April 10, 2016
In sporting terminology, to telegraph is to unintentionally alert an opponent to one’s immediate situation or intentions. The sporting use of the term telegraph draws a direct comparison with the communication device of the same name. ‘Telegraphing’ always refers to a reflexive physical action rather than a protracted or intellectual give-away. For example, a boxer rotating his shoulders to throw a hook would be telegraphing. A rugby team betraying its line-out plays by using an easily decoded line-out code is not.
While telegraphing is a hazard for any sporting event, it is particularly risky at upper levels of competition where talented players are better able to anticipate and react to telegraphed actions. The ability to suppress telegraphing is often the hallmark of elite athletes.
read more »
Posted in Games |
1 Comment »
April 4, 2016
The National Beep Baseball Association NBBA was organized in 1976 for visually impaired adults to play baseball. Each year it coordinates local, state, and regional tournaments. The World Series was held in Taiwan in 2000. The game is played on a grass field with six fielders (generally a first-baseman, third-baseman, shortstop, left fielder, right fielder, and center fielder) and one or two ‘spotters’ (sighted individuals that call out a number to signify which part of the field a ball is travelling towards), as well as a sighted pitcher and catcher. Fielders and batter are blindfolded.
There is also a DH and DF (designated hitter and fielder). They must also be legally blind in most cases. However, the NBBA has a rule that, if a team cannot field the minimum six batters required to fill its lineup card, it may opt to allow up to two sighted volunteers to blindfold themselves and play as the visually impaired players do. The ball beeps and is a modified, and oversized, softball. The bases are blue, nearly 5 ft tall, and have mostly foam interior with the electronics that cause it to buzz steadily when a switch is thrown. They are each placed 100 ft from homeplate and are in the equivalent positions to first and third bases in regular baseball.
Posted in Games |
Leave a Comment »
March 11, 2016
Liar’s Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author’s experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s. Two important figures in that history feature prominently in the text, the head of Salomon Brothers’ mortgage department Lewis Ranieri and the firm’s CEO John Gutfreund. The book’s name is taken from a high-stakes gambling game popular with bond traders.
First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street in that era, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s ‘Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco,’ and the fictional ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.’ The book captures an important period in the history of New York’s financial markets.
read more »
Posted in Games, Language, Money |
Leave a Comment »
March 9, 2016
Pregaming (called prefunking in Europe and preloading or prinking in the UK), is the process of getting drunk prior to going out socializing in a manner as cost-efficient as possible. Although typically done before a night out, pregaming can also precede other activities, like attending a college football game, large party, social function, or another activity where possession of alcohol may be limited or prohibited. The name ‘pregaming’ spread from the drinking that took place during tailgate parties before football games to encompass similar drinking periods.
Pregaming first became popular in the US in the 1990s, becoming a common practice after MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) pressured the federal government to coerce states into increasing the legal drinking age to 21 nationwide. It is also an unintended consequence of alcohol laws that prohibit happy hours and other discounts on alcohol, as well as rising tuition and other costs for students. Pregaming minimizes the cost of purchasing alcohol at local bars and clubs and can reduce the problems associated with obtaining and using fake identification listing an age permitting legal consumption of alcohol.
read more »
Posted in Drugs, Games |
Leave a Comment »
March 2, 2016
A sneakerhead is a person who collects, trades or admires sneakers as a hobby. The birth of sneakerhead culture in the United States came in the 1980s and can be attributed to two major sources: basketball, specifically the emergence of Michael Jordan and his eponymous Air Jordan line of shoes released in 1985, and the growth of hip hop music. The boom of signature basketball shoes during this era provided the sheer variety necessary for a collecting subculture, while the Hip-Hop movement gave the sneakers their street credibility as status symbols.
Several popular brands and styles of sneakers have emerged as collectors items in the sneakerhead subculture, including Air Jordans, Air Force Ones, Nike Dunks, Nike Skateboarding (SB), Nike Foamposites, Nike Air Max, and in the past few years, the Nike Air Yeezy. Shoes that have the most value are usually exclusive or limited editions. Also certain color schemes may be rarer relative to others in the same sneaker, inflating desirability and value. Recently, sneaker customs, or one-of-a-kind sneakers that have been hand-painted, have become popular as well.
Posted in Art, Games, Money |
Leave a Comment »
February 6, 2016
Super Bowl ads are commercials run during the National Football League (NFL) championship game, among the United States’ most watched television broadcasts, with Nielsen having estimated that Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 was seen by at least 114.4 million domestic viewers, surpassing the previous year’s game as the highest-rated television broadcast in US history. As such, advertisers have typically used commercials during the Super Bowl as a means of building awareness for their products and services among this wide audience, while also trying to generate buzz around the ads themselves so they may receive additional exposure, such as becoming a viral video.
Super Bowl commercials have become a cultural phenomenon of their own alongside the game itself with some viewers reporting that they are more interested in the commercials than the game. In 2015, Dish Network went as far as allowing the ‘commercial skipping’ features on its Hopper digital video recorder to function in reverse and allow users to view a recording of the Super Bowl that skips over the game itself and only shows the commercials.
read more »
Posted in Games, Money |
1 Comment »
January 25, 2016
Virtuality is a line of virtual reality gaming machines produced by Virtuality Group, and found in video arcades in the early 1990s. The company was founded by Jonathan D Waldern, a VR researcher supported by IBM Research Labs in Hursley, UK. Virtuality Group began life in 1985 as a garage startup called W Industries. Waldern’s company developed many of the principal components including VR headsets, graphics subsystems, 3D trackers, exoskeleton data gloves and other enclosure designs.
