Real Estate Purchase

(via Bad Newspaper)

Road Diets

Yeah, America is big, so we developed four lane roads to get us from town to town faster. Then four-lane roads were extended into town to alleviate traffic. But do we really need four-lane roads in a city? City streets are safer with traffic going slower. To achieve that, some cities are putting their streets on a diet, making them smaller and slower. So far, that's making street use easier for pedestrians and cyclists, while still not causing worse traffic for drivers -in most places. Your mileage may vary, no pun intended. (via Laughing Squid)

US Passports Come in Five Colors

   
Did you know that there are five colors for US passports? I've never seen one that isn't blue. But there are also black, gray, maroon, and purple passports, each belonging to a different class of Americans. The purple one is the one you want to avoid. Meanwhile, look for the many humorous easter eggs in this video. (via Boing Boing) 

    

Underneath

(Thanks, WTM!)

911 Explained

The 911 emergency system was inaugurated in the 1960s, but its rollout was slow, and it took years for smaller towns to fund and implement it. We all knew it was a great idea. Then enhanced 911 came out, and they could locate your landline phone as soon as you called. What sorcery is this? But technology advances, and now cities with the most sophisticated 911 service can locate the cell phone that made the call. 

We rely on the system, but few of us understand how it works now. Half as Interesting explains what happens when you make a 911 call. I have a bone to pick, though. Back in the day, you never had to dial a ten-digit number to get the local police. That would be a useless long-distance call. Local numbers are seven digits, or four digits if you go back far enough. This video is only 5:27; the rest is an ad. 

The Illegal Airport?

Ercan International Airport in Cyprus is weird because it's caught in a political no man's land. The history of Cyprus is like a lot of other country's histories: ruled by the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, then left to their own devices. This led to a split between the ethnic Greeks and the ethnic Turks, and the formation of Northern Cyprus, which is not a recognized country. That designation puts the  Ercan International Airport in a weird spot, as Half as Interesting explains. The video is only six minutes; the rest is promotional.   

The Pan-American Highway

The Pan-American Highway is a road that goes from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in the Arctic Circle, to Ushuaia, Argentina, known as the most southern city in the world. It was going to be a railroad, but then cars were invented and that made construction easier. The United States has the most miles of the highway, but we had to cheat a bit to actually claim that. But a hundred years after the project was initiated, the highway is still not complete. The real problem is the Darién Gap, in southern Panama and western Colombia. So the highway gap is right where the two American continents meet.  

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones make jokes aplenty while explaining how the Pan-American highway was conceived and what stopped its completion. There's a sponsor message from 4:43 to 6:10, and everything after 11:06 is promotional. (via Damn Interesting) 

Why Danger Symbols Can't Last Forever

You'd think that a skull-and-crossbones symbol would strike fear into people no matter where they are, making it a good warning symbol for danger in all languages. But over time, the Jolly Roger came to be associated with pirates and treasure maps, so not only is the fear muted, but the symbol became attractive. Hey, there may be treasure buried here! What seemed common sense became useless to warn people away from dangerous sites, like, say, a nuclear waste disposal site. So how do we label such dangers in a way that people who don't read, or don't know the language, will know what they mean thousands of years in the future? Designing a warning sign is much more complicated than you'd think. In addition to this video from Vox, you can read the accompanying article at 99% Invisible.

Dropping a GoPro Down a Well

Mathany Green House is a sustainable off-the-grid home in upstate New York. When their well was installed, they sent a GoPro camera down into the newly-drilled well because the driller said there were limestone caves down there. As the rope is fed, you see what the inside of a modern day drilled well looks like. Then all you can think is "How deep is this well?"

It's 120 feet deep. Or maybe more, but that's as far as the camera went down. Most of it is under water. They either reached the bottom, ran out of rope, or gave up when the light was gone. The caves were reported to be at 110 feet, but we can't see anything that far down. Still, the video is mesmerizing as it plunges further and further into the depths. The ride might be a little claustrophobic if you are so inclined, but you can pretend you're traveling through a wormhole into another dimension, if that helps. (via Geekologie) 

How Airlines Transport Your Luggage

You probably travel with just carry-on luggage if you have to fly, because not only does checked baggage cost extra, there's a chance you may never see that baggage again in one piece. What do airlines do to cause all that damage? One commenter told of the time he received his clothing in a garbage bag at baggage claim. The explanation was that an airplane had run over his suitcase. 

