Featured Links - April 29, 2026

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A calm day on the lake

• A Tale of Two Countries. "Two superpowers, one behaving pathetically." The contrast between China and the U.S. is stark. 
• Comrade Trump. The unintended consequences of Trump's policies are not what he intended. 
• Certain Nap Patterns in Older Adults Could Be a Warning Sign, Study Find. "Taking a lot of daytime naps, especially in the morning, is associated with higher mortality rates for older adults, researchers in the US found. This "excessive" napping may signal underlying or developing health problems, they note, and could represent a trackable metric for early detection."
• The new iPhones have a problem turning back on after the battery runs out. If you have an iPhone 17, you should read this. 
• This pitching robot has been a ‘game changer’ for the Blue Jays and its inventors. It all started in a Toronto classroom (gift link). "Twenty-eight MLB teams and many more around the world lease the Trajekt Arc, a baseball training machine that recreates a pitcher’s delivery."
• This exotic particle could finally explain why matter has mass. "A newly spotted exotic particle state could finally expose how the universe gives matter its mass."
• Linus Inside a PDF. Really. Some people have too much time on their hands. 
• The MAHA-MAGA Breakup. "The political marriage brokered by RFK Jr. was doomed from the get-go. And Republicans may pay a steep electoral price in November."
• Where to get the 2026 Hugo finalists. Links to all of the 2026 Hugo Awards finalists. Most of the short fiction and some of the other categroies are free to read online. 
• Peptides, explained: Answers to your top questions. "Catching you up on the flood online information." Reiable information on the latest wellness buzz.
• More Surveillance Demands to Come?: Government Admits Bill C-22’s Lawful Access Provisions Could Be Expanded. Canadians should be aware of what the govrenment is doing here. 
• Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text. "Discovery sheds new light on how famed astronomer came to lead a scientific revolution."
• The Slopaganda War. "The Iran war isn’t over yet, but on the online battlefield, Trump has lost decisively.."

Featured Links - April 22, 2026

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Boats at the marina waiting for summer

• Game of drones. "As the federal government spends billions on military modernization, Canadian drone innovators are vying to meet the moment in the sky, on land and in the water." Good coverage of a new industry with lots of photos. 
• Power imbalance. "James S.A. Corey on The Captives War, The Book of Daniel, and how the only way to survive an alien invasion might be appeasement." A fascinating interview with the authors of the wonderfu Expanse series. 
• What Discoveries Might Be Hiding in the Artemis 2 Images and Data? "NASA’s Artemis 2 mission produced a wealth of data that experts will be analyzing for years to come."
• They Are Killing Our People. "This past week, the Mikisew Cree First Nation of Alberta released a report on the massive cancer rates in their community. The Alberta government withheld key medical statistics, and the federal government dragged their feet. The Feds promised to fund a study that would take 10 years to complete. And so, the community paid for their own research." This is what happens when you live downstream from the biggest polluter in Canada. 
• 'For All Mankind' alternative timeline vs reality: How Apple TV's sci-fi show diverges from history.. "How do "For All Mankind"'s six decades of space exploration "history" compare with the real thing?" Spoiler warning for those who haven't watched the show,
• Why Medieval Bread Was A Superfood While Your Modern Bread Makes You Sick (YouTube). "There's a significant issue with the bread we consume today. While bread was once a fundamental part of civilizations, sustaining families and armies, modern bread often causes gut issues, blood sugar spikes, and leaves us feeling unsatisfied. This food history explores how the bread industry has changed, contrasting today's offerings with the traditional bread that nourished our ancestors. We conduct a food industry case study, examining how the history of bread, including ancient grains and sourdough, shows a stark difference from what we find on shelves now."
• The Making of Miles Davis' "Birth of the Cool".  A long essay on one of the true classics of 20th century music. 
• Facebook and Instagram Tighten Censorship Rules for Saying “Antifa”. 'Meta’s new rules let it ban users or suppress comments that include the word “antifa” alongside “content-level threat signals.”'
• How two mathematicians created an equation that quietly runs the planet. "The Diffie-Hellman key exchange secures everything from your text messages to government secrets." This article has the best explanation I've seen ofhow public key cryptography works. 
• Winner of top Sony World Photography Awards $25,000 prize revealed. "With nearly half a million entries, the judges must have had a tough job choosing the winners of this year’s Sony World Photography Awards. The competition is now in its 19th edition, and the overall Photographer of the Year 2026 title has been named as Citlali Fabián with the series ‘Bilha, Stories of My Sisters’."
• Inside the stunning fall of the Maple Leafs: Chaos, dysfunction and AI. For the (probably few) hockey fans reading this blog, a deep dive into the latest pathetic season of the Toronto Maple Leafs. I was in high school the last time this team won the Stanley Cup. The way they are playing, I may not live long enough to see them win one.
• How Ukraine became a drone factory and invented the future of war. "Ukraine has responded to a war it didn’t start by creating an industry it doesn’t want, but could the nation's drone expertise help it rebuild? To learn more, New Scientist gained exclusive access to the research labs, factories and military training schools behind Ukraine’s drones."

