5 Intriguing Things
"First, the standby team transfers the patient from the hospital bed into an ice bed and covers them with an icy slurry. Then Alcor uses a 'heart-lung resuscitator' to get the blood moving through the body again. They then administer 16 different medications meant to protect the cells from deteriorating after death. As they note on their website, 'Because cryonics patients are legally deceased, Alcor can use methods that are not yet approved for conventional medical use.' Once the patient is iced up and medicated, they move them to a place for surgery. The next step includes draining as much blood and bodily fluids as possible from the person, replacing them with a solution that won’t form ice crystals – essentially the same kind of antifreeze solution used in organ preservation during transplants. Then a surgeon opens up the chest to get access to the major blood vessels, attaching them to a system that essentially flushes out the remaining blood and swaps it with medical grade antifreeze." (bbc.com)
2. Hardcore trivia competition—and the Internet community that loves it.
"Bushfield is the one-man impresario behind LearnedLeague, a booming, invitation-only, underground trivia competition I joined two years ago. As the creator and host, he is more Alex Trebek than Ken Jennings — who, incidentally, has been a member for three years, along with other trivia fanatics like Carter Bays (co-creator of “How I Met Your Mother”), Daniel Okrent (a historian who invented Rotisserie Baseball and served as the first public editor of The New York Times) and the novelist Anna Quindlen." (washingtonpost.com)
3. Ikea hacking—and the Internet community that loves it.
"IKEA hacking is the practice of buying things from IKEA and reengineering—or 'hacking'—them to become customized, more functional, and often just better designed stuff. The locus of the IKEA hacking movement is a website called IKEAhackers.net. It’s a showcase for people who have tricked out their KALLAXES, their ARKELSTORPS and their FLÄRDFULLS." (99percentinvisible.org)
4. The 36-volume history of the Manhattan Project is now fully available.
"General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Engineer District, in late 1944 commissioned a multi-volume history of the Manhattan Project called the Manhattan District History. Prepared by multiple authors under the general editorship of Gavin Hadden, a longtime civil employee of the Army Corps of Engineers, the classified history was 'intended to describe, in simple terms, easily understood by the average reader, just what the Manhattan District did, and how, when, and where.' The volumes record the Manhattan Project's activities and achievements in research, design, construction, operation, and administration, assembling a vast amount of information in a systematic, readily available form. The Manhattan District History contains extensive annotations, statistical tables, charts, engineering drawings, maps, photographs, and detailed indices. Only a handful of copies of the history were prepared. The Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources is custodian of one of these copies." (osti.gov)
5. A site for generating and naming new, ever-more-obscure emoticons.
"へ(✕▿✕)へ ━━► dead bird
(((＼（◍⍛◍）／))) ━━► I come in peeeece
⊂ -ᴥ- ⊃ ━━► smug koala
ヽ༼⚈,_ゝ⚈༽ﾉ ━━► I'm meeeelltiinnngg
♱☉ᴥ☉♱ ━━► lemur friend" (newmoticons.com)
Book 1. The Girls of Atomic City, by Denise Kiernan. The story of the women who worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the key sites in the development of American nuclear weapons. Recommended by subscriber Evangeline Garreau.
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
circumstance. The objection to under the circumstances, & insistence that in the circumstances is the only right form, because what is around us is not over us, is puerile. To point out that around applies as much to vertical as to horizontal relations, & that a threatening sky is a circumstance no less than a threatening bulldog, might lay one open to the suspicion of answering fools according to their folly. A more polite reply is that 'the circumstances' means a state of affairs, & may naturally be conceived as exercising the pressure under which one acts. Under the circumstances is neither illogical nor of recent invention (1665 in OED), & is far more often heard than in the circumstances.
I love the pique in this entry, as if legions of pedants were once going around chastising people, "Actually, strictly speaking, under the circumstances is incorrect, young lady."
♱☉ᴥ☉♱