According to the poster Mystic_L, each bottle represents a year in the cask. A good illustration of how fast (slow?) whiskies age, but also where diminishing returns kick in, and the Angel's Share — the loss of volume over time through evaporation.
Jared "Go Daddy" Kushner is in the news for using his private server to conduct White House business. It's only a crime if you are a Democrat, so he has nothing to worry about, but that didn't stop prankster @sinon_reborn from convincing Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, that he was Kushner and had been emailing porn through the server.
Lowell's exchange with the man posing as Kushner marked the second time this month that a top lawyer representing a senior White House official corresponded with the prankster thinking he was a colleague or client. White House special counsel Ty Cobb disclosed information about the FBI's Russia probe to the prankster earlier this month thinking he was White House social media director Dan Scavino.
On Monday, the prankster wrote to Lowell from the email address "kushner.jared@mail.com" asking what he should do with "some correspondence on my private email ... featuring adult content."
"Can I remove these?" the prankster asked.
"Forwarded or received from WH officials?" Lowell wrote in response.
"I think one was forwarded from a White House official, we had discussed a shared interest of sorts. It was unsolicited. Then there are a handful more, but not from officials," said the prankster, still posing as Kushner.
"I need to see I think all emails between you and WH (just for me and us)," Lowell wrote. "We need to send any officials emails to your WH account. Not stuff like you asked about. None of those are going anywhere."
"But we can bury it?" the prankster responded. "I'm so embarrassed. It's fairly specialist stuff, half naked women on a trampoline, standing on legoscenes, the tag for the movie was #standingOnTheLittlePeople :("
A recent study published in the scientific journal The Auk: Ornithological Advances claims a competitive social environment may cause certain species of ducks to grow even bigger penises.
Researchers studied two species of ducks placed in environments where there were fewer females and more males, along with ducks housed in male-female pair bonds, according to Phys.org.
Lesser Scaup ducks that were housed with several males were said to have grown longer penises. Ruddy Ducks, who are already well-endowed to begin with — placed in the same predicament — would grow their penises faster than pair-bonded ones, but also might “offset” their sexual development to not interfere with other males.
What the study really reveals is that there’s a sizeable job market for measuring duck wangs.
Via Phys.org:
"This is an excellent experimental study of penis morphology, looking at the effects of social environment on penis size in two duck species that have different mating systems," according to Queen's University's Bob Montgomerie, an expert on reproductive strategies who was not involved in the study.
"The question now is whether the observed increase in penis size in Lesser Scaup under the threat of sperm competition actually gives males a competitive advantage. Like all good studies, this one will undoubtedly stimulate more research, as it provides both methodologies and a clear focus on interesting questions."
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is recommending shrinking the size of at least six national monuments — four on land, and two at sea, TheWashington Post reported today. That includes the fiercely contested Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, according to a leaked draft of a memorandum Zinke submitted to the White House. Should President Donald Trump follow the Interior Department’s recommendations, the actions will likely lead to lawsuits.
Jeffrey Tsang is a sailor on a cargo ship. On a recent voyage from the Red Sea to Sri Lanka to Singapore to Hong Kong, he set up a camera facing the bow of the ship to record the month-long journey. From ~80,000 photos taken, he constructed a 10-minute time lapse that somehow manages to be both meditative and informative. You get to see cargo operations at a few different ports, sunrises, thunderstorms, and the clearest night skies you’ve ever seen. Highly recommended viewing. (via colossal)
Chinese vendors on online marketplace Taobao never resist a chance to peddle their goods. Just days after Apple announced the iPhone X that replaced the home button’s Touch ID for Face ID, Chinese merchants have launched “protective masks” in response to the news.
If you’re worried that someone will unlock your phone while you’re sleeping (which is probably unlikely, given that Face ID has been designed to not work when your eyes are closed), there are a number of masks you can order straight to your house for $5 to $15. Do you want one or three exposed holes on your mask, or none at all? Or is black too plain and you’d prefer green?
Reactions in the Verge offices were mixed when we saw ‘The Wype’ — a “personal desktop snack rag” that’s supposed to keep your hands clean while you’re using your computer.
