Fastest Human on a Bike

Mueller-Korenek mounted a specially equipped bike with a massive gear and tethered it to a race car, which then accelerated to 100-plus kmh-the velocity necessary for the rider to turn over the cranks on her own volition. Then she unhooked from the car and stayed in the slipstream, smashing the pedals around to hit the highest speed possible under her own power. Her speed on her final mile on the Bonneville Salt Flats was 296 kmh. This short film from WSJ shows how Mueller-Korenek became the world’s fastest human on a bike.

Tribal Politics

He could get people to change their position on welfare, 100%, all the way to the other side of the spectrum of policy, just based on what party they were told supported that position. After they said they supported that position, he asked them why they supported that position, and they didn’t say, ‘Because my party does.’ They came up with other reasons. So, after being experimentally induced into holding a position that they actually didn’t agree with, they then came up with reasons that they thought they agreed with that.

Brainstorm

35 years ago, a fantastic movie came out that starred 4 Hollywood legends, 3 of whom were Oscar winners. It was directed by one of the most important and influential visual artists in film history, and the plot foretold the invention of virtual reality decades ahead of its time. The script was written as a showcase for a new technology designed to change the way we see movies. One of the Hollywood legends died before the movie was finished, a mysterious death, and this ended up being her last movie—And you’ve never heard of it.

Learn Ancient Languages

Lexicity: dedicated to providing online study resources for ancient languages, claims to be “the first and only comprehensive index for ancient language resources on the internet.” With links to resources for 30 ancient languages from Akkadian to Ugaritic (a language discovered in 1928!), you can spelunk and meander and amble your way through dictionaries, grammar lessons, charts and aids, ancient texts, and other resources. As you’d expect, the site has ancient Greek and Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, Sanskrit and Sumerian. Sure, they’ve thrown in Old French and Gaulish, Old Irish and Old English, Old French and Old High German. But the “olds” don’t stop there, and if you want to find resources to brush up on your Church Slavonic, Hittite, or the Mayan language families, there’s something here for you.

Sloppy Geocoding

MaxMind determined that 1m IP addresses were operated by entities in Pretoria, and so it geolocated those IP addresses to the coordinates offered by the NGA for the city. And any time someone uses one of those IP addresses to do something bad—like cyberbullying the owners of a leather shop—it looks to someone who maps the address like the bad thing is being done by someone sitting in John and Ann’s backyard.

Disabled Avatars

In December of 2018 I visited a temporary robot cafe, but it’s not the type of Japanese robot cafe that comes to mind to most. Rather than a robotic show, this was a cafe where the robot waiters were in fact avatars for people with disabilities, who remotely controlled them from their homes.

Art Thief

The skilled climber and thief Vjeran Tomic, whom the French press referred to as Spider-Man, has described robbery as an act of imagination. Tomic’s confidence as a burglar grew to the point that he felt “indestructible and invulnerable.” Once, while fleeing the police across the rooftops of Paris, he took refuge in an empty apartment in a fashionable building. He decided to take whatever jewelry he could find; suddenly, the owner came home. “I saw that he was an old man with a very sexy girl”. He hid in a closet in the bathroom adjoining the man’s bedroom. “I couldn’t get out of it without crossing the room,” he recalled. “The couple . . . began making love, and that went on all night!” He waited until they finally fell asleep, then made his escape. “I have taken many risks like this one, and sometimes much worse ones. But I always perform well when faced with these sorts of obstacles.” Tomic kept moving through the galleries, taking down “Pigeon with Peas,” by Picasso, and “Olive Tree Near l’Estaque,” by Braque. He almost stole a 6th: Modigliani’s “Woman with Blue Eyes.” “When I went to get it off the wall, it told me, ‘If you take me, you will regret it the rest of your life.’ I will never forget what this ‘Woman with Blue Eyes’ did to me. When I touched it, to take it out of its frame . . . the feeling started instantly—a fear that came over me like an iceberg, a freezing fear that made me run away.” It took 2 trips for Tomic to carry the canvases out of the museum. He had parked his Renault a few minutes away, along the Avenue de New York. He sat in the driver’s seat for 5 minutes. As a professional thief, Tomic knew that it was reckless to linger at a crime scene, but he continued to equivocate about the Modigliani that he hadn’t taken. Tomic headed back, but within 1 minute reality set in: the streets of Paris were deserted, and he was quite possibly the only person within blocks of a recently burglarized museum. He fled the scene again, though his regret lingered. “When I drove, the blue-eyed lady was in my head”.

Nakamura Niche

Called Niche, the restaurant will be next door to Nakamura’s popular eponymous restaurant and is expected to open with a limited menu. For the new, 14-seat restaurant, Nakamura is serving dishes that combine elements of traditional Japanese cooking with inspiration from New York food culture, such as the legacy of Jewish-American food on the Lower East Side. One is an homage to Russ & Daughters’ famous smoked fish store, topped with copious amounts of fish roe and salmon smoked in-house. There will also be a Japanese take on carbonara, with uni and bacon replacing the guanciale.