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.

Clock Wise

Why Clocks Run Clockwise

The first thing most of us notice about clocks and watches when we learn to tell time, is that the hands turn clockwise – the habit of perceiving clockwise motion as a representation of the forward movement of time is deeply ingrained; so much so that once having learned it, most of us cease to notice it at all. Imagine you are standing on the center of a watch: in any direction you face, the hands will appear to pass from left to right. Theoretically, we could just as easily tell time if they went from right to left, so why do clock and watch hands overwhelmingly have rightward, or clockwise, motion? Why is there no period in history where anticlockwise and clockwise rotation competed for supremacy?

Click Here

Why are hyperlinks blue?

The internet has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives, but there’s one aspect of the digital world that I bet you take for granted. Did you ever notice that many links, specifically hyperlinks, are blue? When a co-worker casually asked me why links are blue, I was stumped. As a user experience designer who has created websites since 2001, I’ve always made my links blue. I have advocated for the specific shade of blue, and for the consistent application of blue, yes, but I’ve never stopped and wondered, why are links blue? It was just a fact of life. Grass is green and hyperlinks are blue. Culturally, we associate links with the color blue so much that in 2016, when Google changed its links to black, it created quite a disruption.

But now, I find myself all consumed by the question, WHY are links blue? WHO decided to make them blue? WHEN was this decision made, and HOW has this decision made such a lasting impact?

I turned to my co-workers to help me research, and we started to find the answer. Mosaic, an early browser released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina on January 23, 1993, had blue hyperlinks. To truly understand the origin and evolution of hyperlinks though, I took a journey through technology history and interfaces to explore how links were handled before color monitors, and how interfaces and hyperlinks rapidly evolved once color became an option.

Links

• The Insides of Bowling Balls
• Ted Lasso VFX Breakdowns
• Nestflix
• Donny Kerabatsos “Action Figure”
• Cord Cutting Comparison
• Questions Concerning Technology

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Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

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.

His Name Was Emmett Till

His Name Was Emmett Till

In 1955 an all-white, all-male jury, encouraged by the defense to do their duty as “Anglo-Saxons,” acquitted J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Because the defendants couldn’t be tried again, they got paid to make a confession to a national magazine—a heavily fictionalized account stage-managed by their lawyers—and Leslie Milam and his barn were written out of the story. Ask most people where Till died and they’ll say Money, Mississippi, the town where Till whistled at Bryant’s wife outside the family’s store. An Equal Justice Initiative monument in Montgomery says Money. Wikipedia does too. The Library of Congress website skips over the barn, which is just outside the town of Drew, about 45 minutes from the store.

I learned about the barn last year and have since made repeated visits, alone and with groups, once with members of Till’s family. Over and over, I drove from my home in the Mississippi hill country back into the gothic flatland where I was born. The barn’s existence conjures a complex set of reactions: It is a mourning bench for Black Americans, an unwelcome mirror for white Americans. It both repels and demands attention.

Wright Thompson’s story-telling is enviable.

Kim + Im

Two South Korean golfers will play these Olympics with everything to lose

In the pyramid of professional golf, these two 20-somethings enjoy the view from tip-top. Their careers are the envy of countless grinders out there clawing for a breakthrough. And yet, in the eyes of the South Korean government, Im and Kim are but two able-bodied men with an unpaid debt to their country.

This week, both Im and Kim will be reunited with avoidance pressure of the highest order. In anticipation of perhaps the most important tournament of their lives, both men took the extraordinary step of skipping the Open Championship to devote their entire focus to the Olympics. Can you blame them? A medal would exempt them from mandatory military service. A fourth-place finish or worse—well, they’d prefer not to think about that.

“I don’t know how…”

A Round with Tiger: Celebrity Playing Lessons – Jada Pinkett Smith

This is some weird cross between a date, an interview, a golf lesson, and motherly wisdom. Tiger’s discomfort and Jada’s conviction in explaining what his story means is freaking awesome.

Tiger leaning forward and saying, “I don’t know how…” to see that people find his journey inspiring.

Don’t miss:
– 2:23-3:20
– 9:52-11:00
– 17:57-19:35

Penniless

Why a Victoria man has gone two decades without money

His last purchases — beer, cigarettes, pot — occurred 18 years ago, he says, on his 31st birthday. He claims he hasn’t spent any money since. It’s true, his friends have told me. No money at all.

Links

• 1/998001 has all 3-digit numbers from 000 to 999 in order, except for 998
• Photos of Life in North Korea
• Olympus MonsCompared to Arizona
• Draw Yourself as a Peanuts Character
• The Man Responsible For Timing The Olympics Tells Us How It’s Done

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Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

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.

Why do we like what we like?

The Lottery of Fascinations

But the thing is, I couldn’t choose to be interested in sports any more than I could choose to be interested in math or a huge sports fan could choose to be interested in psychology or a gay person could choose to be interested in women. I mean, there’s probably some wiggle room, maybe if I put a lot of effort into finding the most interesting sports and learning everything about them I could appreciate them a little. But would I have comparative advantage over the kid who memorized the stats of every pitcher in both leagues when he was 8? Barring getting hit by some kinda cosmic rays or something, I don’t think that’ll ever happen.

Lord of the Roths

How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank

Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments.

Owning Artists

Would You Buy Shares in Your Favorite Musician?

The notion of selling shares in an artist in band raises many intriguing possibilities—too many to deal with here. But let me list some of them.

