Month: September 2016

Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and completed in the 1860s, Central Park was constructed to feel like a natural landscape. The area features waterfalls, tree, ponds, and rocks arranged to look like they had always been there.

One of the most woodland-like areas is the Ramble, more than 30 acres of trees, paths, and gardens, designed to take visitors completely out of the hustle and bustle of the city and into a nature wonderland. Olmsted deemed the Ramble “a wild garden,” though it was a carefully made one—nearly all of the area, minus the bedrock foundation, was fabricated by the famous landscape architect.

When they were excavating the area, however, workmen discovered at least one naturally occurring element that Olmsted and Vaux decided to work into their plans: a narrow little cave, apparently carved out in part by humans. Some speculated that Native Americans had once used the cranny for shelter, though no evidence was found to back the theory.

To help it blend into the landscape they had meticulously planned, large rocks were arranged around the cave to make it look as if they had naturally settled there. They also arranged flat stones into a staircase leading down into the hidden room. The man-made lake was altered to allow adventurous boaters to row right into the cave.

As you might imagine, the Tom Sawyer-esque hideout was a big hit with children. It was also a hit with adults—particularly couples who liked to steal away for some private time in the secluded cave.

But the cave also seemed to attract more nefarious activity. In 1904, a man attempted suicide (not the first to take place in the Ramble) on the stone steps—though some believed it was actually attempted murder. Whatever happened, it wasn’t the only negative press for the cave.

In 1922, artist Alexander MacArthur was sentenced to three months in a workhouse for “behaving improperly” inside the cave, and in 1929, about 335 men were arrested in Central Park for “annoying women”—and the Ramble Cave was one of the preferred spots to do so.

Apparently fed up with the complaints, park authorities had the cave sealed off sometime in the 1920s. Though it can no longer be entered, intrepid explorers can still discover the old stone steps that lead down to the cave—they’re located on the east side of the Ramble Stone Arch (pictured above).

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Nike’s Marty McFly-inspired self-lacing sneakers finally have a release date. The futuristic sneakers will go on sale in a limited number of stores on November 28, according to Engadget.

The HyperAdapt 1.0, with what Nike calls “adaptive lacing,” was first teased as a prototype in a video with Michael J. Fox in 2015, and the final product was officially announced in March. However, we’re still waiting on information on how to make the appointment required to purchase a pair.

For now, users will still have to adjust the fit manually, but one day, the company hopes to create shoes that can sense exactly how snug you need the fit to be for different maneuvers.

Here’s how the HyperAdapt 1.0 works, according to a statement from Nike’s technical lead on the project, Tiffany Beers: “When you step in, your heel will hit a sensor and the system will automatically tighten. Then there are two buttons on the side to tighten and loosen. You can adjust it until it’s perfect.”

The shoes are made for athletes, but as Nike’s partnership with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research indicates, they could also be useful for people with diseases or disabilities that make it difficult to accomplish fine motor tasks like tying shoes.

[h/t Engadget]

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You no longer have to worry about perfecting the filter on your Instagram in one go. Now, you can save drafts of your photos before you post them. The photo-sharing app, which launched six years ago this October, just debuted a drafts feature, and you don’t need to update the app to activate it.

All you have to do is hit the back button once you’ve started editing your photo (say, a picture of your cat like the one below), and the app will prompt you to save a draft. The next time you go to post a photo, you’ll find your drafts just below the last photo in your library (say, a different photo of your cat) and above the rest of your library images. Like so:

For obsessive photo-editors who like to toggle back and forth between their filtered images and others in their library, it’s a blessing to be able to press pause on whatever contrast or lighting tweaks have already been made. And now, you could even save different versions of the same image with a bunch of different filters and look at them side-by-side, just to be sure that Valencia really is your favorite.

More detailed instructions on how to save your drafts are here.

[h/t Engadget]

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Despite significant technological advancements in recent years, no one seems focused on what should be a priority: making a car that can transform into a towering, vengeful robot.

