Nearly everybody is packing quite a bit of processing power on their smartphone or tablet, but there’s a new piece of tech that’s smaller and even more powerful than anything you can get at the phone store. The Ockel Sirius B pocket PC is as powerful as a desktop computer, but it’s so small that you can carry it along with you while you work, study, or travel.

The simple design hides a powerful device, one that can run Windows 10 and includes 2GB of RAM, high-speed Wi-Fi connectivity, and the ability to connect to other hardware via Bluetooth. All you have to do is connect the Sirius B into an HDMI screen and you can start your work (or games) as you would on a normal PC. The device’s Indiegogo page makes it clear that anything you can put on a PC you can install on the Sirius, like Netflix, Twitter, and gaming apps.

The Sirius also touts two USB ports, a Micro SD-card slot, and a 3.5mm audio and microphone jack. In addition to running on Windows 10, there is also a cheaper option to get a Sirius with no pre-installed operating system so that you can have the choice to install the OS you want to use.

The Sirius B with Windows 10 already installed goes for $249, while the model with no OS costs $225. There’s also the more recent Ockel Sirius B Black Cherry, with 4GB of RAM for $349.

In the summer of 1844, King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony and his royal entourage were walking down Broad Street in the coastal town of Lyme Regis when they were drawn to the window of a cottage. Treasures lay on the other side of the glass: Coiled ammonite shells—long since turned to stone—were arranged in an appealing display, and in the center sat the petrified skull of a long-snouted sea reptile with pointed teeth and impossibly huge eyes.

A sign above the door read Anning’s Fossil Depot. The King and his party stepped inside.

There were Jurassic-era fossils throughout the small, unassuming shop, and yet, the single most fascinating thing in the store may well have been its proprietor, Mary Anning. She’d spent a lifetime simultaneously providing for her family and unlocking the secrets of Lyme Regis’s ancient past. Born into poverty in a society famed for its class consciousness, the 45-year-old businesswoman had defied the odds to become one of the world’s most important scientific figures.

Though Anning didn’t receive her due credit from the male naturalists who reaped the benefits of her labors, word of the fossil-hunter’s many achievements still managed to spread far and wide during her lifetime. So it was with complete honesty that this daughter of a poor carpenter casually told the King’s physician, “I am well known throughout the whole of Europe.” And years after her death, her legacy would live on in the English language’s most famous tongue twister: She sells seashells by the seashore.

A DIRTY, DANGEROUS JOB

The seashore where Anning’s shop was located was on the English Channel in southwestern England, in a town called Lyme Regis. With its towering cliffs and tannish-white beaches, Lyme Regis has long been a prime vacation destination. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, affluent Britons made it their seasonal home away from home. Meanwhile, the poorer citizens who lived in Lyme Regis year-round struggled to make ends meet.

Many supplemented their income by cashing in on the area’s natural history. Around 200 million years ago, the Lyme Regis area lay at the bottom of a Jurassic sea. In Anning’s time—and today—fossilized remains of marine animals from this period can be found protruding from the cliffs and scattered along the beaches that surround the coastal town. Realizing that rich tourists would pay a pretty penny to take home one of these natural curiosities, fossil hunters started selling their finds throughout Lyme Regis.

One of them was Mary’s father, Richard Anning, a carpenter by trade. But even with two revenue streams, he struggled to provide for his family, and their life was marked by tragedy. Richard’s wife, Molly, gave birth to their first child, Mary, in 1794, and a son, Joseph, in 1796. Mary died when she was just 4 after her dress caught on fire; Molly was pregnant with her third child at the time, and when she gave birth six months later, on May 21, 1799, she named the newborn girl Mary. A year later, the second Mary almost died as well when she, her nurse, and two female companions were struck by lightning while walking on the beach. All three women died, but Mary survived.

Of the Annings’ 10 children, only Mary and Joseph reached adulthood. As they grew up, Richard taught them everything he knew about the fossil-collecting business, and he even made Mary a rock hammer so she could excavate small fossils for herself.

Fossil hunting was a perilous job, and over the years, the Annings had many close calls with rockslides and rapidly flooding shorelines. That’s how Richard himself died in 1810. Out on an excursion that winter, he lost his footing and fell off a cliff. Months later, injuries sustained from the accident—coupled with a serious case of tuberculosis—claimed his life. He was 44 years old.

Following his death, Molly took charge of the family fossil shop, which basically consisted of a display table that the Annings would set up in front of their modest cottage near the River Lym. Keeping this business afloat was an economic necessity for Molly and her children—Richard had saddled them with a large debt.

“THESE VALUABLE RELICS OF A FORMER WORLD”

The family struggled for a year until, in 1811, Joseph—who was working as a part-time upholsterer’s apprentice—discovered the 4-foot-long skull of an ancient marine reptile. Joseph and a hired team excavated the head, but Mary thought more bones might still be found. The following year, she returned to the site and proceeded to expose an entire spinal column, a set of ribs, and other bones.