1. A band could sell shares in its music, with potential for spinning off ownership of individual musicians as separate tokens in the case of a breakup. One day you own shares in the Beatles, and after the band dissolves, you still control those tokens, but now receive (in a tax-free spinoff) rights to John, Paul, George and Ringo.

2. Artists could do mergers. So Beyoncé and Jay Z decide one day to issue a combined token. They both enjoy some diversification benefits, and help cement their relationship at the same time.

3. Artists would be free to issue new shares, provided the cash or benefits received are shared equably among current owners. The end result would be like different stages in venture capital financing. I can already imagine the conversations on Sand Hill Road: “Hey, our firm got into Olivia Rodrigo in the first round, for ten cents a token—and we’re now issuing new tokens at two bucks.”

4. When artists run into career problems, they could turn to their powerful billionaire owners for help in resolving them. Consider it as the digital age equivalent of Johnny Fontaine in The Godfather, who gets Don Corleone to make an “offer that can’t be refused” to a stubborn movie mogul. In fact, the whole relationship between Frank Sinatra and the Mafia might be considered as a prototype for the artist tokenization business.

5. Fans would have endless opportunities for demonstrating their loyalty. In the old days, they could buy every album by a favored artist, but in a tokenized world the bar is raised considerably. Even accumulating, say, a 1% stake in second-tier musician might take years of scrimping and saving.

6. Artists would face the complex financial trade-offs all corporations need to address. Do they give away earnings as dividends to token holders, or invest the money in future projects? The older the musician, the greater the pressure to distribute the profits.

Links

• Six Degrees of Wikipedia
• Star Wars: Time between first mention and first appearance
• Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?
• The Country That Becomes a Racetrack
• Jesus H. Christ
• 100 Visions of Motherhood, 100 Visions of Fatherhood
• X-Ray of a dog swallowing
• Jetman
• 3D Rendering Base Animation Challenge
• Ball Balancer

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Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

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.

Have you had enough pi?

How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need?

For JPL’s (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793. Let’s look at this a little more closely to understand why we don’t use more decimal places. I think we can even see that there are no physically realistic calculations scientists ever perform for which it is necessary to include nearly as many decimal points as you present.

[…]

[Earth] is 7,926 miles in diameter at the equator. The circumference then is 24,900 miles. That’s how far you would travel if you circumnavigated the globe (and didn’t worry about hills, valleys, obstacles like buildings, rest stops, waves on the ocean, etc.). How far off would your odometer be if you used the limited version of pi above? It would be off by the size of a molecule. There are many different kinds of molecules, of course, so they span a wide range of sizes, but I hope this gives you an idea. Another way to view this is that your error by not using more digits of pi would be 10,000 times thinner than a hair!

Hold the Booze

The Economics of Non-Alcoholic Spirits

One big reason for the higher price? Even though water is cheaper than alcohol, it’s less effective at carrying flavors. Ethanol is an exceptionally good solvent for capturing aroma compounds. These get released when poured into a glass, sipped or mixed with ice or a cocktail, which is what enables the sensory intensity and complexity of distilled spirits.

Alcohol offers so many advantages for flavor extraction and retention that many, if not most non-alcoholic spirits use it at some point in the process, either as a base of distillation that is later removed or as a tincture added in trace amounts to the nearly finished product.

Links

• Larnell Lewis Hears and Drums “Enter Sandman” For The First Time
• ”The microwave was invented to meet need to heat hamsters humanely…”
• Air Pollution Affects Umpires
• The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you
• Why are there crushed stones alongside rail tracks? Twitter, Quora
• List of company name etymologies
• City Guesser

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Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

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.

RIP Yahoo Answers

‘How Do You Get Spaghetti Stains Out of Underwear?’: An Ode to Yahoo Answers

We enter and leave this world alone, but spend the time in between seeking connection. It’s the human experience. But when we’ve strayed too far from the pack, when we’re at our most ashamed, our most lost, our most … too high, Yahoo Answers was there to lead us back home.

The McElroy brother’s podcast, My Brother, My Brother, and Me is fantastic — pick any episode. I’m not sure how they do it but the brothers somehow have new listeners clued in to all the inside and running jokes within an episode or two.

Tell Tale

The Honor System

Until Bakardy came along, Teller had never needed his copyright filings to stake a claim. “It’s not like good manners and generosity are inappropriate ways to behave in the world,” he says. When he has contacted light-fingered magicians in the past, they have always apologized and stopped performing the trick. For instance, he does a trick in which he spills handfuls of coins into a tank filled with water, and they somehow turn into living, breathing goldfish. It’s a throat-catching effect, and a magician in Sweden, who had seen Teller performing the trick on TV, studied the tape and finally lifted it. After Teller called him, the magician said sorry, boxed up his props in a crate, minus the fish, and shipped them to Las Vegas.

This time around, Teller offered to pay Gerard Bakardy several thousand dollars for the time he spent working on the Rose & Her Shadow. He had to promise only that he would stop performing and selling the trick. Bakardy, after asking whether Teller might help him bring Los Dos de Amberes to America, countered with a higher price. No one will confirm exactly what that amount was, but it was allegedly more than $100,000. “It really wasn’t possible for me to come to any terms,” Teller says. “It ended up having certain elements that reminded me of a kidnapping.”

Teller, who had already persuaded YouTube to take down the offending video, asked Bakardy whether his demands were firm. Bakardy said they were.

Teller had a decision to make.

