You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.

Texas Summer Soundtrack

Rangers broadcaster Eric Nadel finally makes his ‘bucket list’ World Series call, free version

In Nadel’s time on the job, he has called over 6,000 Rangers games. To measure it by other means, that’s 10 broadcast partners, 15 managers, nine GMs and five different ownership groups. When Nolan Ryan notched his 5,000th strikeout, it was Nadel on the call. When they made their first postseason, 25 years after moving to Arlington, Nadel was the voice that shared the moment. When they finally won their first playoff series, in 2010, Nadel was on the call.

When Nadel finally got the chance to call another Rangers World Series, it came at the end of a difficult season, one in which the broadcaster took a leave of absence to address mental health issues before returning to the team in August. It was the first time fans had been without his presence in 45 years.

‘Louie Louie’

The story behind the song everyone knows but no one understands

The first recording of the song dates back to 1957. Richard Berry, an L.A. musician, recorded a song about a sailor who has to ship out, and leave his girl behind. While the words – written in a fake-Jamaican patois – were an attempt to tap into the calypso music popular at the time (Harry Belafonte was topping the charts), the melodic riff came from a song called El Loco Cha Cha, recorded by Cuban-American band leader René Touzet.

119 pages of the FBI’s investigation into The Kingsmens “Louie Louie” that does not included anyone just asking Jack Ely, the man who sang the song, what the lyrics were.

Links

• Travel Score
• Replacing a pool cue tip
• Astronauts dropped a tool bag during an ISS spacewalk, and you can see it with binoculars
• The 2023 Uber Eats Cravings Report
• Where in the world do men sit down, or stand up, to pee?
• Soccer goalkeepers literally see and hear the world differently
• Glass fighting
• Annular Eclipse 2023 full Ring of Fire Timelapse in 8k
• “I built a trading bot that buys stocks that are being bought by politicians.”
• Now And Then – The Last Beatles Song (Short Film)
• How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk, My Results
• The Science Behind Gordon Sargent’s Insane Swing Speed
• DP World Tour plays Keepy Uppy
• What is the time signature of the Bluey Theme?
• The Mayflower Passengers
• My Pi Day
• What’s up with cuffed pants?
• A Secret Room with Drawings Attributed to Michelangelo Opens to Visitors in Florence
• Nom Nom Nom. What’s the Deal With Cookie Monster’s Cookies?
• Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus – What are his clouds all about?
• Sharks are old

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Clay

You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.

Swag Stance

The Long, Slow Death of the Wacky Batting Stance

For decades, balletic and bizarre behavior illuminated the batter’s box. As a 30-year-old, I grew up mesmerized by the fluid wiggle of Ken Griffey Jr., the volatile wrists of Gary Sheffield, the open-face comedy of Tony Batista, the handsy shtick of Kevin Youkilis—the list goes on. But my childhood heroes were merely advancing what they’d seen growing up: Joe Morgan’s elbow twitch, Rod Carew’s acute hunch, Roberto Clemente’s flying back foot, and so many more. Funky stances trace back a century, to Babe Ruth’s immaculate stroke and Turkey Stearnes’ twisted heel, and further still, weaving through time, back at least to Cy Seymour of the New York Giants, a supposed early purveyor of batter’s box wonk in the 1800s. Distinct stances stole our hearts, immortalized all-time greats, and forged unexpected legends.

But we’re losing the thread. In recent years, the desire to nurture this art form has been overtaken by an obsession with hyper-efficiency on the field and in front offices. Baseball’s analytical revolution long ago warped the way the game is played; next up is how the game looks. Little now distinguishes the stances of most hitters, who stand straight up at the plate, legs mostly still, hands about shoulder high, overall devoid of kinks or heaves or glorious whathaveyous. Where there are physical differences—as in the extended arms of Matt Olson versus the rested bat of Pete Alonso—there is still a shared ideology: minimalism. Forget about experimentation. Do nothing random, audacious or endearing at all.

Jack Black Sabbath

One Great Rock Movie Can Change the World: An Oral History of ‘School of Rock’

It was 20 years ago this month that Jack Black put on a bow tie, walked into a prep school, and told a bunch of fourth graders to get the Led out. His star turn as the lovable loser in Richard Linklater’s School of Rock helped the film gross nearly $20 million when it opened, breaking the record for music-themed comedies at the time. Over the years, it’s inspired a hit Broadway musical, a TV show, and a children’s book, and helped popularize actual School of Rock programs for kids who want to serve society by rocking. Two decades on, it remains a wildly funny movie with honest-to-God great tunes — and its kind, inclusive spirit has aged much better than most 2000s comedies.