Featured Links - October 21, 2025

Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. 

• Sportsnet gives viewers what they want after Brendon Little’s Game 5 meltdown in ALCS — the unvarnished truth (gift link). Even the broadcasters from the network owned by Rogers (who own the Blue Jays) were criticizing manager John Schneider's controversial eighth-inning call. 
• Not needed, not wanted. "PEC defaces Sir John A's building anyway." A story about a citizen's successful action against small-town bureaucracy.
• Mark Carney Is a Very Demanding Boss. "His elbows-up enthusiasm won him the election. Now he’s governing like a Bay Street exec." A long and detailed profile of Canada's new prime minister. It's not a puff piece but the contrast between him and Trump is stark. 
• The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh. Some economic pessimism from Cory Doctorow.
• A High-Tech Ankle Guard Is Helping NBA Players Stay in the Game. "BetterGuards has teamed up with the NBA Training Association to outfit players with its adaptive ankle brace. The pro ballers are avoiding serious injury while evaluating the stabilizing design."
• The Great Reckoning: What the West Should Learn from China. 'The economic historian Adam Tooze, reflecting on his recent, intense engagement with China, put it to me in July with characteristic directness: “China isn’t just an analytical problem,” he said. It is “the master key to understanding modernity.” Tooze called China “the biggest laboratory of organized modernizations there has ever been or ever will be at this level [of] organization.” It is a place where the industrial histories of the West now read like prefaces to something larger.'
• How we sharpened the James Webb telescope's vision from a million kilometers away. "We would be using Webb's highest-resolution mode, called the aperture masking interferometer or AMI for short. It's a tiny piece of precisely machined metal that slots into one of the telescope's cameras, enhancing its resolution. Our results on painstakingly testing and enhancing AMI are now released on the open-access archive arXiv in a pair of papers. We can finally present its first successful observations of stars, planets, moons and even black hole jets."
• Millions of Us Have Likely Lost Our Smell Without Even Realizing It. "The impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continue to be felt across the world, but some consequences are more noticeable than others. New research suggests a large proportion of people may have lost their sense of smell after catching COVID-19, without even realizing it."
• ‘What I do with my body is none of your business’: musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland on trans rights, cult stardom and living with dementia. "His music was ignored for decades. Now, at 81, he is collaborating with pop stars. He and his wife talk about his extraordinary life – and facing severe illness."
• Constipated? Here’s What Actually Works, According to Scientists. "New evidence-backed guidelines highlight the things most likely to help you stay regular in the bathroom."
• Beware “Evil Kerning”: How Hackers Trick You with Fake Email Addresses. Someone needs to write a browser plugin that displays URLs in a monospace font that cant be kerned.

Featured Links - October 7, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The Scarborough bluffs

