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The Grocery Stocker Who Makes Hypnotic Vegetable Designs

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At a Festival grocery store in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, there's artwork in the vegetable aisle. Though it changes daily, it's always in the same place: between the parsley and the Swiss chard. Scallions form broad white and green lines, while rosy radishes add curves of color. Bell peppers may break up the abstract designs or the inner shading of initials, or flowers may bloom from between the vegetables. The designs are the work of a produce stocker who (for privacy reasons) gives his name simply as Brad.

The designs started off as a work requirement, Brad says. Many Festival grocery stores try to arrange their produce attractively, and he was asked to do the same with the scallions and endives in the "wet wall" of vegetables. "This is the one area where you have the ability to exercise your own creativity," he recalls being told. Without any art or design training—other than a past habit of sketching—he was slightly intimidated. But he came to enjoy it. "It's the one good part of my day," he says.

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His designs vary. Some days he makes abstractions of jagged lines or floating circles. On holidays, he might make a cabbagey Christmas tree, a "W" for International Women's Day, or a Valentine's Day heart that is split in two by a scallion. Brad sometimes creates initials to honor musicians he loves, such as "DB" on the birthday of David Bowie or "DO" on the death of Cranberries singer Dolores O'Riordan. Brad says that artist Georgia O'Keefe, whose paintings often had a vegetal quality, is an influence. As a Madison native, he also points out that O'Keefe was from Wisconsin.

Brad thinks of his creations as an artistic piece, especially when they are perfectly arranged at the beginning of the day. After photos of his vegetable designs were sent to corporate management, he says, some other stores started emulating his style. After hearing that photos of his work were online, he started posting his designs on Instagram.

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"The best reactions I get are from customers," he says. Compared to past jobs, "doing this work was the first time people would stop, smile, and give me nice comments on the beauty of my work." The designs have even inspired him to pursue art outside of work, in the form of ink drawings and watercolors. Though he often has to complete his produce designs quickly, he sketches some designs far in advance.

"Despite my low wages, it's nice to make people smile," Brad adds.

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In 1933, Four Cows Went to Antarctica

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Guests of New York City’s Commodore Hotel in the 1930s were used to spotting celebrities. But on May 15, 1935, they were joined by two true heavyweights. Around lunchtime, a cow and a bull were wheeled out of a freight elevator and into the East Ballroom, where they mingled with guests and posed for photos. "Both had hay cocktails—heaps of hay with cracked ice," explained the New York Times, which covered the event. Despite this delicacy, they grew restless: "Iceberg [the bull]... grunted vociferously," the Times reported. "Foremost Southern Girl [was] also indifferent to the speeches."

No one likes to be ignored, even by a cow. But the speakers and the hay-bartenders were likely sympathetic. These two animals, more than most, were used to adventure: Just days before, they had returned from a two-year trip to Antarctica, where they and a couple of other cows had been part of an expedition led by Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd.

What drives someone to bring cows to the bottom of the world? In the press, Byrd gave one main reason: milk. "Admiral Byrd drinks two quarts of Guernsey milk daily," one article explained. Another said that although Byrd had brought plenty of dried and evaporated milk on his first expedition to the continent, the crew missed the real thing.

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But as Antarctic scholars Elizabeth Leane and Hanne E.F. Nielsen detail in a recent paper, Byrd likely had other motives, too. One was publicity: While Byrd initially gained fame for his feats of derring-do—becoming the first person to fly over the South Pole, for example—this expedition was a bit more staid. It focused on scientific endeavors, including meteor-spotting and ice-cap-measuring, rather than dramatic stunts. “[The cows] added some novelty and newsworthiness to an expedition which, in contrast to Byrd’s first Antarctic venture, threatened to be a little dull,” Leane and Nielsen write. More news coverage meant more sponsorships, and more chances to raise money in the future.

Another impetus, they argue, was more symbolic. Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as other countries scrapped for territory at the bottom of the world, the United States had fallen a bit behind. By the time the 1920s and '30s came around, nations including France, Argentina and Great Britain had claimed chunks of the continent, and America found itself at a bit of a geographic disadvantage: even the base Byrd had established during his first trip was on land the British considered their own. To that end, Leane and Nieslen write, Byrd had purposefully styled said base "in the form of a frontier town," calling back to the the U.S.'s colonial-era pushes into (supposedly) unknown territory. He called it "Little America." And what was a little America without a little dairy farm?

And so—for all these reasons, and perhaps more—in the fall of 1933, the team loaded a trio of Guernsey cows into the SS Jacob Ruppert. There was "Foremost Southern Girl," from New York, "Deerfoot Guernsey Maid," from Massachusetts, and "Klondike Gay Nira," from North Carolina, who was pregnant. All were the same breed, thanks to a deal Byrd had struck up with the American Guernsey Cattle Club. The crew's carpenter, Edward Cox, shouldered the caretaking responsibilities. A bevy of other sponsors provided the cows with some necessary accoutrements: 10 tons of feed, various farm equipment, and a Surge Milking Machine.

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The cows took the three-month journey alongside their human companions, living first in a knocked-together stall on the deck, and later, after it was completed, in a larger barn below. There was hope that Klondike would give birth within the Antarctic Circle, giving her calf "a unique claim to immortality," as Byrd put it in his memoir of the expedition. Instead, it happened about 250 miles too far north. Still, this proved more thrilling than the frozen surrounds: "Almost to a man the crew waited with breathless expectancy for an event which has been common in Nature since the world began," Byrd recalled wryly. They named the calf Iceberg—only fair, given baby icebergs are called calves—and the birth announcement made the New York Times.

The team made landfall in mid-January, and soon after, the cows were craned down from the ship and onto the ice. Southern Girl immediately tried to walk back up the gangplank. According to a crew dispatch, Iceberg "took it like a major and led the way," trekking three miles on foot before hitching the rest of the way in a tractor. A wood-and-iceblock cow barn went up in Little America, alongside other new infrastructure—including a mess hall, a meteor observatory, and an underground "dog town" for the expedition's 126 huskies—and the four cows moved in, along with Cox and his assistant, the milking equipment, two kittens, and a wolf-dog hybrid named Jimmy.

It was a pretty strange life for a cow. "The only relaxation they have is a weekly walk down the narrow tunnels during which they are usually assaulted by the wild pups from dogtown, and the only grass they have seen is hay at least a year old," the crew's head of communications, Charles J. V. Murphy, said in a radio dispatch. "In spite of it all they maintain that blank, docile expression of resignation characteristic of all cows." It helped that they were pampered by the crew members, who liked to visit the warm, lively barn. "If our cows get back to New York alive they will be worth 20,000 dollars," wrote one fan. "Don't we all make a fuss of them … they love apples."

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Caring for the cows could be tough work. "To me one of the most melancholy sights of the winter was the spectacle of Cox, with the temperature -70°, trying to pry with a crow bar a bale of hay from a stalagmite of ice," wrote Byrd. It didn't always pay off, either: although the three adult cows gave "up to 40 quarts of milk a day" at first, this later slowed to "a trickle which barely moistened the morning cereal." In mid-December, Klondike—who had suffered a bad case of frostbite—was put down via gunshot, while a weepy Cox covered Southern Girl's ears. Meanwhile, despite the crew's wishes, Iceberg steadfastly refused to mate with Deerfoot. Three cows had left for Antarctica, and only three cows would return.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., various bureaus and companies were happily capitalizing on the cows' journey. Larro Dairy Feed, which provided rations for the cattle, put out a multi-page booklet about "the first cows to ever venture into the frozen wastes of the South Pole region." Several New York newspapers reported on how happy the state's Commissioner of Agriculture was to receive good tidings from "the strangest dairy in the world." When Admiral Byrd returned to the base from an ill-fated solo journey, Leane and Nielsen write, the Guernsey Breeders Journal published an article detailing his calcium-rich recovery, titled "The Milk Really Pulled Me Out Of My Tailspin."

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In early 1935, Deerfoot Guernsey Maid, Foremost Southern Girl, and Iceberg got back on the Jacob Ruppert, which arrived in the U.S. that May. Although the expedition was over, all three were on the hook for a different kind of journey: a publicity tour.

Iceberg and Southern Girl made their appearance at the Commodore. Deerfoot—who never lost the shaggy winter coat she grew during the trip—showed up at the Michigan Dairy Fair, at which point she had already "grazed on Boston Common ... eaten from a banquet table in one of Washington's best hotels, [and] crooned over the radio." Even after all three retired to their original farms, their legend spread via screenings of a documentary called Guernseys Discover Antarctica, which apparently features footage of Iceberg "frisking on the ice barrier… at the tender age of two months."

Byrd returned to the Antarctic multiple times, and eventually helped establish the current American base, McMurdo Station. He never brought cows with him again, and, it seems, neither did anyone else. As for Iceberg, Deerfoot, and Southern Girl, their expressions continued to betray very little. As dispatcher Murphy put it during the expedition, "it is a great pity that cows can't talk. I would certainly like to hear what they think of this whole business."

Bookplates Hold the Secrets to Books’ Past Lives

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Inside the front cover of a book made in the 16th century, someone has pasted a mysterious, black-and-white bookplate. At the top, Greek letters spell out a cryptic identity—"Philos Pontou," or "Friend of the Sea." Underneath, the bookplate depicts a noble white unicorn dashing through the water, its horn pointing down into a cresting wave.

In one corner is a year—1917—and the name of the engraver, Joe Andrada. There were no other clues, though, about who actually owned the book.

This particular volume has a long history, and it shows. An edition of St. John Chrysostum’s fourth-century work on the priesthood, the book was published in 1599, by Michael Manger, the “single printer worth mentioning" in 16th-century Augsburg, Germany. It was bound in a deep red Morocco leather, with a border of gold and a crest stamped in the center, the arms of Jacques-Auguste de Thou and his first wife, Marie de Barbançon. Later, another owner, François-Michel de Verthamon, Marquis de Breau, added his own heraldic bookplate inside the back cover. And on the back of the title leaf, there’s an inscription, noting that Félicien Estignard gifted the book to Abbé Pistre, former Curé of Conne, in December 1861.

But some time after that, the book must have passed into the hands of this Philos Pontou, whoever that person might be. In theory, a bookplate should identify its owner. But in this case, by the time the book had entered the collection of the University of Pennsylvania, the identity of this cryptic "Friend of the Sea" had become obscure.

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As long as there have been books, their owners have been finding ways to leave marks on them. In a personal collection, these notes might evoke a particular memory: the college semester dedicated to finally reading James Joyce’s Ulysses or the name of the boy who gave the book as a gift. But for librarians and curators, those assertions of owners’ identities—provenance marks, they’re called—are clues to a book’s history.

“They help you understand how these books were used and who was reading them,” says Laura Aydelotte, the director of the Provenance Online Project at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Since 2011, the project has collected more than 15,000 images of provenance marks in books from the university’s own collection, as well as from a handful of partner libraries.

