We think of the steam turbine as the force that powered the Industrial Revolution. We think of automatic doors and vending machines as modern conveniences. But these things existed a couple of thousand years ago during the days of imperial Rome. They had accurate clocks, grain mills, and self-healing concrete, too, not to mention the amazing aqueducts and sewer systems that aren't covered here. Many inventions are ascribed to Hero of Alexandria, who was a gifted mathematician and an engineer who experimented with mechanical developments of all kinds, often powered by the physics of water, whether gravity or steam power.
But before the Roman Empire gets all the credit, we have to remember that Hero was Greek, and Ctesibius as well, and they worked in Egypt. Both were probably expanding on even more ancient knowledge from both cultures. The Roman Empire was big and powerful enough to allow such geniuses to not only work but document their innovations in Alexandria, established by the Greeks as a center of learning and knowledge. Nevertheless, what those engineers of the Roman era accomplished is pretty impressive. -via Damn Interesting
At about the same time every year, when huge Halloween props greet you at every store and every drink smells like pumpkin spice, SmokyMountains.com rolls out their Fall Foliage Prediction Map. It's almost all green right now, but you can move the slider below to see where the brightest colors will be for each week through November 17th. The map shown above is for the week of October 20th. If you want to plan a trip to see the autumn colors, this map is intended to help you decide what days to reserve accommodations. It's also handy to plan a photography day trip or invite your friends from the desert or the tropics to visit.
The map uses historical data, weather trends and forecasts, user observations, and the kind of trees in each area to predict when and how the cooling temperatures will affect leaf color each week ahead. Conditions that are cooler and drier than normal in my corner of Kentucky means that leaves will turn earlier and be brighter than average. We should have some really beautiful mountains for a month or more. And, like every year, I will see those mountains and think about making a quilt in those colors, but I never do. -via Laughing Squid
Automobiles came along in the late 19th century, and before the 20th century rolled in were already up to more than 65 miles per hour! Of course, these were never our everyday cars, but race cars designed and built by those with a need for speed. Therefore, they looked pretty weird. Believe it or not, race cars broke the 100 mph bar in 1904. Eventually, they put jet engines and rockets in cars and got them up to ridiculous speeds, while the rest of us were driving at 75 mph or less, and we had to build a nationwide highway system just to do that. These cars were never meant to be mass-produced, because they would never be safe for getting to a destination.
Don't let the length of this video keep you from watching. They go through all the record-breaking cars in just four minutes, then show them again from the perspective of someone standing still on the roadside. Then the last four cars are shown again from an overhead drone view, twice. Somehow, I'm still most impressed with the earliest cars. -via Born in Space
In the 1988 Tim Burton comedy Beetlejuice, the ghost with the most always spelled his own name Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse is a star in the Orion constellation, and it has four common pronunciations; one of them is Beetlejuice, which is how it is pronounced in the film. But don't practice that pronunciation, because if you say three times, you'll have to put up with him. In fact, the movie was almost titled Betelgeuse, but the studio figured audiences would have trouble with that.
Beetlejuice became a staple of Halloween, because the costumes were both monstrous and funny. Spirit Halloween sold a prop that resembled the sign shown in the scene above, but the word was spelled Beetlejuice. Twice. Did they think buyers wouldn't notice, or care? Or did they think fans of the film would still be confused as to the pronunciation of Betelgeuse? Or did they assume most buyers decades later hadn't seen the movie? At any rate, true fans avoided buying the sign, even if their entire house was decorated in a Beetlejuice theme.
They've finally corrected that. This year, Spirit Halloween is offering a movie-accurate sign that lights up. And all is right with the world.
It took redditor /u/Barbi0za 22 hours and countless sprinkles to compose this cherry and almond cake. They used tweezers to carefully arrange each of the sprinkles into a remarkably accurate depiction of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. The solid forms of the sprinkles work well to convey the brush strokes of the original work.
When asked if it was difficult to cut into this masterpiece, /u/Barbi0za responded that they appreciate a temporary art form, so that experience was actually enjoyable.
Ellis Rosen is my favorite New Yorker cartoonist. Every one of his posts on Instagram is worth browsing through complete.
One of the stories that he is gradually developing is the struggle between Mr. Ruffles, a dog who is implicitly a secret agent similar to James Bond, and an evil squirrel who is his archnemesis. The squirrel usually has the upper hand. You can find a collection of cartoons developing this storyline here.
Ronobir Lahiri is a sitar player in Los Angeles who has accompanied musicians as famous as Katy Perry and Lil Nas X.
On his YouTube channel, Lahiri provides recordings of covers that he has created of pop and rock songs, such as the above "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana. You can also find his covers of "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon, "Just Like Heaven" by The Cure, and "Take on Me" by A-ha.
-via Born in Space
Minnesotastan said, "There are approximately 10,000 covers, variations, and adaptations of Bohemian Rhapsody. Over the years, all of them have been posted at Neatorama." Well, here's another one.
Julien Cohen assembled singers and musicians from all over for a flashmob performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the streets of Paris. They are all good, but particularly notable is the guitarist, 11-year old Olly Pearson, known as Guitar Olly. Olly became widely known after appearing on Britain's Got Talent earlier this year. The other soloists are credited at the YouTube page. Pulling this off meant enlisting the cooperation of apartment dwellers all around the square, plus a team of videographers and sound people, all in stealth mode. Cohen is a pianist who has organized quite a few of these pop-up public performances before, so he had some idea of what he was getting into. Still, this is the biggest and most elaborate flashmob he's managed so far. -Thanks, gwdMaine!
