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This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed.

Finding challenges prior assumption that consistent favouring of one hand over the other is a characteristic unique to humans and certain primates

Kangaroos are left-handed, according to a new study.

The finding challenges a prior assumption that the consistent favouring of one hand over the other is a characteristic unique to humans and certain primates.

The Blackwing of chalks, Fulltouch is beloved of mathematicians who despair now that the manufacturer, Hagoromo, is out of business.

Watch those fingers go!

Below, a classic video showing more cash counting techniques from around the world:

Slow-motion footage of “exploding plants” compiled by the Smithsonian Channel. Mind blown!

(via Laughing Squid)

Image: Wikimedia Commons

If every pair of people in a group have exactly one friend in common, then there’s always one person who is a friend to everyone.

This rather heartwarming fact was proven by Paul Erdös, Alfréd Rényi, and Vera T. Sós in 1966. It’s sometimes more cynically known as the paradox of the politician.

The Erdös proof uses combinatorics and linear algebra, but in 1972 Judith Longyear published a proof using elementary graph theory.

See The Elevator Problem.

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Fascinating: what3words is a global addressing system based on a grid of 57 trillion 3mx3m squares. Each square has been allocated a unique, fixed 3 word address. Poor addressing is costly and annoying in some developed countries, but around the world it hampers the growth and development of nations, ultimately costing lives.

UCLA psychology professor Alan Castel ran an experiment where more than 100 students drew the Apple logo from memory, and the results were surprisingly terrible. Why? Read the rest

“Very” is one of those unnecessary words that can dull our writing. Take Mark Twain’s advice and if you get the urge to write “very,” substitute “damn” instead.

Read more...

A classic viral video that's been making the rounds since viral videos were shared on VHS tapes. (more…)

Boulder artist Michael Garb (aka "Gravity Glue") says Boulder police have threatened to fine and jail him for stacking river rocks, which he has been doing for years.

Guitarist Randy Bachman (Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive) explains how he figured out the famously mysterious opening chord to the Beatle's 1964 song "A Hard Days's Night."

Previously: HOWTO play the opening chord from 'A Hard Day's Night'

[via]

I'd rather go completely dead-tree than have to surf like Stallman does, but if it works for him, great! Read the rest

When I was a kid,  I spent a lot of time at the Indianapolis Star, where my mother worked in what was then referred to as the “women’s pages.” She kept me busy returning the photos that accompanied marriage and engagement announcements, using the SASEs the young brides had supplied. After that, I’d hit the printing floor, where veteran workers sported square caps folded from the previous day’s edition, as that day’s issue clacked on tracks overhead. If I was lucky, someone would make me a gift of my name, set in hot type.

The Star still publishes – I shudder to report that its website seems to have renamed it IndyStar… – but cultural and digital advances have relegated all of the particulars mentioned above to the scrap pile.

They came rushing back with wild, Proustian urgency when Osamu Yamamoto, a master printer at Benrido Collotype Atelier in Kyoto, mentions the smell of the ink, in the short documentary above, how over the years, it has seeped into his skin, and become a part of his being.

Collotype, defined by the Getty Conservation Institute as “a screenless photomechanical process that allows high-quality prints from continuous-tone photographic negatives,” has been on the way out since the 70s. As master printer Yamamoto notes, it’s a low-efficiency, small batch operation, involving messy matrixes, hand-operated presses, and heavy iron machines that give off a sort of animal warmth when working.

Rather than pressmen’s caps, Benrido’s shirtless printers wear hachimaki, rubber aprons, and purple disposable gloves.

Filmmaker Fritz Schumann (whose film on the oldest hotel in Japan we previously featured before) evokes the workplace – one of two remaining collotype companies in the world – through small details like the plastic-wrapped digital Hamtaro clock and also by drawing viewers’ attention to the number of years logged by each employee. The art of collotype takes a long time to master and novices appear to be in short supply.

