Weekend Reads

March 2023

Author

Paul Skallas
March 18, 2023

This Week on the Lindy Newsletter

Major League Baseball has become the first sport to make major rule changes to stop the optimization of the game from ruining the sport. In the last 10 years, the data analytics revolution has swept through every major sport and caused changes in how games are played. Once this happened in baseball, the games started to spiral to 3-4 hours long. In order to combat this optimization. They added a clock that counts down the time behind the batter which gives the pitcher 15 seconds to throw the ball.

How did Baseball become optimized? What did players do to change how they played?

Weekend Reads

Do people make money from making music anymore? The music industry was probably disrupted the most after we transitioned to digital. Spotify feels like a music museum, not a place to discover new music. I asked this question to my followers this week and got interesting responses. When you use the streaming services your money goes to the RIAA. Adam Singer wrote an interesting piece on why Music does not pay much money anymore. 

A new version of Chat-GPT was released. This time it is version 4. AI is getting very good. It is acing all the big exams like the LSAT, or MCAT, etc. This version also allows you to create images or translate images into text. Google is adding it in to its products. Microsoft is even embedding it into its applications.

The top-selling vehicle in 2022 was the Ford F-150; top selling vehicle in 1982 was Ford Escort. 80 percent of new cars sold are SUVs and Trucks. Everything is bigger now. But America is a big place. The roads are wide. People usually live in the suburbs with big a driveway. It makes sense. However, this video argues bigger trucks are a problem for pedestrians.

In a funny video. The City of Newark, New Jersey admits it got scammed into becoming “sister cities” with a fake nation.

Megalochelys atlas, the largest tortoise ever once lived throughout SE Asia. It was likely driven to extinction by the arrival of Homo erectus >1M years ago. Familiar gigantism in animals is seen on islands. Here, isolated on an island a normally small mainland animal becomes pretty darn big. We have seen this in a number of our beasts: the dodo (being an oversized pigeon); the giant lemur of Madagascar; the huge Hawaiian Duck; the massive flightless Moa; and many more. Some animals will quickly get bigger in their new environment due to lack of predators and new and plenty foods around.

This book looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class.

What Happens When the Army Needs 36,000 Kettlebells, Fast - This is the remarkable true story of the largest order of fitness equipment ever placed. This reminds me of how the US ramped up wartime production by starting factories to fulfill huge orders that were sure to come, betting the farm they would, and rethinking processes.

Interesting post about a deal. Back in 1998, before comic book movies made trillions of dollars and were mainstream Marvel offered the entire catalogue to Sony. I remember 1998, it was hard to picture a world where super hero movies were the most popular medium on film. Just take a look at the top box office hits from that year.

Population map of Europe in 1848. Ireland is the only country on this map with a population still at 1848 levels due to the famine. In 2021 the Republic of Ireland reached 5M for the first time since 1851.

This walking tour of Seoul, Korea at night is pretty interesting. It’s a city that is very illuminated and extremely clean.

Robert Burton on finding a middle emotional ground.

Dan Wang released his annual letter on China. Also, look at this second-tier city in China. It’s massive.

Matthew Crawford writes about the DMV experience in California

Re-oriented maps can make you see the world with fresh eyes. New Western Pacific wall map

An introduction to the New York-Albanian mob

Music