From London to Rome in Only 26.4 Days!

This is balls to the walls amazing. Someone put together a transportation map for the Roman Empire which lets you know not only the method of travel but also the cost.

The Case of the 500-Mile Email

One day, the range of successful emails was “500 miles, or a little bit more”:

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when
I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte.  “Come again?”

“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated.  “A
little bit more, actually.  Call it 520 miles.  But no farther.”

“Um… Email really doesn’t work that way, generally,” I said, trying to
keep panic out of my voice.  One doesn’t display panic when speaking to a
department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like
statistics.  “What makes you think you can’t send mail more than 500
miles?”

“It’s not what I *think*,” the chairman replied testily.  “You see, when
we first noticed this happening, a few days ago–”

“You waited a few DAYS?” I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice.  “And
you couldn’t send email this whole time?”

“We could send email.  Just not more than–”

“–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that.”

North Korea’s Gift Shop

North Korea seriously has a CafePress shop where you can get propaganda printed on t-shirts and iPhone cases. We live in a world where you can actually buy this from one of history’s most deplorable regimes:

And yes, this is indeed real. The CafePress site is linked directly from the Korean Friendship Association official website.

Why Lenses Are So Expensive

None of this process makes any sense to me:

The Wire and Style

I can’t imagine the number of man-hours that went into making this very thorough piece on The Wire:

Technology Boner

This is amazing and totally plausible:

The Internet Circa 1994

Interesting narrative regarding budding etiquette and communication from the early days of the internet:

If the net as a civilization does mature to the point where it produces a central book of wisdom, like the Bible or the Koran, the following true story might make a good parable. In 1982, a group of forty people associated with a research institute in La Jolla established a small, private on-line network for themselves. For about six months, the participants were caught up in the rapture of the new medium, until one day a member of the group began provoking the others with anonymous on-line taunts. Before long, the community was so absorbed in an attempt to identify the bad apple that constructive discourse ceased. The group posted many messages imploring whoever was doing this to stop, but the person didn’t, and the community was destroyed. Stewart Brand, who is a founder of the well, an on-line service based in San Francisco, and who told me this story, said, “And not only did this break up the on-line community–it permanently affected the trust that those people had for each other in the face-to-face world, because they were never able to figure out who did it. To this day, they don’t know which one of them it was.”

The Architecture of Acoustics

Yet another fascinating episode from 99% Invisible, this time on the small details crucial for a deaf person that would largely go unnoticed by the hearing.

The Automated Future

This footage of an automated Amazon warehouse is mindblowing: