John Venn (1834-1923) accomplished much during his life. He began as an Anglican priest, although his study of logic, mathematics, and philosophy eventually led him to shed the clerical collar. He taught at Cambridge and eventually became president of one of its constituent colleges. Venn also tinkered with machines and invented a cricket ball bowling machine that was better than top human bowlers.
But Venn is most famous for one of the diagrams that he developed to show partially overlapping sets of values. That design is the basis for a memorial window in his honor at Gonville and Caius College.
His birthplace in Hull is also marked with an Alternative Heritage marker inspired by Venn's diagram.
With egg prices still high, the potato industry is looking to scramble up Easter traditions with a budget-friendly alternative: Easter potatoes. https://t.co/fP2M9FEaE2
It started out as a joke, an internet meme, then leaked into the real world- potatoes as an alternative to eggs for Easter egg hunts. The price of eggs has been historically high over the past year, but the price of potatoes has risen only 13%. So why not have children decorate potatoes and hunt them for the holiday? Once potato producers heard of the joke, they jumped on it, hoping to sell some potatoes and maybe start a new tradition. There are plenty of tutorials online on how to paint Easter potatoes.
Besides the difference in price, the benefits of using potatoes include less breakage, and the fact that if you use food-safe paint, the potatoes can be cooked and served afterward. People rarely do that with Easter eggs, which are ultimately out of the refrigerator for who knows how long. But overall, it's more of a meme than a reality, as egg hunts have nothing to do with the religious holiday, and so many people use plastic eggs anyway, which are cheap and can be used year after year. Personally, one chocolate egg is enough for me. -via Digg
The first appearance of Virtuix’s Omni was in Stephen Spielberg’s Ready Player One. According to founder and CEO Jan Geotgeluk, Warner Brothers reach out to them for two of their VR Treadmills to be used in the move. “We shipped them two, and they were used as the model for the CGI in the movie,” he shared.
The Omni doesn’t look like a traditional treadmill. It has a concave design and slip-on shoe covers, which use the effect of foot slipping to stimulate movement in VR. A decade since its Kickstarter campaign in 2023, people can now grab their high-tech treadmills for exercise or video games.
The story of how the Omni was built was quite a journey. The production of the device was known by Ernest Cline, the writer of Ready Player One. Interested in the development of the gadget, he even allowed the company to give signed copies of his book to the backers of the Kickstarter campaign.
Initially, they were able to deliver hundreds of units to backers, but refunded all of them eventually as they shifted plans for the Omni. They wanted to focus on commercial clients such as arcades and arcade-adjacent venues. This is because the size and price of the device can be more profitable if pushed toward these bigger companies.
Now, people at home can get their own Omni One, read for individual use after a decade of development. Priced at $2,595, the device comes with a customized Pico Neo 3 headset. Beta users will get the gadget first, but eventually, Virtuix remarked that a commercial version will be released later this year.
A group of researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel discovered that plants make noise when they are “stressed.” These sounds cannot be heard by humans even though they are emitted at a volume similar to human speech. This is because they are at such a high frequency that we can’t hear them.
What’s funny though is that when the researchers recorded and analyzed the sounds, it sounds like either someone is clicking their mouse too fast or someone’s popcorn is popping. The researchers also shared that each plant and each type of stress has its identifiable sound. “While imperceptible to the human ear, the sounds emitted by plants can probably be heard by various animals, such as bats, mice, and insects,” the researchers said.
No, it’s not America. Surprisingly. As of 2023, Luxembourg is the richest country in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, with a value of $135,700.
So what is it like to visit such a wealthy place? Insider’s Mikhaila Friel decided to visit the country back in March, and she’s now back to tell her experience. She spent three nights in different luxury hotels and went to different tourist spots using Luxembourg’s free public transport.
Friel shared that one of the best parts of her trip was the hotels that she stayed in. She paid $275.50 for a one-night stay in a traditional queen room at Hotel Le Royal, a five-star hotel. The furniture and amenities were all there for her, and she had a complimentary fruit bowl and a box of chocolates as a gift.