Links

• Every Type of Railcar Explained in 15 Minutes
• Flappy Bird implemented in MacOS Finder
• Talking Watches with Ed Sheeran, Hosted by John Mayer
• Shop for a private island
• The Economy (Taylor’s Version)
• Rounded Corners
• Movie Grid
• Can You Win This Game of Rock, Paper, Scissors?
• Bird Migration Explorer
• Bill Braun’s hyper-realistic paintings
• Why Are Video Games So Big? What’s Inside the 100 GB?
• NameGrapher

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Clay

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Pick Pockets

‘Pockets’ Review: Carrying Capacity

By the 15th century, the shape of armor had changed, and the contours of civilian men’s clothing changed with it. Breeches emerged from the formless void, and men began to walk on two well-turned legs, with pockets to carry their essentials. Tracking the pocket’s real-world appearance through sources as diverse as tailors’ inventories and royal household accounts, Ms. Carlson reveals the emergence of a new feature of male dress and with it, a new “seat of patriarchal power.” (Early modern writers made high comedy of “the fight for the breeches.”) Function followed form. Pockets changed larceny, as pickpockets edged out cutpurses. They changed reading and writing: Pens, almanacs, watches, compasses, even abridged books all shrank to fit the pockets of the man on the move, a miniaturization trend Ms. Carlson calls “the science of the small.” They changed self-defense, too; pistols and pockets grew up together. “Tied up in any man’s look were ideas about honor and his capacity for violence,” Ms. Carlson writes.

Honk Honk

Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

Car makers have been bragging about their cars being “computers on wheels” for years to promote their advanced features. However, the conversation about what driving a computer means for its occupants’ privacy hasn’t really caught up. While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the internet might be spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their vehicles into powerful data-gobbling machines. Machines that, because of all those brag-worthy bells and whistles, have an unmatched power to watch, listen, and collect information about what you do and where you go in your car.

Links

• This USB button helps Jeopardy! contestants get their buzz on
• Pluto: 1994 vs 2019
• A Journey to the End of Time
• So You’re an American? A Guide to Answering Difficult Questions Abroad
• Ballpark cost for some artists to perform your event
• A clock where the time is made of news headlines
• Record-breaking Super Mario Bros. speedrun approaches robotic perfection
• A literary history of fake texts in Apple’s marketing materials
• Made me Psymile
• Every time I buy ice cream my car won’t start.
• The most-visited English Wikipedia articles, updated daily.
• Can you bring a lightsaber on a plane?

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Clay

You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.

Re-Turn and Burn

What Happens to All the Stuff We Return?

A century ago, the average return rate at Penney’s was probably something like two per cent; before Internet shopping truly took hold, retail returns had risen to more like eight or ten per cent. Returns to online retailers now average close to twenty per cent, and returns of apparel are often double that.

$.99, Bob

Host With the Most: The Cult of Bob Barker

The crowd is ushered in, with the energy of sleepless speed addicts who just got a fresh fix. The sound system pumps a techno-beat version of the theme song, and they dance goonily. Names are called to “come on down” and do they ever. Those big paneled doors upstage part — a little arthritically, as if they need to be greased or replaced — and Barker strolls purposefully out toward them, and it is bliss, and he basks in it for a professional 10 seconds and away we go, grind out another hit:

Rich, show us the first item up for bid!

Of Dice and Men

The Dungeons & Dragons Players of Death Row

Playing Dungeons & Dragons is more difficult in prison than almost anywhere else. Just as in the free world, each gaming session can last for hours and is part of a larger campaign that often stretches on for months or years. But in prison, players can’t just look up the game rules online. The hard-bound manuals that detail settings, characters and spells are expensive and can be difficult to get past mailroom censors. Some states ban books about the game altogether, while others prohibit anything with a hard cover. Books with maps are generally forbidden, and dice are often considered contraband, because they can be used for gambling. Prisoners frequently replace them with game spinners crafted out of paper and typewriter parts.

[...]

Sometimes, through their characters, they opened up about problems they would never otherwise discuss — abusive parents, fractured childhoods, drug addictions — unpacking their personal traumas through a thin veil of fantasy. “With Billy, D.&D. has become our therapy,” Ford wrote in 2019.