The Astronomy Picture of the Day for September 9th was taken in July by astronaut Nichole Ayers from the International Space Station. The plume of plasma rising from the clouds over earth is a Transient Luminous Event, or TLE. There are several kinds of TLEs, including jets, sprites, elves, trolls, ghosts, gnomes, and pixies.
This particular type of TLE was later confirmed to be a gigantic jet, which is pretty rare. It's rarer still to catch it in a photograph, since the longest of them only last a couple of seconds. According to NASA, a gigantic jet is a huge electrical discharge going from the top of a high thunderstorm (around 20 kilometers) upward toward the upper atmosphere (around 100 kilometers). In other words, atmospheric storms produce a lot more electricity than we see on earth, but not all of that power makes its way down to us. Nice to know. -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: NASA/Nichole Ayers)
Aiden Wilkins is only nine years old, but he is already a college student. He demonstrated remarkable intelligence while still a toddler, began high school at the age of seven, and is now enrolled in a neuroscience course at Ursinus College in eastern Pennsylvania.
The CBS News affiliate in Philadelphia reports that Aiden is taking this class as part of his long-term goal to become a pediatric neurosurgeon. Although he enjoys typical childhood interests like soccer and video games, Aiden's sights are already set on the very adult challenge of medical school. So far, he's aiming at Johns Hopkins and Princeton.
Astronomy, mathematics, physics.
— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) August 31, 2025
The evolution in our thoughts and models: Heliocentrism and Geocentrism.
By Malin Christersson, source: https://t.co/0T2N21Uiro (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) pic.twitter.com/nDQkEEUmq9
Ancient people assumed that the sun moved as it rose in the east and set in the west. Stars and planets did the same. This is geocentrism, the theory that the earth is the static center of the universe. It made sense because nothing is as human as people thinking the world revolves around them. But as scientists and philosophers observed the orbits of planets and the relative movements of stars, the idea of heliocentrism arose. That's the theory that earth and other planets revolve around the sun. The illustration above shows how each of those theories work from a distance, and which one makes more sense.
Malin Christersson has an enhanced interactive version of the illustration at his website, along with a timeline of scientists and philosophers who advocated one theory or the other. Notably, the war between the two theories lasted up through the 17th century, mainly because geocentrism was considered to be Biblical, but also because Tycho Brahe misinterpreted an observation. -via Memo of the Air
Jason Kottke posed a question on his blog this morning: What is the longest monosyllabic English word you can think of? It's a curious question, since we think of words with one syllable as being all the same length. To be exact, he was thinking of monosyllabic words with a lot of letters. The first thing that popped into my head was "queue." It's only five letters long, but the four vowels are redundant. You need to think of words with many consonants. The comments he got were enlightening. The actual longest monosyllabic English words are recorded by the Guinness Book of World Records, and they feature long strings of consonants.
One commenter suggested "squirreled," which has ten letters in American English and eleven in British English. What? That's two syllables! But he argues it rhymes with "world," which only has one vowel. Language is a funny thing. Syllables are not a function of a word's spelling, but of its pronunciation. There are plenty of English words that can have varying numbers of syllables, depending on the dialect, that we can still easily understand. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Peter Trimming)
Weird Universe tells us that Joseph Pilates (1883-1967), the developer of the popular exercise program that bears his name, invented numerous pieces of exercise equipment. He had a holistic approach to fitness, which prudently included sleep.
In 1930, after immigrating from Germany to the United States, Pilates invented and patented a spring-less bed that has a v-shaped inner frame and mattress. Pilates argued that the human spine tends to curve inward when posture is not deliberately maintained. It is necessary to discipline the spine into proper alignment with a flat, hard bed. The V-shape permits the arms and legs to provide some support and therefore allow the sleeper to relax fully into this cradle.
Warning: this video will produce involuntary butt-clenching and possible vertigo.
The 2025 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships are being held right now in the Valais canton in Switzerland. Canadian cyclist Jackson Goldstone won the Downhill World Championship in the elite category, even though at age 21 he's still technically eligible to compete in the junior category. The race down the Alpine track in Champéry was incredible, and we get to watch from Goldstone's POV angle. This is a track I would be hesitant to walk down unless it was a life or death matter. Goldstone takes it flat out in three minutes of terror as he rounds tight corners and sudden turns, all while the crowd yells and blows whistles. If the above video is too much for you, we also have a non-POV video with commentary.
Goldstone made Canada proud, as you can see in coverage of the celebration. He makes the rest of us nervous. -via kottke
We all know how Beethoven went deaf later in his life, yet kept composing. Lesser known is the story of Johann Sebastian Bach's sight, which was always weak but he eventually went blind before he died. Bach underwent cataract surgery twice.
In the 18th century, those who suffered from cataracts, or cloudy lenses, had only one surgical treatment available. It involved "couching," or separating the lens from the front of the eye, which could restore some vision. Replacement was not possible at the time. Bach, at age 65, turned to famous eye surgeon John Taylor, who called himself an "ophthalmiater." Taylor was famous in some places for his skill at eye surgery and in others for the disastrous results of his eye surgery. A look into his techniques would make any modern patient shudder. Taylor performed cataract couching on Bach twice. We don't know if those involved a surgery on each eye, or an attempt at repair after a failure, but we know they led to Bach's blindness and death within a few months. Read about Taylor and what he did to Bach (and later composer George Frideric Handel) at Amusing Planet.
