a fictitious New York City apartment for sale that covers more than 20M m2 and spans the 5 boroughs. Compiled from actual online real estate listings, the artwork collapses the high and low ends of the market, architectural periods and styles, and neighborhoods and affordability into a single space that cumulatively creates a portrait of New York’s living spaces and the real estate market.
Month: March 2020
Hagia Sophia Music
The marble interior of Hagia Sophia was 70 meters long, while in height it reached 56 meters at the apex of the great dome. The vast chamber and its reflective surfaces of marble and gold resulted in unprecedented acoustics of over 10 seconds reverberation time.
Swiss Maps eastereggs
For decades, mapmakers working for the Swiss Federal Office of Topography have defied their mandates to create the most accurate maps possible by covertly inserting drawings in official maps.
Mars Gigapixel Panorama
Late last year, NASA’s Curiosity rover took over 1000 photos of the Martian landscape while exploring a mountainside. NASA stitched the photos together and recently released this 1.8 gigapixel panorama of Mars
Googol-to-1 Gear Ratio
This machine has a gear reduction of 1 to 10 a 100 times. In order to get the last gear to turn once you’ll need to spin the first one a googol amount around. You’ll need more energy than the entire known universe has to do that. gears are probably the most magical device of basic physics. such profound implications from such a simple setup.
Unreliable subsidized energy
The consequences of treating electricity as a right.
In poor countries the price of electricity is low, so low that “utilities lose money on every unit of electricity that they sell.” As a result, rationing and shortages are common.
as electricity generation decentralizes, who pays for the grid?
Overzealous Gardening
“I had it up in my kitchen window. I had a watering plan for it, if someone else tried to water my succulent I would get so defensive because I just wanted to keep good care of it. Today I decided it was time to transplant, I found the cutest vase that suited it perfectly. I go to pull it from the original plastic container it was purchased with to learn this plant was FAKE. It’s sitting on Styrofoam with sand glued to the top! I feel like these last 2 years have been a lie.”
this is super zen
Waymo hardware
Where a standard car radar tells the computer, “object x meters ahead moving at y kmh,” Waymo’s tech provides the resolution to distinguish a car from a truck and a motorcyclist from a pedestrian.
Go Bag
30 seconds flat means you need to pack what’s needed and keep it where you can easily reach it and hit the road. Having the right stuff in the bag is key—a “go-bag” makes it easy because you’ve planned ahead of time and don’t have to think.
Reonization galaxy
For 100s of millions of years after the Big Bang, the entire universe was a thick soup of hydrogen atoms swimming in total blackness. So dense was this cosmic goulash that the first light from the first stars in existence couldn’t penetrate it — the hydrogen fog simply absorbed and scattered the starlight in circles, trapping the universe in a cosmic dark age as ever more stars, galaxies and black holes slowly smoldered to life. That all changed after 500 ma, when a grand cosmic makeover called the epoch of reionization began. As ancient galaxies grew ever larger and radiated more powerful energy, they began to burn away the cosmic fog that surrounded them by ionizing hydrogen atoms into a plasma of free protons and electrons. Suddenly, light could travel across the cosmos — first through “bubbles” of plasma surrounding large galaxies, then farther and farther as multiple bubbles began to expand and overlap. The galaxy group, named EGS77, dates to 680 ma after the Big Bang and appears to be surrounded by 3 overlapping bubbles of plasma — meaning these pioneering galaxies may have been caught in the act of reionizing their corner of the universe and bringing the cosmic dark ages to an end.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 