The 5-day trivia hunt is back — and with a fresh, new look! For those who missed the first few challenges, it’s not too late. Be sure to solve Monday’s right over here; Tuesday’s challenge is here and yesterday’s right here.
To repeat the rules: Every day this week, I’m presenting a specific challenge. Your job: come up with the answers and hold onto them! Why? Because on Friday, you’ll need them to solve a short puzzle. The first person to email in the correct answers and successfully show how you arrived at them (thus the title: How Did You Know?) wins a choice of any t-shirt and book from our store.

As with last month’s How Did You Know?, I definitely encourage you to work in teams. Email your friends, send around each daily challenge, conspire, work together, whatever it takes to make sure you’re armed with the right answers going into Friday’s puzzle.

Today, we’re playing “Name That Movie” again. Each of the five pages below contains a close up of a movie poster you might recognize. If not, do what’s necessary to get the names of these films before Friday.

Make sure you click through all the pages, and see you back again tomorrow at 12pm EDT for the final puzzle where you’ll be asked to plug in answers from the week and show us your logic. Remember: It’s all about the process in How Did You Know?
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What president shared his name with the black Power Ranger? What cast member of the BBC hit EastEnders wouldn’t have been out of place in the Oval Office?

We found 10 famous people who shared their names with US presidents. Can you match the descriptions with their presidential namesakes?

Take the quiz.

It’s a sad day for Fast Food history enthusiasts. Herb Peterson, the genius behind the Egg McMuffin passed away today. The 89-year old former ad man dreamed up the sandwich as a way to open up a whole new area of business for Ray Kroc and company- breakfast! Before the McMuffin, McDonald’s lived off of its lunch and dinner  operation. Peterson was also the brains behind McDonald’s original slogan “Where Quality Starts Fresh Every Day,” and I’m sure his enthusiasm for the Golden Arches will certainly be missed.

Of course, it’s curious to me that the first time I learned of Peterson is the same day I learned about this invention from OhGizmo. If you love your Egg McMuffins, but can’t stand the morning drive-thru, this muffin and egg toaster might be the way to go. More links (of both the sausage and web variety) at OhGizmo.

After the first week of the NCAA basketball tournament, only sixteen teams still have a shot at the title. Your bracket is probably in disarray. March Madness has brought you nothing but anguish and pain. What’s a fan to do? Cheer up, March isn’t just about hoops. Here are some great March championships you may have missed, and some you can still catch if you hurry. Here are some of our favorites you might have missed:

1. The World Coal Carrying Championships

That’s not a misleading title. It’s an actual championship where people carry coal, and you just missed its most recent running on Monday. The contest started in 1963 in Gawthorpe, a small village in British coal country. Two friends, Reggie Sedgewick and Amos Clapham were enjoying a brew when a third man, Lewis Hartley teased Sedgewick that he looked a bit worn out. A vigorous debate over the two fellows’ relative fitness ensued, and it was decided that they would run a race on Easter Monday while carrying large sacks of local coal.
Since then the event has gained fame, but the same basic idea persists: competitors are given a 50-kilogram bag of coal and told to run from The Royal Oak to the village’s Maypole, a distance of 1108.25 yards. The world record is held by David Jones of Meltham, who made the spring in just over four minutes in both 1991 and 1995.

>>8 more after the jump.
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Over the years, media coverage occasionally ramps up around what I think of as the Great Penny Debate: whether to discontinue the U.S. one-cent denomination. The issue was covered on 60 Minutes a few weeks back, and now it’s showing up in an excellent New Yorker article. The heart of the issue is that pennies cost more than one cent to make, so why not stop making them? There’s also some disagreement as to the efficiency (and thus cost) of counting out change using pennies — wouldn’t rounding to the nearest five cents be faster? Given the prevalence of “take-a-penny” dishes at many checkout counters, it seems that cashiers already prefer rounding than dealing with pennies.

Countries (including the U.S., with the 1857 elimination of the half-penny) have discontinued low-denomination coins before, so it’s not a far-fetched notion to think that the penny’s days are numbered. But the actual issue aside, this whole penny discussion is jam-packed with trivia about coins and metallurgy. The New Yorker piece linked above brings us some great tidbits. I’ve gone ahead and collected some of its best factoids for your reading pleasure:

A penny minted before 1982 is ninety-five per cent copper — which, at recent prices, is approximately two and a half cents’ worth.

…More recent [pennies] are ninety-seven and a half per cent zinc.

Nickels, despite their silvery appearance, are seventy-five per cent copper.

Canadian five-cent coins … were a hundred per cent nickel most years from 1946 to 1981.

Primarily because zinc [in addition to copper] has soared in value, producing a penny now costs about 1.7 cents.

