The Great MIT Pigeon Prank
How Bob Kane stole all the credit for inventing Batman
From Daniel Rennie for Bold Entrance: “The biggest villain in Gotham isn’t the Joker, but Batman’s creator himself, Bob Kane. In the years following Batman’s first appearance in May 1939, Kane became almost as famous as the Caped Crusader himself. But Kane wasn’t responsible for what makes the crime-fighter so memorable: his costume, his arsenal of cool gadgets, or his secret identity. He didn’t even create Gotham City. All these creations belong to Bill Finger, whose identity remained as secret as Bruce Wayne. Finger made Batman what he is, and had a hand in the creation of Robin, and villains like The Joker, Penguin, and Two-Face. Nonetheless, Kane got all the credit – and the money.”
The inventor of the Pringle’s can was so proud of it he was buried in one
From Scott Horsely at NPR: “If it weren’t for Frederic Baur, Pringle might still be just a street name in suburban Cincinnati. Back in the 1960s, Cincinnati-based Procter and Gamble, where Baur worked, developed a potato chip made from dehydrated flour and shaped like a saddle. They didn’t look like any other potato chip, and Baur’s can was just as novel. Baur won a patent on the tubular container in 1970, and packaging experts say the distinctive can was a big reason for the national and international success of the chips. Baur died in 2008 at 89, and at his request, some of his ashes were buried in a Pringle’s can.”
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Continue reading “How Bob Kane stole all the credit for inventing Batman”How the world ends, according to Kierkegaard
His staff stole $34 million from him and he didn’t notice
From Maxine Bernstein for Oregon Live: “Husband-and-wife chauffeurs are accused of stealing $34 million from wealthy publisher Win McCormack over seven years. Sergey Lebedenko and his wife, Galina provided rides to McCormack through their limousine service and then made unauthorized charges of up to $34 million to his American Express card.The couple used the money to buy lavish vacation homes and a $1.5 million executive jet. While executing search warrants at the couple’s homes, federal agents seized more than $100,000 in cash and 150 ounces of gold bullion worth about $300,000. It is the largest alleged heist against a single person in the history of Oregon.”
The US government created a battle plan in case of a zombie invasion
From Thaddeus Morgan for History: “The United States may have one of the largest armies on earth, but even the Pentagon has taken no chances at being caught off-guard by an unusual foe. In fact, in 2011, the U.S. Department of Defense released a strategy to combat a potential zombie apocalypse. While the potential opponents might be fictional, the military took it seriously. In fact, the first line of the Counter-Zombie Dominance Plan, or “CONPLAN 8888-11,” states, “This plan was not actually designed as a joke.” The origins of the plan can be traced to training exercises held in 2009 and 2010, during which young officers realized the potential upsides to planning for a hypothetical zombie attack.”
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Continue reading “His staff stole $34 million from him and he didn’t notice”When you just can’t decide
Jimmy Sabatino may be the loneliest prisoner in the US
From Alan Prendergast for WestWord: “Located a hundred miles southwest of Denver, just outside the high-desert town of Florence, ADX houses more than 300 terrorists, gang leaders, drug lords and other high-risk prisoners. Its guest list includes Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols and shoe bomber Richard Reid, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was housed there for decades until he committed suicide. And then are the two guys in The Suites, the most solitary of men. They are each entombed behind double doors in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell; the men are under scrutiny 24 hours a day, by cameras and listening devices in the cells. FBI agents read their mail and listen in on their phone calls.”
Why did this New England college campus see a wave of student suicides?
From Jordan Kisner for the NYT: “The first death happened before the academic year began. In July 2021, an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was reported dead. The administration sent a notice out over email, with the familiar, thoroughly vetted phrasing and appended resources. The week before the academic year began, a second student died. A rising senior in the computer-science department who loved horticulture took his own life. This brought an intimation of disaster. One student suicide is a tragedy; two might be the beginning of a cluster. Some faculty members began to feel a tinge of dread when they stepped onto campus. A third student died before September was up.”
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Continue reading “Jimmy Sabatino may be the loneliest prisoner in the US”Stewart Butterfield and Slack, his second accidental success story
I’ve been going through some archives of mine, and came across a story I wrote in February of 2014, almost exactly 10 years ago, when I was working for Gigaom in San Francisco. I interviewed a young Canadian guy named Stewart Butterfield about a new thing he had just launched called Slack — a kind of all-in-one chat and workflow discussion app. I freely admit that I was not sold on this app at first, despite Marc Andreessen’s excitement about its growth rate, and I blame that on my lack of interest in corporate productivity apps in general, which I’m sure are really important but in most cases are as boring as watching paint dry.
What really interested me about Stewart and Slack was that the development of Slack happened while Butterfield and his team were trying to launch an online game called Glitch — according to Stewart, they came up with Slack as a way of collaborating with each other while working on the game, because every other form of collaboration (email, MSN Messenger, etc.) didn’t have the features they were looking for. But the really interesting part of the story was that this was the second time Stewart had invented something successful seemingly by accident, while doing something completely unrelated.
