We’ve finally made contact. Aliens have arrived. As they descend from the sky, humanity gathers to marvel at their high-tech, interplanetary spaceships made entirely out of...knotty pine.
Likely? No. But the idea of a tongue-and-groove spacecraft became a little less sci-fi last month when a team of Japanese scientists put a wooden satellite into orbit. Their goal is to find a sustainable construction material that could one day be produced in space. (Yes, we’re talking lunar tree farms.) Suddenly, an Unidentified Forest Object doesn’t sound like such a space oddity.
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Whittling satellites is a wildly ambitious idea. But even more powerful is the idea it’s rooted in—using old concepts and materials for radical new applications. There’s plenty of precedent here. Take the double helix, nature’s primordial data bank and the template for next-gen data storage. Or the abacus, an ancient inspiration for binary code (not to mention beaded seat covers).
Maybe one way to invent the future is looking to the past. Who knows what innovations are waiting to be discovered. Steam-powered smartphones? Gregorian chantGPT? Sounds almost as crazy as a wooden satellite. |
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📸 6 degrees of pixelation. Einstein to Patsy Cline. Charles Dickens to Charli XCX. Link any two celebs through a chain of archival photos. |
🍏 Produce scale. Is your favorite apple variety golden and delicious? This ranking might make you want to McIntoss it out. |
🗺️ Pushing boundaries. Globetrot and time travel across an interactive map showing how borders have shifted over the centuries. |
💔 The thrill is gone. Are pop ballads disappearing? You’ll love the answer offered by this data deep dive. |
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Our holiday sale is on! Save 20% on Premium for friends, family, or yourself. |
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The quality of a joke is equal to the probability that you tell it to a friend the next time you see them. The diagram above shows the sequence of social interactions between the members of Cody’s immediate friend group.
If Cody hears a joke of quality p = 0.6, what’s the probability that Al, Jan, Woo, or Sam hears it?
Bonus: Now Cody’s social network is infinitely deep, with a sequence of interactions that continues the pattern above. What’s the chance that infinitely many people hear the joke?
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We’ll randomly choose one correct respondent to each puzzle for a shout-out in next month’s email. |
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Congratulations to Janik Jungclaus and František Kalvas, our winners this month.
The key to last month’s puzzle was to find the chance that a particular guest was the only one to remember their Can o’ Cran, and multiply it by the number of attendees. The bonus question extended this logic up to 3 “rememberers,” then used a graph to find the optimal number of people to ask.
Check out the full solution here. |
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“Science, like life, feeds on its own decay.” |
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