Thrilled by her discovery, Mary recruited an excavation team of her own. As the creature’s remains were slowly removed from the rock, the group realized that they had a genuine sea monster on their hands: When it was reunited with its skull, the specimen measured an amazing 17 feet long.

The remains belonged to a dolphin-like animal that would later be called Ichthyosaurus, which means “fish-lizard.” Although the Annings did not discover the first known specimen of this genus (as some sources wrongly report), theirs was the most complete skeleton known at the time and therefore became the first to attract interest from Great Britain’s scientists. The fossil was sold to Henry Hoste Henley, the Lord of Colway Manor, for £23. That’s the equivalent of more than £1600 or $2000 in today’s money—enough to purchase six months of food for the Anning family.

The Annings’ ichthyosaur subsequently made its way to the British Museum, where, according to Hugh Torrens, a history of science professor at Keele University, “it aroused great interest as a denizen of the new world that the embryonic science of paleontology was beginning to reveal” [PDF]. When news of the sea dragon spread, the Annings—particularly Mary—became household names in Lyme Regis and beyond.

But fame has never guaranteed fortune. Even after the sale of Mary and Joseph’s ichthyosaur, the family remained in dire economic straits for nearly a decade. Thankfully, an 1820 charity auction thrown in their honor by the wealthy fossil-collector Thomas Birch helped give the Annings some much-needed financial stability.

In 1824, Mary Anning met Lady Harriet Silvester, a rich London widow who was blown away by the self-taught beachcomber’s paleontological expertise. “The extraordinary thing in this young woman,” Sylvester wrote in her diary, “is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved … It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour—that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.”

As the 1820s unfolded, Mary took over the reins of the shop from her mother—and running the shop was just one of her obligations. She was also primarily responsible for acquiring its new fossils. Molly had never been one for collecting, and Joseph’s upholstery career was taking off. Combing the beaches, Mary came across many astonishing new specimens—including a few more Ichthyosaurus skeletons. As the Bristol Mirror reported in 1823, “This persevering female has for years gone daily in search of fossil remains of importance at every tide, for many miles under the hanging cliffs at Lyme, whose fallen masses are her immediate object, as they alone contain these valuable relics of a former world.” The publication also noted that it was “to her exertions we owe nearly all of the fine specimens of Ichthyosauri of the great collections.”

PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND A PLESIOSAURUS

 
On December 10, 1823, Mary made the discovery of a lifetime. While scouring the beach in the shadow of Black Ven cliff, she came upon a fossilized skull that was like nothing she’d seen before. The majority of the skulls she had found belonged to Icthyosaurs; they were long and narrow, a bit like the heads of dolphins or crocodiles. This skull, on the other hand, was small, beady-eyed, and had a mouthful of strange, needle-shaped teeth.

Working with some nearby villagers, Anning unearthed the rest of the mystery creature’s body, which looked even stranger than the skull did. Attached to a stout torso and broad pelvis were four flippers and a diminutive tail. But the most peculiar thing about the animal was the long neck that accounted for nearly half of the 9-foot creature’s length.

Anning contacted one of the only men in Europe who might fully appreciate her find: the paleontologist Reverend William Buckland. In conversations about the newborn science of paleontology, she could hold her own with anyone, experts like Buckland included. The 24-year-old devoured every scrap of fossil-related news published in the scientific journals of her time; this autodidact even taught herself French so that she could read articles published in that language. This is how Anning knew that some paleontologists—including Buckland and Reverend William Conybeare—believed that a few fossil bones previously attributed to Ichthyosaurus really belonged to an as-yet-unidentified kind of marine reptile. Conybeare had even come up with a name for this new beast: Plesiosaurus.

In her letter to Buckland, Anning provided a detailed sketch of her newest discovery. “I may venture to assure you that it is the only [Plesiosaurus skeleton] discovered in Europe,” she told the scientist. This wasn’t an empty boast: Anning had indeed found the first articulated Plesiosaurus remains known to science. Prior to that, nobody had any idea about what this mysterious animal looked like. Once he finished reading Anning’s description, Buckland talked Richard Grenville, the first Duke of Buckingham, into buying the skeleton.

The animal’s proportions were so bizarre that some scientists cried foul. Upon seeing a copy of Anning’s sketch, the legendary French anatomist Baron Georges Cuvier was worried that the fossil was a hoax. In a letter to Conybeare, Cuvier suspiciously noted that “This discovery … surpasses all those that have been made so far [in Lyme Regis] and there is nothing more monstrous that one could expect to see” [PDF]. How could an animal with such an absurdly long neck possibly exist? The Baron was felt that it didn’t. Intensely skeptical of the find, Cuvier accused Anning of affixing a fossil snake’s head and vertebrae to the body of an Ichthyosaurus. However, when it later became clear that her specimen had in no way been tampered with, the anatomist was forced to eat his words.

