There aren’t too many regular English words that contain five consecutive consonants, but three of them will be uttered fairly often during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Can you identify these three words, where the asterisk represents any number of missing letters?

HERE’S the answer.

Staircases can be so much more than just a means of getting to the next floor. A staircase can be a work of art, a conversation piece, a place to meditate, or a historical marker.

Floating on a Wall

This floating staircase by designer Jordi Vayreda looks dangerous, but the steps are made of steel welded to a thick beam inside the wall. The top of the wall can be used as a handrail for the upper half of the staircase. See more pictures and an explanation here.

Hanging Spirals

This design makes sweeping under the stairs easy! A hanging double spiral staircase is part of the Didden Village project in Rotterdam. There are two such staircases; the other is a single spiral.

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The Tinderbox: Europe—all of it. By the dawn of the 20th century, the European powers were involved in so many treaties and counter-treaties, it’s a wonder one of the countries didn’t declare war on itself.

The Lit Match: One wrong turn.

June 28, 1914, was just one of those days … that lives in infamy. That was the day Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the less-than-popular heir to the even-less-popular Austro-Hungarian Empire, chose to go on a processional drive through Sarajevo. Surprisingly, this is not the great mistake we’re writing about.

Actually, the first few days of the archduke’s visit to Bosnia went pretty well—particularly considering that nationalists from neighboring Serbia had marked him for death. He even managed to survive an assassination attempt in Sarajevo by successfully playing Hot Potato with a lit bomb that was thrown at his convertible. The bomb exploded in the street, and the archduke continued about his business. Unfortunately, he let his guard down a bit too soon. (more…)

It’s time for another Thingamajig Thursday. Today I’m naming that silvery metal thing you stick your foot in when you go to the shoe store. It’s called the Brannock Device because it was–surprise, surprise–invented by one Mr. Brannock… Charles F., to be precise.

Some interesting facts via The Lemelson-MIT Program:

As a Syracuse University student, young Brannock wanted to find the best way to measure the foot. He played around with the idea for a couple of years and finally built a prototype using an Erector set. In 1926 and 1927, Brannock patented the device and created a company to build it.

Some other interesting things worth knowing about this particular thingamajig:

* It comes in a variety of colors! (green, purple, red and black.) * In addition to different models for men and women, adult and children, there are also Brannock Devices for ski boots! * During WW II, the Army hired Brannock to make sure boots and shoes fit soldiers. * Advised to make his devices out of plastic, ensuring that they would need to be replaced every couple of years, Brannock refused and would only make them from durable steel. * Today, most shoe stores don’t get rid of their Brannock Devices for 10 or 15 years, until the numbers finally wear away from so much use.

Okay, so now we’ve reached my favorite part of Thingamajig Thursday, the part where I ask you all to come up with a better name for the thingamajig, because, let’s face it, the Brannock Device is about as original as a new reality TV show on Bravo. So lay ‘em on us!

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A librarian gives a calm and thoughtful response to a complaint about a children’s book. In the process, he explains the underlying philosophy of our free and open library system.
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Homeland Security looks for suspicious characters at Comic Con 2008. I bet they find some.
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Electing a US President in Plain English. A straightforward video that explains the electoral college system.
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How Beliefs and Values Influence What Tastes Good. The taste of meat means power, and the taste of Pepsi means you’ve seen too many ads.
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Vegans can’t decide whether they are allowed to eat honey. Sure, we exploit the bees’ labor, but they don’t die as a result.
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Ten Films That Should Be Broadway Musicals (with song suggestions included). If Legally Blonde can do it, why not Jaws?
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Traditional Faroe Island Viking homes have grass growing on their roofs. This environmentally-friendly feature is making a comeback.
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Lamps with Personality. Eleven ways to light up a room with your strange sense of taste!

Yesterday I covered the 10,000 Year Clock: a clock designed to tick just once per year, and intended to run for a long, long time. The clock will be housed in a chamber inside a mountain in Nevada (yes, The Long Now Foundation bought a mountain for this purpose — pictured below, left), and photographer Edward Burtynsky wants to put some photographic art in that chamber. But how do you make a photographic print that will last 10,000 years?