The project focuses on "primary provenance,” that is “anything that’s in or on the book itself that tells you who owned the book before,” says Aydelotte. (Secondary provenance material would be, for example, a receipt or auction record that records the transfer of the book from one owner to the next.) These marks can be bookplates, marginalia, bindings, or even more obscure details, such as the particular way an owner once dog-eared the pages.

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Over the history of printing, these provenance marks have evolved. In medieval times, some libraries marked the edges of a book’s pages, and illuminated manuscripts might include a portrait of the book’s owner. In the past, a book’s owner might use a formulation such as “Lucinda, her book” to assert ownership, rather than the more modern “This book belongs to ... ” Coats of arms used to be a popular way of marking books. Bookplates appeared with the age of print, stamps later on. There are painstaking and creative provenance marks, such as embroidered bindings, but the most basic assertion of ownership—writing one's name—has been a constant.

The cataloguing staff at UPenn’s special collections started posting images of provenance information online in part to help solve the many mysteries they came across. They were also curious to know more about previous owners. When the project posted an inscription from “Celestino Joaristi, Havana, Cuba,” his descendants found the image and filled in the details of his life: A student at UPenn in the 1930s, he left school suddenly to take over the family hardware business in Cuba after his father died. Another bookplate prompted an old friend to comment that he had known the book’s owner in Algeria during World War II. But many of the bookplates and notes remain mysterious. Who is represented by this bookplate featuring a squirrel and a strongman? Who was Anastasia Löwin?

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Philos Pontou was eventually identified, with the help of the Ritman Library, which specializes in texts about ancient mysticism and had other examples of the bookplate in its collection. Philos Pontou, according to the Ritman, is a pun on the name of René Philipon, a French count who lived until 1936. His library was sold three years after this death, but he had left behind his mysterious mark, a puzzle for future collectors.

375 Years Later, English Schoolchildren Still Learn About a Magic Propaganda Dog

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During the English Civil War of the mid-1600s—the one that pitted the Royalists or “Cavaliers” against the "Roundhead” Parliamentarians—one of the most notable figures to emerge was Prince Rupert of the Rhine. A feared cavalry commander and nephew of King Charles I, Rupert became the figurehead of the Cavalier forces. Over the course of the war he gained a reputation for being such an unbeatable foe that he was accused of having supernatural powers.

He also had a white poodle named Boy, who for a time became almost as famous as Rupert himself. Boy was also thought to be a witch. But as one scholar tells it, that was all just a big joke.

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“I said at the end of my book, all that we know about this dog, we can write on the back of a beer mat. Which is true,” says Mark Stoyle, a professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton and author of The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog: Witchcraft and Propaganda During the English Civil War. In terms of hard facts about Boy, it turns out we only have a few.

According to Stoyle, we know that Rupert received Boy as a sort of get-well gift while he was imprisoned in Austria. Boy came back to England with Rupert, and there is an account of Rupert and Boy going on a hunt. “They go hunting, and he takes down a deer, and the dog pulls it down. So, we know it’s a hunting dog,” says Stoyle. The only other real facts are about the animal's death at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, where the dog was killed. We know this because his death was celebrated by Roundheads in a pamphlet entitled, Dog's Elegy or Rupert's Tears.

As for the propaganda regarding the dog, it likely began with the Royalist poet John Cleveland’s satirical verse “To Prince Rupert,” in which Boy is said to have learned to pee at the mention of the Parliamentarian leader, among other outlandish tricks. Not long after Cleveland’s missive was published, Boy was swept up in the wider rumors of witchcraft that swirled around Rupert. “It was just a little throw away joke, but it seems to have become quite popular,” says Stoyle. “Then someone went on to write a whole [pamphlet] suggesting that the Parliamentarians believe that the dog is a witch.”

This 1643 pamphlet, titled Observations Upon Prince Rupert's White Dog Called Boy, promoted the story that Boy was capable of all sorts of occult feats including speaking multiple languages; being able to make Rupert bullet-proof and invisible; and having the gift of prophecy. According to Stoyle, this too was a joke. “It was fake news! It was a pamphlet written by a Royalist, pretending to be a Parliamentarian, in order to poke as much fun as possible at Roundheads for believing in ‘witches under the bed,’ if you like,” says Stoyle.

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Whatever the intent, rumors about Boy’s magical powers began to spread as fact among the common folk, including Royalists and the very Parliamentarians the rumors were originally intended to mock. The mind reels. “I would say that 95 percent of English people really believed in witchcraft,” says Stoyle. “It is a joke that appeals to quite a small strata of people on the Royalist side, who don’t take witchcraft seriously. If you can imagine all these ordinary people out there on the streets, this joke almost goes over their head.”

What had started as satirical propaganda on the part of the Royalists had backfired. Boy gained a reputation as Rupert’s supernatural familiar, and there was even an implication that the dog would shape-shift into a beautiful woman and sleep with Rupert. This association with witchcraft lent credence to some of the Parliamentarians’ anti-Royalist sentiment. “The trouble is that if lots of ordinary people start to believe that the king is surrounded by witches, that there really are witches in the king’s camp, this gets out of control,” says Stoyle. And since the entire story became so unsavory in the popular consciousness, most of the high-minded Royalists wouldn’t deign to touch it, so no corrective messaging seems to have been attempted.

The twists of meaning, intent, and reality among the stories of Boy can be somewhat convoluted, but the story came to an abrupt end at Marston Moor, where Boy was killed after Rupert brought him into battle. It’s not clear what became of Boy's body, although Stoyle suggests that if the Parliamentarian soldiers knew who the dog was when they killed him, they would have wanted to have a grim trophy of their conquest. “He’s the most famous dog in England at this stage.”

Today, the mysterious poodle’s story still sticks in the minds of many English school children. “It’s an easy takeaway fact that almost everyone knows,” says Stoyle. “But they all think we’ve got lots of hard evidence, and all we’ve got are fragments of evidence and a propagandist campaign about the dog.” Fake news indeed.

A New Edition of 'Frankenstein' for Scientists, Mad and Otherwise

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Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds

$19.95, Amazon

By some accounts, science fiction was born 200 years ago this year with the publication of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s romantic, florid novel of a grasping young scientist in over his head and his surprisingly chatty creation. The story has (a dead man's) legs, and with good reason. To celebrate, Arizona State University created the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project, which includes the publication of a new critical edition of the novel with a specific, modern focus: Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds.

The problem with Victor Frankenstein as a scientist and human being was never that he did it—that is, defied god and nature by creating life—or even how (galvanism was such "A Thing" back then), but that he denied any responsibility for what he had done. His lesson is that the great pitfall of creation is moral cowardice. And like the productivity, invention, and technology that fueled the upheaval of Shelley’s time, our creations are both existential threats and our last hopes for salvation from the world we together have corrupted.

One reason—beyond Boris Karloff in a blazer—that Frankenstein has stayed so popular is that it never fails to seem relevant. Take the parallels between the Industrial Revolution that helped inspire Shelley and the Information Age. One was belching and sooty, the other immaterial and omnipresent, but both set the world on edge with anxiety and hope. Our new generation of human-made monsters—synthetic biology, rogue AI, defiantly opaque social networks, a climate that seems to have a will of its own—are the monsters we deserve.

The new edition of the novel, through all-new essays and footnotes, wrests the text from English majors and hands it to STEMers, but also brings the concerns of literature—moral weight, literary device, creativity—to readers at risk of underestimating their importance. There are pieces of necessary context, about the state of science at the time, the history of mummies, the nature of sympathy, the structure and purpose of epistolary writing. But most prominently the essays and annotations offer lessons for scientists—on hubris, intellectual property, mentorship, isolation, and the temptations of pursuing technical elegance above all else. It’s an interesting way to revisit a story we will keep telling over and over again—in part because it tells us why we do.

The Beautiful Complexity of Naming Every Living Thing

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It was 1758, and Carl Linnaeus was thinking about honeybees. The Swedish naturalist was putting the finishing touches on the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, his encyclopedic compendium of taxonomy, or the classification of living things, and the honeybee was ripe for rebranding.

At the time, the European honeybee was widely known as Apis pubescens, thorace subgriseo, abdomine fusco, pedibus posticis glabris utrinque margine ciliatis. The moniker was a reasonably good summation of the bee’s features: It roughly translates as “furry bee, grayish thorax, brownish abdomen, black legs smooth with hair on both sides.” The trouble was that it is a mouthful—difficult to remember and tricky to squeeze onto a tag. “Names could become polynomial to the point of no return, rendering them virtually unusable,” writes the German biologist Michael Ohl in the English translation of his new book, The Art of Naming.

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In that edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus offered a solution: binomial nomenclature. Two words—no more, no less. Linnaeus wasn’t the origin of the idea—it was first advanced by Gaspard and Johann Bauhin, Swiss-French botanist brothers—but he was an exacting and enthusiastic champion. Linnaeus’s reference books were the first to use binomial naming all the way through. The honeybee became Apis mellifera (“honey-bearing bee”), the badge it still wears today.

Linnaeus and his contemporaries catalogued thousands upon thousands of species. They ran through a lot of Latin names, but there are always more monikers and species to apply them to. Centuries after Linnaeus standardized this vocabulary, the world still teems with untold stories and undocumented creatures. As many as 18,000 new species are newly described each year—and every one needs a scientific name.

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Naming a species is a way to organize and decipher the world—to understand something as itself, and also in relationship to other things. If the goal is to impose order, researchers can’t go around naming things willy-nilly. Everyone must adhere to a system, and there needs to be a process to prevent a creature from being named over and over again, or to keep different species from carrying the same name.

When a researcher suspects she’s encountered a new species, her first step is a deep plunge into the existing literature. The scientist will compare her finding to other descriptions, drawings, and more, to determine how it should be classified. She needs to fully describe the find and then publish the description in a journal. Researchers seek out a “type specimen” or, as Ohl writes, “the individual creatures that scientists lay out on their desks during the naming process and base their names on.” The type specimen becomes a kind of universal delegate for its entire species. (Ever dutiful, Linnaeus appointed himself the type specimen for Homo sapiens.) This representative approach has some drawbacks—namely, the variety that can exist from one individual to another. Researchers must negotiate and interpret these differences, Ohl notes, to find the place where the differences are numerous and clear enough that two animals or plants or fungi can’t be credibly assigned to the same species.

This is no simple task, and it is applied to species both living and long dead. Scientists from the University of Manchester and the College at Brockport, State University of New York, recently studied 99 specimens of Ichthyosaurus, a marine reptile dating to the late Triassic and early Jurassic Period, to document hindfin features across the six known species. In the course of their research, they found significant variations between the fossils. "If we considered the variation as unique, it would mean we would be naming about 30 new species,” said Judy Massare, a coauthor and professor of earth sciences at Brockport, in a statement. “Instead, we had enough specimens to determine that it was just an extreme variation of a common form."

