Mercedes-Benz only made nine chassis for the 1955 Mercedes-Benz SLR coupe. The Mercedes SLR was a racing legend. It won every race it participated in, but then an SLR was involved in the 1955 Le Mans disaster, in which French driver Pierre Levegh's SLR was thrown through the air and landed, twice, among spectators. The car exploded into flames. Levegh and 83 spectators were killed, making it the deadliest car race ever. Mercedes-Benz withdrew from racing for three decades.
Two of the nine SLR chassis became street-legal autos for Mercedes executives, one being Daimler-Benz motorsport chief Rudolf Uhlenhaut. These two cars were called Uhlenhaut Coupés. That in itself made each one of the rarest cars in the world. One of those cars is in the Mercedes corporate museum. The other has set a world record for the most expensive car ever sold. In May, the bids went up to €135 million, or $142 million! The previous record was set in 2018, when a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO sold for $70 million.
Of course, that $142 million is just money. The SLR that exploded at Le Mans was much more costly, but in a different way. The buyer has yet to reveal himself. Mercedes will use the proceeds to launch a global scholarship fund.
The Uhlenhaut Coupé has a 300 horsepower eight-cylinder engine, gull-wing doors, and exhaust pipes on the passenger side. If someone offers you a ride in one, take it, but be careful getting in. -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: Alexander Migl)
— Pablo Rochat (@PabloRochat) June 7, 2022
The worst has happened: there is a moment in time in which there is nothing distracting you from your own thoughts. You can sit in peace and think clearly for the first time since you first held a smartphone.
This is a disaster waiting to happen and Pablo Rochat isn't helping any. He's an artist and commercial art director in Atlanta. Rochat's Twitter feed is filled with many public pranks and visual jokes that bend reality. In this case, Thing from The Addams Family is disciplining you for your addiction to the phone. It's time for an upgrade.
Or, to be more precise, having a name that takes longer to pronounce correlates with lowered job prospects with the sampled group for this study.
Qi Ge (Vassar College) and Stephen Wu (Hamilton College) are economists. They studied the employment prospects of 1,500 recent graduates of economics doctoral programs by measuring the acquisition of tenure-track positions at institutions with high research productivity. An algorithm assessed the pronounceability of names by the "commonality of letter and phoneme combinations" within those names.
One standard deviation in the time that it takes to pronounce a person's name reduced the likelihood of attaining a tenure-track position by 8%. Although anti-bias training of hiring committee members may address the pronounceability of the names of candidates, such training does not appear to have made a significant impact on the cost of having a name that takes a long time to pronounce.
You can read the full text of Ge and Wu's paper at SSRN.
-via Marginal Revolution
Escape from Auschwitz: the most extraordinary Holocaust story you’ve never heard | Holocaust | The Guardian https://t.co/2hahTMhnBI
— Pete Blackman (@peteblackman) June 5, 2022
Walter Rosenberg was only 17 when he arrived at Auschwitz in 1942. Most new arrivals were sent straight to their deaths, but Rosenburg, being young and strong, was assigned to work. Over the next two years, he did almost every job in the camp, and learned the ins and outs of the camp layout and Nazi procedures. He also witnessed thousands of deaths, including the public hanging of two men who attempted to escape. The spectacle was designed to scare other inmates, but it only made Rosenberg more determined to escape. And he did.
In April of 1944, Rosenberg and fellow inmate Fred Wetzler hid under a pile of wood, and stayed there for three days before making their way out of the camp. Once back in their native Slovakia, Rosenberg and Wetzler wrote up a report on everything they'd witnessed at Auschwitz, a document that changed the course of the war. Read about the daring escape in a book excerpt at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting
Sometimes a drug's side effects turn out to be more important, or at least more lucrative, than its original purpose. A drug that was developed to address heart problems took off when it was repurposed under the name Viagra. Wellbutrin is used to treat depression, but also became an aid to quit smoking under the name Zyban. These were repurposed after rigorous medical studies. An earlier case of drug repurposing happened outside of the lab and involved an over-the-counter cold remedy.
