The very first banknotes were used by the Chinese in the 7th century, during the Tang Dynasty. Before it was used as an actual currency, paper money was part of a deposit system in which merchants would leave large amounts of coins with a trusted associate and receive a paper receipt for the transaction. The reason was simple — the copper coins used as currency then were heavy.
When you encounter a mysterious laundry care symbol or alarming vehicle indicator light, you might just ignore it rather than ask somebody, search online, or open a user manual for the answer. If you have an iPhone, there's an easier way to decipher the meanings behind perplexing symbols and signs—and it only takes a few seconds.
If we were to assign a theme for the 2019 edition of the Next Reality 30 (NR30), it might be something along the lines of, "What have you done for me lately?"
The year 2020 was a pivotal span of time during which the word "virtual" took on a brand new meaning. Instead of referring to VR or augmented reality, the term was hijacked to describe meeting across long distances through a variety of software tools, most often through video.
To name just a few companies, VK, µTorrent, and ClixSense all suffered significant data breaches at some point in the past. The leaked password databases from those and other online sites can be used to understand better how human-passwords are created and increase a hacker's success when performing brute-force attacks.
Shot at the Brambuk National Park and Cultural Centre in Australia, this video shows how to properly throw a boomerang. Take a look this video and give it a try.
Another name for jumper's knee is patellar tendinitis. Jumper's knee is an injury that affects the tendon connecting your kneecap (patella) to your shinbone. The patellar tendon plays a pivotal role in the way you use your legs. It helps your muscles extend your lower leg so that you can kick a ball, push the pedals on your bicycle, and jump up in the air. Learn about the different causes of, symptoms of, and treatments for jumper's knee in this video.
In this video series, watch as coffee brewer Johnny Kha teaches how to make Thai & Vietnamese coffee. Learn the ingredients needed, how to prepare condensed milk, how to brew the coffee, and how to mix it with he condensed milk and ice. The best part of waking up is letting the experts at Expert Village wake you up with a unique and cultural coffee.
The last few months of WikiLeaks controversy has surely peaked your interest, but when viewing the WikiLeaks site, finding what you want is quite a hard task.
This is a walkthrough of Chinese city Beijing home of the 2008 Olympics. Beijing is a huge metropolis and this tour shows you everything from the airport, cultural destinations, etiquette, city regions and train maps. Travel around Beijing, China.
For those of you behind on their international politics, Vladimir Putin has once again been elected as President of Russia. And right now, there are over 20,000 protesters in Moscow yelling about election fraud. Now, whether or not you think they're right, or whether or not you think Putin is a badass (he is, for the record), you have to admit he is an amazingly interesting cultural figure. And what do we do with amazing cultural figures? Why, we make fun of them with Impact-laden photos, of ...
Yale University has opened up its museum archives to the public in digital form, providing free online access to high-resolution images from its cultural collections, making it the first Ivy League school to do so in this fashion. Currently, there's over 250,000 "open access" images available from their new online collective catalog, with the goal of providing scholars, artists, students and all other worldly citizens royalty-free, no-license access to images of public domain collections with...
In late 2011, representative from China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan submitted a proposal called the International Code of Conduct for Information Security (ICCIS) to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that called for international consensus of a global set of rules and regulations that standardize information flow on the internet.
Angry Birds finally hits LEGOs. It was only a matter of time before some LEGO maniac constructed Angry Birds from those popular little plastic building blocks. Stop motion brickfilms are sure to follow.
Vive Cool City (a crew of raucous Aussies who decided to make internet TV) tour the world featuring marvels, oddities, and cultural anomalies. This particular episode features Minoru, veteran Yo-yo World Champion. This dude is good. Skip ahead approximately half way through to see his moves.
I have to admit that I am an environmentalist wacko. That may sound strange, considering my life is tied up in PVC, which is considered one of the most poisonous materials on earth... but it's true. I love this planet, and I want it to be inhabitable for as long as the sun is in this phase of its life.
Video games and movies have a history of interaction dogged by failure. Video game movies and movie video games both tend to be terrible. There has never been a good feature film based on a video game franchise. Even documentaries about games, which should be rife given the rapid rise of games on the cultural stage over the last thirty years, have been few and far between. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is by far the best, and for several years now has been the only really stirring f...
Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, dates back to over 500 years ago and is still practiced as a highly respected cultural art form in modern-day Japan.
As a kid, my favorite thing to do at the Natural History museum was a midday stop, when my family strolled past an antiquated looking vending machine in the museum's musty basement. The Mold-A-Rama machine was oddly shaped, George Jetson-esque, and spewed out made-to-order, brightly colored plastic dinosaurs. There was such joy in watching the liquid wax pour into the mold, and then eject a warm, custom toy—well worth the dollar or two demanded. A version of this tradition was recently elevat...
Oleg Mavromati's latest project, Ally/Foe, allows online voters the chance to electrocute the Russian artist at a mere fifty cents a pop. From November 7th to November 13th, viewers of Mavromati's livestream can pay to vote “innocent” or “guilty.” 100 guilty votes result in the artist voluntarily shocking himself in front of the camera, live, with his homemade electrocution machine.
Sounds like an odd bragging right, but hold your horses, artist Hannes Langeder's handmade Porsche is pretty damn interesting.
The New York Times magazine posts a fascinating feature on a Chinese cultural phenomenon known as human flesh search engines. Out of China has borne cyberposses, internet vigilantes, who target everybody from twisted individuals violating social norms to government corruption.
Scrabble Bingo of the Day: * FINNESKO [n/pl.] A finnesko is a boot made of tanned reindeer skin, with the reindeer's fur on the outside. It's an especially good, warm boot for subarctic regions. These boots originate from the Sami, indigenous people from the cultural region of Sápmi, located across four countries in the Arctic Circle; Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. This area is also referred to as Fennoscandia.
How much money do you think you're worth? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Think again. In the world of shopping centers and barcodes, you may only be worth a few bucks.
Video games are the newest major expressive media. As such, their role in society is still being defined continuously. A monumentally important example of this took place yesterday at the US Supreme Court. After a long deliberation, the highest court in the land handed down a decision invalidating a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors on the grounds that video games are protected speech under the First Amendment, like movies and books.
MAKE-UP:
Feeling comfortable or at home means living in an atmosphere where you are accepted. Some people moving abroad worry about getting adjusted to the new social environment or the western culture. You may have left your home to make big business, excel in your career, get married, meet a relative/friend, discover new places, or for any good reason.
Cartograms are usually pretty mundane, but throw in Flickr, Photoshop, and a well-known public place and you have an artistic representation of popular colors. Much more eye-grabbing than your common map.
Check out this lesson in KhoeKhoegowab, the Namibian language commonly referred to as Click
The debate over whether video games can be considered art or not has intensified in recent years as games like Braid and Flow have taken the digital aesthetic experience to new heights. These new games are great examples, but there are much older ones that present compelling arguments as well. The best is a 1986 ZX Spectrum/Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC game called Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
Japanese people are into many things Americans find weird—like YouTube's beloved canine-hosted cooking show or Daito Manabe's light up LED grills or even more insane, a vending machine that distributes live crabs. In light of these cultural oddities, the Japanese phenomenon of visual novels (NVL, or bijuaru noberu), seems relatively normal. A meeting place of books and video games, visual novels are a sort of "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" for the new generation.
FOXBORO, Mass. - The New England Patriots Alumni Club (NEPAC), announced that more than a dozen former Patriots players are gearing up to host a "Football for You" youth clinic in Worcester on Saturday, May 29 from 12:30-5:00 p.m.
A Self-Protection Guide 1) You can help protect yourself from violent crimes.
“Of a generation who remembers Tiananmen Square, 1989, I considered how some excuse – the lack of, or slow progress on, human rights in China because ‘times have changed’, or because other concerns, including making money, come first, or because rights, freedom, and democracy are somehow different issues there than in the West.” Denise Chong
At GDC 2011 this past March, three of the world's best game designers participated in a contest called Game Design Challenge. Each presented their vision for a game that fit the prompt "Bigger than Jesus: games as religion" before an audience, with applause to determine the winner. Jenova Chen, John Romero, and Jason Rohrer all spoke, and Rohrer won in a landslide with his revolutionary game called Chain World.
Two new and radically different ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) have burst into the news in the last week, and illustrate the very best of an innovative phenomenon: the commercial tie-in ARG, and the public service ARG.
Keanu Reeves is a really good actor and I'm not even kidding Pity the fate of the blank-faced man or: Why you need to rewatch Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
If you've been reading, watching or listening to the news, you sure know about the Trayvon Martin case. If you visit this site often, you may also have noticed that I've not put up any news on this case. I have my reasons. And this post will describe why.
(This is a manifesto I wrote 2 years ago. I have never published it. It was a reaction to the ignorance I faced in graduate school from the modernist sculpture
Austrian composer Peter Ablinger has created a "speaking" piano. Ablinger digitized a child's voice reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court to "play" on the piano via MIDI sequencer. Apparently, the computer is connected to the piano, which analyzes the human speech, and then converts it to key-tapping.