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Once the hurdles of similarities and differences are cleared, it’s time to choose a name. In binomial nomenclature, Ohl writes, the generic and specific names must each consist of at least two letters. There are a few other official stipulations, outlined in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. The name must not belong to another species, it must be a word (or a deliberate approximation of one—no gibberish), it must be free of special characters, such as diacritics, and it has to be rendered in Latin. If the name is drawn from an existing Latin word, the code says that the name must take the gender ending specified in Latin dictionaries. (“Orca,” the Latin world for “a large-bellied pot,” was the basis of Orcinus orca, the killer whale, as well as Orcaella brevirostris, the Irrawaddy dolphin.) Then, “scientists may … deviate from the strict parameters of pure science and indulge in their own preferences and proclivities,” Ohl writes. This is where things can get fun.

The first challenge, Ohl writes, is “to figure out what the name should express.” Sometimes scientists zero in on geography (guess where the cockroach Blatella germanica is from). They might go descriptive, leaning on the classical terms for colors, shapes, body parts, or even behaviors (like that honeybee above). There are entire catalogues of taxonomic names to serve as inspiration. Researchers also draw from the world outside the laboratory, naming their finds after friends, funders, mentors, or stars. Naming can, in that case, be a strategy for drumming up interest and support—take the 12 species, from a trapdoor spider to a lichen, named after Barack Obama, or the newly christened Haptoclinus dropi, a fish named for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Deep Reef Observation Project (DROP) expedition that encountered it in a largely unstudied portion of the ocean.

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Brian Brown, the curator of the entomology department at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, has named 600 species. (Entomologists are among the most prolific namers. Francis Walker, a 19th-century Englishman, named 23,506, though critics accused him of putting pace above rigor.) Brown is an expert in tiny flies. While there a lot of them, he estimates that just 10 percent of the world’s species have been documented so far. With so many in need of names, he says, “it seems to me that agonizing over what to name them is largely a waste of time.” The caveat: “Giving something a name that is particularly unpronounceable is not a service to anybody, especially if it’s going to be widely known.”

Brown is the first to admit that getting the public interested in tiny flies can be a heavy lift. They’re minuscule, unfamiliar, and lacking in the charisma department. Earlier this year, Brown tried something he hadn’t done before: naming one after a rather well-known bodybuilder, movie star, and politician. “Naming after a celebrity, that has to be done with a light touch,” he says. “Someone who does that a lot is going to saturate the concept pretty quickly.” But in this case, it was descriptive, too. Megapropodiphora arnoldi has bulging legs, which reminded Brown of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique. It is also a remarkable species—the smallest parasitic fly recorded to date. “I would only give a celebrity name to something that is kind of special,” Brown says.


There are some who dismiss celebrity names as crass. (It does grab headlines, though. After Peter Jäger, head of arachnology at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, named a spider Heteropoda davidbowie, the arachnid got a write-up in the German edition of Rolling Stone—and on Atlas Obscura.) Brown sees these types of names as a tool to help inspire people to care about something larger—the state of biodiversity in the Amazon rain forest, for example. “If I had to distill down my main goal, it would be saving tropical forests,” Brown says. “If tweaking people’s interest by naming something after a celebrity can get people thinking, ‘Wow, that’s cool, where’s it from? The Amazon? Well, that must be a really cool place,’ that’s going to work me towards my goal.”


These names may carry the impression of that they are stable, constant and unchanging, but that is an illusion. New species are recorded all the time, and many of these are cleaved from existing known ones, as new research offers ever-more-fine-grained analysis. On the other hand, researchers sometimes walk back their counts, too, as once-diverged lineages merge together again, or because, in the rush to impose order, scientists apply names to fragments that aren’t up to the label.

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This problem, like binomial naming itself, has roots in the 18th century. Just before his death in 1702, collector William Charlton delivered a curious butterfly to entomologists in London. The yellow insect looked similar to the English brimstone butterfly (Gonepteryx rhamni), Charlton noted, with the exception of a smattering of little speckles that resembled blue moons. Linnaeus studied the specimen in 1763 and christened it, somewhat poetically, Papilio ecclipsis. Four years later, it was included in Systema Naturae, then in its 12th edition. It was another three decades before John Christian Fabricius, a Danish entomologist, realized that the butterfly was a fake—a doctored version of that common brimstone butterfly, artfully splashed with paint. By some accounts, upon learning of the deception, the butterfly’s custodian at the British Museum “indignantly stamped the specimen to pieces.” Papilio ecclipsis was no more.

Part of the majesty and magic of a name, Ohl writes, is how it gives the listener or reader a firm, solid foundation from which to transport herself to a place she’s never been. Names nudge open portals to new parts of the world or the long-receded past. “As though they were secret incantations, these names grant access to the world of those extinct behemoths,” Ohl writes. “Mental images of prehistoric landscapes take shape at the sound of their names, and we feel we are among the initiated, the entrusted, the knowing.”

Snow Leopards Shouldn't Have to Deal With Our Garbage

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When Shashanka Nanda was in his late teens, he went on a climbing trip to the Pir Panjal mountains, in the inner Himalayas. One night, as his friends were setting up camp, he took a short hike by himself to look for firewood. On his way back, he stopped and watched some bharal grazing on a nearby cliff. Suddenly, all hell broke loose. "It was chaos," he remembers. "The sheep started running left and right." A perfectly still shape Nanda had taken for a rock was actually a snow leopard, waiting in ambush. It rocketed after the sheep. "It was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen in my life," he says.

Fast forward a couple of decades. Still blown away by his encounter, Nanda developed a keen interest in conservation. He took up wildlife photography, traveling all around India to photograph tigers, vultures, and monkeys. Although he kept dreaming of snow leopards, none materialized. "It's not something that you show up and you hope to find them," he says. "You have to make a concerted effort." So last year, he says, "I decided enough is enough. It's time to make that dream come true."

In February 2018, after about a year of planning, Nanda and two friends drove three days from his home in Delhi to a village in the Spiti Valley, a mountain desert in the Himalayas where about 30 of the big cats live. On their second day, they found one: a male down in a crevasse, crouched over a recently killed sheep. "I took two pictures and then I started crying," Nanda says. "It took me about ten minutes to compose myself." Then he looked closer: "That's when I realized it was sitting in trash."

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There are some places you just don't expect to see garbage. But one of the enduring lessons of the contemporary age seems to be that it's often there anyway. There don't even have to be people nearby for trash to flourish: There's an uninhabited island in the Pacific, once described as a "near-pristine" ecosystem, that is now strewn with millions of pieces of plastic. But when communities experience sudden influxes of newcomers, trash problems are often not far behind.

That's what has been happening to Spiti. Over the past few years, the roads that lead up the mountains have improved, and "it has found its place on the tourist map," Nanda says. But even as other infrastructure gets built, many of the villages there still lack set garbage management systems.

Local people are used to making do by reusing items (although urbanization means they have more stuff to deal with, too). The villages are beginning to implement larger-scale systems, and support coordinated trash pick-up campaigns. But often, visitors just drop their junk on the ground. It then generally gets picked up by snowmelt, funneled into a river, and taken far away, often to the same place where animals stop to drink. When they saw the leopard, "we were far away from the village," Nanda says. "But trash found its way there."

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Nanda spent hours photographing the male as he ate his kill, and talking to other visitors as they joined him over the course of the day. Later in his trip, he followed a different cat, and got the classic snow leopard photo he'd been dreaming of for decades: a female with her paw on a boulder, poised against a snowy backdrop. Everything in the picture is silver, brown, and white. There are no green plastic bags or red wrappers to be seen.

Sometimes, though, the fulfillment of one dream can beget another very different one. When Nanda and his friends left, he says, they took extra care to bring all their plastic waste with them. He's been speaking to contacts in Spiti, trying to figure out how to educate visitors, including photographers like himself, about trash pack-out practices.

When he got back to his computer and began going through his images, he decided to start by sharing his first photo, of the snow leopard crouched in the garbage. "I wanted to point out the real story," he says. If trash is spreading everywhere, images of it should, too.

The Los Angeles Bakery Keeping Mochi in Temples and Traditions

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Once a year, Japanese Buddhists and followers of the Shinto religion lay an unusual offering on altars in their temples: sculpted candy most Americans know only as a wrapping for ice cream treats. It’s mochi, a soft pastry made from sweet, glutinous rice flour, and it has been an integral part of religious ceremonies for centuries.

The Japanese strains of Buddhism don’t have many followers in the United States, and Shinto has even fewer, so it’s not easy for mochi makers who follow these traditions in America. But Benkyodo in San Francisco has been in business since 1906, and the oldest, Fugetsu-do in Los Angeles, opened in 1903. That city has always had the largest culturally Japanese population on the American mainland, and the store is within blocks of four Buddhist temples that celebrate the traditional rites.

Brian Kito of Fugetsu-do makes over 100 kinds of mochi, including the kagami mochi that is used for the annual Japanese New Year’s ceremony. This construction of two rounded white discs of mochi topped with a tangerine or orange is meant to symbolize both family ties and the sacred mirror of the sun goddess Amaterasu. (To the uninitiated, it looks a bit like a squashed snowman with an orange head.)

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The mochi sculpture is only made for the Japanese New Year celebration, and it sits on the altar for 11 days, developing a hard crust in the process. That crust is broken with a hammer on Kagami Biraki day—literally, breaking the mirror. (It is never cut with a knife, because that would symbolically mean severing a family.) The pieces of mochi are put in a soup called ozone that is eaten with family as the first important ritual of the new year. It’s a joyous celebration whose origins are obscure, though other religions, including Christianity and Hinduism, have also evolved midwinter celebrations that are celebrated with family meals and sweets.

According to Kito, there is an element of divination in the making and displaying of kagami mochi. “Folklore says that if the two layers stay intact, it will be a good year,” he explains. “But if they crack, it will be a bad year. The year the Great Recession started, in 2008, all the mochi we made cracked significantly.”

There’s a logical basis for this belief, Kito adds. A bad growing year that stresses the crop produces less elastic dough that’s prone to cracks. In that way, cracked mochi predicts the misfortune caused by a bad crop. “Mochi is an economic indicator,” he says.

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Kito makes mochi for other ceremonies too, including a version wrapped in oak leaves for Children’s Day and a layered variety for Girl’s Day. Other ceremonial versions are available all year, such as an ornately decorated pastry for Japanese tea ceremonies and a type of bun called manju, which is filled with red bean paste. Though this is a popular everyday snack, it is also given at Japanese funerals. It’s traditional for guests to give money to the family to cover burial expenses, and the buns are exchanged as a way of giving thanks. Unfortunately for artisan mochi makers, many families have shifted to other small gifts such as postage stamps.

