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Do We Judge Music More on Sight Than on Sound?
Yulianna Avdeeva of Russia, first prize winner, performs during the 2010 Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. (Reuters)Spend any time performing classical music and you are told that appearance matters....
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Video Didn't Kill the Radio Star, but the Debit Card Is Killing the Check
SNL FinancialA little more than a decade ago, American businesses issued more than 70 million checks a day. In the first quarter of 2013, daily commercial check volume was down -- way down, about...
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Interactive Map of the California Wildfire
Mapping firm Esri has today released an interactive map of the California Rim Fire, which is now in its 12th day. In the map above, you can explore the fire's geography -- its invasion of Yosemite...
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How Scholars Hack the World of Academic Publishing Now
The National Library of Brazil (Eduardo Coutinho/Flickr)If you want to understand the modern academy, it wouldn’t hurt to start at “impact factor.” Every year, the company Thomson Reuters assigns every...
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The Ruthless Global Battle for Your Back-to-School Shopping Dollars
In a world cell phones and iPads, there's one back-to-school product both grandparents and children share: lined paper. Whether it's three-hole punched for a binder, perfect-bound into a...
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The Rad New Words Added to the Dictionary in the '90s: Where Are They Now?
Poking fun at new words added to various dictionaries is a time-honored journalistic tradition, nearly as well-loved as writing about nomenclature after the Social Security Administration's annual...
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The World's Best Website About Pencils
Alexis C. MadrigalIt started eight years ago without any fanfare, just a simple little blog post appropriately titled "First post." And that seems appropriate for a blog that is singularly,...
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The Batman of Central Park
Batman finds his bat. (Megan Garber)At the base of a craggy hill in the middle of Central Park, under one of those rocky overpasses you're not supposed to pass over after dark, a waterfall settles into...
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You Can Now Post GIFs on Facebook
GiphyListen: Facebook is no one’s favorite social network. It’s excellent at nothing in particular, mediocre at mostly everything, and maybe surveilled by the government. But yesterday, you could not...
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The Fastest-Spinning Object Ever Made
Wheeee! The spinning system, up close and personal (Nature Communications)We know how very large objects move -- and we have theories about how very tiny particles move. But classical physics and...
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Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments
Ian BogostLast year, while cleaning out the basement of my childhood home, I discovered a plastic storage bin marked "Calcusoft." Inside were piles of notebooks filled with sketches, storyboards, and...
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Every Tech Commercial Ever Made, in 60 Seconds
Have we reached peak tech commercial? Yeah, probably not. But we have reached a saturation point with our abundant ads for smartphones and wearable tech and web services -- to the extent that it's...
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The 17 Designs That Bell Almost Used for the Layout of Telephone Buttons
If you look at the layout of the number buttons on a phone -- smart, cell, landline, what have you -- the number buttons will feature, almost inevitably, a uniform layout. Ten digits, laid out on a...
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Remember When Nokia Also Made Paper, Galoshes, and Gas Masks?
Reuters/Dado RuvicNokia began as a paper company. It was 1865, and the mining engineer Fredrik Idestam established a wood pulp mill next to the Tammerkoski Rapids in the southwest of Finland. A few...
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If This Toaster Could Talk
drougge/FlickrThe cultural conversation about the Internet of things has tended toward a highly functionalist, utilitarian set of ideas: Connected objects can make smart homes a reality, where toasters...
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When Dumb Phones Were Cool: A Visual History
Remember when Nokia was cool? No, seriously: Remember when Nokia was legitimately, undeniably cool? When its products were status symbols? There was a time. It was a simpler time, a gentler time. A...
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Could the Yosemite Rim Fire Be Ecologically Beneficial?
The incineration in Yosemite on August 22 (NASA Earth Observatory)For nearly two weeks, the nation has been transfixed by wildfire spreading through Yosemite National Park, threatening to pollute San...
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Your Heartbeat: The Ultimate in Password Protection?
NymiNearly all of computer security boils down to one question: How can a device know that you are you? Passwords are the most basic tactic for confirming your identity. If you can come up with your...
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Attention as Performance, or, Here's a Photo of John McCain Playing Poker...
Here is a caption that is now part of the photographic archives of The Washington Post: Senator John McCain plays poker on his IPhone during a U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing where...
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How So Many People Got Seamus Heaney's Last Words Wrong
Shutterstock/Igor StevanovicBefore his death, the poet Seamus Heaney sent a text message to his wife. It said, in Latin, “Don’t be afraid.” Heaney’s son, Michael, disclosed those words at his father’s...
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