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Saturday, August 31, 2024
Thursday, August 29, 2024
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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.
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