43carbon datingguess when it was made. a photograph of one object out of the met turns up, a sphinx or a samurai sword guard or a bronze wine jar, and you drag a marker along a timeline running four thousand bc to nineteen thirty. everybody in the room is dating the same thing on the same twenty five second clock, and at the buzzer all the guesses land on the bar at once, in front of the faint crowd of everyone who has ever dated that object before. the bar is warped so that being a hundred and fifty years out on a five thousand year old amulet is a good guess and the same hundred and fifty years on an eighteen eighty print is a bad one, which means one tick means the same thing everywhere on it. drag away from the line to slow down and you can pick out a single year. ten rounds to a game, then a podium, then it starts again. it stops in nineteen thirty because that is where the public domain stops
42on the recorda writing app where the camera is running the whole time. you get your face on top and a plain page underneath, and it keeps every keystroke with its timing, so afterwards the thing writes itself again at exactly the speed you wrote it: the typos, the sentence you selected and threw away, the pointer drifting over to click, the four minutes you spent looking out of the window. it plays back as a recording of the room and the writing at once, and comes out as one video. all of it stays on your machine unless you decide to put one session up at a link
41stand correctedevery correction the guardian has printed since july 1999: 47,085 of them, out of 8,879 daily columns set in the smallest type the paper owns. where a correction turns on one thing, the version that ran is printed struck through with the true one beside it, and then the pivot is blanked out and you are asked which of the two was true. the ledger counts the whole archive. numbers fail more than any other kind of fact, 20,105 times, and millions for billions is the house speciality: the record is $9m for $9bn. page one is the wrongest page in the paper. the slowest confession took a full year, to concede it had printed the wrong kind of quince
40ask aroundnobody has ever made a list of every advice column, so here is one, and the thing that makes it worth drawing is that a column is a role rather than a person: the name outlives whoever is writing it. dear abby has been two women, dear prudence four people, care and feeding seven. so every bar breaks where the name changed hands and you can watch a pen name get handed down like a job. it runs from the athenian mercury in 1691 to this morning, and somewhere in the middle the newspaper columns die off and the newsletters bloom. then upstairs there is a room where you can just ask, because people have been writing in to strangers about this stuff for three hundred and thirty five years and there was nowhere on the site to actually do it. strangers answer, you mark the one that helped, and whatever you asked about it will tell you which real column would have taken it
39open nowhow much of the world is open at this exact second. four and a half million places tell openstreetmap when they are open, and shifting every one of them into its own timezone gives a single number that never stops moving: at the deadest hour on earth one and a quarter million places are open, at the busiest three and a half million. the map is drawn from nothing but opening hours, and the continents show up anyway. every hour a wave of opening rolls west around the planet with a wave of closing behind it, and you can watch it: right now things are unlocking in seoul while new york puts the chairs up
38round the clockthe 729,156 places on earth that never close. 24/7 is the single most common thing anyone has ever written in the opening hours field, about one in six of all of them, and this is the whole inventory: the laundromats, the vending machines, the temples, ten thousand little free libraries, an automat für rohmilch in tyrol. beside each one is the real local time where it is, ticking. scroll and you get a column of clocks all reading different hours, every one of them somewhere that is open at that hour
37office hours235,157 government offices, town halls, post offices and courthouses, ranked by how few hours a week they will let you in. the median is forty. french town halls run at seventeen. at the very bottom sit hong kong's mobile post offices, a van that pulls into a village and is open for fifteen minutes, once a week. a dot beside each one says whether it is open at this moment in its own timezone, and if you ask it what is near you the answer is usually no
36by appointmentopening hours is not a number, it is a little grammar, and a million people have written in it by hand. these are the ones where that shows: places open for exactly one minute a week, hours that move with the sunset, rules that fire only on the last thursday, and four thousand three hundred whose entire stated opening hours is the sentence "nach vereinbarung". some of it does not parse at all, including one that says öffnungszeiten vorhanden, aber unbekannt, opening hours exist, but unknown. each value is drawn as the week it describes
35crash coursepeople ask for topics and once a week one of them becomes the entire site. everybody piles in adding things to read, watch and listen to, experts turn up and mark what actually matters, and at the end it seals shut as a permanent reading list. the trick is that nothing here is guessed: articles get counted word by word, books and papers come off their real page counts, video off its running time, so a course arrives with an honest total on it. twenty seven items, fourteen hours and twenty minutes to get through. filter it down to just the essential ones and the clock retotals in front of you
