Dave Belisle is the coach of the Cumberland American Little League team of Rhode Island, the New England regional champions. They were eliminated from the Little League World Series regional finals by a team from Chicago. The coach gave the kids a speech they will always remember. Tom Hanks said there's no crying in baseball, but you may feel a little sting behind the eyes. This is what Little League should be. -via reddit
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Aw, look at this squirrel balancing on his nose on the cat’s outstretched paw! Yeah, that’s what it looks like, but the squirrel is outside, clinging to the invisible screen door, while the poor cat is stuck inside. Redditor oona36 says this squirrel is always teasing her cats. One of these days, the cats will bolt outside, and it won’t be so funny for the squirrel then!
Monsieur Caron of BrickFun spent all summer working on a LEGO movie version of Ghostbusters. Now that school is about to start, he must go back to teaching history. But what a great project to show his students! And you may be surprised and delighted by who gets to play the role of Slimer in this. The behind-the-scenes video is pretty cool, too! -via Geeks Are Sexy
This kid they call Nut is not very good at playing the guitar and singing, but he tries so hard. Is he just a loser? Will he ever make friends playing music? This is a Thai life insurance ad, so you know there’s a lot more involved. Get your hanky out. This one is based on a true story. -via Viral Viral Videos
The academics are miffed that they spent the whole day on admin and got no research done at all. Ultrarealistic Lego. pic.twitter.com/XDUAUM17Xe
— Lego Academics (@LegoAcademics) August 8, 2014The LEGO Research Institute, featuring three females scientists and their gear, is now available in stores and online. Donna Yates, an American archaeologist in Glasgow, Scotland, bought one of the first sets as soon as they went on sale -plus a few extra pieces for creativity’s sake. She recreates scenes from her own life in archaeology and academia and posts them to her new Twitter account, Lego Academics. Although the account only went live on Friday, Yates already has thousands of followers, as so many scientists and academics can relate to her LEGO scenes. The most popular, shown here, is about dealing with paperwork. Yates told the Washington Post the real-life story that inspired it.
“This scene was ripped from real life: the Lego set was delivered to my office right when my office mate (another female academic) and I were filling out our performance evaluations: a slow, frustrating task which was keeping us from what we really love, namely our research. I think that scene struck a chord with other academics because it was brutally realistic. We’ve all been there, and been there more often than we want.”
Other vignettes deal with drinking as stress relief and a dinosaur fossil that wants to be the boss. Yates says she’s been a LEGO fan since childhood, and will continue to post such scenes “as long as it’s funny.” -via Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
Tom Fonder is finding out what it is like to be old and logical. This is the kind of conversation I have with my kids all the time. The truth is, in today’s high tech world, it doesn’t matter whether a new application or social media platform makes any sense. It only matters whether young people use it, because when young people gravitate to one thing, they use it constantly -until something else comes along. If I were in charge, I would have taken that three billion dollars, because you never know when the next big thing will come along and burst your business bubble. See this comic full-size at Happy Jar.
The city of Yokohama, Japan, staged a Pokémon Pikachu Festival last week. It was called the Pikachu Tairyou Hassei Chu, or “An Outbreak of Pikachus,” which included a parade of twenty marching Pikachus! How fun! The parades happened four times a day all week, but that was far from the only Pikachu event in the city. See plenty of pictures of the Outbreak of Pikachus at RocketNews24.
Ideas? They come in all shapes -and the more open you are to them, the easier they are to find. And in the least expected places, too! Sure, they may need some alteration, but that’s just fine. This is the latest inspirational comic from Grant Snider at Incidental Comics.
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Researchers are delving into the blood, fingers, and genes of financial traders. Here are some of the studies that may give us insights into the success or failure of the traders, and of the researchers who study the financiers’ digits and chemical composition.
Here, too, are a few earlier studies that probe the mysteries of high and low finance.
Coates and the Blood of Fabulous Financial Traders (2008)
John M. Coates is a leader of the modern scientific attack force.