Letvision, a company based in Turkey, is looking to change that. They’ve just demonstrated a functioning BMW automobile that can morph into a humanoid at the touch of a button.

Dubbed “Letrons,” the car-bot is obviously paying homage to the Transformers, Hasbro’s long-running toy and feature film franchise. Unlike those CGI and plastic counterparts, however, Letrons transforms very, very slowly and cannot walk or shoot weapons, though it will belch smoke to confuse your enemies. It’s also a non-passenger vehicle that can be driven only at modest speeds via radio control.

Still, it’s a start. Letvision designed the prototype with the hope of eventually making mass-market machines for collectors with significant disposable incomes. Expect Letrons to wind up at a comic convention near you in the near future.

[h/t /Film]

What would the Internet be without :), :P, and the ever-popular ¯\_(ツ)_/¯? If you’ve ever used a few keystrokes to express your mood, you have Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Research Professor Scott E. Fahlman to thank.

As you’ve likely experienced, it can be hard to tell when someone is being sarcastic in print, which was as true in 1982 as it was now. On September 19, 1982, Fahlman was part of a message board discussion about the working status of a set of elevators, which quickly turned silly. The jokes were flying so fast and furious that some participants couldn’t tell if the elevators were actually working or not, and so the discussion turned to how to denote jokes. One person suggested placing an asterisk after remarks meant to be funny. Someone else preferred using the percent sign, which is when another user tried to combine the two:

“How about using * for good jokes and % for bad jokes? We could even use *% for jokes that are so bad, they’re funny.”

That was a no-go. The response:

“No, no, no! Surely everyone will agree that ‘&’ is the funniest character on the keyboard. It looks funny (like a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter).”

Finally, Fahlman stepped in with the invention that would change the way we communicated online:

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

🙂

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

🙁

Using textual devices to convey emotion had been suggested throughout history, possibly as early as 1865. But none of them took off the way Fahlman’s suggestion did.

Of course, it’s easier to express yourself these days—emojis have taken the place of the text-based emoticons for most people. Fahlman is not a fan.

“It’s interesting to note that Microsoft and AOL now intercept these character strings and turn them into little pictures,” he told Business Insider in 2015. “Personally, I think this destroys the whimsical element of the original.”

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As one of the founding fathers of science fiction, Herbert George Wells certainly had a lot to say about the human race. From mankind’s fondness for war to our place in the universe, Wells certainly didn’t shy away from sharing his opinions. In honor of what would have been his 150th birthday, here are a few of H.G. Wells’s greatest hits.

1. ON WAR

“If we don’t end war, war will end us.”

—From Things to Come (1936)

John F. Kennedy’s speechwriters later adapted the phrase for his 1961 address to the United Nations: “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

2. ON GLOBALIZATION

“Our true nationality is mankind.”

—From The Outline of History (1920)

3. ON WRITING

“I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.”

—From Experiment in Autobiography (1934)

4. ON GOLF

“The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays at golf. It’s almost a law.”

—From Bealby: A Holiday (1915)

5. ON THE FUTURE

“We were making the future, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making.”

—From When The Sleeper Wakes (1899)

6. ON EDUCATION

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

—From The Outline of History (1920)

7. ON REALITY

“The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.”

—From The Discovery of the Future (1902)

8. ON JEALOUSY

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”

—From The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914)

9. ON HUMAN CHARACTER

“Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trustworthy in the dark.”

—From The Open Conspiracy: What Are We to Do With Our Lives? (1928)

10. ON CYNICISM

“Cynicism is humor in ill health.”

—From Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump (1915)

11. ON ART

“An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.”

—From The Temptation of Harringay (1895)

12. ON BICYCLES

“To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair; chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and for the life of you, you cannot.”

—From The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll (1896)

A more whimsical quote about bicycles is often attributed to Wells, but has never been proven: “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”

Fans of Keith Haring’s work can see his graffiti images of dancing figures, barking dogs, glowing infants, and flying saucers in museums and cities across America. But according to NPR, one of the late American artist’s lesser-known public works—a stairwell mural inside a former New York City convent—is now in danger.

