Werner Herzog on the mysteries of Pittsburgh and his second family

Editor’s note: This is so full of amazing parts it’s hard to pick just one! Please read it, even if you don’t know who Werner Herzog is. The link should hopefully take you around the paywall.

From Werner Herzog in The New Yorker: “Pittsburgh turned out to be a bad idea. For a start, the steel industry was almost dead, and the shuttered plants were rusting away. Second, Duquesne University was an intellectually impoverished place. Quitting school would have meant losing my visa and having to leave the United States. So I kept my registration. I slept on the sofas of various acquaintances and of my original host, a professor, forty but terrified of his mother, who forbade contact with female students and perhaps with women in general. A freak encounter changed everything. One day, it started raining, and the car drew up beside me. The woman wound down her window. She could give me a lift, she said. It was a two-minute drive to Fox Chapel. She said I’d do better staying with her; she had a spare room in her attic. Her place was just a quarter of a mile from his. And so I found myself adopted by a family.”

How Syria tried to solve its drought problem in the 1930s by banning the Yo-Yo

Yo-yo champion pursues his passions at MIT | MIT News | Massachusetts  Institute of Technology

From Dan Lewis at Now I Know: “In late 1932, Syria experienced a significant lack of rainfall, and the results were dramatic. As Time magazine reported at the time, a handful of Muslim priests believed that the start of the drought coincided with the introduction of the yo-yo into Syrian society, or at least, with the newfound popularity of the toy in Syrian communities. (It’s not exactly clear when the yo-yo first came to Syria, but according to the CBC, there’s evidence that the Greeks used them as early as 500 BCE, so they probably weren’t brand new to Syria at the time.) So, as Time Magazine reported at the time, the priests approached the government and argued that “the up-and-down movement of these infidel tops counteracts the prayers of the pious for rain. [ . . .]  Rain will never fall again in Syria while the wicked play with yo-yos.”

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Why yes, officer, that is a longhorn steer sitting in the passenger seat

From Michael Levenson for The New York Times: “Let this be a warning to those of you who long to hit the open road with a 2,200-pound steer riding shotgun: Observe all traffic laws, especially when passing through Norfolk, Neb. Lee Meyer, 63, a retired machinist, learned that lesson on Wednesday. For seven years, Mr. Meyer has been chauffeuring his 2,200-pound Watusi-longhorn mix (whose name is Howdy Doody) with its horns and head exposed to the open air in a customized Ford Crown Victoria with the license plate “Boy & Dog.” But he had never been stopped by the police, he said, until Wednesday morning as he drove Howdy Doody into Norfolk from his 15-acre ranch.”

Which freezes faster, hot water or cold water? Scientists still aren’t sure

From Adam Mann for Quanta magazine: “It sounds like one of the easiest experiments possible: Take two cups of water, one hot, one cold. Place both in a freezer and note which one freezes first. Common sense suggests that the colder water will. But luminaries including Aristotle, Rene Descartes and Sir Francis Bacon have all observed that hot water may actually cool more quickly. Yet for more than half a century, physicists have been arguing about whether something like this really occurs. The modern term for hot water freezing faster than cold water is the Mpemba effect, named after Erasto Mpemba, a Tanzanian teenager who, along with the physicist Denis Osborne, conducted the first scientific studies of it in the 1960s. While they were able to observe the effect, follow-up experiments have failed to consistently replicate that result.”

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In France, cheese is alive. In America, it is dead

(via Kottke.org) Market researcher Clotaire Rapaille was interviewed for an episode of Frontline on advertising and marketing back in 2003, and he talked about the differences in how the French and Americans think about cheese:

For example, if I know that in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don’t want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that’s where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America.

I started working with a French company in America, and they were trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn’t understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that’s why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It’s the same; it’s alive. We are very afraid of getting sick with cheese. By the way, more French people die eating cheese than Americans die. But the priority is different; the logic of emotion is different. The French like the taste before safety. Americans want safety before the taste.

He landed a plane on a New York street outside a bar – twice

From Corey Killgannon for the New York Times: “Thomas Fitzpatrick turned a barroom bet into a feat of aeronautic wonder by stealing a plane from a New Jersey airport and landing it on St. Nicholas Avenue in northern Manhattan, in front of the bar where he had been drinking. As if that were not stupefying enough, the man did nearly the exact same thing two years later. Both landings were pulled off in incredibly narrow landing areas, in the dark – and after a night of drinking in Washington Heights taverns and with a well-lubricated pilot at the controls. Both times ended with Mr. Fitzpatrick charged with wrongdoing. The first of his flights was around 3 a.m. on Sept. 30, 1956, when Mr. Fitzpatrick, then 26, borrowed a single-engine plane from the Teterboro School of Aeronautics in New Jersey and landed on St. Nicholas Avenue near 191st Street.”

Researchers say they can “see” people through walls using WiFi signals and AI

Sit Up Straight: Wi-Fi Signals Can Be Used to Detect Your Body Position |  PCMag

From Samantha Cole for Vice: “Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a method for detecting the three dimensional shape and movements of human bodies in a room, using only WiFi routers. To do this, they used DensePose, a system for mapping all of the pixels on the surface of a human body in a photo. DensePose was developed by London-based researchers and Facebook’s AI researchers. From there, according to their recently-uploaded preprint paper published on arXiv, they developed a deep neural network that maps WiFi signals’ phase and amplitude sent and received by routers to coordinates on human bodies. The Carnegie Mellon researchers wrote that they believe WiFi signals “can serve as a ubiquitous substitute” for normal RGB cameras, when it comes to “sensing” people in a room. Using WiFi, they wrote, overcomes obstacles like poor lighting and occlusion that regular camera lenses face.”

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