The business of making these traditional pastries—in Japan and abroad—has changed as younger generations lose interest in or stop upholding customs like this one, a process Kito has struggled to reverse. For over 30 years, he taught summer school classes to local children that included mochi-making and other traditional crafts. But he admits that few participants seem inspired to explore their heritage in depth. While mochi remains popular in the Japanese-American community because of its flavor and beauty, most people buy mass market, imported brands that contain preservatives. Those are months old, while the freshly made items from Fugetsu-do have a shelf life of only a few days.

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“The older Japanese remember the difference between those products and what we make,” Kito says. “They may still buy the mass market products sometimes, because they’re convenient, but they get ours for special occasions.”

These special occasions include the cherry blossom season, when Fugetsu-do sells mochi wrapped in pickled and salted cherry leaves. But these niches are not enough to maintain a business. So Kito has developed new styles of mochi, including a rainbow version that resembles old fashioned salt water taffy and is made in a similar manner. He’s counting on these varieties to attract a new audience that lacks the cultural connection.

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“Mochi is becoming popular with people who have no idea of its place in Japanese culture, and we’re now packaging it like snack food,” says Kito. “If you give non-Japanese people a way to ease themselves into it, after a while they start getting interested in the traditional styles.”

On a recent winter afternoon, the strategy seems to be succeeding. While Kito makes a batch of pancake-wrapped traditional mochi on a griddle older than he is, a crowd of teenagers flows in. They chatter in Japanese, English, and Spanish and peer at the gaily colored treats. The floor beneath their feet is worn, and the finish on the counter has been dulled by a river of pocket change. If even a few of them become interested in the culture behind the candy, it will help ensure that the mystique of mochi survives into a new generation.


How a Location Scout Spends 3 Days Touring L.A.

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The history of Los Angeles' dominance in the entertainment industry involves a trope older than Hollywood itself. East Coast-based filmmakers longed for the year-round sunshine of Southern California.

The other major reason nearly all of America's early film studios ended up in L.A. was to escape the iron grip of Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents company, which made it nearly impossible for filmmakers to work independent of Edison. Across the country in California, the inventor's patents weren't enforced.

But Los Angeles didn't just offer mild weather and artistic (and legal) freedom. "Within a 30 or 40 mile radius, you have desert, you have beach, you have mountains, you have city, and you have suburbia," the location scout Nick Carr explains. "You have everything.”

For storytellers, Los Angeles' diverse terrain offers endless possibilities. Since cinema first took root in the city around 1912, the relationship between filmmaking and Los Angeles has been symbiotic. On a micro-level, mini-transformations take place on a daily basis, when buildings, blocks, or patches of wilderness are made to look like far-flung locales. On a macro-level, the city has evolved into the metropolis it is today because of its widely diverse landscapes.

In 2015, Carr—known for his blog Scouting New York and now, Scouting L.A.—moved from New York to Los Angeles and "never looked back."

Carr spends his days driving through Los Angeles, sizing up the smallest of details and weighing careful, logistical considerations in search of real places that suit fictional universes.

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes, a location itself becomes the star of a film. "Storytelling elevates these places to mythic status," Carr says. And even when it doesn't, there's nothing quite like stumbling on a place and finding out that one of your favorite movies was filmed there. This can happen anywhere, but it happens all the time in Los Angeles.

Following Carr's lead, we've put together a three-day itinerary featuring some of Los Angeles's most iconic shooting locations. While some are well-known pilgrimage sites for film buffs, others are inconspicuous reminders that, like the most skilled of actors, Los Angeles can take on any role.

Day 1 Agenda:

  • Start the day at Point Dume

  • Visit Western Town at Paramount Ranch

  • Explore the ruins of Peter Strauss Ranch

  • Have Dinner at The Old Place restaurant



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Point Dume

For a city of its size, it's remarkably easy to escape the bustle of Los Angeles. Begin the journey at the city's westernmost edges, in Malibu. Seclusion, scenery, and terrain have made this beach community irresistible to filmmakers since the 1960s.

Point Dume is a promontory that dramatically rises above the surrounding sands, walling off either side of the beach. It's as stunning a sight as it is surreal, making it the perfect location for the ending scene of the original Planet of the Apes.

Charlton Heston's character, having escaped his primate captors, walks along an alien shoreline when he sees a crumbling Statue of Liberty wedged among the rocks in Point Dume. The twist is that he'd been on earth this entire time. If the ending sounds like a Twilight Zone episode, it's not a coincidence: Rod Serling co-wrote the screenplay.

It may seem odd that filmmakers chose a recognizable natural landmark to capture a scene that should have taken place in New York. But Point Dume's size obscures the scenery behind it, making the location difficult to pinpoint. Point Dume was largely uninhabited until shortly after WWII, and the first school didn't open there until 1968—the year Planet of the Apes was released. It's safe to say that the location wasn't recognizable yet.

In the years that followed, Point Dume became a popular shooting location. Planet of the Apes was its big break.


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Paramount Ranch

A short drive heading east will bring you close to Paramount Ranch, a former "movie ranch"-turned national park that delivers on everything its lofty name promises.

In the early 1920s, when Westerns were rising in popularity, a number of studios purchased ranch locations to shoot outdoor sequences. One of these was Paramount Ranch. During the golden age of cinema, just about every screen legend you can imagine filmed on Paramount Ranch's versatile grounds, which were used for more than just Westerns. Paramount Ranch filled in as the Sahara desert in the Marlene Dietrich vehicle Morocco, and Ancient Rome in Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Sign of the Cross.

Though Paramount eventually sold the lot, a portion of it was saved in the 1950s by a retired Western-lover and his son. Together, they built Western Town to encourage filmmakers to continue making the films they loved there. Located at the park's entrance and open to the public to explore, it remains Paramount Ranch's most visible attraction, though the park also beckons with its miles of storied trails and beautiful views of the Santa Monica mountains.

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A second revitalization in the late 1980s has kept Western Town buzzing to this day. In the 1990s, it served as the main setting for Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. More recently, you might recognize it as Westworld's town square.


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Peter Strauss Ranch

Just about two miles from Paramount Ranch, Peter Strauss Ranch is a historic gem you wouldn't necessarily guess you could access. Auto businessman Harry Miller bought this land as a weekend retreat in 1923, building a ranch house, aviary, and stone tower, all of which are still standing.

Legend has it that Miller used the elfin tower at the ranch's entrance as a lookout whenever he hosted one of his notorious Prohibition-era parties.

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Miller sold the ranch in the midst of the Great Depression, and the area was soon developed into an amusement park and resort called "Lake Enchanto" (a portion of the Malibu Creek on the premises was dammed, creating an eponymous body of water). At one time, the park boasted the largest swimming pool west of the Mississippi. A miniature amphitheater built during the same time hosted musicians including Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson.

The park eventually closed in 1960. In 1976, the actor Peter Strauss bought the ranch, restored it to a more "natural" look, and then sold it back to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy a decade later. Though it can be traversed in under an hour, it's worth it to spend some time in this strangely serene, whimsical place.


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The Old Place restaurant

Directly across the street from Peter Strauss Ranch is the Old Place restaurant. Its weathered wood facade topped by a massive pair of antlers could fool an unappreciative eye into thinking they've come upon an Old West-themed restaurant. But the Old Place is the real deal.

In the 1960s, Tom Runyon bought a decrepit general store with the dream of transforming it into a restaurant. If his name sounds familiar, you're not mistaken. He grew up shooting pigeons and raising falcons on his father's land, Runyon Canyon.

Runyon carefully selected salvaged materials to build his restaurant. The 30-foot bar was transported from a saloon in Virginia City, Nevada on his private bomber (he had served as a pilot in WWII), and the stool that surrounds it is an antique diving board. Virtually every square inch of the Old Place tells a story.

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The location's closeness to Paramount Ranch ushered plenty of actors through the Old Place's swinging doors. A part-time fiction writer, Runyon's love of storytelling endeared him to the actors and filmmakers who frequented the restaurant. A display in the back of the restaurant details Runyon's friendship with luminaries such as Sam Peckinpah and Steve McQueen.

After Tom Runyon passed, his son Morgan inherited the place. There are a few more items on the menu these days (in the beginning, the restaurant only served steak and clams), but the place has preserved an aura of reticent charm in step with the silver screen cowboys who used to congregate there.

Day 2 Agenda:

  • Stay at the Millennium Biltmore hotel

  • Visit City Hall's Observation Deck

  • Stroll through Union Station


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The Millennium Biltmore

After a day spent hiking in Malibu's "wild west," begin the second day of your trip by waking up in a place that epitomizes Hollywood glamour. It may feel strange, but Carr experiences this sort of discombobulation everyday.

"One day I’m scouting underground subway tunnels, the next day I’m looking for a hidden lake in the mountains, the next day I’m trying to find a beach for a surfing scene…my office changes every single day," he says.

The ultimate arbiters of pomp, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded at a luncheon banquet at the Millennium Biltmore in 1927. According to legend, the MGM art director Cedric Gibbons sketched the Oscar statue that we know today on a napkin, on the spot.

When it was built in 1923, the Millennium Biltmore was the largest hotel in the United States west of Chicago. Its design is a catalogue of Baroque European influences. From the palatial ballrooms crowned by massive chandeliers to tiny mosaic tiles that depict mythical figures, the Millennium Biltmore is as awe-inspiring as it is tantalizing in its details.

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Beyond its history with the Academy Awards (it hosted nine ceremonies in total), the Biltmore has, unsurprisingly, always been a popular filming location. It may be most recognizable as the site of the Ghostbusters' battle with the green "Slimer." If the connection doesn't strike one immediately, it's no surprise: we think of Ghostbusters as taking place in New York. It's clear that the filmmakers were on the hunt for a grand hotel to host the gross battle sequence for comedic effect, and the Millennium Biltmore fit the bill.

If you stay at the Millennium Biltmore, don't miss one of its most wonderful, hidden features: an underground health club designed in the style of 1920s luxury ocean liners. The turquoise-hued pool is surrounded by subtle Grecian features, including figurative tiles and gold-capped columns. The deck chairs that line the pool would look at home on the Titanic.

In the 1999 film Cruel Intentions, Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe take a dip in the Biltmore's pool, where it's intended to look part of a country club. Filmmakers didn't even need to disguise the set. Hidden beneath the Biltmore and having preserved its continental, 1920s design, it betrays no sign of its location.


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Union Station

An itinerary featuring filming locations in Los Angeles wouldn't be complete without a nod to Blade Runner. Perhaps more than any other film, Blade Runner has enthralled moviegoers with its surreal depiction of Los Angeles in 2019.

Ridley Scott achieved this uncanny affect by choosing well-known Los Angeles landmarks (including the Ennis House and Bradbury Building) and filtering them through a lens of dystopian gloom. Anyone who has ever stepped into the bright, magnificent interior of the Bradbury Building knows of the transformative powers Scott was able to conjure in his vision of the not-too-distant future.

