Popular Woodworking magazine weighs in: why are major league bats breaking at an increasing rate?
So is the broken bat mystery merely a question of maple vs. ash? As a woodworker, I doubt it. I will concede that the safety question is best answered with the choice of ash over maple because I'd bet the ash will be far less likely to break in two and send a hurtling projectile. More likely, ash will just crack or splinter.
(thx, brent)
In terms of population, the Bahamas won more medals at the 2004 Summer Olympics than any other country, by more than double. For a country of ~21 million, the super-fit Australians make a good showing on the list.
The top ten psychology videos includes footage of the Stanford Prison Experiment and Jill Boyte Taylor's TED talk about having a stroke. Surely this 45-min video about The Milgram Experiment should have been on the list.
A list of possible discoveries by the Large Hadron Collider and the probability of each discovery being made within the next five years.
The Higgs Boson: 95%. The Higgs is the only particle in the Standard Model of Particle Physics which hasn't yet been detected, so it's certainly a prime target for the LHC (if the Tevatron doesn't sneak in and find it first). And it's a boson, which improves CERN's chances. There is almost a guarantee that the Higgs exists, or at least some sort of Higgs-like particle that plays that role; there is an electroweak symmetry, and it is broken by something, and that something should be associated with particle-like excitations. But there's not really a guarantee that the LHC will find it. It should find it, at least in the simplest models; but the simplest models aren't always right. If the LHC doesn't find the Higgs in five years, it will place very strong constraints on model building, but I doubt that it will be too hard to come up with models that are still consistent.
The list also functions as a nice overview of what's happening at the edges of our physics understanding. (via 3qd)
'Llectuals is like Gossip Girls or 90201, except it's on PBS and for English majors. Girls Gone Wilde! (thx, matt)
NBC has an extensive calendar of events on their fancy Olympics web site but it doesn't look like they have the option of simply subscribing to a TV schedule calendar in iCal or on Google Calendar. I found a Google Calendar of the Olympic TV listings that looks to be accurate. I couldn't find an iCal calendar; the closest I got was this schedule of competition calendar, which looks like it may or may not jibe with the broadcast schedule here in the US (many of the main sports will be broadcast on a tape delay). Has anyone found a Olympic TV sched iCal calendar?
The Parallel Universe Film Guide catalogues hundreds of movies that never were but may exist in another quantum reality. Titles include Help! Our Camera Has Palsy, Adorable Italian Stereotypes Al Dente, and Who's Tired of Philosophical Hit Men? Not Me! (via vsl)
How many of the 100 most common English words can you name in 5 minutes? Surely you can do better than my pathetic 42/100.
Atheist finds image of nothing in his toast. Quick, put the toast on eBay!
Yesterday developer Armin Heinrich posted an iPhone app to the App Store called I Am Rich. The program displays a red gem, has no function but to display your wealth to others through ownership, and costs $1000. It has since been removed from the App Store, although no one knows whether Apple or Heinrich pulled it.
I Am Rich isn't the most clever piece of art, but it's not bad either. For some, the iPhone is already an obvious display of wealth and I Am Rich is commenting on that. Plus, buying more than you need as an indication of wealth is practically an American core value for a growing segment of the population. Is paying $5000 for a wristwatch or $50,000 for a car when much cheaper alternatives exist really all that different than paying $1000 for an iPhone app?
When news of the app got out onto the web, the outcry came swiftly. VentureBeat implored Apple to pull it from the App Store, as did several other humorless blogs. Blog commenters were even more harsh in their assessments. What I can't understand is: why should Apple pull I Am Rich from the App Store? They have to approve each app but presumably that's to guard against apps which crash iPhones, misrepresent their function, go against Apple's terms of service, or introduce malicious code to the iPhone.
Excluding I Am Rich would be excluding for taste...because some feel that it costs too much for what it does. (And this isn't the only example. There have been many cries of too many poor quality (but otherwise functional) apps in the store and that Apple should address the problem.) App Store shoppers should get to make the choice of whether or not to buy an iPhone app, not Apple, particularly since the App Store is the only way to legitimately purchase consumer iPhone apps. Imagine if Apple chose which music they stocked in the iTunes store based on the company's taste. No Kanye because Jay-Z is better. No Dylan because it's too whiney. Of course they don't do that; they stock a crapload of different music and let the buyer decide. We should deride Apple for that type of behavior, not cheering them on.
