It wasn’t so many years ago, you’ll remember, that the Internet was just a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye. Soon after its birth came Compuserv, local-area dial-up bulletin board systems, AOL — and a slew of TV segments and how-to videos designed to address the question that seemed to be on just about everyone’s mind in the early 90s: just what is the Internet? (And to a lesser degree: what do I do with it?) Witness this gem from a 1994 edition of the Today show:

More prevalent were videos like this, handy primers on things like “electronic mail” and how to get dates, find jobs, and do homework on the Internet. Also, check out these sweet computer graphics!

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When Arnold Schwarzenegger was Governor of California, he sometimes sounded like he was acting in a summer blockbuster. In this quiz, we’ll give you 10 quotes. Can you tell if he said them in a movie or in his political career?

Take the Quiz: Where Did Arnold Say It?

If you attend a Super Bowl party on Sunday, you’ll probably hear at least one casual football viewer ask, “How do they get that yellow first-down line on the field?” While “magic” is a fine answer in its own right, the real explanation is a bit more technologically intense. Let’s have a look at the background and mechanics behind every football fan’s shining beacon, the yellow first-down line.

Like the first-down line, football fans? You owe a tip of your cap to an unlikely source: hockey. According to Allen St. John’s 2009 book The Billion Dollar Game, the first-down line actually emerged from the ashes of one of sports broadcasting’s bigger debacles: the FoxTrax system for hockey, which was designed by a company called Sportvision. FoxTrax – which hockey fans no doubt remember as the much-maligned “technopuck” that debuted in 1996 – employed a system of cameras and sensors around a hockey rink to place a little blue halo around the puck.

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As I mentioned last week, the actual Super Bowl game isn’t really my thing. If you’re in the same boat as I am, but still want to compete when people are spouting off obscure stats and trivia, try tossing in a little, “Yeah, Roethlisberger is great. Did you know the smiley face emoticon was invented in Pittsburgh?”

1. Pittsburg, Pittsburgh or Pittsbourgh? The town was named in 1758 by Scotsman John Forbes, who was honoring William Pitt the Elder. Forbes sent a letter to Pitt the same year to let him know that the city had been named for him, and in the letter he spelled it “Pittsbourgh.” Most experts agree that as a Scotsman, Forbes probably pronounced it the same way we pronounce Edinburgh. It wasn’t until 1769 that the “Pittsburgh” spelling first turned up on a surveying document, but the real controversy came with the 1891 United States Board on Geographic Names ruling that all towns with the spelling “burgh” needed to drop the “h.” Many people were outraged at the decision and refused to follow the rules, even the Pittsburgh Gazette, the University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Stock Exchange. In 1911, the Geographic Board gave in and officially restored the “h” that was never really missing for most people anyway.

2. San Francisco may be own for its hills, but Pittsburgh has it beat when it comes to verticality. In fact, Pittsburgh has more vertical feet than San Fran, Cincinnati and Portland, Oregon, combined. There are more than 700 sets of stairs in the city.

3. Pittsburgh dialect is so distinct, some locals who speak Pittsburghese have their own name: Yinzers. From what I understand, “Yinz” is kind of like “ya’ll.” Some examples of Pittsburghese:
City Chicken = pork or veal cubes on a wooden skewer.
Crudded milk = cottage cheese
Gum band = rubber band
Red up = clean up or tidy up

Any others we should know about?

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“I have a very peculiar background, attitude, and approach to the real world, because I am a conjurer.” So begins James Randi’s 2007 TED Talk, a few minutes before he takes a lethal dose (32 caplets) of homeopathic sleeping pills. He then proceeds with a scathing takedown of psychic practices, explaining how cold reading works, and ultimately calling psychic practice a “cruel farce.” Randi then proceeds to explain his One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, and briefly discusses homeopathy, including a very nerdy shout-out to Avogadro’s limit.

This is hugely entertaining and interesting if you’re into science. You may not agree with everything he says, but you will likely at least enjoy his style. Have a look below, or watch the high-resolution MP4 version.

There’s lots more where this came from at Randi’s website.