In Blade Runner, Union Station is cast as a dark, barren, police station—one so large that it suggests the concepts of law and order may be bygone relics. We never see the station's exterior, for good reason: it's too beautiful. The stunning structure is a combination of Mission Revival, Streamline Moderne, and Art Deco influences. It's flanked by sky-high palm trees, and looks exactly as you would want a Los Angeles train station to appear.

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The interior is just as impressive, with its teak ceilings, waiting areas lined with distinguished leather chairs, and Navajo-inspired tiled flooring. Though it may not see the traffic it did before air travel took off, a visit to Union Station quickly dispels the myth that Angelenos only travel on four wheels. The station bustles as a public transit station and an Amtrak hub that takes riders up the coast and down to Mexico.

Beyond Blade Runner, Union Station has played a more conventional role in plenty of productions, including Catch Me if You Can and Drag Me to Hell. Even if you're not en-route to another destination, Union Station is a must-visit for anyone with an appreciation for architecture, not to mention film history.


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City Hall

"There’s this feeling of L.A. as a dueling ground for police and safety versus corruption," says Carr. "If you’re going to tell that story, you’re always going to find a way to put city hall in the background.”

As storytellers since time immemorial have shown, there are many ways to tell the story of good versus evil. But the method that Carr describes is specific to Los Angeles, and can be credited in large part to writers like Raymond Chandler. In the 1930s, film noir authors and filmmakers introduced the world to a Los Angeles that was equal parts seedy and sultry. The 1997 neo-noir L.A. Confidential tips its hat to this legacy and features City Hall in its background.

Associations aside, City Hall may be most recognizable for its role in another tale of good versus evil. In the 1950s, it served as the Daily Planet headquarters for the original Superman TV series.

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City Hall is worth a pilgrimage for film fans, but its most delightful feature has nothing to do with movies. Taking the elevator up to the 27th floor, one enters a grand banquet hall with floor-to-ceiling windows draped in red velvet curtains and a dizzying, geometrically patterned ceiling. Stepping outside, there's a viewing platform that offers a 360-degree panorama of Los Angeles that's breathtaking to behold.

Directly beneath the banquet hall and viewing platform, the Mayor Tom Bradley room features portraits of Los Angeles's mayors since the city's genesis. It may appear staid in comparison to the majesty of the 27th floor, but a closer look yields a semi-comprehensive history of the city's development. Superbly written panels contextualize each portrait, reminding one of the continuous struggle for power and justice in the city.

Day 3 Agenda:

  • The Gamble House

  • Pee-wee Herman's House

  • Michael Myers' House

  • The Luggage Room/La Grande Orange Cafe


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The Gamble House

"L.A. is fantastic at being everywhere," says Carr. On day three, spend your time exploring a city that may exemplify this more than any other place in the metro area: Pasadena.

The Gamble House is often referred to as a masterpiece of Arts and Crafts architecture, a movement focused on traditional craftsmanship that incorporated medieval, romantic, and folk styles of decoration. It originated in Britain and spread through North America, eventually reaching Japan in the 1920s. The Gamble House's Japanese influence in particular (or at least, an American's interpretation of Japanese influence) is evident in the structure.

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Back to the Future fans will recognize it as Doc Brown's house. But whether you've seen the film or not, the three-story, 6,100-square-foot structure will make you want to pull over. It's beautiful yet imposing, bizarre but slightly somber. In other words, the perfect residence for a madcap scientist.

Due to the delicate nature of the preserved home, filming of the interior actually took place at another residence. But luckily, today the Gamble House is a museum that is open for tours. If you go, consider taking a bar of soap: the house's name comes from its original owners, the Gambles of Procter & Gamble. Visitors have been gifting soaps to the house for years, and a small cupboard displays their labels through the ages.


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Pee-wee Herman's House

Another madcap adventurer who resided in Pasadena was Pee-wee Herman. But unlike the Gamble House, Pee-wee's abode is easy to miss.

White picket fences are supposed to symbolize suburban perfection, but the crooked fence that stands in front of this white house resembles a jagged grin. The place is nearly unrecognizable without its fire-engine paint and fanciful lawn sculptures, but the fence in particular is a signifier of what the director Tim Burton saw in his original vision: he wanted a house that resembled a face.

"There are the locations that have obvious artistic value or cultural merit, but then there are the ones like Pee-wee Hermann’s house, which is just a house," Carr explains. "But because of it’s connection to our shared cultural history, it’s a house that’s beloved by the world."

Pee-wee's cult following is strong to this day. Discovering that an otherwise unremarkable house once in fact belonged to the fictional character could be the highlight of your trip.


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Michael Myers' House

Like Pee-wee Hermann's house, the childhood home where Michael Myers murdered his sister in Halloween isn't instantly recognizable (aside from a terrifying Michael Myers dummy that its owners have hung from a nearby tree). It's since received a blue paint job and operates as a chiropractic clinic.

Paint job aside, it's still hard to envision the house in Illinois where the action of the film took place. But as Carr points out, filmmakers love to shoot suburban scenes in Pasadena because of its traditional, craftsman style homes and more importantly, its lack of palm trees.

But the best explanation as to why this home looks so different from the one we see in the film is that the entire house has actually been moved. In 1987, the house was in danger of being demolished. Super-fan David Margrave (with the support of fellow Pasadena residents) bought the home for $1, with the promise to move it somewhere safe. The house landed just a few blocks away, right across from the South Pasadena train station.


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The Luggage Room/La Grande Orange Cafe

You may not recognize the former Santa Fe depot from movies or television, but its connection to Hollywood dates back to its golden age. Today, the old train station has been faithfully restored to house two restaurants: the dinner and cocktail spot The Luggage Room, and the daytime, family-oriented La Grande Orange Cafe.

A hub of the Santa Fe railway and home of the Super Chief streamliner, the Santa Fe depot was favored over Union Station by some of cinema's biggest stars because going incognito in Pasadena was easier than it was in downtown Los Angeles. Additionally, the Super Chief (which could get you to Chicago and Kansas City) was considered the height of luxury in travel and was one of the first trains to serve gourmet food. Diners could treat themselves to a champagne and steak dinner.

The two restaurants have preserved plenty of the original structure's details. La Grande Orange Cafe's dining room was the depot's original waiting room, while the Luggage Room was the partially open-air storage facility where luggage was passed from the train through the station through large windows. A peek into the open-air kitchen reveals the bones of the depot's old ticket counter.

After three days immersed in film history, end your journey by taking a seat at a former Hollywood hideout. Unlike plenty of the locations included in this itinerary, this is a place that could only be found in Los Angeles.

The Victorian Cards That Explained How to Use a Book to Flirt

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It started with an envelope. Twelve years ago, Sheryl Jaeger, who owns Eclectibles rare bookstore in Tolland, Connecticut, acquired a mass of “family papers” in an auction. Among them was an envelope—and in that envelope were two slips of card, each around the size of a business card, dating from the late 19th century. “I put them aside because I thought they were charming, and didn’t really think I needed to sell them—because I liked them,” she says.

The cards were “flirtations”: coded explanations for how to flirt with the opposite sex, using an item as your prop. In this case, the item was a book. Book leaning against your left cheek? Careful, someone’s watching us. Book on your knee? Let’s talk. Book between your teeth? It’s over.

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Her interest piqued, Jaeger has since kept an eye out for “flirtations” at estate sales, auctions, and other hideaways for ephemera. They almost always come in the form of printed or handwritten cards, slightly larger than a matchbox. “Once you find one thing, you start looking for other things,” she says. “And I’ve now come up with a pencil flirtation, eye flirtations, hats flirtations, handkerchief flirtations...” But what was the point of these ciphers? Was every handsome stranger holding a book upside down really asking, “Do you love me?”

Calling cards are a well-documented phenomenon of Victorian Britain and the late 19th-century United States. Professionally printed with someone’s name, and often their photograph, they had a complex function in social interaction and were variously used to announce a forthcoming visit, invite someone to your home, or denote that you had attempted to visit someone at their home while they were out.

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“Flirtations," however, don’t seem to have had a practical function. According to Alan Mays, a collector of Victorian ephemera, “The coded gestures really seem too complicated for easy communication.” Jaeger has a similar take. A possible analog is the often-cited language of flowers—the idea that Victorians were all extremely well-versed in the subtle difference between a yellow and a white rose.

In The Language of Flowers: A History, the author Beverly Seaton dispels this notion. “To modern enthusiasts, no feature of Victorian popular culture appears more charming, more cozy, or more absolutely Victorian than the language of flowers. But, in reality, none is more obviously misunderstood.” It’s likely that these cards served a similar function to dictionaries for the meaning of flowers: a gift that Seaton says were primarily to “entertain a genteel female reader for a few dull afternoons,” rather than send coded floral messages to a suitably repressed paramour. According to Seaton, in fact, "There is almost no evidence that people actually used these symbolic lists to communicate, even if the parties agreed upon what book to use for their meanings.” Rather than being ciphers in forbidden love stories, in fact, cards of this nature may have simply been whimsical gifts from one friend to another.

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Other pre-printed cards were swapped between friends and then pasted into scrapbooks for safekeeping—some of which contained sentiments largely unintelligible to a modern reader. On one, the “Anti-Poke Your Nose Into Other People's Business Society” seeks “a person at a salary of $500 a year, with a periodical increase to $1,000, to mind their own business and let other people's business alone.” A common, if puzzling, message reads: "When are you going to pay the old lady for your last week's washing?"

But there were some flirtatious cards which could be used to court members of the opposite sex. Exclusive to the United States were “escort” or “acquaintance” cards, which usually included a pick-up line and were designed to be slipped into the clutches of a prospective beau. “I very much desire to make your acquaintance,” reads one. Another more direct version wastes neither time nor letters: “May I. C. U. Home?”

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These pre-printed love notes had an obvious utility. “As the 19th century progressed,” writes Canadian collector Barbara Rausch, “rules of deportment became more rigid, and cards helped define the complicated new social code and express its growing sentimentality.” Escort cards were discreet, demonstrated a certain amount of disposable income to spare on frivolities, and often quite humorous—who could resist a card decorated with a musket and a guard dog that reads: “I will risk everything depicted here if you will permit me to see you as far as the gate”? Young people wanted to flirt with one another; the cards were just one very small part of it what the pearl-clutching Morning Oregonian, in 1871, called “apparently innocent indulgences” that paved the way “to ruin.”

