https://youtu.be/ZCKwAI-c1jU For this fellow, finding a six-pound mushroom is equivalent to witnessing a double rainbow. It looks like a king boletus.
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Look how happy the "Mushroom King" is to find a gargantuan mushroom
Spanish designer Alberto Lucas López created this gorgeous infographic that shows the proportion of native speakers of each major language. (more…)
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Beautiful chart displays native speakers of world’s languages
A cannabis products producer bought the town of Nipton, California (pop. 20) for $5 million, with the intention of turning into a weed “destination.” From BBC : American Green wants to invest up to $2.5m (£1.9m) in revitalising the town to make it more tourist-friendly as well as eco-friendly. “We thought that showing that there was a viable means of having a cannabis-friendly municipality and further making it energy independent could be a way of really inspiring folks to say, ‘Why can’t we do that here?'” project manager Stephen Shearin told Bloomberg. “The gold rush built this city,” he adds. “The green rush can keep it moving the way people envisioned it years ago.” The Gateway to the Mojave National Preserve. . 30 April 2017 Nipton, CA A post shared by Prince Travels (@prince_travels) on May 2, 2017 at 9:00am PDT Nipton California. pic.twitter.com/l8PBEbFk35 — Jeff Lloyd (@lloydjbl) April 16, 2016
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Marijuana company buys entire town in California to make it weed friendly
In 1815 an American ship ran aground in northwestern Africa, and its crew were enslaved by merciless nomads. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the desperate efforts of Captain James Riley to find a way to cross the Sahara and beg for help from Western officials in Morocco. We’ll also wade through more molasses and puzzle over a prospective guitar thief. Show notes Please support us on Patreon!
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Twelve Americans were enslaved in Africa after an 1815 shipwreck
Here’s something you don’t see every day: a typewriter that hammers out musical notations. Made for use with music staff paper, the Keaton Music Typewriter was first patented in 1936 by San Francisco’s Robert H. Keaton for use by composers, arrangers, teachers and students. The original model had just 13 keys but Keaton’s second patent for this “music typing machine” was granted in 1953 and included 33 keys. If you’ve got a spare $12K, you can pick one of these little beauties up from Etsy shop WorkingTypewriters (back in the 1950s they sold for $225). The seller writes: Estimates are that there are less than 20 machines on there, maybe even as few as 6… The Keaton Music typewriters were produced in two batches, this one stemming from 1953 and has the more elaborate keyboard. They were made with the idea that musicians would be able to quickly and precisely write out their compositions. A typewriter for music. It didn’t work as well, typing music is more laborious than typing words and it never really caught on. Watch the video to get a feel for how challenging this “typewriter for music” is to operate.
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This rare 1950s typewriter hammers out musical notations, not letters and numbers
In 2005 a young man from England created a website called The Million Dollar Homepage and sold advertising space on it. The page is a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid (1,000,000 pixels) and he sold the pixels for $1 each. The page has 2,816 links in it. A recent analysis of all the links reveal that only 1,780 are still reachable. From Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab : Over the decade or so since the Million Dollar Homepage sold its last pixel, link rot has ravaged the site’s embedded links. Of the 2,816 links that embedded on the page (accounting for a total of 999,400 pixels), 547 are entirely unreachable at this time. A further 489 redirect to a different domain or to a domain resale portal, leaving 1,780 reachable links. Most of the domains to which these links correspond are for sale or devoid of content. The 547 unreachable links are attached to graphical elements that collectively take up 342,000 pixels (face value: $342,000). Redirects account for a further 145,000 pixels (face value: $145,000). While it would take a good deal of manual work to assess the reachable pages for content value, the majority do not seem to reflect their original purpose. Though the Million Dollar Homepage’s pixel canvas exists as a largely intact digital artifact, the vast web of sites which it publicizes has decayed greatly over the course of time. [ via Clive Thompson ]
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Link Rot: only half of the links on 2005’s Million Dollar Homepage are still reachable
The British Library has digitized 570 loose pages of notes written and drawn by Leonard da Vinci to compile a notebook which is called, The Codex Arundel . You can view the document online for free, although it’s written in Italian and uses his “characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left).” The Guardian suggests enjoying the work of the self-taught Renaissance man as it is, without translation: The digitised British Library manuscript is a fascinating artefact in itself, just to browse. You don’t need a translation to appreciate the beauty and wonder of Leonardo’s mind. This is a great work of art, in a precociously conceptual genre that has been emulated by modern artists such as Joseph Beuys and Cy Twombly. The Codex includes “diagrams, drawings and brief texts” which cover “a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes.” The British Library describes some of Da Vinci’s insights: His notebooks combine detailed observation with notes of experiments. Even if he did not actually undertake the experiments, he described what could be tried. Many of his insights foreshadowed scientific research by many centuries. For example: Leonardo repudiated perpetual motion, understood the principle of relative motion, and foreshadowed Newton’s Third Law by two centuries: “For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.” He rejected the notion that the Biblical flood was responsible for depositing fossils many miles from their origin and deduced the existence of very long spans of geological time. By dissecting humans and animals, Leonardo made many anatomical and some physiological discoveries. He investigated optics and perception with subtle experiments, explaining why the sky is blue, arguing that light has a finite velocity and travels in straight lines, and deducing the existence of a surface within the eye that receives light from a wide field of view. Leonardo formulated the law of the flow of currents: “All motion of water of uniform breadth and surface is stronger at one place than at another according as the water is shallower there than at the other.” ( Open Culture ) Previously: Students build working version of Leonardo da Vinci’s self-supporting bridge
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A big chunk of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks have been digitized and can be viewed online
Paris, France is making good on its promise to reopen long polluted waterways to bathers. Up to three hundred people at any time can use the lifeguard-protected pools, although the pools only have locker space for 80. Located in a part of Paris already popular as a place to stroll in fine weather, the new bathing spot is likely to prove a major hit in an already hotter-than-average summer. Early reports suggest that the water is indeed delightful, though a small residuum of green algae does make a post-bathe shower a good idea. How did Paris pull this off? The city’s been working on cleaning up the waters here for decades. Paris’s canals here were once unsurprisingly filthy, running as they do through a former industrial area once packed with cargo barges and polluted by sewage. Since the 1980s, however, regulations managing industrial run-off have tightened substantially, while Paris has invested heavily in wastewater treatment and in preventing sewage from being discharged into the canal during periods of high water. Two years ago, following a concerted clean-up, bacteria levels dropped below safe levels, and rogue bathers have been jumping in the water here for a while. Meanwhile, the Canal Saint Martin, which runs downstream from the basin down to the Seine, was entirely drained and cleaned in 2016, a process that sent a powerful visual message to Parisians that the area’s historic filth was being swept away. Via CityLab
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Parisian canals now open to swimmers
In addition to benefiting from excellent feng shui, the family harvests about 15 kilograms of honey each year from their bee housemates , who showed up on the day of a wedding. (more…)
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For twelve years, this family has let bees nest in their living room
An unnamed North American casino was hacked through an on-site fish tank connected to the Internet, reports CNN. “Someone used the fish tank to get into the network, and once they were in the fish tank, they scanned and found other vulnerabilities and moved laterally to other places in the network,” Justin Feir, director for cyber intelligence and analysis at Darktrace, told CNN Tech . Image: example of a smart fish tank (not the kind the casino had) by Duncan Hull .