- newWhy English spelling looks like it lost a bar fight with history
English spelling is not broken so much as visibly injured. A video by Airlearn Language Show explains how the printing press, the Great Vowel Shift, dead gods, French-Italian beef, Dutch typesetters, and Renaissance Latin nerds left English looking l…
- 1 hour ago 7 Jul 26, 10:38am -
- newCalifornia makes food labels less stupid
California is finally doing something about the tiny fridge panic caused by "sell by," "best by," "use by," and whatever other cryptic prophecy your yogurt cup is trying to deliver.Food labels have been doing haunted-house work for years. You open t…
- 2 hours ago 7 Jul 26, 10:00am -
- newTurn your ideas into full-length books—Get a lifetime subscription on sale for $119
TL;DR: The Aivolut AI Book Creator can turn your notes and ideas into full books, and a lifetime subscription is only $119 right now.Nobody tells you this, but most of the work of writing a book is not writing it. — Read the rest The post Turn…
- 2 hours ago 7 Jul 26, 10:00am -
- newTRMNL: hackable e-ink dashboard to put anywhere
TRMNL is a battery-powered e-ink display that sits on a desk, shelf or refrigerator and shows the information you choose—calendars, weather, sales pipelines, transit times, the latest church wall collapse news, etc.—without pinging, glowing, irr…
- 5 hours ago 7 Jul 26, 6:33am -
- newDeaf kids in 1980s Nicaragua created a language from thin air
In 1977, a special-education center opened in Managua with 50 deaf children. Enrollment reached 400 across two schools by 1983. Teachers drilled the students in spoken Spanish and lipreading, "with most pupils failing to grasp the concept of Spanish…
- 19 hours ago 6 Jul 26, 5:23pm -
- newThe ancient spark plug and other "out-of-place artifacts"
The Coso artifact, dug from a California hillside in 1961 and claimed to be prehistoric, was "actually a 1920s spark plug that had become encased in a concretion." It belongs to the category of the out-of-place artifact, or OOPArt — an object found…
- 19 hours ago 6 Jul 26, 5:13pm -
- newThis permanent $55 Microsoft Office deal was made for people who want stability over subscriptions
TL;DR: Get lifetime access to Microsoft Office 2024 Pro Plus for Windows for $54.99 (MSRP $249.99) with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more in a one-time license.Subscription fatigue is real. Between cloud storage, streaming services, and s…
- 20 hours ago 6 Jul 26, 4:00pm -
- newIn 1872 a ship was found drifting, empty. The 1913 "solution" was absurd.
In 1913, the Strand Magazine invited contributors and readers to propose solutions to the mystery of the Mary Celeste, the ship found sailing crewless in 1872. One answer arrived from an apparently impeccable source: A. Howard Linford of Magdalen Col…
- 21 hours ago 6 Jul 26, 2:34pm -
- newCamel-racing robots wear perfume so the camels accept them
Camel racing in the Gulf states once ran on child jockeys — "usually boys around the age of four," according to Wikipedia. "Often, the boys would be starved to be as light as possible," and "there was an active child slave trade for camel jockeys."…
- 21 hours ago 6 Jul 26, 2:27pm -
- newThe internet spent years hunting a game that never existed
In 2021, a Reddit user named "Sparta123" posted to r/tipofmyjoystick trying to recall a farming game like Harvest Moon, "with the premise involving a man who kills his wife and tries to hide the body while working as a farmer." Nobody could name it.…
- 22 hours ago 6 Jul 26, 2:22pm -