34on the nosepaste any url and it comes back as a perfume. nine notes arranged top, middle and base, each one a real photograph, plus a line of fragrance copy written straight. the irs forms page is printer toner over fluorescent light and receipt paper, drying down to waiting room and old paper. two hundred and twelve notes to draw from and a lot of them are things like hot laptop, parking garage and wet concrete, so it can only describe a page with what a page actually smells of. everything scented goes on one wall, and each page tells you what else in there smells like it
33lit crazy moviea parental-advisory site for how dark the movie is. not tonally. lighting wise. look up any film and your browser measures its actual brightness off twenty stills, then the people who tried to watch it overrule the measurement with a score, an advisory checklist, and the exact minute they lost the picture
32pipe upsend someone a note through a glass pneumatic tube. the pipe is rolled to a different length every time and nobody tells you which, so it might land in ninety seconds or on thursday, and you both stand at your own ends watching it come. drop a key or a boiled sweet in with it and they can see that but still not read the note. a heavy canister goes slower. pump to pull it in, twice as fast if you both do. pull back and you're floating in the whole plant, everyone's capsules running through the glass. only one canister fits in a tube, so until it lands neither of you can send anything
31box officeevery post office box on the public record, in one list, sorted by box number. 372,704 of them, so you can read box 1 in a thousand towns at once, or go straight to box 7777. from irs, fec and sec filings. yours comes off the wall in one click
30food fightrace everyone at the table to eat one shared plate of food. your webcam reads your chewing: aim with your head, chomp to bite, and swallow fast because a fresh bite is still stealable
29heads upcut out just the head: background and body gone, then refine by hand. optional hd hair-matting pass. the whole screen glows like a head. runs in your browser
28word of mouthstumble the web, but each page only shows up inside your open mouth, cut to the shape of your lips. chomp to stumble somewhere new, move your head to look around, chew to scroll. runs in your browser
27spin offa shared dj booth: everyone in a room drives the same two live radio channels together in real time. crossfade, eq, filter, loops, drum pads, plus rooms and chat
26due processa photo editor where every effect is a physical process: riso, cyanotype, halftone, polaroid. watch each one develop, tweak the real knobs. runs in your browser
25log onone public log of everyone who's here right now, and how long they stayed. you get a random name you can change, and a clock that only ticks while you're really there
24public accessflip through tv channels of public-domain video from the internet archive, complete with static between stations
23unreal when i shop my faceedit a picture with friends in real time — your webcam face is the cursor, and whatever tool you grab is hoisted over your head
22keyword saladupload a photo and get bourglor-style hyper-literal, keyword-stuffed captions (part reaction-archive, part aliexpress product title), then post to a searchable archive
21swear jara jar that fills up off the live bluesky firehose, one swear at a time, each shown in context. slurs filtered out
20linked outthe day's real news, rewritten as insufferable linkedin humblebrags: "i'm thrilled to announce..."
19stroke of geniustype any drawing tool and it draws like the real thing: pencil, spray can, water bottle dipped in paint, dragon breath
18much obligedpatron of the farts: spend favor, not money, to dedicate someone's meal, a bench, or an unwritten page to whoever you like
17crodie chowreal toronto restaurants with names too absurd to be real — a gallery + map
16well readpaste any article and re-typeset it into a reading layout you fully control
15forks givena fork economy: get a random handful of forks each day and give them to posts you appreciate
14roll calla public wall of people's rss subscriptions: drop yours and read over everyone's shoulder
13weather or notlocation-first weather channels: call the sky's next move, surf where people are guessing, chat with your area
12cite seeingpaste a paper, follow its citations and backlinks down the rabbithole
11for yousearch your name: find the books secretly dedicated to a you
10gloss overpaste any link, get a glossary of its terms defined only by real dictionaries
09paper-trailsurf research papers by how they read: semantic river + a field map, inspired by jabbic
08course loadtype a topic, pick real internet archive items, build a weekly syllabus
07clock ittime is a social construct.. and can therefore be crowdsourced..
06sound offupload sounds, auto-pitch-detected, curate your own soundboard
05read the rooma temporary holding space for friends to read and annotate pdfs together in real time
04handshaketwo-player trade table for digital scraps. swap on mutual confirm
03faces-placesexploring pareidolia phenomena and how humans/machines might interpret them
02hear, herean ephemeral group (text-to-speech) chat that tunes you into the present moment
01jabbicjudge a book by its cover.. inspired by max bittker's exploration engine