Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, and died just one day short of his 85th birthday, on April 1, 1976. At the request of readers Peter and Lauren, today’s “Feel Art Again” post features the German artist, who is considered by some to be the “purest surrealist painter.” (Shown above is his 1943 “Vox Angelica.”)

1. During the First World War, Max Ernst was conscripted into the Germany army to serve as an artillery engineer. The traumatic experience prompted Ernst to write in his autobiography, “Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914.” Ernst further emphasized his point by writing, “You cannot save a man who has already been dead. And I had been dead since the first ‘World War.’”

2. Apparently, Ernst first got drunk at the tender age of 2, when he drank the dregs from his father’s wine. The young boy was discovered in the garden, pointing at trees and saying, “Look, they’re going round.”

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Have you ever strolled along outside, serenaded by a lovely song, only to look up and not know to whom you owe thanks for such a sweet sound? Is that a nuthatch you see, or a chickadee? Bunting or sparrow? Let’s see if you can match these familiar birds to their common names.

Take the Quiz: Bird Watching

This week’s G20 summit meeting has put London on alert. City workers have been told to stay home or dress more casually to avoid being targeted by protestors, while police prepare for the thousands of G20 demonstrators expected to flood London’s Canary Wharf. If you’re seeing shades of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, where days of rioting resulted in more than 500 arrests and $2.5 million in damages to the city, so are the cops.

What Exactly is the G20?

The G20, more officially known as the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, includes banking ministers from 19 of the world’s wealthiest economies, plus the European Union. The group’s inaugural meeting was held in 1999 in Berlin, to strengthen international financial architecture and to foster economic development on a global scale. The member countries represent 80% of the world’s trade, two-thirds of the world’s population, and roughly 90% of the global gross national product. A few of the countries include the US, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. Basically, the G20 summit gets all of the people who control economy in one room at least once (or in 2008’s case, twice) a year, and asks them to make decisions about things. Whether or not that actually accomplishes anything isn’t immediately evident. The existence of the meeting, however, provides a wonderful physical focal point for the masses of people angry at the current direction of the global economy.

Security Issues

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Broadway in Chicago recently held a conference on the topic of transforming books into Broadway Musicals, partially due to the success of “Wicked,” the longest running Broadway Musical in Chicago history. But “Wicked” wasn’t the first work of literature to be interpreted through song on the stage. Here are ten Broadway musicals based on books.

1. “Wicked,“ “the untold story of the witches of Oz,” is based upon the best-selling novel by Gregory Maguire, which parallels L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz.” The story follows the friendship of Glinda, the good witch, and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and what transpired before Dorothy dropped in and started causing trouble. In 2003, “Wicked” opened in New York and quickly became a favorite among Broadway buffs, winning three Tony awards. Success birthed tours across the U.S. and productions worldwide. More than three million people have seen this play that imagines the lives of two “misunderstood” characters.
2. “Les Miserables” is my (and “American Psycho” Patrick Bateman’s) favorite Broadway Musical of all time! Based on one of my favorite books of all time, the 1862 classic by Victor Hugo, in 2006, “Les Miserables” officially became the longest running musical in London’s West End history. The original French version of the musical opened in 1980, but soon closed because of budget shortages, even though audiences loved it. In 1985, the Royal Shakespeare Company put on the first English production. Revolving around the themes of revolution and redemption, “Les Miserables” has been seen worldwide in dozens of languages.

3. “The Woman in White,” written by Wilkie Collins in 1859, was adapted by Andrew Lloyd Weber into a musical in 2004. Original star Michael Crawford, who played the grossly obese Count Fosco, had to be replaced by his understudy when he fell ill from over-sweating in the fat suit.

4. “Jane Eyre,” a musical based on the novel by Charlotte Brontë, premiered in Wichita, Kansas, with many locals cast in chorus roles and the main characters performed by Broadway professionals. After the small-stage success, the musical slowly transitioned to the Broadway stage in 2000. “Jane Eyre” featured songs about blindness, because at the end of the novel, Mr. Rochester is stricken blind after his estate burns down. (more…)

Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal brings us a smart article on overvalued points in games. In short, the issue is that rule changes in games like Scrabble (allowing new words like “qi” and “za”) allow players a new way to exploit the system, throwing it out of balance. Some high-level players argue that when a rule change allows in new high-value type of play (like “za”), the overall scoring system needs to change to account for it, rebalancing the game. Others disagree, seeing the rule change as a simple evolution of the game’s already-complex rules. From Bialik’s piece:

For some — especially opponents — “za” is too cheap and easy. The New Yorker recently published a letter from Matthew Butterick, a Los Angeles lawyer and Scrabble player, bemoaning the preservation of the original tile values as long as the new words are being added. He acknowledges changing the rules might hurt his won-loss record: “I realized that fewer people wanted to play me because I like to use words like ‘xi’ and ‘xu,’ which most casual players consider to be a form of black magic.”

Larry Sherman, who has been ranked as high as 35th by the National Scrabble Association, also would like to see score changes. “X, Q, Z and J were originally assigned high values because of their rarity in our language,” Mr. Sherman says. “Dictionary additions that make it much easier to use these letters contradict the game’s internal logic.”

But his brother Joel, a former champion, responds, “Good players adapt their play to the changes in the dictionary; changing the values only accommodates weak players.”

The argument of those wanting to rebalance the tile scores seems to hinge on an assumption that the original game (in this case, Scrabble) was perfectly balanced — meaning that the letter scores and the allowed word list were somehow in perfect harmony. As a nonprofessional (and indeed, sort of bad) Scrabble player myself, this seems unlikely — the official Scrabble word list (see SOWPODS) is huge, and its relationship with the tile scores is unimaginably complex. Letting in new words undoubtedly changes the balance in some way, but it seems that only the highest-level professional players will ever notice…and haven’t they already benefited from such imbalances throughout the game’s history? Bialik points out that this problem is not isolated to Scrabble:

For amateurs, these are hard points to come by. But as professional kickers have specialized and improved their technique, field goals have become more common. National Football League teams last season made nearly 85% of field goals, compared with barely 60% in 1974, according to Brian Burke of Advanced NFL Stats. There were two successful field goals for every three touchdowns last season, compared with barely two for every five touchdowns in 1974.

Read the article for a nice overview of the issue, including an image showing Alfred Butts’s original letter frequency tabulation.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user garlandcannon, used under Creative Commons license.)

The Breakdown

Newton’s résumé is certainly more diverse; he’s got the gravity thing, calculus, his contributions to optics, and his laws of motion. Each of those things would make him a standout genius in history. Beethoven, though, has scores of brilliant compositions and the impressive feat that he overcame deafness to write them. Beethoven was the central figure in music’s transition from Classicism to Romanticism, while Newton was able to formulate calculus while he was stuck at home for two years during a plague outbreak. Neither of these guys is a slouch, but who gets the genius nod?

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[See the whole bracket here.]

After we floated the idea of a dog breed quiz, our loyal readers overwhelmed our inbox with photos of their dogs. We’ve picked 15 of those pictures. How well do you know your dog breeds?

Take the Quiz: What Kind of Dog Is That?

Sporting toxic saliva and shark-like razor sharp teeth, the Komodo dragon is one fierce predator. But they rarely attack humans. Which is why the recent fatal Komodo dragon attack on a fruit picker is big news. It’s also why we’ve decided to cover a few other attacks by rare animals. Or rare attacks involving animals. Or just weird encounters with animals.

1. Paris Hilton Attacked

Perhaps striking a blow for vanity animals everywhere, Baby Luv, Paris Hilton’s illegal pet kinkajou, bit the heiress and “star,” resulting in a trip to the emergency room for Paris and expulsion from the Hilton way of life for Baby Luv. A kinkajou is a rainforest mammal that is related to raccoons and looks a bit like the illicit love child of a ferret and a monkey. While they rarely attack humans, Baby Luv evidently made an exception for Paris. It wasn’t the first time Baby Luv showed Paris no love: A year before, Baby scratched Paris’s face whilst the two were out shopping together.

2. Lamb vs. Eagle

Weird things happen in Scotland, it’s true. According to a recently released report on the wildlife of the Outer Hebrides, the island chain off the west coast of Scotland, a lamb was seen head-butting a golden eagle. How exactly a lamb could head-butt an eagle is unclear, but evidently

the lamb spotted the eagle flying low over a rabbit and, in a show of solidarity with its fellow Easter creatures, attacked the eagle.

No word on what happened next or if both made it out of the scrap unscathed.

3. Bambi on a Rampage

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We apologize for the site going down last night. You’ve heard of the famous half-time toilet bowl flush? We think we may have had a similar click situation last night, as the masses tried to load the final puzzle. To make it up to you, we’ve decided NOT to award one winner, but to award prizes to any team, or individual, who gets all the answers correct. We’ll keep the contest open until Midnight ET tomorrow night.

To raise the stakes even more, we’ll be awarding THREE $50 gift-cards to THREE random semi-grand-prize winning teams, redeemable in our store.

So the hunt is back on. All you have to do is send in all the right answers this month, and you’re a guaranteed winner! That’s lemonade from lemons, no?

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We’ve reached the last day of our week-long trivia hunt! If you’re still with us, congrats on getting this far. But even if you don’t have all the answers yet, don’t forget: there still may be time to solve the puzzle, working backwards from today’s final challenge.

You never know how long it’s going to take for someone to send in ALL the correct answers to ALL the challenges along the path. And even if you aren’t the first, there’s always the second place $50 prize, which we award at random. Random winners have even submitted up to 48 hours after the closing bell, so it always pays to send in your work, no matter when you finish.

If you missed any of last week’s challenges, you can find them here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4.

Now, after the jump, I present the final puzzle drawing on answers you’ve unearthed all along the trail.

See you back here on April 21st for the next HDYK?

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It’s an everyday tragedy of the modern world: you have a favorite piece of clothing that fits just so, but when it comes out of the wash, it’s shrunk. Did you offend the clothing gods with your style? Is Maytag in league with American Apparel to keep you buying new clothes? No. In fact, your shrunken clothes didn’t even really shrink. Let’s take a look at what’s going on.

The name’s Bond, Broken Bond

A cotton t-shirt is made of cloth — made of woven together threads, which are in turn made up of cotton fibers. These fibers are constructed of long molecular chains, which are linked end-to-end by hydrogen bonds. As the fibers are spun into thread and the thread is woven into cloth, the fibers and the polymers they’re made of get pulled, stretched and twisted and the hydrogen bonds holding everything together get stressed.

This stress is relieved when you throw the shirt in the wash. The energy in the heat and agitation that clothes are exposed to during washing and drying break the stressed out bonds and the polymers are free to relax and return to their natural, pre-stretching size. In turn, the fibers, the threads and the cloth get smaller and you wind up with a shirt just big enough to fit the cat (come here, Mittens, it’s time to play dress up!)

Wooly Bully

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