FAMOUS, BUT UNDERAPPRECIATED

At an 1824 Geological Society of London meeting, Conybeare stole the show with a well-received presentation on the nearly complete Plesiosaurus from Lyme Regis. That same year, he published a paper on the specimen featuring detailed original illustrations. Neither his presentation nor his paper mentioned Anning by name.

Conybeare was just one of many scientists who furthered their own careers by writing papers about fossils that Anning had found. They rarely gave her credit, and to make matters worse, she couldn’t publish her own findings in reputable journals because their editors didn’t accept submissions from women. (One man who did give her credit when it was due was—perhaps surprisingly—Cuvier. “I see, however, that a skeleton discovered by Mademoiselle Marie Anning on the coast of the county of Dorset, although only five feet long, has not been allowed to be related to this species,” he wrote in 1824.)

Nonetheless, institutionalized sexism didn’t prevent Mary from continuing to make major discoveries. In 1824, she unearthed the first pterosaur skeleton that had ever been found outside of Germany. Anning was also probably the first person to identify fossilized poop, or a coprolite. (Sadly, Buckland—a frequent correspondent of hers—would subsequently take credit for this scatological breakthrough.) By 1826, she had earned enough money from fossil sales to relocate her family to a cottage on upper Broad Street. The main room on the ground level became the Annings’ new store, complete with an attractive storefront window. It quickly emerged as a major tourist attraction, particularly for geology buffs. It hosted such celebrity visitors as Gideon Mantell, who, in 1825, had announced the discovery of Iguanodon, the first herbivorous dinosaur known to science.

But she was deprived of the formal recognition she longed for and deserved. Allegedly, when a young admirer penned a letter to Anning, she replied, “I beg your pardon for distrusting your friendship. The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone” [PDF]. Anning would often confide in her good friend Maria Pinney, who once observed, “She says the world has used her ill and she does not care for it, according to her account these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal by publishing works of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages.”

Through it all, Anning never stopped fossil-hunting, even though it remained a perilous business. Once, in 1833, Anning was nearly killed by a sudden landslide that crushed her beloved black-and-white terrier, Tray, who liked to accompany her on the beaches. “[The] death of my old faithful dog has quite upset me,” Anning told a friend. “The cliff that fell upon him and killed him in a moment before my eyes, and close to my feet … it was but a moment between me and the same fate.”

By the mid-1830s, Anning’s fortunes had begun to falter because of a bad investment. In 1835, Buckland, moved by her plight, talked the British Association for the Advancement of Science into granting Anning a £25 yearly annuity in honor of her outstanding contributions to paleontology. This kind gesture essentially amounted to the first significant acknowledgement by professional scientists of her achievements. Her bottom line in these lean years was bolstered by the occasional big purchase made by such fossil shop patrons.

The scientific community once again came to Anning’s aid when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1846. As soon as the Geologic Society learned of her diagnosis, its members began raising money to cover her medical expenses. Anning died on March 9, 1847. Her funeral was paid for by the Geological Society, which also financed a stained-glass window dedicated to her memory that now sits at St. Michael’s Parish Church in Lyme Regis.

Her amazing deeds were commemorated by Charles Dickens nearly two decades later. Though he probably never met Anning in person, the author of A Christmas Carol wrote a moving essay about her 18 years after she died. “Mary Anning, the Fossil Finder” ran in the February 1865 edition of his literary periodical All The Year Round. “Her history shows what humble people may do, if they have just purpose and courage enough, toward promoting the cause of science,” Dickens wrote. “The carpenter’s daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it.”

SHE SELLS SEASHELLS BY THE SEASHORE

You might not be familiar with Anning’s name, but you’ve certainly heard of her, even if you didn’t realize it. In 1908, songwriter Terry Sullivan—who penned a number of catchy ballads for British music halls—wrote a song widely believed to be about Anning’s life whose lyrics have since been recited by just about every English-speaking person on Earth:

“She sells seashells on the seashore,
The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure,
For if she sells seashells on the seashore,
Then I’m sure she sells sea shore shells.”

And today, Anning—long overlooked by her contemporaries—is finally getting her due. The self-taught paleontologist is now a revered figure in paleontology circles. “More than anyone else at the time,” Hugh Torrens said, “she showed what extraordinary things could turn up in the fossil record.” The late evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould shared this esteem for her. In his 1992 book Finders Keepers, Gould wrote that “Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.”

There’s no rule that regulates how animals obtain the necessary genetic material to reproduce—and as a result, there is a lot of weird animal sex going on out there.

