Mikal Hart wanted to give his friend a wedding present like no other – so he engineered a box that can only be opened at a particular location. Here’s the story of the Reverse Geocache Puzzle Box:
Hmm. What does “Distance 391km” mean? “Access Denied” suggests that getting inside the box is indeed the objective of all this button pushing. Just for fun, let’s try again.
Uh oh. We seem to be consuming our limited supply of “attempts”. The “No signal” problem seems to be solved, but the message “Distance 391km” remains puzzling. Does the box know its own location? Is there something 391 kilometers away? London? The Hague? A circle of that radius drawn around Paris intersects quite a few interesting places in France, England, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany.
via
Bringing much needed levity to the stressed out airplane passenger is this website, Fun with TSA. The website suggests a few things that you, the downtrodden traveler, can do to stick it to the man and have a bit of fun. For example:
Be the person on your flight to suddenly shout out “Marco!” during that last hour when others are looking for things to do. It might take a few tries, but eventually someone somewhere on the plane will respond with a “Polo!” if for no other reason than to shut you up. Entertainment achieved.
But if you get into trouble, we don’t know each other, mmmkay? via
Why do traffic jams happen? Check out this simulation tool and play god of rush hour.
“When you tap your brake, the traffic may come to a full stand-still several miles behind you. It really matters how hard you brake – a slight braking from a driver who has identified a problem early will allow the traffic flow to remain smooth. Heavier braking, usually caused by a driver reacting late to a problem, can affect traffic flow for many miles.”
The Daily Beast crunches the numbers for America’s 55 largest cities, ranking their brainpower from first-to-worst. How does your hometown fare?
Our country is as flat as a pancake, we have no mountains nor rocks to climb. So we need to be inventive if we want to practice climbing. This tower is a steel and wood construction, 37 metres high, with an overhang of 11 metres.
Sony’s portable tape cassette player — a revolution when first released in 1979 — has finally reached the end of its production life:
The final batch was produced in Japan in April, and no more will be produced as soon as the current run is sold out. Just over 200 million cassette Walkman players have been sold over the years since being first introduced in 1979.[…]
The Walkman is widely credited with pioneering the concept of personal, portable audio beyond the radio. It helped spur on the cassette as a popular format and also maintained interest in albums. Interest only began to fade in the 1990s when the Discman took over, and saw a more definite end when the iPod was in sight.
via
