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This game from Tom Watson is great fun: you’re presented with a succession of people, places, and things with associated dates that you have to correctly place in chronological order, like so:

All the data is pulled from Wikipedia and it gets harder as you go along because the gaps in time between dates already on the timeline get shorter. Did the discovery of radium happen before or after Queen Victoria’s death? Was Jane Austen born before or after the American Revolution? I know everyone is all about Wordle right now, but this game is much more my speed (and I can’t stop playing). (via waxy)

Update: For fans of this, there are at least two board games that are similar: Chronology and Timeline.

You may have also noted that the data is a little…wrong in places. The dangers of building a game based on a non-structured dataset. Think of it as an unintentional “hard mode”. (thx @bobclewell & peter)

Tags: games   Tom Watson   Wikipedia

Ronnie Spector, best known for leading groundbreaking ’60s pop group the Ronettes, has died. She was 78. Spector’s family confirmed the news in a post on the singer’s website, writing, “Our beloved earth angel, Ronnie, peacefully left this world today after a brief battle with cancer. Ronnie lived her life with a twinkle in her eye, a spunky attitude, a wicked sense of humor and a smile on her face. She was filled with love and gratitude.”

Not to be outdone by the bizarre and inappropriate kids' toys that were made to accompany David Lynch's Dune, Walmart is selling an exclusive box set of Denis Villeneuve's Dune that comes in a "limited edition pain box." ＰＵＴ ＹＯＵＲ ＨＡＮＤ ＩＮ ＴＨＥ ＢＯＸ．

Repeating the phrase "limited edition pain box" over and over in my head until it sounds normal pic.twitter.com/4RDBa4H1VJ

— Read the rest

For the last few years, I’ve been a fan of Tom Whitwell’s annual list of 52 things he learned during the past year — here’s his list for 2021. This year, I kept track of my own list, presented here in no particular order:

