5 Intriguing Things
"With colleagues, Ulm began analyzing cities the way you’d analyze a material, looking at factors such as the arrangement of buildings, each building’s center of mass, and how they’re ordered around each other. They concluded that cities could be grouped into categories: Boston’s structure, for example, looks a lot like an 'amorphous liquid.' Seattle is another liquid, and so is Los Angeles. Chicago, which was designed on a grid, looks like glass, he says; New York resembles a highly ordered crystal."
2. The secret knowledge of Minecraft.
"I’m a writer, and don’t get me wrong: To publish a plain ol’ book that people actually want to read is still a solid achievement. But I think Markus Persson and his studio have staked out a new kind of achievement, a deeper kind: To make the system that calls forth the book, which is not just a story but a real magick manual that grants its reader (who consumes it avidly, endlessly, all day, at school, at night, under the covers, studying, studying) new and exciting powers in a vivid, malleable world."
3. Best-selling book of all time gets a redesign.
"Bibliotheca is the realization of Greene’s long-held desire to help others discover the Bible. The premise is at once simple and daring: to lay out the Bible as a collection of literature, rather than a single encyclopedic volume. Bibliotheca consists of four volumes, three for the Old Testament and one for the New. There are no chapter divisions, no verse numbers, and no annotations. Greene hopes this will transform the biblical text, making it as easy to read as a New York Times bestseller."
4. Apparently, Heinz and Ford are researching turning tomato parts into car parts.
"Ford Motor Co. and H.J. Heinz Co. are exploring the use of tomato fibers in developing sustainable, composite materials for use in vehicle manufacturing. Specifically, dried tomato skins could become the wiring brackets in a Ford vehicle or the storage bin a Ford customer uses to hold coins and other small objects. 'We are exploring whether this food processing byproduct makes sense for an automotive application,' said Ellen Lee, Plastics Research Technical Specialist for Ford."
5. Big telescopes.
"More than a decade after competing groups set out to raise money for gargantuan telescopes that could study planets around distant stars and tune into the birth of galaxies at the dawn of time, shovels, pickaxes and more sophisticated tools are now about to go to work on mountaintops in Hawaii and Chile in what is going to be the greatest, most expensive and ambitious spree of telescope-making in the history of astronomy. If it all plays out as expected and budgeted, astronomers of the 2020s will be swimming in petabytes of data streaming from space and the ground."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
casket, a small chest or box, as for jewels. Its use for coffin is an Americanism , and so used in Brit. is a GENTEELISM.
Seattle Is Another Liquid