Death row didn’t offer any of the educational or mental-health programs available in regular prisons; rehabilitation isn’t the goal for those on death row, and special programming is not always logistically feasible for people held in solitary confinement. For these players, the games served as their life-skills course, anger-management class and drug counseling, too. Like Ford and Wardlow, a lot of the men on the row came to prison at a young age and never had a chance to be adults in the free world.

Links

• A Chronological List of WWII Movies
• The most savage Mario Kart play I have ever seen
• New Word Order
• The high-tech, super-secure government warehouse where old cash dies
• What-song
• Why do old books smell so good? and the Mariko Aoki phenomenon
• How to watch football like an expert from the comfort of your couch
• How playing Jar Jar Binks led to abuse, near death – and saving Baby Yoda
• Wear All You Want, They’ll Make More
• How Are Webb’s Full-Color Images Made?

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Clay

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Security by Obscurity

A few things to know before stealing my Porsche 914

Welcome to my Porsche 914. I imagine that at this point (having found the door unlocked) your intention is to steal my car. Don’t be encouraged by this; the tumblers sheared off in 1978. I would have locked it up if I could, so don’t think you’re too clever or that I’m too lazy. However, now that you’re in the car, there are a few things you’re going to need to know. First, the battery is disconnected, so slide-hammering my ignition switch is not your first step. I leave the battery disconnected, not to foil hoodlums such as yourself, but because there is a mysterious current drain from the 40-year-old German wiring harness that I can’t locate and/or fix. So, connect the battery first. Good luck finding the engine cover release. Or the engine, for that matter.

Read On

Who killed Google Reader?

Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.

A decade later, the people who worked on Reader still look back fondly on the project. It was a small group that built the app not because it was a flashy product or a savvy career move — it was decidedly neither — but because they loved trying to find better ways to curate and share the web. They fought through corporate politics and endless red tape just to make the thing they wanted to use. They found a way to make the web better, and all they wanted to do was keep it alive.

Idiocracy

How To Spot An Idiot

The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. When we see someone who doesn’t look like us, or sound like us, or act like us, or love like us, or live like us — the first thought that crosses almost everyone’s brain is rooted in either fear or judgment or both. That’s evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren’t familiar with.

In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges. I’m here to tell you that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.

Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true: the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.

Bowl of Oranges

The Man Who Broke Bowling

Nothing in the rule book makes the two-hander illegal, but the delivery does confer at least one advantage. Because two-handers don’t use their thumbs, it’s easier to impart spin, or revolutions, says Mark Baker, a renowned coach. And when coupled with the right velocity, those revs translate into power down lane, sending pins flying: messengers, as they’re called, when one of them rolls or bounces and takes out a still-standing pin to complete a strike or spare. Belmonte’s rev rate, which topped 600 per minute when he first joined the tour (most players averaged somewhere around 350-400 at the time), was otherworldly. The trade off, says Baker, is that it’s harder to generate velocity with the two-hander, to remain balanced and accurate in your delivery. (Belmonte’s technique is, technically, a one hander—his left hand leaves the ball a split second before he releases it with his right.) Metaphorically, Baker says, Belmonte is still playing the same instrument, just with different artistry: Jimi Hendrix on the guitar instead of Chuck Berry.

Icon Galleries

• Mac OS Icon Gallery
• iOS Icon Gallery
• watchOS Icon Gallery

Links

• Understanding SVG Paths
• If “Unwritten” Was A Heavy Pop Punk Anthem
• The Grass of Wimbledon
• The Pizza Emoji
• The mathematically correct way to tie your shoes
• Immaculate Grid
• Here’s why the best IMAX movies still need a Palm Pilot to work
• We Asked 100 People to Scream as Loud as They Can
• Legal Lullabies
• How MrBeast Became the Willy Wonka of YouTube

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Clay

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Basically, just walk in and take it

How to Steal a Masterpiece: Advice from the World’s Greatest Art Thief

Don’t come alone. You’ll need a trustworthy accomplice as lookout. Breitwieser’s partner was his long-time girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus. To blend in with the tourists, they always dressed sharply. Cooler weather, Breitwieser emphasized, is preferable for stealing. This way, you can wear an overcoat – just make sure that your stealing coat is at least one size too big, and that your pants are a little loose at the waist.

The only tool necessary is a Swiss Army knife. Stash it in a pocket of your coat. The best way to gain access to a museum is through the main entrance. Purchase a ticket for you and your partner in cash. Walk in.

