PlowNYC is the City of New York’s official snow removal website. It allows New Yorkers to, in real time, “(1) track the progress of DSNY spreader/plow vehicles; and (2) confirm the snow designation of City streets (i.e., primary, secondary, tertiary, or non-DSNY).” [via]

Even when you’re rush through Grand Central Terminal, it’s impossible not to glance up and notice its breathtaking treasures, like the beautiful light fixtures, clocks, and painted or tiled ceilings.

But there’s a decorative theme running through the station that’s a little more subtle and easy to miss: acorns and oak leaves.

An acorn tops the iconic brass clock above the information booth.

Marble garlands of oak leaves and acorns decorate the original 1913 water fountains. They’re also on the ceiling, chandeliers, and staircases.

So what’s with all the harvest images?

It’s a Vanderbilt thing. The Vanderbilt heirs financed the construction of the terminal, and the family crest is all about acorns and oaks leaves.

“From a little acorn a mighty oak shall grow,” was Grand Central builder Cornelius Vanderbilt’s motto, according to Christopher Winn’s I Never Knew That About New York.

I’m not sure if any of the Vanderbilt homes that lined Fifth Avenue in the Gilded Age also featured acorns and oaks. Those flourishes may not have gone with the decor in this chateau-style mansion, for example.

But Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport, Rhode Island summer “cottage,” the 70-room palazzo-inspired Breakers, is also decorated with acorns—a symbol of strength and long life.

[Third photo: via newyork.com; fourth photo: via interestingamerica.com]

The post Algebraic Identity Issues appeared first on Beatrice the Biologist.

If you need to urinate while away from home, you will have to find a welcoming place to do so, or else you risk a citation—around 20,000 are doled out in NYC annually. Thankfully, there are some public restrooms in NYC, some of which are not located in a Starbucks—some of them are actually kind of nice! [ more › ]

Saliva Pool

How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva?

—Mary Griffin, 9th grade

The average kid produces about half a liter of saliva per day, according to the paper Estimation of the total saliva volume produced per day in five-year-old children, which I like to imagine was mailed to the Archives of Oral Biology in a slightly sticky, dripping envelope.

A five-year-old probably produces proportionally less saliva than a larger adult. On the other hand, I'm not comfortable betting that anyone produces more drool than a little kid, so let's be conservative and use the paper's figure.

If you're collecting your saliva,[1]This question is gross, by the way. you can't use it to eat.[2]I hope. You could get around this by chewing gum or something, to get your body to produce extra saliva, or just by drinking liquid food or getting an IV.

At the rate of 500 mL per day from the paper, it would take you about a year to fill a typical bathtub.

A bathtub full of saliva is pretty gross, but that's not what you asked about. For some reason—I don't really want to know why—you asked about filling a pool.

Let's imagine an Olympic-sized swimming pool, which is 25 meters by 50 meters. Depths vary, but we'll suppose this one is uniformly 4 feet deep,[3]You can read more of the regulations here; a pool with starting blocks does need a slightly deeper bit near each end, but it can be shallower in the middle. There doesn't seem to be anything in the rules about a maximum depth, so I suppose you can make a pool that continues through to the other side of the Earth, but then you run into trouble when you try to follow the instructions in section FR 2.14 about painting lane markings on the bottom. so you can probably stand up in it.

At 500 mL per day, it would take you 8,345 years to fill this pool. That's a long time for the rest of us to wait, so let's imagine you went back in time to get started on this project early.

8,345 years ago, the ice sheets that covered much of the northern parts of the world had mostly receded, and humans had just begun to develop agriculture. Let's imagine you started your project then.

By 4000 BCE, when the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent had begun to develop in modern-day Iraq, the saliva would be a foot deep, covering your feet and ankles.

By 3200 BCE, when writing was first developed, the saliva would creep past your knees.

Around the mid-2000s BCE, the Great Pyramid was constructed and early Mayan cultures emerged. At this point, the saliva would be getting close to your fingertips if you didn't lift your arms up.

Around 1600 BCE, the eruption of a huge volcano in the Greek island now known as Santorini caused a massive tsunami which devastated the Minoan civilization, possibly causing its final collapse. As this happened, the saliva would probably be approaching waist-deep.