There are two types of units (referred to by the company as ‘pods’): stand up (SU) and sit down (SD). Both unit types utilize head-mounted displays (the ‘Visette’) containing two LCD screens at resolutions of 276 x 372 each, four speakers, and a microphone. The SU units achieve motion tracking via a magnet built into the waist high ring with a receiver in a free-moving joystick (the ‘Space Joystick’). The stereoscopic display was able to react to head movements based on what the player would be ‘looking at’ within the gaming environment. The position of the joystick (also magnetically tracked) controlled movement of the player’s ‘virtual hand,’ and a button on the joystick moves the player forwards in the game arena.
Posted in Games, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
November 24, 2015
Headis (Header Table Tennis) is a hybrid game that combines table tennis with soccer. Players strike a 7-inch rubber ball with their head. Physically headis is more comparable to badminton than to table tennis, but the rules are closer to table tennis with a few exceptions. Volleys (striking the ball before it hits the player’s own side) are allowed, as well as touching the table with any part of the body. Each game is played to 11 points and up to 2 sets, although a player must be ahead by two points to win each set.
The sport was invented in 2006 by René Wegner, a Saarbrücken sports science student at the time, at the ‘Wesch,’ a swimming pool in Kaiserslautern, Germany. The soccer field was occupied, which was why he and a friend started heading the ball back and forth at the table tennis table. In 2008 headis became part of the sports program at the University of Saarbrücken.
Posted in Games, Humor |
Leave a Comment »
November 3, 2015
QI (‘Quite Interesting’) is a British television quiz show hosted by comedian Stephen Fry. There are four contestants in each show, of whom one is always stand-up comic Alan Davies. Most of the questions are extremely obscure, making it unlikely that the correct answer will be given. To compensate, points are awarded not only for right answers, but also for interesting ones, regardless of whether they are right or even relate to the original question.
QI has stated it follows a philosophy: everything in the world, even that which appears to be the most boring, is ‘quite interesting’ if looked at in the right way.
read more »
Posted in Art, Games, Humor |
1 Comment »
October 15, 2015
Tommy John surgery (TJS), known in medical practice as ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) reconstruction, is a surgical graft procedure in which a ligament in the elbow is replaced with a tendon from elsewhere in the body (ligaments and tendons are connective tissue; the former connects bones to each other and latter connects muscles to bone). The procedure is common among collegiate and professional athletes in several sports, particularly baseball pitchers.
The procedure was first performed in 1974 by orthopedic surgeon Dr. Frank Jobe, then a Los Angeles Dodgers team physician who served as a special advisor to the team until his death in 2014. It is named after the first baseball player to undergo the surgery, major league pitcher Tommy John, whose record of 288 career victories ranks seventh all time among left-handed pitchers.
read more »
Posted in Games, Health, Money |
Leave a Comment »
October 10, 2015
The Koosh ball is a toy ball made of rubber filaments (strings) attached to a soft rubber core. It was developed in 1986 by Scott Stillinger to be easy for his 5-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son to hold and throw, and was named after the sound it made when it landed. The following year, he started OddzOn Products Inc. with his brother-in-law, Mark Button, who had previously been a marketing manager for Mattel. The Koosh ball was one of 1988’s hot Christmas toys.
The company later expanded their product line to include keyrings, baseball sets, yo-yos, and currently, foam disc guns. The number of Koosh balls sold is estimated to be in the millions. The ball consists of about 2,000 natural rubber filaments, and has been released in a variety of color combinations. Koosh balls are often used with tennis exercises to help children develop motor skills. They are currently manufactured by Hasbro.
Posted in Games |
Leave a Comment »
October 3, 2015
Joshua Foer (b. 1982) is a freelance journalist living in Connecticut, with a primary focus on hard sciences. He was the 2006 USA Memory Champion, whichwas described in his 2011 book, ‘Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.’ Foer set a new US record in the ‘speed cards’ event by memorizing a deck of 52 cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds. His book describes his journey from participatory journalist to national champion mnemonist, under the tutelage of British Grand Master of Memory, Ed Cooke. Penguin paid a $1.2 million advance for publishing rights, and the film rights were optioned by Columbia Pictures shortly after publication.
Foer was born in Washington, DC to Esther Foer, Director of Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, and Albert Foer, the president of the American Antitrust Institute, an antitrust watchdog. He is the younger brother of former ‘The New Republic’ editor Franklin Foer and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. Josh has organized several websites and organizations based on his interests. He created the ‘Athanasius Kircher Society,’ which had only one session, featuring savant Kim Peek and proto-astronaut Joseph Kittinger. He is the co-founder of the ‘Atlas Obscura,’ an online compendium of ‘The World’s Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica.’ He is also a co-organizer of ‘Sukkah City’ a Kosher architectural design competition, and Sefaria, a non-profit dedicated to building digital experiences and infrastructure for Jewish texts.
Posted in Games, Language, Science |
Leave a Comment »
The Daily Omnivore 