No one knows what happened to Thomas Paine's body

From the Library of Congress: "Thomas Paine was a national hero, best known as the author of Common Sense, which convinced many Americans to join the fight against the British. Over time, however, he became a social outcast, particularly for his controversial views on organized religion. He died in poverty on June 8, 1809 and only six people attended the burial — his isolated grave was all but forgotten until a onetime foe dug up his skeleton ten years after his death. William Cobbett had once been Paine’s bitterest enemy, but he became disillusioned with the Tory class he had so staunchly defended and came to believe that he had done Paine a great injustice. Cobbett was horrified when he visited Paine’s neglected grave, so he dug him up and tried to have a memorial created in Britain. Upon Cobbett’s death in 1835, the bones then were passed to a day laborer, then Cobbett’s secretary, then oblivion. According to legend, some of the bones were lost or destroyed, made into buttons, or sold off individually."

Scientists say female frogs pretend to be dead to avoid unwanted attention from male frogs

From ABC News: "Female European common frogs were observed engaging in "tonic immobility," essentially feigning their own death to avoid mating, according to a study published Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science. The phenomenon seems to have evolved in order for females to survive an intense and potentially dangerous mating season, Carolin Dittrich, an evolutionary and behavioral ecologist who conducted the research as part of the Natural History Museum Berlin, told ABC News. European common frogs engage in an "explosive" breeding season, a short season in which males fiercely compete for access to females, which results in scrambling and fighting. Males also may harass, coerce or intimidate females into mating, according to the study. Amid the chaos, female frogs are at risk of getting trapped in "mating balls," in which several males cling to them to vie for their attention, which could lead to their death."

McDonald's was sued by the creators of the kids show H.R. Pufnstuf and lost

From the Generalist Academy: "Beginning in the 1970s, McDonalds had a whole cast of characters for their advertising campaigns. These included Hamburglar and Captain Crook; Grimace the purple ghost; Officer Big Mac; Mayor McCheese; and Ronald McDonald himself. H. R. Pufnstuf was a one-season TV show first released in 1969. Its eighteen episodes have amassed a significant cult following for its surreal, almost hallucinatory qualities (and, possibly, veiled drug references). The titular hero of the show was H. R. Pufnstuf, an anthropoid dragon mayor with a giant head. When the McDonald’s commercials came out, the creators of H. R. Pufnstuf saw the obvious parallels and sued the restaurant company. In the trial, it came out that the advertising company had originally invited the Pufnstuf creators, Sid and Marty Crofft, to collaborate on the commercials. At the last moment, the advertising company backed out and poached the TV show’s creative talent for themselves. McDonald’s lost the lawsuit."

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.

A mixup at the Q-tip factory convinced German authorities there was a female serial killer

From Wikipedia: "The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the "Woman Without a Face", was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009. The six murders among these included that of police officer Michèle Kiesewetter, in Heilbronn, Germany, on 25 April 2007. In January 2009, the reward for clues regarding the whereabouts of the Phantom was increased to €300,000. The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries. In March 2009, investigators concluded that there was no phantom criminal, and the DNA had already been present on the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples; it belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made."

The US Army created a supercomputer in 2010 using 1,716 PlayStation 3 game consoles

From the US Army: "The Condor Cluster was a heterogeneous supercomputer built from off-the-shelf commercial components, including 1,716 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles. The system computed operations by the trillions per second – called "teraflops" in the computing world. Some supercomputers can operate at a quadrillion calculations per second, or a "petaflop." Mark Barnell, the director of high-performance computing and the Condor Cluster project at the Air Force Research Laboratory, said the Condor Cluster also represents new ways for supercomputers to increase computational resources while using less energy. The system was capable of about half a petaflop, or 500 trillion calculations per second, and at the time was the 35th- or 36th-fastest computer in the world. It cost about $2 million to build, compared to the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars that traditional supercomputers cost."

He made his own wooden prosthetic foot with a built-in shock absorber

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