When the Vikings settled Iceland a thousand years ago, it had plenty of forests, but the trees were cut down to build homes and ships, and to clear the land for livestock. That led to erosion and poor agriculture. For centuries, the only wood available to build homes was driftwood. So people instead built homes using wood for only the roof supports and doors, and filled in the walls and roof with turf. These homes were innovative, and today would be called sustainable and charming, but they weren't what we'd call pleasant to live in. 

For one thing, if you had a decent-sized turf home, you were obliged to take in all family members, plus widows and other indigent people as servants. These all lived together in one room upstairs with the family's children. Downstairs, you might need to take sheep inside to gain a little extra warmth. Besides that, the turf tranferred moisture inside. They may be traditional, but when imported lumber became available, Icelanders rushed to replace their turf houses with wooden structures. This was not only for comfort, but to shed their reputation as uncivilized. Read about life in the turf houses of Iceland at JStor. 

X user Patrick Heizer brings to our attention this geographical oddity. Under the current law of the sea, nations have exclusive economic regulatory authority over a certain distance beyond their territorial seas.

Many of these claims overlap each other or lead to unusual borders for the exclusive economic zones. The Bering Sea Donut Hole refers to one such area that was heavily overfished in the 1980s. Several nations with large fishing fleets rejected American claims to the maritime region.

The Donut Hole Convention (as it was popularly but not officially called) is a 1994 treaty between the United States, Russia, Poland, Korea, Japan, and China determining the status of the area.

Yes, that's Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with all words replaced with meows.

You may think it's a fun gag, but have you seen the state of public education these days? Many cats are functionally illiterate. Even those cats who can read at grade level aren't getting exposure to the classics.

Fortunately, the Meow Library is here to help. This organization has translated essential works from the Western canon into cat, including War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Odyssey, and the Constitution of the United States of America.

The organization also has a podcast for cats interested in engaging with serious literature.

For security reasons, many public performance venues do not allow people to bring in bags unless they are transparent. Accessory makers manufacture and sell specialized bags to accommodate this need.

Etsy seller Slater the Creatorr of Chattanooga, Tennessee offers an alternative: a clear plastic corset. In a video on Instagram, she demonstrates how to use it.

The new movie Digger is the story of Digger Rockwell, a wealthy and powerful oil tycoon whose previous actions have set the world on a course of total environmental destruction. The character may remind you of any of a number of real people. Facing old age and possibly death, he decides he now has to save the world. The real kicker is that it's a satirical comedy.

You might not recognize Tom Cruise at all in the title role. The actor is 64 years old, and has taken some criticism in the past few years for continuing to portray much younger characters. He seems to have finally come to terms about playing someone his age, or older in this case. The movie also stars Jesse Plemons, Riz Ahmed, and John Goodman as the president of the United States. But we can tell right now that the real star of the movie is Digger's beloved cat. Digger is scheduled to open nationwide on October 2.  This trailer contains NSFW language. 

The United States declared its independence from the British Empire in 1776, but it was almost 90 years later that its enslaved people achieved their own independence. In France, the abolition of slavery started and ended earlier, but it came about in fits and starts. 

In 1789, during the French Revolution, Count Mirabeau of the new National Assembly declared that freedom should extend to all men, even the slaves in the French colonies of the New World. His suggestion was ignored, because the plantations of the Caribbean were just too lucrative. Then in 1794, enslaved colonists were not only granted freedom, but also citizenship. This only lasted until 1799, when Napoleon took over and rescinded those rights. Meanwhile, Haiti staged its own revolution and became independent in 1804. It wasn't until 1848 that slavery was permanently abolished in France, but they were still ahead of the US. Read how the French abolished slavery at the Conversation. 

As the Odyssey may be considered a sequel to the Iliad, the new film opening this weekend The Odyssey may be considered a sequel to the 2004 film Troy, at least by certain fans of the genre, even though the two movies are separated by more than 20 years and completely different casts and crews. At least the original poems were written by the same author. So in honor of the occasion, Screen Junkies goes back in the vault and gives us an Honest Trailer for Troy. 

Of course, they quickly focus on the overwhelming beefcake angle that the movie was so derided over. Give the audience what they want. There's plenty of bloodshed, too. When you've got this much sex and violence, you don't need much historical accuracy- or even literary accuracy. That said, you might want to go back and rewatch Troy before seeing The Odyssey this weekend. And then let us know how they compare. 

James Cameron wrote, produced, and directed Terminator 2: Judgement Day after announcing a 1991 release date. The movie was put together at breakneck speed, and the theatrical prints were delivered to theaters only the night before opening day. Now, if you recall, T2 had some pretty innovative special effects, especially the shapeshifting T-1000 that melted and reformed at will. 

