I don’t know if I saw a quick clip of My Fair Lady recently or exactly what happened, but I’ve been going around saying “ello” to people for nearly a week now. And yes, most of them hate me for it. But as work imitates life, Kara and I decided to put together an “ello” quiz just for your mental_floss folks. Feel free to return here and comment with your scores. Enjoy!

Take the Quiz: ‘ello there!

P.S.: The reason the quiz doesn’t include a JELL-O question? JELL-O has a nasty hyphen. Now you know.

In New York City, celebrity sightings happen on street corners and even on street signs.  You can play a tune on Duke Ellington Boulevard or read the headlines on Peter Jennings Way. In Champaign Illinois, you can rock out on REO Speedwagon Way, and in Augusta, Georgia, you can find your soul on James Brown Boulevard.

Historians Benardo and Weiss write in their book Brooklyn by Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges and More Got Their Names that, “Street names function as a barometer of social values at a given time, and as such have historical significance that goes beyond a name.”

That’s exactly why sometimes cities have to undo their street renamings. In Brooklyn, Corbin Place was named after Austin Corbin who was a longtime Brooklyn developer and the president of the Long Island Rail Road for fifteen years. Corbin was also a member of the American Society for the Suppression of Jews and once said “If this is a free country, why can’t we be free of the Jews?” (more…)

Some of you might have seen this little flash-based brain game. Whenever my mother forwards me something, I have to assume at least half the moms in America have already seen it. Nevertheless, I thought it was appropriate for the _floss for two reasons:

1) If you haven’t played the game, you’ll probably dig it and
2) We’re giving away two cool new books to two lucky winners

Here’s how you play. Click the link and then click start. Numbers will appear and then disappear. Your job is to memorize the numbers’ respective positions and then click on them starting with the smallest and proceeding on up in order to the largest.

After 10 rounds, the program will calculate your brain’s age.

I tried it a couple times and scored a 27 and then a 24, which made me feel pretty good since I’m practically twice that.

Post your lowest score in the comments, along with your actual age. We’ll give away two books*: one to the first person with the absolute lowest score and one to the person with the biggest difference between actual brain age and brain age according to this fun game (please post your math, too).

All we ask is that you tell the truth, of course… because what fun would it be if you embellish or stretch or otherwise warp the actual results?

* The two new books I have sitting on my desk right now, waiting to be claimed, are: Adam Nimoy’s just released ‘anti-memoir’ My Incredible Wonderful, Miserable Life (yes, son of Leonard) and Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky’s Mission Accomplished! How We Won The War In Iraq.

Want a 100 billion dollar bill? Well it’s yours for $199, $49.72, or as low as $25 if you act fast. The only problem – these Zimbabwean banknotes can’t even buy a loaf of bread, and are only worth about $1 US dollar each.

But hyper-inflated bills aren’t even the most outrageous banknotes in history. The Economist lists the highest-denomination national banknotes since 1900. They are:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Hungary Pengo, 1946

100,000,000,000,000 Germany Papiermark, 1923

500,000,000,000 Former Yugoslavia Dinar, 1993

100,000,000,000 Zimbabwe Dollar, 2008

100,000,000,000 Greece Drachma, 1944

50,000,000 Poland Marka, 1923

It’s funny that if you stare at the first few lines of digits for a while, suddenly a 50,000,000 Marka bill almost makes sense! Pictured below are the Pengo and the Drachma mentioned above.

Pop songs. They’re the fast food of the music world. But if you think pop is a relatively recent invention, then you’ve got it wrong. The first pop song? Well… that’s not so easy. Here are ten candidates.

1. “Summer is Icumen In” (c.1239)

Why it might be the one: It didn’t tell a story, or sing praise to God. Like most pop songs, it was about… nothing, really. Welcome to the Seinfeld of mediaeval music.

In medieval times, courts employed minstrels (or “jongleurs”) to sing sagas or legends, as much to pass on information as for entertainment. These guys would bring their songs on the road, spreading them through the villages. But musical notation (in the West, at least) wasn’t invented until around 1020, to make sure that every church parish was chanting the same tune. In the early days, most notated songs were hymns.

Possibly the first major piece of non-hymnal music to find a mass audience was “Summer is Icumen In,” which predates the printing press by at least 150 years. After Johannes Gutenberg’s invention came to England, however, it was published in all its glory. Here was a song in six parts (unheard of at the time), sung in an endless “round.” Rather than praising God, it simply extolled the joys of summer, like so many later pop songs. “Summer is icumen in,” it began. “lhude sing cuccu.” (Or “Summer has arrived, loud sing the cuckoo.”) Was it popular enough to be the first “pop” song? Maybe… but if we said “yes,” this would be a really short list.