Many of the estimated 110 million viewers of Sunday’s Super Bowl XLV are likely to have some sort of bet on the game. There are the $20 bets amongst friends, those who lay down a wager in a casino, the casual fans who engage in Super Bowl party games, and then there are the people who have 19th century art riding on the game – as the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art do.

In a daring bit of local team confidence, the two art institutions have agreed to a friendly wager – with the losing side loaning a piece of art to the other.

With a Steelers’ win, the city of Pittsburgh will be able to go wave their Terrible Towels in front of Gustave Caillebotte’s Boating on the Yerres:

And in the event of a Packers win, there’ll likely be a bunch of people with foam cheese heads gawking at Renoir’s Bathers with Crab: (more…)

How well do you know your foreign languages? Let’s see if you can match characters with the language they come from.

Take the Quiz: What’s the Language?

It’s like an acronym, except the words are chosen to fit the letters rather than the other way around. The term was coined in 1983, part of a monthly neologism contest held by the Washington Post. (I’m not sure if we can call a word that’s been around for thirty years a “neo”-logism anymore — what’s the statute of limitations on that?) A quick and probably needless refresher: acronyms are words created using letters from an already-existing phrase. For instance, “Radio Detection and Ranging” was the name of a technology which became popularly shortened into the acronym RADAR. Backronyms work the other way around. One creepy example — you’re all familiar with AMBER alerts, the child abduction bulletins that go out across cities when kids have been snatched? (In LA they flash across freeway billboards at least once a month.) Officially, AMBER stands for “America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response,” but that’s actually a backronym invented to fit the name “Amber,” after Amber Hagerman, a Texas girl whose 1996 abduction and murder led to the program’s formation.

Alcoholics Anonymous uses a few backronyms, as well. They function as ironic mnemonic devices, almost; they backronymed word “slip” to mean “Sobriety Losing its Priority.” (Great band name: ironic Mnemonic.) Many times, backronyms help create a false etymology for a word — something I covered in last week’s post on a word that many people falsely believe is an acronym for Ship High in Transit. Another one of these backronymic folk etymologies? For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. I hate to quash that one, but its supposed medieval origins as an acronym are total bunko; acronyms were rarely used prior to the twentieth century.

Another folk etymology — one I hadn’t heard of — is POSH, meaning fancy rich person, or the wife of a famous soccer player. Its supposed origin was the phrase “Port Out, Starboard Home,” referring to the most expensive first-class cabins on trans-Atlantic ships, which would’ve been on the side of the ship shaded from direct sun, assuming you set sail from Europe (as all the poshest people do). Interesting, but etymologically false. We’re not sure where the word “posh” comes from, though it may be derived from the Urdu safed-pōśh, meaning “one who wears white robes.” (I guess white robes were the old-school Urdu equivalent of $600 Prada sneakers today.)

To watch me type more stuff, you can follow me on Twitter.

“This program contains true stories of rescues.
All of the 9-1-1 calls you will hear are real.
Whenever possible, the actual people involved have helped us reconstruct the events as they happened.”

If you recognize that disclaimer, you’re one of the millions who tuned in on Tuesday nights for Rescue 911. While it’s been off the air for years, many still remember their favorite episode, and many young people pursued a career in emergency services because of the dramatic tales of these hometown heroes.

Join us as we investigate the history of this influential television show that touched so many lives.

Reality TV with a Positive Spin

According to William Shanter’s book, Up Til Now: The Autobiography, the inspiration for Rescue 911 came from an episode of the popular the radio show The Osgood File. (more…)

Between the Danube’s role in establishing early Eastern European cities and the Ganges’ role in shepherding the souls of the dead to paradise, rivers across the world have played a critical part in human history and continue to be a crucial piece of our environment. This Woman’s Day article features a few of the world’s most famous rivers, from the Nile to the Amazon.

One of the lesser-known rivers featured is also one of the most beautiful, the picturesque Caño Cristales (seen above). Every fall, the river is taken over by brightly colored algae, turning the water gorgeous shades of red, orange, yellow, green and blue—and inspiring its nickname, “river that ran away from paradise.”

[Image courtesy of CultivArte and CollaborationNation's Flickr stream]