…The Treasury incurs an annual penny deficit of about fifty million dollars — a condition known in the coin world as “negative seigniorage.”

Breaking stride to pick up a penny, if it takes more than 6.15 seconds, pays less than the federal minimum wage.

…Eliminating pennies would increase our reliance on nickels, which now cost almost ten cents to manufacture….

There’s much more to the article than these bits of trivia, so I encourage you to read it in full. Also, the article mentions people “throwing away” pennies. Really? Dear readers, please tell me if you’ve been throwing away pennies. I toss mine in a jar, but never the trash.

You sent us pictures of your pets. We chose our six favorite cats, then asked you for LOLcat captions. The suggestions came pouring in, and after sifting through hundreds of suggestions, we finally have our very own mental_floss-brand LOLcats! Big thanks to everyone who participated. Here are the winning LOLs!

We had a lot of great entries that weren’t entirely flattering to the man in the pink Chuck Taylor (”Kitteh will takez U shoppin 4 man shoez,” from Ellen, for instance), but Amy’s was our favorite. She wrote “I can does electrolysis?” (which I changed slightly).

Thanks to Peter for the hilarious suggestion!
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Joining the office pool for the NCAA tournament is definitely exciting for sports enthusiasts. But what if you love brackets, but don’t really dig basketball? Well, we’ve got the solution right here. Read on as we cover 6 tournaments that come fully loaded with all of the gambling, but none of the sport.

1. Nerd Icons

Nerds on Sports is having an tournament to decide who is the greatest nerd icon of all. They started out with 32 contenders. The voting is now down to the Elite Eight.

2. Fug Madness

Celebrity blog Go Fug Yourself is winnowing down 64 celebrities in their Fug Madness tournament. They are divided into the Cher, Madonna, Bjork, and Charro regions. The Sweet Sixteen round is starting, with matchups between Fergie and Courtney Peldon, Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce, Paris Hilton and Brittany Murphy, and Chloe Sevigny and Phoebe Price today. The championship matchup will be on April 7th.
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The signs of spring are coming earlier in the American west. Scientist say global warming is to blame.
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The Ten Most Historically Inaccurate Movies. Hollywood never lets the facts get in the way of a good yarn.
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Ten Ways to Raise a Green Baby. Let’s just hope baby turns a more natural color before first grade.
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Too Much Information? Study Shows How Ignorance Can Be Influential. And we certainly have enough of it to go around!
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Before radio was widely used, planes used “road signs” painted on roofs to find airports! Some of these signs may still exist; some survive only in pictures.
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When you first saw the video of the BigDog quadruped robot, you were thinking the same thing I was. And so were these people. Swallow your coffee before watching.
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The political costs of primping. A woman running for president will spend an extra two weeks over the course of a campaign just getting ready in the morning, just because she can’t afford not to.
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MIT offers free college courses online. Here are some links to get you started.

The 5-day trivia hunt is back — and with a fresh, new look! For those who missed Monday’s challenge, it’s not too late. Be sure to solve it right over here. And don’t forget yesterday’s challenge – that one is right here.

The rules: Every day this week, I’ll be presenting a specific challenge. Your job: come up with the answers and hold onto them! Why? Because on Friday, you’ll need them to solve a short puzzle. The first person to email in the correct answers and successfully show how you arrived at them (thus the title: How Did You Know?) wins a choice of any t-shirt and book from our store.

As with last months How Did You Know?, I definitely encourage you to work in teams. Email your friends, send around each daily challenge, conspire, work together, whatever it takes to make sure you’re armed with the right answers going into Friday’s puzzle.

Today, I’m borrowing a bit from the TV show Camouflage. On the next page you’ll find three rows of letters. Each row has a movie title buried in it. Your job is to eliminate the letters that don’t belong, revealing the letters that spell the words in the movie titles.

As on the TV show, there’s no need to move letters around. All the letters and all the words are in the right order in each row. All you have to do is see the trees for the forest. Again: all you have to do is remove the letters that don’t belong. The words are all right in front of you, in the correct order.

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1. The first recorded earthquake was in China in 1177 B.C.E.

2. China is also the birthplace of the first seismograph. Built in 132 C.E. by a man named Cheng Heng, it consisted of eight metal dragons holding eight carved balls over eight frog figurines. If an earthquake made the ground vibrate, the dragon facing the quake’s source would (naturally) drop a ball into the mouth of its corresponding frog.

3. Of course, it didn’t really work.

4. But it did look cool.

5. While dragons aren’t that good at predicting earthquakes, other animals might be. According to ancient reports, critters in the Greek city of Helice headed for the hills just before a massive quake leveled the city in 373 B.C.E. (more…)