All posts from Times Labs Blog

Ever since Homer spoke of the “wine-dark” sea (and probably before), we have attributed colours to objects. The bars on the right illustrate the responses of more than 500,000 people to an ongoing online survey asking them to associate colours with words.
Sometimes our colour associations are “diagnostic” - heat being red, for example - but they can also be semantic, a product of culture: we associate red with danger because our society has tended to make warning signs red.
Our response to colour is also partly physiological. Humans are trichromatic, meaning we have three colour receptors: for red, green, and blue. Most other mammals have only two, which, one theory goes, is what helped set man apart: we could more easily distinguish ripe fruit in trees.
An emerging view in scientific literature, however, is that language, as much as anything, shapes the way we perceive colour. Russian, for instance, has two totally separate categories for light and dark blue, and in a remarkable study of native Russian and English speakers in the Sixties, Russians proved more adept at distinguishing different shades of blue - not because of any greater perceptive ability, but because of their mother tongue.

If the Queen’s speech were the only record of history, there would be more than a few holes in our knowledge of the 20th century, not to mention an inflated sense of the importance of Commonwealth Prime Ministers. But in 57 addresses since 1952 - all of which are represented above - Her Majesty has borne witness to several of the big events of our time.
In 1991 she spoke of the fall of Communism, and in 2001 of the “terrorist outrages” in America. In many ways, though, it’s her grip on wider trends that makes her speeches stand out on re-reading. Consider this - on technology - in 1983: “We have the means of sending and receiving messages… but we can still talk in riddles.” Or this, on the environment, in 1989: “The future of all life on Earth depends on how we treat the planet and the animals that share our world with us.”
Of course, when reaching out to one’s subjects - particularly those in far-flung lands - one must mix majesty with modesty. Perhaps the loveliest example of this came in 1964: “We do not wish to impose a particular form of government on any peoples; we merely say, ‘This is what we do; it’s not perfect, but it is the best we have been able to create after many centuries of trial and error.’”

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Thinking of heading to Verbier this winter? You’ll find better value at Courchevel. We collected data from 15 ski resorts: total length of runs (km), total length of runs for the regional ski pass, if available, and cost of a six-day regional peaktime ski pass (named in brackets after the relevant resorts). To “read” our mountain: the further to the right skiers are, the greater the total length of runs at that resort; the higher up they are, the larger the ski region, and the taller the skiers, the greater the cost of a ski pass. The ultimate resorts - by these criteria - are higher, but with a shorter skier (Morzine does well). It’s not surprising to find Verbier at altitude, but the taller skier denotes pricey skiing. Bear in mind we’ve only included ski areas that are linked by lifts (hence Banff isn’t included, and Aspen doesn’t perform as well as you might expect because its mountains are a bus ride apart).
Had we allowed bus-linked regions, Aspen - with Les Deux Alpes and St Anton - would have carved up the competition. Austrian resorts are not as expensive as French or Swiss ones, and skiing in Bulgaria is cheap, but you might get tired of the same old scenery.

When heads of state met in Copenhagen recently, one question they may have asked was whether biodiversity is more important than clean air. The Environmental Performance Index - developed by scientists at Columbia and Yale - aims to aggregate various countries’ performance across environmental indicators, and give each an overall mark out of 100.
Half the rating is based on indicators that have a direct effect on us, such as the quality of drinking water. The other addresses areas that affect ecosystems, such as the health of fisheries. Only a snapshot of the research is shown here, but some interesting facts emerge.
For example, while developing countries often score badly in areas that directly affect humans, they are blessed with relatively clean environments. (Niger rates 4 for drinking water, for instance, but it ranks alongside Switzerland for biodiversity.) In rich countries, however, the reverse is true: compare the urban air quality in the US with the air-quality rating of its atmosphere, which reflects the country’s high levels of ozone.
Says Marc Levy, one of the scientists on the project: “The challenge for poor countries is to fix the performance in the first set of indicators without ruining the second.”

The arrival of immigrants from non-Christian countries in the Fifties and Sixties brought large-scale changes to British society. As the children of that first wave of immigrants have come of age, and the school curriculum has been overhauled to reflect the fact that many classrooms - especially in inner cities - are mixed faith, so too has our own coverage of religious festivals such as Ramadan grown.
The peaks in mentions of both Ramadan and Passover in the years after 2001 probably reflect the heightened interest in religious affairs in the wake of the September 11 attacks; it’s hard to be conclusive, though, because the overall story numbers are relatively low.
Also, as church-going has declined (fewer than one million people now attend Church of England services on Sundays), Britons have begun to take an interest in the rituals of other religions as a form of spiritual guidance.
“People now feel there’s a smorgasbord of faith traditions they can dip into - even if the evangelicals don’t like it,” says Ruth Gledhill, our religion correspondent.
Meanwhile, coverage of Christmas has risen four-fold, from 850 articles in 1985 to more than 4,000 last year (if we added it to the graph, it would dwarf the others). This increase appears to reflect both the growth of seasonal charity appeals from the Eighties onward, and the rise of lifestyle journalism, in which the birth of the Saviour has become a joyous and bountiful excuse to eat, drink and shop.

Last week the world received an extraordinary glimpse into what America was thinking during the September 11 attacks thanks to the release by Wikileaks of the details of half a million pager messages that were sent that day.
The messages - drawn from ‘text pagers’ carried by people in an official capacity - range from snap news reports to messages between members of essential services as well as expressions of support for loved ones. They were, Wikileaks said, “a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time.”
We wanted to focus in on those which constituted messages between humans (many were in fact sent from one computer to another, and are largely indecipherable), and in particular on messages of love and support. So we removed searched the archive for messages which contained the expression ‘love you’, as well as those which contained the words ‘world’, ‘trade’, or ‘centre’, and ‘you’ (to exclude more impersonal reports).
The result - around 1,000 messages - are displayed above. Bear in mind that not all refer directly to the collapse of the twin towers. (Inevitably some messages sent that day were not related to the attacks but satisfied our criteria. We left them in.) Some also appear to cut off abruptly - that is how they appeared in the archive.
The most frequently used words in the total set of pager messages are displayed in the Wordle below.

