One of the earliest video games made for computers was chess. It’s not hard to see why chess was chosen: the rules are pretty simple, and the game is widely played. Artificial intelligence mastered chess early on, and programmers have long been able to set chess programs to play at different levels of difficulty. The first person to suggest that a computer might play chess was the celebrated computer scientist Alan Turing. Turing started talking about this in the 1940s, and in 1950, he wrote the first computer chess program. Turing himself was a weak chess player, but he started something, and a lot of others agreed. It was a common belief that by 1970, the world chess champion would probably be a computer. This never came to pass, of course, probably because human beings still got to decide who could enter chess tournaments in 1970 (and they haven’t given up that privilege yet), and humans never let computers in. With the arguable exception of IBM’s Watson’s appearance on Jeo...

This is the part of Manhattan that allegedly needed to be sawed off, fifty years after the hoax.  Note that it still hasn't sunk by this point. One of the better known hoaxes in the history of New York City is the famous “sawing off” of the lower end of Manhattan.  The story goes that a ship’s carpenter, a man known simply as Lozier, got to talking with a number of lower Manhattan tradesmen one day in 1824 about how built-up the island was getting.  The story goes that it was widely feared that lower Manhattan would get so heavy with buildings that it would tip over and sink into the harbor.  A solution was proposed: cut the lower part of the island off, float it out into the harbor, spin it around 180 degrees, and reattach it, thus balancing out Manhattan and preventing it from sinking.  Lozier gathered a number of workers who met at where the Bowery and Broadway split, and another group to meet at the corner of the Bowery and Spring Street.  Th...

Spaghetti, as everyone knows, is Italian cuisine.  The word spaghetti itself is Italian for little strings.  Yet for an import, it’s pretty ubiquitous outside of Italy.  All over Europe and the Americas, spaghetti is one of the most popular dishes.  Many of us grew up with it, whether or not we have any Italian ancestry.  All the same, it still registers as a foreign dish.   With all the Italian immigrants to the United States, it’s hardly surprising that this simple yet versatile dish caught on here, but it still had to be new at one point.  Exactly when spaghetti stopped being an outsider food and started ranking as comfort food for Americans is hard to pin down.  It probably started around the time we stopped seeing Italians as outsiders who were threatening our way of life.  The Immigrant Exclusion Act of 1924, which effectively stopped (legal) Italian immigration to the United States, was just a symptom of a rising anti-f...