Voila, the 1899 pre­cur­sor to this amaz­ing 2009 bike stunt video orig­i­nal­ly found on the @courosa Twit­ter stream. And who can doubt that we’re mak­ing progress?

via Andrew Sul­li­van

When you’re read­ing The New York Times and stum­ble upon a word you don’t know, you can high­light it and the Times will give you the def­i­n­i­tion. Nat­u­ral­ly, the Times keeps track of the def­i­n­i­tions it pro­vides. So what are the most com­mon­ly looked up words? You can find the top ten below. (Get a longer list here.) So, smart read­ers, did you know all of them?

1. sui gener­is
2. solip­sis­tic
3. louche
4. lacon­ic
5. sat­ur­nine
6. ante­dilu­vian
7. epis­te­mo­log­i­cal
8. shib­bo­leths
9. penury
10. sump­tu­ary

via @aknopf

A nice cre­ative use of Legos. For $55, you can build The Guggen­heim Muse­um and Falling­wa­ter, two Frank Lloyd Wright cre­ations, with Legos. That’s right up there with Clas­sic Pho­tographs Remade Lego Style.

via Boing­Bo­ing

At the TED Con­fer­ence, actress Sarah Jones takes a fun­ny look at “the inven­tion of self,” which is a fan­cy way of say­ing she does some good imper­son­ations. Com­ing up, Jones imper­son­ates an elder­ly Jew­ish women, a young fast-talk­ing Domini­can col­lege stu­dent, peo­ple from var­i­ous nation­al­i­ties (Chi­na, India, France, Ger­many, Jor­dan, etc.). And it’s all mixed with some humor. Runs about 21 min­utes.

Just a quick fyi, we cre­at­ed a lit­tle Face­book page where you can access our dai­ly con­tent. So head over and become a “Fan.” And tell a friend.

Also, please note, you can find us on Twit­ter or sub­scribe to our RSS feed. And remem­ber that we’re now locat­ed at www.openculture.com  

Have a good week­end.

Give this a minute. It gets quite good once it gets going. Thanks Philip for send­ing this along. (Read­ers always feel free to send intel­li­gent audio & video our way.)