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Everyone Knows it’s Windy
Wednesday, January 4, 2017 – 09:13
You don’t need a special occasion to enjoy a refreshing shower beer, but you just might need these specially designed bottles to make the whole event a little more environmentally friendly. The efficient brew is designed to be enjoyed quickly, with a small dose packing a big punch.
Shower Beer is the invention of the Stockholm-based creative firm Snask and nearby PangPang Brewery. Together, they’ve crafted a beer that’s smaller in size and stronger in alcohol content so it can do the trick, no matter how short the shower. After all, a steamy room full of hot water isn’t exactly a hospitable place for cold drinks. These adorable bottles are only six ounces, with a formidable 10 percent ABV.
As InsideHook points out, the glass bottle could be considered a bit of a design flaw, as they could get slippery without traction or grip. Luckily, there’s already a fix for that: a shower cup holder. Regardless, the sweet pale ale sold out immediately, so you might have to settle for regular shower beers for now.
[h/t Geekologie]
January 5, 2017 – 6:30am
The Ice-Skating Dandies of 18th-Century Paris. They took a mode of transportation and made it into an art form.
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Yale student turns 5-day mumps quarantine into the best Snapchat story ever. Boredom can do strange things to a person.
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In the video Smile, a woman fantasizes about her possible reactions to a catcaller. Contains NSFW language.
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France Has Her Own Lady Liberty, and Her Name is Marianne. She changes with the nation’s political climate.
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The synchronization of 100 metronomes. Watch and try to identify the last holdout.
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A Cromulent Exercise in Language. An awful lot of our new words come from pop culture.
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Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic? Another of the many way the prequels defied common sense.
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When Arthur Conan Doyle Judged A Bodybuilding Contest. It was elementary, my dear.
January 5, 2017 – 5:00am
See those keys at the top of your computer keyboard, labeled with letters and numbers ranging from F1 to F12? Unless you’re a computer whiz, there’s a good chance you rarely—if ever—use them, let alone know why they’re there in the first place.
For the uninitiated, these seldom-touched keys are called function keys, and they can help you perform basic computer tasks with a single touch of a finger. Get familiar with their many functions by checking out the infographic below, created by the folks over at Bright Side.
[h/t Shareably.net]
January 5, 2017 – 3:00am
Where towns get built throughout history may seem pretty random to the modern eye, but there’s actually a pretty simple calculus that can explain why cities develop where they do, according to a new video, spotted by Gizmodo, from the explainer YouTube channel Wendover Productions.
If each town is only 10 miles from another, people within that 10-mile radius only have to travel five miles to get to the nearest town to buy or sell goods—which was useful before cars. Rural areas that built towns before the auto age often have towns only about 10 to 15 miles apart for this exact reason.
People don’t want to walk very far to get something they buy every day, like coffee, but will venture farther to make a rarer purchase, such as new tires or a new laptop. Shops that people visit all the time tend to be more common because they don’t need as many individual customers to stay afloat. Meanwhile, specialized businesses that consumers shop at infrequently generally need to be located in areas with higher populations.
However, geographic considerations can change that model. It’s hard to build cities on mountains and move goods across ranges, but mountains can also protect against invading forces, and they can have resources like coal and gold. Cities are built on ports so merchants can move goods in and out efficiently. Rivers are necessary to provide a water source for citizens as well as a transport route to the ocean. If there are natural resources, people have historically gravitated toward them, setting up shop right where they can grow crops or build factories.
And that’s before you even consider the history of how Europe and Asia developed early empires, which one theory hypothesizes could be due to climate similarities across continents from east to west, and differences from north to south.
Watch the full video for a much more in-depth explanation:
[h/t Gizmodo]
January 5, 2017 – 1:00am
In Scrabble, two-letter words are often used only as a last resort. In a race to use up your final few tiles at the end of the game, low-scoring pairs like AD, AS, AN, and AT can suddenly become unexpectedly useful. But among competitive Scrabble players, two-letter words are a crafty means of boosting your score: Instead of linking one word perpendicularly to another, try playing one word directly on top of, alongside, or overlapping another on the board to form a chain of two-letter words between the two. So imagine, for instance, that your opponent has just played the word EARTH. If you play the word DREAM directly beneath it, one letter below the other, then you’ll not only pick up points for using your D, R, E, A and M, but you’ll also score for the words ED, AR, RE, TA, and HM that are formed between the two.
