Women know that clothing sizes don't make any sense at all. Even if you are young and average, you have to try a garment on to know what size to purchase, because manufacturers set their own size standards. But it goes much further. You may have read that the average American woman is a size 14, but that doesn't tell the whole story. The median 15-year-old wears a women's size 10, while the median woman in her 20s wears a size 14, or large, and the median woman in her 30s wears a 16, or extra large. When you consider all women over age 20, the median size is 18. Yet many clothing brands only carry sizes up to 16. And that's before you figure in vanity sizing, height, or body shape. Most women are not shaped like an hourglass.   

Once upon a time, stores offered alterations, or you could find a local tailor. And many women could alter or even make their own clothing. Now, women outside the target customer range order clothing online, and the returns due to sizing are crowding our landfills. Read a deep dive (including interactive graphs) into the craziness of women's clothing sizes at The Pudding. -via Metafilter 

Michael "Pac-Man" Leroy Luther loved playing Pac-Man as a young man. He did it so much that, after his death in 2007, his family commissioned a gravestone with images from the classic arcade game. It stands atop his final resting place in Thetford Township Cemetery outside of Clio, Michigan.

Pac-Man lived a full life, having served 10 years in the US Air Force and then working for General Motors. He was married and had three children at the time of his passing.

You can view other photos of the grave taken by Graves with Grace, an Instagram account that photographs unusual graves.

Remember the first time you bought a hair dryer and saw a warning label that said "Do not use while bathing"? You had a good laugh and wondered who would ever need such a warning. Most bathrooms don't have an electrical outlet near the bath tub -for a reason. See, there's always someone with no common sense who will use a product in the most dangerous way possible, injure themselves, and sue the manufacturer for not warning you that you aren't supposed to eat fire logs, or that you have to unfold a folding chair, or that swallowing dry ice is dangerous. Manufacturers don't want to go through that again. 

Chill Dude Explains runs through ten product liability court cases that led to warning labels written by Captain Obvious. Most of them seem pretty dumb, but people did get hurt. The last one is correcting the record because the general public completely misunderstood the case. 

Hobby dogging takes its name from the hobby horse, which itself has spawned an eccentric sport. But in hobby dogging, participants lead imaginary dogs through real canine agility competition courses. This activity began in Germany with humor in mind, but has become at least semi-serious to participants who see it as a way to socialize and develop communication skills.

-via Aelfred the Great, who quips "Affection for commands, order, and training without anything as dirty and distressing as life, it’s the perfect German hobby."

In 1994, archaeologists in Russia retrieved the partially-mummified body of a woman who died around 2,500 years ago from a grave in southern Siberia. The woman, believed to be between 25 and 30 years old at death, was of the  Pazyryk people, a nomadic Iron Age culture known for their advanced sewing skills. With skin covering her head, they could not examine her skull and the remains were put in storage after examination. 

Thirty years later, scientists at Novosibirsk State University revisited the body with modern technology, meaning a CT scan that non-invasively revealed the skull. What they found was remarkable. The woman had suffered a devastating injury to her jaw that was repaired surgically! Her right temporomandibular joint had been crushed, which would have left her unable to eat. The scan revealed that two canals had been drilled into the jaw, and some kind of fiber, possibly horsehair or an animal tendon, was used to stabilize the joint. In other words, they tied her jaw back together. Furthermore, there are signs of healing, and her left teeth showed much worse wear, indicating she survived the surgery and thereafter chewed on her left side. Read the evidence for the prehistoric surgery at Gizmodo. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Elina Panfilo/Novosibirsk State University)  
  

Where do the eggs in your refrigerator come from? The supermarket, of course! But before that, they come from chickens. Sure, you already knew that, but you've probably never thought about how a hen makes the egg, and how they manage to do it almost every day for months at a time. What goes on inside a hen in order to lay an egg every day is astonishing.  

Egg production is managed differently depending on whether you want eggs for the breakfast table or chicks. If you don't gather eggs every day, a hen ends up with several eggs, and stops producing them in order to keep them warm for hatching. But for chicks, you'll need a rooster. But if you only have hens, and take their egg every day, they'll keep laying them as long as they have the proper nutrition and the proper stimulation- which is not a rooster, but sunlight! 

The popular idea of a psychopath is a person with a personality disorder making them incapable of distinguishing right from wrong or feeling empathy. The idea has been around for hundreds of years, and was extensively studied in the 20th century. But the studies and experiments on psychopathy mostly produce null results, meaning that whatever factor you were measuring (empathy, emotion, or impulse control), there was no significant difference between people identified as psychopaths and those who were not. Those considered psychopaths had emotions, they could recognize emotions in others, and they were capable of empathy. It began to look like psychopathy was a label that arose because we no longer wanted to classify people as evil or demon possessed. Or maybe it was a handy diagnosis for psychological conditions we just couldn't figure out.

Despite the research, psychopathy roared back into popular culture in the 1990s with movies like Natural Born Killers, Silence of the Lambs, and American Psycho. In the real world, we want to make sense of the senselessly evil things people do. But the research doesn't make that easy. Read about the science behind psychopathy and what it tells us at Aeon. -via Damn Interesting 

One thing you really did study in American history class was the California Gold Rush. John Sutter found gold and everyone on the east coast decided to move to the west coast and get rich. But that's not the entire story. Sutter was actually a settler who was building a community, and the discovery of gold upset his plans and his life.  