Links

• Building a Radio Controlled Replica Airbus A350
• Slamilton
• Rules of Sports
• One man hits a golf ball and another man tries to catch it in a moving car
• Testing Magnus Carlsen

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Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

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.

Getting Paper

The Article About Paper Sizes You Didn’t Know You Needed

ISO 216 specifies the dimensions of the A-series of paper. It begins at A0 and gets progressively smaller up to A8. Part of the specification is that the ratio between the length and width of each paper size is always √2-to-1. This gives the series a unique characteristic: When you fold a piece of paper width-ways, the halves have the same aspect ratio as the original. That means if you need to shrink a printout to half its size, you can perfectly fit two pages onto the original-sized paper — which as far as paper technology goes, is basically witchcraft.

Process People

Effort

People like to say that lives on social media look unattainable and perfect, but whenever I see something that’s beautifully curated all I can see is the sweat: the money expended, the surgery and fillers, the workouts, the interior designers, the carefully selected objects, the hours spent setting up and filming and taking photos. I think the effort is what’s most interesting. I like people who try very hard, and I like people who attempt to conceal their effort, but I especially like people who let all their effort show. We are all Frankenstein monsters—patchwork quilts of past experiences—trying to pass ourselves off as whole and cohesive things.

[…]

But this post isn’t about how to get good at things. It’s about how people always assume I’m interested in the end result—the wonderful thing they’ve made—when what I’m really interested in is the process. How did you get this way and why? I’m curious about the ugliness of trying, the years and years of wanting and hoping and working. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by craft. I think it’s because it requires such a sustained tenacity. Like Michelangelo saying that he just chips away at everything that didn’t look like David: a hundred thousand little motions to reveal the underlying beauty.

Formula to Thrive

The Formula Won

Formula 1 did not develop this show with Netflix out of the goodness of its heart: The sport needed a kick-start. Ratings were falling in key countries as distribution and audience attitudes were changing. Drive to Survive is based on the personalities of the drivers and the team principals, the people in charge of the drivers’ teams who function as a sort of general manager/coach. The show revolves around type-A alphas staring directly into the camera like Jim Halpert from The Office and bluntly saying whatever they mean about their boss or coworker. The team principals are walking, talking Tom Wolfe novels; the drivers are all rich, look like models, and still have a lot to complain about. These are the pillars of the show: The principals try to outflex each other as masters of the universe while the drivers navigate HR dramas and try to race as fast as they can. It is the most chaotic possible mashup of Hard Knocks, Gossip Girl, James Bond, and Game of Thrones. It is perfect television.

Topsy Turvy What’s a Fermi

The Fermi Paradox

You are probably familiar with The Fermi Paradox, or have at least heard of it. It might ruin the night’s sky for you but it is “fun” to think about. Tim Urban summarizes our place in the universe and beyond by saying…”We’re rare, we’re first, or we’re fucked.”

In the search for additional intelligent life the portion of speculation that eats at me is, ‘There are scary predator civilizations out there, and most intelligent life knows better than to broadcast any outgoing signals and advertise their location.’

It does seem rather…Earthly (specifically, American) to be the ones to show up on the galactic stage blarring noise from our giant megaphone.

Links

• Behind the Scenes with Drones in Titleist Golf Ball Commercials
• How Stuff Works Infographics
• Right Up Our Alley
• This video is for everyone who has ever sat on their couch and said, “I could do that.”
• Automating Among Us
• Navigating the Suez Canal
• Iceland volcano: Drone footage captures stunning up-close view of eruption

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Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

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.

Like, Super Random

Randomness 101: LavaRand in Production

LavaRand is a system that uses lava lamps as a secondary source of randomness for our production servers. A wall of lava lamps in the lobby of our San Francisco office provides an unpredictable input to a camera aimed at the wall. A video feed from the camera is fed into a CSPRNG, and that CSPRNG provides a stream of random values that can be used as an extra source of randomness by our production servers. Since the flow of the “lava” in a lava lamp is very unpredictable,1 “measuring” the lamps by taking footage of them is a good way to obtain unpredictable randomness. Computers store images as very large numbers, so we can use them as the input to a CSPRNG just like any other number.

• Video Version

“I shot myself, but I killed my ego.”

San Francisco Giants outfielder Drew Robinson’s remarkable second act

Being a professional baseball player isn’t only about playing baseball better than everyone else. It’s accelerated adulthood. It’s an 18-year-old paying bills, managing disappointment, navigating politics, forging relationships — figuring out how to live in a universe designed to weed out the weak.

Goldberggggg

Hockey Has a Gigantic-Goalie Problem

Particularly intriguing is to watch them position their body when the action is to one side of their net, near the goal line. On their knees, one leg extended to the bottom far corner, the top of that leg pad filling the five-hole, their upper body crammed up against the post, their shoulders shrugged upward to take away the top corners, all of their body parts coming together so seamlessly. It is like watching an origami master in action, constructing not a paper crane, but a perfect wall.

Understanding Efficacy

What does 95% COVID-19 vaccine efficacy really mean?

It is imperative to dispel any ambiguity about how vaccine efficacy shown in trials translates into protecting individuals and populations. The mRNA-based Pfizer, and Moderna vaccines were shown to have 94–95% efficacy in preventing symptomatic COVID-19…It means that in a population such as the one enrolled in the trials, with a cumulated COVID-19 attack rate over a period of 3 months of about 1% without a vaccine, we would expect roughly 0·05% of vaccinated people would get diseased. It does not mean that 95% of people are protected from disease with the vaccine—a general misconception of vaccine protection…

A 95% vaccine efficacy means that instead of 1,000 COVID-19 cases in a population of 100,000 without vaccine we would expect 50 cases.

