1. The American Autobahn of 1925 would’ve run next door to the White House
In 1925, several American highway associations drafted up designs for a six-lane highway running from NYC to Washington DC. This doesn’t sound controversial, but they also decided to plop down the road adjacent to the White House and Capitol.This proposed motorway (dubbed the “Lee Highway”) was part of a greater plan to unite the nation with a massive Autobahn-like road system from sea to shining sea. The thing is, the designers thought it was a fine idea to to toss the highway smack dab through Washington DC along Pennsylvania Avenue. Automobiles and national security concerns of the 1920s weren’t what they are now, but it’s nonetheless a bizarre notion to put a roaring road within earshot of the Rose Garden.
3. Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code
Srivastava realized that the same logic could be applied to the lottery. The apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie. And this meant that the lottery system might actually be solvable, just like those mining samples. “At the time, I had no intention of cracking the tickets,” he says. He was just curious about the algorithm that produced the numbers. Walking back from the gas station with the chips and coffee he’d bought with his winnings, he turned the problem over in his mind. By the time he reached the office, he was confident that he knew how the software might work, how it could precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random. “It wasn’t that hard,” Srivastava says. “I do the same kind of math all day long.”That afternoon, he went back to work. The thrill of winning had worn off; he forgot about his lunchtime adventure. But then, as he walked by the gas station later that evening, something strange happened. “I swear I’m not the kind of guy who hears voices,” Srivastava says. “But that night, as I passed the station, I heard a little voice coming from the back of my head. I’ll never forget what it said: ‘If you do it that way, if you use that algorithm, there will be a flaw. The game will be flawed. You will be able to crack the ticket. You will be able to plunder the lottery.’”
4. 2011 Christianity Today Book Award
5. Sniffer mice have a nose for explosives
One day, there may be more than X-ray machines and full-body scanners awaiting you at the airport. Listen out for the snuffling of sniffer mice as you pass through security.The critters will not be angling for a snack, though. They are part of a bomb-detecting unit created by Israeli start-up company BioExplorers, based in Herzeliya, which claims that trained mice can be better than full-body scanners and intrusive pat-downs at telling a bona fide passenger from a terrorist carrying explosives.
7. Weird News of the Week: Robbery crew steals, snorts cremated ashes
Police said they will search Thursday for what is left of the cremated remains of a man and two dogs that robbers stole from a Florida house and then snorted after mistakenly thinking it was cocaine.
8. Do you know how much an average house sold for in the year you were born? What about the price of a pound of steak? Use this interactive graphic to discover how much inflation has effected prices since your birth year.
9. Dog takes bullets to save owner
Sure, your dog keeps the letter wielding postman from attacking, but would he take a bullet on your behalf?Dog owner Osmar Persisco of Garibaldi, Brazil, knows the answer is “yes” after his pet Max leapt to defend him from armed robbers, taking three bullets along the way.
10. 59 Things You Didn’t Know About Virginia Woolf
11. The Best Time to Buy Airplane Ticket: 3 P.M. Tuesday
So a ticket can be $199 certain days and $499 other days even months ahead of a flight. “There’s a lot of method behind the madness, a lot of rationality behind the moves for airlines,” said Ike Anand, Expedia’s director of airline strategy. “But for consumers, it does seem crazy.”Rick Seaney, chief executive of FareCompare.com, studied three years worth of airline prices and concluded that 3 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday was the best time to buy. “That’s when the maximum number of cheapest seats are in the marketplace,” he said.
A daily check of fares in 10 different markets for the past two weeks showed that the average of the lowest prices offered in those markets was often mid-week, while weekends were higher priced. In the days studied, there were no “mistake fares” at ridiculously low prices that could skew results.
12. Image of the Week: The Beowulf Sock
waet! Listen! Thus begins the immortal tale of the hero Beowulf, the bard summoning the attention of his audience. And so begin these socks, which give the text of the first page of the surviving manuscript, a copy dating to around 1000 CE. The writing flows from one sock to the other, so that you may read it uninterrupted.
13. The 10 Most Scenic Waterfalls of the World
14. Infants Ascribe Social Dominance to Larger Individuals
Psychologists at Harvard University have found that infants less than one year old understand social dominance and use relative size to predict who will prevail when two individuals’ goals conflict. The finding is presented this week in the journal Science.
