Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Why "Windy City?"
An excerpt from Readers' Digest -
The Surprising Reason Why Chicago Is Called the "Windy City"
It's got nothing to do with the weather.
By Meghan Jones
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| Grey Tree Studios/Shutterstock |
When you hear someone mention the “Windy City,” you immediately know they’re talking about Chicago, as surely as the “Big Apple” means New York and “Sin City” refers to Las Vegas. Knowing this, you might make sure to pack your best windbreaker for your first trip to Illinois’ biggest city. But it turns out that, while Chicago is as prone to a blustery day as any other metropolis, its wind isn’t particularly exceptional. How did the city get this nickname?
| Well, when the nickname came to be, the “Windy City” meaning wasn’t describing the weather but the people. (Don’t worry, not that kind of wind.) Nineteenth-century journalists first gave Chicago this designation when criticizing the city’s elite as “full of hot air.” In the Chicago Daily Tribune, a reporter wrote in 1858 that “[a] hundred militia officers, from corporal to commander … air their vanity … in this windy city.” Another reporter, a proud citizen of Milwaukee, boasted that his own city was the better of the two: “We are proud of Milwaukee because she is not overrun with a lazy police force as is Chicago—because her morals are better … than Chicago, the windy city of the West.” They meant that the city was full of “windbags,” people with inflated egos who cared about nothing but profit. (Learn these 12 signs someone has a massive ego.) https://www.rd.com/article/chicago-windy-city/ |
Monday, August 26, 2024
Saturday, August 24, 2024
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
Monday, August 19, 2024
21 Clever Memory Tools
An excerpt from Buzzfeed -
21 Clever Mnemonic Devices That Will Help You Remember Almost Everything
Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally.
By Sarah Aspler, BuzzFeed Staff, Canada
1. The order of planets from the sun:
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| BuzzFeed / Getty |
4. The order of mathematical operations:
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| BuzzFeed / Getty |
5. When to use "affect" or "effect":
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| BuzzFeed / Getty |
7. How to remember who is on which bill:
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| Buzzfeed / Getty |
14. How to set the table:
A Freshman at Georgia Tech at 13
An excerpt from CBS Evening News -
He was reading at 1 and doing fractions by 2. At 13 years old, he's majoring in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech.
By Mark Strassmann
The 360 Degree Revolving, Titling House
An excerpt from designboom -
alex schweder + ward shelley's 'ReActor' house rotates atop a concrete column
the house has been conceived as a piece of performance architecture
video courtesy of art OMI / © richard barnes
‘ReActor’ is the latest work in an experimental, performative series of ‘social relationship architecture’ designed and built by artists alex schweder and ward shelley. this summer, for a total of five days, the architect-artist duo lived in the rotating house, located in upstate new york. the habitable sculpture measures 44-foot by 8-foot (13.4 x 2.4m) and rotates a complete 360-degrees atop a 15-foot (4.5m) concrete column.
https://www.designboom.com/architecture/reactor-house-alex-schweder-ward-shelley-omi-international-arts-center-new-york-08-21-2016/
The Valley of the Dolls
An excerpt from AllThatsInteresting -
Haunting Photos Of Nagoro, The Japanese Village Where The Dead Are Replaced With Life-Size Dolls
Artist Tsukimi Ayano has made at least 400 dolls to repopulate the dwindling village of Nagoro
By Erin Kelly | Edited By Jaclyn Anglis
The streets in the tiny village of Nagoro, Japan are far from bustling. In fact, things are remarkably still. Then, through the corner of your eye, you see a figure — then a group of figures huddled together.
Then you realize they're everywhere you look.
But these aren't people. They're actually life-size dolls — and they make up most of Nagoro's population. The dolls outnumber humans by a ratio of more than ten to one.
The handmade dolls are one woman's attempt to fill the loneliness that exists in Nagoro. This small village becomes increasingly void of people as time goes on. The elderly die and the young people leave for city jobs. Not even a local grocery store remains open.
The village, also called Kakashi No Sato, or Scarecrow Village, is not unlike other rural areas in Japan facing this depopulation trend. Since 2010, the nation has lost about 1.4 million of its people — and it's having a major impact on both the economy and society.
However, here in Nagoro, it's like no one has left; each doll seems to contain the soul of a departed villager. A local official told one tourist that "the figures have even been added to the census records of the village, with detail descriptions of each figure."
In this way, it really does seem like the dolls have a larger-than-life presence in the village of Nagoro.
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| Several dolls sit lined on a bench. KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images |
BACK-TO-SCHOOL
It’s BACK TO SCHOOL time in America. And if we don’t trust Trump with our kids, we can’t trust him with our country.
— Eric Swalwell (@ericswalwell) August 14, 2024
🎬WATCH my new ad pic.twitter.com/2qGmeWAPm7
Time Magazine's 2024 Kid of the Year
An excerpt from Time -
Heman Bekele Is TIME’s 2024 Kid of the Year
Dreaming of a cure
By Jeffrey Kluger
Heman Bekele whipped up the most dangerous of what he called his “potions” when he was just over 7 years old. He’d been conducting his own science experiments for about three years by that point, mixing up whatever he could get his hands on at home and waiting to see if the resulting goo would turn into anything.
