Zany Old-Timey Newspaper Graphics: After the Cubs' chances at ending their World Series drought were dashed last week, the New York Times had a little fun in their newspaper in the most 1908 way possible:
Cubs graphic in Friday's NYT is a throwback to classic Chicago Tribune graphic from the early 1900s. So awesome. pic.twitter.com/2BGEoxSQEL
— Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) October 23, 2015Chicago magazine laid on the nostalgia a little further for data reporter Tanveer Ali, unearthing some crazy graphics in the Tribune from the period after the Cubs became world champions. Among the bizarre drawings, charts and maps created that year: an intricate illustration of a subway station that goes many levels deep on Dearborn Street, how to make a seven-room apartment out of a three-room bungalow and a diagram of every football play in a game between Purdue and University of Chicago. (Yes, U. of C. had a football team.)
Buy Michael Jordan's House and Get All His Shoes ABSOLUTELY FREE: Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan has tried (and failed) to unload his palatial Highland Park home for years. Now, he's offering would-be buyers every single pair of signature Air Jordans in their size if they buy his 1990s manse, reporter David Matthews is reading in Maxim. Jordan's 56,000-square-foot house (and all those sneakers) are available for $14.9 million, down from the original asking price of $29 million three years ago.
Does Music Change How Your Food Tastes?: Smell isn't the only non-taste sense that changes our perception of how food tastes. According to a New Yorker story, people who ate from heavier yogurt containers found their yogurt more filling, thought cookies were crunchier when served from rough surfaces and thought foods with a hard "k" sound in their name were more bitter than other foods.
And if you're interested in testing your own food senses, you can take a quiz at the bottom of the story that will determine if you can hear the differences between hot and cold water being poured and see if different music affects how you taste foods.
Typos Aren't as Stoopid as They Seem: Not to justify the typos that occasionally crop up in DNAinfo stories, but there's a scientific explanation for why they're easier for readers to catch. Leave it to Wired.com to explain the science behind the misspellings that have been the curse of writers and editors since the invention of writing and editing. Writer Nick Stockton interviewed psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos for a living at the University of Sheffield in Great Britain. According to Stafford, when we're reading, “We don’t catch every detail, we're not computers.... Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”
"This explains why your readers are more likely to pick up on your errors," Stockton writes. "Their brains are on this journey for the first time, so they are paying more attention to the details along the way and not anticipating the final destination."
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