The saliva would continue to rise throughout the next three millennia of history, and by the time of Europe's industrial revolution it would be chest-deep, easily enough saliva to swim in. The last 200 years would add the final 3 centimeters, and the pool would finally be filled.

It would take a long time, sure. But it would all be worth it, because at the end of it all, you'd have an Olympic-size swimming pool full of saliva. And isn't that, deep down, all any of us really want?[4]No. It is not.

Because I’m still excited about The Force Awakens, here are some of the characters as… birds.

Europa Water Siphon

What if you built a siphon from the oceans on Europa to Earth? Would it flow once it's set up? (We have an idea for selling bottled Europa water.)

—A group of Google Search SREs

No, but I like where you're going with this.

Siphons are neat—they let you pump water up and over a barrier using just a tube and gravity. You can use siphoning to empty swimming pools, fill awkwardly-shaped containers, or get up to all kinds of trouble.[1]I asked some friends to suggest which thing in their house they'd be most upset to find someone siphoning water into. Answers included: Spice drawer, gumball machine, tea collection, bottle of vitamins, watercolor paint set, bag of rice with a cell phone in it, mint-condition instant oatmeal collection, carefully tuned musical glasses, ice hotel, prizewinning sand castle, sodium action figure collection, gremlin cage, Martian soil sample, dehydrated astronaut ice cream, and rack of those water-sensing self-inflating lifeboats.

It's not necessarily obvious at first glance, but siphoning works because of air pressure. Before we answer the Europa question, it may help to go over how siphons work.

If you take a tube full of water and point the ends down, gravity will try to pull the water down, making it fall out of both sides. If the water did start to fall out, a vacuum would form in the middle, since there's no way for air to get in to fill the gap. Each column of water would then have a vacuum on one side and air on the other, which means it would be pushed back up into the tube.

In reality, this doesn't happen; the air pressure stops the vacuum from opening up in the first place, and the water just sits there in the tube. Or, at least, it would if it were perfectly balanced.

If the water in one end is slightly lower than the other, then the column of water on that side pushes down harder against the air than the column on the other side. This imbalance causes the water to "tip" and run out of the heavier end.

To siphon something, you can just keep feeding more water into the tube on the higher side. As long as the surface of that water is higher up than the place where the water is coming out, the siphon will keep running.

If the column of water is more than about 34 feet[2]10 meters​[3]2 giraffes high, the pressure from the weight of the water becomes too strong for Earth's air pressure to counteract, and the water does fall out from both sides and briefly create a vacuum.[4]Although as the pressure drops, the water boils away to fill it, so you can't actually get too close to a pure vacuum this way. However, if you use something like olive oil (or mercury), you can get much closer. This means that on Earth's surface, you can't siphon water over a barrier that's more than 34 feet high. In Denver, where the air pressure is lower, the limit is 28 feet. In a vacuum—in theory—you can't siphon at all.[5]In practice, it turns out siphons do work in a vacuum, at least a little bit, because the "stickiness" of the water keeps it from pulling apart in the middle.

Europa has barely any atmosphere, so you won't be able to do much siphoning. But you also can't siphon water out of the atmosphere from a planet in general. A column of atmosphere, which is miles high, pushes down only as hard as a column of water 34 feet high. The water column is smaller because water is much denser than air. As long as the stuff on top is less dense than the liquid below it, you can't use the pressure from the stuff on top to siphon the liquid up above the stuff on top.[6]Most of the time, things sort themselves into layers, with the denser ones on the bottom. Occasionally, in the Earth, layers of dense rock will end up above layers of less-dense oil. This is why—when oil wellheads break—oil can sometimes come spurting out without any help from the pumps.

Even if you could generate a lot of pressure, pumping water from Europa's surface would take some work. Europa's gravity is weaker than Earth's, which means lifting something up from the surface of Europa takes less energy, but it's still not easy. The energy required to "climb out of Europa's gravity well" is the same as the energy required to climb up 209 kilometers against Earth's surface gravity. (Earth's gravity well, by comparison, is about 6,379 kilometers "deep"—click on this comic for an illustration.)

