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Sears, the department store, sold DIY homes via catalog for 32 years between 1908 and 1940 through a program called Sears Modern Homes. They offered 447 different housing styles which you can see here. The designs were not ‘remarkable’ in any way: Sears themselves admit that they were “not an innova…

They look like priceless brooches and are tremendously important to our planet. Emphases mine: Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth’s biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year, take in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon…

This is from a while ago but I didn’t get the memo. It’s a little crazy: It’s named after Reddit user /u/vaieriepieris, an ESL teacher from Texas, who made it for a map subreddit in 2013. There are more Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Communists inside the circle than outside it. It “pulls all of…

A study of DNA extracted from the leg bones of extinct moa birds in New Zealand found that the half-life of DNA is 521 years. So every 1,000 years, 75 per cent of the genetic information is lost. After 6.8 million years, every single base pair is gone. Bacterial RNA is much tougher and sequences ha…

I just ordered a set of “blackout” plates from the DMV here. They’re rather cool and look like this: I didn’t know that they were actually a solution to a problem. People would take existing, specialized plates for Dordt University and cover them up to look like the blackout plates. Clever! But le…

Reddit user u/Inzitarie made this lovely Cultural Map of the United States. It’s not perfect but it’s something. He based his version on this one by u/Aijol10 right below it…

Allysson Lucca is a Brazilian designer who took this original list (cached) of what the world would look like with a 1,000 people and shrank it to a hundred. The idea of reducing the world’s population to a community of only 100 people is very useful and important. It makes us easily understand the…

I’m put off by the word “gubernatorial” whenever I see it. Seems very silly, saccharine, like something a 5-year old mispronounced in 1953 that just stuck because it was so cute 🙄 Nope. “Because, if you go back to where this word came from, in the original Latin, it’s from the verb, gubernare and…

It belongs to Tom Bosworth. I thought “I cannot even run that fast” and decided to look at the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOYdS5QZasMÏ While it certainly does look like they’re running, there are some severe restrictions on their movement, of course, else it’d be an event called ‘Trottin…

I bought this print at a thrift store a decade ago because it looked ‘nice’ and warm and I loved the colors. It’s an innocent celebration at a glance and from a distance, and a total bacchanal when you examine its scenes up close. I never knew who painted it until now. It’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder…

I have a dying peace lily. I’m a bit attached to it and don’t know that I’ll be able to save it. Searching the internet for any hope led me to this post (cached) which made me feel slightly better about my inexperience. The first mistake is relying upon the plant’s visual cue that needs water: the l…

Koji Kondo is a “sound designer” who composed music for Super Mario Bros. He was inspired by these songs. Music Artist Song The Main “Overworld” Theme T-Square Sister Marian (3:08) When you go down the Warp Pipes Friendship Let’s not talk about it When you get a Star Piper Summe…

This is the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, an eponymous and subjective measurement of the pain caused by bees, wasps, and ants (and other things in the order hymenoptera.) It ranges from 0-4. In Level Zero, you don’t feel any pain whatsoever; the stinger doesn’t even penetrate your skin. The humble and f…

Vox on something I’ve always wondered: Why tennis pros reject balls before a serve (and what happens to the ones they do.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChzL17zV9hA More fluff ⇒ more drag ⇒ more time for your opponent to react. So they’re looking for a ball with less fluff for their first serve, a…

A group of stringrays is called a fever (my head: “So that’s where that album name came from!”) This is what they look like: /misc/f/fever-ray.mp4…

Here’s another list of 36 styles with real examples. (Cached: styles, elements one and two.)…

Dark Brown or Black: Nocturnal (helps with camouflage.) Orange: Dawn and Dusk. Yellow: Daytime. There are no Blue-Eyed Owls.…

In computing, stop words are words which are filtered out before or after processing of natural language data (text). Though “stop words” usually refers to the most common words in a language, there is no single universal list of stop words used by all natural language processing tools, and indeed…

The Scunthorpe problem (or the Clbuttic Mistake) is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Wikipedia Example…

Followed by the Chinese Army (2.3M), Walmart (2.1M), McDonald’s (1.9M), and the NHS (1.7M). The Indian Railways comes in eighth with 1.4M people.…

By the Audubon Society. Ravens are beefier, gauche, and less ‘refined’. They’re also relatively solitary. They have curvier beaks, wedge-like tails, and soar instead of flap. Here’s what a raven and a crow sound like.…

Corpsing is British theatrical slang for unintentionally laughing during a non-humorous performance or when a role in a humorous performance is intended to be played “straight”. In North American TV and film, this is considered a variation of breaking character or simply “breaking”. Wikipedia He…

One who makes douchebag statements, particularly sexist, racist or otherwise bigoted ones, then decides whether they were “just joking” or dead serious based on whether other people in the group approve or not. Urban Dictionary They’re always “just joking.” About pandemic response, about request…

Of course. Well, the transaction was in person and in cash (of course.) It was just a little bag of weed sold through an Arpanet account in Stanford’s artificial intelligence lab in 1972. It’s not clear who was in on the sale aside from the students, but despite the underhanded nature of the deal,…

Using a Bloopy Thing to print on all sorts of materials is called “Pad Printing” or tampography. Here’s a Big Bloopy Thing printing a very beautiful pattern onto a bowl (and here’s two of them going at the same time.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I2fMf0xtCQ You can use the same technique on all…

Turns out Miyazaki’s dad was an aeronautical engineer.…

🐶…

It helps minimize or eliminate popping sounds (“aspirated plosives”) like when you say ‘pop’ or ‘pepper’ or ‘pots’!…

Was looking for a portable iPhone microscope and came by this one on Amazon. Doubted the “50x-1000x magnification” claim and landed on this video by Oliver Kim (here’s his channel on YouTube) on how to make sense of that feature. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whvviay3fu4 The key idea here is to th…

Via AS as we were discussing Audemars Piguet’s “petite tapisserie”…

Optician Sans is a free optotype 1 based on the Sloan letters2. I had no idea this was a thing. There’s a lot to learn here about the eye charts I see once a year. The earliest chart appears to go all the way back to 1862 (!) Those little "C"s are called Landolt C. The one most optometris…