December 2022
This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.
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.
Key Change
As hip-hop grew in popularity, the use of computers in recording also exploded too. Whereas the guitar and piano lend themselves to certain keys, the computer is key-agnostic. If I record a song in the key of C major into digital recording software, like Logic or ProTools, and then decide I don’t like that key, I don’t have to play it again in that new key. I can just use my software to shift it into that different key. I’m no longer constrained by my instrument.
Ive-y League
Jony Ive on Life After Apple(Archived)
One surprising thing about Ive’s approach is that conversation, rather than sketches, is how he often begins a project. Thinking—and then speaking about that thinking—is the raw material he works with. “Language is so powerful,” Ive says. “If I say I’m going to design a chair, think how dangerous that is. Because you’ve just said chair, you’ve just said no to a thousand ideas. […] “This is where it gets exciting,” he says. “You have an idea—which is unproven and isn’t resolved, since a resolved idea is a product—and the only tangible thing about the idea are the problems. When someone says it’s not possible, and all you are being shown is why it’s not possible, you have to think and behave in a different way. You have to say, from a place of courage, I believe it is possible.
Pie and Goodbye
Love, Marriage, Loss, and Apple Pie
And, I can now say, losing both parents feels like losing your footing altogether, as you must move on without any tangible human proof—beyond yourself, of course—of how you came to be. To lose them is to lose the gods of your universe, if not that universe itself, and this stark eventuality will cleave your life in half, with one part encapsulating them and the other grappling with their absence: being of them but without them. You will become a strange, new person, unfamiliar with your former self.
Inside the NBA Bubble
How Black Players Performed Better without Fans
In the NBA, predominantly Black players play in front of predominantly non-Black fans. Using the ‘NBA bubble’, a natural experiment induced by COVID-19, we show that the performance of Black players improved significantly with the absence of fans vis-`a-vis White players. This is consistent with Black athletes being negatively affected by racial pressure from mostly non-Black audiences. We control for player, team, and game fixed-effects, and dispel alternative mechanisms. Beyond hurting individual players, racial pressure causes significant economic damage to NBA teams by lowering the performance of top athletes and the quality of the game.
Links
- Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve
- Press 3 for a pep talk from kindergartners
- Bubbles
- How the ManningCast Improbably Became One of the Best Comedies on TV
- AI Directory
- How do you like them apples?
- How tattoos work
- Map of the Universe
- A collection of 852 blogs about every topic
- Is Wine Fake?
- Happy Grass
- A parasite makes wolves more likely to become pack leaders
- Shitty Beer Showdown
Sign Off
Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.
Thanks for reading. Have a great month,
Clay
How kind of you to make your way down here.
A bit about me: I can be interested in anything, for better or worse. I love photography, travel, golf, and baseball. My latest pursuit is learning the guitar. I write a rad newsletter that I publish monthly.