June 10, 2019
Almost as absurd as dressing a chicken in lederhosen
Inside Patriots coach Bill Belichick's coaching mastering
The New England Patriots coach, who has took the Patriots to 9 Super Bowls has a degree in economics and has NO time to waste. The New England Patriots have ruled the NFL since 2001 and it seems that they are not going anywhere. They are here to stay.
Reunion
88 year old dad and 53 year old son At the airport (SLYT)
Mostly, but not all, dead white men
Australia's ABC Classic FM asked its listeners to vote for their top 10 favourite composers, and over the weekend of 8-9 June counted down the top 100 results. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of long-dead white men, but also some unexpected results - who would have thought 12th-century nun Hildegard von Bingen would make it as high as 33? And although Aboriginal Australian composer William Barton clocked in at 87, at least he is still alive so has time to climb the ranks. [more inside]
What's the collective noun for Meeples?
The 45th Annual Origins Game Fair kicks off in Columbus, Ohio this Wednesday. Inaugurated in 1975 as the Origins International Game Expo in Baltimore, and initially focusing on large scale wargaming, the Convention has taken place in Columbus, Ohio since 1996 and was renamed Origins Game Fair in 2007. Origins is second only to Gen Con in size with almost 20,000 attendees in 2018. While Gen Con might be considered the darling of the industry, with more premiere issues and far more attendees overall, Origins still enjoys the participation of a large number of game publishers. [more inside]
Fantasy Shipping Forecast!
"I've heard of Fantasy Football but Fantasy Shipping Forecast?" Using the daily 0048 Shipping Forecast from the Met Office, we take the average of each gale force mentioned for an area to determine that area's score. Pick a dream team of five sea areas, and your team's score will be the average of the scores of those regions, both daily and weekly. [more inside]
Patricia Battin, Lightning Rod in a Library War, Dies at 89
Patricia Battin, Lightning Rod in a Library War, Dies at 89 (New York Times): In the 1980s, she led a national campaign to save millions of disintegrating books that were published between 1850 and 1950, persuading Congress to increase its funding for microfilming these so-called brittle books.To many librarians, Ms. Battin, who died on April 22 at 89, was a pioneer and a visionary. Horrified that the printed word seemed to be crumbling to dust before her eyes, she helped lead the profession out of the dark ages and embraced the digital revolution. To others, however, this revolution was misguided. It was, they said, stoked by hyperbole and had devastating consequences: the destruction of irreplaceable original documents. [more inside]
I am confused about the hearts of insects
At University of California at Santa Barbara's ScienceLine, UCSB research scientists answer questions from teachers and students in K-12 schools. Are you "confused about the hearts of insects?" Maybe you want to know "Where does salt come from?" Or perhaps you have "been researching, and Venus seems AWFUL. Is there anything good about Venus?" [more inside]
There Was Never a Chance That He Would Not Smoke the Toad
Tyson had a story to tell. Tyson had become a dedicated marijuana user. After he'd endured years of more serious substance abuse, weed had helped him come out of the shadows. He was a chilled-out 50-something tennis dad who'd seemingly put active self-destruction behind him. Hickman says that by that point he had “a lot of major A+ stars coming at me, trying to coordinate some branding in the [cannabis] space.” He says he met with Snoop and with representatives from Playboy. But no one made more sense than Mike Tyson. “It's changed his life,” Hickman says. “He's the perfect person.” Mike Tyson Smokes the Toad [SLGQ] [Content Warning: Tyson]
Don't ask for a god-damned tomato slice
“I felt like it was giving me power and respect and authority.”
“Many right-wing creators already made long video essays, or posted video versions of their podcasts. Their inflammatory messages were more engaging than milder fare. And now that they could earn money from their videos, they had a financial incentive to churn out as much material as possible. A few progressive YouTube channels flourished from 2012 to 2016. But they were dwarfed by creators on the right, who had developed an intuitive feel for the way YouTube’s platform worked and were better able to tap into an emerging wave of right-wing populism.“I’m not sure the left understands the monumental ass-whupping being dished out to them on YouTube,” Mr. Watson, the conspiracy theorist, tweeted in 2017.” The Making Of A Youtube Radical (New York Times Feature Story)
Africa’s Lost Kingdoms
It may remain a little-known fact, but Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed. Some remarkable new books make this case in scholarly but accessible terms, and they admirably complicate our understanding of Africa’s past and present. ~ Howard French long read
"There is only terrifying perfection."
You Can't Beat An Unwinnable Game. But You Can Break It
In 2010, some random guy on the internet beat SimCity 3000. At least, that’s how articles on the internet described it at the time. What happened was a 22-year-old architecture student in the Philippines named Vincent Ocasla achieved gaming perfection. He painstakingly designed, without the aid of cheats, a city so complex and densely populated that it rendered all future attempts at SimCity pointless. It was beautiful and horrifying.[more inside]
"To steer safely, we need new narratives."
"One of the highest callings of science fiction is imagining utopia as a possible human future. I don't mean creating a fantasyland. I mean honest, earnest engagement with the question of what a better world looks like. " Writer Monica Byrne speaks on imagination, science fiction, and climate change in her Albright Institute talk, Our Age of Emergency: 2019-2100 (text of the talk as well as video).
“No one is going to stop me from playing,”
Striving to be seen: Black Girl Gamers on Twitch [BGG] “BGG has nearly 6,000 followers on Twitter and more than 4,000 followers on Twitch, and it's been featured in publications including Blavity, BBC Radio 4 and Vice's Broadly. BGG partners with other organizations, such as Intel's AnyKey, to support inclusivity efforts on all sides of video game development and consumption. "We really want to work with game developers to be able to represent the community more accurately," Lopez said. "To be able to represent the community not just as a token, as well, but also get people -- young, black girls -- into coding."” [via: Engadget] [more inside]
sbt-ethereum
Ethereum for humans - "A bit pathetically, much of what I have been doing for the past two years is working on a software project called sbt-ethereum."[1] [more inside]
Brazil: Massive leak proves Lula's trial was a farce
The process that imprisoned Lula & rendered him ineligible to run – paving the way for Bolsonaro's ascension to power – was fueled by wrongdoing, politicized abuse of power & deceit: all of which will now be revealed due to this massive leaked archive of their secrets.
1/3 How and why The Intercept is reporting on a vast trove of materials about Brazil’s operation Car Wash and justice minister Sergio Moro
[more inside]
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