Sports + Feelings
…we’re talking about psychometrics– how to measure the ways that a player’s psyche (thoughts, feelings, opinions) relates to the most important thing imaginable for sport teams: performance.
The scheduler steps down
“I tell the teams, ‘Hey, that’s the way the computer did it,'” Winick said from behind his desk. “But it was never the computer. I was the computer.”
Super 2016
2016 is the Promised Land that superhero fans have been waiting for. You cannot underrate the sheer Destiny Achieved absurdity here. The notion of linked-universe franchises was comment-forum fodder 20 years ago – even 10 years ago. Now it’s standard operating procedure.
Military Gremlins?
In what some might regard as a swipe at certain high-priced fighter jets, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, today announced a new program to develop distributed drones that can be recovered in the air via a C-130 transport plane, and then prepped for re-use 24 hours later. They’re calling them Gremlins.
On the Ballpoint
Bich didn’t just profit from the ballpoint; he won the race to make it cheap. When it first hit the market in 1946, a ballpoint pen sold for around $10, roughly equivalent to $100 today. Competition brought that price steadily down, but Bich’s design drove it into the ground. When the Bic Cristal hit American markets in 1959, the price was down to 19 cents a pen. Today the Cristal sells for about the same amount, despite inflation.
Wire Cutters (Short Film)
A chance encounter proves fateful for 2 robots mining on a desolate planet.
The [Female] Soviet Architect Who Drafted the Space Race
During the space race in the 1950s and 1960s, the task of designing the look of the Soviet Union’s booster rockets, orbital laboratories, space shuttles, and other masterworks of engineering fell to one woman: Galina Balashova. For the budding architect in the midst of a militarized rush into space, the work was also a chance to bring the principles of architecture into places it had never been before.
Via Motherboard
Minecraft founder tweets about the isolation of success
Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion almost a year ago, and the founder did not join Microsoft after the sale.
…
But he’s really bored and deeply lonely, he revealed in a series of tweets.
“The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance…”