1. “In Fargo, Carl says ‘30 minutes, Jerry, we wrap this thing up’ when there are exactly 30 minutes of the movie remaining.”
2. There’s a Boeing 727 cargo plane that’s used exclusively for horse transportation nicknamed Air Horse One.
3. In March 2020, the Covid-19 testing capacity for all of NYC was 120 tests per day.
4. “The last time ships got stuck in the Suez Canal [in 1967], they were there for eight years and developed a separate society with its own Olympic Games.”
5. The pronunciation of the last name of the man who lent his name to Mount Everest (over his objections) is different than the pronunciation of the mountain.
6. While recording the audiobook version of Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White needed 17 takes to read Charlotte’s death scene because he kept crying.
7. America’s anti-democratic Senate, in one number. “Once Warnock and Ossoff take their seats, the Democratic half of the Senate will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.”
8. The first rap video shown on MTV was Rapture by Blondie.
9. As of 2019, only 54% of Americans accept the theory of evolution.
10. When CBD is taken orally (as in a pill, food, or beverage), as little as 5% of it enters your bloodstream. “If you’re at the coffee shop and like ‘oh, yeah, give me a CBD,’ you’re just wasting $3.”
11. The size of FedEx boxes is proprietary. “The size of an official FedEx box, not just its design, is proprietary; it is a volume of space which is a property exclusive to FedEx.”
12. In golf, finishing four strokes under par on a single hole is called a condor.
13. A commemorative press plate is given to authors and photographers who have made the front page of the NY Times for the first time.
14. A button installed at the behest of the previous President summoned a Diet Coke to the Oval Office when pressed.
15. The number of people born in Antarctica (11) is fewer than the number of people who have walked on the Moon (12).
16. The market for table saws is $200-400 million but they cause almost $4 billion in damage annually. Power tools companies aren’t liable for the damage, which is borne by individual users, workers comp, and the health system.
17. Disney animators occasionally “recycle” scenes from older films, keeping the motion and choreography while redrawing the characters.
18. In the past 45 years, the top 1% of Americans have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90%.
19. People age at different speeds. “People varied widely in biological aging: The slowest ager gained only 0.4 ‘biological years’ for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5 biological years for every chronological year.”
20. The Six Flags amusement parks were named after the flags of the six countries that represented Texas throughout its history, including the Confederacy. The last Confederate flags flying outside Six Flags’ locations were removed only in 2017.
21. Humans have evolved to out-drink other mammals. “Many species have enzymes that break alcohol down and allow the body to excrete it, avoiding death by poisoning. But about 10 million years ago, a genetic mutation left our ancestors with a souped-up enzyme that increased alcohol metabolism 40-fold.”
22. “It takes about 200 hours of investment in the space of a few months to move a stranger into being a good friend.”
23. There are only 25 blimps in the whole world.
24. In 2016, a fourth division Spanish football club renamed itself Flat Earth FC.
25. “What exactly is meant by the term ‘Holocaust’? It means that the global Jewish population in 2019 (~15 million) is still lower than it was in 1939 (16.6 million). So many Jews were murdered that we still haven’t recovered demographically after 80 years.”
26. Cannabis delivery isn’t legal in Maine, so this enterprising online shop employs “psychics” to “find a wide selection of your lost weed and drop it off at your home”.
27. How algorithms radicalize the users of social media platforms. “Facebook’s own research revealed that 64 percent of the time a person joins an extremist Facebook Group, they do so because the platform recommended it.”
28. Andre Agassi learned to break Boris Becker’s fierce serve by noting the position of Becker’s tongue right before he served.
29. In emergencies, mammals can breathe through their anus.
30. There are chess positions that humans players can understand easily that the most powerful chess engines can’t.
31. As of May 2021, “Republicans and white people have actually become less supportive of Black Lives Matter than they were before the death of George Floyd.”
32. Build-A-Bear over-purchased yellow fabric to make Minions plushies, so the company released a number of yellow stuffed animals made of the surplus “minion skin”.
33. Scientists didn’t discover that the cause of the 1918 influenza pandemic was a virus until 1933. “At the time most microbiologists believed that influenza was caused by a bacteria.”
34. Skinny bike tires are not faster than wider tires. “The increased vibrations of the narrower tires caused energy losses that canceled out the gains from the reduced flex.”
35. The first RV was made out of a fallen redwood tree and was called “Travel Log”.
36. “In the last four years, Costa Rica has generated 98.53% of its electricity from renewable sources.”
37. Disney Imagineers use smaller bricks at the top of buildings to make them seem bigger and taller than they are.
38. “Dogs tend to poop aligned north-south.”
39. There are three different types of fun. “Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect.”
40. Babylonians were using Pythagorean calculations for the dimensions of right triangles 1000 years before Pythagoras was born.
41. Galileo didn’t invent the telescope and wasn’t even the first to use it for astronomical purposes.
42. By counting excess deaths from Jan 2020 to Sept 2021, the Economist estimates that more than 15 million people have died of Covid-19 worldwide, more than 3 times the official death toll of ~4.6 million.
43. Michael K. Williams choreographed the dancing in the music video for Crystal Waters’ 100% Pure Love.
44. Gas stations don’t make much money selling gasoline. The goods inside gas station stores “only account for ~30% of the average gas station’s revenue, yet bring in 70% of the profit”.
45. Solastalgia “is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault” (e.g. by climate change).
46. The Beishan Broadcasting Wall in Kinmen, Taiwan was a massive three-story speaker system built in 1967 to broadcast anti-Communist messages to China.
47. Before he became a famous actor, Timothée Chalamet had a small YouTube channel where he showed off his custom-painted Xbox 360 controllers.
48. “China is planning at least 150 new [nuclear] reactors in the next 15 years, more than the rest of the world has built in the past 35.”
49. Earlier this fall, a bar-tailed godwit set the world record for the longest continual flight by a land bird: about 8100 miles and “flapping its wings for 239 hours without rest”.
50. “About one in five health-care workers [in the US] has left medicine since the pandemic started.”
51. The Chevy Suburban has been in production under that same name since 1935, “making it the longest continuously used automobile nameplate in production”.
52. The ubiquitous Chinese food takeout container was originally invented for carrying oysters.