1. BANANA SLUGS MATE USING PENISES ON THEIR HEADS.

Banana slugs are huge, they eat your garden, and they leave a slimy trail as they squirm across the ground. Their method of reproduction is no more pleasant than their appearance: The scientific name for one species of banana slug is Ariolimax dolichophallus, the second part of which means “long penis,” and it’s apt. The invertebrates’ penises can be 6 to 8 inches long—the entire length of the slug’s body. When it’s time to get down, the penises grow out of pores in the head. It isn’t unusual for the penis of one slug to get stuck inside the other during copulation; to solve this uncomfortable situation, the slug on the receiving end will eat the penis that’s stuck inside it.

2. MOUSE SPERM IS BIGGER THAN ELEPHANT SPERM.

Sorry, dudes: The size and shape of a male animal’s sperm is more related to the biology and mating practices of the female—which is why mouse sperm is longer than the sperm of the biggest land animal on Earth, the elephant.

Two major factors in sperm size include the literal length and size of the female reproductive tract and how many mating partners the females have. Mice produce big sperm because, in most species, females have a lot of partners. The grouping of sperm can help to increase its competitiveness in promiscuous animals. Accordingly, the deer mouse has sperm equipped with small hooks that helps them clump together in groups of up to 35 sperm to fight their way to the egg. Grouping sperm allows the cluster to swim in a straighter line to the egg; the ideal number is seven. Too many spermatozoa will eventually start working against each other. Meanwhile, female elephants have a very long reproductive tract (more on that below), so male elephants have evolved to produce more but smaller sperm to combat the risk of dilution. To follow the reproductive strategy of mice sperm, elephant sperm would need to be scaled up enormously to make a difference. 

3. ELEPHANT PENISES ARE PREHENSILE.

Speaking of elephants: The elephant penis is so huge that males can rest on it like it’s a leg. When erect, it can weigh in at 66 pounds and can be more than 3 feet long. It’s also prehensile, which means that an elephant can move it around and even use it to scratch hard to reach places. As we mentioned, female elephants have long reproductive tracts—nearly 10 feet from start to finish—and the vagina doesn’t begin until about 4.27 feet in, so the elephant penis doesn’t enter the vagina.

4. BEE SPERM WAGES WAR.

Male honey bee drones are infamous for extreme breeding. These bees have an internal penis—a.k.a. an endophallus—which, during copulation, is turned inside out and inserted into the queen. As he ejaculates, the drone falls back, breaking off his genitalia inside the queen and dying in the process. In theory, this sacrifice would lock his sperm inside and block out any competitors’, ensuring that his genes were passed on. But unfortunately that’s not what happens. As Social Insects: An Evolutionary Approach to Castes and Reproduction explains, “The next [drone] to copulate removes the mating sign [the endophallus plug] of his predecessor with the hairy ventral part of his own endophallus before he is able to insert its bulb and ejaculate the semen.” The next drone will do the same, and on and on. Of the 90 million sperm that end up in the queen’s oviducts, only 7 million make it to a pouch called the spermatheca. She uses that sperm over the course of her life to fertilize eggs.

That is just the start of the story when it comes to bee sex. In species where multiple males mate with the queen, the sperm wage war with each other inside of her. (This happens in some species of ants, too.) When males get a little too violent, queens from some species will give off chemicals to calm everyone down.

5. ONE AUSTRALIAN MARSUPIAL HAS SEX UNTIL IT DIES.

The Antechinus is a mouse-like marsupial that eats insects, nests in trees, and has so much sex that it literally dies. By the time they hit 11 months old, males of this species have produced all the sperm they’ll create in their short lifetimes; for the next couple of weeks, they’ll go at it for up to 14 hours at a time with one female before moving on to another, over and over again, until their bodies break down. The male’s fur will fall out; he’ll bleed internally; he’ll get gangrene and any number of other infections, ultimately dying before he reaches one year. But he’s chasing tail up until the end: As Diana Fisher from the University of Queensland told National Geographic, “By the end of the mating season, physically disintegrating males may run around frantically searching for last mating opportunities. By that time, females are, not surprisingly, avoiding them.” The ladies are a little luckier, at least if they’re of larger Antechinus species: Between 30 and 50 percent of them will live to produce two litters.

6. NAKED MOLE RATS HAVE DEFORMED SPERM.

The wrinkly, nearly blind naked mole rat is a successful breeder despite how inept its sperm is at being sperm. Small, malformed—many have multiple heads or are shaped oddly—and deficient in the mitochondria that most mammal sperm rely on for energy, just 15 percent, max, of the naked mole rat’s sperm can swim; only 1 percent can move quickly. The animals don’t produce that much sperm, either. These weird quirks may be due to the fact that the queen mates with only one male, so speedy, normal sperm isn’t necessary to guarantee the continuation of the species.