Shortly after Christian Dior premiered his spring/summer collection in 1947, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar approached the designer, shocked, and said, “Why, Mr Dior, it’s such a new look.” The name stuck. As the above graph - which shows the number of dresses by different 20th-century designers on display at the V&A - indicates, Mr Dior’s influence on the fashion world is unparalleled. A total of 29 Dior dresses, spanning 33 years, are on show in the museum’s esteemed textile and dress collection, an achievement challenged only by Yves Saint Laurent, who has 26. (Even Chanel, covering twice the number of years, only manages 14.) Having your dress displayed by the V&A is, of course, the equivalent of being inducted into the fashion hall of fame. “The piece must be virtuosic - made to the highest standards of design quality, and show an exceptional degree of craftsmanship,” says Eleri Lynn, a curator at the museum.
Among the more famous pieces to be immortalised by the V&A are Yves Saint Laurent’s black trouser suit - “Le Smoking” - from 1966 and all nine inches of Vivienne Westwood’s “Super-elevated Ghillie” platform heels, which were too high even for Naomi Campbell: she tottered and fell while wearing them on the catwalk in 1993.
PS A big thank you to the data team at the V&A, who helped us source the data for this piece. After a splendid overhaul, the museum’s entire collection is now fully searchable via this brilliant digital archive (which was built on Django).

In 1967, the same year John Lennon said he knew “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall”, the Boeing Company started work on another large hall, in Washington. The Everett Factory, where Boeing builds its aeroplanes, is so large that, were it possible to fill it with multiple Albert Halls, 153 would be required.
The 3.5km outer wall encloses a space that The Guinness Book of Records recognises by some margin as the world’s largest building. Clinching third place - we skipped Airbus’s factory in Toulouse - is the Aerium, just south of Berlin: a 5.5 million cubic metre edifice originally designed as an airship hangar, but which now houses a most unlikely tropical paradise. Underneath its 107 metre-high dome can be found a rainforest with 50,000 plants, a giant lagoon more than 1sq km in area (and heated year round to a cosy 25C) and a hot-air balloon riding facility.
It easily eclipses the Vehicle Assembly Building where Nasa builds its rockets. But our favourite big building fact still concerns the home-grown O2 arena, and is this: were we to take this deceptively large dome, turn it on its head, and set the full might of Niagara Falls to gush into it, at peak flow, it would take 12.5 minutes to fill.

The TV industry may long have been trying to fight off the predatory might of YouTube and other web-based distractions, but there was always one trump card it held up its sleeve: it was a damn sight nicer watching video on that big black box in the corner of the room. No longer.
As the above graph - which plots screen size (the number of inches from corner to corner) against display resolution (the number of pixels on the screen) - shows, computer screens now easily compete with TVs on size. As for picture quality, see the vertical line showing 1920 x 1080? That’s the most advanced form of HDTV currently available.
Now look at the extent to which the new Apple iMac exceeds that level. That means that, as well as easily handling HDTV, the iMac can also better display photographs from the highest quality digital cameras - which are much too detailed for most screens.
Add to this that the vast majority of the BBC’s and, as of two weeks ago, Channel 4’s content is online, and you have the makings of a genuine living room revolution. There’s just the small matter of price.
At 27 inches, the iMac may be nearly as big as the current, top-selling 32in TVs, but the £1,349 price tag means it’s £1,000 more expensive, too.

Over 40, and still not delivered your “great idea”? You may be too late. A sample of the 100 greatest inventions of the 20th century, as compiled by a patent expert at the British Library, suggests that it is in their thirties that men (and it is invariably men) are struck by inspiration. Curiously, happenstance can be just as much the mother of invention as necessity.
Consider the American engineer Percy Spencer, who, trying to help the British develop radar, walked past a magnetron one day with a chocolate bar in his pocket, found it had melted, and conceived of the microwave. Art Fry, an adhesives expert in Minnesota - and keen chorister - was frustrated that the scraps of paper he used as bookmarks in his hymnal would always fall out. One day, a colleague made some weak glue by mistake, and thus was born the Post-it Note.
There is, evidently, an under-representation of women - though it’s not for want of involvement in the process. In 1906, Bess Cary, the soon-to-be fiancée of a little-known American inventor, wanted an ice cream while picknicking on an island in Lake Okauchee. Her beloved was dispatched two miles to fetch one in a rowing boat - and he promptly had the idea for an outboard motor.

The search, it seems, may be at an end. Two months ago, we compared the cost of several high-value objects - the Gherkin, a Trident nuclear missile, truffles, etc - by their weight, and discovered that diamonds, at £34,450,000 per kg, comfortably held off Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks as the world’s most expensive stuff.
So lively was the discussion about what other things we might have included in our list that we decided to do a second round and found, to our amazement, an item more than 100 times as expensive as the world’s most precious stone.
The Treskilling Yellow is a fantastically rare stamp dating from the first issue of postage stamps in Sweden in 1855. It is all the more prized because it was issued in error - a printing malfunction caused a small number of the first 3-skilling banco stamps, which were supposed to be blue, to come out yellowy orange. The only one known still to exist has changed hands seven times since, most recently in 1996 for 2.5 million Swiss francs. (To its great advantage in our calculations, it weighs just 250mg.)
Not even a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite, once owned by Thomas Jefferson, and which sold for $156,450 (around £96,000) at auction in 1985, comes close.