Hpecker

Have I mentioned lately that me and Kelly wrote a book about future science and technology that's LOADED with brand new comics? It's called SOONISH, and jeez, we'd appreciate if you'd grab a copy.

Spanish artist Oscar Diaz found a literal way to mark time: He designed a calendar that writes itself. The dates of each month are embossed as a connected series of numbers on a sheet of paper; when the first digit is inserted into a bottle of ink, capillary action draws up the fluid and informs each date in succession over the course of the month.

Diaz writes, “The ink colors are based on a spectrum, which relate to a ‘color temperature scale,’ each month having a color related to our perception of the weather on that month. The colors range from dark blue in December to three shades of green in spring or orange and red in the summer.

More at his website.

In Germany, where modern forestry began, a curious new sort of literature arose in the 18th century:

Some enthusiast thought to go one better than the botanical volumes that merely illustrated the taxonomy of trees. Instead the books themselves were to be fabricated from their subject matter, so that the volume on Fagus, for example, the common European beech, would be bound in the bark of that tree. Its interior would contain samples of beech nuts and seeds; and its pages would literally be its leaves, the folios its feuilles.

That’s from Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, 1995. These xylotheques, or wood repositories, grew up throughout the developed world — the largest, now held by the U.S. Forest Service, houses 60,000 samples. “But the wooden books were not pure caprice, a nice pun on the meaning of cultivation,” Schama writes. “By paying homage to the vegetable matter from which it, and all literature, was constituted, the wooden library made a dazzling statement about the necessary union of culture and nature.”

BAHFest Sydney is now taking submissions! Check it out!

This is apparently the week of dirty jokes.

In which Kyle Hill of Nerdist presents the fifth form of matter:

The post Shake on it. appeared first on Indexed.

During the burning of Washington in the War of 1812, when a British expeditionary force leveled a cannon at the Patent Office, superintendent William Thornton “put himself before the gun, and in a frenzy of excitement exclaimed: ‘Are you Englishmen or only Goths and Vandals? This is the Patent Office, a depository of the ingenuity of the American nation, in which the whole civilized world is interested. Would you destroy it? If so, fire away, and let the charge pass through my body.'”

“The effect is said to have been magical upon the soldiers, and to have saved the Patent Office from destruction. … When the smoke cleared from the dreadful attack, the Patent Office was the only Government building … left untouched.”

(From R. Beresford’s Brief History of the United States Patent Office From Its Foundation, 1886.)

AMEN

(area maceration via emancipated neutrons)

Chess master Wilhelm Steinitz was having a heated political argument.

His opponent said, “Do you think you understand politics because you can play chess?”

Steinitz said, “Do you think you understand politics because you can’t play chess?”

An optical illusion. The black dots disappear unless you focus on them.

1305 5th Street, NE Photo by Joy Asico

From a press release:

“Union Market, northeast D.C’s vibrant culinary and retail district, will kick off its monthly drive-in movie series this Friday, April 7 at 8pm with feature presentation The Royal Tenenbaums. The special screening marks the start of Union Market’s annual classic American drive-in experience, which in partnership with Getaround, is held in the parking lot (1305 5th Street NE) and projected onto the market’s wall. Each family-friendly showing is free for walk-up film fans in the picnic area, or costs $10 per car.

Movie lovers and retro fanatics alike can munch on theater-quality delectables while The DC Rollergirls will be on hand delivering snacks and drinks on wheels. The always-popular drive-in movie series has brought in consistent crowds since its inception in 2012, with the throwback event offering a unique retreat for those looking for communal fun and vintage kitsch.

Union Market 2017 Drive-in Series Schedule

Friday, April 7: The Royal Tenenbaums
Friday, May 5: Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
Friday, June 2: Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
Friday, July 7: Coming to America
Friday, August 4: Chef
Friday, September 1: Days of Thunder
Friday, September 29: Clue
Friday, November 3: Willy Wonka

Hours
Gates open at 6:30pm
Gates close at 8:30pm
Film begins at 8:00pm/sunset

Location
Union Market parking lot
1305 5th Street NE”

Just one week left to get BAHFest MIT tickets so you can come see me and Marc Abrahams of the Ig Nobel Prize!

(Please note: Student tickets are available to students from *any* university).

In his Book of Good Love (1330), Juan Ruiz tells of a silent debate between Greece and Rome. The Romans had no laws and asked the Greeks to give them some. The Greeks feared that they were too ignorant and challenged them first to prove themselves before the wise men of Greece. The Romans agreed to a debate but asked that it be conducted in gestures, as they did not understand the Greek language. The Greeks put forward a learned scholar, and the Romans, feeling themselves at a disadvantage, put forward a ruffian and told him to use whatever gestures he felt inspired to make.

The two mounted high seats before the assembled crowd. The Greek held out his index finger, and the Roman responded with his thumb, index, and middle fingers. The Greek held out his open palm, and the Roman responded with a fist. Then the Greek announced that the Romans deserved to be given laws.

Each side then asked its champion to explain what had happened.

