The offer is out there, but it won't be easy. The Indus Valley civilization thrived some 5,300 years ago in what is now northwest India and eastern Pakistan in one of the world's earliest urban settings. After a thousand years or so, the people dispersed and the culture disappeared, along with a written language no one can decipher today, although archaeologists, linguists, and other scholars have tried for around a hundred years. Deciphering the language is difficult, because the remaining examples are short, found on ceramic tiles and seals. No one knows whether the markings represent an alphabet or full words. Or even possibly numbers. 

The government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has made an official offer of a million dollars to any individual or organization who can crack the code and decipher the written language of the Indus Valley civilization. To claim the money, the translation must satisfy the archaeologists who have been working on the project for years. Some people who have already made claims made too many assumptions about the script, which is thought to have more to do with trade and finance than religion or culture. Read about the undeciphered script at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Ismoon)

The most memorable scene in the 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally took place in Katz's Delicatessen in Manhattan, when Sally demonstrates that women can fake an orgasm so well that men can't tell. In this ad, Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reunite more than 35 years later to have lunch at Katz's, and accidentally end up recreating that scene when Ryan adds an obscene amount of Hellman's mayonnaise to her sandwich. The fact that a Jewish deli would not have mayonnaise available on the tables is an extra layer of absurdity. Sydney Sweeney appears to deliver the punch line this time.

As you might have guessed, this is a Super Bowl ad. The game is still ten days away, but in recent years advertisers feel they have invested too much money into their Super Bowl ads to keep them under wraps until kickoff. Get ready for a tsunami of high-priced ads coming in the next few days. -via Metafilter

Anna Odi lives in an apartment in a building that is mostly offices for the museum of Auschwitz in Poland. Her parents lived at the site when she was born in 1956. Both of them were arrested by the Nazis and kept in concentration camps during World War II, and met after liberation. Why would a newly married couple choose to live at Auschwitz? In the aftermath of the war, housing was scarce and the camp and its buildings were available. Mira and Józef Odi were also dedicated to preserving the history of the camp so the world would never forget what went on there. They and other survivors guarded the site and curated its items and documentation for posterity.

When Odi was a child, her parents shielded her from the details of the Holocaust, but as a teenager, she gradually learned what Auschwitz meant, and she joined her parents in working there when she finished school. Read about Odi's life at Auschwitz and her dedication to preserving its history at Notes from Poland.  -Thanks WTM!

(Image credit: Michel Zacharz AKA Grippenn)

We love to hear a good bagpipe song here at Neatorama, so that's why we've posted the music of the Unipiper, the Badpiper, and the Red Hot Chilli Pipers. When you hear a bagpipe, you either think "Turn it up!" or "Run away!" There's no in between. But how does one become a bagpiper?

Apparently it's not as easy as just being Scottish, because Stuart Smillie of Great Big Story is of Scottish descent, although he lives in London now. His boss sent him to Edinburgh to learn how to play the bagpipes, which shouldn't take long, seeing as he's already Scottish, but it turns out that didn't help a bit. Neither did having his own kilt. Smillie contacted Andrew Coulter at Killberry Bagpipes, Edinburgh's last custom bagpipe maker. Did Smillie learn to play the bagpipes that day? That might depend on your definition of "playing," but he did learn a lot about bagpipes, pipers, and the kilts they wear. -via Laughing Squid

The Modern Novel is a website curated by Mia Couto consisting of lists and descriptions of literary fiction by apparently every nation on earth, as well as many non-independent regions. Cuoto considers all fictional works of literary value from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.

It's fun to browse. For example, what authors are from Liechtenstein? Perhaps the most famous author of literary fiction from the tiny principality is Jens Dittmar, who wrote Sterben Kann Jeder. This title translates as Anyone Can Die. A summary is here.

Liechtenstein is--mostly--an independent nation. Chukotka, which is the westernmost part of Russia, is not. But this sparsely-inhabited region claims the author Yuri Rytkheu, who wrote the 1970 novel A Dream in Polar Fog.

Explore The Modern Novel. Do you see any surprises or are inspired to read some listed works?

-via Marginal Revolution | Image: Amazon

Happy Lunar New Year! The Asian festival begins today, and in China, this holiday ushers in the Year of the Snake. In Hong Kong, people will eat plenty of traditional holiday foods, and among them will be the traditional Kjeldsens Danish butter cookies. What? Many families in Hong Kong celebrate the new year with “blue tin cookies,” which everyone knows is the hard-to-pronounce Kjeldsens brand.

Traditions have to start somewhere, and this particular tradition goes back to 1963, or at least that's where the story begins. Within a few years, Kjeldsens butter cookies were available in Hong Kong as the Western tradition of snacking on sweets was about to take off. Kjeldsens cultivated this market, and did extra advertising in Hong Kong around holidays. The familiar blue tin is often kept and reused for sewing supplies, just as Royal Dansk cookie tins (introduced in 1966) are used in the US. Read up on how Kjeldsens Danish cookies became a part of the Lunar New Year at Atlas Obscura.

Yes, it's a video about snail mail, so I went into this wondering how it would be relevant or interesting. It's from CGP Grey, who can make the most mundane subject fascinating, and he does manage to make us care about ZIP codes by revealing their internal logic that you didn't know about.

Most countries use postal codes, but they use a variety of systems to assign those codes and make them work. Americans have a vague notion that our ZIP codes are geographic, but that's only part of the story. The Postal Service has their own geography that no one outside the industry understands. It works, but it's a system that was launched in 1963 designed for mail that was hand-sorted. Halfway through this video, we switch from the US system to the Irish postal system, which is designed for machine-sorting and will blow your mind. It's totally ingenious and has a lot of benefits, up until the moment the power goes out.

