Clevenland Indians

Many, many years ago, long before any of you who are reading this were born, and long, long before Major League Baseball went woke, pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta for not toeing the Left’s line, and made race-baiting Communist agitprop a permanent feature of its website, I learned about a man named Louis Sockalexis. 

Sockalexis, a great baseball name if there ever was one (later announcers would have loved to report about how he “socked” one into the stands), is largely forgotten today, although he has made a few headlines in the last few days because the Cleveland Indians, a team that bore that name in his honor, has now dishonored him by changing its nickname, so as not to insult Indians. Yes, friends, it’s a topsy-turvy world, and it isn’t getting any saner.

Have you heard of Louis Sockalexis? Some of our great-grandfathers marveled at his feats. He was a Penobscot Indian from Maine who became a major league player in 1897, hitting .338 in 66 games for the old National League Cleveland Spiders. He generated a great deal of fan enthusiasm, but indifferent to or unable to overcome stereotypes, he succumbed to alcoholism and had washed out of the major leagues by 1899. 

The Spiders amassed the eye-watering record of twenty wins and 134 losses that year, and went out of business right after the season’s end, opening up an opportunity in 1901 for the new American League. It was not until 1915, however, that Cleveland’s American League team began calling itself the Indians in honor of Sockalexis. He hadn’t played in the major leagues in a decade and a half, but was newly recalled to fans when he died an untimely death from tuberculosis in 1913. 

The Society for American Baseball Research notes that in January 1915, Cleveland team owner Charles Somers, “perhaps recalling the all-too-brief period of excitement that Louis Sockalexis had brought to Cleveland in 1897, dubbed his team the Indians.”  READ MORE

Tokyo Olympics 2021

 

Don't Be A...

 

Growth

 

People

Objectivity in New Rporting

Faculty members of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media converged last week to bemoan a statement of values that’s etched in granite and is found in the lobby of their school.

The core values statement, installed two years ago, touts objectivity, impartiality, integrity and truth-seeking, and after their session that statement was reportedly scrapped from the school’s website, the News & Observer reports.

In 2019, Walter Hussman, a UNC alumnus and owner of a media conglomerate of newspapers and other media outlets, donated $25 million to the UNC journalism school. Part of the donation contract installed those values into the school’s wall and mission, according to UNC’s website.

But Hussman had expressed concerns over the hiring of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of the New York Times 1619 Project, and she cited the journalism magnate as one reason she rejected the UNC job.

“Faculty say the display gives the impression those statements are values of the school and its faculty, and in a draft of a statement … faculty wrote it should be removed or given more context. The draft also said Hussman’s actions had been harmful to the school’s reputation,” the News & Observer reported.  READ MORE

Animals

 

Looking Inside Mars

The solar system’s god of war has a bigger heart than expected: Using humankind’s first seismometer on another planet, researchers have analyzed the interior structure of Mars for the first time, including its oversize liquid core.

The findings, published on July 22 across three studies in the journal Science, mark the latest scientific triumph for NASA’s InSight lander, which arrived at the flat equatorial plain known as Elysium Planitia in November 2018. The stationary spacecraft has measured faint “marsquakes” rumbling through the planet since early 2019.


On Earth, seismic waves can reveal our planet’s inner structure by revealing boundaries deep underground where the waves’ speeds and directions change. InSight’s similar measurements of Martian temblors have let scientists detect distinct layers within the red planet, including the boundary of its roughly 2,300-mile-wide core.

“As a seismologist, you probably have one chance in your life to find a core for a planet,” says InSight team member Simon Stähler, a planetary seismologist at the research university ETH Zurich in Switzerland, interviewed by video call.

Mars is just the third celestial body to have its core directly measured with seismic data, following Earth in the early 1900s and the moon in 2011. When combined with InSight’s first measurements of Mars’s mantle and crust structure, the core size will refine models for how Mars formed and changed over the past 4.5 billion years, from a possibly habitable world with liquid water and a planet-wide magnetic field to the hostile, rusty desert it is today. (Read more about humankind’s long-lasting obsession with Mars in National Geographic magazine.)  READ MORE

Odds and Ends

 

Consciousness and Quantum Physics

One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer.

They claimed that the brain's neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics – the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around. This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.

Penrose and Hameroff were met with incredulity. Quantum mechanical laws are usually only found to apply at very low temperatures. Quantum computers, for example, currently operate at around -272°C. At higher temperatures, classical mechanics takes over.

Since our body works at room temperature, you would expect it to be governed by the classical laws of physics. For this reason, the quantum consciousness theory has been dismissed outright by many scientists – though others are persuaded supporters.  READ MORE

Cats and Dogs

 

Word Salad

 

Vaccination Passports

 

All over Europe people are protesting the government requiring a vaccination passport in order to be allowed entry into a variety of venues because of COVID and all the varients that are coming online...

