stringbook

World on a string.

[emlocke]

[emlocke]

The ARK at J.F.K. is something Noah himself could not have imagined: a privately owned, round-the-clock operation at New York’s largest airport built to accommodate a range of guests with a variety of needs, from purebred racehorses to exotic zoo animals. The facility, which encompasses 14 acres and 178,000 square feet, prepares animals to fly around the world, making sure they are calm, traveling at comfortable temperatures and equipped with enough food and water. It also receives animals when they arrive in New York, quarantining them if necessary and preparing them for the next steps in their journeys.

Now Arriving at J.F.K.: Horses From Iceland and Dogs From the West Bank

The ARK, a 14-acre facility at Kennedy International Airport, is often the first stop for animals of all kinds arriving in the United States

[laughingsquid]

A Wonderful Animation That Captures the Rhythm of Different Gaits Used by Four Legged Animals

[singinprincess]

My turn to hold the baby! Oh, okay, Uncle Fin!

LAW & ORDER: SVU 25.01 'Tunnel Blind'

[emlocke]

What’s New in 2018? Something Old: The Bullpen Cart - The New York Times By Tyler Kepner March 26, 2018

“I’ve never thought of being driven into a game, so it’s a little weird concept, but I think it’s pretty cool,” said Archie Bradley, the Diamondbacks’ ace reliever. “We have some creative minds out in the bullpen. We’re already talking about tricking this thing out — subwoofers, underglow lights. And I definitely want to drive guys in. That would be sick.” 

Alas, the Diamondbacks have hired four game-day staffers to drive the cart, and so far, the only add-ons are logos for OnTrac, a shipping company based in Chandler, Ariz., that signed a six-figure sponsorship deal. Derrick Hall, the Diamondbacks’ president, said pitchers would have the choice to be driven from the bullpen or trot in, as usual.

[emlocke]

(via Greg Bird could not stop dancing on the first episode of 'Roll Call Idol' | MLB.com)

[emlocke]

Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million

And state lawmakers have dispensed with commas altogether in the relevant provision of the law.

The relatively small-scale dispute gained international notoriety last year when the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that the missing comma created enough uncertainty to side with the drivers, granting those who love the Oxford comma a chance to run a victory lap across the internet. 

 But the resolution means there will be no ruling from the land’s highest courts on whether the Oxford comma — the often-skipped second comma in a series like “A, B, and C” — is an unnecessary nuisance or a sacred defender of clarity, as its fans and detractors endlessly debate. (In most cases, The Times stylebook discourages the serial comma, often called the Oxford comma because it was traditionally used by the Oxford University Press.) 

 It appears the Maine Legislature has learned its lesson, at least. It revised the disputed state law last year to end ambiguity by adding new punctuation — but not in the way you might be thinking.

[baseballin]

♫ I Want It That Way ♫

[emlocke]

The Rays Are Playing a Traditional Doubleheader. By Choice. - The New York Times By Pat Borzi June 7, 2017

In September, when the Tampa Bay Rays announced their 2017 home schedule, it included something so unusual that some of their players didn’t quite grasp the concept. There would be, on Saturday, June 10, an old-fashioned, conventional doubleheader, two games for a single-admission price. 

A common practice in Major League Baseball for a good part of the 20th century, traditional doubleheaders fell out of favor by the late 1980s, when rising attendance and escalating salaries led baseball owners to abandon them as an unnecessary giveaway since it amounted to a game’s being played free of charge. 

 As a result, almost all doubleheaders these days take place only as a last resort — as a way to make up a rained-out game . . . But doubleheaders are almost never scheduled before a season, the way they were when two games on a Sunday, or a holiday, were a standard practice . . . It was just the second time since 2004 that a team began the season with a single-admission doubleheader on its schedule, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

[trollitics]

How Hillary met Bill: the greatest love story of our time

[emlocke]

You Still Need Your Brain | Gray Matter — NYTimes.com

Outsourcing knowledge to Google keeps you from learning things the right way.

Outsourcing knowledge to Google keeps you from learning things the right way.

By Daniel T. Willingham May 19, 2017

Google is good at finding information, but the brain beats it in two essential ways. Champions of Google underestimate how much the meaning of words and sentences changes with context. Consider vocabulary . . . With the right knowledge in memory, your brain deftly puts words in context . . . The meaning of [a word] depends on context, but dictionaries, including internet dictionaries, necessarily offer context-free meanings . . . 

Perhaps internet searches will become more sensitive to context, but until our brains communicate directly with silicon chips, there’s another problem — speed . . . Opening a new browser tab takes moments, not the minutes required to locate the right page in the right book. Yet “moments” is still much slower than the brain operates . . . Speed matters for reading, too. Researchers report that readers need to know at least 95 percent of the words in a text for comfortable absorption. Pausing to find a word definition is disruptive. Online, the mere presence of hyperlinks compromises reading comprehension because the decision of whether or not to click disrupts the flow of understanding.

[emlocke]

What best distinguishes human beings from other animals is our foresight, as scientists are just beginning to recognize.

What best distinguishes human beings from other animals is our foresight, as scientists are just beginning to recognize.

By Martin E. P. Seligman and John Tierney May 21, 2017

We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? . . . 

A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain . . . It is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected. 

Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior. Therapists are exploring new ways to treat depression now that they see it as primarily not because of past traumas and present stresses but because of skewed visions of what lies ahead . . . The central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications.

[donnajosh]

Unfortunately, it takes a long time for that to be recognized: what buying elections really costs us. It costs us our spirit, our soul. It damages our culture. I want an America where everyone has an equal voice, not just the money interests. It’s not about right and left. It’s about right and wrong. It is not ever gonna change until we are resigned and committed to saying, “Enough. No more corruption in politics.” One heart with courage is a majority. I think we need to be reminded of that, particularly today.

We asked Martin Sheen a question and got out the cameras. His unscripted response shocked us. http://www.Represent.Us

[sixpenceeeaesthetic]

Insomnia. 

[emlocke]

real life

[fallontonight]

nbcparksandrec’s Nick Offerman does his own version of the classic tale, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas!

[nbcparksandrec]

[lilmissamerika]

The version my children will know when they are old enough 😂👍🏻

[fallontonight]

It isn’t Christmas without Nick Offerman’s version of the classic tale, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas!

[brakken]

Uh oh.

[emlocke]

Why does using a period in a text message make you sound insincere or angry?

For centuries, written communication was tinged with formality and finality. But since the emergence of casual forms like texting, using proper grammar can be fraught with misinterpretation.

By Lauren Collister July 19, 2016

Earlier this year, psychologist Danielle Gunraj tested how people perceived one-sentence text messages that used a period at the end of the sentence. Participants thought these text messages were more insincere than those that didn’t have a period. But when the researchers then tested the same messages in handwritten notes, they found that the use of a period didn’t influence how the messages were perceived.