Haring painted the mural inside the Grace House, a home for Catholic teenagers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, between 1983 and 1984. The artist was scouting locations for a film, and Grace House asked him to decorate the stairwell. By then, Haring was already famous, but he obliged and covered the walls with his signature radiant babies, dancers, and dogs. The entire project was completed so quickly that viewers can still see paint drips on the walls.

The lost Keith Haring mural in Manhattan (@stavziv – @newsweek) https://t.co/S1c4G8aNTY

— MediaREDEF (@MediaREDEF) September 16, 2016

Keith Haring died from AIDS-related complications in 1990—six or so years after painting the Grace House mural—at the age of 31. Today, it’s one of less than 30 worldwide public works created by Haring. Soon, this number might drop even lower: A local church, the Church of the Ascension, owns Grace House—and thanks to financial difficulties, its officials want to sell it.

Most of Grace House’s tenants have moved out, but two tenants named Robert Savina and Yana Sabeva have hired a local law non-profit to help them fight eviction. They want to stay in their homes—and they also worry about the mural’s future.

“My fear, and I think other people’s fear, is that if they sell the building that anybody could go in and tear the building down,” Savina told NPR. “There didn’t seem to be … any forethought in: How do we preserve the mural?”

For now, the work’s future is in limbo: The Church hasn’t sold Grace House yet, but tenants say that realtors are showing it to prospective buyers.

[h/t NPR]

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For every approaching asteroid that dominates headlines for a day or two, there are numerous asteroid flybys most citizens of Earth never hear about. Now, there’s an easy way to keep tabs on the notable space rocks that zoom past the planet without purchasing a high-powered telescope.

The Daily Minor Planet is a new daily online newsletter produced by the Minor Planet Center, located at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, with technical help from the Oracle Corporation. Its name is a combination of the newspaper where the Earth-defending Superman worked as Clark Kent and the historical name for asteroids (“minor planets”). The top—and only—story each day is whichever known asteroid happens to be passing within a few million miles of Earth. These events occur on a near-daily basis, but on the rare occasion when there isn’t a celestial flyby, the newsletter will choose a newly discovered asteroid to highlight.

“Most people don’t realize how common asteroid flybys are,” Minor Planet Center director and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Matt Holman said in a press statement. “We want the Daily Minor Planet to educate readers in an entertaining way, so the next time they see a doom-and-gloom asteroid headline, they’ll know where to go to find the facts.”

To see what’s traveling through our planet’s corner of the solar system today and every day, you can subscribe to the newsletter at the Minor Planet Center’s website.

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Plants play a key role in our mental and physical health—from helping us focus and beautifying indoor spaces, to maybe helping us live longer. And you can breathe a little easier knowing they actually help us breathe easier.

In the 1980s, NASA, along with the Associated Landscape Contractors of America (ALCA), sought to figure out exactly which plants were most effective at keeping the air clean—a relevant study for an agency whose astronauts were spending more and more time aboard space stations. The results of that Clean Air study are detailed in the infographic below from Love the Garden.

As you’ll see, not all indoor plants are created equal. Florist’s chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum morifolium) and the Peace lily (Spathiphyllum) take top honors as natural air filtration systems, removing benzene, formaldehyde, trichloroethylene, xylene, and ammonia from your home or office space, all of which could cause negative health effects. (You probably didn’t even know those things were floating around, did you?)

Earlier this year, a team of researchers presented new research on the purifying power of plants at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society. They identified the dracaena plant and the bromeliad plant as highly effective at removing pollutants and toxins, which means you have a lot of options when it comes to multitasking greenery.

To get the best results, the Clean Air Study recommends one plant per 100 square feet. And while they may help you live better, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to keep them alive, so be sure to work on that green thumb, too.

[h/t Lifehacker]

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