News Letter 020925

Just to note

I found this in the paper today. A coach’s description of a new player in perfect sportsese. “He has the ability to make plays,” __ said. “He’s got good hands and can shoot the puck.”
Nice. 

February 28, 2025

Good people gotta get together. One great thing we can do that I’ve heard about is getting off social media and any media and spending no money anywhere on February 28, 2025. Especially online or large retailers. Money is one of the psychopaths’ two languages; this would send a very strong message that we are the ones with the real… Power is the other language they understand. Neanderthals.  
Let’s take it away for just one day.
To start.

From Harper’s Index

Estimated amount of energy, in kilowatt-hours, that was used to discover a new prime number last year: 3,100,000

Estimated number of U.S. households this amount of energy could power for a year: 287,000.

The world is full of these things that just slip by.

I love this

From: “The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art” by Dean Kissick in Harper’s December 2024. I love Harper’s. Can you tell?

SCIENCE!!

“In his 2022 book The Mind of a Bee, behavioral ecologist Lars Chittka chronicles his decades of work with honey bees, showing that bees can use sign language, recognize individual human faces, and remember and convey locations of far-flung flowers. They have good moods and bad, and they can be traumatized by near-death experiences such as being grabbed be an animatronic spider hidden in a flower. (Who wouldn’t be?)”

From “Minds Everywhere” by Rowan Jacobsen, in Scientific American February 2024; Illustrations by Natalya Balnova 

(Do I need to cite an artist when I’m just pulling a quote?)


Kendrick Lamar and the Super Bowl Halftime Show

The Super Bowl Halftime Show is an extravaganza of outrageousness. But it can be really cool. I just watched Kendrick Lamar – I have one of his albums – “To Pimp a Butterfly” – and I dig it and see his genius throughout his career and know how talented he is. But the extravaganza of outrageousness calls for a can-be-somewhat outrageous artist, an artist that can match that huge stage, in the middle of a boring (or exciting) football game, like Prince. Prince owned that huge stage.  And I think that is partly because the tempo of his music changed.  He could start slow and build up for the audience and then blow the doors off the place. Which he did. Rap songs mostly stay with one tempo which makes it harder for the artist to do what a Prince or Bruno Mars or Madonna can do. That is my theory of Kendrick Lamar and the Super Bowl Halftime Show

Luke Digs Deep to Discover How Tempo Affects Mostly Wealthy Listeners Clutching 24 Ounce 75 Dollar Beers in a Dark Stadium During the Halftime Break of an Athletic Contest

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