“Endogenous Steroids and Financial Risk Taking on a London Trading Floor,” John M. Coates, Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, vol. 105, no. 16, April 22, 2008, pp. 6167–72. (Thanks to Catharine Dobbs for bringing this to our attention.) The author, at Cambridge University, reports:
Here, we report the findings of a study in which we sampled, under real working conditions, endogenous steroids from a group of male traders in the City of London. We found that a trader’s morning testosterone level predicts his day’s profitability. We also found that a trader’s cortisol rises with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. Our results suggest that higher testosterone may contribute to economic return, whereas cortisol is increased by risk.
Coates and the Fingers of Fabulous Financial Traders (2009)
“Second-to-Fourth Digit Ratio Predicts Success Among High-Frequency Financial Traders,” John M. Coates, Mark Gurnell, and Aldo Rustichini, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 106, no. 2, Jan. 13, 2009, pp. 623–8, DOI:10.1073/pnas.0810907106. (Thanks to Hugh Henry for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Cambridge University, explain:
Here, we report the findings of a study conducted in the City of London in which we sampled 2D:4D [second-to-fourth digit length ratio] from a group of male traders engaged in what is variously called “noise” or “high-frequency” trading. We found that 2D:4D predicted the trader’s long-term profitability as well as the number of years they remained in the business.
Millet on Coates (2009)
Professor Coates’s publications spurred at least one colleague to hazard a daring new interpretation of Coate’s daring interpretation.
“Low Second-to-Fourth-Digit Ratio Might Predict Success Among High-Frequency Financial Traders Because of a Higher Need for Achievement,” Kobe Millet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 106, no. 11, Mar 9, 2009, p. E30. Millet, who is at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, writes:
The article by Coates et al. adds interesting evidence that a low 2D:4D ratio in men predicts success, not only in sports or music, but also in job performance.... However, they overlook another frugal explanation for their findings.... I expect low-2D:4D people to outperform high-2D:4D people in all kind of competitive jobs, sports, and other activities, not because of specific physical characteristics, but because of one specific psychological characteristic: a higher need for achievement.
Coates on Millet on Coates (2009)
Take a quiz to see how well you know countries around the world and their capital cities. In some of the twenty questions, you’ll be given a country and must select the capital city; in others, you’ll be given the city and must select the country. They start off very easy, but begin to get harder as the quiz goes on. I missed a couple toward the end and ended up with a score of 18, which disappointed me. Try it yourself! And then tell us how you did.
The blog Small Town Noir tells the stories of people who were arrested in New Castle, Pennsylvania, between 1930 and 1960. Diarmid Mogg became interested in the town and its people when he found some mugshots on eBay, and researched the stories of those people in the local newspaper archives -not just their crime, but their entire lives as well as they can be reconstructed.
Small Town Noir is dedicated to recovering the life stories behind mug shots from the vanished golden age of one American town.
The men and women in these mug shots are nobody special, but they saw things that none of us will ever see. They were all arrested in New Castle, a small town in western Pennsylvania, right over by the Ohio border. It was once one of the most industrially productive cities in America, but all that’s gone now.
Although Mogg is in Scotland, he continues to collect and research the mugshots that the New Castle police threw out some time around 1990. The stories are sparse but fascinating, and the blog as a whole serves to chronicle the history of a declining American town and the everyday people who lived and died there.
The mugshot above is of John Saul, who was arrested in 1957 for disorderly conduct. But the real story came later, when he got involved with holding a woman against her will for the purpose of prostitution, a crime that involved some of the town’s notable politicians. -Thanks, Lisa Menter!
Redditor merrderber is from the island of Rendova in the Solomon Islands. She is a now a law student in Australia. Her story is quite interesting.
Merrderber’s people have been in court for 14 years, fighting a logging company for the use of their land. She posted an explanation, but the TL;DR version is that an unscrupulous chief sold the tribal land to a large logging company out from underneath the people who lived there. The company came in and cut plenty of trees, but had to fight the residents, who were determined to stay. The residents won the case as of yesterday. Merrderber posted an album of pictures to celebrate. Be sure to read the captions.