• Prime's enshittified advertising. "Prime's gonna add more ads. They brought in ads in January, and people didn't cancel their Prime subscriptions, so Amazon figures that they can make Prime even worse and make more money." From Cory Doctorow. 
• ‘Everything is dead’: Ukraine rushes to stem ecocide after river poisoning. "Russia is suspected of deliberately leaking chemical waste into a river, with deadly consequences for wildlife."
• Escalating contest over South China Sea disrupts international cable system (gift link). "China’s effort to dominate the disputed waterway is taking a toll on the network of underwater cables that provide essential internet connectivity in Asia."
• College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time. "The demo highlights the dark side of AR glasses."
• Mark Shapiro doesn’t even talk a good game. "The Blue Jays are a disaster. And the boss has to go (gift link)." As usual, Rosie DiMano doesn't pull any punches.
• License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars. "From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americans’ political leanings and more."
• The 1912 War On Fake Photos. "Concern about deceptively edited photos feels like a very modern anxiety, yet a century ago similar worries were being litigated."
• Enough, already: why humanity must get on board with the concept of ‘sufficiency’. "It’s a policy approach gaining momentum around the world. It aims to avoid demand for energy, materials, land and water, and ensure wellbeing for all humans, while staying within planetary boundaries."

Featured Links - September 23, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Sunset clouds

•  ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker. "The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023." This should be no surprise to anyone.
• Amazing engineering: How to stretch a cruise ship. "Slicing huge cruise ships in half, then welding in an extra segment to lengthen them, is more or less a license to print money for cruise operators – so this 'jumboization' surgery is becoming very common. Let's take a look at how it's done."
• Chinese researchers figure out how to detect stealth aircraft using Starlink satellites. The US military must be very worried about this. 
• The crypto bros who dream of crowdfunding a new country. It's an interesting idea but I can't see how it could be implemented in practice. It's a bit reminiscent of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities. 
• 20 Million Cards: A Sports Memorabilia Gold Mine Uncovered in Virginia (gift link). "Three years ago, a businessman bought a collection of roughly 20 million sports cards from its reclusive owner. Now he wants to show it to the world." He has 5 Babe Ruth cards!
• How Google Chrome is declaring war against ad blockers. "Ghostery's CEO and Director of Engineering break down the new Manifest V3 changes, and why they're bad news for anyone who wants to block ads."
• Massive China-state IoT botnet went undetected for four years—until now. "75% of infected devices were located in homes and offices in North America and Europe."
• The Searchers (gift link). "Dave Eggers on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab."
• Lawsuit wants Canadian lake to be legally defined as a person. "A court has been asked to declare Lake Winnipeg a person with constitutional rights to life, liberty and security of person in a case that may go further than any other in trying to establish the rights of nature in Canada." This is a central idea in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, and I hope it gains traction. If corporations can be legal people, why not lakes?

Featured Links - July 8, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Summer clouds

• Here’s why SpaceX’s competitors are crying foul over Starship launch plans. "Competitors have tried and failed to keep SpaceX from establishing launch sites before." It's not all jealousy and sour grapes; the Cape is getting crowded and Starhip/Superheavy will have a significant environmental and logistical impact.
• How to Stop Fascism. "Five Lessons of the Nazi Takeover." Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
• Vatican excommunicates Archbishop Viganò for refusing to recognize Pope Francis. "In a rare trial, the Vatican acted against Carlo Maria Viganò, a former ambassador to the U.S. and one of Pope Francis’s most vociferous internal critics."
• Magnifier App on Google Pixel Makes Fine Print, Faraway Objects Easier to See. "Here's how to get and use the app." This is one of the most useful apps I have on my phone. 
• Amazon Kindle e-readers cannot access Overdrive Books anymore. Amazon seems to be having a lot of problems with it's Kindle ecosystem. I now do most of my reading on Google Play Books, mainly because it gives me better control over font sizes than the Kindle app. 
• John Mayer and Mickey Hart of Dead & Company Talk About Their Big, Strange Sphere Trip—and the Future of the Band. 'Mayer goes long on the creative process behind the Sphere show, the influence of Star Tours and Titanic, Egyptian bats, “utilitarian nausea,” the 2001/"Monster Mash" spectrum, and what it's like to play in the world's most science-fictional venue: “I mean, it's a duet, right? There's the band and then there's the Sphere, and we are duetting every night.”'
• How Influencers and Algorithms Are Creating Bespoke Realities for Everyone. "Disinformation researcher Renée DiResta's new book lays out how people’s realities are shaped not by facts and evidence, but by black boxes, niche celebrities, and online communities."
• Microsoft’s climbdown over its creepy Recall feature shows its AI strategy is far from intelligent. "The tech company’s new Windows machines can take constant screenshots of users’ every action – quelle surprise, it’s a privacy minefield."
• Missing Bats: How an obsession with strikeouts upended the balance of baseball. Because it's baseball season. 

