First, examine the equation below.

Obviously, this equation is false. There are a few ways we could alter the equation to make it true, such as removing the + from the left side and the × from the right side to make both sides read 1111. This maneuver would NOT solve today’s Brain Game, however. Too easy. Your goal:

Find a way to insert the SAME SINGLE MARK to the SAME SPOT
on both sides of the equation in order to make it true.

What if the internet were a musical? It would be called Web Site Story, and would make you snigger at its cleverness.
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Censoring information in the mainstream news media is a lot easier than controlling information on Wikipedia, even when lives are at stake. The case of kidnapped journalist David Rohde is a thought-provoking example.
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Have you ever seen a guy jump out of a helicopter into the ocean to catch a huge game fish with his bare hands? Well, you’re in luck today!
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Words That Changed Their Meanings. Popular usage trumps original usage, especially when “…the actual meaning is the complete opposite of the literal meaning.”
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5 Pathetic Groups That People Think Rule the World. A primer to keep your worldwide conspiracies straight.
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There, I Fixed It collects evidence of “adventures in home pwnership”. As scary as these repairs are, they show the genius of making do with what you have.
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8 Examples of Witty Knitting. If you can visualize it, someone can knit it.

After the Beatles, Radiohead may one day rank as the most-covered band of all time. It seems like everyone wants to take a crack at recreating the odd rhythms and melodies the band is famous for (even if most vocalists can’t match Thom Yorke’s distinctive wail), and over the years a very diverse group of artists have tried their hand at bits of Radiohead’s body of work. Here are some of the most interesting I’ve found. (PS, we’ll be mixing it up a bit on this edition of “late movies,” with a few sound clips in addition to film clips.)

Easy Star All-Stars – “Karma Police”
The Easy Star All-Stars are known for their dub-style covers of entire albums. They’ve done three thus far: Dub Side of the Moon, a cover of the legendary Pink Floyd album its title so clearly echoes, RadioDread, from which this track is culled, and most recently, the Lonely Hearts Dub Band, a really interesting reinterpretation of Sgt. Pepper’s.

Pianist Christopher O’Reilly is famous for reinterpreting Radiohead songs. Here’s his take on “Exit Music for a Film.”

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In Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing universe, Josiah Bartlet was first elected President on November 3, 1998—ten years ago today. (Well, it was ten years ago when we first ran this quiz.) To mark the occasion, here are ten questions about the fictitious Bartlet Administration.

Take the Quiz: The West Wing

If you enjoyed the TED Talk I pointed to last week, How Brain Damage Reveals Brain Function, I have a treat for you. Here’s a ninety-minute lecture by the same speaker (V.S. Ramachandran), in which he talks about how the human brain deals with visual art. Why do we enjoy art? How do we know what is “good” art? How does the brain process metaphors? What does neurology tell us about how the brain processes visual information? This is a great way to spend an hour and a half — it’s enlightening, entertaining, and most of all, very flossy. You can watch the video (sadly, in low quality) here, and there’s even a link to download it for your iPod.

Representative quote: “The purpose of art is not realism…. The purpose of art is not copying reality. The purpose of art is hyperbole, exaggeration, distortion…to produce pleasing effects in the viewer’s brain.”

Discussed: Capgras Syndrome, synesthesia, metaphor, Indian art, European art, other art, and the neurology of art. (Also more art.)

On June 30, 1859, a French acrobat added something new to the already-dangerous trend of performing crazy stunts at Niagara Falls: he crossed its gorge on a tightrope. We’ll get to him in a minute, but first, a few other people decided to seek their fame by risking their lives at the Falls (and one who didn’t mean to).

1. Sam Patch was kind of the first Evel Knieval. In early October of 1829, Sam, AKA “The Yankee Leapster,” jumped from a 125-foot ladder that was extended out over the river. He was supposed to jump at noon, but just before he was scheduled to jump, the wind snapped a piece of the ladder off. It was rescheduled for 4 p.m., and that time, it went off without a hitch. He jumped and the crowd waited with bated breath, staring at the spot where he was supposed to appear – but he never did. Finally, he crawled to shore in an unexpected spot and his short-lived daredevil career was born. Sam did the same jump again several days later – to a bigger audience, of course – and then went on to jump into the Genesee River. The first time worked, but the second time was his undoing. Just a month after his Niagara Falls jump, Sam Patch leapt into the Genesee and never came out. His frozen body was discovered in the thawing river in the early spring of 1830. The epitaph on his gravestone reads, “Sam Patch – Such is Fame.”

2. Annie Edson Taylor was the first person to ever go over the Falls in a barrel and survive. In 1901, the 60-something-year-old schoolteacher commissioned a custom-made barrel made of oak and iron and lined with a mattress. To test it out, Taylor sent a cat over the Falls five days prior to her jump – and it made the trip intact. Annie made the same trip several days later, and she made the trip intact as well, although she did suffer a gash on her head. She made it quite clear that the trip was anything but fun and that she never intended to do it again: “I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces, than make another trip over the Fall.”

