
Bed-sharing had other perks, too. It was an opportunity to transgress social norms. Male servants who shared a bed sometimes engaged in sexual relations, and it was not unusual for illegitimate babies to be conceived when male and female servants became bedmates. The hierarchical relationship between mistresses and their female servants softened and loosened when they shared a bed.
So who finally put an end to communal sleeping? The Victorians.
The Victorian home abounded with rooms and was bisected into the realms of servants and masters. This marked a shift toward privacy that had been slowly taking place over the past two centuries. Individual bedrooms were assigned to each family member, and gradually the idea that communal sleeping was improper and downright immoral took hold and trickled down to the lower classes.
These separate spheres extended to the marital realm. Couples now not only had their own rooms, but their own beds as well. This offered the appearance of propriety that Victorians coveted. However, there was an even greater reason that his-and-her beds came into vogue: disease.
During the mid 19th-century, there were many anxieties about public health. It was thought that diseases generated spontaneously where foul water and air lived, and a sleeping body was a prime offender.
In her housekeeping guide published in 1892, Mrs. Elizabeth F. Holt warned readers that “the air which surrounds the body under the bed clothing is exceedingly impure, being impregnated with the poisonous substances which have escaped through the pores of the skin.” There were other health concerns, too. One Dr. B. W. Richardson writing in 1880, advised that children not share a bed with an adult because the aged suck the “vital warmth” from children. Also, no wants to deal with “heavy” and “disagreeable” morning breath.
Separate beds had other benefits as well. The late 19th-century saw the advent of the “new woman.” She no longer wanted to be subservient to her husband and she actively claimed a new level of autonomy within her marriage. This shift was displayed in the middle-class bedroom where sexual boundaries were redrawn once again. In the grand old debauched marriage bed, wives were always available to their husbands. Separate beds marked an equipoise between the couple. “Twin beds are visually equal to each other; they take up the same amount of space,” says Hilary Hinds who authored an article titled“Together and Apart: Twin Beds, Domestic Hygiene and Modern Marriage, 1890-1945.”“There’s a kind of pause between one bed and the other. There would have to be some kind of conscious negotiation, or at least some conscious decision to move from one to the other.”
Twin marital beds had a good run. After the Second World War, working wives returned to the home and there was a greater emphasis on family togetherness. “There began to be a turn against twin beds as somehow dividing the couple at the point where they needed to be at their closest and their most intimate,” says Hinds. Well into the 1960s, Sears and other large department stores in both America and England, advertised twin beds for middle class married couples. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that a consensus was reached: “Twin beds were old-fashioned and unhealthy and prudish,” Hinds says. “No self-respecting couple would willingly embrace twin beds from now on.”
Recent research out of Ryerson University in Toronto supports Dr. Richardson’s assertion that couples sleep better when they sleep apart. In Canada, it’s estimated that as many as 30 to 40 percent of couples are embracing the idea. But the stigma of the twin bed remains strong. “I don’t think there is going to be any revival in twin beds any time soon,” offers Hinds. So communal sleeping lives on, but only for couples. Everyone else is fated to sleep alone.