I couldn’t really wrap my mind around how this math worked out. Or rather, I hadn’t found anyone who could explain it well enough for me to explain to someone else. This NY Times exercise really helped.

Should you take a less efficacious vaccine or wait for a more efficacious vaccine?

Don’t fail to wear your seatbelt today because your next car may have airbags.

Please keep in mind,

All three vaccines were 100% effective at preventing severe disease six weeks after the first dose (for Moderna) or seven weeks after the first dose (for Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, the latter of which requires only one dose). Zero vaccinated people in any of the trials were hospitalized or died of COVID-19 after the vaccines had fully taken effect.

Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy Page

Links

• Modern Presidential Portraits
• A Day in the Life of Your Data
• Everest – A Time Lapse Film
• I Miss My Bar
• Draw an iceberg and see how it will float
• Be My Eyes
• A digital archive of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives
• Nature Score

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.

Wonderwall

Washington’s Secret to the Perfect Zoom Bookshelf? Buy It Wholesale.

Another force at work, however, was the rise of the well-stocked shelf as a coveted home-office prop. When workplaces went remote and suddenly Zoom allowed co-workers new glimpses into one another’s homes, what New York Times writer Amanda Hess dubbed the “credibility bookcase” became the hot-ticket item. (“For a certain class of people, the home must function not only as a pandemic hunkering nest but also be optimized for presentation to the outside world,” she wrote.) And while Roberts makes an effort not to infer too much about his clients or ask too many questions about their intent, he did notice a very telling micro-trend in orders he was getting from all across the United States.

Grab Your Cauldron

Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines

I’ll start with the bad news: Nobody will be making an mRNA vaccine in their garage any time soon.

And from The Washington Post:

Step one is to generate lots of genetic material.

Scientists use a buzz of electricity to create holes in the cellular skin of E. coli bacteria to let a ring of DNA slip in, carrying the blueprint for the coronavirus spike protein. Those cells grow in large stainless steel vats, allowing the bacteria — and the DNA blueprint of the spike protein inside — to multiply over about four days. At the end of the process, scientists kill and break open the cells, using a purification process that takes about a week and a half to strain out a ring of DNA, called a plasmid, that codes for the spike protein.

Le Sigh

Why We Sigh

Research from the University of Oslo found that most people associated sighs with negative emotions like disappointment, defeat, frustration, boredom, and longing. But the primary physical function of a sigh is for the benefit of your lungs. Sighs keep the tiny air sacs in the lungs, the alveoli, from collapsing, and maintain the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide, said Silvia Pagliardini, an associate professor in the Department of Physiology at the University of Alberta.

Healthy adults sigh about once every five minutes. If you don’t sigh and re-open the alveoli, you could become hypoxic and die. People died when using the earliest iron lungs because designers didn’t account for sighing, which modern ventilators now do. When mice are genetically engineered to not be able to sigh, they eventually die of major lung problems.

Historically, the sigh was considered to be like a reflex, Pagliardini said. “The lungs collapse, they send some input to the brain, and the brain makes a sigh,” she said. In the past few decades, we’ve learned that sighs are programmed by the brain to occur no matter what signalling is coming from the lungs.

Links

• You can cook a chicken by slapping it at 3725.95 mph, an impossible task by any human means. If you do succeed however, you will not only cook the chicken but also decimate its entire structure, causing a violent explosion.
• Those Lines On The Road Are Longer Than You Think
• Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”(Transcript)
• Umarell: A folk term in Bologna referring specifically to men of retirement age who pass the time watching construction sites, especially roadworks — stereotypically with hands clasped behind their back and offering unwanted advice.
• Final Tally: 30,573
• Hyperrealistic Paintings by Jeff Bartletels
• Satoshi Found
• Apple Beige

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Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

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.

Announcement

Tending this website keeps me sane. I think of it as a digital garden, a kind of sanctuary. I recognize this in Ethan Marcotte’s eloquent suggestion that we “let a website be a worry stone.” And if my site is a kind of garden, then I see myself as both gardener and architect, in so much as I make plans and prepare the ground, then sow things that grow in all directions. Some things die, but others thrive, and that’s how my garden grows. And I tend it for me; visitors are a bonus. — Simon Collison

1. I’d invite you to check out the redesigned website. I suppose the only real excitement is the timeline. For some time now, and increasingly in the future, I have been and will be tracking movies, tv shows, books, quotes, thoughts, photos, and travels (RIP *sobbing*).

   I think the details behind the timeline are kind of cool. I use Airtable and Zapier to create new posts. All I have to do is update the spreadsheets I already use to track everything and a new post is created on the site.

   If you see something weird or that doesn’t look right, please let me know. I’ll add it to my list.

2. The newsletter is moving from being self-hosted to Mailchimp. You might see a welcome or confirmation email, or if things go horribly (horribly, horribly) wrong you might need to opt-in again. We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.

And now, as we were…

“…rip your individual cells apart” * blink, blink *

What Would We Experience If Earth Spontaneously Turned Into A Black Hole?