Should we conceive of this operation as a quaint relic, creeping along thanks to the whimsy of a few nostalgia buffs?

Surprisingly, no. The laborious collotype process remains the best way to duplicate precious artworks and historic documents. The way the ink interacts with reticulations in the gelatin surface atop results in subtleties that pixellated digital images cannot hope to achieve.

Visitors to the studio may support the enterprise by picking up a handful of collotype-printed postcards in the gift shop, but the office of the Japanese Emperor is the one who’s really keeping them in business, with orders to copy hundreds of delicate, centuries old scrolls, paintings and letters.

Like a circle in a circle…cultural preservation via cultural preservation! Perhaps the smell of the ink will prevail.

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– Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

“Air Jordan XI (11) Retro Legend Blue Unboxing + Review + On Feet,” by Brad Hall. (more…)

Reuters

Belgian regulators have ordered Facebook to stop tracking people who have logged out of the service—and those who never signed up in the first place.

The rest of the article is also worth a read, and it includes some links near the end to learn more about Australian Indigenous languages. Wikipedia also points out that: 

A common feature of many Australian languages is that they display so-called mother-in-law languages, special speech registers used only in the presence of certain close relatives. These registers share the phonology and grammar of the standard language, but the lexicon is different and usually very restricted. There are also commonly speech taboos during extended periods of mourning or initiation that have led to a large number of Aboriginal sign languages.

The Kingdom of Enclava is a 1000 square feet plot of "terra nullius" (no-man's-land) 30 miles west of Croatia's capital, Zagreb.

Everyone suspects that buttons on pedestrian crossings, elevators, train doors, etc., do nothing. They are right. The BBC's Chris Baraniuk reports on the buttons that lie—and the power of the illusion of control.

Call for long-term strategy as studies find widening gap between earnings and mortgages, lack of affordable housing and 64% increase in ‘risky’ lending

The financial challenges facing would-be home owners will be laid bare on Monday by new research showing that a first-time buyer now needs to earn £77,000 a year to get on the housing ladder in London.

Across the UK, a first-time buyer needs a minimum income of £41,000, according to the report from KPMG. It also shows that affordable housing has become an issue for all but the above-average earners and those coming into inheritances.

Put the word "only" between any two words of this sentence: "She told him that she loved him."

I found this video oddly anxiety-proviking, and yet, stupid funny, too.

You spin the Pie Face wheel to see how many times you have to click the catapult. If you perform your clicks and the pie doesn't smash in your face, you move it to your partner.

But in the end, someone gets a pie to the face.

[DailyPicksandFlicks]

All countries have quirky traditions that probably look a little odd from the outside Read the rest

PEC 215, a proposed amendment to Brazil’s constitution, threatens to make worse the already fragile plight of the country’s impoverished indigenous communities

From downtown São Paulo, the Pico do Jaraguá – the crest of a mountain ridge on the city’s north-western horizon – looks like a broken tooth, crowned by a towering TV antenna. Just beyond the rocky peak and down a steep, deeply rutted, unmade road, lies the nascent village of Tekoa Itakupe, one of the newest fronts in Brazil’s indigenous people’s struggle for land to call their own.

Related: Indian tribe in São Paulo faces eviction – in pictures

The legendary spiral is a human fetish found rarely in good design or nature.

Ten years ago, a trio of MIT students created SCIgen, a program that spits out gibberish academic papers that have, improbably, since been published in real journals. Many embarrassing catches later, SCIgen’s creators are back with something even better: SCIpher.

Read more...

If you had lived in Germany in 1939, would you have helped protect Jews or gone along with their systematic extermination? If you had been an MP 10 years ago, would you have milked your expenses for what they were worth? And if you and your family faced a threat, would you protect them or save yourself?

Big groups can do amazing things with surprisingly few implements, and internet communities can spontaneously become collaborative experience designers. Redditors are playing a new game of sorts with themselves and each other involving a color-changing button and a timer, and the emergent memes are weird and glorious. Read the rest