They are protesting this direction because they believe that it is an invasion of privacy and an intrusion into an individual's medical history...

Personally,

I don't really care and have no problems showing to whoever wants to see that i have had both my COVID shots...

HOWEVER...

I do think it is inappropriate for GOVERNMENTS to mandate something like this...  that, in and of itself, gives GOVERNMENTS more control over the people than they should have...

Super Yachts

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ACCESS THE WORLD'S SUPERYACHTS
Superyachts come in all shapes and sizes, measuring from 20m to over 100m there are motor yachts that can zip from one island hotspot to the next in record time or sailing yachts that allow a more gentle cruise along the coast, there truly is something for everyone. Fraser offers a range of displacement and semi-displacement motor yachts, as well as a variety of sloop and ketch rigged sailing yachts for sale. If you’re familiar with superyachts you may prefer to choose your yacht by shipyard or designer.

FIND THE PERFECT YACHT FOR YOU
Our brokers are the experts who can guide you through the thousands of yachts to choose from. However for an initial glance you can use our specialised search feature to look for what is important to you, you can search by price, length, number of guests, the year the yacht was built and who it was built by. Then you can order the search results by the same parameters and choose which currency to show or measurement unit to display. Just like the perfect yacht for sale, the choice is yours.  READ MORE

Photo Variety

 

On Track for Global Collapse

Human society is on track for a collapse in the next two decades if there isn't a serious shift in global priorities, according to a new reassessment of a 1970s report, Vice reported

In that report — published in the bestselling book "The Limits to Growth" (1972) — a team of MIT scientists argued that industrial civilization was bound to collapse if corporations and governments continued to pursue continuous economic growth, no matter the costs. 

The researchers forecasted 12 possible scenarios for the future, most of which predicted a point where natural resources would become so scarce that further economic growth would become impossible, and personal welfare would plummet.

The report's most infamous scenario — the Business as Usual (BAU) scenario — predicted that the world's economic growth would peak around the 2040s, then take a sharp downturn, along with the global population, food availability and natural resources.

This imminent "collapse" wouldn't be the end of the human race, but rather a societal turning point that would see standards of living drop around the world for decades, the team wrote.  READ MORE

A Few Old Cartoons

 

The Art of WAR

"If you now wish to inquire into the Way of [the ancient sages], may I suggest that one can hardly be certain of it? To be certain of it without evidence is foolishness, to appeal to it though unable to be certain of it is fraud."   Hanfeizi (3rd century BCE)[1]

“Translation,” an American poet and translator of Dante’s Inferno opined, “is the art of failure.”[2] In Don Quixote, the eponymous character notes that distortion is often a natural byproduct of the effort: “translation from one language into another…is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with the smoothness and brightness of the right side.” 

The reverse tapestry is an apt metaphor for reading any ancient Chinese text, particularly The Art of War. While the use of logographs to express complex thoughts has been a constant feature throughout China’s recorded history, the written language of thousands of years ago differs significantly from its modern variant. 

While the original Art of War consists of approximately 6,ooo characters, a modern Chinese version requires more than double that number to convey the same approximate meaning.  Even most native Chinese speakers, therefore, read a translation of the original.

While The Art of War is surprisingly short and compact, much remains ambiguous in its received message. As a result, our contemporary interpretations require constant skepticism, debate, and revision. While Sun Tzu’s text is arguably the oldest within the core strategic canon, it has been studied for the least amount of time by Western military theorists, in comparison with Thucydides and Clausewitz, for example. 

First translated into English only in the early twentieth century, strategists largely ignored The Art of War until the Vietnam War renewed interest in Asian military thinking. READ MORE

Riding Buddies

 

Snow Leopard

A photograph of a wild snow leopard often referred to as ‘ghost of the mountain’ camouflaging in the rocky terrain has sent the netizens scratching their heads. The image giving an optical illusion with the ferocious animal resting in the hiding has confused the viewers who have been struggling to spot the ‘phantom cat’. 

The image was shared on Tuesday by the IFS officer Ramesh Pandey on his official Twitter handle. Sharing the tricky picture, the forest officer tasked the internet to search the location of the apex predator.

The elusive big cats are known for their stealth and predatory behaviour. Often 1.8-2.3m in size, the snow leopards don’t usually roar like the lions but send the yowling cries across the mountainous regions only exceptionally during the breeding season. These cats are primarily solitary and are active hunters during the dawn and the dusk by taking a quiet ambush, meaning they are crepuscular. 

In the image shared by the Forest officer, the cat had been presumably patrolling the ridge-lines and rocky terrain searching for food. However, it’s a tough feat for anyone to locate its bearing in the depicted area.  READ MORE