Follow the Lady

Known by a number of names, including Follow the Lady and Follow the Bee, three-card monte is a confidence game in which victims, or marks, are tricked into betting that they can find a certain card, such as the queen of spades, among three face-down playing cards. After showing the target card, the dealer often uses sleight of hand before rearranging the cards quickly and giving the player an opportunity to select one of the three cards. What happens if the mark unexpectedly finds the queen? Discuss

Source: The Free Dictionary

Language: What Is It?

Humans are the only creatures to use a form of communication that scholars consider “language”—a system of spoken sounds or conventional symbols that communicates thought. Although some animals display similar social behavior, linguists are reluctant to term it language, instead describing it as “animal communication.” Still, some animals have been taught certain features of human language. Why are most animal languages considered “closed”? Discuss

Source: The Free Dictionary

The Loudness War

The music industry’s tendency to record, produce, and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness to create a distinct sound is known as the Loudness War. Because the maximum amplitude of recorded music cannot be increased, overall loudness can only be boosted by reducing the dynamic range of source audio and distorting recordings, leading to complaints from some audiophiles. What 1997 remix of a 1973 album is considered by some to be the loudest rock CD ever recorded? Discuss

Source: The Free Dictionary

Synchronicity

A term coined by psychologist Carl Jung to describe what he called “meaningful coincidences,” synchronicity is the experience of two or more causally unrelated events that are conceptually similar and have very little chance of occurring together randomly—such as the discovery of the same idea by two different people at approximately the same time. Although Jung had introduced the concept of synchronicity in the 1920s, he did not fully explain it until when? Discuss

Source: The Free Dictionary

Wish Trees

Identified by the faithful as possessing special spiritual value, wish trees are individual trees which have been distinguished—often by species, position, or appearance—as the objects of wishes. Visitors commonly offer up coins, liquor, and other gifts in order to gain fulfillment of their desires. Among the most famous wish tree visitors was Queen Victoria, whose 1877 visit to an oak in the Scottish Highlands brought it much fame. How are Christmas trees connected to the concept of wish trees? Discuss

Source: The Free Dictionary

Photographic Mosaics

Simply speaking, a photographic mosaic is a picture made of smaller pictures. Often used to recreate iconic images such as the Mona Lisa, photomosaics are created by replacing rectangular sections of an image with smaller pictures or photographs of an average color. When viewed from afar, a primary image is visible. When examined closely, the hundreds or thousands of smaller images acting as pixels are revealed. In 1994, a photomosaic of John F. Kennedy was created with pictures of whom? Discuss

Source: The Free Dictionary

Orcas

Found in oceans worldwide, orcas display sophisticated hunting techniques and social behaviors that have been described by experts as manifestations of a shared culture. Like other dolphins, orcas produce a variety of vocalizations used for communication and echolocation. Orca mothers have even been observed training their young in the group’s dialect, and it is said that groups that share ancestors are likely to have a similar set of call types. What does this suggest about orca vocal behavior? Discuss

Source: The Free Dictionary

Exabytes

An exabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quintillion bytes—an amount roughly represented by the number 1 followed by 18 zeros. Though the term is rarely encountered in any practical context, a popular, hotly contested assertion, which often cites as support a project at the UC Berkeley School of Information, is that “all words ever spoken by human beings” can be represented by approximately 5 exabytes of data. What is meant by the related term “exaflood”? Discuss

Source: The Free Dictionary

Mail Art

Some claim that mail art, an art form that uses the postal system as a medium, began when Cleopatra had herself delivered to Julius Caesar in a rolled-up carpet, but the thousands-strong, international network of mail artists as it exists today is a more recent development, evolving between the 1950s and 90s. Mail artists typically exchange ephemera in the form of decorated envelopes, illustrated letters, artist trading cards, and many other items. Who is deemed the pioneer of modern mail art? Discuss

Source: The Free Dictionary

Olbers’s Paradox

If the universe is assumed to contain an infinite number of uniformly distributed luminous stars, then every point in the sky should be as bright as a star. So why is the sky dark at night? That is the question posed by Olbers’s paradox, named for astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, who described it in 1823, more than 200 years after Johannes Kepler first posed the question as an argument against the notion of a limitless universe with infinite stars. How has the paradox since been resolved? Discuss

Source: The Free Dictionary