Quiz Of The Week A fish dish served at Noma (but not necessarily the answer to question 1) - What is Tonfön?
(i) A Tongan telecoms company
(ii) A German manufacturer of audio goods
(iii) A fish dish served at Noma
(iv) The Swedish name for Tintin - What is the Lindy Effect?
(i) The more famous you are, the more likely you are to be kidnapped
(ii) The emptier the restaurant, the slower the service
(iii) The longer something has existed, the longer it will continue to exist
(iv) Sooner or later, everybody eats cheesecake - How many movies are currently available on Netflix?
(i) 2,000
(ii) 4,000
(iii) 8,000
(iv) 16,000 - For what purpose was the first centrifuge used?
(i) To separate sugar crystals from molasses
(ii) To dry wet clothes
(iii) To separate cream from milk
(iv) To separate uranium-235 from uranium-238 - What was the Red-Dead Project?
(i) A plan to replenish the Dead Sea with water from the Red Sea
(ii) A jam-band involving various Grateful Dead and Red Hot Chili Peppers
(iii) A Cold-War CIA scheme to desecrate Lenin's Tomb
(iv) The working title of the film Hellfighters, with John Wayne as Red Adair
Answers at the foot of the page, before the giraffe
Andre 3000 As Jimi Hendrix  Andre 3000 as Jimi Hendrix Click on the image to see the video on YouTube Andre 3000 of Outkast plays Jimi Hendrix in Jimi: All Is By My Side (2013), a film about Hendrix's life in London in 1966-67, written and directed by John Ridley. In this scene Andre/Jimi covers the title song from the Beatles' newly-released album Sergeant Pepper, on 4th June 1967 at the Saville Theatre in London, with The Beatles in the audience. See also footage from that 1967 performance, with Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums.
From The Browser Seven Years AgoHow Things Work
Nick Denton | Gawker | 22nd August 2016 | U
The founder of Gawker bows out, and reflects on lessons learned. “The Gawker domain is being left behind in bankruptcy. This is the last post. We were internet exceptionalists, believing that that from blogs, forums and messaging would emerge a new world of unlimited freedom to associate and to express. That freedom was illusory. The system is still there. It pushed back” (4,200 words) From The Browser Eight Years AgoWar In Donbas
Julian Evans | Granta | 17th August 2015 | U
Letter from Ukraine, one year after pro-Russian separatists began a civil war intended to carve off the eastern flank of Ukraine, from Donbas (in green on the map) to the newly-annexed Crimea. They were held at bay by Ukrainian troops and militias in a deadlock that led to Russia's outright invasion of Ukraine in 2022. "It’s the last war of the Soviet Union, and a war against ourselves" (6,300 words)
Book Of The WeekCosmic Scholar: The Life And Times Of Harry Smith
John Szwed | Macmillan | 2023 Recommended by Dwight Garner in the New York Times:
"Harry Smith was one of the great downtown New York figures of the second half of the 20th century — scraggly, stooped, wild-haired, impeccable in his sloppiness. His Anthology Of American Folk Music became a crucial countercultural document. He studied parapsychology, hieroglyphics, astrology and alchemy. He produced records by noted rabbis, learning Hebrew to do so. The screenings of his experimental films were legendary happenings. He was the worm at the bottom of American culture’s mezcal bottle. You slam the glass down, because his experience still makes you feel alive"
Problem Of The WeekA target-shooter puts two bullets into consecutive chambers of a revolver, leaving four chambers empty. The target-shooter spin the cylinder of the revolver randomly, then fire once. The chamber is empty. Is the target-shooter more likely to fire a bullet on the next shot by letting the cylinder advance one chamber, or by giving the cylinder another random spin before firing? Solution below, after the crossword
The healthy life expectancy of the average American, rich or poor, has been less than that of the average English person since the early 1980s, But absolute declines in American public health over the past decade have made the problem far worse. The healthy life expectancy of the average person in America in 2020 was equal to that of the average person in Blackpool, England, the town which has by far the lowest healthy life expectancy in the whole of England.
— via John Burn-Murdoch
Image Of The WeekMinimalist Superman Superman (1978), from a series of minimalist movie posters imagined by Michal Krasnopolski. "Each poster is based on a simple grid of a circle, a square, and four intersecting lines. It would be a challenge to come up with a poster for every movie in this style, but the ones he picked work really well" — Jason Kottke
Poem Of The Weekfrom Water Nymph At A Magnox Storage Pond
Paul Farley | TLS | 2019 We hook up in the last places you’d look.
