🚴‍♀️ youth bike america.

on the agenda this week: left-handedness, historical maps, & the nba bubble.

Aug 17, 2020

📖 reading time: 3m 50s.

doggosdoingthings

Important stuff to be honest

August 10, 2020

hi, happy monday :)

tag me on instagram or follow me on twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain.

feel free to skip any section that doesn’t interest you or reply directly to this email. a special thank you to my paid subscribers — i really appreciate the support.

👂 earworm: listen to jaden’s track on spotify or apple music.

📚 word of the week:

“sinistral”.

of, relating to, or on the left side; left-handedness.

kermit’s sinistrality leapt right off the page at me as soon as i saw the photograph of him with bret mckenzie.
- the new york times, 2011

🧠 brain candy:

💰 some of the world’s largest tech & gaming companies are throwing down the gauntlet to protest apple’s 30% take on in-app purchases. most notably facebook & epic games (fortnite) are, for alleged anti-competitive practices.

🥛 facebook are in the news again, this time for leaving drilling equipment on the sea floor near the oregon coast. you might be wondering… drilling? facebook-owned subsidiary, edge cable, were planning to lay a fiber-optic cable system (the jupiter cable project) capable of providing a large capacity direct link between the u.s., japan and the philippines.

☀️ want to get away but don’t want to travel? take a trip to the chillest part of the internet with poolside.fm - a place where it’s perpetually the summer of 1997, and where, as the intro copy says, “safety comes second and drinks come first.”

🌎 google earth has a fascinating collection of historical maps that you can overlay over their satellite imagery. i spent a little too long zooming through ancient greece & ireland during the 18th century.

🇬🇧 london’s british museum is full of stolen artifacts. some of the world’s greatest cultural and historical treasures are housed there, and a significant number of them were taken during britain’s centuries-long imperial rule.

🤪 mildly humorous:

arshia @arshia__

kind of Hate it when ppl say “ack” to me at work like pls i am a human being not a tcp packet

Robert McNees @mcnees

Somehow I’ve lucked out and have an 8yo who thinks secretly reading under the covers past her bedtime is an act of rebellion, and it hasn’t yet occurred to her that her flashlights never seem to run out of batteries.

Shohini Gupta @shohinigupta

my neighbor's kid asked me what i do for my job i can barely explain product management to the engineers on my team forget a five year old so i was like, i send emails for a living and he goes so you're a mailman??? .. ... ... ..... honestly yes

💡 longer reads:

🏀 `the nba bubble.`

johnny watson keeps an eye on the scoreboard clock whenever the miami heat are the home team — on paper, at least.
nothing is normal inside the n.b.a.’s bubble at walt disney world near orlando, fla., but the heat can count on watson for one familiarity: the sound of michael baiamonte, the team’s longtime public-address announcer, shouting, “dos! minutos!” whenever two minutes remain in a quarter.
watson cues up the audio recording of baiamonte in his role as the primary game presentation director at adventhealth arena, one of the two gyms that the n.b.a. will use for its playoff games starting monday.
“everything about this experience is surreal,” watson, 41, said in a telephone interview. “but the players and coaches seem to appreciate all the little touches at the venue.”
the 16 teams competing in the n.b.a. playoffs spent the season jockeying for position in standings that determine who has home-court advantage. but the n.b.a. bubble is a mostly depersonalized environment for athletic competition. if it were any more neutral, it would be in reverse. even the orlando magic, who could uber home, have been living out of suitcases ahead of their first-round series against the milwaukee bucks. that matchup, like all the rest, will be staged without fans, aside from the virtual ones that populate the wraparound video boards inside the arenas.

👉 read more via the new york times.

`🚴‍♀️` `youth bike america.`

on july 1, three teenagers from san francisco pedaled their bicycles to ocean beach and ceremoniously dipped their back wheels into the waters of the pacific. with that, they pushed east, beginning a transcontinental journey that appears on course to wrap up later this month in new york.
the vague spirituality of their departure echoed the journeys of idealistic travelers across generations who have made the act of traversing the united states — on a bicycle, by foot, behind the wheel of a car — one of the evergreen sacraments of the american psyche.
the romance of the endless open road is well established: the freedom, the connection with strangers, the path to self-enlightenment, the joy and misery of getting lost and breaking down.
but would these ideals hold true in the cruel summer of 2020? would bisecting a country in the throes of a pandemic, in a time of deep political division and a wrenching movement for social justice, yield any amount of personal transcendence? their trip had been meticulously planned for months, but it suddenly needed to be re-evaluated when the coronavirus hit.
even for a 3,000-mile journey, this was plenty of food for thought.

“you have a lot of time to think when you’re on your bike 10 hours a day,” emmet ford, 17, one of the cyclists, said on a recent day by phone somewhere in the middle of ohio.

👉 read more via the new york times.