Apparently a ConEd transformer blew in Queens and the fire lit up the sky. There are reports that LaGuardia has lost power…
Author: fish1964
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Strike Two?
FiveThirtyEight.com has a year end post on the 45 best and weirdest charts they made. There are many great examples, including the family tree connecting a single sire to every horse in the Kentucky Derby:
But my favorite is the clear baseball analysis showing that in extra innings umpires, like the rest of us, just want the damn game to end, calling borderline balls and strikes in whatever way will end the game quicker.
On Diekman’s fifth pitch, it appeared that Marisnick had earned a walk. “This is not a strike, this is off the plate,” ESPN broadcaster Jessica Mendoza opined as the networks’ K-Zone showed the pitch a few inches outside.
Home plate umpire Adam Hamari disagreed, however, calling the pitch strike two. Marisnick struck out swinging on the following pitch to end the game, and the outfielder slammed his bat in disgust.
I get it. It’s late, we all want to get to bed…
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Juul May Be Evil
Honestly, let’s just wipe out 20 years of progress. Per a University of Michigan study:
Among 10th grade students nicotine vaping also increased at a record rate as it doubled and rose eight percentage points, from 8% to 16%. This is the largest percentage point increase ever recorded by the survey for any past 30-day substance use outcome in this grade.
For secondary students in grades 9 through 12 the increases in nicotine vaping translate into at least 1.3 million additional nicotine vapers in 2018 as compared to 2017.
“Vaping is reversing hard-fought declines in the number of adolescents who use nicotine,” said Richard Miech, the lead author and principal investigator of the study. “These results suggest that vaping is leading youth into nicotine use and nicotine addiction, not away from it.”
Or as Kevin Drum prefers, in handy chart format:
Honestly, this is bad.
Vaping in general, and Juul in particular, have wiped out years of hard work to get teens off of cigarettes. And since most of the increase is in vaping nicotine, it means we’re raising yet another generation of addicts, sucked in by the same kind of marketing that was originally used to suck them into cigarette smoking. What a crime this is.
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My Dad’s Friendship With Charles Barkley
This is an amazing story. Just read it.
“It was, like, one of the most random things,” Barkley recalled with a laugh.
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Greenland Ain’t That Big
Most of you are probably aware that the most common world map distorts land area. For the map geeky, read this explanation of the Mercator projection, why it became popular, what’s wrong with it, and various alternative maps. But more than anything, this gif drives it home. Also via Visual Capitalist, an animation showing the true land area distortion in our popular map:
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Mars, Mars, Baby
Tfw your mission lands on Mars…
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Twain Talk
Julia Louis-Dreyfus for president…
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Rake America Great Again
The entire country of Finland is apparently trolling Trump with the #haravointi hashtag (means raking in Finnish)
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 