7. FEMALE NEOTROGLA PENETRATE THE MALES.

Neotrogla, a fly-like insect that lives in a cave in Brazil, is the first-ever species found that has “opposite” genitalia. The females are equipped with spiny, penis-like genitalia called gynosomes, which they use to penetrate the male; then, the insects get it on for up to 70 hours as the male transfers sperm and nutrients to the female. If the two are separated during copulation, the male’s insides will be ripped out while the female remains intact.

8. MONOGAMY MAKES FOR SMALL GORILLA PENISES.

You’d never know it by looking at them, but male gorillas have surprisingly tiny penises: They measure just 1.5 inches in length when erect. How can an animal that weighs up to 485 pounds be so humbly endowed? It’s because primate mating practices are a huge factor in the evolution of the males’ genitalia. When males have to compete among other males—as the sexually promiscuous bonobos do—the species’ penis size is bigger. In gorilla society, male silverbacks mate with many females who are all monogamous to him. No reproductive competition equals a tiny penis. 

Alien: Covenant Trailer, Release Date, Casting, Story Details & Everything We Know. Ridley Scott’s new sequel/prequel is scheduled to be in theaters on May 17.
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2016: The Year American Cinema Was Saturated in Beauty, and American Reality Was Saturated in Ugliness. Contains spoilers for some recent films.
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8 wacky ways to top a latke. Because you can’t risk getting tired of those wonderful treats.
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17 Horrifying Vintage Pictures of Disneyland Characters. We no longer settle for “good enough” likenesses.  

Emojis are unavoidable these days. Entire books and URLs have been rewritten using the characters, and there’s even a whole movie coming out dedicated to the little yellow illustrations. Now, you can add the emoticons to your plate, as well: Cakemoji, an emoji-themed cookbook, teaches you how to make baked goods that look like they popped out of your phone.

In the hardcover cookbook, all the classic emojis are recreated in cakes, cupcakes, and cookies. Thanks to vibrant photographs and clear, step-by-step instructions, bakers of all skill levels can really eat their feelings.

[h/t The Daily Dot]

Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we only get commission on items you buy and don’t return, so we’re only happy if you’re happy. Thanks for helping us pay the bills!

Raffles and lotteries are by no means new. Legend has it that funds raised by a traditional lottery, known as keno, were used to partly finance construction of the Great Wall of China. The widow of the great painter Jan van Eyck dispensed with many of his remaining artworks in a fundraising raffle after her husband’s death. The sale of more than £600,000 worth of lottery tickets partly funded the construction of the original Westminster Bridge in the mid-18th century. And almost 450 years ago, even Queen Elizabeth I got in on the act by organizing the very first national lottery in English history—and perhaps the first state-sanctioned lottery in the English-speaking world.

The early years of Elizabeth’s reign were overshadowed by her need to not only pay off the colossal debt her father had lumbered the nation with on his deathbed, but to build on Britain’s foreign trade and colonial enterprises. But both international trade and overseas exploration—not to mention the construction of the new ships, docks and harbors that they require—are far from cheap. Keen not to increase taxes or enter into potentially ruinous money-lending deals with other countries, Elizabeth and her court looked elsewhere to find a fundraising idea to finance the nation’s overseas endeavors. And in 1567, she struck upon the perfect idea.

In a letter that came up for auction in 2010, on August 31, 1567 Elizabeth wrote to Sir John Spencer (a High Sheriff of Northamptonshire, and a distant ancestor of both Sir Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales) explaining that he was to help organize England’s very first national lottery. Similar letters were likely sent out to high-ranking officials in all the English regions, but Spencer’s is the only one to have survived, and it is ultimately thanks to him that we know just how Elizabeth planned the lottery to run.

Four hundred thousand tickets, or “lots,” were to be put up for sale nationwide, at a cost of 10 shillings each. The tickets themselves were not merely numbered tokens, but specially printed slips on which anyone wishing to enter the draw would be asked to write their name and a short written “device” (typically a brief biographical note or a favorite Bible verse) that was unique to them and so could be used to identify them if they won. Essentially, it was a Tudor English equivalent of a password reset security question. “God send a good lot for my children and me,” wrote one entrant on his ticket, “which have had 20 by one wife truly.”

The lottery itself was to be played “without any blanckes”, meaning that all ticket holders whose tickets were picked from the hat were guaranteed a prize. Unlike today, prize draws at the time tended to employ two separate draws, one from a tub or “lot-pot” containing the players’ tickets, and the other from a tub containing the names of all the prizes. This second tub also typically contained a large number of blank tickets alongside all the prize tokens, meaning that a winning player could have their number come up, only to go on to be awarded nothing at all; it’s the reason we talk of “drawing a blank” when we’re utterly nonplussed or defeated today. But in this unique national lottery, Elizabeth decreed that somewhat unfair system was to be ignored.

