If you meet a space alien you should try to kill them

From Nautilus: "If we ever contact extraterrestrials, we’ll have to find a way to understand them. Who are they? What are their intentions? What have they discovered that we haven’t? Olaf Witkowski thinks the only way to begin that dialogue is to try and kill them. Clearly, there are going to be major differences between us and them. Biological, technological, and cultural gaps are likely to be as wide as interstellar space itself. “The only way to communicate with a creature that is very different from you, and you can make no assumptions at all about how they encode language or meaning, is just killing them,” Witkowski says. He argues that the only universal basis of communication, the sole feature that all life shares, whatever its form is that life wants to live."

Experts at the Van Gogh Museum have exposed three early fakes

From The Art Newspaper: "For decades Interior of a Restaurant was regarded as a second version of an authentic painting, Interior of the Grand Bouillon-Restaurant le Chalet, Paris. This was understandable, since Van Gogh would sometimes make another version of a composition. The second version of the restaurant scene, which only surfaced in the 1950s, was recently studied after its owner submitted it for possible authentication. The colours also included Manganese blue, a synthetic pigment only patented in 1935. In the original painting the red flowers can be identified as autumn begonias, which graced restaurant tables in November or early December 1887, when the picture was completed. The artist of the second version interpreted them as yellow sunflowers, which would have been over by the end of September."

World War II propaganda cartoons by Dr. Seuss, Frank Capra & Mel Blanc

From Open Culture: "Private Snafu was the U.S. Army’s worst soldier. He was sloppy, lazy and prone to shooting off his mouth to Nazi agents. And he was hugely popular with his fellow GIs. Private Snafu was, of course, an animated cartoon character designed for the military recruits. He was an adorable dolt who sounded like Bugs Bunny and looked a bit like Elmer Fudd. And in every episode, he taught soldiers what not to do, from blabbing about troop movements to not taking malaria medication. The idea for the series reportedly came from Frank Capra and the chairman of the U.S. Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit. He wanted to create a cartoon series for new recruits, many of whom were young, unworldly and in some cases illiterate."

Most of Nietzsche's writing has been distorted by his sister Elisabeth

From the LRoB: "We more or less know about Nietzsche, but Elisabeth, the little sister and living embodiment of everything the mad philosopher disdained, who took control of her brother’s thought, should not on any account be overlooked. Her life is a story of mediocrity triumphing over inspiration, meanness over excess, ressentiment over the Übermensch. Her transformation of her brother’s work into a Nazi cookbook bears an uncanny resemblance to the rise of National Socialism itself in a chaotic Germany. After a lifetime of failing to keep up with her brother, she finally appropriated him, body and what was left of his mind: not so much will to power as determined opportunism. Little beasts that lay their eggs in a larger creature and whose offspring use the living body of their host as a food store come to mind."

How grape growers managed to get around the rules of Prohibition

From Now I Know: "The law that banned alcohol was called the “National Prohibition Act." But the law had a few loopholes, most notably Section 29, which allowed 200 gallons of non-intoxicating cider and fruit juice to be made each year at home. Initially intoxicating was defined as exceeding 0.5% alcohol by volume, but the Bureau of Internal Revenue struck that down in 1920, effectively legalizing home winemaking. Unfortunately for the home vintners out there, that was easier said than done. Most people don’t have a large supply of grapes at the ready. To make things even more complicated, the grape growers couldn’t help you do this either — at least, not explicitly."

A coyote waits for his badger friend so they can go on an adventure

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis's Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's The Browser, Clive Thompson's Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy's Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova's The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com