St. Rappeo and All His Friends

‘Why don’t we lean the other way?’: How ‘Strapped’ became a YouTube cult hit

On paper, “Strapped” is a show about two friends and a director who take three-day trips to play cheap, usually municipal golf in cities you would not normally associate with the sport, like Peoria, Ill., or Tallahassee, Fla., or—in the 11th series, coming out this month—Phoenix. They have a budget of $500 to cover all rounds, lodging, food and entertainment, and they can earn extra money (or lose it) based on how they play. They’re joined by occasional guests, ranging from local fans like a Baton Rouge pastor to Homa, a six-time PGA Tour winner who grew up playing cheap golf in California and is such a mega-fan that he volunteered himself for the job.

Get involved: Strapped (Iowa): Part 1, Budget-Friendly Golf at Waveland Golf Course

Feelin’ hot hot hot

Global average sea and air temperatures are spiking in 2023, before El Niño has fully arrived.

The 36-month running average for the Earth Energy Imbalance is now at a record 1.36 Watts per square metre. This looks like a small value, but it corresponds to an average of 11 Hiroshimas of excess energy per second accumulating in Earth’s climate system over the past three years.

Links

• Welcome to Infinite Macintosh
• Jack’s eyes in The Shining
• Mobile Phone Museum
• The Trump indictment for people in a hurry
• The best college baseball interview of all time
• A Massive 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
• The Art of Being a Flâneur
• Pilot safely lands his plane after a huge bird struck his windshield
• Digits: A new math puzzle game from The New York Times,Play
• Humans Have Pumped Enough Groundwater to Change the Tilt of the Earth
• No Vehicles in the Park
• The Password Game
• Wes Anderson’s Secret Weapon: The Camera Moves of Sanjay Sami

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Clay

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Ghosted

Notes From Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter

At once, the meal turned into a raucous meeting of Ghostwriters Anonymous. Everyone had a hard-luck story about being disrespected, dismissed, shouted at, shoved aside, abused in a hilarious variety of ways by an astonishing array of celebrities, though I mostly remember the jocks. The legendary basketball player who wouldn’t come to the door for his first appointment with his ghost, then appeared for the second buck naked. The hockey great with the personality of a hockey stick, who had so few thoughts about his time on this planet, so little interest in his own book, that he gave his ghost an epic case of writer’s block. The notorious linebacker who, days before his memoir was due to the publisher, informed his ghost that the co-writing credit would go to his psychotherapist.

U-G-L-Y

he Ugly Truth Behind “We Buy Ugly Houses”

HomeVestors, the self-proclaimed “largest homebuyer in the United States,” goes to great lengths to distinguish itself from the hedge funds and YouTube gurus that have taken over large swaths of the real estate investment market. The company says it helps homeowners out of jams — ugly houses and ugly situations — improving lives and communities by taking on properties no one else would buy. Part of that mission is a promise not to take advantage of anyone who doesn’t understand the true value of their home, even as franchisees pursue rock-bottom prices.

Treat every customer like they’re your 85-year-old grandma who’s never done a real estate deal, HomeVestors trainers tell franchise owners at annual conferences.

But a ProPublica investigation — based on court documents, property records, company training materials and interviews with 48 former franchise owners and dozens of homeowners who have sold to its franchises — found HomeVestors franchisees that used deception and targeted the elderly, infirm and those so close to poverty that they feared homelessness would be a consequence of selling.

Links

• The man who repossesses multimillion-dollar airplanes
• The Definitive Guide that You Never Wanted: Backpack Fabrics
• How Do the Light-Up Bracelets on Taylor Swift’s 1989 Tour Actually Work?
• Jony Ive spent the last 4 years perfecting his typeface
• Guitar Teacher Reacts: The Mars Volta “Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)”
• Why This Art Is In Every Hair Salon
• AI News Minimalist
• A tornado on top of a mountain
• Byte by byte
• Moderator Mayhem: A content moderation game
• The Best Close-Up ASMR Videos from OBJECT
• When Skateboarding Was Young
• How AR-15 rounds went through Noah (age 6) and Peter (age 15)
• Stevie Ray Vaughan – Voodoo Child
• Histography – Timeline of History

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Clay

You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.

