As of today, “Feel Art Again” has been a regular feature on mental_floss for 52 full weeks, having made its debut on September 26, 2007, with Caspar David Friedrich’s “Two Men Contemplating the Moon.” To celebrate this momentous occasion, today’s post is a journey through time, “Feel Art Again” style. Every artist in the past 52 weeks is listed below (linked to the original posts), arranged by artist’s birth year (since I don’t have dates for every painting).

1450 – 1550

Leonardo da Vinci, “Mona Lisa”
Albrecht Durer, “Self-Portrait at 26″
Michelangelo (di Lodovico Simoni), “Pietà”
Sanzio “Raphael” Raffaello, “The Three Graces”
Vecellio “Titian” Tiziano, “Portrait of Isabella of Portugal”
Giulio Romano (part of November Artists post)
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, “The Librarian”
Domenikos Theotokopoulos, “A Lady in a Fur Wrap”
(more…)

Ever order the second-cheapest wine on the menu while dining out? You don’t want to spend very much, but you also don’t want to look like a cheapskate ordering the cheapest bottle on the whole menu. Well, one in four diners do (in the UK, at least). In the marketing world, we can define this as a choice set effect with respect to reference pricing—using the cheapest bottle of wine as a standard of comparison against which the other wines are compared.

But did you know that the second-cheapest bottle is usually the worst value?
(more…)

Suzanne Vega’s catchy tune has made her “Mother of the MP3″ — though it took a while. Vega wrote “Tom’s Diner” as an a cappella song way back in 1982. By 1984 it has been released on an obscure folk compilation, and didn’t appear on Vega’s studio albums until 1987′s Solitude Standing. In 1990, the song was remixed by The DNA Disciples, adding a danceable beat and instrumentation — this version hit the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #5 in the US.

So what does this have to do with MP3? Well, after its release in 1987 audiophiles began using Vega’s a cappella track to test speaker systems for clarity. It was considered a good, warm recording of a human voice — something that could reveal flaws in an audio setup. Working at the Fraunhofer Society in Germany in the 90′s, audio engineer Karl-Heinz Brandenburg was hard at work developing the MP3 audio compression scheme. Brandenburg used Vega’s a cappella version of “Tom’s Diner” to tune the compression system, playing the track before and after compression was applied to tell whether MP3 sounded good enough. He figured Vega’s song would be a tough track to compress (as it was already favored by audiophiles), and would be a good test for whether MP3 was really listenable. Although many audiophiles ended up hating MP3, Brandenburg seems to have done pretty well for himself — MP3 became an incredibly popular technology. On the choice of “Tom’s Diner,” Brandenburg recalled: “I was ready to fine-tune my compression algorithm…somewhere down the corridor, a radio was playing ‘Tom’s Diner.’ I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a cappella voice.”

In last week’s New York Times, Vega reminisced about the song and her career as a “two-hit wonder” (the other hit was “Luka”). From her article:

So Mr. Brandenberg gets a copy of the song, and puts it through the newly created MP3. But instead of the “warm human voice” there are monstrous distortions, as though the Exorcist has somehow gotten into the system, shadowing every phrase. They spend months refining it, running “Tom’s Diner through the system over and over again with modifications, until it comes through clearly. “He wound up listening to the song thousands of times,” the article, written by Hilmar Schmundt, continued, “and the result was a code that was heard around the world. When an MP3 player compresses music by anyone from Courtney Love to Kenny G, it is replicating the way that Brandenburg heard Suzanne Vega.”

So goes the legend. The reason I know what that MP3 originally sounded like is that last year I was invited to the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, Germany, where I met the team of engineers who worked on the project — including Mr. Brandenberg, who I had met once before at the launch of the Mobile Music Forum in Cannes in 2001.

All the men are obviously intelligent, but Karl-Heinz is a character. He stands out, because he looks like a mad scientist. His hair and tie always look as if they have been blown askew in a stiff wind, and he taps the tips of his fingers together constantly, smiling beatifically.

Read the rest for one artist’s thoughts on her nearly thirty-year career in music — and the unexpected resonance of a song scribbled on paper back in 1982.

You always hear about how rich Bill Gates is, how rich Oprah is, how rich J.K. Rowling is. But none of them even make the top 10 richest people of all time. Compiled by Forbes magazine, this a list of the wealthiest people ever (EVAR!). They ranked these bazillionaires (my term, not theirs) according to the total GDP of the nation they lived in and adjusted their net worths to account for inflation as of 2007.

1. John D. Rockefeller, worth a staggering $318.3 billion. He could have funded nearly half of the bailout all on his own! He was America’s first-ever billionaire (not even including inflation). He was generous with his money, though, and gave away an estimated $550 million to various charities and foundations, including the ones he founded. When he was much older, he was known for giving money away wherever he went – dimes to adults and nickels to children.

2. Andrew Carnegie’s steel company earned him about $298.3 billion. Nothing to sneeze at. I recently visited his grave in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., and was surprised at how modest it was for a billionaire. Watch for more on my trip to the home of the Headless Horseman in a few weeks!

3. Nicholas II of Russia. $253.5 billion, inherited from his dad, Alexander III, who was the previous Emperor of Russia.
(more…)

Work hard, get promoted, succeed in your new post, and eventually you’ll start earning the big money. This progression seems like a firmly ingrained part of the American Dream, and it’s certainly worked for a lot of people.

