Ascoti

[Lindsay Owens @owenslindsay1]

Surprise, surprise. New reporting from @guardian confirms what fans have long suspected. Sky-high World Cup tickets were not inevitable. FIFA staff pushed for a more affordable ticketing strategy.

FIFA leadership instead made a deliberate business decision to maximize profits with dynamic pricing, even if it meant pricing diehard fans out of a once-in-a-generation experience.

The results have been what you might expect: the most expensive World Cup in history.
https://t.co/8xA2HZXwRY

[marqix ☆ @fwmarqix]

My wife just got home from a baby shower and I am actually crying, this is the peak of "Main Character" delusion.

She’s at this party for a girl who is, how do I put this, the "Live, Laugh, Love" type.
The mom to be stands up and announces she’s giving the baby a "spiritual" name she picked up while backpacking in Southeast Asia.

She says the name is *’Chai-Yo’* (or something similar) and tells the whole room it means "Pure Soul of the Morning Mist." She’s getting all emotional, everyone is clapping, it’s a whole vibe.

My wife is sitting in the back, choking on her cupcake.

Why? Because my wife actually grew up there.
She leans over to her friend and whispers: “That doesn’t mean Morning Mist, That’s literally the word for 'Fried Chicken.' She is naming her daughter Fried Chicken.”

The moral dilemma was real. Does she let this kid grow up as a literal snack, or does she kill the vibe?

My wife chose chaos, She waited for a lull in the conversation and gently asked, “Oh, like the street food?”

The silence was DEAFENING. The mom to be turned a shade of red I didn't know humans could achieve.

She tried to argue that her "guide" told her otherwise, but the damage was done. The "Morning Mist" era ended right there.

The party ended 20 minutes later and now my wife is officially banned from the group chat.

If you're going to use a culture as an aesthetic, at least make sure you aren't naming your firstborn after a $5 bucket of wings. 😭🍗

[Squawka @Squawka]

Erling Haaland's last 11 competitive games for Norway: 

⚽️🅰️  vs Slovenia
⚽️⚽️⚽️ vs Kazakhstan
⚽️ vs Moldova
⚽️ vs Israel
⚽️ vs Italy
⚽️ vs Estonia
⚽️⚽️⚽️⚽️⚽️🅰️🅰️ vs Moldova
⚽️⚽️⚽️ vs Israel
⚽️⚽️ vs Estonia
⚽️⚽️ vs Italy
⚽️⚽️ vs Iraq

25 goal contributions in 11 games. Pretty good that. 👍

[Iván @IvaanBlanco26]

Ha dejado de ser una pausa de hidratación para ser una pausa de 3 minutos de anuncios.

Vamos a tener que acostumbrarnos a que los partidos sean prácticamente de 4 cuartos, como se juega en Baloncesto...

Y hace poco leí que pronto veremos parones de hidratación en noviembre/diciembre en la Liga y a nadie le va a extrañar.

Es triste, pero es así.

[Michael Green @profplum99]

“The time between 2 and 12 years of age is used to build a reservoir of love and affection for your children, that might, if you’re lucky, last from 13-21.”

Best parenting advice I received. And I got lucky.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Every annoying password rule you follow, the capital letter, the number, the symbol, changing it every few months, came from one man at a US government office in 2003. He was mostly guessing. Years later, he went public and apologized to all of us.

The password is older than that rule, and it was a mess from day one. It was born at MIT in 1961, when a scientist named Fernando Corbató built one of the first computers many people could share at once. Since everyone shared that one machine, he needed to keep each person's files separate. His fix was the password. He never meant it as serious security, just to stop casual snooping.

It didn't even do that much. Every password sat in one plain file anyone with access could read. In the spring of 1962, an MIT student named Allan Scherr hit his four-hour-a-week limit and wanted more. One Friday night he asked the system to print that file, then grabbed the whole list Saturday morning. He logged in as other people and passed the list around to friends. The password was about a year old, and it was already broken.

The man behind the rules you hate was Bill Burr, and in 2003 he wrote an eight page guide on building a password. He told everyone to add a capital letter, a number, and a symbol, and to switch to a new one every 90 days. Banks, schools, and offices copied it word for word. That is why your login still wants a symbol and a number you can't recall. He had almost no proof any of it worked. He leaned on a paper from the 1980s, before the internet existed, when almost no one had studied what made a password safe.