Tags: lists

People use machines to find people they lost.

As the nation continues to mourn the loss of Betty White, it’s almost impossible to not take a moment to laugh with her during one of her many famous cameo appearances. White became the olde... More »

Covid Standard Time is a clever if gloomy idea, implemented well. Someone do a speaking clock phone line, every loop ending with a dry, unsuppressible cough!

Norway has slow television, a genre of calming broadcasts depicting railways, boat rides, knitting, and wood-chopping. The internet has ASMR. The Midwest has Joe Pera Talks With You. More »

After Hours is a one-crazy-night movie about how work sucks. We don’t need to know much about Paul Hackett, the data-entry drudge played by Griffin Dunne, beyond the fact that he is bored with his job and the life it has afforded him. Dining alone at a café after leaving his nondescript ... More »

Joseph Ducreux was a French painter active in the latter part of the 18th century — he was a portraitist in the court of Louis XVI and continued his career after the French Revolution. But Ducreux is increasingly remembered for his series of self-portraits that were surprisingly informal for the age in which they were painted. To contemporary eyes, they almost seem to have been painted for use in memes, a purpose for which they certainly have been used.

Tags: art   Joseph Ducreux

"I graduated college with a degree in design and I redesigned some popular logos I think we can all agree are ugly," says Emily Zugay on her TikTok account. She proceeds to redesign iconic logos into Microsoft-Paint-style abominations. Zugay is clearly doing this as a joke, and her three videos have gotten nearly 12 million views— each. — Read the rest

Cecily Strong has a particular talent for playing “Weekend Update” characters bristling with thinly veiled rage (recall “Claire from HR”More »

Sometimes called "the greatest movie that was never made," Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune was the cult director's mid-1970s effort to adapt Frank Herbert's novel for the big screen, starring Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, and Gloria Swanson, with music by Pink Floyd and Magma. — Read the rest

As part of an online course on fashion and design, MoMA visited the Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard to learn how they go about making one of their bespoke suits.

Behind a drawn curtain, a master cutter takes an initial series of 27 measurements: 20 for the jacket, 7 for the trousers. From these measurements, the cutter fashions a pattern in heavy brown paper. At the cutter’s table, the cloth is cut in using heavy shears, and the many pieces of fabric are rolled for each garment into tiny packages, which await the tailors.

See also $399 Suit Vs $7900 Suit. And you can check out the rest of the MoMA’s online course Fashion as Design in this YouTube playlist.

Tags: design   fashion   how to   MoMA   video

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before James Austin Johnson’s Trump got some airtime on Saturday Night Live; the impression, which went viral last year, is what the comedian is mos... More »

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We love Pongo. He is one of the most important members of our family, and his love and devotion never waver. — Read the rest

Most people have had dreams where they have the magical ability to hover, glide down the sidewalk, and soar into the upper atmosphere. This ad for Burberry does a great job of depicting dream flying. I wonder if such a capability could be possible in the far future? — Read the rest

Leave it to Archie McPhee to bring the world Hot Dog Candy Canes:

WIENER WIENER HOT DOG DINNER

Hot Dog Candy Canes will remind you of school lunches and backyard BBQs. Instead of cookies this year, maybe Santa would prefer a wiener?

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Using samples of chopped-down wood left behind by Viking explorers at their settlement in Newfoundland and known chemical markers of powerful solar storms in 993 AD, a group of scientists has determined the exact timing of the first-known visit of Europeans to North America: 1021 AD. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s 471 years before Columbus.

A team of scientists looked at wood found at the L’Anse aux Meadows Viking site. In three cases the trees had been physically cut down, and moreover, they were clearly cut with metal tools — Vikings had metal implements at the time, but indigenous people did not. The wood was all from different trees (one was fir, and another juniper, for example). The key parts here are that the wood was all from trees that had been alive for many decades, and all had their waney edge intact as well.

