Hurdy-gurdy for beginners
Caroline Phillips cranks out tunes on a seldom-heard folk instrument: the hurdy-gurdy, a.k.a. the wheel fiddle. A searching, Basque melody follows her fun lesson on its unique anatomy and 1,000-year history. [Via TED]
Category Archives: Culture
Choose Your Own Adventure: The Case Of The Patent Application
1) You are an employee of the United States Patent Office. Early one sunny morning you are asked to examine a patent claim from IBM. Its first claim reads: A method for selecting a logical branch in a storyline among a plurality of available storyline branches on a computing device, based on voters’ votes, comprising: […]
Things We Say Wrong [Video]
So, are there any grammar nazis out there who want to chime in about this video? :) [Via Reddit]
The price of love: two friends
Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and marks any heart not tough enough or strong enough to take a lot of pain. But what the Everly Brothers, Nazareth, Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons and Roy Orbison all omitted to mention is that love costs you two close friends. That’s the conclusion of research at Oxford University […]
Fake your online death and move to New Zealand
Okay, this is a weird one. Frank Ahearn, an expert in “disappearing” – the art of creating false paper trails and deleting your identity so that you cannot be traced – has written a book and conducted an interview with KiwiFM, a radio station based in New Zealand, on how, exactly, to “fake your death,” […]
Holy Crap that’s Awesome: Geek & Gamer Girls Music Video
Yeah, this is another one of those Caligornia Girls parodies… but this one is really, really cool. Apart from starring the four sexy geekettes from Team Unicorn, the video also features a rapping Seth Green, Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff, and legendary comic book writer Stan Lee. Check it out:
The Routine [PIC]
[Via MUO]
Journalist publishes the 12,000th draft of history
A tech writer has put together a five-year history of the Iraq war. But James Bridle’s publication does not cover the military conflict: instead it’s a complete record of the Wikipedia page on the topic. The idea of the project, which Bridle describes as a “historiography”, is to highlight the effects caused by the fact […]
Happy 25th Birthday Super Mario Bros!
25 years ago, on September 13, 1985, the original Super Mario Bros. game was released in Japan. Happy Birthday Mario! To celebrate the occasion, here’s a short video outlining some of the game’s most notable tricks and and easter eggs. Enjoy! Edit: Had to change the video because the other one got pulled. Sorry folks! […]
QUESTION: Are Atheists Really Smarter?
A dating website has implied that atheists are more educated or intelligent than religious people. But applying the rationality that is supposed to accompany atheist thought highlights some major caveats. It’s not often you can release a set of statistics comparing the reading levels of people of different religions and it be among the least […]