More than a hundred two-letter words are acceptable in Scrabble; 22 of the most unfamiliar and most bizarre of which are listed here.
Note: In North America, all the words that are officially acceptable in a game of Scrabble are listed on the TWL or Official Tournament Word List. In the rest of the English-speaking world—including the UK and Australia—Scrabble players use the so-called SOWPODS list, which combines Merriam-Webster’s Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary and the Official Scrabble Words list produced by The Chambers Dictionary. All of the words listed here are included on both lists, and so are officially playable in any English language game.
You’ll only score two points for the name of this rough and rubbly basaltic lava, but it’ll be a useful two points if you’re sitting with a rack full of vowels. You can also play AI, the name of a species of three-toed sloth, and AE, a Scots variation of “one.”
An abbreviation of agriculture, used in phrases like “ag college” and “ag school.”
Another name for the Indian mulberry tree, Morinda citrifolia.
You can play the names of all of the letters of the alphabet in Scrabble, including AR, ES, and TEE.
BA is an old dialect word meaning “to kiss,” but among Egyptologists it’s also the name given to a person’s immortal soul.
American slang for a boy or best friend, and an exclamation used to frighten or surprise someone.
You can use DE as a synonym of “from” or “of.”
As well as being the name of the letter L (you can play EM and EN as well), an EL is an elevated railroad.
A dialect spelling of “ate.”
Also spelled PE (which is also acceptable, incidentally), FE is a letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
The expressions HM, HMM, UM, and MM are all acceptable in Scrabble, as are HA, HO, OH, and AH.
An old Scots word for a sweetheart.
Like the BA, in Egyptian culture the KA is the spiritual part of a person’s soul.
A LI is a standard Chinese unit of distance, equal to 500 meters.
As the names of letters of the Greek alphabet, you can play both MU and NU in Scrabble.
OD is the Odic Force, a hypothetical life force theorised to exist by the 19th century philosopher Carl Reichenbach.
As well as being an old word for an island, the OE is a whirlwind near the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic.
Taken from Sanskrit, the syllable OM is used as a mantra in certain forms of meditation.
In Chinese philosophy, QI is the vital life force inherent in all things.
The first note of the musical scale, now known as DO, was originally called UT. The other note names RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, and TE (or TI) are all also acceptable.
As well as the name of the Greek letter XI, you can also play the word XU in Scrabble as the name of a monetary unit worth one-hundredth of a Vietnamese dong.
As a slang abbreviation of “pizza,” ZA is worth remembering if you need to ditch a letter Z at the end of the game. If you’re playing with the SOWPODS list outside of North America, you can also play the word ZO or DZO, which is the name of a hybrid of a domestic cow and a Himalayan yak.
January 4, 2017 – 12:00pm
If you’re willing to shell out nearly $31,000 for a bespoke brew, The Drinks Business reports that Meantime Brewing Company, a London-based craft beer company, is now offering customers the chance to create a beer that appeals specifically to their individual flavor profiles by using DNA testing.
Meantime Brewing Company has joined forces with genetics company 23andMe to make custom beverages, which they’re advertising as “the world’s most personalized beer.” Dubbed “Meantime Bespoke,” the service begins with 23andMe’s scientists, who test beer lovers’ saliva samples for hereditary variations in oral taste receptors (which involves a taste gene called TAS2R38). This helps identify genetic variants that may determine whether drinkers are disposed toward certain flavor profiles—think sweetness or bitterness—in beer. (This is reportedly determined in part based on customers’ sensitivity to a bitter compound called 6-n-propylthiouracil.)
Once your genetic makeup is analyzed, Meantime’s brewers will use the scientists’ findings to guide the brewing process. You’ll consult with a brewmaster to contribute feedback, and ensure that the final product is exactly suited to your liking. If you want, you can even partake in the fun by adding hops and grain to the mix and testing it. (To ensure your skills are up to snuff, your commissioning cost also pays for a beer-making course called “The Knowledge.”)