In 2017, he came clean. He told the Wall Street Journal, "Much of what I did I now regret." Forcing a new password every few months just taught the lazy move, bumping Rosebud1 to Rosebud2 to Rosebud3, which a computer cracks in seconds. So the same office threw the rules out. The new advice is to skip the symbols and forced changes and use a long, plain phrase. A cartoonist named Randall Munroe ran the numbers. A phrase like "correct horse battery staple" would take a computer about 550 years to crack, while a rules-style password like "Tr0ub4dor&3" falls in three days.

People have leaned on spoken passwords for roughly 3,000 years. Roman soldiers had a code word for the night guard, and during Prohibition you needed the right phrase to get into the bar. But there was only ever one of them, just for that night. The same brain that once held a single code word now has to track 120 of them, each with a capital and a symbol, half guarding accounts you forgot you ever made. So no, the human spirit was not built for this. One man's shaky guess in 2003 just made it hurt a whole lot more.

[Deep @DeepStarts]

That's how programming feels nowadays

[C.Jay Engel 🌲 @contramordor]

This book goes hard. Everything comes under his demolition, everything about our lives: popular music, television shows, game consoles, crocs, soft shorts, graphic Ts, “goofy spectacles” (vipers), slang, memes, fast food (Buc-ee’s), the very concept of children’s entertainment, Legoland, Disneyland, splash pads, amusement parks.

All these and hundreds of more examples which swarm every molecule of modern life exist in a complex conspiracy against the maturing of man, which can only occur under conditions of struggle, of opportunities for experienced wisdom, of aesthetic standards, and the cultivation of mind and body.

Sobering thesis so far.

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

And you actually own the thing.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. When they stop, something dangerous is nearby. When they continue, the coast is clear. This wiring predates primates. These kids are being sedated by the oldest safety signal in the mammalian nervous system.

The Max Planck Institute tested this in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong reduced anxiety and paranoia with medium effect sizes. Six minutes of traffic noise increased depression by the same margin. The effect worked on people who had never left dense urban environments. Their bodies responded to a signal their conscious minds had never learned.

King's College London ran a larger study. 1,292 participants, real-time mood tracking through a phone app, 26,856 assessments over three years. Hearing or seeing birds improved mental wellbeing for up to eight hours afterward. The effect held for people diagnosed with depression. Trees, plants, and waterways didn't explain it. The birds themselves were the variable.

Now here's where Italy connects to Finland. 95% of parents in the Finnish city of Oulu let their babies nap outside starting at two weeks old. A 2008 study confirmed the children took longer, deeper naps outdoors. Parents reported letting them sleep in temperatures as low as -15°C. 66% said their babies were more active afterward compared to indoor naps. The practice started as a public health initiative from Nordic maternity clinics in the early 1900s and became cultural infrastructure.

The Italian kindergarten in this video is running the same program the Nordic countries have been running for a century. Outdoor naps, natural soundscapes, no white noise machines, no blackout curtains. Meanwhile, American kindergartens have been eliminating nap time entirely to squeeze in more instruction. A UMass study showed that children who skipped naps forgot 12% of what they learned that morning. The nap itself was the learning.

The irony is that the countries spending the least on sleep technology for children are producing the best sleep outcomes. No sound machines. No apps. Just birds.

[B/R Football @brfootball]

Spurs avoid relegation on the final day of the season with West Ham dropping down to the Championship 😮‍💨

[robyn☦️ @RRR0BYN]

Cannot recommend a responsibility/behaviour chart for young children enough. The power that a mere star sticker holds over their brains is the difference between a kid who will fight you on everything and a kid who will grow their self esteem in working as a member of the family team.

They look forward to working towards a reward at the end of the week and develop a sense of accomplishment from checking things off the list each day. Not getting a sticker is in itself enough of a deterrent to curb many unwanted behaviours. Kicking myself for not doing it sooner.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Airlines don't know who you are and they don't care. The "clear your cookies" hack is one of the most persistent myths in travel, and the real reason prices change is way more interesting.

