This is L’Inconnue de la Seine, the death mask of an unknown woman found drowned in the Seine in the late 1880s. Photographs and reproductions of the death mask were very popular in France after 1900 and there was a literary fashion in creating stories to match her Mona Lisa smile, her mystery and her tragic end, usually stories involving suicide after disappointment in love. Even Nabokov wrote a poem called L’Inconnue de la Seine.
Remarkably, eerily, bizarrely, the face of Resusci Annie, the mannequin you use to practice CPR is modeled on the death mask:
http://www.laerdal.com/docid/1117082/The-Girl-from-the-River-Seine
Radiolab also did a great podcast about her. Listen here
(Source: conorhoughton, via shitty-best-teacher)
This is the Kjeragbolten, a boulder wedged into a narrow crevice in the Kjerag mountain of Lysefjorden, Norway. Supposedly, it’s good luck to stand on it.
I think I’ll stick to hunting for four-leaf clovers.
(image credit: Flickr User klareralt)
#7. “OMG” Was Invented by a 70-Year-Old British Admiral
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first person to use “OMG” was a 75-year-old British admiral, which is about as far as a carbon-based life form can get from a teenage valley girl in a mall texting her friends about Justin Bieber’s butt. His name was John Arbuthnot “Jacky” Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, and he coined the term while writing his memoirs … in 1917. Almost 100 years ago.
The exact phrase was: “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapia — O.M.G (Oh! My God!) — Shower it on the Admiralty!”
The human body is capable of some incredible autonomous processes, processes which happen subconsciously (like breathing), or bypass the brain entirely, like the notorious ‘knee-jerk’ reflex.
The Lazarus reflex, however, is a much more disturbing product of evolution. Hours after the brain has died, bodies are seen to suddenly raise their arms upwards and then gently lay them on their chest.
In the past, this has obviously led to the assumption that the patient is, in fact, alive and trying to make a sign or alert others. As Allan Ropper states in his paper ‘Unusual spontaneous movements in brain-dead patients’;
Back in 1884, a Swiss astronomer by the name of Arndt made headlines when he claimed to have discovered a very curious planet in an orbit beyond Neptune — a surprisingly cubical planet.
Of course even in 1884, everyone knew this was bunk. The New York Times even ran a piece titled “The Cubical Planet” in their Nov. 16 edition. As informative as it is stuffy, the Gilded Age article interviews physicist Dr. Theodore Vankirk, who first dismisses the prospect of a square planet as pure hooey, and then proceeds to wax scientific about just what a cube world would be like. It all comes down to gravity. On our spherical Earth, gravity pulls “down” us toward the planet’s center of mass. So on a flat surface, we naturally stand up straight.
A hypothetical cube world, however, would feature six square faces and you’d only encounter up/down gravity toward the centers of these regions. As you traveled closer and closer to the edge, it would feel like you were walking up an incline and it would be difficult to stand up straight because the gravitational pull would draw you toward the center of the massive cube, which wouldn’t lie directly beneath your feet. Standing on the “edge” of this cube world would feel like standing atop a mountain range. Contemporary cosmologist Karen L. Masters also finds the topic of cube worlds fascinating — especially the atmospheric possibilities. As she explains in Cornell’s Ask a Physicist feature, all six faces of the plant aces would boast temperate weather, centralized bodies of water and none of them would feature polar or equatorial weather. What’s more, the pointy edges of the cube would actually poke through the planet’s atmosphere like titanic mountains. Here’s her explanation : Let’s assume that the atmosphere goes up 1000 km above the Earth (when it is a sphere), and so is a sphere itself of radius 6400km+1000km=7400km. This should be about the right number. A cube with the same volume as the spherical Earth would have a side 10,000 km (6,400 miles) long so the corners are 8700 km from the center! They would definitely stick out above the atmosphere.
Rhaphanidosis
Rhaphanidosis is the act of inserting the root of a plant of the raphanus genus (commonly known as horseradish) into the anus. It is reported to have been a punishment for adultery in ancient Athens of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. There is some doubt as to whether the punishment was ever enforced or whether the references to it in comic plays (such as the debate between Right and Wrong in The Clouds of Aristophanes,) should be understood as signifying public humiliation in general.
In order to be allowed to apply rhaphanidosis to an adulteror, one must catch the man in the act of adultery with one’s own wife, in one’s own house. Rhaphanidosis was not the only penalty available; sodomy by mulletfish was common as well, or the man could simply be killed on the spot. Following this, the adulterous wife would have to be divorced.
Later classical references to the punishment include Catullus 15 where percurrent raphanique mugilesque (both radishes and mullets will run you through) is threatened against those who cast lascivious eyes on the poet’s boyfriend.
(Source: Wikipedia)