But backing up a bit, the first question is: why photographs? Why not statues or some other highly durable art form? Burtynsky answers: “because [photographs] tell us more than any previous medium. When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family photos.” While I think this is a very recent notion (as is photography in general), maybe he has a point — if we had photographs of human life from thousands of years ago, they would surely tell us a lot about those periods. Here’s more from an article on Burtynsky’s project:

But photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time. Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn’t work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called “carbon transfer print.” It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone—the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany—and the black ink is carbon.

On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone’s living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock’s mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years. He said that making one print takes five days of work, costs $2,000, and only ten artisans in the world have the skill, at locations in Toronto, Seattle, and Cornwall. Superb images can be made on porcelain (or Clock chamber walls), but Burtynsky prefers archival watercolor paper, because the ink bonds deep into the paper, and in the event of temperature changes, the ink and paper would expand and contract together.

Read the rest for a bit more on Burtynsky’s proposed project. See also: Wikipedia on Burtynsky, and Manufactured Landscapes, an excellent documentary about his unique photography.

(Via Kottke.org.)

On this day five years ago, the last of the old-style VW Beetles rolled off of the assembly line. I always wanted to own an old, convertible-style Bug. Practical for the cold Iowa winters, no, but I was madly in love with it. To commemorate this momentus occasion, I give you today’s Quick 10:

10 Beetle Bits

1. The Beetle was designed by Ferdinand Porsche. Yeah, that Porsche.
2. Volkswagen didn’t start using the name “Beetle” or “Bug” until after the public did – it was originally known simply as the Volkswagen Type 1.
3. The very last of the old Beetles produced (#21,529,464) is now at Volkswagen’s Automuseum.
4. Lots of kids play Slug Bug here in the Midwest. If you see a Bug somewhere, you immediately punched whoever is closest to you and say, “Slug Bug, no slugs back.” Apparently the game is called Punch Buggy everywhere else in the world.
5. In Denmark, the Beetle is called Boblen (the bubble).
6. If you’ve only seen the movie version of Transformers, then you don’t know that Bumblebee was originally a Beetle. Michael Bay didn’t want the audience to make comparisons to Herbie the Love Bug, so he changed Bumblebee to a Camaro for the big screen. (more…)

Sometimes false advertising is easy to spot. Statements like “Lose 20 pounds in 5 days” or “Make $1 million a month while sitting at home” seem to choke on their own incredulity, but sometimes marketers employ a little more finesse to bamboozle you. Here are six examples of shamelessly false advertising that weren’t just implicitly misleading, they were blatant lies!

1. Listerine as a Cure-All

Listerine was the first over-the counter mouthwash sold in the United States in 1914 and by 1921 it was already falsely marketing its product. Declaring itself a cure-all for common cold ailments like sore throats and coughs, a dandruff preventative, an anti-shave tonic, and a safe way to protect yourself from cuts, bruises, wounds, and stings, Listerine was slapped with numerous false advertisement lawsuits. In 1975, the Federal Trade Commission ordered the company to spend $10 million in corrective advertising, seeing as their product was no more effective in treating colds than gargling warm water. Even then, the mouthwash giant didn’t really learn their lesson. In 2005, the company was slapped with another lawsuit. This time because Listerine claimed it was as “effective as floss” after rigging clinical trials.

2. Lydia Pickham’s Vegetable Compound (Great for boozy housewives!)

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In an effort to show off our magazine content, and lighten our wallets (those bills are causing such a strain on our back), we’re debuting a whole new contest… The $100 Challenge! (Note: these are American dollars, not Canadian or Zimbabwean, just in case you were looking for a favorable exchange rate.)

The Challenge:

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Maybe you can’t fight city hall … but you can certainly drive them nuts. Most local government proceedings like city council meetings have a mandatory “public comment” segment, in which members of the audience can stand up and “have their say” for a proscribed (and thankfully short) amount of time — whether what they have to say is relevant to the proceedings, or the ramblings of a madman. The ones that end up on YouTube, more often than not, fall into the latter category — with hilarious results! Let’s take a look at some of the weirdness our city councils are forced to put up with every day. All we can say is, thank goodness they tape these things.

Terrorist Pu$$sies and Rogue Helicopter Pilots

David Thompson took the podium at a Jan 28, 2002 meeting of the Charlotte, NC City Council, and his comments prompted one councilman to ask Thompson to tone it down for fear he might be “scaring the Boy Scouts we have in the audience today.” Needless to say, his insane rant is YouTube gold. (more…)