#trivia

talk about scanners and photocopiers that alter the content of documents, e.g. change numbers in tables

Chinese government wanted to abandon Chinese written language because it seemed fundamentally incompatible with computers — there was no way to fit 70k+ characters on a QWERTY keyboard and the character set was bigger than available memory

beat alignment: 107, melodic discrimination: 123, mistuning perception: 119

“why it is so irrational”

“If 12% of women have four cone types in their eyes, why do so few of them actually see more colours?”

mindblown.gif

why the world only has two words for tea

“Ankrom, an artist and sign painter, decided to make the Interstate 5 North shield himself. He also decided that he would take it upon himself to install it above the 110 freeway.”

LCDs and OLEDs

“As long as you’re reinventing yourself, you can persist.”

“Ungeniused is a show dedicated to covering the weirdest articles found on Wikipedia. Stephen Hackett and Myke Hurley are here to explain topics and share knowledge you’ll never be able to use in real life.”

concentrated solar thermal power plus molten salt storage

talk by Gregory Berns

skin bacteria, wow

“Some of the sounds may not be real, but they still tell a true story. Sound design in nature docs.”

looks sci-fi

“One report suggests that traditional automakers […] remain ahead […] when it comes to self-driving tech — but investors don’t appear to care.”

“Since you can’t buy SpaceX stock, Tesla is the only way for people to invest in the Musk cult of personality.”

“My son excitedly called me over to point out that 1/998 has decimal digits of successive powers of 2. 0.001002004008016032064128256”

a mind-blowing story about how trees and the forest work

“[A] cave that has remained isolated for 5.5 million years. […] Despite a complete absence of light and a poisonous atmosphere, the cave is crawling with life. There are unique spiders, scorpions, woodlice and centipedes, many never before seen by humans, and all of them owe their lives to a strange floating mat of bacteria.”

“Scientists have built a robotic stingray made of heart muscle cells from a rat, a skeleton of gold, plastic fins, and light-activated algae proteins—because, why not?”

“We’re taking astronaut pee… and we’re burnin’ it. And we’re looking at the color… of burned astronaut pee.”

“Why play Chess using pieces of just one color? Because it’s weird, that’s why! […] on-lookers understand enough about what’s going on to know that something is very wrong. And that’s exactly the point of Monochrome Chess - […] to distort their sense of reality.

The other half of the fun comes from the fact that Monochrome Chess requires unconventional thinking on the part of the players. To play Monochrome Chess, you need to unlearn many of the strategies and techniques you know from Normal Chess. To be good at Monochrome Chess, you need to learn to think in new ways.”

Solar-powered plane flying at altitudes higher than 20 km, for 90 days, beaming internet connectivity down… WJW

“It turns out it was easier to make the train car a piece of head armor and slap it onto an NPC than it was to make a working vehicle.”

Because 3 and 4 are factors of 12, dozenal system is easier for computing thirds and fourths than decimal system, which means it is more convenient in everyday life.

computer in an SD card

“Laser death cat punishes Team Fortress 2 grinders.”

awesome scientific/trivia YouTube channel

awesome trivia YouTube channel

“Some people complain that 48 fps looks too much like a video game - which happens to be perfect for how we’re using it. The in-video-game action sequences of VGHS Season 2 were shot at 48 fps with the intention of playback at 48 fps. The in-the-real-world sequences are shot at a much more traditional 24 fps.”

“Built between 1916 and 1923 […] there was a rooftop test track.”

…Fights Pirates with Piracy

Oculus Rift guillotine simulator

“What happens when you send something by mail? […] I put a small camera in a box […] and shipped it.”

by The Oatmeal

High Speed Book Scanner at over 250 pages/min

use heat from a mining rig

gosphero.com

order of 30 MB of transfer to share (per day)

forgery-impeding typeface used on vehicle registration plates of Germany

“I’ve been playing the same game of Civilization II for almost 10 years. This is the result.”

first person horror adventure, in which you play as a two-year-old

ASCII tweets campaign

talk by Kyle Johnson

Slides are horrible, the speaker is annoying, he does way too much sales talk… But hell, the things he says about Nolan’s film? Mindblowing.

(I didn’t really like the “Inception”, nor understand it.)

played in Star Trek

can miss so many things when afk to make a tea