The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally

Today also happens to be Grandparents Day ...! 

 

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Today in History

1297		Scots under William Wallace defeat the English at Stirling Bridge.
1695		Imperial troops under Eugene of Savoy defeat the Turks at the Battle of Zenta.
1709		John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, wins the bloodiest battle of the 18th century at great cost, against the French at Malplaquet.
1740		The first mention of an African American doctor or dentist in the colonies is made in the Pennsylvania Gazette.
1777		General George Washington and his troops are defeated by the British under General Sir William Howe at the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania.
1786		The Convention of Annapolis opens with the aim of revising the Articles of Confederation.
1802		Piedmont, Italy, is annexed by France.
1814		U.S. forces led by Thomas Macdonough route the British fleet on Lake Champlain.
1847		Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” is first performed in a saloon in Pittsburgh.
1850		Soprano opera singer Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” makes her American debut at New York’s Castle Garden Theater.
1864		A 10-day truce is declared between generals William Sherman and John Hood so civilians may leave Atlanta, Georgia.
1857		Indians incited by Mormon John D. Lee kill 120 California-bound settlers in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
1904		The battleship Connecticut, launched in New York, introduces a new era in naval construction.
1916		The “Star Spangled Banner” is sung at the beginning of a baseball game for the first time in Cooperstown, New York.
1944		American troops enter Luxembourg.
1962		Thurgood Marshall is appointed a judge of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.
1965		The 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) arrives in South Vietnam and is stationed at An Khe.
1974		Haile Selassie I is deposed from the Ethiopian throne.
2001		In an unprecedented, highly coordinated attack, terrorists hijack four U.S. passenger airliners, flying two into the World Trade Center towers in New York and one into the Pentagon, killing thousands. The fourth airliner, headed toward Washington likely to strike the White House or Capitol, is crashed just over 100 miles away in Pennsylvania after passengers storm the cockpit and overtake the hijackers.
2005		Israel completes its unilateral disengagement of all Israeli civilians and military from the Gaza Strip.
2007		Russia detonates a nano-bomb; dubbed the “Father of All Bombs,” it is the largest non-nuclear weapon developed to date.
2012		US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is attacked and burned down; 4 Americans are killed including the US ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens.

Questions About Questions and Unanswerable Questions

The most meta of queries finally get their due.

1. Who invented FAQs?
The Frequently Asked Questions format has existed for a while, just not by that name. (The Four Questions of Passover have been in the Talmud since around the 4th century.) Today’s popular FAQ format actually began at NASA. In 1983, Eugene Miya was tired of seeing the same old questions posed by new members of a pre–World Wide Web newsgroup. The excessive questions took up space on the mailing list’s servers and flooded users’ inboxes. To correct it, Miya started posting a monthly Frequently Asked Questions list to the group, and thus, the FAQ was born.
2. Who asked the first question?
Believe it or not, someone’s taken a crack at answering this: Joseph Jordania, an Australian-Georgian ethnomusicologist and the author of Who Asked the First Question? The Origins of Human Choral Singing, Intelligence, Language and Speech. He proposes that the first question was asked by the first human being, because—as he explains it—the ability to ask a question was a critical evolutionary leap in distinguishing hominids from their ancestors. So we can't say who, exactly, but that individual gets credit for kicking off the entire human species.
3. Do other species ask questions?
Apes have understood and answered questions humans have asked in studies, but despite their sense of curiosity, they don’t ask questions themselves. “Chimpanzees in the wild have vocalization that has elements of questioning behavior,” Jordania writes. But aside from call-and-response dynamics, questioning is distinctly human.
4. Who came up with the question mark?
Linguists generally credit British scholar Alcuin of York with the first question mark, which was a tilde over a Roman dot that was meant to help with reading inflection. But in 2011, Cambridge researcher and manuscript expert Chip Coakley discovered the earliest documented instance of a question-indicating mark. The symbol, known as a “zagwa elaya”—which looks like a colon— was in a 5th-century Syriac text following what was clearly a question.

And Four Burning Questions We Just Can’t Answer

Despite all of the incredible things humans have figured out, we don’t know everything.