A single economy cabin has 7 to 12 invisible fare classes, each assigned a letter. Q-class might have 40 seats at $250. When those 40 sell, the system closes Q and opens H-class at $350. When H sells out, M-class opens at $475. The price jumps you see aren't the airline punishing you for searching twice. They're inventory depletion in cheaper buckets happening in real time as other people book.

A major US carrier with 500 daily flights manages roughly 2.5 million booking limits at any given moment. The yield management system optimizes over a hundred fare bucket combinations per route, updated continuously based on booking velocity, competitor pricing, seasonal demand, and days until departure. Your browser cookies are not a variable in that equation. Your individual search history has the same effect on the algorithm as yelling at a vending machine.

The price went up between your first search and your second search because someone in Dallas bought the last seat in the cheap bucket while you were debating. That person would have bought it whether you were on a library computer, your phone, or a 1997 ThinkPad running Netscape Navigator.

The real hack for cheaper flights is boring. Book 6 to 10 weeks out for domestic, 8 to 12 weeks for international. Fly midweek. Set fare alerts and wait for the airline to reopen a cheaper bucket when demand underperforms their forecast. That actually works. Clearing your cookies saves you exactly zero dollars.

[Sarah St. Onge ن ♀🦬 @shebringsjoy]

So…. The answer has been;

I set her birthdate to 2020, meaning according to the iPad she is 5. It will be 8 years, when she is already in adulthood, before she has control of this iPad without my permission.

Downtime is set to 12am to 11:59 pm, meaning I must manually toggle downtime off if she is to use it at any point during the day except for one minute before midnight.

I left the calendar, camera, and books available when downtime is set, meaning she can use these three items at all times. Even these only have a 1 hour daily time limit.

I was able to remove almost every app I didn’t want.

For the items which I can’t remove, like Apple News, I just made them available for 0 seconds each day.

This took a while, but only because I was unfamiliar with the process and had to keep going online to seek out answers. To someone who is familiar with an iPad it would have taken about 5 minutes.

[Raising Healthy Families @thriving__kids]

One of the best pieces of advice for parents is to focus on being more present

As a busy parent its easy to get caught up in work, emails & unwinding with some scrolling

But this quickly becomes a habit at the expense of giving the attention to kids that they desire

Kids are smart. They can tell when you're around but focused on a phone or thinking about work

This makes them feel unimportant.

On the flip side, when you give kids your undivided attention, they feel loved & important.

Put the phone in a drawer.
Leave work at work.
Check emails after kids are down.

Whatever steps you need to take to be present with your kids do it.

Work tasks & social media will always be there.

Kids desire to always be around their parents wont be.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A fire chief runs into a burning building. He has seconds to decide where to send his crew. In a 1985 study tracking 156 of these split-second calls, fewer than 12% involved weighing options. The rest, the chief just walked in and knew. Magnus is describing the same skill.

Top chess players have spent so many hours staring at boards that their brains have stored somewhere between 50,000 and 300,000 board positions in long-term memory. Think of it as a giant filing cabinet of "I've seen this before." A Dutch psychologist named de Groot proved this in 1946. He showed grandmasters real game positions for 2 to 5 seconds, then asked them to recreate the board. They got 93% of the pieces right. Players just one level below got barely half. When he showed them random pieces scattered on a board, the grandmasters did no better than beginners. What looks like 32 individual pieces to a beginner shows up as maybe 6 or 7 familiar shapes to a grandmaster.

Magnus's blitz rating is 2869. No one alive plays faster chess at a higher level. In blitz he gets about 6 seconds per move. In classical chess, 3 full minutes. His play quality barely differs. He's pattern-matching from a stockpile of positions built over decades. At that speed, calculation barely enters into it.

Gary Klein, the researcher who ran the firefighter study, watched the same skill in trauma surgeons, fighter pilots, and ER nurses making triage calls. The chief walks in, matches what he's seeing to something he's seen before, and acts.

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel partly for showing how often human gut feelings get things wrong. Then in 2009 he co-wrote a paper with Klein laying out the specific conditions where intuition is reliable. Two things have to be true. The activity has to be predictable enough that patterns repeat. And the person has to have years of practice where they get clear, honest feedback on every move.

Chess is the cleanest example on Earth of both. Magnus has been playing since he was 5. He's now 35. He peaked at the highest classical rating ever recorded, 2882. He once went 125 games in a row without losing.

In his own words: "Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition, but usually it's just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do."

A stock picker doesn't get the same kind of feedback chess gives Magnus. The market's noisy and the lessons don't repeat cleanly. A political commentator doesn't either. But on the chessboard, every move you make leads to a clear outcome and the rules never change. So 30 years of moving pieces around 64 squares quietly builds the same brain machinery a fighter pilot uses to decide whether to break left or right. Magnus is describing the most studied form of expert decision-making in cognitive science.

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

Remember the "Disgrace of Gijón" of WC 1982 where Austria lost 0-1 to Germany on purpose to eliminate Algeria?

Get ready for the "Disgrace of Kansas City", the last group game before R32 which Austria will lose on purpose to Algeria to finish 3rd rather than 2nd.

Why? 👇🏻

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Yomif Kejelcha had never run a marathon before yesterday. He finished his first one in under 2 hours, faster than any Olympic gold medalist has ever run it. He came in second.

A recreational marathoner finishes a marathon in 4 to 5 hours. Kejelcha finished in 1 hour 59 minutes 41 seconds, averaging just over 4 and a half minutes per mile. Most people can't run a single mile that fast. He did it 26 times in a row.

The 2-hour mark used to be running's version of the sound barrier. In 2019, Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya broke through it once. But it was a special billionaire-funded event in Vienna. He had a closed course, rotating teams of fresh runners setting his pace, and ideal weather. It didn't count as an official record because the setup was too controlled.

Yesterday at the London Marathon, two men broke the 2-hour barrier in an actual race for the first time. The winner, Sabastian Sawe of Kenya, ran 1:59:30 for a new world record. Kejelcha came in 11 seconds later. Jacob Kiplimo of Uganda came third in 2:00:28, also under the previous record.

This was Kejelcha's first ever marathon. His career was on the track, in shorter races. The longest race he had ever run was a half marathon. Almost no one goes from a half marathon straight to a marathon and posts the fastest marathon debut in history on their first try.

All three top finishers wore the same shoe, a new Adidas model called the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3. It weighs 97 grams, about as much as a deck of cards. Adidas only released it days before the race. The company says it makes runners 1.6% more efficient. That sounds tiny, but across 26 miles it can shave a minute or more off your time.

Three men in the same race ran faster than the old world record. Two of them ran under 2 hours. The old record wouldn't have made the podium.

[TierZoo @TierZoo]

I have a reputation among my local friends for being exceedingly lucky, and it's kinda crazy how when you tell yourself this enough it does actually become true

[Kevin | Large Fam Dad @LargeFamDad]

My boss's boss is like 42, never married, no kids. Earns $275-300K per year. Goes on a minimum of two international vacations a year w/ his girlfriend. 10+ days, all out.

Eats the best food, stays in top notch accomodations. Excursions, tours, nicest beaches, etc.

Great guy, I'm happy for him.

But what I've realized is that without kids, you end up chasing a lifestyle that has to continually be topped in order for you to be satisfied and find happiness.

What he and others like him don't understand is that when you have children, seeing THEM experience life's most basic things and watching their eyes light up at all the "firsts", brings greater pleasure and joy than any vacation or travel experience ever could.

Seeing THEM try blueberries for the first time is greater than dining at the best 5 star restaurant in Europe.

Seeing THEM learn how to walk is greater than walking the Great Wall of China or strolling along the most picturesque beach.

Watching THEM giggle uncontrollably at "peek-a-boo" tops any A-list comedian act.

Seeing THEIR excitement when building a fort out of cardboard boxes and making a door big enough for daddy is superior to staying at 5-star resorts.

Flying kites with THEM far outweighs excursions like parasailing or helicopter rides.

Seeing THEM perform a recital on stage for the first time is more rewarding than watching a Broadway show or top notch symphony orchestra.

-----------------

When you have children, all of a sudden you realize that life's greatest joys are not in the pursuit of things or pleasure or travel, but rather in the LOVE and bond you share with your very own image bearers.

Seeing the beauty and magnificence and wonder of life all over again for the first time through THEIR eyes and expressions gives you something the world simply cannot offer, nor even come close.