When you consider how many cybercriminals are able to force their way into people's bank accounts, you might be impressed with how easy it is to guess someone's PIN (personal identification number). It's a factor of a what PIN people choose, and too many people select one that is easy to remember and therefore simple to guess. There are 10,000 four-digit number combinations, but about 10% of all PINs are 1234. That would be a thieve's first guess.  

The grid above has a square for all 10,000 possible 4-digit numbers. The brighter ones are the most popular PINs for a reason. The diagonal line from the bottom left to the upper right are the PINs that use repeated digits. But what explains the brighter green rectangle on the bottom left? And why is there a bright green line going across? Those popular numbers are also the first to be tried. Find out why your PIN number is too easy to guess and how you can come up with a better one by reading this.  -via Damn Interesting

Ceci n'est pas une perceuse.

WOTC News tells us about Sylvester Franklin, a man in Savannah, Georgia, who ordered a drill from the online store AliExpress, a subsidiary of AliBaba, which is the "Amazon of China." Instead he received a photo of a drill. Frankllin also ordered a pressure washer and received a bit driver.

AliExpress has so far refused to refund his money. WOTC News reports that the company has a reputation for poor customer service, such as providing fake tracking numbers, as well as a history of counterfeiting.

-via Derek Guy

Ben Ashton is a British artist who is classically trained as a realistic painter. He can perfectly render portraits in the style of Old Masters and reflecting the highest standards of the Academic tradition.

Then he adds a twist. His images are not digital renderings with glitches, but are actually painted to look like that.

Every year, the company Meat & Livestock Australia puts their heart and soul into an ad campaign to get people eating local lamb meat. The ads over the last few years have been both funny and relatable, and the 2025 campaign is no exception. It's a live-action recreation of the internet, complete with comment sections represented by people in bleachers enjoying the show. Everyone's got something to say, but no one has anything to say that you haven't already heard. First, people disagree about whether the thing they've just seen is any good. Then they disagree about whether it's even real. Then they throw derogatory names and insults at each other. And those comments are floating among ads, unrelated jokes, and single emojis, which are not even worth logging in for. It's obvious that if real life were like the internet, we'd have to invent some alternate world to get away from it. The point is that no one agrees on anything, except the wonderful allure of grilled Australian lamb.  

Many of us grew up on Warner Bros. cartoons that contained a lot of sexual innuendo, but that was because they were written for adults, back in the days when all ages watched the same movies and animation wasn't specifically aimed at kids. Pee-wee's Playhouse, on the other hand, was a Saturday morning show written for children. However, Paul Reubens, the artist behind Pee-wee, wasn't above some suggestive double entendres, which flew over the heads of little children, but delighted their parents and other adults.

These jokes walked a fine line, since Pee-wee's Playhouse avidly promoted good behavior such as friendship and sharing, but also acknowledged the silly side of life. When Pee-wee or the other characters "went there," they had a thick layer of plausible deniability for anyone who might complain, but if you knew what they were alluding to, you just knew. The exceptions are a couple of instances of Pee-wee looking up someone's dress, which all children of the 80s knew was just naughty enough to be funny. Don't expect anything shocking in a list of eight Pee-wee's Playhouse scenes that could be classified as dirty jokes, but you will be impressed by their cleverness in being something that could be blamed on your dirty mind instead of the writers having a good time.   

The bigger the boy, the bigger the toy -or at least more of them. YouTuber Brutal Menace has plenty of Hot Wheels tracks, and he makes good use of them. He's turned his entire house into a track, complete with speed boosters! What's even better, he rigged a car with a camera so we can get a thrill from the point of view of the hypothetical tiny driver. Watch as this car zips around the house at different levels, loops the loop, and enters dark tunnels. Then it goes outside for a wild ride through the back yard which includes a fire tunnel and more loop-the-loops, through pipes and all the way across the street before the track runs out. The effect is like watching a roller coaster POV video, but it also makes you want to try something like this yourself, which a roller coaster video doesn't do, for me at least. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union went on for around 45 years. The people of the two nuclear powers watched for signs of an attack constantly. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, no one was really sure how to wind down a Cold War. Would the US take advantage of the situation? Would Russia be as belligerent as the USSR once was? Meanwhile, people kept doing their jobs, some better than others. In 1995, when Norway planned to launch a rocket for scientific study, the government notified all its neighbors and allies, including Russia, but the word didn't get to the actual Russian radio technicians in the field. They were Soviet-trained to look for incoming nuclear missiles and determine the level of danger within ten minutes. This rocket looked like a nuclear missile, and traveled like a nuclear missile. They made the call to take the "nuclear suitcase," which contained the codes for a nuclear attack against the US, to Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

Of course, we know the incident did not lead to a Russian nuclear attack, because it if had, we either wouldn't be here or we would have remembered that day. But as it was, the 1995 nuclear scare is said to have been the closest we've ever come to nuclear war, despite very few people knowing what really happened. Read the story yourself at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: NASA/Wallops)

Instagram user @g0nghua is a food artist who creates conceptual and inventive products at Who Eats Art. Her recent work includes experiments with tea eggs, which are a food originating in China. Boil an egg, crack it, then boil it again in tea to brew tea flavors into your egg.

@g0nghua says that her grandmother would disown her if she discovers that she's been doing this to pigeon eggs. I assume that she used molds to shape the semi-cooked eggs into dice. This was part of an exhibition of edible art that invited guests to sample the works on display.

-via Gastro Obscura