June 22, 2015
Can you solve this puzzle?
Downstairs in a house are three identical on-off switches. One of them controls the lamp in the attic. The puzzle is to work out which switch controls the lamp.
The rules are as follows. You are allowed to manipulate the switches all you like, and then you are allowed a single trip to the attic. How do you do it?
Charcoal is the New Black
Charcoal has become the hot new flavouring in everything from cocktails to meat and mash See also: BURN YOUR FOOD , "Chefs all over the U.S. are bringing the grill indoors with charcoal infusions, vegetable ash, and more creative techniques for getting smoky, charred flavor". Chef Adam Perry Lang's recipe for "Charcoal Salt" from his book "Charred and Scruffed" (reviews) and an "improved" version of the recipe on Instructables.
Almosting a Joycean Listicle
"In keeping with James Joyce’s own love of lists, here’s a terribly subjective list of ten books published in this century that are in different ways as inventive as Ulysses was in 1922. These novels aren’t necessarily inspired by Ulysses, except insofar as it has affected every subsequent novel, but like Joyce’s masterpiece they challenge us in ways we never knew to expect. If nothing else, Bloomsday should remind us to pick up some books not despite their difficulty but because of it." (Electric Literature) [more inside]
Jobst Brandt, 1935–2015
RIP, Jobst Brandt. Brandt established a reputation among cyclists first with his book The Bicycle Wheel, later with his promotion of slick-treaded clincher tires for road bikes, and finally with his presence on Usenet, where he and Sheldon Brown (RIP) were the Pillars of Hercules of technical knowledge about bikes, with Brown on the east coast and Brandt on the west, Brown with his jovial personality, and Brandt with what can euphemistically be described as an insistence on intellectual rigor.
Full cast and crew
David Lebovitz visits the Le Creuset factory in Fresnoy-le-Grand, France.
And the flamingos sadly hung their plastic heads
The Blog at Improbable Research reports that Don Featherstone, inventor of the iconic plastic lawn flamingo has died. [more inside]
Take the Third Stream, turn left at the sun
An epic history of the movie trailer
"The spirit of the 60s lives in these trailers, leaning hard on mood and music, not plot. The same is true for the Godfather trailer, as Coppola gives audiences a peak into the Corleone family.-- An epic history of the movie trailer, by Matthew Schimkowitz
However, the closer Hollywood gets to the age of the blockbuster, the more the modern trailer starts to reveal itself, and it all starts with Jaws -- the film phenomenon of the summer of 1975. [ ... ] It introduced something new to trailers: relying almost entirely on the narrative of the film to advertise it. In 3 minutes and 21 seconds, the entire story arc of the film, save for the ending, is given away. There’s a shark terrorizing the beach on the 4th of July, it’s up to a local sheriff to take care of it, and he teams with a scientist and a fisherman to get the job done."
$3,000 worth of "gems"...
Gaming Your Brain - How to top the leaderboard of Clash of Clans, and how Freemium games rake in billions of dollars from their players.
this is literally the most srs bsns question ever.
So I lit a firecracker, went off in my eye
1 in 25 female inmates is pregnant when the prison doors lock behind her
Prison Born. What becomes of babies born to mothers behind bars? Research suggests that having nurseries in prisons leads to lower recidivism rates among incarcerated mothers and better outcomes for their children.
Ban Ki-hypocrite, more like.
"I think we have to respect when people say, 'No—that is enough.'"
Euthanasia for psychiatric patients was rare in the early years of the law, but patients complained that they were being unfairly stigmatized: psychic suffering, they argued, was just as unbearable as physical pain. Like cancer patients, they were subjected to futile treatments that diminished their quality of life. Dirk De Wachter, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Leuven and the president of the ethics commission for the university's psychiatric center, said that he reconsidered his opposition to euthanasia after a patient whose request he had rejected committed suicide. In 2004, she set up a camera in front of a newspaper office in Antwerp and set herself on fire.Rachel Aviv traveled to Belgium, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002, to report on the complications and consequences that surround the practice of assisted suicide and euthanasia for psychiatric patients: The Death Treatment.
Broadly speaking, a Duck Dynasty shirt is not a good sign.
One of my favourite Twitter accounts is the frustrating and important @AfAmHistFail, run by an anonymous (for obvious reasons) docent who gives slavery presentations at a historical plantation. She shares the ups and downs of her job, the struggles to keep composure in the face of racist questions and monologues, and the difficulty of puncturing the romanticization of the antebellum South. She was kind enough to answer some questions for us.
"things you thought would never end turned out to be the first to vanish
Start-up Costs: ‘Silicon Valley,’ ‘Halt and Catch Fire,’ and How Microserfdom Ate the World
Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs is about the spiritual yearnings and time-frittering activities of youngish coders immersed in the drudgery of the software-development process, and how those activities become an expression of those yearnings. It was published 20 years ago this month, which as far as I’m aware makes it the earliest significant stab by a fiction writer at the Great North American Tech-Company/Start-up Novel. It predates Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Dave Eggers’s The Circle, numerous other neuroman-à-clefs, score-settling pseudomemoirs and murder-dot-com whodunits,1 as well as tech-sector TV shows like Silicon Valley and Halt and Catch Fire, serials that pick up where the novels leave off.[more inside]
For Sale: 40,000 Square Feet of Lost Baggage
Your lost airline luggage probably ended up at this store You might think that, for such a big store to remain full, there must be an epidemic of lost luggage, but actually just 0.5% of all bags don’t make their way to the baggage carousel [more inside]
Ceci n'est pas un Parkplatz
Erwin Wurm just received a parking ticket in the city of Karlsruhe. Nothing to write home about, except for the fact that the offending object was one of his artworks. Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has become famous for bending, inflating and twisting cars, trucks and camper-vans in the name of art.
HEEEEERE'S KINGSLEY!
Earth’s sixth mass extinction has begun
If we regard the Earth as nothing more than a source of resources and a sink for our pollution, if we value other species only in terms of what they can provide to us, then we we will continue to unpick the fabric of life. [more inside]
Off Diamond Head
"Their little heads are exploding"
Mrs. Nguyen’s Prestidigitation From a set of 1 through 9 playing cards, I draw five cards and get cards showing 8, 4, 2, 7, and 5. I ask my 6th graders to make a 3-digit number and a 2-digit number that would yield the greatest product... and somehow we end up with lacing diagrams and Python. (The original post on Fawn Nguyen's blog)
Just another day at work
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