A weblog about ampersands, "often the most attractive punctuation mark of them all". (via le gruber)
Fourteen ways in which Starbucks has tried to revitalize its brand.
8. Ditch the underperformers: In July, Starbucks announced its closure of 600 stores. Check this map for a closure near you, or peep the full list. It's also dropping 61 of its 84 stores in Australia, and eliminating 1,000 support jobs (not including all layoffs due to stores closures).
Do you want a big yard in a walkable community? Can't happen.
But you can't have it! Or, more specifically, if everyone has a big yard the community ceases to be especially walkable. That isn't to say that you can't have developments with yards relatively near to retail, so that there is stuff within walking distance. You can still have corner shops or similar, but having sufficient residential density to support significant neighborhood-serving retail isn't really compatible with everyone has a big yard. Keep your yard! Just understand the tradeoff.
(via marginal revolution)
Photos and video of an in-flight tour of an Emirates Airbus A380, a passenger jet that can be configured to carry more than 850 passengers at a time. This particular plane had room for 399 economy, 76 business class, and 14 first class passengers (ensconced in suites, not just seats). There was a bar, showers for first class passengers, video cameras on the tail, nose, and underside of the plane that you can watch during the flight, and a relatively soundproof cabin (even during takeoff). (via capn design)
The New Republic on the demographic inversion of the American city.
In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city -- Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center -- some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white -- are those who can afford to do so.
Update: The WSJ wrote about this issue a couple of weeks ago.
This story about a "most outrageous case of neglect" was extremely difficult to read at times, but it's an amazing tale.
"It's mind-boggling that in the 21st century we can still have a child who's just left in a room like a gerbil," said Tracy Sheehan, Danielle's guardian in the legal system and now a circuit court judge. "No food. No one talking to her or reading her a story. She can't even use her hands. How could this child be so invisible?"
There's a collection of video and audio that accompanies the story as well. (via waxy)
This short NY Times profile of economist David Galenson reminded me that I never shared Old Masters and Young Geniuses with you. The book was recommended to me by Malcolm Gladwell -- which means that many of you can now form your opinion of it without even reading it -- through a talk that he gave a couple of years ago. Gladwell also wrote an article for the New Yorker about Galenson's work but it was rejected:
When Mr. Gladwell submitted an article about Mr. Galenson's ideas to The New Yorker, he suffered his first rejection from the magazine. "You buy this Galenson stuff?" Mr. Gladwell recalled his editor saying to him. "What are you, crazy?"
But never mind all that, Old Masters and Young Geniuses is one of the most interesting books I've read in the past few years. I haven't studied enough art history to know if Galenson's thesis is correct, but the book presents an interesting framework for thinking about innovation and how to best harness your own creativity.
The main idea is this. Instead of people being super creative when they're young and getting less so with age (i.e. the conventional wisdom), Galenson says that artists fall into two general categories:
1) The conceptual innovators who peak creatively early in life. They have firm ideas about what they want to accomplish and then do so, with certainty. Pablo Picasso is the archetype here; others include T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Orson Wells. Picasso said, "I don't seek, I find."
2) The experimental innovators who peak later in life. They create through the painstaking process of doing, making incremental improvements to their art until they're capable of real masterpiece. Cezanne is Galenson's main example of an experimental innovator; others include Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, and Jackson Pollock. Cezanne remarked, "I seek in painting."
Galenson demonstrates these differences through analysis of how often artists' works are reproduced in textbooks, auction prices, and museum shows. The pattern is clear, although the method is less than precise in some cases and Galenson has since backed off his thesis somewhat. But the compelling part of the book is what the artists themselves say about how they work. The text is littered with quotes from painters, poets, writers, sculptors, and movie directors about how they perceived their own work and the work of their peers and predecessors. Their thoughts provide ways for contemporary creators to think about how their creativity manifests itself.