However, these steps aren’t absolutely necessary to fatten your bank account, as Washington Mutual CEO Alan Fishman learned last week. When WaMu failed and was seized by government regulators, Fishman had been on the job for just 17 days. However, he was contractually guaranteed $11.6 million in cash severance on top of the $7.5 million signing bonus he got for taking the job. Basically, Fishman netted just under $20 million for 17 days of work, which is a pretty nice setup for the head of a collapsing corporation. (In Fishman’s defense, it’s tough to blame WaMu’s failure on his leadership alone; it seems highly unlikely that any CEO, however determined, could crash such a large thrift in just two weeks.)

Fishman’s not the only person to reap huge rewards for relatively little work. Here are few other well-compensated employees who didn’t have to put in too many years of service:

1. Michael Ovitz

(more…)

The products gracing the pages of the SkyMall Magazine provide guaranteed laughter, disbelief and audible exclamations of “Who would buy that?” In each question in today’s quiz, one product is actually for sale in SkyMall Magazine; the other is an invention that failed to secure a patent. Can you tell the difference?

Take the Quiz: Actual Skymall Product or Rejected Invention Patent?

Today we have a real treat: Scientific American writer/author George Musser joins us for a chat about his new book: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory. As always, we’ll be giving away a copy of the book in a special contest tomorrow. But, as always, you’ve got to read the interview if you want to be able to compete (knowing a lot about string theory might help, too).

DI: Okay, so let’s start with a real basic question: What the pluck is string theory?

GM: It’s one of the ways that physicists have proposed to unite physics. Although nature has a unity to it, the laws we use to explain nature don’t. Phenomena such as electricity, magnetism, and nuclear reactions are explained using one theory (quantum theory) and phenomena such as gravity and orbits are explained using another (Einstein’s general theory of relativity). We get away with that because those phenomena cleanly separate, but they don’t always. Black holes and the big bang require the use of both theories at once, and then you run into trouble, because the theories are incompatible. String theory aspires to reconcile them, to be a single theory that handles everything. I’d be tempted to call it the “uniter not a divider” if someone else hadn’t already taken that phrase.

String theory may be the deepest level of physical reality — the wellspring from which all else flows. It takes all the zillions of different types of matter and forces and suggests that they are aspects of *one* type of thing, a string, like a tiny guitar string or tiny rubber band. By vibrating in different ways, such a string can play the role of an electron or a quark or a photon or whatever other type of particle you like. You don’t even need to pluck the string. Because of quantum effects, it plucks itself. Whether that is a mental image appropriate for a family-oriented website, I leave up to you.

[Read on for George’s thoughts on string theory and time travel, the 10th dimension, D-branes, and a whole lot more.]

(more…)

Life is not the same today as it was yesterday. A quick scan of the news headlines reveals that the Dow posted record losses, Ed McMahon is being sued (again!), and the Detroit Lions didn’t lose. (Okay, it was their bye week.) It’s singlehandedly up to me, your humble research editor and quizmaster, to keep mental_floss afloat in this sea of confusion and dismay. And you know what that means: a T-shirt sale!

Actually, we’re offering a sale on everything in our store. Just key in the coupon code BAILOUT and enjoy a ten percent discount on your purchase. When you’re done, bask in the glow of the pride you feel for helping to keep mental_floss running smoothly – and then give today’s Brain Game a shot! Here it is:

Beyond back issues of the magazine, T-shirts were one of the first items we offered in the mental_floss store. Our best-selling shirt is nicknamed Pluto, followed by Rhesus, Pi, Scurvy and Pavlov.

For the upcoming holidays, Penny bought one each of these five T-shirts for her siblings, Benny, Denny, Jenny, Kenny and Lenny. But who received which shirt? Here are four clues to help you come up with your answer: 

NOTE: for those of you with monitors that don’t show it well,
the two shirts with two-color printing are Pluto and Pi.

HERE is the solution.

The English Channel (La Manche) is the part of the Atlantic Ocean that separates Britain from France. The actual channel is the length of the entire southern coast of England, and contains many inhabited islands. When people attempt new ways of crossing the channel, they do it at the Strait of Dover, which is the narrowest point of the channel at only 34 kilometers (21 miles) between Dover and Calais. The cachet of crossing the channel is way out of proportion to its distance. There is something symbolic about making the trip, particularly if you do it in a new way.

1. Balloon

The first channel crossing by air was in the 18th century. French balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American doctor John Jeffries took off from Dover Castle in a hydrogen balloon on January 7th, 1785. The two had to pitch almost everything they took overboard in order to stay afloat, but landed unharmed at Guînes, France about two and a half hours later.

2. Swim

The first man to swim the channel was Captain Matthew Webb in 1875. It took 21 hours and 45 minutes. Webb trained for two years and made an unsuccessful attempt a couple of weeks before his historic crossing. The course he took was 39 miles, due to strong currents. He became a celebrity and a professional swimmer afterward. Webb died while attempting to swim the Whirlpool Rapids under Niagara Falls in 1883.
(more…)

A privately developed rocket, the Falcon 1 by Space X has made it into space. It passed above the International Space Station on Sunday. With video.
*
The 10 Most Famous Preserved Body Parts. Don’t bother looking for Rasputin; he’s not here. (via Look at This)
*
The Cab Ride I’ll Never Forget. A small gesture can sometimes mean the world to someone who needs it. (via YesButNoButYes)
*
12 Greek Words You Should Know. You probably already use them, but do you use them properly?
*
The Night the Knickerbocker Theater’s Roof Collapsed. One man’s eyewitness account of a disaster that killed 98 people.
*
Wired’s Guide to Green Travel. You can see the world without destroying it -if you plan ahead a little.
*
Conjoined twin Abby and Brittany Hensel turn 16. Yes, they had to take the driver’s test twice.
*
If you liked Periodic Tableware, you’ll enjoy More Periodic Tableware. The periodic table can be adapted to many purposes besides elements.