Who built the ruins on Malden Island?

Malden Island is a tiny uninhabited dot of land sticking up smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, part of what is today the Republic of Kiribati. It was discovered by a British sea captain in 1825. And upon discovery of this tiny ~15 square-mile island, a mystery was born.

Specifically, the uninhabited island was the site of many stone structures, including the ruins of "temples" or at least monolithic, temple-like structures. Nobody knows who could have put them there. To this day, your theory is as good as anybody else's.

Very little else is known about or written about this site; however, I did find one crackling good conspiracy theorist who classifies it as 'forbidden archeology.'

Wacky medieval laws

During the height of witch-hunting in the 15th century, there was a book published in Germany that was a sort of "Witch-Hunting for Dummies" guide, name of Malleus Maleficarum.

Full page scans available at Cornell's online repository, and while you're there, they have a few other witch-related tomes to check out for all your witchery needs. There's also a full site devoted to this and other witch-related beliefs, even into the present day.

But even practices for catching plain old criminals wasn't much better. For instance, there was the process of cruentation, in which an accused murderer was brought together with the corpse of the presumed victim and ordered to lay their hands upon the carcass. If the dead body should then spontaneously begin bleeding from its wounds, that would be a sign from on high that the defendant was guilty. One can only imagine how many murderers got off scott-free.

Many such practices are covered in the blanket category of "Trial by Ordeal," where you get all the variations on tying you up and throwing you into the river to see if you sink or swim, or plunging your hand into boiling water to see if God healed you, or simply swallowing poison, or other such life-jeopardizing trials. In some cases, surviving the ordeal unscathed meant that God had declared you innocent, while in other areas it was considered just the opposite proof, that you had escaped by the Devil's aide.

Then there was the practice of compurgation, a law which meant that you could be found innocent if you could find twelve people who said they believed your side of the story. Well, who couldn't scare up twelve friends?

One more curiosity is the German principle of "stadtluft macht frei," a kind of statue-of-limitations where if a serf had managed to escape capture for a year-and-a-day, they was no longer open to being re-chained.

And for a final medieval law oddity, animals could be tried in a court of law exactly as if they were human.

8 Things you never knew were in the King James Bible

Jesus gets thrown out of town:

Matthew 8:34 "And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts."

You should turn your rebellious son over to the town to be murdered:

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."

God commanded Saul to slaughter a whole town, including the women, babies, and animals:

1 Samuel 15:1-3 "Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD. Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."

If you rape an unmarried woman, your only penalty is paying her father 50 silver coins and marrying her:

Deuteronomy 22:28-29 "If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days."

If two men are fighting and the wife of one gets in the way to try to break it up, she can get her hand chopped off:

Deuteronomy 25:11-12 " When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her."

Moses made a brass snake charm to cure snakebite:

Numbers 21:8-9 "And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived."

God will smear crap on you:

Malachi 2:2-3 "If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the LORD of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart.  Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it."

Uh... this:

2 Kings 18:27 "But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?"

I can't pass up this opportunity to tie in one of my favorite works from one of my favorite web humorists, so here's the Professor Brothers (aka SuperDeluxe aka Brad Neely) with a lesson on Sodom & Gamorrah:

Stumbled on Star Wars in animated GIF form. The entire movie.

It appears to have been done entirely in MSPaint, to boot. What an artifact! Wonder how old this is? The domain shown at the end, www.barbelith.co.uk, is dead.

Steampunk automatons

Not many artifacts from 500 years ago strike this kind of balance between "astounding" and "skin-crawlingly creepy", but this windup toy mechanical monk certainly claims the title. The thing works perfectly; on winding, it marches around in a square moving its arms and head, mouthing (presumably) Latin chants. Here's a video of the device in action:

It's just one example of automatons, a lost art of entirely clockwork mechanical toys and figures. In this day and age, the sum total of animated figures most people may encounter in a lifetime is at a theme park. We know some of the arts from this era, such as cuckoo clocks and coin-operated fortune tellers, but few appreciate just how hard Renaissance people worked to try to make convincing androids using only gears, chains, and springs.

You'll find many more examples at the UK site House of Automata. Here's a few more fascinating artifacts from this lost, magical era:

And there were quite a variety of clever mechanisms deployed for these. For instance, why wind a toy when you can power it entirely by dumping in a bucket of sand?

And here's a Chinese magician set from 1920 - doing an actual magic trick!

"Simplified" Ptolemaic family tree

From the Wikipedia article on the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, 305-30 BC.