The first time was a little app called Flickr, which more or less invented the online photo-sharing market. Flickr grew out of another attempt at an online game that Stewart and his partners (including Flickr co-founder and Butterfield’s wife at the time, Caterina Fake) were working on. This one was called Game Neverending, and it was a very cool exploratory open-world type of animated game — I played it a few times and quite liked it, but it never took off. As part of the game, you could upload an avatar of yourself, a picture or image of some kind, and that feature turned out to be really popular, so Stewart and the Flickr team wisely decided to focus on expanding that, and Flickr was born.
Continue reading “Stewart Butterfield and Slack, his second accidental success story”It’s Torpenhow Hill, or Hill hill hill hill
Note: This has been kind of debunked — or at least 25 percent debunked 🙂 As a number of people pointed out on Mastodon, it seems there is no real place (in terms of being listed on a map) that is called Torpenhow Hill, as noted here, so that might be an embellishemnt just to make the whole story even more absurd sounding. Tom Scott also notes that in his video debunking on YouTube — however, he does mention that there is clearly a small rise near Torpenhow (which he walks up) and this could be considered a hill. So there.
Start ’em early
Pro-life bake sale
The most Canadian content possible
His death was accidental so why did some call it murder?
From the New York Times: “It was the kind of tragic accident that reverberates through a community: a first-year college student, out late in New York City on New Year’s Eve, falls onto the subway tracks and is killed by an oncoming train. Word of the 19-year-old’s death spread quickly among the people who knew the young man, Matthew Sachman, who went by Matteo. But when they typed his name and what little they knew into the search bar, they found a blizzard of poorly written news articles, shady-looking YouTube videos and inaccurate obituaries. Some said that Sachman had not fallen onto the tracks at all, but had been stabbed to death in a Bronx subway station.
Top Harvard cancer researchers accused of scientific fraud in 37 studies
From Beth Mole for Ars Technica: “The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute’s top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop. The accusations come from data sleuth Sholto David and colleagues on PubPeer, an online forum for researchers to discuss publications that has frequently served to spot dubious research and potential fraud.”
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Continue reading “His death was accidental so why did some call it murder?”The forgotten genius who changed British food forever
From Jonathan Nunn for The Guardian: “If you were a young person living in London in the early 1970s and you were looking for a bargain, the word of Nicholas Saunders was something close to holy scripture. Whatever you sought, Saunders had the answer. If you wanted to start an anarchist squat or self-publish a Trotskyist pamphlet, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you wanted to know how much a gram of cocaine should cost, or where to get free legal advice if you were arrested, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you just wanted to find out which supermarkets were cheaper for which goods, or how to fly all the way to India on a ticket to Frankfurt, you consulted Nicholas Saunders.”
What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?
From Eric Berger for Ars Technica: “Taylor Wang was deeply despondent. A day earlier, he had quite literally felt on top of the world by becoming the first Chinese-born person to fly into space. But now, all of his hopes and dreams, everything he had worked on for the better part of a decade had come crashing down around him. He asked the NASA flight controllers if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. After being told no, Wang said something that chilled the nerves of those in Houston watching over the safety of the crew and the Shuttle mission. “Hey, if you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not going back,” Wang said.”
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Continue reading “The forgotten genius who changed British food forever”The launch of the first Apple Mac
On January 24th in 1985, a little company called Apple launched a revolution in personal computing with the first Macintosh computer — a chunky-looking desktop with an equally clunky-looking mouse and a washed-out screen, which cost $2,495 US (the equivalent of about $7,000 today). It’s difficult to see this as revolutionary now, but in the mid-1980s it absolutely was. The only computers most people — including me — were familiar with were room-sized corporate servers with tape drives. The Mac made computers human-sized, and its graphical user interface with the trash can icon and file folders, and the mouse to navigate among them (both of which Steve Jobs borrowed from the Xerox PARC research lab) were unlike anything else on the market. No more typing DOS commands in green text on a black background!
I didn’t get one when they first came out — instead, I asked a friend who knew about such things what I should buy, and knowing of my interest in both drawing and music, he suggested the Atari 1040ST, because it had a better colour screen and a MIDI interface (which I never used). But I admired the Mac, and every Apple computer that came after it — especially the candy-coloured iMacs and the all-in-one desktops that succeeded them. I could never afford to actually buy one; I almost always wound up with some PC knockoff, which I liked in part because they were easier to take apart so you could upgrade the RAM, graphics card, etc. Also, PCs were better for playing games like Doom. But there’s no question Jobs and Apple were masters of marketing, especially the original Mac “1984” ad, which was created by Ridley Scott.
The amazing Tragopan pheasant
A video by Jonathan Pointer, found via The Kid Should See This