February 4, 2020
Betty White Gets The Giggles
30 second scene from Hot In Cleveland in 2015. (Audio maybe NSFW but no foul language.) It apparently took a while to get that one take. [Outtake reel, 60s]
Haircut Practice
It started with a tweet: Still no word on whether or not they will let me take over Peanuts. [more inside]
🤟 o'er the land of the freeeeee 🤟
Artist Christine Sun Kim interviewed about preparing to ASL interpret the National Anthem and America the Beautiful at the 2020 Super Bowl. (All links YouTube).
How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class
As McKinsey’s John Neuman admitted in an essay introducing the method, the “process, though swift, is not painless. Since overhead expenses are typically 70% to 85% people-related and most savings come from work-force reductions, cutting overhead does demand some wrenching decisions.”
Getting up close and personal with the moon
Andrew McCarthy explores the universe from a backyard in Sacramento, CA, and shares his images on Instagram. Recently, he shared a 400 Megapixel Moon photo on EasyZoom. If you want to name the features you're seeing, check out Visit The Moon's lunar atlas, or Google Moon for a different view. McCarthy also provides a short video introduction to amateur astronomy, breaking down how to better see into space. [via Mltshp]
The Edison of the Slot Machines
‘But in the slot cheat business, triumph is always short-lived. Less than two years after The Monkey Paw’s invention, fresh innovations in security rendered it obsolete. Indeed, the legacy of The Monkey Paw wasn’t so much in its lasting efficacy, but in the confidence it instilled in Tommy. Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” At the end of the nineties, Tommy Carmichael declared, “Give me a slot machine and I’ll beat it.”’
What
The Joy of Cooking Naked. "Despite the occasional splatter burn, nudists say their relationship to eating, at home or in restaurants, is better and healthier without all the clothing." (SLNYT)
Your Boots can injure or kill you.
The dangerous speed-lace hook. "So I'm out for my hike this morning with a 45 lb pack, my Hanwag Alaska GTX Boots and my Kahtoola Micro-Spikes... I'm coming down a steep rocky grade and suddenly both of my feet are somehow shackled together, resulting in a major wipe-out that somehow, miraculously resulted in no damage to my pathetic body. As I lay in the rock-slide assessing if I'd broken anything I realized that my feet were inexplicably connected at the ankles. One of the links on my spikes had caught a speed lace hook on the opposite foot and hooked my boots together."
"Russian priests should stop blessing nukes: church proposal"
"Russian priests should refrain from the practice of blessing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction that can inflict indiscriminate loss of life ..." [more inside]
"He said, 'No, women don't eat that'"
Honk More, Wait More
Police in Mumbai, India were tired of drivers honking while stopped at red lights, so they hooked a few of the lights to decibel meters. The more you honk, the longer the light will take. They put up signs but not everyone figured it out, so they put up a video to explain it.
There's also a New York Times article here.
Carbon dating counterfeit whisky
Nuclear fallout exposes fake 'antique' whisky (LiveScience): Nuclear bombs that were detonated decades ago spewed the radioactive isotope carbon-14 into the atmosphere; from there, the isotope was absorbed by plants and other living organisms, and began to decay after the organisms died. Traces of this excess carbon-14 can therefore be found in barley that was harvested and distilled to make whisky. [...] Then, they evaluated allegedly rare whiskeys from 1847 to 1978, and found that nearly half the bottles weren't as old as they were supposed to be. One bottle, a Talisker with a label indicating it was distilled in 1863, was likely distilled between 2007 and 2014. A bottle of Ardbeg from 1964 was probably distilled after 1995, and a Laphroaig labeled 1903 dated to 2011 or later. [more inside]
The Best Of All Possible Keyboard Layouts
How was the Sholes QWERTY type-writer designed? Was it meant to slow typists down, or to speed them up?
I added up all of the possible word matches found in my word pair database, for all of the adjacent type-bars in his keyboard. I found 3877 total word matches for these type-bar pairs. This is out of a total of 1,239,045 found word matches, or about 0.3%. So I rewrote my simulation for this new standard, trying to find keyboards with this few total word matches of colliding type-bar pairs. With this new approach, it takes on average more than five million (about 5.9 million) random tries to find a keyboard layout that is as good as QWERTY.By the constraints of the 19th century, the QWERTY keyboard is shockingly well optimized. But we're not typing on 19th century machines anymore. And QWERTY might not have been the best solution available even in the 19th or early 20th centuries (PDF). Why can't we give up this odd way of typing? [more inside]
Images of America
In Focus, The Atlantic's long-running photo series, is focusing on US States this year. Every week will bring a photo set for a new state. [more inside]
“Ask me about Loom.”
Why 'Loom' Remains the Hidden Gem of Lucasfilm Adventures [VICE]
Cobb’s advertisement gives us a hint of why it was not as commercially successful, in spite of its artistic achievements. The description of the game only talks about the technical aspects - animations, music, controls - but not what the game is about. Loom was technically impressive - the original pixel graphics depict a wonderful world in only 16 colors; the soundtrack also made a wonderful use of the sound card by including a variety of pieces from Tschaikovski’s Swan Lake. The game takes its time to establish the world, with elegance and poise, in contrast with the riotous humor of Monkey Island. Loom is not bombastic, it has funny moments but not laugh out loud. Its fantasy world will not blow you away immediately - but it will steal your heart if you persevere.[more inside]
You are over-encumbered and cannot run.
• Pack-Ratting in Video Games: Do Players Have to Have It All? [Gamasutra] “Many people like to collect. It is a compulsion, a hobby, maybe even an instinct. Video games these days have noticed this behavior. If players love to scavenger hunt whenever they pick up a controller, then developers have a responsibility to manage this compulsion. How does a developer do this; put systems in place to manage or outright prevent players from hoarding? They usually either limit the player to encourage them to think about what they carry, or they encourage the player to grab all that they can find. The most important thing a developer needs to figure out is when to do one or the other. When it is fine to let a pack rat roam free? [...] Regardless of if the game is fast or slow paced in a relative sense, playing a game should not feel like a chore. The developer can get around this by either keeping the actual amount small, or by centering an interesting mechanic/mini game around it. Similarly, if a game developer decides to place limits on what or how much a player can carry, that player is more willing to accept the limitation if there is a clear dynamic at work.” [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »