Glenn Fleishman, a writer for the Economist, was selected to be a contestant on the popular quiz show, Jeopardy. He took the opportunity to review how other candidates have prepared for their appearances on the show in the past:

• Fans of the show have assembled a comprehensive archive of every clue and answer in the history of the show. One contestant downloaded it and created his own training program to practice.
• Other contestants have turned their homes into replicas of the Jeopardy Studio. One contestant even made sure that the snacks in their mock green room matched those available on the show.
• Fleishman himself, however, simply brushed up on his knowledge of a few categories that seem to be tested often. This included knowledge about popes, royal families, pop songs, states, major rivers, Presidents, and wars around 1900. It worked. He made it to the next round.

Read more about the experience, and how the show’s producers trick you into thinking it has been filmed over several weeks over here

Source: The Economist

Plenty of cities from around the world aim to be the next Silicon Valley. But only one has the backing of the actual Silicon Valley: Cornell is building a campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island in an initiative backed by most major technology companies. The first designs of the proposed campus were recently released and Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan looked at some of the highlights:

• The campus will be built for 2,000 students and is expected to be completed in 2037.
• While it is going to be a university campus, there will be few classrooms. Instead there will be open spaces where students can collaborate and hopefully build the next big thing.
• The government even plans to house a representative from the patent office on the island to deal with the expected deluge of patent infringement complaints
• The campus will be energy neutral. Solar panels and energy generated by turbines in the east river will power the buildings.
• One concern is getting the building materials onto the island. New Yorkers won’t appreciate having the lone bridge to the island clogged up with construction vehicles.

Read more about the plans for the campus, the companies backing it, and some concept photos over here.

Source: Fast Co.Design

A speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson caused Jeff Porten to think about what it means for something to look cool. He pointed out:

• We think the SR-71 Blackbird (pictured above), and the Concorde look cool, but not the double deckered Airbus A380.
• We consider the Saturn V space rocket to look pretty cool, but not the Atlas V.
• Yet the SR-71 Blackbird, Concorde, and Saturn V are fifty years old, and none of them are in active service anymore. In contrast the modern A380 and Atlas V are considered to be ugly.
• We don’t think that phones that are fifty years old look cool. But we do think these ancient pieces of technology do. Why? Perhaps it’s because they were at the very top of their class and we have yet to develop anything cooler. When we develop something that’s even better than these older pieces of technology, we’ll begin to think that the old things look dated.
  • It’s disappointing then that some of our best technology was invented half a century ago.

Read more about the argument and how this relates to the space race over here.

Source: TidBITS

Via: Marginal Revolution

Which artist has the (un)fortunate distinction of having the greatest number of their works stolen? The staff at Life’s Little Mysteries wrote:

• Picasso easily takes first place. 1,147 of his paintings are missing as of January this year.
• Picasso easily eclipses an unknown artist who takes second place with 557 pieces missing. Most of them were lost after they were moved due to a fire code violation.
• The most frequently stolen individual piece of art is likely “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” which, over 600 years, has been stolen seven times.

Read more about the hundreds of millions of dollars that these paintings could be worth and more about art heists over here.

Source: Life’s Little Mysteries

Which colleges are the top pirates of movies and music on the internet? Ernesto reported:

• Rutgers topped the list. Statistics suggest that students from that university download almost twice as much as the next biggest pirate university, NYU.
• The most downloaded files at Rutgers were:
  • Fast Five (movie)
  • Cars 2 (movie)
  • Puss in Boots (movie)
  • The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (game)
  • The Dreamer, The Believer (music)
• Productivity software such as Micorosft Office were also popular items

Find the full list and check out where your university (or Alma Matter) stands over here.

Source: TorrentFreak

Gangnam Style is a music video that has gone viral, and there is a lot that it tells us about Korean stock markets:

• Despite losing money over the past year a Korean firm called DI has seen its share price jump almost 500%. The reason? The chairman’s son is the creator of Gangnam Style.
• This development should make no difference to how the company performs. Yet Korea has a history of unimportant things causing wide swings in the stock market.
• If the child of a company’s CEO marries into the right family, then the company can expect to see gains in the market.
• Or, if a person is seen in a photograph with an important politician, they too can expect to see a rise in their company’s performance.
• These gains are generally temporary, and the stock soon comes back down to earth.
• Some investors have taken to exploit this quirk of the Korean stock exchange to spread small pieces of seemingly innocuous and false information to make quick gains.

Read more about the ants behind the phenomenon, and examples of the wild swings in Korea’s market over here.

Source: The Economist

Via: Marginal Revolution