Author: Chris Higgins

Monty Python is famous for mixing silly and smart to make something masterful. The silliest bits—Ministry of Silly Walks, anyone?—played on broad physical comedy. At the same time, the troupe indulged its nerdy side with sketches featuring complex wordplay. These are my true favorites.

Below, enjoy four brilliant examples of Monty Python playing with language. Please post your favorites in the comments!

THE MAN WHO SAYS THINGS IN A VERY ROUNDABOUT WAY

This sketch starts with a very straightforward premise, then goes utterly off the rails as a series of men appear who speak only the beginnings, middles, or ends of words. Delightful. (Note: there’s a transcript in two parts that may help you follow along.)

THE MAN WHO SPEAKS IN ANAGRAMS

And then there’s this delightful bit, which is exactly what it says on the tin. Check the transcript.

THE WOODY SKETCH

A family delights in the sounds of words. Deeply silly. Behold, the woody transcript.

“ROMANES EUNT DOMUS” (FROM LIFE OF BRIAN)

Latin is hard. (Transcript.)

On June 25, 1998, Windows 98 went on sale, and geeks like me were excited…ish. At the time, I saw it as a small incremental change from Windows 95, but of course I bought it.

Featuring lots of web integration and slightly improved graphics, Windows 98 wasn’t incredible—it wouldn’t be until Windows XP that a massive change in consumer Windows operating systems came—but it did have some handy features around networking and driver support. On the bright side, it introduced Windows Update. Ugh but yay?

Check out this vintage episode of Computer Chronicles all about the then-new operating system. Stick with it for an interview with Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux. Also fascinating is a review of a very fancy pager with a hardware keyboard, made by RIM…who would go on to make a device called the BlackBerry starting in 1999.

Also of interest: Watch Computer Pros Get Excited About Windows 95…in 1995.

On this elaborately carved wooden track-slash-Rube-Goldberg-Machine, a pack of marbles race from start to finish. Our hero is a shiny yellow/gold marble. Will it win?

The track’s creator, YouTube’s Murmiland, calls this a “rafting track” because it has water running along it. That makes for an exciting sound mix, and adds a bit to the visual chaos of all these marbles rolling along.

Keep an eye out for the miniature Stonehenge replica, and enjoy the simple pleasures of marbles and gravity.

Hair conditioner is something of a mystery to me. Yes, I know it’s supposed to make hair shiny and lush and all that. But how does that actually work? In the video below, chemist George Zaidan goes deep on the chemical properties of hair conditioner, breaking down the many categories of ingredients and how they interact to make conditioner work.

The other fun part of this video, aside from the seriously geeky chemistry stuff, is Zaidan’s attempt to make and use his own hair conditioner. Get ready for the inevitable shower scene!

Enjoy:

On November 12, 1980, Voyager 1 flew by Saturn. It was the second spacecraft to do so (Pioneer 11 had taken low-resolution pictures in 1979). But Voyager 1 had a high-resolution camera onboard, and it snapped photos of the planet, its rings, and its moons. It also found three previously-unknown moons: Atlas, Pandora, and Prometheus.

The image shown at the top of this post actually came a few days later, when Voyager 1 continued its flyby but turned its camera back. The original caption read:

Voyager 1 image of Saturn and its ring taken Nov. 16, 1980 four days after closest approach to Saturn, from a distance of 5,300,000 km (3,300,000 miles). This viewing geometry, which shows Saturn as a crescent, is never achieved from Earth. The Saturnian rings, like the cloud tops of Saturn itself, are visible because they reflect sunlight. The translucent nature of the rings is apparent where Saturn can be seen through parts of the rings. Other parts of the rings are so dense with orbiting ice particles that almost no sunlight shines through them and a shadow is cast onto the yellowish cloud tops of Saturn, which in turn, casts a shadow across the rings at right. The black strip within the rings is the Cassini Division, which contains much less orbiting ring material than elsewhere in the rings.

Among the first photos we got back were these views of Saturn’s satellites. I have embedded some nice ones below.

TITAN’S HAZE (FALSE COLOR)

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon. Voyager 1 found Titan’s thick atmosphere, which prevents visible-light cameras from seeing the surface. The image above shows a false-color view of the “haze” in Titan’s atmosphere, which is mostly made up of nitrogen.

RHEA

Looks a lot like our moon, eh?

DIONE

Another familiar-looking moon. JPL notes:

At the top of the image is the 166 km diameter crater Aeneas, centered at 26 N, 46 W. North is at 12:30. This image was taken from a distance of 162,000 km and has a resolution of 1 km/pixel.

BROWN OVALS ON SATURN

JPL notes:

Two brown ovals can be seen towards the right. The lower one is at about 40 degrees north latitude. The upper one, the polar oval, is at 60 degrees north. Both ovals are about 10,000 km across. North is at 1:30.

VOYAGER 2

Voyager 2 also flew by Saturn, in August 1981. It took some amazing pictures. If you want to get deep into the Voyager data sets, JPL and the USGS have you covered. If you’re just looking for images, check out the Voyager 1 section of this page.

U.S. nickels have been made from a mix of metals—nickel (75%) and copper (25%)—since 1866. The U.S. Mint is currently looking into ways to make the nickel less expensive to produce. But what if we go back to 1866 and explore what the nickel looked like then? What were early American five-cent pieces actually like?

THE HALF-DI(S)ME

The U.S. first minted a 5-cent coin in 1792. Congress called it a half-dime. (Technically it was a “half-disme,” but see below for more on the spelling.) That coin was only briefly made, and had an odd design. Numismatists also disagree about whether it was even intended to circulate. The more common design looks like the image above—starting in 1794, the “flowing hair” half dime ruled, though it too went through a series of design changes in 1796 and 1800.