Featured Links – February 12, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Ducks in the bay

• Do We Simply Not Care About Old People? In the last week of 2023 and the first two weeks of 2024 alone, 4,810 people 65 and older lost their lives to covid — a group that would fill more than 10 large airliners — according to data provided by the CDC. But the alarm that would attend plane crashes is notably absent. (During the same period, the flu killed an additional 1,201 seniors, and RSV killed 126.)
• 5 dark mode upgrades for your Windows 10 or 11 PC. "Microsoft is slowly making dark mode better on Windows, but these tips will give your dark mode a big upgrade today." I would have a hard time using my computer without dark mode. I second the recommendation in the article for using the Dark Reader extension. 
• Next-Generation Spaceplanes Are the Cutting-Edge Evolution of the Space Shuttle Dream. "Spaceplanes seemed out of favor when the Shuttle was retired in 2011. They now seem to be making a comeback."
• Moderately Advanced Aliens Could Easily Take Over A Milky Way-Like Galaxy, Simulations Show. "A new simulation has looked at how quickly a moderately advanced alien civilization would take to spread itself across a galaxy and the answer is not long at all, at least in relative cosmic terms. Even equipped with spaceships not much faster than our most advanced interplanetary probes, the whole ordeal could happen in just 1 billion years."
• Micromobility: An Urban Transportation Revolution. "E-bikes, E-motorcycles, E-scooters displacing oil use and improving urban living."
• Why physicists are rethinking the route to a theory of everything. "Physicists’ search for a theory that explains all reality in one framework appeared to have stalled. But now they are reinvigorating the hunt by exploring a wild landscape of abstract geometry."
• The Super Bowl will be watched by 100 million people. But not all of them will see the same game. "Two million Canadians and 13 million Americans live with colour blindness, and North American sports are behind on making their products accessible." Fortunately, I have normal colour vision, but I can understand how being colour blind would be a real problem for sports fans. 

Featured Links - December 11, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Cement graffiti

• The Stormy Age of SFF Magazines by Neil Clarke. "When people proclaim that we’re experi­encing a ‘‘Golden Age’’ for short fiction, I tend to look at them sideways. While we’ve seen an explosion of new markets over the last two decades, it’s never been a particularly healthy time for the overwhelming majority of them. For print editions, increasing postal and printing costs are eating away at profits. Those publishing online struggle face steeper challenges and often have unpaid or steeply underpaid staff."
• Behind the Scenes of the Most Spectacular Show on TV (gift link) "Months of preparation, hundreds of staff, convoys of cutting-edge gear: inside the machine that crafts prime time’s most popular entertainment." I hardly ever watch football (and if I do I prefer the Canadian variety), but I still found this article fascinating. 
• Google Rolls Out New Accessibility Features to Make Daily Tasks Easier. "New features in Maps, Search and Chrome are aimed at helping users with disabilities navigate their devices more easily."
• Here's a primer on the far-out sounds of free jazz. Some way out there music as an antidote to the onslaught of syrupy Christmas music I'm being bombarded with everywhere I go right now. 
• The High Life and Shocking Death of Beatles Sidekick Mal Evans. "New bio 'Living The Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans' tells one of the the strangest stories in all of Beatles lore." I have been watching Get Back and wondering what happened to him after the Beatles.
• There’s a crisis in the Yukon River. "Flowing from British Columbia through Alaska to the Bering Sea, the nearly 2,000-mile-long Yukon River used to teem with Chinook and chum salmon, sustaining a culture of harvesting fish to feed both Alaskans as well as sled dog teams vital for transportation during the winter. Now those salmon runs have turned into to a trickle, as climate change and other factors weigh against the fish. The result is a drastic cut to local food supplies in a region where store-bought food, shipped in from thousands of miles away, is expensive."
• Opinion: This is a pandemic of attrition. "It’s time for our society to admit that we’ve made a mistake and change course. The COVID-is-mild experiment, despite the wishing and the hoping, has been a tragic failure. We aren’t just accepting ongoing hospitalizations and deaths to protect the economy, but also ignoring the social and economic costs of continuing high levels of acute infections. Worse still are more cases of Long COVID, a condition that takes many people entirely out of the workforce. And with every wave, the staffing attrition worsens."
• Electric vehicles are better than gas-powered cars in winter—here’s why. "All cars lose range when the temperature drops below freezing, not just EVs."