John Walkenbach, formerly known as J-Walk, teased a tortoise with a remote control toy truck. The tortoise does his best to give chase, and would have made some real turtle tracks if that floor wasn’t so slick. Look at those little legs go! He probably have some amorous intentions, but the truck is under human control, and has a better grip on the floor. -via Arbroath
The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad. These mysteries are from The Little Giant® Book of Whodunits by Hy Conrad and Matt LaFleur. Can you solve the mystery before you read the solution?
(Image credit: Flickr user sciencesque)
The time of death was firmly established. At 10:06 P.M. all three suspects said they heard a gunshot echo through the house. The house was shared by four graduate students; three, if you no longer counted Harry Harris, the victim who lay in his second-story bedroom, a bullet in his chest.
Harry, it seemed, had been a ladies' man. He had even bragged about seducing the girlfriend of one of his housemates. Unfortunately, the police didn't know which one. They separated the three remaining housemates and interviewed each one.
"I was working on my car," Bill Mayer insisted. "I plugged an extension cord into an outlet behind the house. Then I took a work light around to the side driveway, in front of the garage. When I heard the gunshot, it took me a second to realize it came from the house. Then I ran inside."
The following is reprinted from the book Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.
The next time you find yourself rolling a pair of dice, know that you’re tapping into something primordial- keeping alive an ancient tradition that began long before recorded history.
DEM BONES
(Image credit: Vassil)
Archaeologists can’t pinpoint the first human who threw dice, but they do know this: Unlike many customs that started in one place and then spread, dice-throwing appeared independently all across the populated world. The oldest known dice -dating back at least 8,000 years- consisted of found objects such as fruit pits, pebbles, and seashells. But the direct precursors of today’s dice were bone: the ankle bones of hoofed animals, such as sheep and oxen. These bones -later called astragali by the Greeks- were chosen because they are roughly cube-shaped, with two rounded sides that couldn’t be landed on, and four flat ones that could. Which side would be facing up after a toss, or a series of tosses, was as much a gamble to our ancestors as it is to us today.
The first dice throwers weren’t gamers, though -they were religious shamans who used astragali (as well as sticks, rocks, or even animal entrails) for divination, the practice of telling the future by interpreting signs from the gods. How did these early dice make their way from the shaman to the layman? According to David Schwartz in Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling:
The line between divination and gambling is blurred. One hunter, for example, might say to another, “If the bones land short side up, we will search for game to the south; if not, we look north,” thus using the astragali to plumb the future. But after the hunt, the hunters might cast bones to determine who would go home with the most desirable cuts.
SQUARING OFF
And with that, gambling -and dice gaming- was born, leading to the next big step in dice evolution. Around 7,000 years ago, ancient Mesopotamians carved down the rounded sides of the astragali to make them even more cube-like. Now they could land on one of six sides, allowing the outcome to become more complex. As their technology advanced, materials such as ivory, wood, and whalebone were used to make dice. (Image credit: Swiss Museum of Games)
It is believed that the shamans were the first ones to make marks on the sides of the dice, but it didn’t take long for them to roll into the rest of society. Dice first appeared in board games in Ur, a city in southern Mesopotamia. Now referred to as the “Royal Game of Ur,” this early version of backgammon (circa 3,000 BC) used four-sided, pyramidal dice.
However, the most common dice, then and now, are six-sided cubic hexahedrons with little dots, or pips, to denote their values. The pip pattern still in use today -one opposite six, two opposite five, and three opposite four- first appeared in Mesopotamia circa 1300 BC, centuries before the introduction of Arabic numerals.
WHEN IN ROME
In the first millennium BC, civilizations thrived in Greece, India, and China- and they all threw dice. In Rome, it was common for gamblers to call out the goddess Fortuna’s name while rolling a 20-sided die during a game of chance. But they had to do it quietly -dice games were illegal in Rome (except during the winter solstice festival of Saturnalia). Not that that stopped anyone from playing it: One surviving fresco depicts two quarreling dicers being thrown out of a public house by the proprietor.
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