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So while coded flirtations involving props were probably ineffectual, flirtatious cards were not. It seems unlikely that anyone ever successfully dropped a book to tell someone that they needed to speak to them, pronto. But it didn’t stop late Victorian anti-obscenity crusaders from confusing the two, and worrying that they might. Mays gives the example of the politician Anthony Comstock whose “dire warnings,” he says, “seem somewhat overbearing.” In his 1883 text Traps for the Young, Comstock writes:

“I refer to the ‘handkerchief’ and ‘glove’ flirtation cards, by which means the schoolgirl is taught how to respond to signals from male prostitutes … Some are harmless, while others show that by a simple turn of the hand with a handkerchief or glove in it, an impure suggestion is meant to be conveyed. By this means an innocent girl may be drawn into the meshes of the net of the veriest scoundrel.”

The codes might not have worked for the general public—but they seem to have been closely scrutinized by those for whom they were least intended.

Karl Marx Is the Latest Historical Figure Helping People Cross the Road

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When Karl Marx was born in the university town of Trier, Germany, in 1818, pedestrian lights and their various components—electricity, LED bulbs, cars—were all utterly unimaginable. But, in celebration of the revolutionary thinker's 200th birthday, these elements are coming together, with red and green Marxes making appearances on the city's pedestrian lights. The first set was unveiled on Monday, The Local reported, around six weeks before the the anniversary proper, on May 5. A second set is to follow just before Easter weekend at the Karl Marx House, where the philosopher was born.

Each light shows a slightly cuddly cartoon of Marx, featuring a brush-like beard and arms outstretched as though he's going in for a hug. It's an affectionate portrait—indeed, Wolfram Liebe, the mayor of Trier, said, "Trier is showing its colors for Marx." (A forthcoming bronze statue of Marx from the Chinese government has attracted controversy, the BBC reported, with some critics citing concerns that honoring Marx ignores the suffering that took place under communist ideology in the last century.)

Marx's likeness on the traffic lights is the latest in a merry brigade of electronic crossing guards. In 2016, the city of Bonn in Western Germany installed lights featuring Beethoven, as a way to advertise celebrations for the composer's 250th birthday in 2020. In New Zealand, the first country to give women the vote, the suffragette Kate Sheppard appears on traffic lights at eight intersections near the country's Parliament. Fictional figures have also made an appearance on traffic lights, including the puppet Kasper, in the Bavarian city of Augsburg, and, in Japan, the famous manga character Astro Boy.

The lights have mostly been met with approval online, though you might find yourself asking: Why aren't both of them red?

Exploring Iceland's Beautiful, Desolate Westfjords

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One morning last July, the photographer Matt Emmett emerged from his tent next to Rauðasandur Beach and went for a walk. He had just begun a five-day trip through the Westfjords, Iceland’s westernmost region, and while walking along a 6-mile stretch of red sand, he noticed something. “I stopped and realized I was totally alone,” he says. “The only sound was the wind, the cries of arctic terns swooping above my head and the distant breakers crashing against the shore.”

Iceland is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. Two-thirds of the entire population lives in Reykjavik; less than 2 percent lives in the Westfjords. Ísafjörður, the largest town in the Westfjords, has a population of about 2,600. It’s a remote area within an isolated island, and seemed, at least initially, an unusual choice for Emmett, who usually specializes in abandoned architecture.

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The trip had been arranged by Pentax, for whom Emmett is a brand ambassador. The plan was to test out a new camera by shooting landscapes, alongside another Pentax ambassador, the photographer Bill Ward. But, Emmett recalls, “as the trip neared I noticed in photos online that there appeared to be lots of abandoned houses and farms dotting the landscape.” He contacted a Reykjavik architecture firm that had produced a book on abandoned farmsteads in Iceland, and they helped him locate various ruins.

“The Westfjords suffer from extreme weather during the winter months, and after the global financial crash of 2008, many of the properties have been abandoned,” Emmett says. “These structures are often small and empty but amazingly atmospheric, full of the strange sense of other-worldliness you often find in derelict buildings, but that strange feeling is matched by the landscapes that surround them, so you get a double dose of magic. I was totally in my element.”

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Emmett photographed abandoned farmhouses, fishing shacks, and even a beached whaling ship rusting on the shores of Skápadalur Valley. The Westfjords provided a startlingly beautiful backdrop. “The landscape is breathtaking; rugged, vast and empty, a true wilderness that is largely untouched.”

Traveling around such a remote landscape has its own challenges. “The roads tend to hug the coastline and this can make for some interesting journeys,” says Emmett. “You can end up at a point just a mile from where you were several hours beforehand after traveling down a fjord, and then returning along the opposite shore.”

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On the same day that he woke up next to Rauðasandur Beach, Emmett visited the Látrabjarg Cliffs. Like the rest of the Westfjords, the sheer scale is breathtaking: the cliffs stretch for more than 8 miles and, in places, tower more than 1,400 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. In a single day, Emmett had walked on a deserted beach and accompanied colonies of puffins on a towering cliff face. "For me," he says, "it was simply the experience of being in such a wild and isolated place that that I found the most inspiring."

Atlas Obscura has a selection of Emmett’s photographs from the Westfjords; you can find more of his work on his Instagram.

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DIY Tech Is Helping Scientists Keep Up With Marine Life

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It's hard to conduct research in the ocean. Electronics don't mix well with salt water and waves knock things around. The deeper you go, the darker and colder it gets. Pressure mounts to crushing levels. Oceans account for 70 percent of Earth's surface and more than 99 percent of its biosphere, but only about 10 or 15 percent of it has been mapped with any rigor, estimated curator and ichthyologist John Sparks at a recent tour of the American Museum of Natural History’s new Unseen Oceans exhibition. “We know more about the surface of Mars than the ocean floor,” he said.

When scientists want to track how the tiniest microscopic plants or the largest of whales move through, they often find themselves without the right tools for the job. Whether looking at creatures that are carried by currents, propel themselves slowly through bays, or cross long distances of open ocean, researchers often have to make their own machines and devise ad-hoc solutions, added Michael Novacek, the museum’s provost of science and the curator of the division of paleontology. "It’s not stuff that’s off the shelf.”

Researchers have to rig up rugged, inexpensive, custom tools and sensors that are both flexible and adaptable. (Take, for instance, a robotic fish that can mix in with schools or squishy-fingered grippers that can grab corals with minimal damage.) Sparks refers to this breed of scientists as tinkerers. “They build their own equipment, they solve their own problems,” he said. Here's how some of them have engineered ways to keep track of creatures on the move.

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How to hang with jellyfish

Kakani Katija, a postdoctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, wants to know what moon jellies are up to. How do they behave in their natural environment? Do they linger in areas where food is plentiful, or are they completely subject to currents? To answer questions like these, Katija needs data—acceleration, pressure, depth, and temperature.

The trouble is that the qualities that make jellies look so ethereal also make them hard to handle or track. They are delicate and neutrally buoyant, so researchers are reluctant to saddle them with devices that can drag them down. Off-the-shelf tags and sensors tend to be too bulky and heavy for jellies. Scientists also want to make sure that their interventions aren't sabotaging their data. “If you’re interested in behavior, how do you ensure that the way you’re attaching [a device] doesn’t change behavior?” Katija asks. To control for this, a data-collecting tag needs to be small, unobtrusive, and aerodynamic. So Katija and her colleagues collaborated with Florida-based Loggerhead Instruments to engineer a slim tag using open-source models. The next hurdle was finding a way to affix it to a diaphanous creature.

Some researchers had tried affixing equipment to jellies with zip ties, but not all of them have the right kind of protuberances to attach them to. Katija and her collaborators started playing around with different materials and adhesives, and collaborated with various aquariums to try them out on animals in tanks. One of the best solutions for attaching the tag, it turned out, was in Katija's backpack the whole time.

Katija keeps a stash of vet glue, for treating cuts, on hand in case her dog gets injured while they're out hiking. That same glue has proved to be a promising way to adhere sensors to the jellies. The glue holds tight, and then sloughs off in a few hours or days—the timeline is still up in the air. They sensors are strung on monofilament line and tied to a float, so the researchers can use GPS to collect them.

The tags will hit the water of Monterey Bay next month, just in time for a jellyfish bloom.

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DIY drifting with plankton

Many sea creatures—fish, whales, and the like—can swim against a current. Not plankton. These microscopic plants and animals, which provide the base of the marine food chain and are major sources of atmospheric oxygen, are dedicated drifters who go where the currents take them. Despite their tiny size, their fate matters a great deal. “If the phytoplankton crash, there goes our oxygen,” said Sparks.

Jules Jaffe, a research oceanographer at the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, wanted to get a better sense of how and where plankton move. His “autonomous miniature underwater robot drifters” are proxies for the tiny organisms themselves. Composed of concentric foam cylinders around suite of sensors collecting temperature, pressure, and more, these floaters are tossed over the side of a small boat. Then they ride underwater currents, just like plankton.

Researchers use sound to track the devices, which stay in the water for a few hours or a couple of days at a time. So far Jaffe has used them off of La Jolla, California, and the Cayman Islands, where they were used to study grouper embryos.

“These guys aren’t bad, but they’re not exactly like a plankton,” Jaffe says. For one thing, they are considerably larger, which effects the drag on them as they travel through the water. “If the water is moving slowly enough, presumably their drag coefficient is high enough that we can get meaningful data from them,” he says. “If the water was really accelerating, they might be left behind a little bit, and then we would worry about that.”

Jaffe looks forward to more tinkering—to a 3-D-printed future brimming with “smaller, cheaper, faster things.” But he’s already pretty amazed by how his devices have provided a never-before-seen view into the planktonic world. “Nobody would have seen this before unless you put yourself in their reference frame,” he says. “We are coexisting with these different scales of life, and the physics surrounding them actually changes the way they experience the world.”

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Tagging along with whales

A researcher stands at the front of a boat, grappling with a long pole that dangles into the water. There’s a whale up ahead, a flash of a fin or a plume of spray. The researcher stretches the pole out just a little farther, and makes contact. With suction cups, he adheres a collection of lightweight sensors to the whale’s back. When the cetacean dives back underwater, a whole scientific crew is going along for the ride.

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With his collaborators, Jeremy Goldbogen, an assistant professor of biology at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, devised tags that contain both miniaturized movement sensors—accelerometers, magnetometers, and more—and video recorders. The team managed to shrink these to fit a piece of styrofoam a little larger than a human hand. The sensors gather data, and the video feed lets the researchers ride shotgun.

The suction cups proved to be an ingenious way to adhere the whole thing to a whale's smooth body, and critical for studying species that surface briefly and spend long stretches underwater. You might only have a few chances to make the sensors stick. The team is currently tagging minke whales off the Antarctic Peninsula, where they're learning more about movement patterns, eating habits, and day-to-day life in the ocean’s blue-green depths.

The Great Oxford Poop Prank

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Every day leading up to April 1, we're telling the story of one ridiculous historic prank. Find more here.

