How long does a bike last when left locked to a post in NYC? Yup, there’s a YouTube video to show us.

On January 1, 2011 we chained a fully loaded bike – bells, basket, lights and more – to a post along a busy Soho street. We took a picture of the bike everyday for 365 days, watching it slowly vanish before our eyes.

An astrophysicist and an economist get together and make a new calendar that will have dates fall on the same day year after year. They’re shooting for 2017 for worldwide adoption.

The calendar would accomplish this by means of a 364-day year — augmented every five or six years with an extra week tacked on at the end.

Yeah, that makes it so much cleaner. Good luck with that.

Robbers targeting Columbia University students only want iPhones:

Twice at 526 114th St., and once at 556 114th St., the suspects demanded the victims hand over their iPhones, police said.

The first victim complied, but the second only had a Droid, according to police. The thieves apparently didn’t want a Droid — so they took cash instead.

iPhones fetch upwards of $500 on eBay, while Androids go for much lower.

And nominated for quote of the year:

“It’s insulting they don’t want my BlackBerry,” said a female student.

The Wall Street Journal brings us the quest of one Colin Hagendorf — to taste every slice pizza in Manhattan.

Mr. Hagendorf began in August 2009 at Grandpa’s Place near 211th Street and Broadway—in Manhattan’s northernmost neighborhood—and worked his way down to the island’s southern tip. He excluded from consideration national chains and cafeterias that don’t make their own pizzas.

I’m really not sure why anyone would actually do this, other than to have it as a backup epitaph in case they did nothing else with their lives. Slice pizza is horrible and is only eaten because it’s quick and easy. It’s like comparing canned tuna to an ahi steak, or a Casio watch to a Patek Philippe.

Research from the University of Notre Dame indicates that walking through a doorway between rooms may be the cause of short term memory lapses.

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.

“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”

I would have posted this sooner, but I walked through a doorway after reading it and…poof…it was gone.

Some Penn students created the μWave, a hacked together microwave and tablet computer that will search for and display a highly-rated video on YouTube with the same duration as the cooking time for your food.

Brilliant!

The Times details how many University of Oregon football players are taking American Sign Language to fulfill their foreign language course requirement. When one of them scores a touchdown, they put their hands together in the shape of the letter “O”. Now that they know what that symbol means, they won’t do it anymore.

“I did the ‘O’ once, and I never did it again,” said LaMichael James, the team’s star running back, who recently injured his right elbow. When discussing this, James spoke quietly so that those nearby would not hear. He would not make the sign. His elbow hurt, he demurred.

So…I now know one word in sign language. Probably won’t come in that handy.

ExtendNY takes the Manhattan grid and extends it all over the world.

Big Ben is on E. 63,709th Street and 10,896th Avenue. The Sydney Opera House is at S. 26,283rd Street and 65,946th Avenue.

Famous Objects from Classic Movies is a game where they show you…wait for it…famous objects from classic movies. The objects are in silhouette, and get harder as you progress through the levels. The guessing is done hangman-style, so you can get some right if you guess letters well. If you see the Empire State Building and think “Sleepless in Seattle”, you might not do so well.

I finished it with a 74 and 48 record — not bad considering I’d never heard of some of them. I’m completely pissed that I missed “The Shinning”!

WARNING: Don’t start this game if you have work to do!

Ever since Steve Jobs’ death earlier this month, stories that people might have been afraid to pass on while he was alive have been floating around. The most interesting is how he got away with driving a car without a license plate:

Steve (or someone close to him) spotted a loophole in the California vehicle laws. Anyone with a brand new car had a maximum of six months to affix the issued number plate to the vehicle.

So Jobs made an arrangement with the leasing company; he would always change cars during the sixth month of the lease, exchanging one silver Mercedes SL55 AMG for another identical one. At no time would he ever be in a car as old as six months; and thus there was no legal requirement to have the number plates fitted.

Seth Stevenson, in a Slate article about Rolex choosing Tiger Woods as their new spokesman, writes:

Privately held since its formation in 1905, Rolex is a notoriously tight-lipped company. It doesn’t release revenue figures, or explain leadership transitions. (It had a total of three CEOs from 1905 until 2008, when then-CEO Patrick Heiniger resigned under mysterious circumstances.) Even the corporate structure is a bit murky. Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf died childless in 1960, leaving control of his company to a charitable foundation he’d established. The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation runs Rolex to this day. When I emailed a polite-but-elliptical media-relations woman to ask whether Rolex is essentially a nonprofit, and who the foundation’s major beneficiaries are, she responded with this sentence: “The principal focus of the foundation is to support a variety of philanthropic endeavors.”

Interesting. Sounds a little like Hershey’s, except we know where Hershey’s “philanthropic endeavors” are going.

Joe Nocera pens a Times op-ed piece on Howard Schultz’s attempt creating jobs:

Here we are two months later, and Schultz is back with Big Idea No. 2. It is every bit as idealistic as his first big idea, but far more practical. Starbucks is going to create a mechanism that will allow us citizens to do what the government and the banks won’t: lend money to small businesses. This mechanism is scheduled to be rolled out on Nov. 1. This time, Schultz is not tilting at windmills.

[...]

So am I. With the government and banks unwilling or unable, it’s time we took matters into our own hands. At this point, who else can we count on?

It’s a very interesting idea, and rather sad that we need the CEO of Starbucks to come up with it.

Update: The Create Jobs for USA website is now up.

Lytro is a new kind of camera.

Lytro lets you take pictures like never before. Unlike a conventional camera that captures a single plane of light, the Lytro camera captures the entire light field, which is all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space.

Very interesting technology, and some of the examples are very cool.

Booooooom & Adobe are teaming up with a photo contest where contestants remake famous works of art as photographs.

Some of the submissions are amazing. My personal favorites include “Café Terrace at Night” remake by Jonathan Pruc, “Creation of Adam” remake by Spencer Pidgeon, “Vase with 12 Sunflowers” remake by Qi Wei Fong, and “Automata” remake by Or Eitan.

The Onion reporting Steve Jobs death:

[...] President Barack Obama read in part, adding that Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas—attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen.

It’s kinda sad when The Onion nails it.