The animation above shows how bridges were built in medieval times, well before the advent of backhoes, cranes, and bulldozers powered by steam and gasoline. I could explain what you’re about to see, but you should just watch the video.
The bridge constructed in the video is the real-life Charles Bridge in Prague, which was built over several decades in the 14th and 15th centuries. From Amusing Planet:
Construction of the Charles Bridge started in 1357, under the auspices of King Charles IV, but it was not completed until the beginning of the 15th century. The bridge has 16 arches and 15 pillars, each shielded by ice guards. It’s 512 meters long and nearly 10 meters wide. The balustrade is decorated with 30 statues and statuaries depicting various saints and patron saints, although these were erected much later, between 1683 and 1714. To preserve these statues, they were replaced with replicas during the 1960s. The originals are at Prague’s National Museum.
Until the middle of the 19th century, the Charles Bridge was the only crossing on river Vltava, which made the bridge an important connection between Prague Castle and the city’s Old Town and adjacent areas.
When I was younger, I remember watching (and loving) a PBS series on the building techniques used to construct the pyramids in Egypt, Stonehenge, the Colosseum, and Incan buildings. That the internet is now overflowing with engaging history videos like this bridge video is truly wonderful.
On March 22nd, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott did something seemingly innocuous: he posted a picture of his boarding pass to Instagram. That post was the beginning of a convoluted six-month saga for hacker Alex Hope.
In a blog post, Hope details how they were sent Abbott’s post by a friend and asked if it would be possible to “hack this man” with only the information on the boarding pass. Upon realizing they were indeed able to find personal information, most notably Abbott’s passport number, on the airline website, their task quickly devolved into a black hole of emails, phone calls, and frantic Google searches for definitions of cybercrimes.
for the past six months i've been secretly participating in the Do Not Get...
Google’s hidden Dinosaur runner game that pops up in Chrome when people are offline is a treasured Easter egg for Chrome users, but it was arguably in need of an update.
Enter a modded version of the game called Dino Swords, created by a partnership between Internet collective MSCHF and 100 Thieves that gives the adorable, granulated T-Rex an assortment of weapons to use. Weapons are bound to various keys that players can use, but there’s a catch. Some of the weapons will lead to self-inflicted damage (I found out during one of my play-throughs of the modded version).
Google’s “Dino game is the final holdover from the golden age of things like Addicting Games and Miniclip games,” Daniel Greenberg, MSCHF’s head of strategy, told The...
Lego’s next line of sets offers builders multiple ways to recreate pop culture icons, including Darth Vader and Marilyn Monroe.
Lego Art is a lineup of portrait creations designed for adult builders. Each set features small, bead-size pieces and a canvas that you use to piece together a pop art poster.
There are four sets currently in the Lego Art lineup: Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, portraits of the members of The Beatles, a set featuring various versions of Iron Man’s suit, and a Star Wars set based on popular villains.
There isn’t just one way to create these portraits, either — Lego says each set can be reimagined “in a number of different ways.” For example, if you purchase The Sith set, you can recreate one of three members...
The estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has sued Netflix over its upcoming film Enola Holmes,arguing that the movie’s depiction of public domain character Sherlock Holmes having emotions and respecting women violates Doyle’s copyright.
Enola Holmes is based on a series of novels by Nancy Springer starring a newly created teenage sister of the famous detective. They feature many elements from Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and most of these elements aren’t covered by copyright, thanks to a series of courtrulings in the early 2010s. Details from 10 stories, however, are still owned by Doyle’s estate. The estate argues that Springer’s books — and by extension Netflix’s adaptation — draw key elements from those stories. It’s suing not only...
Well, here’s a camera trick we’ve not seen in a smartphone before: X-ray vision. Or, at least, something that looks very much like it. It’s a feature of the new OnePlus 8 Pro, which seems to use the phone’s infrared sensors to see through a small subset of black materials.
If you’ve got a OnePlus 8 Pro and want to try it out for yourself, just open up the camera app, swipe over to the “Photochrom” color filter, and point it some black objects.
Fair warning: we experimented with the filter ourselves and it really is quite selective. It only works on very thin black plastic that’s already a little see-through in the right light. Think things like TV remotes rather than the sturdier plastic of a high-end DSLR. It’s also hit or miss with...
Later this month, SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon spacecraft will take its first human passengers to the International Space Station — and now you can get a firsthand view of what they’ll be seeing when they approach the orbiting lab. Today, SpaceX released a new online simulator that allows users to try their hand at manually docking with the ISS using the Crew Dragon’s controls. Spoiler alert: it’s actually pretty hard!
The simulator begins with your Crew Dragon vehicle radically askew in space. Ahead, a virtual recreation of the International Space Station awaits, but the docking system on your Crew Dragon is pointed at an angle away from the port with which it needs to align. Luckily, there are plenty of controls to fix the vehicle’s...
There’s a new iPad-related case in town from Pad & Quill: a case for Apple’s newly released Magic Keyboard, which is itself a $350 case for your iPad Pro. It’s called the Copertina, and it retails for $99.95. It looks a little bit like the hard cover of a book; it is made, apparently, from archival-quality buckram linen, which is also used in bookbinding. It is undeniably beautiful.
And yet, its existence troubles me. Not all cases are created equally; we hold that particular truth to be self-evident. However, the question must be asked: why would you need a case to go over a case?
Too Hot to Handle’s premise is hard to see as anything other than desperate. A collection of hot people are promised a hedonistic island getaway, then surprised with a big catch: a $100,000 prize, but only if they abstain from having sex. As a group of mostly accomplished sex-havers who meet each other in swimwear, this is the opposite of what they want, and the show doesn’t actually expect them to not hook up; they’ll just lose some prize money every time they get too horny. Whether or not the show is good doesn’t really matter, because like all of Netflix’s 2020 reality shows, it was made to go viral — and quality doesn’t really matter for that. A successful Netflix reality show isn’t about being entertaining. It’s about being online.