Featured Links - May 8, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Dragon boaters on the bay

• Starship II: A Reprise. A week after his original article, Lavie Ohana looks at the future of the Starship program and sees hard times ahead. 
• We May Finally Know How Our Eyesight Evolved, And It's Not From Our Branch of Life. "New research suggests some components of vertebrate vision may not have been shaped incrementally as their genes passed down family lines, but were 'stolen' from entirely different branches of life."
• Climate Change Is Making Baseball Worse. "Baseball players are hitting more home runs. Is it sheer talent, or warmer air?"
• Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart. "Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data." (Paywall free)
• News Minimalist uses ChatGPT to pick the five most significant news stories of the day. You can get a daily newsletter with article summaries. The choices appear to be reasonable.
• Ads, overlays and paywalls, oh my! How to get around the web’s worst annoyances (updated). "Dwight Silverman says: " During my brief stint at Forbes, I wrote a newsletter item and subsequent story on how to get around the web’s biggest annoyances – intrusive ads, overlays and paywalls. Since that May 2021 piece, I’ve found some new tools and strategies. This is an updated version. Content from the original Forbes article is included with permission.)"
• What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work? "Decades of data support the use and safety of puberty-pausing medications, which give transgender adolescents and their families time to weigh important medical decisions." Scientific American helping to fight transphobe disinformation.

Featured Links - March 7, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• 460 Free Textbooks – Math, Science, and More [Online PDF for College and High School]. " These high school and university textbooks are Creative Commons-licensed by their authors, and you can use them freely."
• Toronto man came up with invention to fix every Canadian kid's worst nightmare. Canadian innovation at it's best.
• Implications to Space Science from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. The implications are many and varied and affect more than the ISS, which has been getting all the news.
• A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws. "For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a longstanding assumption: that big stuff consists of smaller stuff."
• Hackers stoke pandemonium amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. "A wave of cyberattacks meant to buoy Ukraine could have unintended consequences."
• What if the Mid-Atlantic’s worst nor’easter on record struck today? "Sea levels from Virginia to New Jersey are up to a foot higher now than they were when the Ash Wednesday storm struck in 1962."

Featured Links - November 29, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked. "For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake."
• How experiences growing up in the Sault led to Roberta Bondar's mission in space. "A virtual gala will be held in January on the thirtieth anniversary of Bondar's eight-day space flight."
• This Company Tapped AI for Its Website—and Landed in Court. "Under pressure to make their sites accessible to visually impaired users, firms turn to software. But advocates say the tech isn't always up to the task."
• A Weekly Dose of Red Light Might Improve Aging Eyesight, Study Finds. "People given the low-cost therapy in the morning performed noticeably better on tests of their color vision."
• One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball. "Mo Pinel spent a career reshaping the ball’s inner core to harness the power of physics. He revolutionized the sport—and spared no critics along the way.
• Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the Roots of Frank Herbert’s Dune. A long and somewhat scholarly article that take a deep dive into Frank Herbert's Dune.
• A Burp or a Blast. "Seismic signals reveal the volcanic blast to come."

2020 World Press Photo of the Year

Each year, the World Press Photo contest selects some of the best press photographs of the year from photographers across the world. This year's winners are now posted and they are all spectacular.

Unfortunately, there won't be a travelling exhibition this year (at least, I'm assuming that's the case), so you'll have to be content with viewing them online.

This year's contest got a bit of extra press in the Toronto area thanks to Mark Blinch winning the sports category for his shot of Kawai Leonard's incredible buzzer-beating basket in game 7 of the Raptors' playoff series against Milwaukee.

The Training Commission

The Training Commission is a near future science fiction story by Brendan Byrne and Ingrid Burrington, published as a series of emails. You can read it online at the link above.

Several years after a period of civil unrest and digital blackouts in the United States, a truth and reconciliation process has led to a major restructuring of the federal government, major tech companies, and the criminal justice system.

