The Tesla Model Y is now the best-selling car in the world, beating out the Toyota Corolla. The over-reliance on cars is still a big issue, but an EV topping the best-seller list right now is a small bit of good news re: the climate crisis.

A Day in the Life of a Woke Third-Grade Teacher, as Imagined by a Far-Right Politician. "I pull into the parking lot and say hello to the drag queen we recently hired as the school librarian."

From Slashfilm, a list of the Top 100 Movies Of All Time. More accurate to call this a list of favorite movies rather than the best ones...lots of crowd-pleasing comedies on here.

Target Removes All Towels From Stores After Soaking-Wet Lunatic Objects To Dryness. "The towels were never meant to force a bone-dry lifestyle on any sopping maniac..."

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An important opinion piece written by an SUV: Outdoor Dining Must Not Interfere With NYC's Historic Parking Spots. "Who are they to deny me the pleasure of idling underneath a tall willow in the West Village?"

A rave review of Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon by Shannon Shaw Duty of the Osage News. "The film Scorsese has made is definitely not a simple adaptation of Grann's book, but an adaptation that's magnified."

What It's Like to Have an Abortion Denied by Dobbs. An infuriating & important profile of a Mississippi woman who was forced to give birth and raise a child she wasn't ready for. "I feel like I'm in a prison."

From 1999 to 2020, there were 1.63 million excess deaths among Black Americans (when compared to the death rates of white Americans). Total cumulative potential years lost: 82 million.

The 20 best TV series finales of all time. Several of my favorites are on here, including Six Feet Under, Fleabag, and The Americans. I would have liked to see ST:TNG on here maybe?

Sex Ed Books Don't 'Groom' Kids and Teens. They Protect Them. The author of It’s Perfectly Normal says that a 10-year-old girl read the book and "showed her mom the chapter on sexual abuse and said, 'This is me.'"

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A Japanese TV show took three expert fencers and pitted them against 50 amateurs.

I honestly didn't think this would be that interesting and expected the Musketeers to easily get taken out right away or, if they survived more than 30 seconds, to handily finish off the rest of the crowd...nothing in between. But it's fascinating what happens. The crowd, being a crowd, does not initially do what it should, which is rush the experts and take them out right away with little regard for individual survival. But pretty much every person fights for themselves. And instead of getting easier for the Musketeers near the end, it gets more difficult. The few remaining crowd members start working together more effectively. The survival of the fittest effect kicks in. The remaining experts get sloppy, tired, and perhaps a little overconfident. The ending was a genuine shock. (via digg)

[This was originally posted on May 1, 2014.]

Tags:fencing    sports    TV    video   

Microsoft Excel is an extremely powerful, complex, and useful software program that millions of people know how to use, at least a little bit. For those who are experts, there are now esports competitions in Microsoft Excel that pit the best spreadsheet jockeys against each other. Here's what that looks like:

It's....a little confusing to watch if you aren't that good at Excel yourself. From a piece in the Atlantic late last year:

Yes, we are talking about people competing in Microsoft Excel, the famous (and famously boring) spreadsheet software that you may have used in school or at work or to track your finances. In competitive Excel, players square off in test-taking showdowns, earning points each time they answer a question correctly. Players' screens are a whirlwind of columns and keystrokes and formulae; if the terms XLOOKUP, RANDBETWEEN, and dynamic array don't mean anything to you, you are unlikely to understand what's going on. The commentators help, but only to a point. Even so, you can always follow the scoreboard, which tends to change suddenly and drastically. With just over three minutes to play, Ngai nailed a set of questions and jumped out to a 416-390 lead. GolferMike1 began to rethink his earlier assessment: "Uh oh. We got a game."

There's a pretty good explanation of what some of the challenges are like starting at the 6-minute mark in this video:

If you'd like more information, check out the Microsoft Excel World Championship for 2023 — the finals are in Las Vegas this year, they're gonna show it on one of ESPN's channels, and there's more than $15,000 in prize money at stake.

The trailer for a Frog and Toad TV series, now streaming on Apple+.

"Scientists have found a way to decode a stream of words in the brain using MRI scans and artificial intelligence. The system reconstructs the gist of what a person hears or imagines..." Wow.

The web's most important decision: CERN putting the WWW into the public domain. "Nobody owned the web, and the web wasn't licensed. It was simply a part of the world, for anybody to use, distribute, or modify."

The trailer for The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, the Hunger Games prequel set 60+ years in the past, based on the book by 2020 book by Suzanne Collins.

Q&A: Chronicling the failures of the U.S. response to Covid. "The Covid war revealed a collective national incompetence in governance."

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I'm not going to make a habit of posting AI generated video and photography here (mainly because most of it is not that interesting) but Pepperoni Hug Spot is just too perfect a name for a pizza place to pass up. And it's got Too Many Cooks vibes.