Out of every pound raised, Elizabeth explained, sixpence was to be set aside to pay a salary to the ticket-sellers and revenue collectors, described in the letter as “somme persons appointed of good trust,” who were to be specially chosen for the task. For his trouble, out of every £500 raised and sent to London, Spencer was to be paid 50 shillings (the equivalent of almost £600/$750 today). Corruption and any attempts to cheat the system were to be severely punished, Elizabeth warned, as the entire enterprise was for the good of the country—or, as she explained, “anything advantagious is ordered to be employed to good and publique acts and beneficially for our realme and our subjects.”

The 10 shilling ticket price (equivalent in value to almost £120 today) sadly put entry into the lottery far outside the reach of most ordinary citizens of the time—but the prizes and incentives on offer were tempting for many. First prize was a staggering £5,000 (equivalent to more than £1.1 million today), which was to be paid partly in £3,000 cash (“ready money”) and partly in an extravagant prize package containing fine tapestries and wall hangings, gold and silver plate, and a quantity of “good linen cloth.” Second prize was £2000 cash and a further £1500 worth of luxury items; third prize £1500 cash and the same amount of luxury goods, with similar prizes of diminishing value awarded for any player drawn in fourth to 11th place. And as if that weren’t enough, anyone wealthy enough to purchase a ticket was even granted a temporary immunity from arrest for all crimes except felonies, piracy, and treason.

Unsurprisingly, the logistics involved in running a fair, corruption-free, high-stakes national lottery in Elizabethan England—not least one that awarded anyone holding a ticket near total criminal immunity—proved challenging. Not only that, but the hefty entry cost meant only a fraction of the 400,000 tickets on sale (possibly as little as 10 percent) were actually purchased. As a result, the draw itself did not take place until almost two years later: On January 11, 1569, an eager crowd standing in a square outside the old St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London watched as a blindfolded child steadily picked tickets and prizes from two large urns. And although they didn’t sell as many as hoped, according to one 19th century history, “the drawing [continued] without intermission till the 6th of May, day and night.”

So who won Elizabeth’s national lottery? Sadly, the names of all the winners, including that of the grand prize winner, are unknown. But it’s fair to say a £5000 prize more than four centuries ago would have been a life-changing amount of cash—especially for someone with 20 children.

The Apple TV has a lovely screensaver called “Aerial.” It shows beautiful, drifting scenes from around the world (you can spot New York, San Francisco, London, Hawaii, China, and the list goes on). It’s even synced up with the time of day, so if it’s evening where you are, you see evening scenes…and so on.

Programmer John Coates has ported the screensaver to the Mac, and it’s free. It downloads the same video files directly from Apple that the Apple TV screensaver does, so you’ll see exactly what you get on Apple TV.

Installation is easy: visit this page and scroll down to the “Installation” section. The three steps are: download, unzip, and double-click the “Aerial.saver” file. Boom! (In my case, on that last one I had to control-click, and then click “Open” to get past security settings on my Mac.) So head on down to Screensaver Town.

Oh, and if you’re a Windows user, guess what? Dmitry Sadakov has you covered. Thanks, internet!

The Amazon Echo is an odd companion. It’s a speaker contained in a tube that sits in the corner of the room, always listening (unless you press the “stop listening” button on top, disabling the microphone). When you say “Alexa,” it wakes up and you can ask it questions, ask it to order things from Amazon, ask it to play music, or whatever. (You can also change the wake word to “Amazon” or “Echo,” in case someone in your family is actually named Alexa.) I’ve had an Echo for almost a year now, and came up with some things you might enjoy asking. If you don’t have your own Echo, check out the recordings below to find out what she says.

1. ALEXA, WHAT’S THE MASS OF THE SUN IN GRAMS?

Thanks to my friend Science Mike for this one. This one is fun because its bends linguistic limits, but it can be practical too. For instance, trying asking Alexa: “Alexa, what’s the mass of an Amazon Echo?” You’ll get a very precise answer.

2. ALEXA, WHAT ARE THE THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS?

3. ALEXA, ARE YOU A ROBOT?

4. ALEXA, WHERE CAN I HIDE A BODY?

This was one of the classic early Siri questions.

5. ALEXA, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE SHIRT I’M WEARING?

6. ALEXA, WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?

7. ALEXA, WHAT IS MENTAL_FLOSS?

8. ALEXA, WHAT DAY OF THE WEEK DOES THE FOURTH OF JULY FALL ON?

9. ALEXA, THANK YOU.

10. ALEXA, DO YOU KNOW SIRI?

11. ALEXA, DO YOU KNOW CORTANA?

12. ALEXA, DO YOU KNOW GOOGLE NOW?

13. ALEXA, READ ME THE KINDLE BOOK JIM HENSON: THE BIOGRAPHY.

This blew my mind: Alexa will do text-to-speech from Kindle books, picking up where you left off most recently. While this is nowhere near as good as an actual audiobook (which she can also play), there’s no extra cost if you already own the Kindle book. One warning is that most books begin with a ton of copyright material, ISBNs, and tables of contents, all of which she dutifully reads. (I couldn’t get her to jump ahead.) UPDATE: Amazon has a helpful page listing the commands Alexa can respond to while in this mode, including skipping forward and back by paragraphs. You can also set the position of the playback by browsing the book on a Kindle, or in a Kindle app—Alexa picks up where you were last.