“They were just dish soap, laundry detergent, and common household chemicals,” he says today of the ingredients he’d use. “I would hide them under my bed and see what would happen if I left them overnight. There was a lot of mixing together completely at random.”
But soon, things got less random. For Christmas before his 7th birthday, Heman was given a chemistry set that came with a sample of sodium hydroxide. By then, he had been looking up chemical reactions online and learned that aluminum and sodium hydroxide can together produce prodigious amounts of heat. That got him thinking that perhaps he could do the world some good. “I thought that this could be a solution to energy, to making an unlimited supply,” he says. “But I almost started a fire.”
After that, his parents kept a closer eye on him. As it turned out, having adults watching what he does is something that Heman, now 15, would have to get used to. These days, a whole lot of people are paying him a whole lot of attention. Last October, the 3M company and Discovery Education selected Heman, a rising 10th-grader at Woodson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, as the winner of its Young Scientist Challenge. His prize: $25,000. His accomplishment: inventing a soap that could one day treat and even prevent multiple forms of skin cancer. It may take years before such a product comes to market, but this summer Heman is already spending part of every weekday working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, hoping to bring his dream to fruition. When school is in session, he’ll be there less often, but will continue to plug away. “I’m really passionate about skin-cancer research,” he says, “whether it’s my own research or what’s happening in the field. It’s absolutely incredible to think that one day my bar of soap will be able to make a direct impact on somebody else’s life. That’s the reason I started this all in the first place.”
It’s that ambition—to say nothing of that selflessness—that has earned Heman recognition as TIME’s Kid of the Year for 2024.
Facts About the US Black Population
An excerpt from Face2Face Africa -
8 facts about the U.S. Black population you should know
BY Kofi Oppong Kyekyeku
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| Facts about Black people in U.S. - Original photo credits: Pew Research Center and ABC News |
Population
The U.S. Black population in 2022 can be categorized into four distinct groups:
- The total U.S. Black population
- Single-race, non-Hispanic Black people
- Multiracial, non-Hispanic Black people
- Black Hispanic people
Geography
Geographically, the majority of Black Americans reside in the South, with more than half (56%) living there in 2022. Meanwhile, 17% live in the Midwest and Northeast, and 10% reside in the West. Texas is home to the largest Black population among the states, with approximately 4.2 million Black residents. Florida follows with 3.9 million, and Georgia ranks third with 3.7 million.
The New York City metropolitan area, which includes parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, is the preferred metropolitan area for Black Americans, with 3.6 million residents. The Atlanta metro area is the second most popular, with 2.2 million Black residents, followed by Chicago, which is home to 1.7 million Black residents.
Daddies and Daughters
An excerpt from The Daily Beast -
Why Every Father Needs to Watch the Netflix Film ‘Daughters’
The new documentary is about a father-daughter dance at a prison. As one dad of two girls writes, it’s a must-see film that brings all of parenthood into perspective.
By Andrew Crump
Reams of data exist that highlight the range of effects a father’s absence can have on his daughters. They’re likely to struggle with trust issues. Their confidence might flag. They may wrestle with feelings of abandonment, low self-esteem, and rejection, or develop aggressive or otherwise antisocial behaviors, or risk-taking behaviors; they may become depressed, detached, or anxious. Fathers shape their daughters’ relational lives—the foundation and maintenance of meaningful relationships, with family, with friends, with romantic partners, with communities—and spur their creativity.
Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s Daughters, the Festival Favorite and Audience Choice: U.S. Documentary Competition winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival—now available to watch on Netflix—side steps statistical analysis and instead strives for emotional impact.
I have two daughters myself. For their privacy’s sake, I’ll refer to them by their nicknames: Brontosaurus, my eldest, and Elephant, my youngest. I love them more than anything I’ve loved in my forty years on this Earth.
On behalf of that, I intentionally avoided Daughters in my remote coverage of Sundance, knowing full well a movie with that title, focused on the subject of barriers forced between young girls and their incarcerated dads, would likely break me in two; the idea of being separated from my girls is the stuff of my nightmares, as unlikely as it is that we’ll ever be separated. (Sending them off to summer camp and, soon, back to school is hard enough.) I am not a statistic. Brownie and Elephant aren’t, either. All the same, my reality didn’t blunt Daughters’ effect on me.
This is not a film about the numbers: How many girls grow up fatherless in the U.S.; how many of those girls end up in bad partnerships; how many of them become teen mothers; how many are burdened by mental health problems; how many attempt suicide. Frankly, that wouldn’t be a film at all, had Patton and Rae chosen these details as their subject. It would be an academic paper instead, dry and sans any human sensation.
Sensation is what Daughters is all about, of course, a front row seat to an overwhelming reconnection between a cadre of girls and their fathers, each behind bars for reasons Patton and Rae refuse to detail. (Those reasons are neither our business nor relevant to the film’s thesis.). At the same time, it’s an elegant condemnation of America’s love affair with crime and punishment, exhibited through varied atrocities carried out within its prison system.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/netflixs-daughters-the-movie-every-father-needs-to-watch
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