15. Infographic of the Week: The Real Reason No One Reads Privacy Policies
16. Why Bacon Is A Gateway To Meat For Vegetarians
We asked some scientists who study how food tantalizes the brain, and sociologists who’ve looked closely at vegetarianism, about bacon’s seductive powers.Our story was familiar to Johan Lundstrom. He’s a scientist who runs a lab at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. He studies how the brain processes sensory information, like smell, for a living. He also told us he had an ex-girlfriend who became an ex-vegetarian once she tasted bacon.
Because bacon is one- to two-thirds fat and also has lots of protein, it speaks to our evolutionary quest for calories, Lundstrom says. And since 90 percent of what we taste is really odor, bacon’s aggressive smell delivers a powerful hit to our sense of how good it will taste.
17. 10 Great Philanthropists Who Are Kids
18. How did the seahorse get its shape?
19. 50 Things You Didn’t Know About Jackson Pollock
20. Art Museums Make Super Bowl Bet
All around America this week, offices are transforming into bookie joints in anticipation of the upcoming Super Bowl - even the U.S. Senate is getting into it. Curators, it turns out, aren’t immune either: The Milwaukee Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art are putting some paintings on the line in a Super Bowl art-loan smackdown.The bet, instigated by the blog Modern Art Notes for the second year in a row, requires the losing museum to loan a painting to the winning museum. The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh has bet Renoir’s “Bathers with a Crab” on a Steelers victory; the Milwaukee Art Museum has wagered Caillebotte’s “Boating on the Yerres” on the Packers. (Milwaukee’s art museum is the nearest to Green Bay, which has no museum of its own.)
22. HistoricalLOL of the Week
Although it’s fallen off of the headlines lately, piracy continues to be a big problem, with an annual economic impact estimated at $10 billion. Fighting pirates after they’ve already attacked is only so effective. And trying to track them down and bring them to justice before a raid is next to impossible. The best solution is to just keep boats and pirates away from one another. But how? Applied mathematician James Hansen* has an idea. With the Naval Research Laboratory he’s put together a computer model of pirate behavior.
24. The 10 Greatest Child Geniuses in Literature
25. Forensic Breakthrough: Recovering Fingerprints on Fabrics Could Turn Clothes Into Silent Witnesses
orensic experts at the University of Abertay Dundee and the Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA) are leading the way in the research of new ground-breaking forensic techniques within the field of fingerprints.
26. Top 10 Adventurers Who Never Returned Home
27. Better Book Titles of the Week - Antigone
28. How-To of the Week: Make Your Own Iron Age Viking Shoes
29. Women over 40 have more Facebook friends than their children
The research, based on an analysis of 2,000 Facebook users found that mothers were able to capitalise on their wide range of contacts, including friends of their children and even their parents, to collect thousands of friends.Tammi Williams, who conducted the study, said: “One reason is because, when you get to 45 or 50 you have not only your friends, but your children’s friends, acquaintances from school and others.
“Children and teenagers tend to stick to their own age group.”
30. 14 Great Filmmakers Who Never Won “Best Director”
31. Where does modern art end and plagiarism begin?
Nobody has said it better than the art historian Rainer Crone, who worked closely with Warhol from 1968 onward, and recently wrote that Warhol’s unique contribution to contemporary art was “the rejection of authorship as an essential feature of authenticity and originality.” I guess that means that the death of originality is a new form of originality.Such circular reasoning explains why Jeff Koons, the creator of sculptures based on the image of a balloon dog, recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to a company selling bookends that represent a balloon dog and to the manufacturer of said dogs. It is doubtful Koons could win this one in court. We have all watched at a street fair as somebody twists long balloons into dogs or other animals. So what can Koons say is really his? The man has made his reputation as an appropriator—as an artist who borrows images and styles and ideas more or less wholesale from other more or less creative spirits. He himself has been sued for copyright violation four times, which may help to explain his eagerness to establish some legal precedent for appropriation as a form of creation. It is easy to make fun of Koons. But to the collectors, dealers, curators, critics, and historians who have invested time and in many cases considerable sums of money in his work and that of Warhol and other appropriators, the originality of the death of originality cannot be taken lightly. I think there is some concern that the artists will not finally escape what Sir Joshua Reynolds, in speaking about artists’ appropriations from other artists to the students at the Royal Academy in 1774, referred to as “the servility of plagiarism.”
32. 14 Engineering Wonders of The Modern World
33. Tie-Tying Machine
