I shouldn’t be surprised there is a "standard issue government pen" being made but I am. There are just so many choices that it seems unnecessary. Even better, though, is that, by law, it’s made by blind workers:
For more than 40 years, standard black pens have cluttered the desks of thousands of federal employees, hung on a chain at post offices across the country and slipped into the pockets of countless military personnel. Yet few have realized that this government-issue pen has a history to rival that of any monument.
Blind workers assemble the pens in factories in Wisconsin and North Carolina under the brand name Skilcraft as part of a 72-year-old legislative mandate. The original 16-page specifications for the pen are still in force: It must be able to write continuously for a mile and in temperatures up to 160 degrees and down to 40 degrees below zero.
Wizards of the Coast is set to release the final rules for the D&D 5th Edition sometime this summer. And with new rules, comes a new logo.
It’s much improved from the last version — one I was never a fan of what I thought was a pretty cheesy look. The new logo is more simple and dirt at first glance… until you see the ampersand up close.
via Boing Boing
If you aren’t a poker player, it’s probably easy to suspend disbelief when watching a movie with a poker scene. But when you stop and think about the numbers, it’s not only amazing the plot unfolded the way it did, but so improbable that it’s practically impossible for it to happen. Take the scene from Casino Royale:
When they do reveal their hands in the final showdown, the Asian guy has the nut flush (the chances of this happening are 508 to 1); the black guy has a full house (693 to 1); La Chiffre, the villain, has an even better full house; and Bond has a straight flush (72,192 to 1).
If we add these probabilities together, the likelihood of all these monster hands being dealt at the same time is 18 trillion to 1. To put that into perspective, there are only 300 billion stars in our galaxy – so one star within sixty Milky Ways is the probability of Bond winning against all those hands.
Geekosystem talks through four other scenes to explain just how unlikely those events (other plot lines aside) those poker hands were.
Ever wonder where the names of New York City’s neighborhoods came from? You could do the research yourself or you could head over the Mental Floss where they’ve done much of it for you. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to know that many neighborhoods are named after the wealthy farmers and aristocrats that once owned the land. But there are some interesting nuggets of information that I didn’t know before so it’s worth the few minutes to read through them all. My favorite new fact: Washington Square Park once was a cemetery and an estimated 20,000 people are buried underneath it. Creepy.
via Kottke