This reddit thread asks "What can a person learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for life?"
The top-voted answer: "Use your hand span — thumb to pinky — as a built-in measuring tool. Once you measure it you will never forget it."
Even better: If you happen on a person who's unconscious, lift their legs in the air as you call for help, and keep them elevated until help arrives or the person comes to.
This shunts about a third of their circulating blood volume back to the heart and may prevent imminent cardiac arrest.
No, it's not the artist's doppelgänger's work on the Red Planet but rather, according to scientists, it's more likely that what we're seeing is actually one rock that broke apart this way due to wind erosion or being exposed to flowing water on ancient Mars.
Notice how your printer's power cable can be detached from the printer.
Notice that you can remove the power cable from your computer — be it a laptop or a desktop or a tower.
Why shouldn't this same modular principle be applied across the board to everything electrical?
Why should I have to fuss and fool around with keeping the cord out of my way when I clean my microwave or toaster oven?
For that matter, coffee bean grinders and kitchen mixers etc.
Why should I have to reach behind all the stuff on my kitchen counter to unplug these appliances when it would be so much easier to detach their power cables?
Wrote Kottke last year: "I added a new feature to the site: It's a list of websites and people that I follow — 'kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators.'"
How is it that only last night, while thawing out a slice of wonderful super-dense Danish bread, did the penny drop such that I realized that I've been taking an unnecessary extra step all these years when using microwave ovens to thaw frozen things that require me to guesstimate how long I need to nuke them.
Simple hack short: Instead of hitting the STOP button, open the microwave's door — this stops the machine and opens the door with one gesture rather than two.
Doh!
Lagniappe: it's much easier to locate the large OPEN button — which is also outlined by its placement at the bottom of the front control panel — in the dark than have to guess at the whereabouts of the often flush and embedded small STOP button.
Two loaves of sliced Rugbrod Danish Grain Bread (top) cost $25.49.
Everyone who's read Philip K. Dick's great 1981 novel"VALIS" knows that the title is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System.
Just kidding.
Nobody remembers that.
Likewise, the few who've read Sam Abughali's"VANTA," published last month (on April 13, for those who insist on more precision), will recall that it stands for Virtual Adaptive Neural Transfer Array.
Since forever I've been reading seemingly authoritative papers and articles from the Cochrane Reviews et al lauding "Evidence-Based Medicine" as the gold standard for evaluating treatments/drugs/testing etc.
There's only one problem with these: they're often authored by people who've never gotten their hands dirty, as it were, doing basic science — whether it be laboratory-based or clinical — that's reported in the scientific literature.
These grand panjandrums haven't a clue how shot through with arbitrary choices and decisions are the final data reported by the scientists writing the articles.
I know this for a fact because I was one of those scientists for many years, publishing dozens of papers in the premier journals of anesthesiology over decades.
The "sausage," as it were — the raw data which form the basis of all such papers — gets cleaned up by necessity, because it's a hot mess in its initial state as individual data points.
But in the end the data reported are not objective but, rather, subjective, choices: there's far too much noise to generate a signal without processing.
From the website: "36 mechanical keyboards and switches, curated and sound-mapped. From IBM Model M (1985) to Topre to thocky modern customs. Click any card, type on your real keyboard, hear it as if it were on your desk."
Watching "The Code" last night, I was struck by the barren magnificence of the Australian terrain in which most of the 2014 six-part espionage thriller (Season 1; six-part Season 2 aired in 2016) is set.
As I thought about it, the superb six-part 2016 political thriller "Secret City" came to mind: it too was set in Australia.
Though not a spy thriller, "The Dry" — an excellent 2020 mystery thriller also set in Australia — takes us out back as does its equally gripping 2024 sequel, "Force of Nature: The Dry 2."
Then there's Taron Egerton's unforgettable crazed character in pursuit of the great Charlize Theron's solo hiker in the Outback in "Apex," just released on Netflix.
Note: "The Code" Season 1 is available on Prime Video; Season 2 is on YouTube
Master of fright, John Carpenter directs this entertaining and darkly humorous 1988 horror film.
Roddy Piper plays Nada, a down-on-his-luck construction worker who stumbles upon a special pair of sunglasses that reveal an awesome global secret — the ruling elite of the world are actually aliens in disguise, their aim being to keep humans in a state of mindless consumerism.
Wearing the glasses, Nada is able to see the secret messages behind all advertising, and he is capable of discerning which normal-looking people are in fact ugly aliens in charge of the campaign to keep humans subdued.
Now, the battle is on to free the human race from this secret, subliminal tyranny!
Good fun filled with genuine chills and scares and a bitingly satirical assault on our consumer culture, "They Live" is one of Carpenter's finest achievements.