1. What’s inside a black hole?
We’ll probably never know. Nothing can communicate from inside of one—light, radio waves, anything. Even if we could send something (like a signal) into a black hole, we couldn’t get it back. The closest thing we have to an answer employs two established theories (gravity and quantum mechanics). Scientists even have a name for this combined theory—quantum gravity—but they still don’t get how it works. For now, they think everything sucked into a black hole is bunched up and stacked on top of itself in its center, like a big, galactic dogpile. Other people think black holes could be a gate to another universe. But until someone goes into one and comes back? No idea.
2. Why do we have an appendix?
Total mystery! It’s just there (unless you had it removed). A 2007 issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology posited that the vestigial organ once acted as a storehouse for “good” bacteria, so when pre-medicine bodies were hit with dire illnesses affecting the gut, an appendix could help repopulate the stomach with disease-fighting bacteria. Scientists agree that this guess is as good as they come, but the author of the study admitted there’s no way to confirm it without a “very expensive, heinous” experiment that might involve infecting people who don’t have access to modern medicine with dysentery. No thanks!
3. What’s the CIA hiding about JFK’s assassination?
Maybe nothing—or not. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald applied for a visa to travel to Cuba, via the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. The CIA picked up on it. Five senior CIA officers signed off on a cable basically saying Oswald wasn’t a concern (whoops). Of the approximately 3,600 JFK files that remain sealed in the National Archives, 1,100 concern the CIA. And while the JFK Records Act of ’92 mandated all files related to the assassination be released in 2017, it also holds provisions that if the files could potentially compromise national security upon release, they can remain classified ... of course.
4. Did Tony die in The Sopranos finale?
In the most infamous last scene in TV, Tony Soprano eats onion rings to “Don’t Stop Believin’” in a sketchy New Jersey diner, then...nothing. It cut to black. Outrage and conspiracy theories abounded! Show creator David Chase was mostly mum on it until an April 2015 Directors Guild of America interview: “I never considered the black a shot. I just thought that what we see is black. The biggest feeling I was going for ... was don’t stop believing. Life is short. Either it ends here for Tony or some other time. But in spite of that, it’s really worth it.” In other words: You’ll never know.

The Top 10 Sports Cars of the 1970s

They don’t build cars like they used to. In some cases, that’s a good thing, but if you can find one of these fine sports cars from the 1970s, you’re in luck. The list has plenty of Lamborghinis and Ferraris, but there are also vehicles that you might have owned at one time, like the Mazda RX7. 

The first RX-7 models made their entrance into the sports car scene in 1978 for the 1979 model cars. The debut was an instant success, as opposed to its predecessors: the rotary-powered coupes RX-3 and Cosmo 110. The RX-7 came with a 1.1L rotary engine producing 105 lb ft. of torque and 100hp, which was enough to accelerate the 2350 pounds of metal from 0-60 in less than ten seconds. The engine was compact and super light, making it easier to be fitted behind the front axle. It was also uniquely sleek and featured an integrated electric buzzer to warn motorists against blasting through the 7k rpm red line

Mine was blue. See the rest of the top sports cars of the 1970s at Money Inc.

26 Facts about Magic

(YouTube link)

Our distant ancestors took a magician’s tricks at face value and were either amazed or outraged that these showmen would harness the demonic arts. Today, we enjoy illusions and magic tricks as skillful entertainment. How did they do that? There’s a lot involved. Not only is there the basic trick, but the magician’s patter, eye contact, and pacing affect how well the trick works. Elliot Morgan has some facts about not only how magic works but also the history of the art and other neat tidbits about magic, in this week’s episode of the mental_floss List Show.

Fear and Loathing in the Five-Star Rehab

Inside the Controversy Around Ibogaine, the Psychedelic Drug That Just May Cure Addiction

Meet the Cannabis Moms Club

Meet the Cannabis Moms Club

President Obama Halts The Dakota Pipeline

Chairman Dave of The Standing Rock Sioux Reservation responds to the news that the Obama administration has halted development of the Dakota pipeline...

Fox Follies

Satan Catches Cold! Fox Issues Rare Apology!

Hell officially froze over when Fox issued an unprecedented apology for having treated Carlson like garbage.…

Stormfront Neo-Nazis Want Your Kids To Catch Pokémons, Jews

They plan to wear Make America Great Again hats and skull masks in order to hand out Nazi propaganda at Pokémon gyms. What could go wrong!