While all the luxury hotels she stayed in were very high-quality, Friel stated that the highlight of her trip was the public transportation in the country. It is the first country in the world to provide free mass transportation to both residents and visitors in 2022. Everything was easy to use, and the vehicles were clean and comfortable.
If there was something she could say as a bad point about the city is that it was too quiet. While the country has 645,000 residents, most of them commute to Belgium, France, and Germany to work. “While the city was beautiful, the streets were very quiet when I visited,” Friel wrote. “When traveling solo, I usually prefer cities with a larger population, as they usually have a more lively and welcoming atmosphere, which makes it easier to meet new people and to feel less alone.”
Kyoto is one of the cities you’d want to visit when you’re in Japan. As the ancient capital of the country, it has a lot of temples and historical sites to visit. Another big bonus is the cuisine served in the location. There’s a thrill in learning and discovering the local food scene as you try local delicacies and flavors you’ve never tasted before.
For foodies and enthusiasts, Live Japan has created a full-time table of places you could visit for some good food. Their guide is perfect for those who want to sample everything that the city has to offer. They recommend making reservations before you travel to the area.
Aside from that, Live Japan also advises travelers to plan their itinerary based on bus schedules if they don’t have a rented vehicle to use during their stay.
Sometimes, we feel things that we can’t put into words. We can certainly describe things through paragraphs, but finding the exact word to describe our emotions can be limited. It turns out that aside from the common words we used to talk about how we feel, there are other phrases and nouns in English that can describe more complicated human emotions.
For example, the word chrysalism (kris-a-lizim) refers to the feeling of tranquility when you’re indoors when it’s raining heavily outside. Now that’s a very familiar emotion we feel during rainy days.
Another word is monachopsis (mo-na-kop-sis). This term is associated with the feeling of being chronically out of place. It can also refer to the inability to adapt to your surroundings.
If you’re interested in learning more nouns, check out Esquire Magazine’s list of them here.
New York's Hart Island, off the coast of the Bronx, contains the nation's largest cemetery on its 131 acres. But this is no Forest Lawn. This is New York's potter's field, where unidentified or unclaimed bodies are buried, in trenches three coffins deep. The practice has been going on since 1869, and it is estimated that more than a million people are now buried there. Run by the Department of Corrections, the island has been off-limits to the general public for years, except for supervised memorial services twice a month. But that is about to change.
In part by the efforts of the Hart Island Project, the administration of the island was transferred from the Corrections Department to the city's Parks Department. They've been busy cleaning up the island and dismantling some old buildings. Later this year, guided tours will begin as a pilot program, leading to eventual opening of Hart Island as a park. That doesn't mean it will no longer be a potter's field. Burials of New York's more unfortunate deceased will continue. Read about the new park on Hart Island at Smithsonian. -via Fark
The subreddit /r/ProgrammerHumor shares the joys, frustrations, and irreverent jokes from the world of computer programming. In 2017, the members held an informal contest to develop the worst possible volume control from the perspective of user experience (UX). These include selections that are necessarily random, difficult to manipulate, or deceptively labeled.
Twitter user 0xDesigner rounded up the best in a thread. Many of them include uses of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", which should, of course, always be played on full blast. That's hard to do when the slider bounces around the higher you raise the volume.
When Furbys became the "it" toy 25 years ago, they creeped us out. These little toys spoke a language you couldn't understand, but over time they learned to communicate in the language they heard and said some pretty personal things to you or your child. All these years later, technology has given us open source coding, artificial intelligence, warfare drones, and robots that can shoot guns. But Furbys can still creep us out. Especially when they've been skinned.
i hooked up chatgpt to a furby and I think this may be the start of something bad for humanity pic.twitter.com/jximZe2qeG
That little robot had to think about it a minute, but then went ahead and told us exactly what we did not want to hear. In the Twitter thread, Jessica Card told us how she hooked up this nightmare.
hardware:
i’m not a hardware wiz so @kenkeiter really mentored me on this!
skinned the furby, isolated the DC motor wires, soldered on male extension to plug into breadboard. hooked up an h bridge on the breadboard to the pi. control motor via python and run it when it speaks
Just because you can do it, doesn't mean that you should. Card also referenced Roko's basilisk, which is another dimension of terrifying. Have we already sealed our fate? -Thanks, Brother Bill!