Here are the Woz's defining characteristics of a hacker, from his July 11, 2004 keynote address at the Fifth HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) gathering in New York City:
• A sense of humor
• The ability to derive pleasure from jokes and the unexpected
• A tendency to strive for internal rather than external rewards
This just goes to show that being a hacker need not require great computer skills: in fact, you don't need any!
Scottish creator Ewan Cunningham'sPrimal Space started as a hobby in 2018 and has grown into one of YouTube's most compelling sci-edu channels.
A meticulously animated archive of engineering, science, and history stories.
Videos mostly come in under 10 minutes and pack in a density of fascinating, well-structured storytelling that makes it very easy to fall down a rabbit hole.
I'm not a Scotch whisky drinker: I've had perhaps 10 such drinks in my entire life.
Nevertheless, the subject has always interested me, and so when I happened on "Scotch: A Golden Dream" on Apple TV, I watched it.
Fascinating.
The documentary ambles along interviewing master distillers, "noses," writers, and workers in various areas of Scotch production, along with Scottish farmers who grow the barley, wheat, and rye that form the basis of Scotch.
Here are the most useful and interesting — sometimes surprising — things I learned from the film:
• Most experts prefer younger whisky — 6-10 years old, perhaps up to 18 — to much older vintages. They find the sweetness of the young oak barrels preferable to the dominating power of older wood.
• Nosing whisky in a glass will tell you far more about it than tasting it.
• If you're nosing a flight or series of Scotch whiskies, you will find that without added water, the nose and sense of smell become slightly anesthetized by the 40% alcohol in bottled Scotch.
• In Scotland water is always added to single malt whisky: it dilutes the alcohol, reducing the burn and allowing other properties to reveal themselves.
• On a molecular level, aroma molecules share more chemical likenesses with alcohol than they do with water. As such, they tend to bind with alcohol. Adding water frees up more of the aroma molecules to evaporate into the taster's nose. Appreciation of flavors happens at least as much in the nose as on the tongue.
• Two teaspoons of water in 1.5 oz. of Scotch are the sweet spot for most.
• Older Scotch is rarer because most of it is bottled young. Then more is lost by evaporation, the so-called "angels' share." Thus, you're paying more for its scarcity.
• Older Scotch, aged 20/30/40 or more years, may have taken up too much flavor from the aging barrels; thus it might be dry, bitter, or woody as a result of being overaged.
FunFact: the director of "Scotch: The Golden Dream" is... wait for it... Andrew Peat.
[Armor of Henry II, King of France (reigned 1547-1559)]
From Colossal: "In the age of the internet, we're fortunate to have virtual access to museum collections around the world, thanks to objects in the public domain and programs like the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access Initiative. Thanks to the Met's continued emphasis on imaging, we can now experience every detail in 3-D renderings of over 140 significant objects in its holdings."
Robert L. Wolke, the Washington Post's longtime "Food 101" columnist, addressed this topic.
Q. I've been told you should always stir with a spoon's rounded side down, rather than holding the spoon vertically. Is this true? If so, why?
A. If the spoon is large and held vertically, vigorous stirring might slop some liquid over the rim and out of the pot. But if the spoon is held horizontally with the curve down, it will sail smoothly through the liquid, creating a whirlpool effect that enhances efficient mixing.
For the longest time I dutifully watched multiple-part series streaming on Apple TV/Prime Video/Netflix etc.
When I first encountered the term "binge-watching" it was in reference to peeps locking themselves in for a weekend to watch whole seasons of old favorites.
I noticed that each week's new multiple-part series episode required that I watch "Last week on XYZ" to remind myself exactly where it had left off.
But that got annoying over time — I wanted to get right to the new episode.
Besides which, as I'm getting older my memory's not nearly as good as it used to be: I've noticed myself more and more often watching a movie and then realizing part way through that I watched it years previously, though I can't go beyond that fact: I don't remember what happened in the movie, so it's like watching it for the first time in terms of enjoying it.
Likewise, a week's hiatus from a multi-episode series sometimes renders the previous episode a vague scrim.
I started waiting until a series had broadcast its final episode and only then started watching it from the beginning on a daily basis, making it more like a multi-part movie.
The more I did that, the more I liked it.
Now I wouldn't watch the old one-episode/week way.
I learned to look up how many episodes there would be in total, then I'd work backward from the final episode's air date, allowing for two episodes at a time.
Wikipedia is the quickest way to get this information, BTW.
So, for example, when I read earlier this year that "For All Mankind" Season 5 was all set to premiere on March 27 on Apple TV, I calculated forward and noted that Episode 10/10 would air Friday, May 29, 2026.
Working backward at two episodes/day, that meant that my binge-watching should begin next Monday, May 25, with episodes 1&2, to finish with 9&10 on Friday the 29th.
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