In order to approach the actual event horizon itself, you’d have to somehow shield yourself from these tidal forces, which would rip your individual cells apart and even the individual atoms and molecules composing you before you crossed the event horizon. This stretching effect along one direction while compressing you along the other is known as spaghettification, and it’s how black holes would kill and tear apart any creature that ventured too close to an event horizon where space was too severely curved.

As spectacular as falling into a black hole would actually be, if Earth spontaneously became one, you’d never get to experience it for yourself. You’d get to live for about another 21 minutes in an incredibly odd state: free-falling, while the air around you free-fell at exactly the same rate. As time went on, you’d feel the atmosphere thicken and the air pressure increase as everything around the world accelerated towards the center, while objects that weren’t attached to the ground would appear approach you from all directions.

But as you approached the center and you sped up, you wouldn’t be able to feel your motion through space. Instead, what you’d begin to feel was an uncomfortable tidal force, as though the individual constituent components of your body were being stretched internally. These spaghettifying forces would distort your body into a noodle-like shape, causing you pain, loss of consciousness, death, and then your corpse would be atomized. In the end, like everything on Earth, we’d be absorbed into the black hole, simply adding to its mass ever so slightly. For the final 21 minutes of everyone’s life, under only the laws of gravity, our demises would all truly be equal.

Ob-ey-I

The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand

The captain of the container vessel would regularly receive automated emails telling him to slow down the ship. It’s impossible to know why the shipping company’s algorithms decided this was for the best — the captain himself didn’t know. But he could speculate: Maybe the staff or systems at the terminal ahead reported delays with off-loading, or a mechanical hitch. Or maybe the algorithm saw the delays coming in advance because the GPS trackers on other containers showed delivery trucks stuck in gridlock outside the port. Maybe it decided to slow everything down because a customer de-prioritized their order. Or that a change somewhere else in another link of the supply chain meant that getting their shipment from another source became a cheaper or quicker option. Or the cost of oil fluctuated just enough that burning it at the ship’s current rate became inefficient. Or maybe it was all of these reasons simultaneously, or none of them. The point is that we don’t know, the captain of the ship itself didn’t know, and that nobody may know — but that didn’t stop the decision being made.

“McDonald’s is the place we eat when we’re taking a break from being virtuous.”

My Hunt for the Original McDonald’s French-Fry Recipe

My hunt for the lost McRecipe took me up the corporate ladder and to obsessive corners of Reddit. I spoke to fast-food experts, super-fan museum curators, and a 79-year-old former employee of the very first McDonald’s. After weeks of digging, I procured a recipe for the original fries that one fast-food historian believes to be the real deal, one I recreated several times to ensure its legitimacy. I sweat over hot tallow, bled from cutting perfect shoestrings, and literally got pulverized salt in those wounds. But according to at least one expert, I have reason to believe the recipe I’ve uncovered is authentic.

Links

• Crime Scene Science
• Clear and concise explanation of how the COVID-19 vaccine works
• Another good vaccine explanation
• Our World in Data
• Footage of Collapse Arecibo Observatory and an explanation of what happened and the observatory’s significance
• Ent-ar the Matrix
• Sprawling Rivers
• Stephen Curry making 105 consecutive 3-pointers(NBA players make about 35% of 3-pointers)
• Aaron Rai making 207 consecutive 10-foot putts in 2010(Every Shot Counts: PGA Tour players make about 40% of 10-foot putts)

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Do not hesitate to reply to this months email to share links, wisdom, or thoughts.

Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

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.

Colorado’s 697 Sides

Colorado is a rectangle? Think again.

Accordingly, the state has not just four sides, but a total of 697 sides. So if Colorado is not a rectangle, what is it? Well, not a pentagon, (Greek for 5-sider), hexagon (6-sider) or a heptagon (7-sider), but a — hold on to something — hexahectaenneacontakaiheptagon (697-sider).

James Bond Shooting

Casino Royale’s poker scene was as elaborate as a James Bond stunt

The script for Casino Royale worried director Martin Campbell. This was his second reboot of the James Bond franchise, and on the cusp of production, he realized the movie’s centerpiece — a showdown between 007 and the blood-eyed villain Le Chiffre — took place around a quiet poker table. Loosely adapting Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel of the same name, screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis had replaced the author’s original game of baccarat with three big rounds of Texas hold’em. The card game, they believed, made for better drama — it was known more widely, required more skill and delivered higher stakes. But for Campbell, who had never picked up a deck, it looked like a snooze.
[…]
Ultimately, only three hands matter in Casino Royale, and they all feature showdowns between Bond and LeChiffre, providing a three-act structure to the heart of the movie. The first watches Bond muck his cards and intentionally lose to discover LeChiffre’s tell; the second watches LeChiffre dupe Bond and eliminate him from the table with quad jacks; and the third watches Bond return to the tournament to redeem himself with a straight flush. In between, Bond spends a drink break by suffocating two assassins in a stairwell and, at a later intermission, survives a poisoned drink after Vesper (Eva Green), his British accomplice, defibrillates him with his life hanging in the balance.

Yak Bak

Don’t Shave That Yak!

Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occurs when you find something you need to do.

“I want to wax the car today.”

“Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”

“But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.”

“But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor’s EZPass…”

“Bob won’t lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.”

“And we haven’t returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.”

And the next thing you know, you’re at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.