While preparing for post-apocalyptic travel across the barren wastelands of what was once your hometown, you'll need a bike that won't become useless after the first flat tire. YouTuber user The Q has a solution: making functional tires out of tennis balls.
Note that there's a lot of prep work that you'll want to do before the downfall of the civilization and regular electrical power. The Q made small rings of PVC pipe and used them to mount the balls on the rim of the wheels. Attaching the rings required the construction of a custom jig that drove balls inside the rings without rupturing them.
The finished product looks like a rough ride, but functional--at least enough to keep you ahead of the cannibals that have been following you on foot for several days.
Every one of the 50 states has a flag, but you probably only know your own state's design. Yeah, Mississippi's flag redesign was featured here, and Utah's new design has been in the news, and New Mexico's flag is often ranked the best, but otherwise, they all seem to run together. You get the idea that they were all done in a hurry by someone with no design experience. Then you rarely saw your state flag because it's ugly, and no one was bothered by it and never thought about making it better. CGP Grey lays out some vexillology rules and standards, and then gives each state's flag a grade. Most of them fail, and deservedly so. A few are good for a laugh.
In the discussion at reddit, the biggest disagreement is with Grey's opinion of purple and the grade that Colorado got. The friend who sent me this video vastly underestimated its length, because he found it so interesting. -Thanks, Bicycle Bill!
The process used to determine the scent the pharaoh of Egypt used in her prime was paleobotany, the study of ancient plants via fossils found in rocks. Additionally, they turned to recipes recorded in Egyptian texts and inscriptions on temple walls. The results of their work were published in Near Eastern Archaeology back in September 2021 attempted to identify and recreate the scent, which they called “Eau de Cleopatra.”
They were able to recreate a scent that had a spicy base note of freshly ground myrrh and cinnamon, which added a hint of sweetness. “It has remained potent for nearly two years, a quality associated with Egyptian perfumes already in Theophrastus’s time,” the researchers wrote.
It’s unclear however if this recreation was the same thing. According to Hyperallergic’s Elaine Velie, some Egyptian descriptions for perfumes contained unclear depictions of ingredients used in making the concoction.
Image credit: Sean Coughlin/Institute of Philosophy/Czech Academy of Sciences
A new cosmic photo taken by the James Webb Space Telescope showed an instance of our space being warped and bent. The image features a cluster of galaxies looking like something heavy almost made them move closer together. In the huge photo, we can compare it to one section of the bed changing to accommodate a weight of a heavier object resting on that area.
Well, our comparison seems to match the reasoning as to why these galaxies, which are around 6.3 billion light-years away, look distorted and magnified. This was due to gravitational lensing, a phenomenon described by the European Space Agency as something that happens “when a massive celestial object such as a galaxy cluster causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime for light to be visibly bent around it, as if by a gargantuan lens.”
Not really. You can, however, delete the history listed on your computer if you’re worried about somebody seeing some websites or queries you deem embarrassing, like a medical question or some NSFW content.
You can delete your browser’s search history by clearing the data of your browser. Some applications offer the “delete history” or “clear data” button as well. However, that only guarantees deletion from your device. On the off chance that a police department is searching through your phone or computer, then something will turn up (we hope that you are not in this situation, though).
Traces of your searches can be seen elsewhere, according to Eric Santanen, an associate professor at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. “For example, if you are logged into a Google account and perform a web search, Google will retain a list of all searches you have performed,” he shared. “Other search engines tend to retain similar sets of data for analysis and sale to other organizations.”