***

This is just sick.

No Entry While Black

Prominent black lawyer denied entry into exclusive club while whites were buzzed in

Selwyn Pieters is a prominent black lawyer and when the security guard denied him entry to the law society’s headquarters he said he was humiliated.

New Obama Rule Will STOP Wingnuts From Defunding Planned Parenthood – Forever

New Obama Rule Will STOP Wingnuts From Defunding Planned Parenthood – Forever

Is he trying to make us miss him even more?

The Wingnuts' War on College

"Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to Destroy America's Great Public Universities

Man in jail following argument about cheese sticks

A man is behind bars following an argument about cheese sticks. According to police reports, Melvin Bernard Folks, Jr., 25, was upset because he thought another man had eaten his cheese sticks. Police were called to an address in Dayton, Ohio, at around 4:50am on Thursday for an assault. The alleged victim, a 56-year-old man, told police he has permission to stay in the garage of a home on the street.
Between 3am and 4am, the victim said he was approached by Folks who accused him of eating his cheese sticks. The man denied eating the cheese sticks. After a verbal argument, the victim said he was struck multiple times in the head.
A witness known as "Raspberry" confirmed to police that the man and Folks were arguing about cheese sticks. He said that Folks hit the victim during the argument. Police say the man did have a swollen left eye and dried blood on the side of his head. Folks is now in custody at the Montgomery County Jail on a single count of assault.

Colors In Macro

Watch a mixture of milk, acrylic paints, liquid soap, and oil come together to produce a glorious dance of color.

(YouTube link)

Macro Room gives us an art film with just a close-up view of a classic kitchen experiment. The colors are gorgeous as they move through the fluids to some appropriately dramatic music.

Physicists discover ‘smoke rings’ made of laser light

Physicists discover ‘smoke rings’ made of laser light

Most basic physics textbooks describe laser light in fairly simple terms: a beam travels directly from one point to another and, unless it strikes a mirror or other reflective surface, will continue traveling along an arrow-straight path, gradually expanding in size...

Humans, chimps share cognitive connection

Study: Humans, chimps share cognitive connection

Chimpanzees and humans diverge by just over 1 percent of DNA, meaning that, biologically, chimps are more closely related to us than they are to gorillas. But do those similarities extend to our brains and the ways we process information and remember things? A recent...

The Elephant Wore Tennis Shoes

Shanthi is a 41-year-old Asian elephant at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. She suffers from arthritis. The pain affected her stance, which led to foot problems. To give her relief, the veterinary staff approached the problem from several directions. That includes an experimental procedure used on horses ...and a set of Tevas!

(YouTube link)

According to an article at the Washington Post, Teva’s Director of Innovation went to China to supervise the making of Shanthi’s custom shoes, which were given to the zoo free of charge. She took a little while to get used to the shoes, but now obediently wears them, enabling veterinarians to keep her feet bathed in medications for extended periods.

Huge Australian Catfish Have Started Catching and Eating Mice

You’ve probably heard that every creature in Australia is deadly and out to get you. It appears that even formerly innocuous predators are now becoming more dangerous, as catfish in Western Australia have been found to be eating mice. Researchers from Murdoch University in Perth caught 18 lesser salmon catfish from the Ashburton River to monitor the condition of the species.

To their surprise, when they opened up the stomachs of the fish to get an idea of their diets, 44 percent of them were filled with the remains of spinifex hopping mice (Notomys alexis) - a jumpy little native species that keeps to the arid, desert areas of central and western Australia.
And we're not just talking about a single mouse here or there - some of the fish had helped themselves to a few.
"It was pretty surprising - about half had at least one in their stomach, and two of them had three," one of the team, David Morgan, told Shannon Verhagen at Australian Geographic. "Overall, 95 percent of the total stomach contents constituted spinifex hopping mice."

Now, catfish tend to stay in the water, and hopping mice tend to stay on dry land. What’s going on here? The research team has a theory, although they don’t know for sure. One thing they are sure of is that the catfish are growing much bigger than they used to. You can read about the mice-gobbling catfish at Science Alert.

Animal Pictures