Links

• Scented candles: An unexpected victim of the COVID-19 pandemic
• Vermont publishes all candidates receiving write-in votes (Remarkably uninteresting until you click to reveal “Total Write-ins”.)
• Oh my God, my life is perfect!
• Scientists Find the Secret to the Holes in Swiss Cheese: Hay Dust
• The Vintage Beauty Of Soviet Control Rooms
• Augusta’s Green Jackets: For Winners, Members (and Buyers) Only
• 25 Words That Are Their Own Opposites
• Dud To Stud: How Dutch Plant Breeders Built Our Brussels Sprouts Boom

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Clay

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.

99.3%

According to this article by The Ringer, no Umpire has ever called a perfect game behind home plate.

Preliminarily, John Tumpane was considered too have called 135/135 pitches correctly in Game 2 of the 2020 ALCS between the Houston Astros and the Tampa Bay Rays. However, after postgame processing it was determined that Tumpane missed a strike one call to Austin Meadows in the bottom of the 2nd inning by 0.1 inches.

Noting this is really just an excuse to share Tumpane’s story of saving a women’s life in Pittsburgh in 2017.

Sim City

Do We Live in a Simulation?

Plug all these into a Bayesian formula, and out comes the answer: the posterior probability that we are living in base reality is almost the same as the posterior probability that we are a simulation—with the odds tilting in favor of base reality by just a smidgen.

These probabilities would change dramatically if humans created a simulation with conscious beings inside it, because such an event would change the chances that we previously assigned to the physical hypothesis. “You can just exclude that hypothesis right off the bat. Then you are only left with the simulation hypothesis,” Kipping says. “The day we invent that technology, it flips the odds from a little bit better than 50–50 that we are real to almost certainly we are not real, according to these calculations. It’d be a very strange celebration of our genius that day.”

Around The Web

• 100m Swim – 1932 vs. 2016
• How Racewatch Helps Formula One Teams
• Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler
• McBroken, and it’s creator
• Average Happiness for Twitter
• Lobe.ai
• Why aren’t prefab homes everywhere?
• Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

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Clay

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.

Earn Your Participation Trophy

Step 1: Click here to get 5 random dates between January 20, 2017 and January 20, 2021 (gotta future-proof, y’know).

Step 2: Match the month and day with the Catalog of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes and/or, if you would prefer, the Washington Post’s False and Misleading Claims page.

(I highly recommend just using Cmd+F or Ctrl+F to search the page. Otherwise, you will be scrolling until November 3.)

Step 3: VOTE.

Around The Web

• Superman Cyclist
• Stoffel: The Escape Artist Honey Badger
• Todd Mclelann’s Photo Series: Things Come Apart
• Film and Furniture

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Clay

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.

Egg-cellent

Always on the Side of the Egg

Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others — coldly, efficiently, systematically.

The Egg: Andy Weir

“So what’s the point of it all?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”
“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.
I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”
“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”
“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”
“Just me? What about everyone else?”
“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”
You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”
“All you. Different incarnations of you.”
“Wait. I’m everyone!?”
“Now you’re getting it,”
…
“Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”

iPoDoE

The Case of the Top Secret iPod

It was a gray day in late 2005. I was sitting at my desk, writing code for the next year’s iPod. Without knocking, the director of iPod Software—my boss’s boss—abruptly entered and closed the door behind him. He cut to the chase. “I have a special assignment for you. Your boss doesn’t know about it. You’ll help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Report only to me.”

Around The Web

• Olympic Gold Medalist, Katie Ledecky, swims with a glass of chocolate milk on her head
• Popcorn Popping at 100,000 Frames Per Second
• The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia
• Ted Williams Strike Zone
• Things Unexpectedly Named After People

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Clay

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.

How Low Can You Go

What would Tiger Woods shoot on your home course?

For the past 25 years, we’ve watched Tiger dominate on some of the toughest courses in the world. If you’re anything like me, you’ve asked yourself, “How good would Tiger be at my course from my tees?”.

Recently, a good friend asked me an interesting question: “If tour players entered their scores just like we do, what would their USGA handicap index be?” I ran the numbers and it was eye-popping.

And I quote, “A fucking bitch”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Responds to Rep. Ted Yoho

And so what I believe is that having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man, and when a decent man messes up as we all are bound to do, he tries his best and does apologize. Not to save face, not to win a vote, he apologizes genuinely to repair and acknowledge the harm done so that we can all move on.

Lastly, what I want to express to Mr. Yoho is gratitude. I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women. You can have daughters and accost women without remorse. You can be married and accost women. You can take photos and project an image to the world of being a family man and accost women without remorse and with a sense of impunity. It happens every day in this country. It happened here on the steps of our nation’s Capitol. It happens when individuals who hold the highest office in this land admit, admit to hurting women and using this language against all of us.

Around The Web

• 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
• Undersea Cable 
• How Window Blinds Work
• Guess Who: The Office Edition
• The Accidental Dystopia of Major Construction Sites

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Clay

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.

Black Lives Matter

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge

But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.

Adrian Brandon: Stolen

I use time as a medium to define how long each portrait is colored in. 1 year of life = 1 minute of color…So for each of these portraits I played with the harsh relationship between time and death. I want the viewer to see how much empty space is left in these lives, stories that will never be told, space that can never be filled. This emptiness represents holes in their families and our community, who will be forever stuck with the question, “who were they becoming?”

8:46 – Dave Chappelle

We’re not desperate for heroes in the black community. Anyone who survives this nightmare is my god-damned hero.

Around The Web

• John Mulaney: Dear Class Of 2020
• Golf Cart Traffic
• Baseball vs. Balloon
• Holyyyyy…
• Guy talks to a cop like a cop

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Clay

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.

