Origami Risk started 11 years ago with four people. Today we hit 400. Crazy.
Author: fish1964
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Juggling From Above
As a very amateur juggler (I can do pins) this is awesome.
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Holy Crap
Without a parachute. Just watch
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Google Fit vs Apple Watch
As a technology follow up to the post below, here’s the full walk we did according to Google Fit (via my Pixel 5).
The rain held off for the first half… My wife’s Apple Watch called it 9.1 miles. That’s a non trivial discrepancy. The map above is accurate. I would tend to take Google over Apple on maps, but how much does the phone or app play into it?
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Cliff Walk
We ended up with a childless Memorial Day weekend and even knowing that the weather would be lousy, decided to get out of town. We used to go to Newport, Rhode Island before we had kids, so that sounded like a good getaway. Not too far and fun to walk around even if it’s chilly.
The weather lived up to the forecast and was terrible. But we love to walk and decided to bundle up and go for it. There is a cool walk called the Cliff Walk along the water and near the mansions (Newport was the playground of the rich folks back in the day, Morgans, Astors, Vanderbilts, etc.)
We had walked it before, but never the whole thing. It starts out nicely paved.
Parts of it are less so…
Some parts are genuinely tricky on a rainy day. I don’t have pictures of those parts as I was trying not to fall on my butt.
It’s quite long…
There’s way more than this There are many cool mansions.
One of the Vanderbilts apparently thought a Chinese Tea House would be nice. Go figure.
On a nicer day, it could be spectacular. On a bad day it was still pretty cool. We were pretty much soaked by the end of the walk, but fun nonetheless.
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Basic Physics
“This is wrong, but it would explain so much”. I feel that sentence applies to so many things…
Via SMBC as usual.
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We Didn’t Start the Fire
This will be one of my more random posts. On Twitter I have started following Tom Lum because I follow Hank Green who retweeted him. I don’t know a lot about Tom Lum, so hopefully he doesn’t have some sordid background I’m not aware of. He hits my sweet spot of tweeting infrequently and tweeting strange and amusing things. He has the best candle explainer post I’ve seen (that’s what Hank retweeted because he’s been trying to explain candles for a while)
But this one both cracks me up and appeals to my geekness:
He learned D3 just to produce this visualization. I also learned D3 to produce a specific visualization. His is way more fun. I like looking at this visualization and singing the song in my head as I scroll down…
Oh fine, here’s Bread Bowl Oil Lamp:
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Inflation! uh and Girls!
I have no idea how to make an inflation headline sexy. But my favorite inflation headline scold is going crazy so you will be subjected to his rant. Expect a bunch of crazy headlines about inflation over the next few days/months. They may be politically motivated or just naïve, but they are likely to be wrong.
Inflation numbers generally take the CPI (Consumer Price Index) from this month compared to a year ago. That is generally sensible. But what was going on a year ago? Perhaps the entire economy shutting down due to a pandemic? Might that skew the numbers? Will anyone mention that?
Note the chart below (annotations via Kevin Drum). Click the link above if you want the actual math, but it’s pretty clear that if you compare this year’s May/June/July/August numbers with last year, you’ll get an inflation rate that is out of whack (lies, damn lies, and statistics).
Sorry, no actual girls in this post.
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I Can Outrun the Catcher
This is just great baserunning. Gleyber Torres is on first and the infield shift is on. So with a well hit ball that isn’t fielded cleanly, Torres is running to second and realizes that the third baseman is covering second. There’s no one covering third, so he keeps running. The infielder has no one at third to throw it to and hangs on to the ball.
The catcher alertly (well, sort of) sees no one covering third, so he sprints that way to cover third but he’s a catcher and slow so he’s not there in time. So now Torres, having taken third, sees the catcher not far from third and clearly says to himself, “no one is covering home and I can outrun the catcher”.
And he does.
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 