On the one hand, did we really want to admit how far we’ve fallen as a species? That we’re so tied to our machines that we can’t tear ourselves away for two minutes to do something as basic as wash our hands? On the other: we all admitted — quietly, with a vague sense of shame — that, yeah, this looks pretty useful.
So: The Wype. It’s basically a mini mop-head made from microfibers in a “shag-carpet like pattern.” The mops themselves are removable and reusable. You stretch one over a plastic base, wipe your hands on it when needed, and wash the mop...
From the moment you walked in the place, you knew it was something special. You knew this was going to be something you’d remember, and it all started with the decor. The interior didn’t look like a fast food joint with it’s huge, sprawling windows, and cheap looking walls, or tiled floors. When you walked in, you were greeted by brick walls, with smaller windows, that had thick red fabric curtains pulled back, and a carpeted floor. It just felt higher-class than walking into McDonalds or Burger King.
The booths were high-backed, with thick padded vinyl seats and back rests. The high backs was also different from your usual eating out experience. These high backs gave you a sense of privacy, which was great for a date night. Also great for a date night were the candles on the tables. Those little red glass candles that were on every table, and were lit when you got to your seat. It was a little thing, but when added to everything else, it was quite the contribution. Your silverware was wrapped in a thick, cloth napkin that beat the heck out of the paper napkins everyone else was using at the time. And you could always count on the table being covered by a nice, red and white, checkered table cloth.
Pizza Hut was the #1 eating-out destination for me as a kid. My family never ate out much, so even McDonald’s, Arby’s, or Hardee’s was a treat. But Pizza Hut was a whole different deal. Did I enjoy eating salad at home? No way. But I had to have the salad bar at Pizza Hut. Did I normally eat green peppers, onions, and black olives? Nope…but I would happily chow down on a supreme pizza at Pizza Hut. And the deep dish pan pizza…you couldn’t get anything like that in rural Wisconsin, nor could you easily make it at home. Plus it was just so much food…you could eat as much as you wanted and there were still leftovers to take home. Plus, with those high-backed booths, you could play paper football without having the extra points go sailing into the next booth.
Animated science fiction show Futurama is coming back to life as special podcast episode that will reunite the show’s cast and writers. The audio drama ties in with the mobile game Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow, and will premiere on Nerdist September 14th.
Liam Smith, 24, of Bristol, England, was on a dinner date with a woman he met on Tinder when they returned to his flat. She took a poop in his bathroom but it wouldn't flush, so she decided to toss the feces out the window. From there, things became a bit crazy. Here is his story which apparently has been confirmed to be true:
"We had a lovely evening, and enjoyed each other's company very much.
"After our meal, we repaired back to my house for a bottle of wine and a scientology documentary.
"About an hour in to Louis Theroux and chill, my date got up to use the toilet. She returned with a panicked look in her eye, and told me she had something to tell me.
"'I went for a poo in your toilet', she told me 'and it would not flush.
"She continued, I don't know why I did this, but I panicked. I reached into the toilet bowl, wrapped it in tissue paper, and threw it out of the window'."
"I was understandably concerned, and told her we would go outside, bag up the offending poo in the garden, bin it, and pretend the whole sorry affair had never happened.
"Unfortunately, owing to a design quirk of my house, the toilet window does not in fact open to the garden.
"Instead, it opens into a narrow gap of about a foot and a half, separated from the outside world by another (non-opening) double glazed window.
"It was into this twilight zone that my date had thrown her poo.
"As can be seen in the picture, the inside window opens at the top, into the gap that is separated from the garden by a non-opening double-glazed window pane.
"Seeing only one solution, I messaged our house group-chat, and went upstairs to find a hammer and chisel to smash open the window."
"Being an amateur gymnast, she was convinced that she could reach into the window and pull the poo out, using the tried and tested 'inside out bag as glove' technique.
"Unfortunately she couldn't reach. She climbed further in and had the same problem. Eventually I agreed to give her a boost up and into the window.
"She climbed in head first after her own turd, reached deeper into the window, bagged it up, and passed it out, over the top and back into the toilet from whence it came.
