What Is the ‘Monster Mash’? An Investigation

When it comes to seasonal novelty songs, few have enjoyed the level of dominance achieved by “Monster Mash.” Unlike, say, “Jingle Bells,” The Mash (as I will refer to it throughout this post) is now basically synonymous with its associated holiday, becoming the first and maybe only Halloween song readily named by the average person.

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A Conversation With Allan Zeman: The Father Of Lan Kwai Fong

It’s Thursday evening, which means that well below Allan Zeman’s sky-high office, happy hour is in full swing, an optimistically early kickoff to yet another unpredictably turbulent weekend on the streets of Hong Kong’s legendary party district, Lan Kwai Fong (LKF). Zeman, the self-effacing entrepreneurlocally known as ‘The Father of […]

Jill Stein Still Ambivalent About Wi-Fi

In her latest Reddit AMA, Jill Stein pulled a Jill Stein, nicely evading a question about the effects of wi-fi on young children. In August, Gizmodo reported on a video where Dr. Stein responds to a question about wi-fi in schools with, “We should not be subjecting kids’ brains…to that.” On Saturday, the Green Party presidential candidate clarified her stance when Redditor Bromaster3000 asked: “You once said that ‘wi-fi’ is a threat to the health of American children? Why do you hold that belief, if you still hold it?”

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How Skyscrapers Are Being Built Higher and Higher

How Skyscrapers Are Being Built Higher and Higher

Tall buildings often have tuned mass dampers hidden inside their structures to stabilize them against the wind. Those tuned mass dampers are huge and heavy and help limit a building’s movement by swaying in the opposite direction of the building. That is, if the wind is making a skyscraper sway to the right, the damper will sway to the left to dissipate the kinetic energy, and reduce the, um, swaying. What’s interesting is that the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, doesn’t have that.

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