William Buckland always loved poop. Over the course of his long and accomplished life, the 19th-century polymath discovered that so-called "bezoars," coveted by natural historians for their beautiful shapes, were actually fossilized feces. Once, he visited a European cathedral famous for the puddle of "martyr's blood" that continually gathered on its floor. He kneeled down, licked the liquid, and confidently deemed it to be bat excrement. Plus, he did his darndest to eat every type of animal under the sun, which likely made his own lavatory experiences fascinating.

Now that you know this, it should make sense that Buckland was an early adopter of guano as fertilizer, and that he immediately used it to pull off a devilish prank.

Guano–aka seabird poop—is full of nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium, three chemicals that help plants grow. Although South Americans had already been using guano to amp up their soil for centuries, word of this miraculous material didn't reach Britain until about 1804, when the Prussian geographer Alexander Von Humboldt spread the word about it after his travels to Peru.

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Although no one knows the exact year, it must have been around that time that Buckland, then a student at Oxford, managed to get his hands on some guano. He became so curious about its properties that he decided to test it out on the grass on Tom Quad, the massive lawn that spreads out in front of the main entrance of Christ Church, one of the colleges at Oxford.

Sure, he could have put a discrete pile in one corner of the grass to see what happened, but then no one else would be privy to the experiment. So instead, he decided to use the guano to send a message. It's easy to imagine him in the dead of night, carefully spelling out five large letters.

It worked like a charm. "In due course the brilliant green grass of the letters amply testified to [guano's] efficacy as a dressing," reports Buckland's biographer. In other words, it's possible that the authorities quickly cleaned up the poop itself. But come springtime, when students, faculty, and clergy walked the path across the quad toward the stately reaches of Tom Tower, they were greeted by a big green message: GUANO.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and guano was all the rage across Europe. Buckland had racked up several titles, from Fellow of the Royal Society to Dean of Westminster Abbey—and a new, more uniform carpet of grass had doubtlessly come up on Tom Quad. But I'm willing to bet that verdant GUANO was engraved forever in the minds of all who saw it.

Vote in the Final Four of Our Search for the Most Wondrous Everyday Inventions

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Mundane Madness is a month-long quest to anoint the most overlooked everyday objects. Also check out the original call for entries, and how Round 1 and Round 2 went down.

More than 2,600 readers helped us slash eight marvelously mundane inventions down to our Final Four. You kicked out paper clips, string, matches, and the tape measure.

Here’s where things stand as we kick off Round 3:

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Many readers have continued to show their support for their favorites. A few have campaigned hard for sewers, which revolutionized public health, but we've noticed that paper has emerged as a clear favorite to win it all.

@ckosek waxed poetic, with a pretty mesmerizing gif:

It probably comes as no surprise that at least one librarian—with a near-perfect bracket—is #TeamPaper, too:

Will the showdown between paper and sewers come to pass, or is an upset in the cards? It's up to you. Cast your ballot below, and use the #mundanemadness hashtag on Twitter to tell us what swayed your vote. The final two inventions will do battle on Friday, March 30.


How to Create an Interstellar Network of Planets

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One of the greatest challenges that civilizations face is communicating across vast distances. Over the millennia humans have gotten much better (and faster) at it: signal fires, resonant drums, and fleet-footed messengers gave way to telegraphs, then radios and telephones, and now satellite phones and the internet. Those systems all work well, to some extent, here on Earth. But when we look outward into the universe and imagine a conversation with some other form of intelligent life, we’re faced with radically larger distances, which take mind-bending amounts of time to cross.

How would a system of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence work? In a new paper, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, Duncan Forgan, an astrophysicist at the University of St. Andrews, proposes an interstellar communication network that would work like a planetary equivalent of smoke signals. It starts with planets passing in front of the stars they orbit.

Over the past decade, since the Kepler space observatory launched in 2009, scientists have identified more than 2,500 exoplanets orbiting distant stars (along with thousands of possibilities for more). By studying how light from their stars passes around the planets and through their atmospheres, known as a transit signal, scientists have been able to understand the sizes and characteristics of these planets—some of which could support life as we know it. These observations could one day hint at the presence of biological life on an exoplanet: Living things—even if they’re not intelligent— change the chemical signature of a planet’s atmosphere.

“When it comes to looking for something that’s intelligent, you want something a bit more brash,” says Forgan. An extraterrestrial intelligence, he posits, might deliberately modify a planet’s transit signal with a laser or by building a giant orbiting object. Either strategy would make the signal look weird enough that another form of intelligent life (us, say) might sit up and take notice.

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Astronomers have found one star—KIC 8462852, colloquially known as Boyajian's Star—with a transit signal that didn’t fit any standard models. One theory that made the rounds was that an alien megastructure was causing it. Scientists studying the star now believe that space dust is a more likely culprit for its strange dimming behavior, but if we do ever stumble across an extraterrestrial intelligence, the story could start with a similar discovery.

In the new paper, Forgan imagines what would happen next: How could we establish long-distance communication with another civilization? Part of the answer, he writes, is creating a communication network among planets.

“At any instant, only a few civilizations are correctly aligned to communicate via transits,” he writes. But using that form of communication could be just the beginning. Once we know where other civilizations are located, it’s much easier to communicate via electromagnetic signals. Scanning the whole sky for such communications is costly and time-consuming, but if we know exactly where to send or listen for a signal, and how strong it should be, it would, in theory, be possible to start a conversation. Over at least 100,000 years, relationships like these could be knit into a network—like a string of hilltop fires—so that it could become possible to communicate with another planet out of our line of sight.

These communications would be phenomenally slow, though. Over 100,000 years, two planets on opposite sides of the network might communicate 30 to 50 times. Given the limit of the speed of light, that’s the nature of interstellar communications.

From that perspective, the modern search for extraterrestrial life, which is about 60 years old, has been going on for no time at all. “It’s like nothing that humans have ever done,” says Forgan. “Sixty years feels like a long time because, comparing it to a human lifespan, that is a long time. But comparing it to the galaxy’s lifespan, that’s nothing.”

Extraterrestrial communication, if it ever does happen, will be an exercise in patience and luck. If there are other civilizations out there, they’ll need to have achieved a level of technology that allows them to study transits of other planets (a feat we’ve only managed in the last 30 years) and modify their transit signal so that we can see them (a feat we’ve yet to accomplish).

But transit signals may be one of the best chances we’ve got—in part, Forgan points out, because looking for strange signals doesn’t involve extra work. We would simply have to continue looking for exoplanets and take note of the unusual ones, like the one from Boyajian's Star. “All we have to do now is make sure we’re on the lookout for weird stuff,” says Forgan.

The Cartographers Who Put Water Where It Didn't Belong

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To hear Admiral Bartholomew de Fonte tell it, his voyage was full of serendipity and promise. In a 1708 edition of the English periodical The Monthly Miscellany or Memoirs for the Curious, de Fonte recounted a journey, some five decades prior, "to find out if there was any North West Passage from the Atlantick Ocean into the South and Tartarian Sea." He had shoved off from Lima, he wrote, and navigated to the present-day Pacific Northwest, where he entered an intricate system of watery arteries that beckoned him inland.

He chronicled one fortuitous scene after another. Nudged along by gentle wind, he floated into a lake he christened Lake de Fonte. It was 60 fathom deep (roughly 360 feet), and "abounds with excellent cod and ling, very large and well fed." The water was also speckled with islands thick with cherries, strawberries, and wild currants. The land was shaggy with "shrubby Woods" and moss, which fattened herds of moose.

His tales were full of plenty—lush land, well-stocked seas—and they were also totally apocryphal. There's no proof of the voyage, or of the character of de Fonte himself. The whole saga, excerpted in the historian Glyndwr Williams's book, Voyages of Delusion: The Quest for the Northwest Passage, was later attributed to the magazine's editor.

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When plotting out their maps of North America, many 18th-century European cartographers relied on accounts that drifted across their desks. These were a collage of nautical references, local lore, missionary dispatches, and more. Since it wasn't always possible to fact-check these observations, even maps by the most conscientious makers could be sprinkled with errors. Some of these incorrect annotations were aspirational—and many of them had to do with waterways.

Say that de Fonte had indeed, as he claimed, passed a ship that had sailed inland from Boston. That would have been proof of a viable route through the Northwest Passage, which would have been a major boon to British and French traders. This type of passageway, or other interior waterways like it, would have been so convenient, in fact, that a number of cartographers seemed to will it into being by putting it on paper.

Kevin James Brown, the founder of Geographicus Antique Maps, traces the notion of an inland sea to the 1500s, when the Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano spotted the sounds abutting North Carolina’s Outer Banks and assumed he was looking at an ocean. This sea dried up from maps within a few centuries—just in time to make way for an inlet or strait described in another (potentially fabricated) narrative of the explorer Juan de Fuca’s voyage. The Sea of the West (or Mer de la Ouest), a later and larger speculative sea occupying much of the present-day West Coast, gained traction in the work of the cartographers Guillaume de l’Isle and Philippe Buache.

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By the early 18th century, writes Brown, cartographers were combating the problem of patchwork knowledge by plugging in best guesses—drawn from science and geographic patterns—"to fill in blank spaces when little else was known.” The Sea of the West “is the perfect example,” Brown writes. “Though a salt water inlet from the Pacific had long been speculated upon and hoped for, Buache and de l’Isle embraced the theory because it supported both the ambitions of the French crown in the New World and the theoretical geographic theory that Buache was developing.” It was a speculative addition—and a strategic one.

Ditto the the River of the West, an apocryphal route that meandered from the middle of the continent to its western edge. Two different potential routes are suggested on this 1794 double-hemisphere map by Samuel Dunn.

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These features disappeared from maps soon after, as expeditions got an in-person look at the geography and dismissed the more fanciful additions. Now, they linger as reminders that maps don’t only recount geographic traits, but also the aspirations (politically, economically, and otherwise) of the people who plot them.

Found: An Ancient Depiction of Egyptian Pharaoh Hatshepsut

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There were only a few female pharaohs who ruled ancient Egypt, and out of them, Hatshepsut is a legend in her own class. During her reign from 1478 to 1458 B.C., she built up Egyptian civilization to prosperous fortune by establishing trade routes as far as Ethiopia and leading successful military campaigns against legions in Nubia, now modern-day northeastern Africa. When she died, she left a distinct legacy that is reflected in ancient monuments and pottery that are still being unearthed today.

A recent reanalysis of two artifacts housed at Swansea University in Wales has revealed another depiction of the Royal Highness. Excavated by the Egypt Exploration Society in the early 20th century, the two limestone fragments arrived at Swansea University via entrepreneur Sir Henry Wellcome, where they lived in storage for over 20 years. The lower fragment shows the part of a person's nose, mouth, chin, and neck. The upper fragment shows a partially cracked one-eyed head, with a leaf fan and distinct traces of hieroglyphics above the head. Based on the cobra on the figure's forehead, which in Egyptian iconography typically means the person was a pharaoh, archaeologists presumed this person was indeed a high-class citizen. But who?