In the 1930s, phenylpropanolamine (PPA) was developed and marketed as a nasal decongestant, to relieve symptoms of colds, asthma, and allergies. It was sold over-the-counter under many brand names; you are most likely to recall the cold pills called Contac. The drug had a side effect that caused users to feel less hungry. In the 1950s, the patent for PPA lapsed, and manufacturers of diet pills jumped on that side effect, marketing PPA as a miracle diet aid. The FDA had not approved of its use for appetite suppression, but since it was sold far and wide already for colds, there was little they could do about it. It took decades of studies and another rare but scary side effect to take PPA off the market. Read about the rise and fall of PPA at Mel magazine. -via Digg
Tom Scott is at the Wasserspiele of Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, which is a 590-acre park in Germany. It has spectacular water features, which were built privately by various wealthy former landowners. Now, you may agree or disagree that rich people should build such ostentatious displays of conspicuous consumption, but if they did, they should be enjoyable by the public. The public certainly can't devote money to such a useless display just because it's cool (which it is), because we have more important things to worry about, like crumbling infrastructure and national defense. What's interesting is the technology that made these fountains work merely by gravity, for more than 300 years now. Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Alasdair Beckett-King, a very English comedian, offers reasonably good Texas accents in this brief parody of The Lord of the Rings and King of the Hill.
I would really enjoy seeing a special episode of King of the Hill in which the The Lord of the Rings takes place in Texas. Hank Baggins is tasked with delivering a Super Bowl VI ring to Austin for its destruction.
Beckett-King envisions Dale Gribble as Boromir and Boomhauer as Gollum. Additionally, Bill Dauterive would be the ideal as Legolas, Luanne Platter should be Galadriel, Cotton Hill should be Saruman the White, and Bobby Hill should play Pippin Took.
Sick and tired of playing Wordle? Here's something that may replace that daily word game obsession: Cell Tower by software developer Andrew Taylor.
It's a game of finding hidden words in a stack of random letters. You may immediately see certain words in all of those letters ... but the way to solve the game is to utilize ALL of the letters to make words, not just some letters.
Like Wordle, there's a Cell Tower game released daily. Try to see if you can solve it without asking for a hint (which will make the game not count towards your streak).
It's harder than it looks, but it's quite a bit of fun!
After two years without a summer road trip, you may be itching to go somewhere new. But you don't want to drive too far with gas prices the way they are, and you certainly don't want to deal with crowds of tourists doing touristy things. The US offers a lot of interesting and different experiences in small towns, and one may be relatively near you.
Cartersville, Georgia, has only 23,000 residents, but has three Smithsonian Affiliate museums, plus historic sites and businesses that keep an old-fashioned aesthetic. Africatown, Alabama, is where the formerly enslaved Africans of the ship Clotilda settled, and some of their descendants still live there. Africatown has a new museum opening this summer. And everyone knows Winslow, Arizona, thank to the Eagles song "Take It Easy" -they even have a Standin’ on the Corner Park! But Winslow also has Fred Harvey's last railway hotel (now a Historic Landmark), the Old Trails Museum, a Hopi archaeological site, and it's close to Meteor Crater and the Petrified Forest. Read about these towns, 15 of them in all, and what they have to offer at Smithsonian.
Would you like to watch The Terminator again, for just just seven minutes? How about a version starring Sylvester Stallone as the Terminator? Even stranger, Willem Dafoe stars as Sarah Conner! (However, the Terminator obviously still has Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1984 body.) As the scene goes on, you feel like you recognize more and more faces. Jim Carey, Brad Pitt, and Shelly Duval also appear. In fact, the list of cameo appearances in the credits will make you rewind back up the video to check them all out. Was that really Donald Trump? They are all deepfakes, in a video by Ctrl Shift Face and Deep Voodoo that brings the technology to a ridiculously uncanny level. Contains NSFW language. -via Geeks Are Sexy
If you've been confused about "spiciness" or "hot" warnings on menus, or maybe you'd like to try some new chile pepper but don't know what to expect, science has your back. Most peppers are rated by Scoville units to explain how hot they are. But that doesn't really tell the true story of what it's like to eat those peppers. Ivette Guzmán and Paul W. Bosland of New Mexico State University led a study that looked into "the complex nature of this sensory experience" to give us more comprehensive descriptions of the effects of capsaicinoids, or chile peppers. They found that capsaicin experience can be measured in five different dimensions.
1) Development Heat sensation can be felt immediately or is delayed by 5, 15, 30 s, or longer.
2) Duration Heat sensation lasts for a short time, disappearing quickly, or may last for many minutes to even hours.
3) Location Where is the heat sensation felt; on the lips, front of the mouth, tip of the tongue, mid-palate, or in the throat.
4) Feeling Heat sensation feels SHARP like pins pricking the area or FLAT like the heat is being smeared or painted on with a brush.
5) Intensity Stated as Scoville Heat Units. Normally measured analytically and recorded in parts-per-million (ppm), then converted to Scoville Heat Units by multiplying by 16. Commercial products are labeled mild, medium, hot, or extra hot, however there are no industry standards for these terms.