Either this chart is too confusing or there was some nauseatingly impossible feats of coupling and whelping going on (some of these look like they had 3 parents?). It takes inbred family trees to new... something.

The totally cosmic dolphin cult is alive and well

Just in case you were thinking that the New Age hippies had backed off from the dolphins, this LiveJournal observer has bad news:

"I hadn’t realized that among a certain segment of profitable 'eco'-tourism it is a commonly-held belief that dolphins not only have achieved higher consciousness and are intimate with the secrets of life, but also use telepathy to transmit their teachings.

"My favorite interaction with a dolphin-oriented wingnut occurred at the dump. As we threw our trash in the big stinky dumpster, a woman pulled up in her SUV plastered with hippie/new age bumper stickers. Dressed in all white, she asked us, 'Have you seen the dolphins?'

"'Not today,' I answered.

"'They’re out there right now. Did you know that humans are the only animal that fears when it doesn’t need to? Dolphins only fear when they are in danger?'"

Penn 'n' Teller's Bullshit did a whole episode on dolphin New-Age-ism, BTW:

Website featuring "Gothic Babe of the Week" since 1996 to present

I've often defined "Industrial Gothic" as a genre I sort of thought of on my own, to mean "horrors specific to the industrial age" - ghost towns, malevolent corporations, conspiracy theories, man-made monsters, haunted factories, mole people living in the sewers, and whatnot. Imagine my surprise when I poked about to discover whether the domain was taken and stumbled upon this site. Of course, "industrial" and "gothic", separately, are both genres of music and styles / cultures as well.

Gothic Babe of the Week, if its archive directory on the left bears true witness, has been in continuous business since January of 1996, making it one of the oldest surviving private websites from the pre-web-bubble era, and being a great example of a Tumblr type blog decades before anybody thought of Tumblr.

Anyway, if you like Goth gals, this person is really, really into them:

The really, really BIG quasar group

Scientists discover a group of quasars out there lurking in the universe that defies all laws of physics as we know them so far, simply because it's bigger than any known scale of measurement we've ever needed. It's four billion light-years across! That's 4,000,000,000 light-years, the equal of 40,000 Milky Way galaxies side-to-side.

For now, the object is simply tagged the "Huge_LQG." There's plenty of time to fret over it, though, since it's about 9 billion years old as far as we can tell. Here is the world's fastest-talking science news reporter to explain it:

Now, before everybody goes on about how tiny and insignificant they feel because of this new revelation, let me report this old image/rant I did for my daily stupid a while back:

Karni Mata, the Hindu Rat Temple

There's a lot more videos on YouTube where that comes from. The temple of Karni Mata comes complete with silver gates, marble carvings, hundreds of hidey-holes, and that stylish checkered flooring (pity the poor sap that has to clean it!).

Supper time for the well-tended-to rats:

Hindus and animal-housing temples just seem to go together. There's also the Ubud Monkey Forest and temple in Bali, where they have so many temples it's all you can do to find a non-holy place to pee (unless they have a special pee temple too?).

Acta Diurna: The first blog

Every modern journalist - indeed, the entire concept of the Internet itself - owes a debt to the Acta Diurna. Latin for "Daily Acts", it was the first "newspaper" of known civilization. Most people probably know that we get our word "forum" from the Roman term of the same name for a common gathering place where people could discuss the day's events.

However, most people don't realize just how literally this maps to our news forums and blogs today. From the History of Information site:

"Copies of Acta Diurna ("Daily Events", or the "Daily Public Record"), were carved on stone or metal and presented in message boards in public places like the Roman Forum beginning about this time.][These are thought to be the first daily gazettes."

The content very much fit our modern definition of news. Outcomes of court proceedings, public notices and announcements, marriages, births, and deaths, were all part of the daily newsfeed. And furthermore, the Acta Diurna was rotated as new daily installments came in, with the previous tablets stored in an archive (sounding more like a blog now?), and scribes would also make copies of the news and then send them out to remote outposts such as provincial governors. (So, yes, you read that right, they even had a way to "subscribe to an RSS feed"!)

This was actually a major step in Roman government. At this time in Roman history (130 BCE) Rome was transitioning from a pure monarchy to a republic. In so doing, the Acta Diurna was one sign that government had become more open - the business of ruling was no longer a secret affair confined to the inner circle of the ruling class, but the people's business, to be freely shared and discussed in the open. Furthermore, the common rabble were free to discuss the affairs of state right alongside the politicians - an unheard-of lenient policy that informs our modern notion of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press".