Times Like These

The Day the Live Concert Returns

In today’s world of fear and unease and social distancing, it’s hard to imagine sharing experiences like these ever again. I don’t know when it will be safe to return to singing arm in arm at the top of our lungs, hearts racing, bodies moving, souls bursting with life. But I do know that we will do it again, because we have to. It’s not a choice. We’re human. We need moments that reassure us that we are not alone. That we are understood. That we are imperfect. And, most important, that we need each other. I have shared my music, my words, my life with the people who come to our shows. And they have shared their voices with me. Without that audience—that screaming, sweating audience—my songs would only be sound. But together, we are instruments in a sonic cathedral, one that we build together night after night. And one that we will surely build again.

Want to Dance

”The Last Dance” – The 10 part documentary chronicles the untold story of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ dynasty.

“Look, winning has a price,” says Jordan. “And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates who came after me didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard that I played the game. And I wasn’t going to take any less. Now if that means I had to go in there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates. The one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked me to do something that he didn’t fucking do. When people see this they are going say, ‘Well he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ Well, that’s you. Because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win to be a part of that as well. Look, I don’t have to do this. I am only doing it because it is who I am. That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that way, don’t play that way. Break.”

Quote Video Source

Around The Web

• Jukebox, a neural net that generates music 
• Trevor Bauer & Derek Dietrich go head-to-head in the desert
• A Mile an Hour
• 26 Minutes of a Man Doing Sudoku (Make it to the 3’s at least)
• A $h*t font that f*cking censors bad language automatically
• Peeling a Post-It
• Making Golf Balls

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Clay

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.

Pruned

My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?

For the past 10 years I’ve been staring wide-eyed and with alarm as the sweet, gentle citizen restaurant transformed into a kind of unruly colossal beast. The food world got stranger and weirder to me right while I was deep in it. The “waiter” became the “server,” the “restaurant business” became the “hospitality industry,” what used to be the “customer” became the “guest,” what was once your “personality” became your “brand,” the small acts of kindness and the way you always used to have of sharing your talents and looking out for others became things to “monetize.”

The work itself — cooking delicious, interesting food and cleaning up after cooking it — still feels as fresh and honest and immensely satisfying as ever. Our beloved regulars and the people who work so hard at Prune are all still my favorite people on earth. But maybe it’s the bloat, the fetishistic foodies, the new demographic of my city who have never been forced to work in retail or service sectors. Maybe it’s the auxiliary industries that feed off the restaurants themselves — the bloggers and agents and the “influencers,” the brand managers, the personal assistants hired just to keep you fresh on “Insta,” the Food & Wine festivals, the multitude of panels we chefs are now routinely invited to join, to offer our charming yet thoroughly unresearched opinions on. The proliferation of television shows and YouTube channels and culinary competitions and season after season of programming where you find yourself aghast to see an idol of yours stuffing packaged cinnamon buns into a football-shaped baking pan and squirting the frosting into a laces pattern for a tailgating episode on the Food Network.

And God, the brunch, the brunch. The phone hauled out for every single pancake and every single Bloody Mary to be photographed and Instagrammed. That guy who strolls in and won’t remove his sunglasses as he holds up two fingers at my hostess without saying a word: He wants a table for two. The purebred lap dogs now passed off as service animals to calm the anxieties that might arise from eating eggs Benedict on a Sunday afternoon. I want the girl who called the first day of our mandated shut down to call back, in however many months when restaurants are allowed to reopen, so I can tell her with delight and sincerity: No. We are not open for brunch. There is no more brunch.

Shoot, [No] Score

Why Sports Aren’t Coming Back Soon

Athletes, Jenga, Coaching Staff, Jenga, Interpreters, Jenga, Medical Staff, Jenga, Reporters, Jenga, Broadcasters, Jenga, Grounds Keepers, Jenga, Maintenance Workers, Jenga, Bus Drivers, Jenga, Hotel Staff, Jenga, Security Personnel, Jenga, Delivery People, Jenga.

No Worse Nightmare

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder

What makes you you? The question cuts to the core of who we are, the things that make us special in this universe. The converse of the question raises another kind of philosophical dilemma: If a person isn’t himself, who is he?

Countless philosophers have taken a swing at this elusive piñata. In the 17th century, John Locke pinned selfhood on memory, using recollections as the thread connecting a person’s past with their present. That holds some intuitive appeal: Memory, after all, is how most of us register our continued existence. But memory is unreliable. Writing in the 1970s, renowned philosopher Derek Parfit recast Locke’s idea to argue that personhood emerges from a more complex view of psychological connectedness across time. He suggested that a host of mental phenomena—memories, intentions, beliefs, and so on—forge chains that bind us to our past selves. A person today has many of the same psychological states as that person a day ago. Yesterday’s human enjoys similar overlap with an individual of two days prior. Each memory or belief is a chain that stretches back through time, holding a person together in the face of inevitable flux.

The gist, then, is that someone is “himself” because countless mental artifacts stay firm from one day to the next, anchoring that person’s character over time. It’s a less crisp definition than the old idea of a soul, offering no firm threshold where selfhood breaks down. It doesn’t pinpoint, for example, how many psychological chains you can lose before you stop being yourself.