Once you've lifted the water out of Europa's gravity well, you then have to lift it the rest of the way out of Jupiter's, which is a lot deeper. Then, you have to do more work to push the water on a trajectory where it intercepts Earth. In terms of energy, the whole task is roughly equivalent to lifting the water about 2,500 kilometers in Earth gravity:

You could send the water to Earth by launching it from the surface of Europa at about 7 km/s. Conveniently, since Europa has no atmosphere, you don't need to use inefficient rockets to climb up to space. You can launch the water directly from the surface using something simpler, like a coilgun.

When the water reaches Earth, it can use atmospheric braking to slow down, and the individual bottles could be steered directly to their targets. Timing the deliveries would be tricky, sure, but it sure would be impressive if you got it right. Plus, you could totally one-up Amazon's drone delivery scheme.

At current electricity prices, the launch would cost a minimum of 50 cents (US) per bottle. Of course, getting electricity on Europa is probably a bit more expensive than getting it on Earth,[7]Or would need an awfully long cord. and setting up the purification plant and bottling operation on Europa wouldn't be cheap, to put it mildly.

All in all, you're going to have to charge an awful lot per bottle to break even on this whole operation. And if it turns out Europa's water has some weird alien pathogen in it, you might accidentally kill all your customers.[8]And, possibly, everyone else.

This may sound like your plan is pretty impractical and unrealistic, especially since there's no point to it all. Water is water. Once you've purified the water on Europa to make it drinkable, it won't be much different from water here on Earth. On the other hand, we ship water around the world from Fiji for no reason, so who knows. Maybe, with the right marketing, this idea could work.

Sara Teasdale

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Jack Spicer

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Gliding toward one of the hundreds of untouched mountainsides in the high backcountry of Denali National Park in Alaska, a climber skis past sapphire pools atop upper Ruth Glacier.

See more pictures from the February 2016 feature story "How Can 6 Million Acres at Denali Still Not Be Enough?"

Remember when ball pits for adults were all the rage downtown? Pfffft, nowadays you need more than that to reel in the selfie seekers... er, cultural sophisticates. Enter Martin Creed, the Turner Prize-winning British artist whose innocuously-named "Work No. 2592" is currently making people extremely happy at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in Chinatown. [ more › ]

A victim of rising rents and the increasing dominance of online retailers, the sprawling flagship Toys R Us store in Times Square will close at 11 p.m. Wednesday night. Forever. Here's a tissue. [ more › ]

In Singapore, which aims to be a “city in a garden,” greenery cascading off a luxury hotel soothes a guest in a balcony pool.

See more pictures from the January 2016 feature story “This Is Your Brain on Nature.”

“Meet me on Sixth-and-a-Half Avenue” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

But Six-and-a-Half Avenue is a real street (inspired by Harry Potter?) tucked among the silver and gray office towers of Midtown between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.

It was the Department of Transportation’s idea, apparently. In 2012, DOT officials wanted to encourage pedestrians to use the string of existing public plazas and covered passageways running almost in a straight line from 51st to 57th Streets.

So Sixth-and-a-Half Avenue, ruled by stop signs rather than traffic lights, was born—the first fractional street in the city’s grid system.

Half avenues, though, aren’t a new idea.

In 1910, Mayor William Gaynor floated the possibility of building a half avenue between Fifth and Sixth Avenues from Eighth Street to 59th Street, bisecting Bryant Park.

The unnamed half-avenue would help reduce traffic, said Gaynor. But like so many other ideas and proposals, it never went past the concept stage.

[Image: New York Times]

Heavy snowfall, while lovely as it is to look at, creates a headache for most New Yorkers. But all that white stuff presents an opportunity for workers looking for extra cash.

“12,000 Find Work in the Streets,” announced the headline for a New York Times story on February 15, 1914.

After 10 inches of snow had fallen, thousands of men lined up at “unemployment stations” established “in the lodging house districts” by the “cleaning department,” which sounds like it may have been part of the Department of Sanitation.

In Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, “116 gangs of men were put to work in the streets in those boroughs,” wrote the Times, using old-fashioned shovels, horse carts, and 19 “automobile trucks.”

The pay? In 1902, it was 25 cents per cubic yard of snow. By the 1930s, workers racked up an easier-to-calculate 50 cents an hour.