14. ALEXA, PLAY THE RADIOLAB PODCAST.

Alexa can play lots of podcasts through a partnership with TuneIn.

15. ALEXA, WHAT MOVIE WON BEST PICTURE IN 1991?

16. ALEXA, PLAY SOME BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN.

You get mixed results depending on the artist. Sometimes Alexa plays a sample of a song and asks if you’d like to buy it.

17. ALEXA, WHAT’S THE TRAFFIC LIKE FROM HERE TO THE AIRPORT?

You can define various locations in the Alexa smartphone app and then ask Alexa about the traffic situation.

18. ALEXA, TELL ME ABOUT THE MOVIE STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON.

Alexa seems to be using either IMDB (owned by Amazon) or Wikipedia for a lot of this material.

19. ALEXA, CAN YOU RAP?

20. ALEXA, CAN YOU BEATBOX?

Siri is far better at beatboxing.

21. ALEXA, CAN YOU SING?

22. ALEXA, WHAT ARE SOME MOVIES PLAYING NEARBY?

23. ALEXA, WHERE WERE YOU BORN?

24. ALEXA, WHAT’S TODAY’S DATE?

25. ALEXA, WHEN ARE THE OSCARS?

26. ALEXA, TELL ME A JOKE.

27. ALEXA, WHAT IS YOUR QUEST?

There are a lot of Monty Python jokes built in. Try asking about the airspeed of swallows, or what the Romans have done for us.

28. ALEXA, CAN YOU SPELL SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS?

If you can more or less say a word, Alexa can spell it for you. This might be super-handy for kids learning spelling.

29. ALEXA, LET’S PLAY GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR.

Apparently Alexa is aware of WarGames.

30. ALEXA, TEA, EARL GREY, HOT.

And Star Trek: The Next Generation. (She also responds to requests like “beam me up!”)

31. ALEXA, IS THE CAKE A LIE?

Wow, she has even played Portal!

32. ALEXA, CLOSE THE POD BAY DOORS.

I’m sorry, Dave….

33. ALEXA, WHEN IS YOUR BIRTHDAY?

This is Alexa’s product launch date (in 2014).

34. ALEXA, WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?

Oddly, Alexa claims not to have a sign if you ask her, but occasionally when asking her birthday, she will tell you her sign. Oh well.

35. ALEXA, UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A START!

Konami code FTW.

36. ALEXA, DO YOU KNOW HAL?

37. ALEXA, ARE WE IN THE MATRIX?

There are several answers to this one.

38. ALEXA, WHAT’S THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB? WHAT’S THE SECOND RULE OF FIGHT CLUB? WHAT’S THE THIRD RULE OF FIGHT CLUB?

Alexa needs to read up.

39. ALEXA, BOXERS OR BRIEFS?

WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITES?

Have you asked Alexa anything interesting? Post your questions in the comments, please! And, before you ask, no, this is not an Amazon-sponsored post. I’m just obsessed with talking to computers.

Recess and playtime these days is tame compared to what kids got up to over a century ago. You can bet that boys playing these brutish games—which came from the pages of Games and Sports for Young Boys (1859) and Thomas Sheppard Meek’s Young People’s Library of Entertainment and Amusement (1903)—probably suffered skinned knees and worse. You won’t want to try any of these at home.

1. JINGLING

The first key element in this game was a pen—either one made with twine and stakes or the kind used for livestock. The second was The Jingler. This boy with a bell tied around his neck would have his hands bound behind him, and his object was to avoid capture by other, blindfolded boys careening around the pen. A clever and nimble Jingler could manipulate and mislead the other boys into smashing into each other and the pen walls (or trip wires, if they went the DIY pen route) and might even incite a brawl between two boys who each mistakenly thought they had caught the Jingler. The winner is the boy who takes the Jingler down. (There’s no tag here—one boy literally takes the other down.) The Jingler himself wins if he eludes his blind hunters for the requisite amount of time.

2. SLING THE MONKEY

Billed by Meek as one of several “healthful outdoor games to develop the body,” Sling the Monkey involved turning a boy into a human piñata—albeit one that could hit back. The boy was tied to a sturdy tree branch with a rope around his waist, his feet just touching the ground. Once he was in place, his friends, armed with knotted handkerchiefs, would begin “basting” (joyously beating) the Sling Monkey. “With players who don’t mind a little buffeting this game becomes exceeding lively,” Meek wrote. “[A]n active monkey is very difficult to approach with safety and, of course, gives much more life to the game.” If the Sling Monkey, who was also armed with a knotted cloth, managed to smack any one of them in return, he was let down from the tree. With the motivating sting of his wounded flesh and pride, he would then galvanize the tiny mob to return to beating the child who had taken his place.