The scientists extracted 127 samples from the wood, and 83 rings were examined. They used two methods to secure dates. The first was to compare the amount of carbon-14 in each ring with known atmospheric amounts from the time. This gives a rough date for the waney edge of the wood. They also then looked for an anomalous spike in carbon-14 in an inner ring, knowing this would have come from the 993 A.D. event, and then simply counted the rings outward from there to get the date of the waney edge.

In all three samples the waney edge was dated to the same year: 1021 A.D. This would be incredibly unlikely to occur at random.

Outstanding science. It’s incredible how much of a time machine these analysis tools are. There’s so much we don’t know about people who lived 1000 years ago, but it’s astounding that we know anything at all, particularly precise dates like this.

Update: From this Ars Technica piece, some more information on the precision of the dating:

Based on the development stages of certain cells in the waney layer, Dee, Kuitems, and their colleagues say that one of the trees was cut down in the spring, while another was cut down in the summer or fall. The third tree’s final season couldn’t be identified because the cells had been damaged by a conservation treatment, but the results suggest that the Norse cut down these trees within a few months of each other in 1021.

That lends additional support to the other evidence that the Norse only stayed in Newfoundland for a few years.

“One would imagine the dates would have been different if the occupation period of the site was very long,” Dee told Ars. “However, the fact all three of our samples produced the same date does not, of course, mean the site was only occupied for one year. It may indeed have been occupied longer. But I think it is true to say our results support a short occupation.”

Tags: archaeology   science   Vikings

The Library of Congress recently scanned and posted 30,000 maps drafted and published in the 19th century by The Sanborn Map Company. That being rather a lot of get though, Ben Welsh made a Twitter bot that posts one every few hours. — Read the rest

“I think I need a standing ovation/ Over 10 years in the game, I’m impatient.” So says Little Simz halfway through her new album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. Indeed, with a decade under her belt, Simz has made music that is consistently surprising and rewarding — she deserves applause. On her fourth full-length, Simz has made her most accomplished album to date. Introvert is heady and dense and restless — a masterwork, one might say, the definitive document of the musician also known as Simbiatu Abisola Abiola Ajikawo.

When Penelope Lowenstein received invitations to see Nora Cheng and Gigi Reece, her two best friends and Horsegirl bandmates, graduate from their respective high schools, she was faced with a dilemma: Both events were scheduled for the same day. One of the upsides to the pandemic, however, is that virtual options are increasingly available, so she did what any good friend would and figured out a way to celebrate them simultaneously. While Reece’s high school graduation unfolded on her phone, Lowenstein hopped in the car to catch Cheng’s ceremony in person. That’s when their song “Ballroom Dance Scene” came on the radio.

Auctioneers at Binoche et Giquello hope that it's a good year for vintage furnishings—and that someone out there has at least $1.2m Euros and a lot of space to stash a full-size Triceratops skeleton. The 66m-year-old fossil's skull alone is 2.62m (8' 7") long and 2m (6' 7") wide. — Read the rest

Back in July, Courtney Barnett began a four-month rollout for Things Take Time, Take Time — her first album in more than three years — with the release of its lead single and opening track, “Rae Street.” We were big fans. Today she’s back with another new song, which is also great.

I recently came across this 2002 Playbill interview with songwriter Jim Steinman, who passed away earlier this year. The conversation was mostly about his then-upcoming Broadway flop, Dance of the Vampires, which oddly included the Steinway-penned Bonnie Tyler hit, "Total Eclipse of the Heart." — Read the rest

Dictionary.com's word of the day is "Jeopardy" a "noun meaning 'peril or danger.' Here it is in a sentence: 'My job is in jeopardy because of my past comments.'"

"Jeopardy" is a noun meaning "peril or danger." Here it is in a sentence:

"My job is in jeopardy because of my past comments."

— Read the rest

Update, September 2nd, 12:03PM ET: The “actor” Brett Goldstein has addressed the conspiracy theory that Roy Kent is a CGI creation head-on by publishing a statement on Instagram. In it, Goldstein notes (quite accurately) that “there’s a fucking load of mad shit happening on the internet today, as usual” before reassuring viewers that he is “a completely real normal human man” who does “normal human basic things like rendering and buffering and transferring data.” Glad to have that sorted out. (The original story follows below.)

