Showing results for Non-Computer - The Old New Thing

Dominic O'Brien, world speed-memorization champion, on his technique for memorizing over 18 decks of shuffled cards in an hour: "I remember things by personalising them," explains O'Brien, 43. "With playing cards, for instance, I memorise each one as a face. The queen of hearts I think of as Claudia Schiffer, the ace of clubs as Nick Faldo...

Prices in the Microsoft cafeteria are often illogical. For example, a "special sandwich" costs $4.25. A piece of whole fruit costs $0.50. But a "special sandwich with a piece of whole fruit" costs $4.95. If you're not careful, the cashier will ring it up as a "special sandwich with a piece of whole fruit" instead of as a "special sandwich" ...

In the state of Kansas, "The fact that dealing marijuana and controlled substances is illegal does not exempt it from taxation. Therefore drug dealers are required by law to purchase drug tax stamps."

The story of somebody who worked for a job screening service. Companies hired the service to do preliminary filtering of job applicants. The best part: When applicants mistake the screener for the receptionist. When I launched into the actual interview, it really pissed them off. They'd get furious that the freaking receptionist had the ...

Last year there was a recall of exploding frying pans. For some reason I found this funny. "The pans can explode or separate when preheated, used on high heat or used for frying," the safety commission said in a statement. It explodes when you fry something in it. Apparently "frying stuff" was not in the test plan for the frying pans...

It's often fun to go back and see the kooky ideas for television shows that floated around years ago. Here are some from 1997: Plenty more on the linked web site. What's really scary is that a lot of these kooky ideas turned into actual television programs!

It appears that Augusto Pinochet's beverage preferences are a matter of national security. The web site offers the original and redacted versions of the same document, so you can see what sorts of information the U.S. government considers to be worthy of redaction. On a related redactorial note, researchers demonstrated last month a tec...

Norway locks its grip on "Best place to live" status: As I pointed out last month, this then leads to... Shoulda studied Norwegian like I had planned to do originally before I got sidetracked by Swedish.

The BBC reports that official documents in Taiwan must now be written left-to-right (Western style) instead of the traditional top-to-bottom. I grew up with Chinese-language newspapers that ran their stories vertically and numbered their pages from right to left, in the traditional manner. Books and newspapers which run left-to-right lo...

A little-known department in the city of Baltimore is the Rumor Control Center, whose purpose is to squash rumors before they get out of hand. Scott Simon talked with supervisor Tom Saunders on cash rewards for blue-eyed cicadas and other rumors he's had to handle in the past.