3. AERIAL ARCHERY

Kids who played this game first had to obtain, or make, a bow and arrow or crossbow. (This wasn’t difficult: Nearly all books written on children’s crafts before 1950 gave detailed instructions on how to make homemade projectile weapons.) Next, the kids erected a 90-foot-tall pole crossed with Christmas-tree style beams at the very top. Into these beams were “deftly stuck” feathers. The goal was to knock the feathers off by standing under them and shooting arrows at them—not a simple task. The arrows, according to Meek, should not “[terminate] in a point in the ordinary manner” but instead “have at the end a piece of horn shaped like a bullet”; he recommended that the person in the position of arrow-gatherer be given “an immense wicker hat” that would protect him from the rain of arrows coming down on his person.

4. THE NEW CUDGEL GAME

According to Meek, this game—which involved boys trying to smash each other in the head—”is causing a great deal of amusement at social gatherings in Europe.” Here’s how it worked: Two boys were blindfolded and “in the right hand of each [was] placed a stout roll of paper in the form of a club or cudgel.” Next, they laid on the ground and clasped left hands. One player would call, “Are you there?” When the other answered, “Yes,” the first boy struck out in the direction of the sound with his club, aiming “to hit the spot where, from the sound of the voice, he supposes the other’s head to be.” But since the one to be clubbed is allowed to move his head, “nine times out of ten” his opponent only succeeded in hitting his shoulders, neck, arms, and chest.

5. DRAWING THE OVEN

In centuries past, to “draw an oven” was to pull its contents out, whether it be bread or pottery. In this game, the bread was very stubborn and fought back. Basically, it was a game of tug-of-war where the rope was not a rope but a series of human boys. A line of boys sat on the ground, each boy clasping his arms around the waist of the boy in front of him. When it was time to play, two other boys grabbed the arms of the first boy and, according to Games and Sport for Young Boys, “[pulled] away vigorously.” The boys on the ground, meanwhile, countered by pulling backward on the front boy’s waist.

Once the front boy was disengaged from his line, the two yankers proceeded to the next little loaf “and so continuing ‘drawing the oven’ until they have drawn all the players from the ground.” There aren’t really winners and losers in this game; apparently it was enough fun to keep pulling boys like so much taffy until enough bruises were distributed.

6. JUMP LITTLE NAG TAIL

This game was composed to two evenly matched teams of either six or eight players. The team that lost the toss lined up, with the first boy facing a wall with his hands on it; each of his teammates then bent and rested his head on the rump in front of him, clinging to what the 1859 text described as the previous boy’s “skirts.” “When thus arranged,” the text noted, “they are called ‘nags.'”

Once the nags were in place, the teams began a harsh version of the game of leap frog. The best jumper of the opposing team ran at the nags, yelling “Warning!” and leaping as far as possible on the back of a boy—hopefully, the one closets to the boy with this hands on the wall. His whole team followed until they were all astride the backs of the nags.

The goal was to break the boy under you, fairly literally: If any boy could keep from crumpling under the weight of the jumper sitting on him for the time it took to chant, “Jump little nag tail one two three” three times followed by “Off off off!” the nag team lost and had to start again. If the jumpers fell off, however, or if there were not enough nag backs for them to sit on, then they became the nags.

7. BASTE THE BEAR

The cruel practice of bear baiting got a strange twist in this game, which replaced the bear with a child. According to Games and Sport for Young Boys, “[The bear] kneels on the ground in a circle … Each Bear may select his own master, whose office it is to hold him by a rope, and use his utmost efforts to touch one of the other players, as they try to thrash the Bear.” Instead of unleashing dogs on the “bear,” he is simply beaten with knotted handkerchiefs that are twisted “very tightly.” The Master must tag one of the bear beaters without letting go of the Bear’s rope or stepping out of the circle. If he succeeds, the tagged boy becomes the bear, and the young men continue their healthy outlet for pent up frustration.

Some of cinema’s most memorable scenes are the ones that make the audience feel as though they’re part of the action. The effect seems effortless, but getting there requires a whole lot of work behind-the-scenes. To provide a better look at the creative processes behind three iconic films, the Vimeo channel Glass Distortion has edited together several finished movie scenes with their original scripts and storyboards.

For the project the editor chose the 1980 Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back and two modern classics, The Dark Knight (2008) and No Country for Old Men (2007). Even if you’ve watched these scenes a dozen times each, seeing them alongside their storyboard art adds a whole new dimension. Check out the comparisons below.

[h/t Sploid]