After the brewing process is complete, customers are supplied with more than 2000 pints of customized beer. For an additional fee, they can personalize the packaging design, purchase custom glassware, or have their personalized brew poured in Meantime’s tasting rooms and have kegs sent to their local bar.
So far, there are no testimonials from customers on whether Meantime Bespoke’s science-inspired venture really produces the perfect pint. But according to Meantime, their head brewer, Ciaran Giblin, recently became the world’s first person to create his own beer inspired by his DNA flavor profile. He prefers bitter tastes, so he ended up with a hoppy Double IPA.
[h/t The Drinks Business]
January 4, 2017 – 7:00pm
Lemonie via Instructables // CC-BY-NC SA 2.5
With each successive step forward in technology, humanity gets a little bit better at solving medical problems, gathering knowledge, and streaming ’80s sitcoms.
Unfortunately, with progress comes obsolescence—and obsolescence tends to create a lot of waste. If you’re not in the mood to hold a yard sale and you don’t want to toss your Betamax or Walkman in a landfill, you might take some inspiration from these 15 ways people have recycled their old tech.
We can’t exactly advocate wiring an old VHS recorder so it contains heating elements and a rapid-eject feature. We can advocate watching someone else do it.
Flat screen displays have made it easy to forget how cumbersome CRT monitors were. It turns out all of that spacious real estate is perfect for cat occupancy once you’ve ripped out the tube.
Artists like Nathalie Santa and Erika Iris Simmons have mastered the art of unspooling old audio cassettes and arranging the magnetic tape into fantastic portraits of famous figures.
Console televisions are hideous. But they’re also pieces of furniture that can be upcycled into something approaching pop art. Several sites have instructions for creating a water-tight seal and turning the set into something that broadcasts an all-fish channel.
Machine screws, clothespins, and a Sharpie are all you need to cobble together a kind of Spirograph using two turntables. Just make sure they have a variable pitch control so you can manipulate the speed of your automated doodles.
Depending on how old your kids are, they may think this floppy disk pencil holder is cool—or repurposed alien technology. Some light drilling and cable ties will bundle the old hardware together to make for an attractive, functional way to ease up on desk clutter.
The fine people at motherboredjewelry.com upcycle pieces of discarded motherboards, RAM chips, and other outdated computer guts to make fashionable, eco-friendly jewelry. We’re partial to the bookmarks.
It turns out that old cardboard VHS covers are exactly the right kind of durable to repurpose as a spiral notebook. All you’ll need are some pliers, a paper knife, and a ruler to remove the boring store-issued cover and replace it with your favorite Frank Stallone vehicle.
Glittery tree ornaments don’t have to be expensive. If you have unwanted CDs, you can smash them up—or use a good pair of scissors to snip them—and glue the individual pieces to a bare glass bulb. The effect is surprisingly cool, and a way better use for Richard Marx recordings than one would ever think possible.
Apple laptops are so sleek that even one destined for the garbage bin makes for an attractive wall decoration. Several sellers on Etsy have used them to make hanging clocks, with the mouse doubling as a pendulum.
Gather a few dozen floppies, drill holes, and string them together using craft store chain links for a boxy-yet-awesomely-nostalgic piece of mobile storage.
Have a desktop chassis sitting in the basement that used to make an unholy noise with the fan? Turns out those little things are perfect to keep you cool in the warmer months. Some crafty people even use a hard drive as a stand.
Amuse your mailperson by gutting an old desktop and mounting it out front to create a clever letter drop.
Ever wish you had a coin tumbler? Ever wish you could find a new use for an ancient printer? Solve two problems at once by modifying a printer to tumble and clean loose change.
Not crafty or absolutely unable to craft anything without risking injury? You’re still in luck: The spindle from a stack of blank CDs is already the perfect size, shape, and configuration for a bagel. Bonus: the plastic cover keeps the bread from getting mushed while being transported.
January 4, 2017 – 6:00pm
J.R.R. Tolkein / Facebook
Ridesharing Apps Could Easily Replace Taxis in New York City