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When Professor Ken Griffin examined the artifacts he realized the hieroglyphics resembled reliefs in Hatshepsut's tomb in Luxor, Egypt. The reliefs, like the fragments, also had similarly carved cobras above Hatshepsut's head, and the hieroglyphics employ the feminine pronoun. When glued together the fragment revealed Hatshepsut's full visage.

It's still unclear where the object came from. It looks like the upper carving was forcibly removed and carved again, possibly to make it attractive for sale hundreds of years ago. Professor Griffin and his team are conducting further research to pinpoint the fragments' exact location, but for now it's on display at Swansea University's Egypt Centre.

With Musical Cryptography, Composers Can Hide Messages In Their Melodies

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Out of the many tropes in TV and literature, espionage is one that spurs drama and intrigue for viewers and readers alike. A budding protagonist wants to convey a secret message in a letter or text, but must scramble the message so discreetly to avert the eager antagonist’s gaze. Will the message send through securely? The suspense always deadly.

One unexpected form of transmitting such messages is through music. It’s better known as music cryptography, which is a method in which the musical notes A through G are used to spell out words, abbreviations, or codes.

This secret writing appears as a plot point in TV shows such as Outlander, the 18th-century time travel drama based in Scotland, and mystery novels like theSecret of the White Rose, which features characters who employ music ciphers as undetectable modes of espionage or communication.

In the season two Outlander episode “Useful Occupations and Deceptions,” for example, the protagonists, Jamie and Claire, intercept a letter from Prince Charles Edward Stuart that also includes a page of German sheet music sent from England. The clumsy music contains almost the same melodies as Bach’s “Goldberg Variation,” but with five random key changes, which according to the virtuoso nun who played the music, is more than usual. When deciphered by Jamie, the sharps and flats in the musical keys reveal a message that Prince Stuart intends to start a war to reclaim his throne using 40,000 pounds from Jamie and Claire’s nemesis the Duke of Sandringham, and few other English conspirators. This persuasive scenario makes one wonder if music cryptography is a real spy technique.

Early 17th- and 18th-century mathematicians and cryptologists such as John Wilkins and Philip Thicknesse argued that music cryptography was one of the most inscrutable ways of transporting secret messages. They claimed that music was perfect camouflage, because spies would never suspect music. When played, the music would sound so much like any other composition that musically trained listeners would be easily fooled, too. Thicknesse wrote in his 1772 book A Treatise on the Art of Deciphering, and of Writing in Cypher: With an Harmonic Alphabet, “for who that examined a suspected messenger would think an old song, without words, in which perhaps the messenger’s tobacco or snuff might be put, contained a secret he was to convey?” Written letters don’t have this advantage.

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He added, “I am persuaded an alphabet of musical notes may be so contrived, that the notes shall not only convey the harmony, but the very words of the song, so that a music-master ... may instruct his female pupil, not only how to play upon an instrument, but how to play the fool at the same time.”

Thicknesse created an enciphering system that employs quarter and half notes with treble clef and key signature. He claimed his harmonic alphabet ensured strong encryption and expressed the words “perfectly to the eye as they do the harmony to the ear.” He also wrote of English philosopher Francis Bacon’s music cipher technique, in which a particular number of the notes A or B equate to each alphabet letter (aaaaa translates to A), “the above method of secret writing is certainly the most ingenious of any ever invented.”

It is highly likely that messages using codes like these would go undetected, at least to an untrained eye and ear. To a trained eye, however, says Western Michigan University Music Professor David Loberg Code, a sequence of notes with a message hidden inside might provoke questions. “Since their encryption system is not musical, the manuscript would look suspicious because it contains musical nonsense,” he says. If someone were to send music theorist Michael Haydn’s 26-note motif, in which the lower bass clef G translates to A, then G sharp equals B, and so forth, isolated on its own music sheet, the motif would look disjointed. When played, it might sound dreadfully boring in style or like a random, atonal string of pitches, says Code.

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The prime users of musical encryption were classical composers, but there are no known examples of the technique being used for espionage or intelligence purposes. Rather, most composers put the letters of their name or a friend’s into compositions simply because it was fun.

“Sometimes a musical version of a name is a subtle reference in the piece of music,” Code says. “Often it is very prominent; it is the main theme of the piece and is heard over and over. In that case, whether or not you know exactly how the composer translated the name into musical pitches, it is obvious that it is meant to be heard.” These composers wanted to leave a traces of themselves, and they “were not secretive about it; they wrote about [it] or told people what they were doing.” They didn’t mind if interested onlookers found their cryptograms.

One well-recognized music cipher comes from the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms. He included a cryptogram in his 1868 “String Sextet No. 2 in G major.” In the summer of 1858, a 25-year-old Brahms fell madly in love with Agathe von Siebold, a 23-year-old music director and vocal student of Brahms’s friend Julius Otto Grimm. They quickly set plans for marriage, but in January 1859, he broke off the engagement to focus on his music.

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Von Siebold later married, and Brahms remained a bachelor until death, but he still longed for her. He incorporated the notes A-G-A-H-E in bars 162 to 168 in the first movement of his sextet. (B-natural in German nomenclature is the note H; the letter T is not included because it is not a musical note.)

According to BBC radio host Tom Service, the motif is played at the piece’s “greatest and most aching release,” likely signaling Brahms’s heartache. In a letter to his friend Josef Gänsbacher about the sextet, Brahms wrote, “by this work, I have freed myself of my last love.”

Well before Brahms’s time, the prodigious Johann Sebastian Bach spelled out his own name in compositions using a succession of the notes B-A-C-H (B-natural). This short music monogram is now called a Bach motif, and Bach wove his name in various pieces such as his final work, “The Art of Fugue.”

Brahms’ close friend and Romantic-era composer Robert Schumann also integrated music cryptograms into his compositions. Schumann placed the cryptograms, A-S-C-H, A-s-C-H, and S-C-H-A in his piece, “Carnaval.” (In German nomenclature, E flat equates to S and A flat equates to As.) The three codes represent the name of his then fiancé’s birthplace of Asch, Germany, (now in Czechia). The second is the German spelling of ash to honor the Christian holy day of Ash Wednesday. The final cryptogram is selected letters from his name.

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Even as musical styles evolved in the 20th century, music composers such as Joseph Maurice Ravel, Achille-Claude Debussy, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, and Dmitri Shostakovich continued experimenting with musical motifs, some up to 26 notes, to spell out their names in compositions.

French composer Olivier Messiaen’s cipher, which matches a different note for all 26 letters in the alphabet, created words that sounded similar to his organ work “Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité.” Code says the notes deciphered translated to the French words from Summa Theologica by philosopher Thomas Aquinas for essence, humankind, paternity, and illumination. Known for his rich tones and complex rhythms, Messiaen was one of the few to develop a cipher that closely mirrored his own style.


What if you want to create your own composition with a hidden message or a shout-out to a friend? It’s possible. Code has developed a site called Solfa Cipher that turns text into singable melodies. Rather than use 26 different pitches for each letter of the alphabet, “Solfa Cipher maps letters onto only seven notes of a musical scale (Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti) combined with unique durations,” says Code. The site also includes a decoding grid and tool.

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If you’re more interested in cracking codes, there are cryptography groups that exist, too. Last year, some professional and student cryptanalysts met at an applied cyber-security contest and event called NorthSec conference in Montreal, Canada. Among the challenges created by NorthSec, an encoded Solfa Cipher, which the attendants solved using an encryption key that is defined by four elements: a clef, a tonic, a mode, and a rhythmic unit. In his blog Infected Packages, attendee Jonathan Racicot wrote that participants then translated using a English language translation matrix. The message read: “The first half of the flag is the word subdermal. Concatenate with the second half to obtain a complete flag. Glory to Rao.”

Whether a musical cipher encodes a composer’s name or a more complex message like the above, for most music theorists and cryptographers, decrypting is not always the desired trophy. Sometimes the thrill is knowing that the music holds intricate patterns and meaning that are beyond deciphering.

The Long, Strange History of Medicinal Turpentine

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Turpentine is a common sight in hardware stores and art cabinets. Made from pine resin distilled until clear, the oily liquid been used for hundreds of years as a water repellant, paint thinner, solvent, and lamp oil. (It is very flammable.) But for thousands of years, it's also been used as a medicine, even though most modern doctors would strongly advise against ingesting it at all.

Turpentine has deep roots in medical history. In Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest, author Lawrence S. Earley explains that the Romans used it to treat depression, naval surgeons during the Age of Sail injected it (hot) into wounds, and medics used it to try and stop heavy bleeding. Doctors found it appealing, even though they knew about its less-desirable effects.

"The rectified oil of Turpentine is a medicine much less used than it deserves to be. The reason probably is, the fear of its producing violent effects on the alimentary canal and urinary organs," one doctor wrote in 1821. He also wrote that turpentine could greatly be put to use killing internal worms, since insects instantly died if exposed to the liquid. He ordered one patient afflicted with tapeworms to drink turpentine every few hours. During the Civil War, doctors administered turpentine internally and externally to halt infection, often with dubious results.

But the problem with turpentine oil was not simply some harsh side effects. Ingestion is often toxic, causing kidney damage and bleeding in the lungs. So why was it used?

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Viewed in context, it's easier to understand why doctors once used it as medicine. Pine tar, another related product, is still a useful medicine ingredient for rashes and skin problems, while turpentine oil, which was also considered good for lung health, is still an ingredient in Vick's Vapor-Rub. (Although it's listed as an inactive ingredient.) Turpentine is antiseptic, too, and the terrible taste and harsh effects could have been interpreted as signs that it was working. "King of the [medicines] was turpentine, a product of the tidewater pine forests," Kentucky historian Thomas D. Clark wrote. "Turpentine had three important medical requisites: It smelled loud, tasted bad, and burned like the woods on fire." It also had the strange side effect of making urine smell like violets.

Clark would know. Turpentine was widely used in the American South. When sailing meant wooden ships, pine products were in high demand for sealing leaks and preserving wood. The British especially valued pine forests, and almost immediately on reaching the Americas, they went in search of enough pines to produce the favored products. A "turpentine belt" developed in the South, and whole forests were tapped for resin. For many years, slaves were forced to do the difficult, painstaking work of making turpentine by "boxing" pine trees. Unfortunately, they were also compelled to take it as medicine, along with castor oil, for any number of illnesses. Today, some Americans still consider turpentine, often mixed with sugar, to be a folk remedy.

In the golden era of fantastical patent medicine, turpentine was an addition to a number of snake oils, such as Hamlen's Wizard Oil. During Prohibition, piney-flavored turpentine oil was often used to make fake gin. But most people eventually stopped taking turpentine. Though it does have strong purgative qualities, its toxicity far outweighs any potential tapeworm-killing benefit.

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