1. Would Your Manners Cut It in the Victorian Era?
So, you love the Brontës and can’t resist a good 19th-century costume drama. But do you have the manners to survive in the Victorian era? Now you can find out, in a delightful video game from the McCord Museum in Montreal, which sends you on four different period-appropriate adventures and tests whether you dress and behave appropriately for your sex.
(Via: Flavorwire )
2. Are You Smarter Than an Eighth Grader (From 1895)?
3. The universe is big; the mind is bigger
We have a hundred billion neurons in the brain; infants create as many as 1.8 million neural connections per second; a mere sixty neurons are capable of making ten to the eighty-first possible connections, which is a number ten times as large as the number of particles in the observable universe;
(Via: Gene Veith )
4. Five Seconds Of Every Consecutive #1 Pop Single Since 1956
5. The World is Obsessed With Facebook
6. 50 Free, Classic eBooks For The Reading Device of Your Choice
7. Weird News of the Week: Regular old ink-jet printers could soon be making replacement human skin
With the simplest of modifications, a normal ink-jet printer becomes a high-tech 3-D printer, able to build replacement skin for those desperately in need of grafts. The latest breakthrough saw a plastic “ear” being printed out over just a half-hour . . . and it’s only a matter of time before we can do that with skin as well.
8. Wildest Secession Movements in The United States
9. Self-Doubting Monkeys Know What They Don’t Know
The number of traits chalked up as “distinctly human” seem to dwindle each year. And now, we can’t even say that we’re uniquely aware of the limits of our knowledge: It seems that some monkeys understand uncertainty too.
10. Top 10 Greatest Philosophers in History
11. How ‘OK’ took over the world
It crops up in our speech dozens of times every day, although it apparently means little. So how did the word “OK” conquer the world, asks Allan Metcalf.“OK” is one of the most frequently used and recognised words in the world.
It is also one of the oddest expressions ever invented. But this oddity may in large measure account for its popularity.
12. Image of the Week: The view straight down from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge
By George Steinmetz, for National Geographic (Via: 22 Words )
14. Ambidextrous people are easier to manipulate than right-handed people
About 90% of people use their right hand for almost all activities, while the remaining 10% is split between the left-handed and the ambidextrous, people who use either hand with equal comfort. But these “inconsistent-handers” pay a price for their ability to use either hand - a truly bizarre study has discovered that they’re much easier to emotionally manipulate than their right-handed counterparts.
15. 10 pieces of advice your boss won’t tell you
16. How to Make Anything Signify Anything
The photograph was an enduring reminder, then, of Friedman’s favorite axiom—and he was so fond of the phrase that some fifty years later he had it inscribed as the epitaph on his tomb in Arlington National Cemetery.2 It captures a formative moment in a life spent looking for more than meets the eye, and it remained Friedman’s most cherished example of how, using the art and science of codes, it was possible to make anything signify anything. This idea will no doubt strike us as quintessentially modern, if not postmodern, but Friedman took it straight from the great Renaissance scholar-statesman Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), along with both the hidden motto in the image and the method used to convey it. In other words, the graduation photo from Friedman’s earliest course in military cryptanalysis is at once a tribute to Bacon’s philosophy and a master class in the use of his biliteral cipher.
17. Infographic of the Week: IKEA Teaches You How to Build Stonehenge
18. How to Foul Yourself in Soccer
19. 8 Skills Our Parents Had That We Don’t
The stories have female protagonists, are full of dresses and dancing, have no battle scenes whatsoever, and are wildly popular with women. And yet when our girlfriends want to watch a date movie, we men will usually agree to watch Pride and Prejudice before we’ll submit to Ever After .Many people have tried to explain why. Without diminishing any of their explanations, I think there is an important reason today’s guys will watch Jane Austen movies, and even read the books, which may sound counterintuitive. I think we like Jane Austen because we like stories with men in them.
21. Do You Live in One of the World’s Most Livable Cities?
22. HistoricalLOL of the Week
23. 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Batman
24. How to Bluff Fifteen Hungry Lions Out of Their Food
25. 10 Astounding Book Carvings
26. Better Book Titles of the Week - Euripides: Hippolytus
27. How-To of the Week: Make Your Own Curiously Strong Homemade Altoids
28. The Weirdest Animal Expert Who Ever Lived
An eccentric from 18th century Yorkshire, animal-lover and inventor Jemmy Hirst was the greatest eccentric in English history. His bizarre exploits included riding bulls, teaching otters to fish, fixing sails to his carriage, and treating the king like an equal.
29. 10 Architecturally Wondrous Staircases
30. Beer to be classified as alcohol for first time in Russia
The beverage is technically classified as a foodstuff for now, an anomaly that has allowed producers to avoid a sweeping new crackdown on alcohol advertising and night-time sales.
But a new Kremlin-backed bill that passed its first reading in the lower house of the Russian parliament on Tuesday will abolish beer’s special status, dragging Russian alcohol regulation into the 21st century.
31. 10 Scientists Who Experimented on Themselves
32. Why you’ll be sorry if you force a smile while you’re at work
Putting on a bright face at work could leave you feeling miserable.Workers who fake a smile to keep their customers and colleagues happy could be making themselves depressed.
A new study says that fake smiling on the job actually worsens a person’s mood and could even cut work productivity.
33. Sixty-Six Clouds: Visualizing Word Frequency in the Bible
(Via: Challies.com )