In this still-rebuilding America, freelance journalist Aoife Tkachenko is just trying to make a living (and a name for herself outside of the shadow of her famously-martyred older brother) when she stumbles onto a document from the commission’s archives that many powerful people would rather keep buried. As she digs deeper into the story (all the while dispatching her findings to her newsletter subscribers), Aoife realizes that what she’s found could upend America’s tenuously held peace–and get her killed in the process.

It's quite brilliant featuring excellent characterization and world building coupled with a page turning plot. I am fairly certain that it will be a top contender for next year's Hugo and Nebula awards.

Why Is the Triple Double So Hard?

Last week, US gymnast Simone Biles did an incredibly difficult gymnastic skill, a triple double. I am not a gymnast, (I was excused from gymnastics in high school after knocking myself out on the vaulting horse.) nor athletic, but I can appreciate it when someone pushes the boundaries of what the human body can do.

This Twitter thread, by Suzanne F. Bosell, is the best article I've seen so far on Biles' achievement. It explains the history of the gymnastic skill, using video clips to show what she and other gymnasts were doing, and compares it to male gymnasts who have been doing the triple double for a while.

For a different take on it, here's an article from Wired that looks at the physics of the skill. This is something I can actually understand (my minor in university was math and physics). And despite what it looks like in the videos, she was only in the air for 1.18 seconds!

How Concrete and Steel Built Baseball

There's been talk in Toronto about the future of its iconic domed stadium (officially known as the Rogers Centre, but everyone calls it SkyDome or just the Dome). It's one of the largest baseball stadiums, and certainly not the best, as it was designed as an all-purpose stadium, that could host football games and other events.

The trend now is to smaller, purpose-built stadiums that echo the design of the earliest modern stadiums like the original Yankee Stadium or Detroit's Tiger Stadium. Deadspin has an article about the history of those stadiums and how they used modern mate

In the new construction, form no longer necessarily followed function, as the ballparks received artistic flourishes as a testament to the craftsmen who made them as well as permanence they were supposed to embody. The exterior walls at Shibe Park had terra cotta balls and bats as decoration. Ebbets Field’s rotunda included a chandelier of baseball-shaped lights. And Yankee Stadium’s unprecedented third deck was capped with copper friezes, in what’s become probably the most iconic representation of sports architecture. Simply put, these new ballparks were aspirational.

“The concrete-and-steel stadiums not only represented a safety measure, but a leap of faith on how popular baseball would become,” says MLB historian John Thorn. “In effect, it was like Field of Dreams. They built in the hopes it would come. They built ballparks of great seating capacity and seeming posterity.”

If you're a baseball fan, you'll find it a fascinating article.

Increasing Your Odds on Lottery Scratch Tickets

Occasionally I like to play a lottery scratch ticket. I know the odds of winning a big prize aren't great, but they do have some entertainment value. LifeHacker points out that state lotteries in the US generally have pages that show you what prizes are still unclaimed for each type of game. If you're going to waste a few bucks on a ticket, you might as well pick the one that has the best odds of winning, even if they are infinitesimal.

Here's the link to the corresponding page for Ontario's OLG.

Baseball Has Become an Exercise in Tedium

Baseball is the only sport that I watch regularly. One of the things I like about it is its measured pace, but in recent years it's gotten too measured. I don't mind it that much if I'm watching at home, where I am usually reading something at the same time, but it can get annoying at the stadium, when you're trying to figure out if the game will end before you have to leave to catch a train home.

I'm not the only person who finds the modern game too slow. Jack Todd of the Montreal Gazette published a spectacular rant about it last fall. Here's his description of a World Series game from 1957.

The game moved along, much as I remembered. Using my stopwatch, I had timed modern pitchers taking between 30 and 45 seconds to release the ball. But here was veteran lefty Warren Spahn delivering pitches to the Yankees at roughly 15-second intervals.

I had to time the top of the third inning four times on my stopwatch before I was certain the timing was correct: In that half-inning, Spahn went through a murderer’s row of Yankees (Tony Kubek, Hank Bauer and Mickey Mantle) in a grand total of one minute and 10 seconds. Spahn threw five pitches: two to get Kubek, one for Bauer, two for Mantle. All ground balls, three batters retired in less time than it takes some hitters today to adjust their batting gloves.

I'll try not to think about this too much when I'm watching games later this year.