Mefite lalochezia proposes another dimension, having to do with the effects of the pepper leaving the body.
The study paper goes on to give us a profile of quite a few different kinds of peppers using the new lexicon. This may be helpful to you in finding your new favorite kinds of chiles. However, capsaicinoids aren't the only ingredient that makes food hot and spicy. There's also horseradish/wasabi, ginger, onion, etc. To get a full profile of a prepared dish, you'd have to have a flavor profile of all the ingredients. -via Metafilter
A few days ago, on Ask Reddit, a user asked "What is the weirdest thing you had to do at someone else’s house because of their culture/religion?"
Wowimatard shared a strange experience from Sweden:
I remember going to my swedish friends house.
And while we were playing in his room, his mom yelled that dinner was ready. And check this. He told me to WAIT in his room while they ate.
Other users shared that this is an unusual, but not unknown practice in Sweden. When children visit the homes of other children, there's no expectation that the guest children will be fed.
Why? The Washington Post consulted a variety of experts on Swedish culture, including the food historian Richard Tellström at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Tellström explained that in the past, feeding someone else's children would be considered an insult:
“Eating was something that you did at home,” he says. “You didn’t feed other people’s children — that would have been considered a sort of intrusion in another family’s life, with the subtext of ‘You can’t feed your children properly, so I will feed them.’”
Tellström speculates that this now fading tradition was likely due to the atomistic development of families in rural Sweden. Dining with people other than your immediate family was unusual and thus providing food hospitality outside of the family would not be customary.
-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Vitold Muratov
It was 1941 and the war was not going well for the Allies. The Nazis were advancing on multiple fronts, including deep into the unprepared Soviet Union. Britain was now locked into an uneasy but necessary friendship with that Communist power.
HMS Trident, a Royal Navy submarine, docked at Polyarny on the Arctic Ocean coast of the Soviet Union. While his boat was undergoing repairs, Commander Geoffrey Sladen dines with the Soviet post admiral. He comments that his wife sometimes struggled to push their infant's stroller through snow. The Admiral suggests having a reindeer pull the stroller and promptly has a reindeer delivered to Trident as a gift to Commander Sladen's wife.
This was a diplomatically uneasy time, so Commander Sladen knew that it would be unwise to refuse the gift, even though transporting a reindeer by submarine back to Britain would be difficult. The crew names the reindeer Polyanna after the port and takes on a barrel of moss for her to eat during the voyage back home.
On the way to Britain, Trident recieves new orders: stay on patrol in the area on the hunt for German warships. The supply of moss runs out, so Polyanna eats condensed milk instead. She hangs out in the torpedo room and sleeps beneath the captain's rack. But she is not exactly toilet trained and gets rather stinky. Submarines are called "pigboats" for a reason, but Trident gets unusually smelly due to Polyanna's contributions.
Despite spending six weeks on a submarine, Polyanna arrives in the UK healthy and has, in fact, gained weight, making removing her from the boat an added challenge. She lives for five more years at a the Regents Park Zoo in London.
-via Nag on the Lake
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor and the nearby town of Pripyat have been pretty much a no man's land since the nuclear meltdown in 1986. In those 36 years, entropy has damaged structures, trees and plants have taken over, wildlife has moved in, yet you can see that it was abandoned so suddenly that evidence of the former residents are still everywhere.
Joerg Daiber visited Ukraine last year, before the Russian invasion, and got the spend a couple of days in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. He filmed a lot of the landscape by drone, and used the tilt-shift filtering method to give it a miniature toy look, but it's all too real. Eerily real. -via Laughing Squid
The Calgary Stampede is arguably the biggest Western festival there is. This year's stampede will take place July 8-17 in Calgary, Alberta, in full force after being canceled in 2020 and scaled back to a partially virtual event in 2021. In addition to the rodeos, parade, concerts, and other activities, food vendors are bringing out some experimental fusion fair foods this year.
Some of the new recipes are just cute, like the Duck Pond Lemonade, which comes with a rubber duck. Others are combinations of two or even three cultures, like the Korean Squid Ink Corn Dog. Some are just wild, like Honey Habanero Ice Pops. Would you try out some Pop Rocks Popcorn Chicken? How about savory noodles topped with cotton candy? Kraft Dinner soft serve ice cream? There will be hot dogs made with two kinds of insects, and a dozen new ways to dress up donuts. Check out 45 new fair food creations for this year's Calgary Stampede. Remember, it's not in the US, so not everything is deep fried on a stick. -via Everlasting Blort