"She called out to me to help her climb out from the window, I grabbed her waist and I pulled. But she was stuck. Stuck fast.
"Try as we might, we could not remove her from the window. She was stuck fast, upside down in the gap.
"Unfortunately for my date, at this stage I could see only one way out of our predicament.
"She had been upside down in the window for around 15 minutes at this point, and I was starting to grow concerned for her health. I called the fire brigade.
"Bristol's finest were on scene sirens blaring in a matter of minutes.
"Once they had composed themselves after surveying the scene in front of them, they set to work removing my date from the window using all of their special firemen hammers and tools.
"It took them about 15 minutes.
"Unfortunately, although they rescued my date unharmed from what must have been a rather unpleasant confined space to find yourself in, in the process they had to completely destroy the window with their special fire tools.
"I'm not complaining, they did what they had to do. Problem is, I've been quoted north of £300 to replace the window.
You could be the next proprietor of the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada. Packed with kitschy-creepy clown figurines, paintings, and mannequins, it's conveniently located next to a cemetery with the graves of residents and prospectors who died of a strange plague in 1902. Reportedly the ghosts of some of those folks haunt the Clown Motel. You could own it for $900,000 so long as you contractually agree that the Clown Motel won't shut its doors. From Mysterious Universe:
The greasepaint ghouls came from Leona and LeRoy David, a brother and sister who built the motel in 1985 and chose the site next to the cemetery because their father was buried there. They put their small collection of clown memorabilia on display and ran the inn until 1995 when they sold everything to Bob Perchetti, whose family has lived in Tonopah for four generations and most certainly knew the haunted history of the motel and its clownish contents...
Seven-year employee Marlena Dufour says she’s seen apparitions and moving mannequin hands and has heard disembodied voices. Dufur told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that a guest had a room key mysteriously disappear. However, it’s the clowns that cause the most trouble. While many guests come dressed as clowns and enjoy the experience, others have walked into the office and screamed or fainted.
Each year, in honor of English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who once began a novel “It was a dark and stormy night”, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest attracts hundreds of entrants who attempt to craft the worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel. Kat Russo won the 2017 contest with this line:
The elven city of Losstii faced towering sea cliffs and abutted rolling hills that in the summer were covered with blankets of flowers and in the winter were covered with blankets, because the elves wanted to keep the flowers warm and didn’t know much at all about gardening.
I was also fond of this one, by Anna MacDougald:
There’d been six of us at the outset, but after Smythe took a poisoned dart to the chest, Buddlestone fell from the top of a cliff, Stevens and Mayhew were swallowed by quicksand, and Tait-Harris was eaten by ants, only I remained to bring you our amazing tale.
1. “The Confederacy’s biggest problem was messaging.”
9. “A train is traveling at 100 mph. A child is tied to the track. I have a switch in front of me. If I pull it, the train will switch to another track, and instead of hitting the child it will hit ten convicted felons. What do I do? Trick question: I’m not even there. I’m at your company helping you make record profits.”
August 2nd, 2017: San Diego Comic Con was AMAZING: I met so many great and interesting readers, got to meet some people that I really admire, and won two (TWO!) Eisner Awards, for my work on Squirrel Girl and Jughead! IT WAS PRETTY AMAZING!!
In recent years, commentators like Max Roser, Steven Pinker, Nicholas Kristof, and Matt Ridley have argued contrary to the prevailing mood that our world increasingly resembles a dumpster fire, things have actually never been better. Here’s Kristof for instance arguing that 2017 will likely be the best year in the history of the world:
Every day, an average of about a quarter-million people worldwide graduate from extreme poverty, according to World Bank figures.
Or if you need more of a blast of good news, consider this: Just since 1990, more than 100 million children’s lives have been saved through vaccinations, breast-feeding promotion, diarrhea treatment and more. If just about the worst thing that can happen is for a parent to lose a child, that’s only half as likely today as in 1990.
In a long piece for The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman does not dispute that the world’s population is better off than it was 200 years by any number of metrics. But he does argue that this presumably bias-free examination of the facts is also a political argument with several implications and assumptions.