I’ll confess this upfront: I’ve yet to watch an episode of Ted Lasso. But I absolutely buy the...

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Filmmaker Morgan Neville (who did the Fred Rogers doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) has directed a documentary about Anthony Bourdain called Roadrunner that opens in theaters on July 16.

It’s not where you go. It’s what you leave behind… Chef, writer, adventurer, provocateur: Anthony Bourdain lived his life unabashedly. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at how an anonymous chef became a world-renowned cultural icon. From Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), this unflinching look at Bourdain reverberates with his presence, in his own voice and in the way he indelibly impacted the world around him.

This trailer makes me want to buy a movie ticket — and about 10 plane tickets. So looking forward to this. I need more unabashed living in my life.

Tags: Anthony Bourdain   food   Morgan Neville   movies   Roadrunner   trailers   travel   video

Jumbo the Elephant was one of the most famous animals in the world. Bought as a calf in Sudan by a European animal dealer in 1860, Jumbo found fame first at the London Zoo and later as the centerpiece of the Barnum & Bailey Circus in the US. Jumbo was so beloved in London that news of his sale to P.T. Barnum prompted 100,000 children to write to Queen Victoria, urging her to nix the deal. In the video above, Andrew McClellan recounts Jumbo’s too-short (and probably unhappy) life and the impact he had on society.

The word “jumbo” hadn’t been known or used in the English language before he came along and has since become the byword for anything humongous or supersized. So every time we use the word “jumbo jet” or “jumbotron”, we’re actually referring back to Jumbo the elephant.

(thx, ben)

Tags: Jumbo   language   video

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology recently added the ability to identify birds from hearing their birdsong to their Merlin Bird ID app — a “Shazam for bird songs” as Fast Company says. You just start recording with your phone and the app starts telling you the birds it’s hearing. Here’s how it works:

Automatic song ID has been a dream for decades, but analyzing sound has always been extremely difficult. The breakthrough came when researchers, including Merlin lead researcher Grant Van Horn, began treating the sounds as images and applying new and powerful image classification algorithms like the ones that power Merlin’s Photo ID feature.

“Each sound recording a user makes gets converted from a waveform to a spectrogram-a way to visualize the amplitude [volume], frequency [pitch], and duration of the sound,” Van Horn says. “So just like Merlin can identify a picture of a bird, it can now use this picture of a bird’s sound to make an ID,” Van Horn says.

This pioneering sound-identification technology is integrated into the existing Merlin Bird ID app, meaning Merlin now offers four ways to identify a bird: by a sound, by a photo, by answering five questions about a bird you saw, or by exploring a list of the birds expected where you are.

Margaret Renkl tried the app out and it seems to work pretty well:

I set my phone down on the table on my back deck, opened the Merlin app, chose “Sound ID” and hit the microphone button. Immediately a spectrogram of sound waves began to scroll across the screen. Every time a bird sings, the sound registers as a kind of picture of the song. By comparing that picture with others in its database, the app arrives at an ID.

I watched as Merlin rolled out the names of bird after bird — tufted titmouse, European starling, Carolina chickadee, northern cardinal, American crow, white-breasted nuthatch, eastern towhee, house wren, American goldfinch, blue jay, eastern bluebird, American robin, Carolina wren, house finch. It didn’t miss a single one.

What amazed me was not merely the accuracy of the ID but also the way the app untangled the layers of song, correctly identifying the birds that were singing in my yard, as well the birds that were singing next door and the birds that were singing across the street. If the same bird sang a second time, the app highlighted the name it had already listed. Watching those highlights play across the growing list of birds was almost like watching fingers fly across a piano keyboard.

See also this video review. You can download the app here. I’m going to give this a shot over my lunch hour today. I try to eat outside when the weather is nice and there are always birds out singing.

Tags: audio   birds   Margaret Renkl