One of the strangest things about the half-dime was its lack of a numerical value statement. Nowhere on the observe or reverse does the coin say what it’s worth. The designs were very similar to half-dollar and dollar coins, just much smaller. (This was typical for U.S. coins at the time; the 1790s-era dime also lacked an indication of value in cents.)

Fun fact: In the Coinage Act of 1792, the dime was referred to as the “disme,” and that term is printed on the 1792 copper disme…er, dime.

THE PAPER NICKEL

The Civil War had a radical effect on U.S. currency, for various reasons (not least that half the country didn’t recognize its value). In 1884, the U.S. issued and immediately recalled five-cent paper notes. The design was overseen by Spencer M. Clark, who supervised the Currency Bureau. Guess who’s on the note? Yep, it’s Spencer M. Clark. Congress promptly passed legislation preventing the depiction of living people on U.S. currency, as the Clark incident came just after Salmon P. Chase put himself on the dollar bill.

This five-cent note was accompanied by a couple of new coins: two- and three-cent pieces. These are worthy of mention here, but they’re not nickels, so let’s move on.

BIG NICKEL GETS ITS COIN

The aforementioned three-cent piece contained a mixture of nickel and copper, which excited industrials who controlled nickel production. Through good old-fashioned lobbying, Big Nickel interests managed to secure the 75% nickel/25% copper formula for a five-cent piece, and the rest is history.

The first true “nickel” appeared in 1866, and bore a shield design based on the previous two-cent piece. It was a very handsome coin, and it even said “5 CENTS” on the reverse! Good job, U.S. Mint.

FURTHER READING

For more on early U.S. currency: What the Original $1 Bill Looked Like; The First U.S.-Minted Penny Was Horrific; and Where Do U.S. Coin Names Come From? You might also enjoy this history of the nickel, or this beautifully-illustrated nickel story.

(All images public domain via Wikimedia Commons. For details, see the five-cent note, half-dime obverse, half-dime reverse, and shield nickel.)

In the Peruvian rainforest, a mutualistic relationship thrives between Inga tree saplings and native ants. The young trees need the ants as defense, so insects don’t eat their leaves. The ants get “paid” for this defensive role using nectar provided by the tree.

In this beautiful Ultra-HD video from Deep Look, we see how this relationship works—and how it breaks down when clever Riodinid caterpillars come along!

The moral of this story? Never trust ants to protect you.

For more discussion, read this KQED article. Also fascinating is this paper by Suzanne Koptur (PDF link) describing the same ecosystem. There’s also a nice It’s Okay To Be Smart video on ant/tree mutualism.

And if you enjoyed this, watch another Deep Look video: What Do Ants Do With the Leaves They Carry Around?

(Photo courtesy of Josh Cassidy/KQED.)

In this classic episode of Computer Chronicles, host Stewart Cheifet explores the newly-released Windows 95. He invites Microsoft representatives to walk through new features and show off the groundbreaking operating system. We also get to see some clips of Jay Leno and Bill Gates launching the thing, a detailed discussion of how many megabytes are truly required to run Windows 95, plus lots more mid-90s nostalgia.

I remember the launch of Windows 95, and what a big deal it was for PC users at the time. Looking back on it, this is a valuable historical document. This was a time when “Should I upgrade to Windows 95?” was actually a reasonable question for folks using DOS or Windows 3.1.

Look at that fancy new “Start” button! Those were the days:

My favorite part is the sales pitch around 4:45 trying to sell Windows Plus by showing an awfully ugly desktop customization, and a “pretty good” pinball game. A close second is Jay Leno just past 7:00 making Bill Clinton health care jokes.

River crossing puzzles are a classic form of logic puzzle. In them, you’re provided with a scenario—some number of entities trying to cross a river using a raft or boat—and a set of constraints (typically, some of the entities might eat each other under certain circumstances).

In the TED-Ed video below, we tackle a variant of the puzzle in which a group totaling six, three lions and three wildebeest, need to cross a river using a raft. Only two animals can go at once. The problem is, if the lions ever outnumber the wildebeest, they’ll eat them. How can they all cross the river?

The larger question of this puzzle is how should we solve such puzzles? In the video, the narrator walks through this solution, but explains how it can be generalized by drawing up decision trees. At each step of the puzzle, you lay out all the possible options, then cross out any that don’t work. As you proceed, the set of possibilities dwindle until you’re left with only a few viable paths.

Here are the conditions for this puzzle (also listed in the video):

1. The raft needs at least one animal to paddle it across the river, and it can hold at most two animals.

2. If the lions ever outnumber the wildebeest on either side of the river (including the animals in the boat if it’s on that side), they’ll eat the wildebeest.

3. The animals can’t just swim across, and there are no tricks; the animals have to use the boat as described.

Tune in to see how it’s done:

For more on this puzzle, check out this TED-Ed page which explains its relationship to the The Missionaries and Cannibals Problem.

Last week, NASA released a beautiful fly-through of the International Space Station (ISS), captured in 4K Ultra-HD resolution. We drift through various modules of the station for 18 minutes, enjoying views usually reserved for astronauts.

This is exactly the relaxing, beautiful video you need today to space out. Enjoy:

Note that the video was captured using a wide-angle “fisheye” lens. That causes distortion around the edges of the image, but also allows the viewer to really feel like you’re there. If you’re wondering who really is there, check out this handy NASA site.