But the New Optimists aren’t primarily interested in persuading us that human life involves a lot less suffering than it did a few hundred years ago. (Even if you’re a card-carrying pessimist, you probably didn’t need convincing of that fact.) Nestled inside that essentially indisputable claim, there are several more controversial implications. For example: that since things have so clearly been improving, we have good reason to assume they will continue to improve. And further — though this is a claim only sometimes made explicit in the work of the New Optimists — that whatever we’ve been doing these past decades, it’s clearly working, and so the political and economic arrangements that have brought us here are the ones we ought to stick with. Optimism, after all, means more than just believing that things aren’t as bad as you imagined: it means having justified confidence that they will be getting even better soon.
What things are like right now are the result of past actions. But the world to come is the result of what’s happening right now and what will happen in the next few years. Momentum (mass times velocity) is a powerful thing in a big world, but it’s not everything. It’s a bit like saying “ok, we’ve got the car up to speed” then letting up on the gas and expecting to continue to accelerate.
The New Optimists “describe a world in which human agency doesn’t seem to matter, because there are these evolved forces that are moving us in the right direction,” Runciman says. “But human agency does still matter… human beings still have the capacity to mess it all up. And it may be that our capacity to mess it up is growing.”
And just because things are good now doesn’t mean they couldn’t be better or start heading in the other direction soon.
But after steeping yourself in their work, you begin to wonder if all their upbeat factoids really do speak for themselves. For a start, why assume that the correct comparison to be making is the one between the world as it was, say, 200 years ago, and the world as it is today? You might argue that comparing the present with the past is stacking the deck. Of course things are better than they were. But they’re surely nowhere near as good as they ought to be. To pick some obvious examples, humanity indisputably has the capacity to eliminate extreme poverty, end famines, or radically reduce human damage to the climate. But we’ve done none of these, and the fact that things aren’t as terrible as they were in 1800 is arguably beside the point.
Read the whole thing…it’s a solid defense against a sentiment I find increasingly irksome.
Dan Hon recently trained a neural net to generate a list of fictional British placenames. The process is fairly simple…you train a program on a real list of placenames and it “brainstorms” new names based on patterns it found in the training list. As Hon says, “the results were predictable”…and often hilarious. Here are some of my favorites from his list:
Heaton on Westom
Brumlington
Stoke of Inch
Batchington Crunnerton
Salt, Earth
Wallow Manworth
Crisklethe’s Chorn
Ponkham Bark
Buchlingtomptop
Broad Romble
Fuckley
Buncestergans. At first glance this doesn’t look a lot like a place name but let’s break it down. We’ve got Bun which is definitely from Ireland (see Bunratty, Bunclody, Bundoran) meaning bottom of the river, and I believe we’re talking bottom as in the mouth rather than the riverbed (or there are whole lot of magical lady-of-the-lake towns in Ireland, I’m happy believing either). Cester is our Roman fort, then we have -gans.
I don’t think gans has any meaning in British place names. My guess is the net got this from Irish surnames like Fagans, Hagans, Duggans, that sort of thing. My Gaelic’s not so great (my mother, grandmother, and several aunts and uncles would all be better suited to this question!) but I think the -gan ending in Gaelic is a diminuitive, so Buncestergans could be the Small Fort at the Bottom of the River. I quite like that. It’s a weird Gaelic-Latin hybrid but why the hell not!
This week on Cool Tools' Maker Update: Kitty Grabs Gold, a beer cooler that follows you, the Circuit Playground Express, Adafruit and Microsoft, Other Machine Co. and Bre Pettis, Tinkercad Lego export, a great kit for gadget and toy hacking, and Maker Faires. Our featured Cool Tool is the iFixit Electronics Tool Kit.
Advances in culture, technology, and science depend on past innovations and advances. Humans become capable of more and more as the momentum of knowledge grows. Lined up correctly, a tiny domino results the toppling of a massive domino further down the line.
Cognitive biases are systematic ways in which people deviate from rationality in making judgements. Wikipedia maintains a list such biases and one example is survivorship bias, the tendency to focus on those things or people which succeed in an endeavor and discount the experiences of those which did not.