It looks like your typical purse, right? Except...
Image: Twelve South
What we have here is a tiny leather handbag from Twelve South designed for absolutely no other purpose than to carry your AirPods. It’s a limited edition release in honor of (sigh) April Fools’ Day, and there are 671 units left at the time of this writing. It’s called the AirBag, and it’s my absolute favorite thing ever.
“But!” the haters are probably objecting. “Who on earth would actually buy such an impractical and clearly overpriced object?” The answer to that question, haters, is Rihanna. The singer was spotted rocking a $1,000 tiny Delvaux purse last...
YTMND has returned. Nearly a year after being brought down by a server failure, YTMND is back online and somewhat modernized, removing the need for Flash to view its archive of looping GIFs and synchronized music.
“Everyone is stuck inside right now, so I figured it would be a good time to let people play with the site again,” YTMND founder Max Goldberg told The Verge over Discord.
Goldberg has been working to restore the site since it went offline last May. The site’s database was being stored on eight-year-old hardware and was somehow deleted. After going down, Goldberg said he received an “outpouring of support from people all over.” He launched a Patreon, and “people clearly wanted to support the site sticking around,” so he started...
I’ve loved math since I was a kid. One of the big reasons for this is that there’s always more than one way to solve a particular problem and in discovering those solutions, you learn something about mathematics and the nature of numbers.1
In this video, math fan Johnny Ball shows us a different method of multiplication. In Russian multiplication (also called Ethiopian multiplication and related to ancient Egyptian multiplication), you can multiply any two numbers together through simple addition and doubling & halving numbers. The technique works by converting the numbers to binary and turning it into an addition problem.
I loved learning about this so much that I scribbled an explanation out on a napkin at brunch yesterday to show a friend how it worked. We’re friends because she was just as excited as I was about it. (via the kid should see this)
I’ve probably told this story here before, but for an assignment in a quantum mechanics class in college, we had to derive an equation using two different techniques. After much struggle at the whiteboard on a Saturday morning, a friend and I got the results of these two approaches to converge on the same answer and it felt like we had unlocked a deep secret to the universe.↩
Long-time readers know that I like me some maps and in particular hand-drawn/homemade maps and maps of alternate realities. So I was charmed by Anna Calcaterra’s alternate map of the Americas, which features geographic entities like Long Chile, Ohio 2 (“Four Corners replaced w/ Ohio 2”), and East Dakota (RIP Minnesota). The kids are alright, y’all.
There’s no shortage of gadgets at CES ready to invade the last bastion of privacy at home: the bathroom. The intruders aren’t just startups hoping to revolutionize the way we use the bathroom or even companies that manufacture the fixtures we need to get ready each morning. Brands that make personal hygiene products — like Bic, Oral-B, and Charmin — also want in on the action.
These brands want to start collecting data as they get closeer to our crevices
These brands want to start collecting data as they get closer to our crevices. In exchange, they offer detailed information about how much grime is on our teeth — or even how much our poop stinks. In theory, users can have more personalized personal time, and the companies can get some...
On Friday, September 13, a truck bound for the Georgia-based tabletop and video game company Trivium Studios took a turn too sharply, spilling 216,000 gaming dice onto Interstate 75 in Atlanta in what could be the biggest unintentional dice roll ever.
Every few seconds, the visualization picks a new satellite to track, allowing you to see the location, height, and speed. The satellites are 300 miles from the surface of the Earth moving at about 17,000 mph.
We hope you're ready to build your dream PC, because PC Building Simulator is launching today on Nintendo Switch.
Yes, initially revealed ahead of time by an official Nintendo document of all places, PC Building Simulator has now been properly confirmed by publisher, The Irregular Corporation. The game lets you run your own PC repair workshop, taking care of everything from simple diagnosis and upgrades to creating bespoke creations that anyone would love to own.
Few designs can be called timeless and iconic enough to translate well into miniature versions of themselves. Horses is obviously the main one, but the ThinkTiny, a miniature version the Lenovo ThinkPad comes pretty close. Created by Paul Klinger, the ThinkTiny uses the laptop’s iconic red TrackPoint nub as a joystick for classic arcade games like Snake, Tetris, and Lunar Lander.
The tiny laptop runs on an ATtiny1614 microcontroller and features a 128 x 64 OLED screen. It’s all housed in a 3D-printed case that’s complete with a glowing “Think” logo. Sadly, the ThinkTiny cannot runDoom or Crysis, but there is a neat little Mandelbrot fractal explorer.
Browsing the web on a desktop computer can sometimes feel like a carefully crafted test of your sanity. You’ve got ads and auto-playing videos popping up left and right, and you’ve even got pop-ups from sites asking you for permission to send more pop-ups in the form of notifications. It’s enough to make anyone crazy.
I don’t know about you, but I almost never want a website to send me notifications — not while I’m actively looking at the site and certainly not while it’s closed. Thankfully, a minute or two of simple tweaking can stop your browser from ever allowing such invasive invitations to pester you again.
We’ve included instructions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Just follow the steps below. Your sanity will thank you.
Image: Asobo Studio/Xbox Game Studios via Polygon
Photo by Don Arnold / WireImage
He really should get that looked at ... | Image: Nintendo via Xenobia/YouTube
Image: Bacronym/AMC Games
Photo: Epyx
Photo: Nintendo/Lego
Image: Lego
Netflix
Image: Netflix
Seeing into the guts of an Apple TV box. | Images: Ben Geskin / Twitter
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Image: Rockstar Games
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Psyop/KFC
Frank Miller, John Romita Jr./DC Comics
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge