, And Other News
While most of the world was enjoying its weekend, Reddit was roiling. After the company fired Victoria Taylor, who coordinated the site's immensely popular AMA series, the series' subreddit r/IAmA shut down, along with a number of other prominent subreddits. While Reddit CEO Ellen Pao chalked up the turmoil to miscommunication,1another former employee intimated that he had been let go due to his leukemia.
While nearly 1,800 subreddits shut down following r/IAmA, most, if not all, were reopened as of Sunday night, though the long-term effects of the outrage remain to be seen.
The World's Most Useless Gadget Is Kind Of Awesome
Gear ratios are everywhere — car engines, mechanical watches, bike gears, etc. And usually they serve an important purpose (just ask a bike-rider whether it's easier to climb a hill on a fixed or variable-gear bike).
Oskar van Deventer took things to the extreme, building a compact crank device with a gear ratio of 11,373,076 to 1. That is to say, poor Oskar will have to turn the crank over 11 million times to put the largest gear through one full revolution. Its practical applications are TBD, but van Deventer has one suggestion:
A patient person could use it to move a heavy train locomotive with a dental dril [sic].
Texting With My Identity Thief
Baratunde Thurston's Facebook account was hacked. Six weeks later, he received a text from an unknown number. Behind that number was the person who had hacked his account.
So Thurston did the only natural thing — he texted back.
Attn: Greece — Changing Currencies Isn't Easy
Greece's vote to reject a bailout on Sunday heightens the possibility that the country will exit the Eurozone in the near future. If that happens, Greece will likely return to its old currency, the drachma — and it won't be easy:
Introducing a new currency is no small feat. Recent cases — East Germany's adoption of the deutsche mark, the Czech-Slovak divorce of 1993, and the creation of the euro itself — benefited from years of careful planning and broad popular support. If Greece were to abandon the euro, it would have neither.
US Women Cruise Past Japan To Win World Cup
The utter ludicrousness of the Americans' opening salvo against the Japanese — 4 goals in the first 16 minutes of the game — was neatly encapsulated by the fourth (and goal-scorer Carli Lloyd's third) goal, an absolutely ridiculous strike from the midfield line that just evaded the grasp of the Japanese goalkeeper. Japan pulled two goals back, but couldn't get any closer; the game finished 5-2.
If you're into Spanish commentary (ie. 'GOOOOOOOOOOOL'), Deadspin has the highlights as called by the legend Andrés Cantor.
How To Make The Most Of Your Vacation
So you saved up your money and your measly allotment of vacation days for a vacation. That took a while! You'd better make the vacation itself worth it. Luckily, researchers have been looking into how to maximize your vacation happiness and they have a few insights — you can start by planning things well in advance.
Harvard Engineering Students Might Have Cracked The Meat-Smoking Process
What happens when you put 16 hungry college engineering students together? They build the perfect smoker. And to get perfect results, it has to be a bit more complicated than usual:
In prototype form, the smoker looks like a combination of a giant pepper mill, a tandoori oven, and V.I.N.CENT from The Black Hole. It weighs 300 pounds. It has a refueling chute built into the side of it. And it uses a proportional-integral-derivative controller, a Raspberry Pi, and fans to regulate its own temperature, automatically producing an ideal slow-and-low burn.
In the news: Greece voted in a referendum to reject bailout terms, putting its future Eurozone status in doubt; Scientists announced that life could be present on the comet landed on by the Philae spacecraft; Burt Shavitz, founder of Burt's Bees, died at 80; Matt Stonie and Miki Sudo won the men's and women's hot-dog eating championships at Coney Island.