A commonly held opinion in many populations is that machinery, equipment, and goods manufactured in previous generations often is better built and lasts longer than similar contemporary items. (This perception is reflected in the common expression “They don’t make ‘em like they used to.”) Again, because of the selective pressures of time and use, it is inevitable that only those items which were built to last will have survived into the present day. Therefore, most of the old machinery still seen functioning well in the present day must necessarily have been built to a standard of quality necessary to survive. All of the machinery, equipment, and goods that have failed over the intervening years are no longer visible to the general population as they have been junked, scrapped, recycled, or otherwise disposed of.
Buster Benson recently went through the list of biases and tried to simplify them into some sort of structure. What he came up with is a list of four conundrums — “4 qualities of the universe that limit our own intelligence and the intelligence of every other person, collective, organism, machine, alien, or imaginable god” — that lead to all biases. They are:
1. There’s too much information.
2. There’s not enough meaning.
3. There’s not enough time and resources.
4. There’s not enough memory.
The 2nd conundrum is that the process of turning raw information into something meaningful requires connecting the dots between the limited information that’s made it to you and the catalog of mental models, beliefs, symbols, and associations that you’ve stored from previous experiences. Connecting dots is an imprecise and subjective process, resulting in a story that’s a blend of new and old information. Your new stories are being built out of the bricks of your old stories, and so will always have a hint of past qualities and textures that may not have actually been there.
For each conundrum in Benson’s scheme, there are categories of bias, 20 in all. For example, the categories that related to the “not enough meaning” conundrum are:
1. We find stories and patterns even in sparse data.
2. We fill in characteristics from stereotypes, generalities, and prior histories whenever there are new specific instances or gaps in information.
3. We imagine things and people we’re familiar with or fond of as better than things and people we aren’t familiar with or fond of.
4. We simplify probabilities and numbers to make them easier to think about.
5. We project our current mindset and assumptions onto the past and future.
Benson’s whole piece is worth a read, but if you spend too much time with it, you might become unable to function because you’ll start to see cognitive biases everywhere.
Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about a theological battle being fought by Muslim imams and scholars in the West against the Islamic State misstated the Snapchat handle used by Suhaib Webb, one of Muslim leaders speaking out. It is imamsuhaibwebb, not Pimpin4Paradise786.
No wonder people think the NY Times is untrustworthy. Another from the Times:
An article on March 20 about wave piloting in the Marshall Islands misstated the number of possible paths that could be navigated without instruments among the 34 islands and atolls of the Marshall Islands. It is 561, not a trillion trillion.
This one was only slightly wrong:
CORRECTION: Boris Johnson’s award-winning limerick about the Turkish president referred to Erdogan as a wanker who performed a sex act with a goat. A previous version of this article included the prompt for the poetry contest, which included a different sex act, also with a goat.
When in doubt, blame technology:
Correction at 9:58 a.m. on 3/09/2016: Due to an oversight involving a haphazardly-installed Chrome extension during the editing process, the name Donald Trump was erroneously replaced with the phrase “Someone With Tiny Hands” when this story originally published.
Two years ago, the NoPhone launched to rave reviews as the most minimalist yet secure handset on the market. The NoPhone Selfie is the long-awaited follow-up, adding the ability to picture the user themselves without adding significantly to the unit's price.
At $18, the NoPhone Selfie remains among the cheaper options. Mine has a problem, though: the display seems to be stuck on a hideous morph between Chucky the Killer Doll and Brad Dourif, the actor who voices him.
About the Product • The NoPhone is a fake phone for people addicted to real phones
• It has no data plan, no camera, no battery and no Wi-Fi but is completely toilet-bowl resistant
• It's the perfect phone for someone who uses their phone too much
It was the soup that got me early on. Parallel Studio made this and they are running The Unsatisfying Challenge over the next two weeks, looking for people to submit their own animations and videos of unsatisfying situations.
This was all over Twitter this morning without any context or credit going to the original creators, a trend I find unsatisfying. Thanks to Frank Chimero for finding the original.
The new conveyor system will open the week of October 3, ferrying books from the vast, subterranean archives beneath Bryant Park to researchers working in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
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