The transcript of Gladwell's talk is a good introduction to there ideas. Galenson's next book, And Now for Something Completely Different, appears to be available online in its entirety in a preliminary form. Much more information is available on his web site.
Maggie collects the top ten stupidest ideas depicted on Flickr. These are pretty amazing.
The Genius of Charles Darwin is a three-part series about Darwin presented by his rottweiler, Richard Dawkins. A short video taste of the show is here and the entire first part is on Google Video. (via smashing telly)
Dennis Crowley and myself spent all day doing 5 different Olympic Events: 100m freestyle, 100m dash, 110m hurdles, long jump and the rings (in gymnastics) and compared ourselves to Olympic athletes.
Olympic athletes make it look easy and these two make it look difficult. I particularly enjoyed Crowley's 100-meter swim/walk. Related: can you go from normal guy to Olympian with a few years of hard training? (via clusterflock)
Update: ESPN followed Kathryn Bertine -- "an average person with an athletic background" -- on her two-year quest to become an Olympic athlete. (thx gerard)
Update: The Mechanical Olympics project is leveraging the Amazon Mechanical Turk workforce to make videos of ordinary people competing in all the Olympic events. Here's an example video. (thx, michael)
Video of a UFO flying over Gdansk, Poland. I'm probably not spoiling anything by telling you that the saucer is actually an art project by Peter Coffin with an SMS-controlled light show. (via greg)
'Mericans today are eating 1.8 pounds more food per week than in 1970, including an extra 1/2 pound of fat. Check out the chart for more info on how we've changed our diet. (thx, meg)
In 1997, the BBC aired a three-hour documentary based on Stewart Brand's book, How Buildings Learn. Brand has posted the whole program on Google Video in six 30-minute parts: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six.
If you're hesitant about whether to watch the series or not, check out this two-minute appetizer of perhaps the meatiest tidbit in the book: the oak beam replacement plan for the dining hall of New College, Oxford. (via smashing telly)
Update: An old version of the New College web site says that the oaks were not planted specifically for the replacement of the ceiling beams even though they were used for that purpose. (thx, emily, david, and phil)
Corrections to last month's letters to Penthouse Forum.
In the letter "And Wifey Makes Three," the letter writer stated: "My wife was eager to engage in a threesome with me and our incredibly hot 19-year-old babysitter." The sentence should read: "My wife was disgusted, repulsed, and, in every imaginable way, opposed to the thought of engaging in a threesome with me and our incredibly hot 19-year-old babysitter."
NSFW if your default browser font is large enough to be read from several feet away.
Flat-earthers are people who believe, here in the 21st century, that the earth is flat. (Believers in a round earth are called globularists.)
And what about the fact that no one has ever fallen off the edge of our supposedly disc-shaped world? Mr McIntyre laughs. "This is perhaps one of the most commonly asked questions," he says. "A cursory examination of a flat earth map fairly well explains the reason - the North Pole is central, and Antarctica comprises the entire circumference of the Earth. Circumnavigation is a case of travelling in a very broad circle across the surface of the Earth."
If, like me, you have questions about how the earth could possibly be flat, some of them are answered in the Flat Earth FAQ.
Q: "What about the stars, sun and moon and other planets? Are they flat too? What are they made of?"
A: The sun and moon, each 32 miles in diameter, circle Earth at a height of 3000 miles at its equator, located midway between the North Pole and the ice wall. Each functions similar to a "spotlight," with the sun radiating "hot light," the moon "cold light." As they are spotlights, they only give light out over a certain are which explains why some parts of the Earth are dark when others are light. Their apparent rising and setting are caused by optical illusions. In the "accelerating upwards" model, the stars, sun and moon are also accelerating upwards. The stars are about as far as San Francisco is from Boston. (3100 miles)
BTW, the "ice wall" is what separates the edge of the earth's disc with outer space or whatever ether or monsters are beyond the earth. We know the wall as Antarctica. I call shenanigans on all this...it's gotta be a hoax. Nobody's this ignorant, right? Please?
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