Enter The Quiet Zone: Where Cell Service, Wi-Fi Are Banned – NPR
“There are no physical signs you’ve entered the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area that covers the eastern half of West Virginia. But the silence gives you a signal. Somewhere around the Virginia-West Virginia state line, the periodic buzzes and pings of our smartphones stopped.”
I’m the Accidental Owner of a Banksy – New York Magazine
“The truth is — at the end of an exhausting day filled with phone calls talking to lawyers, security companies, art experts, and reporters — I have no idea what it means. There is no rule book when one of the most famous artists in the world decides to drop his work into your life.”
Interview with Bill Watterson – Mental Floss
“I could not take the strip with me if I quit, or even prevent the syndicate from replacing me, so I was truly scared I was going to lose everything I cared about either way. I made a lot of impassioned arguments for why a work of art should reflect the ideas and beliefs of its creator, but the simple fact was that my contract made that issue irrelevant. It was a grim, sad time. Desperation makes a person do crazy things.”
Formula 1′s Leading Team Has a Big Secret – Wired
Ever since the Montreal Grand Prix in June, rumors began to circulate that the Red Bull team was using some form of traction control. The system allows drivers to get off the line quicker and get on the power earlier out of corners as the computer optimizes the engine’s output based on the amount of grip at the tires. But traction control has been banned in F1 since 2008, and every race car uses the same engine control unit (ECU), all of which are inspected by F1 management at every race. It would be impossible for Red Bull to slip some kind of traction control system under the nose of the FIA, the governing body of F1.That’s where the engineering conspiracy theories begin.
The Problem With Taking Too Many Vitamins – BBC
“Vitamins are essential for life, and there are groups of people even in the UK who benefit from specific supplementation, but general unsupervised vitamin pill-popping is more than just a waste of money. The problem is that we all feel very warm and fuzzy about vitamins because, firstly, the tales of deficiency are so horrific, secondly, we read breakfast cereal packs and thirdly, a double-Nobel laureate called Linus Pauling liked vitamin C in vast, vast doses.”
The Rise of the Coffee Machines – Slate
“But what if they could be automated? What if Starbucks were to someday replace its 100,000-odd baristas with machines?”
Scott Adams’ Secret of Success: Failure – Wall Street Journal
“Let me start with some tips on what not to do. Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won’t be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps. Secondly, biographers never have access to the internal thoughts of successful people. If a biographer says Henry Ford invented the assembly line to impress women, that’s probably a guess.”
