Every day for three years, Iancu Barbarasa drew a flower for his partner and recently he compiled all the drawings into this lovely short film set to Chopin’s Minute Waltz. I loved his acknowledgement of his sources and influences:
Questlove once said that “all creative ideas are derivative of another.” My project would not exist (or at least not in this form) without the influences of: Katsuji Wakisaka, textile designer and founder of Sou·Sou, who has drawn over 10,000 postcards for his wife — Christoph Niemann’s work and also his short film “A Tribute to Maurice Sendak” — “Beyond Noh (Masks of our world)” short film by Patrick Smith — “Plante” short film by Reka Bucsi — and Philippa Perry’s “The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did)”. Last but not least, the end credits are a tribute to Hayao Miyazaki’s wonderful “My Neighbour Totoro” film.
No one disputes that referees are as fit as they’ve ever been. The problem, according to many observers, is that referees are also worse than they’ve ever been. In 2017, then-Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger claimed that English referees’ level “drops every season”. The next season, Cardiff manager Neil Warnock despaired at how the “best league in the world” could possibly have “the worst officials”.
Today, that story of perpetual decline has given way to one of full-blown crisis. Every week brings a new wave of anger — from fans, players, managers and pundits — about alleged errors, inconsistencies and incompetence. This is at the polite end of the spectrum. On social media, referees’ mistakes are often blamed not on inevitable human error, or even simple ineptitude, but on elaborate conspiracies to derail this or that club. (The fact that every fanbase believes there is a conspiracy against their particular club does not seem to give people pause.)
There is no statistical evidence to support this story of decline. In fact, all such evidence suggests that referees are making fewer mistakes a match, with accuracy rising each season. (However, these statistics themselves are difficult to assess, given that they are collected not by a truly independent body, but by PGMOL and the Premier League, and very little of this data has ever been made public.) Instead, the critics point to a large, often indisputable, collection of individual errors and baffling decisions. These errors amount to only a tiny percentage of all decisions, but having been replayed and discussed over and over, they are the ones etched into memory.
In season one of his podcast Against the Rules, Michael Lewis explored the disconnect between how referees are perceived and their actual performance, not just in sports but also in governance, business, and even the arts.
There are interesting bits throughout the piece, many of which deal with human psychology (esp. of groups) and even philosophy. I found this bit worth quoting:
On the next day I spent with England, 5 November, he was refereeing the champions, Manchester City, at home to Fulham. In a room at a swanky hotel on the outskirts of Manchester, England and his team gathered for their pre-match meeting. His usual assistants had been replaced, because they support Manchester clubs. (Every official must declare their allegiances, and will not be assigned that team’s matches or those of their closest rivals. Other factors that determine appointments include how many times an official has refereed each club that season, how close they live to the stadium, and which teams their family members support.)
Fascinating! Do any of the sports leagues in the US do this? Or is, as I suspect, the support for one’s team in England just so much more intense and foundational to one’s personal identity than in America?
A Map of Places in the US with the Same Name. "We calculated what place someone is most likely referring to, depending on where they are." For instance, in most of the country, when you say "Springfield", people think "Springfield, MA".
Poverty, By America is a new book by Matthew Desmond in which he argues that a major cause of poverty in the US is because "affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor". Here's a review in The Atlantic.
I’d seen Titanic with a Cat but hadn’t realized there were a whole collection of videos featuring OwlKitty cleverly edited into them. I really like the Jurassic Park one embedded above. The licking! The purring! Fantastic, no notes.
You can check out a bunch of other movies featuring OwlKitty on YouTube (LOTR, Top Gun, Home Alone, John Wick, Mandalorian), including some behind-the-scenes of how they’re made. Here’s how they did the Jurassic Park one:
The power of at-home filmmaking software and equipment is just incredible.
Oh man, Amazon is shuttering DPReview, effective early next month. I spent a lottttt of time on this site before my phone camera got too good to think about carrying something else.
How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain. Lonely people "tend to end up with a more negative spin on whatever information they receive — facial expressions, texting, whatever — and that drives them even deeper into this loneliness pit."
How small can a set of aperiodic tiles be? The first aperiodic set had over 20000 tiles. Subsequent research lowered that number, to sets of size 92, then 6, and then 2 in the form of the famous Penrose tiles.
Penrose’s work dates back to 1974. Since then, others have constructed sets of size 2, but nobody could find an “einstein”: a single shape that tiles the plane aperiodically. Could such a shape even exist?
Taylor and Socolar came close with their hexagonal tile. But that shape requires additional markings or modifications to tile aperiodically, which can’t be encoded purely in its outline.
In a new paper, David Smith, Joseph Myers, Chaim Goodman-Strauss and I prove that a polykite that we call “the hat” is an aperiodic monotile, AKA an einstein. We finally got down to 1!