2. “Greensleeves” (c.1580)

(more…)

What makes this cursive rendition of the word “chump” rather odd?

HERE’S the answer.

The British Mrs. O’Leary: Thomas Farynor, royal baker to King Charles II of England

His “Cow”: His oven, which sparked a fire in the middle of the night on September 1, 1666.

Oops: Around 2 a.m., smoke woke up the Farynor family and their servants in the house above the bakery. Luckily, the entire lot managed to escape—all except for one maid who was too frightened to run and became the fire’s first victim. The blaze quickly spread, but surprisingly, the conflagration alarmed almost nobody. People from around the neighborhood crawled out of bed to watch it and, when the mayor of London was brought by later that morning, he declared it small enough that “a woman might piss it out.” Yes, that’s a direct quote. But by mid-afternoon, the time to extinguish the fire in said manner had passed. Fed by a dry wind and London’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of flammable objects, it burned for five days, wiping out some 13,000 homes and razing 80 percent of the city. (more…)

Beijing has set up a sex determination lab to test female Olympic athletes suspected to be males. Sometimes it’s just not that simple.
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There are blue stars, red stars, and yellow stars. Why are there no green stars?
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Take a nice relaxing flight. There, isn’t that soothing?
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10 Things You Should Know About the Internet. Just so you won’t sound like a n00b at the next geekfest.
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The gender gap in math has disappeared! That is, unless someone has miscalculated the data.
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The World’s Worst Olympians. Some countries don’t bring home many medals, but they have their reasons. They should receive kudos for just making the attempt.
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Watch the Laser Kitty with bobblehead action! Too bad his fat brother won’t chase a laser like that.
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Snowclones. They may sound delicious, but it’s a grammar term for a type of phrase you probably use all the time.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. Birmingham, ALA. Today, at 4:15pm EST, the editorial board of mental_floss magazine kept their promise to  readers and turned their blog’s RSS feed back to full blast. The feed had been temporarily disabled due to hacking issues. The gushing stream of full RSS stories hitting inboxes around the nation was quickly followed by cheers heard across America, and the popping of champagne corks distribution of celebratory juice boxes around the magazine’s headquarters.
“This is a great day for mental_floss and this is a great day for our readers!” exclaimed a triumphant Will Pearson, President of the company. “But mostly this is a great day for mental_floss.” The comment was nearly drowned out by the thunderous sounds of high-fiving and back patting taking place.

Readers interested in subscribing to the mental_floss’ RSS feeds can do so by clicking on the RSS button within the Site Tools box, generally located above the dreamy personal of the day.

Most clocks are built to keep time on fairly short timescales: windup watches may run a few days between windings, torsion pendulum clocks go about a year between windings, battery-powered watches often go several years on a given battery, and of course electrical clocks plugged into mains power run as long as that power is provided. All of these inventions require continuous human intervention to operate, and even more attention to keep the clocks accurately set to the current time. But what if you’re thinking long-term…really long term? In 1986, Danny Hillis (previously mentioned here) envisioned a clock that would autonomously keep time for 10,000 years. Hillis said, “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.” Although the first prototype of the clock doesn’t have a cuckoo per se (it made a “bong” sound), it was up and running for the millennium transition in 2000. (It’s pictured at left.)

Now known alternately as The 10,000 Year Clock or The Clock of the Long Now, this “world’s slowest computer” is intended to foster long-term thinking. It’s an interesting notion, and its proponents at The Long Now Foundation have even taken to referring to years with a leading zero, like 02008…emphasizing the notion that history’s sweep encompasses many thousands of years, and thus long-term thinking is critical to humanity’s long-term survival. Here’s a quote from Hillis’s original article on the clock:

I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now? …

Ten thousand years — the life span I hope for the clock — is about as long as the history of human technology. We have fragments of pots that old. Geologically, it’s a blink of an eye. When you start thinking about building something that lasts that long, the real problem is not decay and corrosion, or even the power source. The real problem is people. If something becomes unimportant to people, it gets scrapped for parts; if it becomes important, it turns into a symbol and must eventually be destroyed. The only way to survive over the long run is to be made of materials large and worthless, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, or to become lost. The Dead Sea Scrolls managed to survive by remaining lost for a couple millennia. Now that they’ve been located and preserved in a museum, they’re probably doomed. I give them two centuries — tops.

If ultra-long-term thinking interests you, check out The Long Now Foundation’s page on the clock. There’s also a good Wikipedia page which summarizes many design considerations. Tomorrow I’ll have some trivia on designing art that will be placed in the chamber with the clock.