Around The Web

• Statistical "Which Character" Personality Quiz
• 25 Movies and the Magazine Stories that Inspired Them
• Exploded View: Nintendo 64 Controller
• Banksy: My wife hates it when I work from home
• Stream Ken Burns’ Baseball Documentary Series for Free on PBS
• The official NASA Acronym Dictionary is 256 pages long
• The Worlds Most Advanced Camera Stabilizer

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Clay

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.

I Spy a Marmot

For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps

But on certain maps, in Switzerland’s more remote regions, there is also, curiously, a spider, a man’s face, a naked woman, a hiker, a fish, and a marmot. These barely-perceptible apparitions aren’t mistakes, but rather illustrations hidden by the official cartographers at Swisstopo in defiance of their mandate “to reconstitute reality.” Maps published by Swisstopo undergo a rigorous proofreading process, so to find an illicit drawing means that the cartographer has outsmarted his colleagues.
[…]
Many maps also contain intentional errors to trap would-be copyright violators. The work of recording reality is particularly vulnerable to plagiarism: if a cartographer is suspected of copying another’s work, he can simply claim to be duplicating the real world— ideally, the two should be the same. Mapmakers often rely on fictitious streets, typically no longer than a block, to differentiate their accounts of the truth

Barenaked Ladies + U2 = ?

The Case of the Missing Hit

This is the best episode of any podcast I have ever heard.

A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case.

Listen to the episode before checking out this interview with one of Reply All’s hosts, P.J. Vogt

P.J. Vogt on Reply All’s Instantly Legendary Episode 

H-E-B, P-P-P-P-P

Inside the Story of How H-E-B Planned for the Pandemic

We did not see runs on toilet paper as one of the first things to go out of stock. That was something we still kind of have a hard time understanding.

Covid-Corner

• Kurzgesagt – The Coronavirus Explained & What You Should Do
• Super-bad-transmittible-contageous-awful-virus
• Flattening the Curve Simulations
• Epidemic Calculator
• Why Soap Works
• How to fight the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and its disease, CoVID-19
• NY Times Front Page Visualization of U.S Unemployment Claims
• The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What’s Coming

Around The Web

• Guide to figuring out the age of an undated world map 
• The 12th hole at Augusta National built with 20,000 Lego pieces
• Penguin Jailbreak: Part 1 and Part 2
• Rory McIlroy on Stoicism
• A look at everything inside the golf bags of the Tour’s elite

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Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

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.

Ready for your close up?

Your Visitors Deserve to Know They’re on Camera

I briefly spoke about this over email with Elizabeth Joh, a University of California, Davis, School of Law professor, who reminded me: “You never just ‘buy’ a new surveillance device. You’ve adopted a worldview about privacy, anonymity and autonomy — whether by conscious choice or accident.”

Quoted law professor Elizabeth Joh also co-hosts the tremendously educational podcast, What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law.

Pro-Am Pageantry

The joy, fear, and occasional humiliation of playing as an amateur in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am

On a Saturday in late October, my cell phone rang and it was Bill Perocchi, the CEO of Pebble Beach Company, and he asked me if I could play. If you ever get one of those calls, yes is the answer. Yes, sweet mother of pearl, yes. Then a leather-bound invitation arrives in the mail with Clint Eastwood’s signature. You send in your check and you’re in.

Swiss Cheese

‘The intelligence coup of the century’

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

Around The Web

• What Tesla’s Self-Driving Autopilot Sees
• Pretending I’m a Superman – The Tony Hawk Video Game Story Trailer
• Super Bowl LIV: A graphical review
• The Fist Bump: A more hygienic alternative to the handshake

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Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

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.

Transcendent

Roger Federer as Religious Experience

The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan, who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could “float” across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. There are probably a half-dozen other examples since 1960. And Federer is of this type — a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces.

“Does it Do Anything?” “It Tells the Time.”

The Watches Of James Bond

And what of James Bond’s watches? From a few clues in Fleming’s novels, we learn that 007 wears a “heavy Rolex Oyster” of some sort, with a luminous dial and expanding metal bracelet. It was possibly an Explorer, the watch of the author himself, who no doubt wore it on his spearfishing excursions from his Jamaican beach villa. This was the 1950s, when steel Rolex sports watches were in their infancy and Bond treats his like the tool it was, not the luxury accessory or status symbol it would become. In the novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he brandishes it as a “knuckle duster”, wrapping it across his fist to render a henchman unconscious in the ski room of a mountaintop hideout. Upon later reflection, Bond decides he can get his shattered watch replaced with a stipend from MI-6, and will probably get another Rolex, which Bond feels no particular affection for, but likes because they’re heavy and easy to read. No more, no less.

Just a Bit Outside

How does MLB check the accuracy of pitch tracking at ballparks?

The ground truth method relies on the frame-synchronized filming of a ball passing over the plate by two high-speed cameras. WSU uses Phantom cameras which operate at 2500 frames per second (fps). These 1920×1200 cameras are focused down to a field of view (FOV) of 5 x 3 ft on the space surrounding the strike zone as in Figure 2. This yields a spatial resolution of about 0.03 inches/pixel within the camera’s field depth. Exposure times of 50 µs allow still images from video with a motion blur of less than 80 thousandths of an inch (\< 0.080”) as shown in Figure 3.

Around The Web

• How the map of the US has changed over 200 years
• ’Succession’ Composer Breaks Down the Theme Song
• Tiger’s Range Session ASMR
• Emoji Scissors
• Instagram for Windows 95
• Long Bets
• Sign Stealing Scandal

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Clay