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Someone Wrote a Poem About The Sims's Amazing Software Updates
“Sing to me of the birthday body switching…” (The Sims / EA)In The Sims, the best-selling PC game of all time, you play people’s lives. At least initially, there’s not much of a plot. Instead, there...
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1,813 People Tried to Bring Firearms Through TSA Checkpoints in 2013
Transportation Security AdministrationTrying to bring a gun onto a plane seems crazy. And yet, it happens with startling frequency, about five times a day according to new stats on the Transportation...
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Hillary Clinton Hasn't Driven a Car Since 1996
At a speech she delivered to the National Auto Dealers Association Convention in New Orleans this morning, Hillary Clinton made a confession that was slightly ironic, given the setting: She no longer...
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2 Spiffy—and Privately Owned—New Cameras Were Installed on the International...
A still from the live video of today’s spacewalk, captured from the helmet of cosmonaut Oleg Kotov (NASA)Two cameras have been installed on the International Space Station (ISS), according to NASA...
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Our Fastest Cameras Are Now 10 Billion Trillion Times Faster Than the First...
Lincoln (Library of Congress)Photographs from different eras are deceptively similar. A photograph from 1860 and one taken on our smartphones are both called the same thing, after all. And yet, the...
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January 27, 1967: NASA Loses the 3 Astronauts of Apollo 1
On January 27, 1967, the three astronauts who had been selected for the first of NASA's Apollo missions entered a grounded space capsule in Cape Canaveral, Florida. They were preparing for a flight on...
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Apple: Still a Cash Factory, Even If It Sells Fewer iPhones Than Expected
Apple's CEO, Tim Cook made iPhones available with arms outstretched on China's massive China Mobile network on January 17 in Beijing. (Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters)Apple's earnings are out. For a company...
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5 Intriguing Things: Tuesday, 1/28
Editor's Note: We've talked about how we're building an island community in the stream of the Internet, right? OK, well, we are. Welcome. Try the coconuts, you can live on them. And though I mostly get...
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'This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender'
Pete Seeger with his banjo in 2004 (AP/Rebecca J. Rosen)When I think of Pete Seeger, who passed away early this morning at the age of 94, in my mind he is never empty-handed. Always, always, always, he...
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The Illusion That Makes It Sound Like a Pitch Is Constantly Rising
Like this, but for sound (ijzerman / Flickr)I just found Meara O’Reily’s tremendous and long-running Tumblr of audio illusions. At the top is one of my favorite aural phenomena: The shepherd scale. You...
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Talking About the Weather: The Next Level
ReutersTalking about the weather used to be a euphemism for not talking about anything at all. But lately, that once-innocent diversion has become mottled with darkness. No matter how many times...
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The Challenger Disaster, Recorded as a Home Video
On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bound beyond Earth. Just after a minute later, it disintegrated in the sky, splitting in two and sending...
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Why ROYGBIV Is Arbitrary
Isaac Newton was the first to demonstrate through his famous prism experiments that color is intrinsic to light. As part of those experiments, he also divvied up the spectrum in his own idiosyncratic...
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5 Intriguing Things: Wednesday, 1/29
1. If you, like me, have heard of "designer drugs" but don't really understand what that means, read this. To understand exactly how access to designer drugs has changed—to see exactly how easy it is...
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Have Presidential Speeches Gotten More 'Tweetable'?
The State of Our Union in One Photo ... pic.twitter.com/yLtPBI8gz3 — Richard Florida (@Richard_Florida) January 29, 2014 The White House regularly tweets sentences from key (and also from not-so-key)...
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The Novelist Who Reconstructs Car Crashes
Miika Niemelä / FlickrEllis Barstow, the protagonist in Nick Arvin's most recent novel, is a reconstructionist—an engineer who uses forensic analysis and simulation to piece together, in minute detail,...
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Earth Resumes Surveillance of Mercury
Xiao Zhao crater (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)Mars gets all the attention. Mars Mars Mars Mars. Then there's Jupiter with its storms and...
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The Book You Read Feel
It's so easy to romanticize books. The things are, as Stephen King once put it, "a uniquely portable magic." Such is their power that, according to Jane Smiley, “many people, myself among them, feel...
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Snowpocalypse in Atlanta and The Walking Dead
Maura Neill was stranded for eight hours in the gridlocked, apocalyptic aftermath of a modest snowstorm that crippled Atlanta this week. “It was like a scene from The Walking Dead,” she told USA Today,...
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How to Pack a Telescope (for a Trip to Space)
In October of 2018, the James Webb telescope will launch into space, where it will travel beyond the moon to peer, as NASA puts it, into "the beginning of time." The Webb, all in all, is roughly the...
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