3. Blondin (Jean Francois Gravelet) was a French tight-rope walker who shimmied his way across the Falls in 1859. At 160 feet above the water (some reports say 190 feet), Gravelet walked 1100 feet from one side to the other. It took him 17 and a half minutes. And he wasn’t content to do it just once – he did it blindfold, he did it on stilts, he did it carrying his manager on his back, he did it at night with locomotive lights shining the way and he did it carrying a table and chairs. The plan was to sit down and enjoy a piece of cake and some champagne, but when he lost the chair, he sat on the cable instead and had his snack before finishing the journey. The American people loved him and he was known as the hero of the falls, but there was at least one person who was unimpressed: Mark Twain. He referred to Blondin as “That adventurous ass.” He died of complications relating to diabetes at the age of 72.

4. Maria Spelterini proved that women can do anything men can do by repeating Blondin’s tightrope stunts in 1876. To date, she is the only woman to ever do so. Like Blondin, she crossed several times after the first time, with each trip getting more and more complicated. The second time she crossed with a peach basket strapped to each foot, the third time she was blindfolded, and the fourth time she crossed with her ankles and wrists handcuffed. (more…)

When Yankees closer Mariano Rivera came up to bat against the Mets last night, even the legendary reliever’s teammates were smiling and snickering. For all of Rivera’s dominance on the mound, he’d spent his entire 15-year career as an American League relief pitcher, a position that offers few chances to bat. It’s not all that surprising, then, that nobody expected much when Rivera picked up a bat for his third career plate appearance against Mets closer Francisco Rodriguez with the bases loaded. When Rivera managed to work a walk, he forced home a valuable insurance run in what had been a tight 3-2 game, but he also got something even more interesting: his first career RBI.

Fifteen years seems like a long time to wait for an RBI, but it’s hardly the only long wait we’ve seen. Take a look at these five streaks of futility that seemed like they’d never end:

1. Yinka Dare Learns to Share

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It’s Monday. You’ve had a nice, long, idle weekend, and—what’s this? Someone who says they’re your boss wants you to do work?! Well, we’ll have none of that, will we? Of course not – this is the internet.

Frittering away hours in front of mental_floss’ Amazing Fact Generator is always an option. But here are 10 other easy ways to put off whatever you’re supposed to be doing while also getting your knowledge fix.

1. Learn at the speed of random

Everyone loves Wikipedia, right? Well, maybe not the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica. But one of the niftiest features of the free online encyclopedia is the “random article” link. There are nearly 3 million articles on the site, so for solitary procrastinators, clicking it is a great way to blow off some steam and to be exposed to new facts.

But if you have two or more people in the room, the random function gets really interesting: you can use it to play an intensely competitive game, called “The Wikipedia Game” (creative title, eh?). Here’s how it works: a player clicks the “random article” link once and gets a start page; then, he clicks it again and gets an end page. The players race to navigate from the start page to the end page, using only the links within the article (no category links, and no editing articles—that’s cheating!). The first person to reach the end page yells “Done!” and must read back their clicking history. If their history checks out, then they become the player who retrieves the starting and ending articles for the next round. If you’re organizing a few rounds of the Wikipedia Game, remember: the more people playing, the better.

2. Learn how to do anything

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Maybe it’s the apocalyptic mood everyone seems to be in lately — just look at how many of this summer’s blockbusters feature the End of Everything — or North Korea’s increasingly bellicose nuke-talk (are they really going to shoot a missile at Hawaii this Saturday?) but lately I’ve found myself checking out vintage (and some not-so-vintage) footage of nuclear bombs exploding on YouTube, and it’s really hypnotic stuff. Soothing almost. (Hey, at least the end of the world will look cool.) I also discovered a few nuclear devices I didn’t know existed. Like —

The Nuclear Rifle

Known as the “Davy Crockett,” it’s the smallest tactical nuke ever built, developed (but never deployed) in the 50s for use by field troops in a potential ground invasion. Part of the thinking was that in addition to the destructive power of the explosion itself, the fallout from the nuclear rifle’s blast would halt enemy troop advance for a few days (as soldiers sickened with radiation poisoning aren’t much good to either side), long enough to call in NATO reinforcements. The trouble was, the Davy Crockett’s firing range was just three miles, which wouldn’t get the nuke far enough away from the side that had fired it to protect them from nuclear fallout.

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Released in 1985, the Garbage Pail Kids were the back alley answer to the too-cute Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. The cards, created by Art Spiegelman, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his graphic novel Maus, were disgusting, violent, hilarious, and very clever. As with most things from the ’80s, GPK cards are back again – currently on the seventh series of all-new, even more disgusting cards for kids to collect.

I know I had a stack of them. Did you? Let’s see if you remember who’s who in this gross-out gallery of great childhood memories.

Take the Quiz: Garbage Pail Kids