The Vend of the World

A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world

Nine hours later, I was sitting in a spruce office in the Manchester suburb of Wythenshawe, drinking coffee with John “Johnny Brod” Broderick, the man who owned and operated that handsome airport machine. I’d had an idea to try to capture 24 hours in the life of vending machines. These weird, conspicuous objects! With their backs against the wall of everyday existence, they tempt out such a peculiar range of emotions, from relief to frustration, condescension to childish glee. For decades I’d been a steady and unquestioning patron. I figured that by spending some time in the closer company of the machines and their keepers, by immersing myself in their history, by looking to their future, I might get to the bottom of their enduring appeal. What made entrepreneurs from the Victorian age onwards want to hawk their goods in this way? What made generations of us buy? Johnny Brod seemed a good first person to ask.

Black Market, Brown Liquor

Inside the World of Black Market Bourbon

Up until the fall of 2019, the bourbon secondary market was a seemingly unstoppable wave. Some groups on Facebook dedicated to reselling bourbon had surpassed 50,000 members, turning the social network into a venerable bazaar, rife with unicorn bottles rarely glimpsed in the wild. Unfathomable pricing abounded, largely propagated by instaflippers: people who brazenly post snapshots of bottles for sale from the driver’s seat of their car, listing them at inflated prices before they’ve even left the store parking lot. Oftentimes the bottles were snapped up within minutes by eager buyers. Blame the taters (slang for a whiskey drinker with more money than taste); blame the allocation system of control states; blame the distillers for poor allotment of limited releases; blame the likes of the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets for declaring that bourbon was a winning investment that would only appreciate in value. One fact was crystalline: the bourbon secondary market had reached fever pitch.

Visualize Being Color Blind

Chasing rainbows

For some people, colorblindness is a serious liability that closes doors on career dreams. It’s hard to become a pilot, train conductor, or pathologist if you can’t differentiate colors in critical instruments, signals, or tissue samples. For others, it seriously impacts their day-to-day ability to do their jobs, like surveyors spotting flags, doctors looking at skin conditions, or electricians looking for colored wires.

But for me, it’s just a lifelong series of unnecessarily confusing interactions, demonstrating that the world wasn’t designed for people like me.

Pay Him What You Owe Him

The $1 million shot that changed sports contests forever

The ensuing 30 seconds might be the most joyous footage of that Bulls team ever. Seriously, watch the most celebratory moments from “The Last Dance,” and compare those with the clips you will inevitably see this April 14 on social media on the 30th anniversary of Calhoun’s heave. John Paxson and Scott Williams go wild. Some player just off-camera slaps Calhoun’s ass over and over again, and even one of the game refs comes over, hits him on the back and hands him the ball from the shot. Phil Jackson stands there with an incredulous grin, looking like he just won the $1 million.

Suddenly, Calhoun found himself bumped and butt-slapped directly into the middle of the Bulls huddle, where the other players parted and there stood Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan. Calhoun was the team’s 13th man at that moment. Calhoun was in there for a good 10 seconds when he felt Jordan slap him on the back and lean into his ear.

“Great shot, kid,” Jordan said.

Links

• Snake swallows egg and discards shell
• Wild worm
• Tooth Fair Payouts
• A Bit About Bicycles
• Major cities and towns in North America replaced by major cities across the Atlantic by latitude.
• Developers hilariously competed for who could create worst volume control interface in the world.
• A baseball at bat as if it were the Masters
• I made a Full-Body keyboard
• Trumpeter shows incredible example of audio waves
• Physically compressing water
• What if?
• Taylor’s Map
• Cardboard Animals

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Clay

You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.

Swing, Swing

What Happens When the Army Needs 36,000 Kettlebells, Fast

By 2012, the military was conducting research to determine what sort of test would better prepare troops for combat. “We identified 113 common soldier tasks and distilled those down to 11 that were of high [physical] demand,” says East. “Then we deconstructed those and found that there were five key physical constructs within those 11 tasks.” Stuff like moving under load and over obstacles, engaging in hand-to-hand combat, moving heavy weights quickly, and so on. Then from there it was simply R&D to find the right series of exercises that simulated those constructs.

Track Attack

Data Free Disney

Once upon a time, you could just go to Disneyland. You could get tickets at the gates, stand in line for rides, buy food and tchotchkes, even pick up copies of your favorite Disney movies at a local store. It wasn’t even that long ago. The last time I visited, in 2010, the company didn’t record what I ate for dinner or detect that I went on Pirates of the Caribbean five times. It was none of their business.

But sometime in the last few years, tracking and tracing became their business. Like many corporations out there, Walt Disney Studios spent the last decade transforming into a data company.