Industrial Light & Magic only had about a dozen employees at the time, so the call went out to hire plenty of effects people. They were given the storyboards that showed how Cameron imagined the T-1000 passing through prison bars. They did not know how to do that. CGI was in its infancy, and the team figured they would have to spend millions on computers and storage to get it done. And they only had ten months. They did have the software that created the creature in The Abyss, but how would they transfer those tools to work with a real human? They ended up developing an early version of motion capture by drawing a grid on actor Robert Patrick's body and rotoscoping it. And that was just one of the problems they had to solve with 1990 technology. Read an oral history of how it all came to be from the effects team of the movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day. -via Metafilter

Around the year 480, Saint Brigid formed a convent in the town of Kildare in east central Ireland. The abbey and its compound was razed and rebuilt many times. The present structure, which includes a cathedral, dates to the Thirteenth Century and was restored in the late Nineteenth Century.

As well as serving as a Catholic house of worship, it is a popular tourist destination. Visitors will find that one corner has a hole reaching through the other side. This is called the Wishing Hole or Wishing Stone. The story goes that if you stick your arm through the hole, touch your shoulder, and make a wish, the wish will come true.

-via Maddie Smith | Photos: 瑞丽江的河水/TripAdvisor

Everything I know about Vermont I learned by watching Newhart, so this home for sale on Zillow fits in nicely to my mental image of the place. The four bedroom, two bedroom, four cell house was built in in 1880 and later served as the residence of the Essex County jailer until 1969.

Passports as we know them are a relatively recent invention in the grand scheme of things. But travel documents of some sort have been around since ancient times. Whether those documents got you into a different country was often a crapshoot. Like many other systems, the birth point of the passport boils down to how you define one. And how you define borders, visas, and rules of passage. You might have guessed by now that the answer to the how and why of passports is war. The journey to the standardized passport was a long and crooked one, since nations don't like to be told what to do, yet most still want their citizens to have freedom of travel. Even today, passport rules are different depending on who you are and where you are going. Not only that, but the rules can change suddenly. Let's hope you are not sitting in an international airport lounge when that happens.   

Colossal introduces us to Helena Minginowicz, a Polish artist. Her oeuvre includes detailed human figures, sensuous nudes, and disposable objects in a throw-away world.

Randall Munroe has posted a chart comparing the earth's holes at xkcd. There's a lot of information, so you will want to see the full-size version here. This might remind you of the ominous depth comparison video from a few years ago, but here you can see how these holes compare next to each other and to sea level. You'll notice some holes that are pretty deep start at higher elevations, and the Jinping Laboratory in China has an impressive hole that doesn't go down at all. The word "oops" made me go look up the Retsof Salt Mine, which has a wild story. We knew Lake Baikal in Russia is the world's deepest lake, but the sediment underneath indicates it was once much, much deeper. But not as deep as the Kola Superdeep Borehole. It's amazing that we have two manmade holes that are deeper than the Mariana Trench.  



If any of these locations pique your interest, there is information and links for each of them at Explain xkcd.  -via kottke 

Today I learned that if you live in Denmark, particularly the Jutland region, and aren't married by age 25, you may be assaulted with cinnamon. Your friends will find you, and maybe douse you with water first or mix the cinnamon with water or eggs to make it stick to you better. The more public the ritual, the better, so the evidence can be smelled for days afterward in some cases. However, those are somewhat rare, and many friend groups just use a little cinnamon or give a gift of cinnamon. Still, you might want to be equipped with a mask for your 25th birthday. 

This tradition grew out of an even earlier tradition that labeled people who were still single at age 30 as pebersvend, meaning "pepper guy" or pepermø meaning "pepper maiden." This comes from the 1600s, when spice traders tended to stay single longer because they were busy traveling the world, although the backstory varies somewhat. Pepper attacks can be dangerous, so the tradition is to give a single person a pepper grinder for their 30th birthday. This has escalated to the construction of huge pepper grinder sculptures made from oil barrels to erect outside the home so that everyone will see it. Some of them can be very suggestive.   

You can learn more from the commenters who've experienced this as either a perpetrator or recipient at reddit. 

(Image credit: Lagrangian21) 

Remember Robert Maddox, the Crazy Rocketman (previously at Neatorama)? He's in his 70s and feels the need for speed. He also sells rocket engines. Maddox is living his best life now as a pirate. 

Maddox figured out how to repurpose an old cannon to direct a 240 pound thrust pulsejet engine to rocket power his boat. As he tested how fast he could use it to get away from shore, he almost killed the guy helping him launch in the process (twice). Max got away, though, and managed to operate the drone camera filming this nonsense, augmented with a selfie stick. Imagine Pirates of the Caribbean with this kind of thrust. 

The next step was to make Captain Bob's 12-foot aluminum boat into a pirate ship, complete with flame effects and Jolly Roger flag, although not enough room for a plank to walk nor anyone to walk it. It's hard to mutiny on a solo voyage. -via Born in Space