Month: August 2015

Black chickens

The Indonesian chicken breed known as Ayam Cemani takes ‘dark’ into an entirely different realm. Their feathers are black. Their skin is black. Cut open an Ayam Cemani and you’ll find black muscle anchored to black bones. Even their organs are black.

nothing crazy was involved in the making of these entirely black chickens.

Built for Eternity

The clock under construction in Texas will be astronomical, mechanical and solar-powered, and will tell time in a similar way to the Hoover Dam’s celestial map, only with moving parts. Those parts will be made from durable but worthless materials (to deter vandals) designed to never corrode or degrade each other in friction. It promises to be in perfect working order some time in the near-ish future. The clock has been in development since 1986. It will be very large, standing over 60m tall. It will be hidden behind 2 heavy metal doors in the side of the mountain and will require the ascension of steep, winding stairwells to navigate its parts and to make it work. There it will be occasionally ticking, like a bomb. The only light will come from a small window at the very top of the clock’s chamber; inside you will not be able to see anything, it will be so dark you will need to have brought your own light source. The chamber will house bells that can play more than 3.5M unique variations of sound, programmed by Brian Eno, when the clock chimes.

Selfdriving advantage

Error-Prone is cute little game of chaos and carnage made for 26 people to play around 1 keyboard. The end result illustrates perfectly how self driving cars are vastly superior to their human counterparts in terms of traffic grid lock, efficiency and avoiding road accidents. A screen shows 26 autonomous cars driving in a loop—one for each letter of the alphabet. Up to that many humans can take control of the cars by pressing the corresponding letter. But doing so is the first step in the inevitable path toward traffic flow inefficiency, at best, and a massive pileup, at worst.

Inferior Copies

It was a brilliant idea: Buy the original, then commission and sell forgeries. It almost worked

To make sure he couldn’t be caught, Ely Sakhai bought the original first—a Rembrandt of enormous value. This “incredibly brazen” con almost worked, writes Anthony M. Amore. The authenticity of his Rembrandt, The Apostle James, was not questioned. Nor was the fact that it was purchased by Ely Sakhai from a reputable source. So when he would offer what he purported to be the painting for sale, it didn’t raise questions about authenticity, if only because those interested in the painting perhaps failed to imagine the nefarious scheme of the seller. Thanks in large measure to his travels in the Far East with his wife, Sakhai made it his mission to establish a steady clientele in Tokyo and Taiwan too. and in June 1997, he sold his Rembrandt to the Japanese businessman and art collector Yoichi Takeuchi.

Learning to Speak Lingerie

Valentine’s Day is one of the few times of the year when most China Star customers are male. Usually, it’s only women in the shop, and often they buy the lightweight, form-fitting dresses that Chinese dealers refer to as suiyi, or “casual clothes.” No Upper Egyptian woman would wear such garments in public, but it’s acceptable at home. This is one reason that the market for clothing is so profitable: Egyptian women need 2 separate wardrobes, for their public and their private lives. Usually, they also acquire a 3rd line of clothing, which is designed to be sexy. The 2 women in niqabs quickly found 2 items that the sheikh approved of: matching sets of thongs and skimpy, transparent nightgowns, 1 in red and the other in blue. The sheikh began to bargain with Chen Yaying, who runs the shop with her husband, Liu Jun. In Egypt, they go by the names Kiki and John, and both are tiny—Kiki barely reached the sheikh’s chest. She’s 24 years old but could pass for a bookish teen-ager; she wears rectangular glasses and a loose ponytail. “This is Chinese!” she said, in heavily accented Arabic, holding up the garments. “Good quality!” She dropped the total price to 160 pounds, a little more than $20, but the sheikh offered 150.