The theme parks alone are a data scientist’s dream. Just imagine: 50,000 visitors a day, most equipped with cell phones and a specialized app. Millions of location traces, along with rides statistics, lineup times, and food-order preferences. Thousands and thousands of credit card swipes, each populating a database with names and addresses, each one linking purchases across the park grounds.1 A QR-code scavenger hunt that records the path people took through Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. Hotel keycards with entrance times, purchases, snack orders, and more. Millions of photos snapped on rides and security cameras throughout the park, feeding facial-recognition systems. Tickets with names, birthdates, and portraits attached. At Florida’s Disney World, MagicBands—bracelets using RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology—around visitors’ wrists gather all that information plus fingerprints in one place, while sensors ambiently detect their every move. What couldn’t you do with all that data?

Photogenic Foibles

The Humbling Tyranny Of The Photos Our Kids Take Of Us

These pictures remind us that while we study our children, they study us back. Before we speak, we see. For months before spoken language ever enters the relationship, a child gazes upon its mother for hours, every day. The gaze of the child is the least judgmental, the most accepting. When a child takes a portrait of their parent, there is an absence of so many of the elements that inherently exist in the portraits an adult makes. There is no moralizing, for one. No manipulation. They don’t bother to hide or deny the aspects we normally do in photos. In fact, unlike in every other photographic example, there is a total absence of forethought or editorializing.

Hit a J

Why Are All Action Heroes Named Jack, James, or John?

I went through 790 plot summaries and wrote down each of the heroes’ names. Excitedly, I clicked Sort on the spreadsheet, not knowing what I’d find. After all, I’d already sunk quite a few hours into this. But as I scrolled down, I saw that my hunch was correct: Of these 790 movies, 33 percent have a male protagonist with a first name starting with the letter J. Thirty-three percent! The most popular J name among these strapping warriors was John, with 74 movies, followed by James, with 50 movies, and Jack, with 37. The second-most-common letter, M, with names like Max and Michael, showed up a comparatively measly 7 percent of the time.

Links

• Chuck E. Cheese Still Uses Floppy Disks To Make Its Rodent Mascot Dance — For Now
• Lunar Lander Game
• The Buttolph Collection of Menus (1843-2008)
• Sympawnies
• Monkeytype
• Duo Dice
• Colombian Angel Alvarado solves three Rubik’s Cubes while juggling them
• MIT Robot Breaks Rubik’s Cube Record (2018)
• Photos from Orbit
• Every Possible Wordle Solution Visualized
• The Hundred Best Lists of All Time
• Museum of Failure
• I made a guitar out of IKEA products
• Why The Label On Your Bottle Of Angostura Bitters Is Oversized
• Messier
• Awesome Falsehoods
• Behind The Scenes – Product Photography
• Inverse Cramer? The madness of modern Thematic ETFs
• Sony Design Gallery

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Clay

You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.

Snoozefest

Why Is Everyone So Boring?

I see roughly three typical public stances: boring, lively, or outraged. Either you act boring, so the bandits will ignore you, you act lively, and invite bandit attacks, or you act outraged, and play a bandit yourself. Most big orgs and experts choose boring, and most everyone else picks bandit, especially on social media. It takes unusual art, allies, and energy, in a word “eliteness”, to survive while choosing lively. And that, my children, is why the world looks so boring.

Picture This

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

What I’ve described sounds a lot like ChatGPT, or most any other large-language model. Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.

Moonclock

What time is it on the mooon?

Defining lunar time is not simple. Although the definition of the second is the same everywhere, the special theory of relativity dictates that clocks tick slower in stronger gravitational fields. The Moon’s gravitational pull is weaker than Earth’s, meaning that, to an observer on Earth, a lunar clock would run faster than an Earth one. Gramling estimates that a lunar clock would gain about 56 microseconds over 24 hours. Compared with one on Earth, a clock’s speed would also subtly change depending on its position on the lunar surface, because of the Moon’s rotation, says Tavella. “This is a paradise for experts in relativity, because you have to take into account so many things,” she adds.

Links

• Do You Know How to Behave? Are You Sure?
• Bumpy Skies
• Birthday Freebies
• Why athletes (and some remote workers) owe a ‘jock tax’ wherever they go
• St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
• Realistic computer-generated handwriting
• Mac 30th Anniversary Icons
• Restoring a Broken Gameboy
• 7 ELEVEn
• One Zack Greinke pitch at every speed from 50mph to 100mph
• Story Structure 101: Super Basic Shit
• FCK PTN
• How is Lithium Mined
• In Defence of the Unoptimised Life
• Bases Loaded by Kindanice

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Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay