By Alex Abella

If you think the Internet came out of Silicon Valley, that NASA planned the first satellite to orbit Earth, or that IBM created the modern computer—think again. Each one of these breakthroughs was conceived at RAND, a shadowy think tank in Santa Monica, California.

The Intimidation Factor

Rand rose out of the ashes of World War II. After witnessing the success of the Manhattan Project—the $2 billion initiative that created the first atomic bomb—a five-star Air Force general named Henry “Hap” Arnold (pictured) concluded that America needed a team of great minds to keep the country’s technology ahead of the rest of the world. In 1946, he gathered together a small group of scientists and $10 million in funding and started RAND (which stands for Research and Development). He even convinced a family friend, aircraft magnate Donald Douglas, to house the project at his factory in Santa Monica.

After a few short months, RAND got the attention of academics, politicians, and military strategists alike by issuing a prophetic study called “Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship.” At the time, rocket science was still in its infancy, so RAND’s call for an orbiting space station was revolutionary. Not only did the think tank specify the kind of fuel the spaceship would need and how quickly it could be built, but it also outlined how the station could predict the weather, transform long-distance communication, and, most importantly, intimidate our rivals abroad. If America could put a satellite into space, what else was she capable of?

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You remember the classic games but how well do you remember their great tunes? Turn up those speakers and take a nostalgic stroll down Theme Song Lane by naming the following 10 classic melodies.

Take the Quiz: Video Game Themes

I’m having a 1920s-themed party for my birthday in a few weeks and was all excited to serve old fashioned 1920s-style drinks. I thought it would be a perfect excuse to try out absinthe, which I have wanted to do ever since the tamed-down stuff was legalized in the U.S. a couple of years ago. Alas, a little research has dashed my hopes, because absinthe was declared illegal long before the Roaring Twenties hit. But if I ever do get the chance to give it a shot, I’ll be in good (crazy?) creative company:

1. Marilyn Manson is such an absinthe advocate that he even has his own brand of the stuff – the appropriately, if-not grossly named “Mansinthe.” But he doesn’t drink it. He prefers a brand called Serpis.
2. Ernest Hemingway once submitted a concoction he called “Death in the Afternoon” to a collection of celebrity recipes and allegedly wrote most of For Whom the Bell Tolls under the influence of the Green Fairy. The recipe: 1.5 ounces of absinthe with four ounces of ice-cold champagne. Hemingway even documented his absinthe-laden activities once: “Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.”
3. Oscar Wilde believed that absinthe helped his creative process, and said, “After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”

4. Van Gogh is rumored to have chopped his ear off during an absinthe binge. Some research has suggested that it’s even the reason that he used so much yellow in his works – thujone, a component of absinthe back in the day (it’s not in the legal stuff in the U.S. these days), has been shown to fuel creativity and cause yellow-tinged vision. (more…)

Writer and researcher Meg Holohan scours stacks of academic journals and texts to bring you all the science you need to know. Here’s this week’s edition.

A Fruit Fly Walks Into a Bar

For years, I’ve harbored dreams of sitting in a lab and getting fruit flies drunk for a living. But it seems that a bunch of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have beaten me to the (rum) punch. Ulrike Heberlein and Ammon Corl have been on the hunt for mutant fruit flies that can drink profusely without passing out. So, what helps a fruit fly hold its liquor? Apparently, it’s a variation on a gene called “happyhour.” (Who says scientists don’t have a sense of humor!) Without an active happyhour gene, flies can party all night long. But when the researchers turn the gene on, the fruit flies get drunk, pass out, and wake up hung-over (often regretting dancing on the bar and sending all those late night texts).Of course, the reality is that the similarities between fruit flies and their human bar fly cousins are staggering. According to Heberlein, “They go through a phase of hyperactivity and they gradually become uncoordinated; they stop moving and they fall over; and eventually they are unable to right themselves.” The hopes are that by understanding the gene, researchers will have insights on creating a medication to treat alcoholism in humans.

Impressing the Chicks

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Diane Benscoter devoted five years of her life to being a Moonie, a follower of Sun Myung Moon. After years in the church (which she now refers to as a cult), Benscoter left and became a “deprogrammer” (…until she was arrested for kidnapping in connection with a deprogramming attempt). In this TED Talk from early 2009, Benscoter describes her history, a bit about deprogramming, and how being a Moonie changed her brain — the specific logical process that led her to lock into the cult’s mindset, bypassing critical thinking. This is a quick talk (just over six minutes), but it raises some interesting points about why cults work; you can read a long Q&A with Benscoter to get more depth on her experience.

Discussed: how cults work psychologically, why people in cults think they need to save the world, viral memetic infection (hello Snow Crash).

Representative quote: “These easy [answers] to complex questions are very appealing when you’re emotionally vulnerable…. Circular logic takes over.”

WARNING: there are a few graphic images depicted in this talk (related to Jonestown and terrorism).

The next time your baby seems to find an endless source of energy for a tantrum, you can only blame yourself. After all, you might be feeding the little tyke rocket fuel. A study the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released earlier this year found that each of 15 baby formulas the CDC tested contained some amount of perchlorate, a key ingredient in rocket propellants. These results sound terrifying, but although high levels of perchlorate can potentially inhibit thyroid function, none of these formulas contained an unsafe amount of the naturally occurring chemical. This discovery might, however, explain the speed with which babies can crawl.

You’re muckin’ about at work, yeah? Whilst gettin’ the job done you’re havin’ a laugh, yeah? Well, according to The Office‘s spectacularly ridiculous protagonist (antagonist?) David Brent, that’s precisely the way it should be. If you’re fixin’ to have a go at a quiz based on the original British version of the Office, then you’ve come to the right place.

How much do you know about season one of the show that spawned Michael Scott, Pam Beasley and Jim Halpert? That David Brent is refreshingly laid back for a man of such responsibility. He’s basically a chilled-out entertainer, so…

Take the Quiz: The Office (UK Edition)

We’ve all had strange dreams: as a kid I was not in the least frightened by the Count Chocula character while awake, but I suffered through many a nightmare about him, his fangs dripping chocolate blood as he stalked me, Bela Lugosi-style, through the eerily empty halls of my school. God knows why. Other dreams make even less sense: I’m packing for a trip when there’s a knock at the door. It’s Fedex. For some reason, supreme court nominee Sandra Sotomayor has overnighted me a kitten.

So why does the brain produce this narrative junk? We still don’t know why for certain, but the last few decades have produced a number of interesting evolutionary theories that move beyond old-hat Jungian archetypes or Freudian “wish fulfillment,” and Scientific American’s Jesse Bering recently laid out the Darwinian contenders.

Brain conditioning

If your brain went completely dark all night, the theory goes, it would begin to lose function just as rarely-used muscles will atrophy.

Several researchers, including the psychophysiologist Fred Snyder, argued that the adaptive purpose of dreaming may therefore be primarily to stimulate the brain or to keep it “in shape” during prolonged periods of inactivity. Later research offered support for this general idea. For example, specific categories of neurotransmitters were shown to be highly active during this period, while others seemingly “rested.”

In other words, as psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, “Dreaming might be a kind of screen saver in which it doesn’t really matter what the content is as long as certain parts of the brain are active.”
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Play for your chance to WIN a $100 shopping spree in our store!

We’re back with another 5-day trivia hunt!

First let’s meet our current champion, and big $100 winner, Daniel Wilson. You can read all about him and see the answers to last month’s final puzzle here.

As comments have been turned off for the length of the 5-day hunt, be sure to hit us up via e-mail with questions if you find something in the instructions unclear.

As always, it pays to play whether you’re the first in with all the correct answers or not. In addition to the $100 shopping spree first-prize, we’re also giving away a $50 shopping spree in our store to one random winner who has all the right answers but isn’t the first to e-mail them in. Random winners sometimes submit all the correct answers/logic a full 48 hours after the closing bell, so don’t worry if you’re late or can’t submit your final answers at 8 pm ET next Monday.

Have fun with it, and, as always, don’t hesitate to work in teams and e-mail all your friends for help. Many, if not most of our past HDYK winners have been teams, not individuals.

If you’re new to the 5-day trivia hunt, be sure to see the rules and regulations page here. Also, we’ve now got a Facebook page which we’re going to use to drop cryptic clues now and then. Don’t worry, even if you’re not a Fan of our Facebook page, you can still view it through the link below, and, of course, you’ll still be able to solve all the puzzles, as normal, even if you don’t want to visit Facebook. But the Fan page will allow you to friend other contestants, form alliances, network and just hang out with other trivia nuts. So go check it out over here. Now on to our first challenge!

We’re going to start you off on the easy side today with a two-part challenge. Solve each part of the challenge and hold onto your answers until next week. Ready to play? Click on through to the challenge.

Believe it or not, there was a time when you went down to the dime store (yes, there were such things) or drug store and bought greeting cards to send to friends and family for special occasions. You could buy birthday greetings, get well cards, congratulations on your new baby, sympathy cards, and not much else. Now that the internet has made our world into a global marketplace, there are special greetings for occasions you’d have never thought of, in styles that no national distributor would’ve taken a chance on selling just ten years ago. Many ecards are free, which only forces sellers to raise the quality of greetings worth paying for. Niche greetings are not limited to ecards, either -you can buy paper greetings in a range of styles that would make Grandma’s eyes pop. This is by no means an exhaustive, or even representative list, just some greeting sources you may not be familiar with.

Depressing Times holiday cards

Order of St. Nick offers Depressing Times greeting cards for all occasions, because no matter how bad you’ve got it, someone else is worse off… and you may as well laugh about it instead of crying! The card shown is actually a birthday card. The 5×7 cards are printed on glossy cardstock and are made of 50% recycled fiber.

Some Ecards

Some Ecards uses the tag line “for when you care enough to hit send.” These greetings are free, but require registration. This company is right on top of the current buzz, with ecards available now on the topics of the Iranian protests and the death of Michael Jackson, as well as the example you see here. You can also customize cards with your own text, colors, and a huge library of images.

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