Wanna Bet?

Need to settle a trivia dispute fast? Richard Blewett, a "Trivial Pursuit" question editor for the games company Hasbro, suggests these websites:

Movies: IMDB.com posts film facts. Were you aware that Tom Hanks is a descendant of Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln's mother?

History: Bartleby.com is an online reference publisher and features historical facts and quotations. The home page also features a list of links to other reference-book sites.

Celebs and TV: Hollywood.com can tell you in which film Jennifer Aniston was menaced by a killer leprechaun, and other details about celebs.

Music: Billboard.com's "Music Info Search" lets you keep up the names of recording artists, song titles and lyrics. » Continue reading

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How are old black and white films converted into colour?

The film is transferred to digital tape. Then, the first time each shade of grey appears, it is coloured manually on a graphics computer and given an identification code. Every time the grey reappears the computer colours it automatically. The process was first used in 1985 on the James Cagney classic Yankee Doodle Dandy. Though the technique was successful for video, the results were not good enough for big-screen projection. Today's advanced film scanners and recorders mean this is now possible, but colorization has largely died out following film industry complaints that the process distorts the original intentions of filmmakers. » Continue reading

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All the juice on the gossip grapevine

Do you remember all the more mundane details about your friends' lives, or are you more likely to remember juicy gossip? UK-based researchers Alex Mesoudi and Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews and Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool used a "Chinese whispers" style of experiment to find out, and it seems gossip wins hands down.

The researchers gave ten people four different passages to read, then asked them to write down what they could remember. Then their writings were passed to another five rounds of volunteers. Not surprisingly, the researchers found that gossip-like information involving deception and infidelity was remembered and transmitted in far greater quantity and with greater accuracy. In a separate study, a British market research company called 72 Point surveyed 2000 volunteers and found 97% of women and 93% of men admitted they like spreading tittle-tattle. Their favorite topic? Information about friends and family, closely followed by details of office affairs and celebrities' lives. » Continue reading

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Silence, Please!

Open windows and more time outdoors can also mean noisy neighbors, barking dogs and the din of speeding cars. Some people have been masking the noise with these methods:

Use your PC with Atmosphere Deluxe, you customize your own nature sound mix. Then, fed through your PC speakers, you'll hear the ocean or tropical frog pond instead of the mower across the street.

Tune it out iSplash waterproof speakers play music from an iPod or any source with a headphone jack.

Consider storm windows An outer laminated window can cut outside noise by up to 10 decibels - perceived as half the amount of sound, says one sound engineer. » Continue reading

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