Flooded subways, lift well pools
where rain holes up, gazed-over gravelled shallows,
moss gardens on bus stop shelter roofs: we’re found near waters just like these since Zeus
got us on zero hours contracts,
having deserted springs, dew ponds and tarns,
taken our severance, joined the queues
and tell our sob stories of meres and fens
long drained, filled in, paved over, cry me a river. Some babble: new reservoirs
will create thousands of jobs; purists
sit on their arses, waiting for water features
to come to them. But if they’d take a cistern, a temporary post beside a rain butt,
a bath plumbed into quickset for the cattle,
a leaky fridge condenser, hoof print, divot
or – sod it – a puddle, there’s always work to be had. continue reading at the TLS
Click here to print this week's puzzle
Click here to load this week's puzzle in Across Lite
Click here for past puzzles and solutions
Click here to solve the Browser Sevens
Problem SolvedProblem: A target-shooter puts two bullets into consecutive chambers of a revolver, leaving four chambers empty. The target-shooter spin the cylinder of the revolver randomly, then fire once. The chamber is empty. Is the target-shooter more likely to fire a bullet on the next shot by letting the cylinder advance one chamber, or by giving the cylinder another random spin before firing? Solution: It feels as though the answer should be "Don't spin", since in the given sequence one empty chamber has already been eliminated. But look at it another way. There are four empty chambers in the revolver. Since the two bullets were loaded in consecutive chambers, only one of the empty chambers is followed by a loaded chamber; three of them are followed by another empty chamber. There is thus a one-in-four chance that the empty chamber will be followed by a loaded chamber. For the cylinder as a whole there are two loaded chambers and four empty chambers. So, after spinning the cylinder randomly, there is a one-in-three chance that the first chamber up will be loaded. The target-shooter thus has a one-in-three chance of firing a bullet by spinning the cylinder again, and a one-in-four chance if the chamber is not spun. Spin.
Quiz Answers - What is Tonfön?
(i) A Tongan telecoms company
(ii) A German manufacturer of audio goods
(iii) A fish dish served at Noma
(iv) The Swedish name for Tintin
Tonfön is a Tongan telephone company founded in 2002 by Prince Saosi, then heir to the Tongan throne. Saosi, who ruled as King George Tupou V from 2006 to his death in 2012, added the umlaut "because he liked the look". Tonfön was the main and perhaps only viable result of a programme to modernise Tonga under Saosi's father, King Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV. Other royal projects included marketing Tonga as a nuclear waste disposal site; selling Tongan passports; registering foreign ships (which rapidly attracted interest from al-Qaeda); buying a long-term charter on an unusable Boeing 757 parked in Australia; and manufacturing cigarettes for export to China. - What is the Lindy Effect?
(i) The more famous you are, the more likely you are to be kidnapped
(ii) The emptier the restaurant, the slower the service
(iii) The longer something has existed, the longer it will continue to exist
(iv) Sooner or later, everybody eats cheesecake
The Lindy Effect proposes that the life expectancy of a given object is proportionate to its current age: which is to say, the longer that something has been in existence, the longer it is likely to remain in existence. The concept, popularised in recent years by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is named after Lindy's delicatessen in New York City's Theatre District, where it was first coined as a rule-of-thumb for the expected life of a Broadway show. - How many movies are currently available on Netflix?
(i) 2,000
(ii) 4,000
(iii) 8,000
(iv) 16,000
There are currently just over 4,000 films available on Netflix. But to see a full listing of them you will have to go to a different site. A Netflix user's landing page shows only about 500 different titles, most of them repeated multiple times in multiple categories as the user scrolls down. For films not featured on the home page, a user must search by name, without knowing whether or not the film will be available. Why Netflix doesn't have a "browse all" function is anybody's guess. Back in the days of videotapes, Blockbuster offered a mimum of 8,000-10,000 titles. - For what purpose was the first centrifuge used?
(i) To separate sugar crystals from molasses
(ii) To dry wet clothes
(iii) To separate cream from milk
(iv) To separate uranium-235 from uranium-238
The centrifuge was invented in 1864 as a device for separating cream from milk, though the first working model was not commissioned until 1875. The inventor, Antonin Prandtl, got the idea from a rotating-arm device built a century earlier by a military engineer, Benjamin Robins, for measuring the resistance of fluids. The arrival of centrifuges revolutionised sugar refining (ha ha) and paved the way for spin drying of laundry. The centrifuges used in uranium enrichment are gas centrifuges which can operate on a continuous flow of gasified uranium without having to pause between batches. - What was the Red-Dead Project?
(i) A plan to replenish the Dead Sea with water from the Red Sea
(ii) A jam-band involving various Grateful Dead and Red-Hot Chili Peppers
(iii) A Cold-War CIA scheme to desecrate Lenin's Tomb
(iv) The working title of the film Hellfighters, about Red Adair
The Red-Dead Project was a joint Israeli-Jordanian scheme proposed in 2005 to draw water from the Red Sea and run it through a desalination plant at Aqaba, creating fresh water for consumption in Israel and Jordan and also a briney residue which would be used to replenish the Dead Sea. The project was scrapped in 2021 after Israel and Jordan found it impossible to agree the terms of their cooperation. Jordan’s per-capita water supply is less than 100 cubic meters per year, one-fifth of the level generally classed as “absolute scarcity”.
 "The Los Angeles Yellow Pages is richer in human incident than all the novels of Balzac" — J.G. Ballard
Shortcode Glossary:
U = Ungated, free. M = Metered paywall. B = Metered paywall can be bypassed using private/incognito browsing. Full details of our shortcodes here.
This post is only for paying subscribers of The Browser, but please do forward it to any friends who deserve a treat today, especially if you think they might be interested in becoming Browser subscribers in the future. Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Jodi Ettenberg, Editor-At-Large; Dan Feyer, Crossword Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Sylvia Bishop, Assistant Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director Editorial comments and letters to the editor: editor@thebrowser.com
Technical issues and support requests: support@thebrowser.com
Or write at any time to the publisher: uri@thebrowser.com Elsewhere on The Browser, and of possible interest to Browser subscribers: Letters To The Editor, where you will find constructive comment from fellow-subscribers; The Reader, our commonplace book of clippings and quotations; Notes, our occasional blog. You can always Give The Browser, surely the finest possible gift for discerning friends and family.
|
