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We Love Who They Aren't: 7 Famous Impostors

Passing yourself off as someone else could land you in prison, but if you are convincing enough, your (fake) life could be the subject of a book or movie! Princess... READ ON

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The Height Gap

We've blogged about the relationship between height and pay before, as well as height and electability, but I've just come across a four-year-old New Yorker article on height and how it's changing around the world. In The Height Gap, reporter Burkhard Bilger explains anthropometric history -- the study of the history of human height, and what factors contribute to it. From Bilger's article: Tall men, a series of studies has shown, benefit from a significant bias. They get married sooner, get... READ ON

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Documentaries I Like: Connections

Connections was a documentary series produced for the BBC in 1978. It sought to explain human history through an "alternative view of change" in which multiple aspects of history, including technology, religion, and finance combine to bring about social change. This mode of analysis moves beyond conventional linear narrative, and as a result embraces complexity. Each episode is an essay connecting several seemingly disparate events or technologies through an extended web of logic -- it's great fun to... READ ON

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Modeling Economics Using Water

Engineer/economist Bill Phillips, a New Zealand native, built a machine to model the British economy in 1949. Although it was high-tech for its time, today the Phillips Machine seems a little...nutty. What's odd about the machine is that it used water power -- hydraulics -- to model the flow of money through the British economy. Here are some snippets from yesterday's Guardian article about the machine (emphasis... READ ON

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Gaming History: Discovering Deep Ms. Pac-Man Secrets

I played a fair amount of Ms. Pac-Man in my youth, sometimes plugging my entire $3 allowance into the machine at the movie theater, or the one at the pizza parlor near my grandmother's house. I was never any good at it -- never much good at any arcade games, really -- but my father and brother were skilled Ms. Pac-Man gamers. They preferred Ms. Pac-Man to the original Pac-Man, but I don't recall ever getting an answer about why. (I must have assumed that her little red bow was the killer feature.)... READ ON

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Required Viewing: I Met the Walrus

In 1969, 14-year-old Jerry Levitan managed to snag a brief interview with John Lennon in his hotel room in Toronto. Using his reel-to-reel tape recorder, Levitan asked Lennon a series of questions about peace, popularity, and messages in music. The answers give us a portrait of Lennon at the end of his involvement with The Beatles. In 2007, Levitan collaborated with director Josh Raskin, illustrator James Braithwaite, and animator Alex Kurina to produce I Met the Walrus, a short animated film... READ ON

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Don't Panic: The Infocom Drive Surfaces

Programmer Andy Baio has gotten his hands on a piece of computer gaming history: a backup of game publisher Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. What's Infocom, you ask? (At least, you ask this if you're under a certain age and/or leaned left-of-nerdy in the 80's....) Infocom is the game company behind classic text adventure like Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and a little game called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- which was written with the help of Douglas Adams. A whole generation... READ ON

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NOVA: Cracking the Maya Code

This week's NOVA has a great story: Cracking the Maya Code explains how Mayan glyphs were deciphered -- a truly difficult problem with a satisfying solution. The decipherment is a surprising adventure involving limited (and often incorrect) examples of the glyphs themselves, Cold War rivalries, the youngest ever recipient of a MacArthur 'Genius' Award (David Stuart received it at age 18), and some good old-fashioned linguistics. My favorite part is how this Russian linguist (Yuri Knorosov) answered... READ ON

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6 Restless Corpses: Heads of State Edition

The reason for exhuming, mummifying, or otherwise displaying the deceased bodies of heads of state is to either 1. continue to pay your respects, or 2. to make sure they are really dead, depending on your end of the political spectrum. Eva PerÃ³n Eva PerÃ³n was first lady of Argentina from 1946 until her death from cancer in 1952. A monument was to be built where her body could be displayed, but when president Jaun PerÃ³n was overthrown by the military, he fled the country without making... READ ON

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The Mike Wallace Interview

Most of us know Mike Wallace from his long career on 60 Minutes, the Sunday-night staple of American TV. But long before 60 Minutes, Wallace established himself on his eponymous The Mike Wallace Interview, a long-form interview show that started in 1957. Wallace donated recordings of some early Interview programs to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and now the interviews and transcripts are available online. Watching the interviews, you're transported back forty years to a time when... READ ON