A list of curious facts
One: Attention, Star Trek fans: Spock was actually terrible at logic, and crap at making predictions: The more confident he says he is that something will happen—that the ship will crash, or that they will find survivors—the less likely it is to happen, and the less confident he is in something, the more likely it is to happen.” In other words, he wasn’t very bright lol! Julia Galef explains why. (h/t founding member Ramanand Mundkur)
Two: The langar at the Bangla Sahib Gurudwara in Delhi is a technological wonder! (h/t subscriber Arcopol Chaudhuri)
Three: Physicist Gabriel Lippmann took some of the earliest colour photographs without any pigments or dyes—using a process that earned him a Nobel Prize. Here are two beauties from the 1890s. Gizmodo has more on his technique.
Four: Speaking of colourising old photos, a new process uses AI to recreate the natural softening effects of light on skin. And the results are astonishingly life-like. The video explainer is kinda nerdy, but still fascinating.
Five: One last photo thing. This is an old-school selfie—taken using a timer—of nuclear inspector Artur Korneyev. What he is doing in this image: inspecting 11 tons of radioactive sludge called the Elephant’s Foot—mere months after the Chernobyl disaster. Point to note: The Elephant’s Foot initially gave off more than 10,000 roentgens of radiation an hour, which would kill a person three feet from it in less than two minutes. And that’s also why the final result looks so ghostly. Atlas Obscura has more on the incredible Mr Korneyev!
