Recently in tidbits Category

• Apparently, squid can fly
• Wi-fi radiation may be killing trees, a study finds
• Scientists have successfully trapped antimatter. The next step? Interstellar warp drives.
  

The Berners Street Hoax was perpetrated by Theodore Hook in the City of Westminster, London, in 1810.

On 27 November, at five o'clock in the morning, a sweep arrived to sweep the chimneys of 54 Berners Street, the home of Mrs Tottenham. The maid who answered the door informed him that no sweep had been requested, and that his services were not required, and the disappointed tradesman went on his way. A few moments later another sweep presented himself at the door, then another, and another, 12 in all. After the last of the sweeps had been sent away, a fleet of carts carrying large deliveries of coal began to arrive, followed by a series of cakemakers delivering large wedding cakes, then doctors, lawyers, vicars and priests summoned to minister to someone in the house they had been told was dying. Fishmongers, shoemakers, and over a dozen pianos were among the next to appear, along with "six stout men bearing an organ". Dignitaries, including the Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor of the City of London also arrived. The narrow streets soon became severely congested with disgruntled tradesmen and onlookers. Deliveries and visits continued until the early evening, bringing a large part of London to a standstill.^[1]

Hook had bet his friend Samuel Beazley that he could transform any house in London into the most talked-about address in a week. To achieve his goal he had sent out 4,000 letters purporting to be Mrs Tottenham, requesting deliveries, visitors, and assistance. Hook had stationed himself in the house directly opposite 54 Berners Street, and he and his friend had spent an amusing day watching the chaos unfold.^[1]

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has a special position in the culture of many human societies which share its range. The coconut crab is admired for its strength, and it is said that villagers use this animal to guard their coconut plantations. The coconut crab, especially if it is not yet fully grown, is also sold as a pet, for example, in Tokyo.^[35] The cage must be strong enough that the animal cannot use its powerful claws to escape.

• What's left behind when glaciers melt?
• Along those lines, apparently the equator was once covered with ice.
• Cell phone data shows that human behavior is predictable. Apparently, most people generally stay within a six-mile radius of their home. 
• The art of Gustave Doré
• 100 Russian tanks were found abandoned in the Ural Mountains. This creeps me out, to be honest - does it have anything to do with the Dyatlov Pass incident?
  

Image by Alaskan Dude via Flickr

Grizzly bears have entered polar bear territory, setting the stage for deadly bear versus bear encounters to come, suggests a study recently published in the journal Canadian Field Naturalist.

Should the bears meet, the grizzlies could do some serious damage.

No doubt about that, but polar bears have a definite size advantage. In one-on-one confrontation, my money's on the polar bear. My question is this: what happens if, rather than fighting, the two species breed? And fuse into some unholy sort of unstoppable ultra-bear with an insatiable taste for human flesh?

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Prehistoric seas were filled with giant plankton-eating fish which died out at the same time as the dinosaurs, new fossil evidence suggests.

Scientists from Glasgow, Oxford and the United States have identified fossil evidence which shows the fish existed between 66 and 172 million years ago.

A Japanese spider crab believed to be the biggest ever seen in Britain is set to go on show at Birmingham's National Sea Life Centre.

Dubbed Crabzilla, his front feeding limbs are more than 5ft (1.5m) long and end in big claws.

In the meantime, the Open_Sailing project is trying to develop (via open source) solutions to enable humans to inhabit the oceans. From their website:

We urgently need a new generation of semi-permanent affordable and sustainable architecture to explore and study the oceans, understand biodiversity, monitor climate change, address marine pollution, invent new modes of sustainable aquaculture, create data mesh networks, produce renewable energies, for navigation safety purposes and much more.

I'm not so sure that I'd be eager to live in the ocean, given its other denizens. The Open_Sailing project sounds fascinating anyhow, though - they're developing, among other things, "an architecture that behaves like a super-organism, reacting to the weather conditions and other variables, reconfiguring itself" and "a mobile aquaculture to sustain human long term life at sea." Check out their concept video below:

Open_Sailing 4 minutes concept on Vimeo.

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Indeed the rhyme

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again

....does not tell us at all that Humpty was an egg. However its etymology has a number of variations, and it was in Lewis Carroll's 1871 book "Through the Looking Glass" (that used this rhyme), where the book's illustrator John Tenniel first drew Humpty as an egg, sitting on a wall.

An 1810 version of the rhyme also does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg because it was originally posed as the riddle as such:

Humpty Dumpty sate on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
Threescore men and threescore more,
Cannot place Humpty dumpty as he was before.

Furthermore, "humpty dumpty" was an eighteenth-century reduplicative (linguistic root) slang for a short and clumsy person.

Shakespeare's hunchbacked Egg, the 'Wall' being either the name of his horse (called 'White Surrey' in Shakespeare's play) or a reference to the supporters who deserted him. During the battle of Bosworth Field, Richard fell off his steed and was said to have been 'hacked into pieces.' (Though the play depicts Richard as a hunchback, other historical sources suggest that he was not.)

• The Introvert's Corner - a blog about introversion. Tagline: "How to live a quiet life in a noisy world."
• Exploded views of everyday objects - ever wondered about the inside of an Etch-a-sketch? Check it out. Among other things. 
• Man creates vacuum-cleaner powered Spiderman device with which to climb walls
• (Unemployed) man (from my neighborhood) creates decked-out igloo with which to escape the harsh realities of the economy
• The interesting relationship between hallucinations and math (it's not just the boredom that does it, apparently)
• Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, via high-speed collisions, cause a mixture to reach the temperature of 4 trillion degrees Celsius.
  

• Have scientists developed a treatment for autism? Apparently, an oxytocin hormone has been shown to increase social interaction. My question is, will "neurodiversity" advocates protest this? They argue that there's nothing "wrong" with autism and Asperger's patients, they're just "different." From their point of view, this might seem like an X-Men 3 type of situation. 
• The marshmallow test: kids are guinea pigs in this test of self-control. Can they resist the marshmallow in front of them in the hopes of receiving an extra one after five minutes?
• New transistors mimic the human brain.
• Was the Alaska purchase (aka "Seward's Folly) worth it? Maybe not. (And not just because of Sarah Palin.)
• A second brain in the gut