Monday Links

In Italy, a good year for wild mushrooms has led to lots of poisoning. Pliny the Elder addressed this problem c. 77.

WWII buff and cryptography geeks - check out this Enigma Simulator, with pictures, diagrams, and code.

The top 50 video games of all time, ranked.

The Suez Canal opened 145 years ago today: history, quotes, maps, videos.

War and Prosthetics: How Veterans Fought for the Perfect Artificial Limb.

Here's a film of American boys at a Nazi summer camp in upstate New York in 1937.

ICYMI, Friday's links are here, and include the salmon cannon, making diamonds out of peanut butter (and the related famous scientific paper "The Effects of Peanut Butter on the Rotation of the Earth"), British border control vs the plague in 1663, and the world's foremost bedpan collector.

Breaking Bad meets Frozen: Do You Want to Build a Meth Lab?

The Breaking Bad/Frozen mashup you've been wishing for: Heisenberg seeking out Jesse, to the tune of Do You Want to Build a Snowman?

I especially like the bit at the beginning where he knocks the little girl aside because, "I am the one who knocks!" (I should know the girl's name, right? Because Grandma? But I don't)

You can download the song at Amazon or iTunes. Lyrics at the youtube page (warning - autoplay video).

Jesse's answer:



Related stuff:

Breaking Bad: The Middle School Musical.
Heisenberg vs Batman: Breaking Bad Rises.

Walter Blanco, the Colombian version of Walter White in a Breaking Bad remake.

Jonah Goldberg's excellent article re: Breaking Bad's Emmy, the evolution of television and the thin veneer of civilization.

Breaking Bad science articles by Popular Science  and Pacific Standard, and a Mythbusters episode.

via Neatorama.

In Italy, good year for wild mushrooms has led to lots of poisoning. Pliny the Elder addressed this problem c. 77

Per the Telegraph, a damp Italian autumn has produced a bumper crop of wild mushrooms, and a busy time for Italian poison control centers.

A surge in the number of mushrooms growing in the damp woods and fields of Italy this autumn has resulted in an increase in people being poisoned after eating the wrong variety.

More than 220 people have been treated for poisoning in the last few weeks and four people have died since the mushroom-picking season started in late August in northern Italy. Of the 227 poisoning cases, more than 20 were classified as serious, meaning that patients are so badly affected by toxins that they may have to undergo liver transplants.

Enthusiasts take to the woods and hills to scour the damp undergrowth and leaf litter for prized varieties such as porcini and chanterelle mushrooms, but edible and non-edible types often look very much alike. Making the wrong choice can be fatal.

Pliny the Elder (wiki) (who also (as reported by Pliny the Younger) witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius):

In general, these plants are of a pernicious nature, and the use of them should be altogether rejected; for if by chance they should happen to grow near a hob-nail, a piece of rusty iron, or a bit of rotten cloth, they will immediately imbibe all these foreign emanations and flavors, and transform them into poison. Who, in fact, is able to distinguish them, except those who dwell in the country, or the persons that are in the habit of gathering them? There are other circumstances, too, which render them noxious; if they grow near the hole of a serpent, for instance, or if they should happen to have been breathed upon by one when just beginning to open; being all the more disposed to imbibe the venom from their natural affinity to poisonous substances. 

It will therefore be as well to be on our guard.

~Pliny the Elder, Natural History (pub c. 77)

* Natural History consisted of thirty-seven books including all that the Romans knew about the natural world in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, geography, zoology, botany, mineralogy, medicine, metallurgy, and agriculture. (source)

via Lapham's Quarterly.

Check out this teacher's 40 years worth of pictures wearing the same clothes

I love this, but don't you wonder how this started? Maybe he accidentally wore the same thing 2 or 3 times and decided to pretend it was intentional, then kept going.

Update: Dallas News had an article on this last year:

In every school picture for the past 40 years, Dale wore the same 1970s-era polyester shirt and coffee-colored sweater.

It began as an accident — a product of his sparse wardrobe back in the day.

“I was so embarrassed when I got the school pictures back that second year and realized I had worn the very same thing as the first year,” said Dale, 63.

But his wife, Cathy, dared him to do it a third year. Then Dale thought five would be funny. “After five pictures,” he said, “it was like: ‘Why stop?’” 

via @_you had one job

Friday links

John Oliver's video report on the Salmon Cannon is the best thing you'll see all week.

Plato, Sartre, Derrida & Other Thinkers Explained With Vintage Video Games.

How to make diamonds out of peanut butter. In related science, The Effects of Peanut Butter on the Rotation of the Earth.

World's Foremost Bedpan Collector.

British border control vs the plague in 1663 may have lessons for ebola. Related, not sure how it works on ebola, but crystal meth may cure your flu (with bonus additional questionable medical advice). 

This Self-Stabilizing Boat’s Deck Is Always Flat, Even in Rough Waters.

ICYMI, Thursday's links are here, and include the Bad Sex in Fiction award finalists, weird haircuts, fake ads from movies, and the gene that turned wildcats into housecats.