They asked the Greek what he had said to the Roman by his gestures, and what he had answered him. He said: ‘I said that there is one God; the Roman said He was One in Three Persons, and made a sign to that effect.

Next I said that all was by the will of God; he answered that God held everything in his power, and he spoke truly. When I saw that they understood and believed in the Trinity, I understood that they deserved assurance of [receiving] laws.’

They asked the hoodlum what his notion was; he replied: ‘He said that with his finger he would smash my eye; I was mighty unhappy about this and I got mighty angry, and I answered him with rage, with answer, and with fury,

that, right in front of everybody, I would smash his eyes with my two fingers and his teeth with my thumb; right after that he told me to watch him because he would give me a big slap on my ears [that would leave them] ringing.

I answered him that I would give him such a punch that in all his life he would never get even for it. As soon as he saw that he had the quarrel in bad shape, he quit making threats in a spot where they thought nothing of him.’

Ruiz writes, “This is why the proverb of the shrewd old woman says, ‘No word is bad if you don’t take it badly.’ You will see that my word is well said if it is well understood.”

(From Laura Kendrick’s The Game of Love, 1988.)

Many German beer brands combine a place name with the word Hell, which means “pale” and indicates a pale lager:

In 2010 German businessman Florian Krause recalled that he’d grown up near an Austrian village called Fucking:

So he brewed a pale lager and named it for the town:

The European Union trademark office initially balked at registering the name, but Krause explained his thinking and they accepted it. “The word combination claimed contains no semantic indication that could refer to a certain person or group of persons,” the office noted. “Nor does it incite a particular act.”

“It cannot even be understood as an instruction that the reader should go to hell.”

We ran out of regular non-student tickets for BAHFest East, so we moved 20 over from a different category. Get'em while they exist!

Just three weeks until BAHFest East and we've already sold half of the tickets! Buy soon if you want one of the cheaper ones.

Wallsend Metro station is located near the Segedunum Roman fort at the end of Hadrian’s Wall, which marked the northern limit of the Roman empire at the time of its construction in 122 A.D.

Accordingly its signs are rendered in Latin.

Our societies values are so massively jacked up.

In 1982, J.K. Aronson of Oxford, England, sent this mysterious fragment to Douglas Hofstadter:

‘T’ is the first, fourth, eleventh, sixteenth, twenty-fourth, twenty-ninth, thirty-third …

The context of their discussion was self-reference, so presumably the intended conclusion of Aronson’s sentence was … letter in this sentence. If one ignores spaces and punctuation, then T does indeed occupy those positions in Aronson’s fragment; the next few terms would be 35, 39, 45, 47, 51, 56, 58, 62, and 64. The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences gives a picture:

1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890
Tisthefirs tfourthele venthsixte enthtwenty fourthtwen
tyninththi rtythirdth irtyfiftht hirtyninth fortyfifth
fortyseven thfiftyfir stfiftysix thfiftyeig hthsixtyse
condsixtyf ourthsixty ninthseven tythirdsev entyeighth
eightiethe ightyfourt heightynin thninetyfo urthninety
ninthonehu ndredfourt honehundre deleventho nehundreds
ixteenthon ehundredtw entysecond onehundred twentysixt
honehundre dthirtyfir stonehundr edthirtysi xthonehund
redfortyse cond...

But there’s a catch: In English, most ordinal adjectives (FIRST, FOURTH, etc.) themselves contain at least one T, so the sentence continually creates more work for itself even as it lists the locations of its Ts. There are a few T-less ordinals (NINE BILLION ONE MILLION SECOND), but these don’t arrange themselves to mop up all the incoming Ts. This means that the sentence must be infinitely long.

And, strangely, that throws our initial presumption into confusion. We had supposed that the sentence would end with … letter in this sentence. But an infinite sentence has no end — so it’s not clear whether we ought to be counting Ts at all!

I was sitting down with a web client, going through the content of their existing site. One page had links to several PDFS, and each link had the PDF icon and then the file name underlined. I went to click on the file name itself but it didn’t work. The only part that linked was the tiny icon for each.

Me: We’ll want to fix that ASAP. That’s terrible UX.

Client: How about we put a note before all of them that says “To view the PDF, please click on the icon instead of the text.”

I make signs.

Client: Okay, I need one sign that says “PARKING” that points to the right, two signs that say “EVENT” that point to the left, and another two signs that say “EVENT” and point to the right.

Me: The signs will be double sided, so they’ll point to whatever direction you want.

Client: *blank stare*

Me: Okay. Here’s a piece of paper. I fold it in half, and draw an arrow pointing to the right on one side, flip it, and draw an arrow pointing to the left on the other side.

Client: *blank stare*

Me: If you look, both arrows are pointing to the same edge. So I can make it point in any direction.

Client: *blank stare*

Me: If your signs are double sided, and they’re pointing in the wrong direction, all you have to do is flip them 180 degrees and they’ll point to the correct direction.

Client: ….

Me: ….

Client: Oh! *stares at me like I’m David Copperfield*

Oh, they routinely fold under a fraction of the pressure.

HEY BOSTON! It's your turn...