While thousands of men were getting paid to haul the snow, a side industry popped up outside the lodging houses: men with pushcarts selling “strips of burlap and bagging,” so the pickers and shovelers could keep their feet warm.

“Practically every ’emergency man’ at work in the street cleaning gangs last night had his feet incased [sic] in overshoes and leggings made of burlap bound with rope and twine,” reported the Times.

[Top and bottom photos: New York Times; middle: LOC/Bain Collection]

Earlier this month, the upstate town of Whitesboro became the focus of a lot of national attention when the village voted on whether or not to keep its controversial seal, which depicts a white man apparently strangling a Native American man (or a "friendly wrestling match," depending on how you look at it!). The residents voted 157-55 to keep the seal—but today, Whitesboro announced that they would reverse that vote and change it. And it turns out that Jessica Williams and The Daily Show have a lot to do with it, as you'll see in the clip below. [ more › ]

Vienna-born photographer Ernst Haas turned his camera to New York City’s skyscrapers and suspension bridges, creating a kaleidoscope of blurry color in this painterly 1970 image, Lights of New York.

Haas started his career as a photojournalist for Life, Vogue, and other magazines. In 1962, he was celebrated with a retrospective show of his color photography at the Museum of Modern Art.

Over the years he captured a postwar, midcentury New York in all its poetic, weird, magical glory.

As Sanitation Department plows began to clear snow from the last remaining side streets in the city this morning, many non-driving New Yorkers navigated thigh-high mounds of snow on street corners. Some cursed silently as they slipped on the underlying slush and imagined the black snow, ribbed ice, and slush lagoons to come. Others took out their phones to shame the property owners, for failing to shovel, and the city, for prioritizing clear passage for cars over clear paths for pedestrians. [ more › ]

When Kate Feering Strong (below) received her invitation to Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt’s “fancy dress” ball, scheduled for March 26, 1883, she decided not to settle for a more traditional costume—like a Medieval princess or fairy tale character.

Nope, Miss Strong went as a cat—complete with an actual (dead) white feline as a head piece and a gown sewn with the body parts of real kitties.

“The overskirt was made entirely of white cats’ tails sewed on a dark background,” commented the New York Times.

The ball was arguably the most incredible social event of the year, and it also served as kind of a housewarming for the new Fifth Avenue Vanderbilt mansion.

“The bodice is formed of rows of white cats’ heads and the head-dress was a stiffened white cat’s skin, the head over the forehead of the wearer and the tail pendant behind. A blue ribbon with ‘Puss’ inscribed upon it, which hung a bell, worn around the neck completed the dress.”

Here are some of the other outrageous and ostentatious costumes, including the battery-powered “electric light,” worn by Mrs. Vanderbilt’s sister-in-law.

Your Shot member Thomas Major saw the opportunity to create this image from above while in Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil. “I wanted to get a shot looking down at the people watching the falls. When I got to the top of the observation platform and looked down I noticed this geometric shape ... When the person put their arms out I knew that this completed the composition.”

This photo was submitted to Your Shot, our storytelling community where members can take part in photo assignments, get expert feedback, be published, and more. Join now >>

Endangered New Zealand sea lions are often found in the rata forests of their home nation’s Auckland Islands. Thanks to myriad threats—climate stress, disease, and fishing hazards—their population is significantly down from historical levels. Your Shot member Jacob Anderson came across this animal near Ranui Cove on the northeast coast of Auckland Island. True to the species’ reputation of being bold around humans, the sea lion was unbothered while lounging on a rich bed of green moss.

This photo was submitted to Your Shot, our storytelling community where members can take part in photo assignments, get expert feedback, be published, and more. Join now >>

Here’s a no-sh*t fact of life: Humans frequently do horrible things to other humans. The latest example comes from the U.K., where a 4-year-old was injured after being superglued to a McDonald’s toilet seat. Four-year-old injured after punks superglue her to…

The post Two Teens Allegedly Superglued A 4-Year-Old To A McDonald’s Toilet Seat appeared first on First We Feast.

Hovertext: The Golden Rule is actually about how long to fry a tortilla.

New comic!
Today's News:

Till it begins. And may I say, the talks for this show are particularly good.