Samuel Brannan, on the other hand, saw opportunity in gold. His plan was not to get rich mining gold, but in publicizing it. He had come to the small village of San Francisco for religious asylum, but abandoned that to become the richest man in the territory. As people came from all over the world to seek gold, he took advantage of those people instead of the gold they were looking for. And the people who came during the Gold Rush and stayed after it was over shaped the area into what it is today. Kurzgesagt After Dark looks at the darker side of the California Gold Rush. There's a one-minute skippable ad at 4:52.

In the spring of 1967, skywatchers near Moscow saw a strange unidentified object in the sky. It looked like a crescent moon, or a big illuminated C in the sky. It happened again and again, always at the same time of day as the sun was setting. Reports got into the newspapers, and UFO hunters across the USSR flocked to Moscow to investigate- or at least see the UFO. Then suddenly the sightings stopped, and so did the newspaper reports, without comment. Government silence settled around the incidents. 

At the time, the US and the Soviet Union were operating under two nuclear arms treaties, one in effect and one pending, prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons in space. But the Soviets had developed an intercontinental ballistic missile that would go into orbit for a trip around the earth in order to sneak through US military surveillance. The Americans were, of course, monitoring the Soviet press and knew about the sightings. Oops. Read about the UFOs that revealed Soviet shenanigans at Popular Mechanics. Alternate link, if needed. -via Strange Company   

(Image credit: ISC Kosmotras) 

Acclaimed musician haruka_2go_ can expertly play two recorders with her nose (one for each nostril) at the same time, which is two more recorders than I can manage. Her performances are precise and masterful.

She usually props the second recorder on an object, such as this loaf of bread. But she also will use a raised knee and complete a performance while standing on one leg.

-via The Awesomer

A Highland charge was a traditional Scottish battle tactic involving wedge-shaped formations of Scots running toward enemy positions. Upon reaching effective musket range, they would fire a single volley, drop their muskets, and then run at the enemy with broadswords.

The last such charge was conducted two hundred years ago today in North Carolina during the American Revolutionary War. The Journal of the American Revolution describes the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge.

General Cornwallis organized 1,600 Gaelic-speaking Scottish Loyalists in North Carolina under Brigadier General Donald MacDonald. The Scots marched inland through the swamps near Wilmington, not aware that their location was well-known and that Patriot militia were assembling into two bodies to trap them.

About half of the Scots deserted as MacDonald proceeded toward a crossing of the Black River, where they encountered a thousand Patriot militiamen under Brigadier General James Moore. MacDonald ordered his drummers and pipers to play "King George and Broadswords" and charge across the damaged bridge.

Effective Patriot musketry shattered the Scots, who fell back in confusion toward the coast. MacDonald himself and many of his troops were captured, as were their valuable supplies. The area remained firmly in Patriot hands for the next four years.

The Scots never tried a traditional Highland charge again.

The odds of winning millions of dollars in a lottery are very, very small, and are only slightly improved by buying a ticket. But people do win. The problem is that most winners believe they are now rich, when they have little understanding of how much money it takes to live like a truly rich person. Your payout is not going to be what you were led to believe, and it can be drained really quick when you see yourself as set for life. 

First, there's income taxes. Then you need to pay people to manage your money. Then you need to consider your life span and how to make a limited amount of cash last before you quit your job. This TED-Ed lesson takes a hypothetical $3 million lottery jackpot and shows how it will not make you fabulously wealthy. However, it can provide you with a comfortable life if you manage it wisely. Personally, I have managed to avoid the curse of wealth by not buying a ticket.  

In grade school, we learn that St. Augustine, founded in 1565, is the US's oldest permanent city settled by Europeans. Outside of Florida, we learned nothing about what happened after that. Florida remained a Spanish colony for centuries, constantly at odds with the British colonies to the north. In 1738, a Spanish royal decree offered freedom and citizenship to enslaved people who escaped British rule and came to St. Augustine, if they converted to Catholicism and served in the militia. Plenty of people who escaped the plantations made their way through alligator-filled swamps to do just that. The new Spanish citizens built Fort Mose just north of St. Augustine and used it to defend the city from British incursions. 

Fort Mose (and Florida) were eventually lost to the British and then the Americans. The destroyed fort was forgotten for more than 200 years, but has been restored and made into a state park. You can now see volunteers staging re-enactments of the history of Fort Mose. Read the story of the formerly-enslaved people who sought freedom in Florida at Smithsonian. 

There are 54 countries in Africa (plus three disputed territories), more than any other continent. You can try memorizing them by studying a map and then picturing the map while you recite them, but that hasn't worked for me because I always miss a few. I'd probably do much better by listening to a pleasant song that recites them in rhyme. I was too old to benefit much from "Yakko's World" (which is now outdated), but now such a song for Africa is finally here. 

Dustin Ballard of There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) constructed a song to the tune of the 1982 hit "Africa" by Toto with lyrics that name every country on that continent. Yes, they rhyme wherever they can, and the visuals help with a bit of context. Far from ruining it, this song actually improves on the infinitely catchy original by having something to do with Africa. 

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Phantasms," Data explores the world of dreams. As a result, he behaves strangely while awake.

In one dream, he sees his colleagues in the Ten Forward lounge. Deanna Troi has turned into a cake with a human head. It is, specifically, a cellular peptide cake with mint frosting. Worf thoroughly enjoys eating her. Holographic Sigmund Freud interprets the dream as Data struggling with sexual dysfunction (contra the experiences of Yar).

So there's a lot to unpack in the episode. But it makes for a straightforward and amusing cosplay. The host of the Trek Profiles Podcast snapped this photo of two cosplayers on the Star Trek cruise currently underway.