To show us what happens in the airport baggage conveyor system, Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines recreated the path that your suitcase takes through an airport. It's a bit scary in places, but somehow, his suitcase beats the odds and makes it out okay. (via Geeks Are Sexy) 

Living Below Sea Level

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones are the Map Men, ready to explain geography to us and entertain us at the same time. This one is about Netherlands, which jutted out into the sea and resembled Swiss cheese for most of its history. The area of its land rose and fell with the whims of the ocean, and settling there was a problem when you could expect floods at any time. So the Dutch engineered dikes and dams to hold back the sea and create fertile farmland below sea level.

There's an epiphany that comes early in the video when I learned, for the first time, that Dutch windmills aren't there to grind grain. They aren't actually windmills at all, but pumps to control the water level! There' a 90-second skippable ad at 4:25. The last 90 seconds is promotional, too. (via Laughing Squid) 

Why British Cartographers Have a Box of Spiders

I have always wondered how anyone made a map without our modern technology. It's hard to wrap one's head around how ancient mapmakers could visualize what the world looked like from above just by traveling through it. The art of surveying has always been a mystery to me. 

Chris Spargo got a chance to visit Ordnance Survey, the government agency in Britain that makes maps. They had a display of historical equipment used to make maps in the days before aerial surveys and GPS, which included a box for spiders. Why? Well, before we get to that, we learn some neat stuff about the advances in cartography over the last few hundred years, but eventually the spiders are explained. There's a one-minute skippable ad at 5:50. (via Damn Interesting) 

Fixing the Universe

We are thankful for those who spend their time bringing order to a chaotic world. Glad to see he's wearing those safety flip flops. This is from Jared Dewy. 

Fake Houses

In the US, we would assume that these unoccupied buildings were some secret government facilities, probably designed to spy on us. This explanation is more benign, and rather clever.

Sewage Treatment Plant

(via Criggo)

Rural Hospitals

Our insurance system makes sure that health care is very expensive. There has to be a profit every step of the way, or the insurance companies would fold. This affects everything from the enormous cost of educating doctors to drugs to the heating bill at your local hospital. Hospitals collect money from private insurers, Medicare, Medicaid, and some amount from patients, often just a fraction of the bill. And as more public health insurance is shifted to the private sector, like Obamacare and Medicare Advantage, more money is shifted to profits. That's bad enough, but if the most reliable payees, Medicare and Medicaid, are cut, it affects the entire system. You may not care about these programs because you don't use them, but collectively, they keep your local hospital running... but that could easily change.

Purple Streetlights

Have you noticed the rise of purple streetlights in your town? I haven't, but that may be because my small town is trying to look quaint and vintage to draw tourists. Purple streetlights are being noticed all across America. There must be a reason for that, but it turns out to be a pretty dumb reason. To get to the bottom of it, this video goes through the change from sodium vapor lamps on our streets to LEDs. Sure, there are a lot of advantages to LEDs, particularly in the amount of energy they use. They are certainly brighter, even though a lot of folks don't like them. The purple has been showing up only in the last few years, and it's not intentional. 

The Trillion Dollar Paradox

We've become really bad at long-range thinking in today's society. Would you invest a lot of money in infrastructure now to ensure the quality of life yourself in ten or twenty years and for future generations? In the example they give, the answer is duh, yes. Throw in some more factors, like survival, and the answer is hell yes! But people still have a tendency to disregard the future to hold onto a dollar now. We are talking about energy consumption. It doesn't help that opposing factions have their own current dollars to consider.

Broken Traffic Light

In this dash cam video, we find that a light has gone wonky on the streets of Kemerovo, Russia. A passerby thinks he can give it a whack with a stick and maybe it will right itself. What could possibly go wrong? You'll have to watch the video to find out. Let's just say he makes things much worse. (via Tastefully Offensive)

The Real Logic Behind ZIP Codes

Most countries use postal codes, but they use a variety of systems to assign those codes and make them work. Americans have a vague notion that our ZIP codes are geographic, but that's only part of the story. The Postal Service has their own geography that no one outside the industry understands. It works, but it's a system that was launched in 1963 designed for mail that was hand-sorted. Halfway through this video, we switch from the US system to the Irish postal system, which is designed for machine-sorting and will blow your mind. It's totally ingenious and has a lot of benefits, up until the moment the power goes out.