Rick Bigsby @REXPcom

@Tyler_Polumbus Funny how one call flips a game. Convert 4th down, score a TD, it’s 14–0 — everything plays out the same, and we’re probably talking about a Broncos win 14-10.

@DefiantLs Indiana needs to find the Hanson Triplet's granddaughters.

Share the fuck out of this.

@DianaWallace888 Eagle 🦅 ability to fly catch a fish and eat mid air

This is incredible. From @Jamie_Lane where AirBnBs are fully booked next week.

The rise and fall of Blockbuster stores in the United States

Satya Nadella walking into the Microsoft Monday Morning Meeting after acquiring OpenAI for $0 and 0 regulatory scrutiny

@ZuzaZasada Impossibly so.

Only one sculptor in history ever came close to Michelangelo. In some peoples' eyes, his technical mastery even surpassed the Renaissance genius. The greatest works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini - a thread 🧵 1. The Abduction of Proserpina (1622)

In 2007, a 43-year-old man named Lenny Robinson from Maryland sold his cleaning business to pursue his dream of becoming Batman. He had bought a replica of the iconic suit earlier to impress his son, which he refined over time. Lenny also acquired his own Batmobile, a black Lamborghini. His mission was to visit children's hospitals and spend time with sick kids, helping them through tough times. Once, he intervened for a 6-year-old girl with a rare genetic disorder who was being called a liar at school for claiming Batman was her friend. Lenny, dressed as Batman, came to her school, confirming her truth publicly. However, tragedy struck on August 16th, 2015. Lenny's Batmobile broke down on a highway. As he examined the vehicle, he accidentally stepped too far onto the road and was struck by a passing car.

When the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was engulfed in flames, Ubisoft, the creators of Assassin's Creed, had previously mapped the cathedral for their game. They generously extended their plans and expertise to assist in the restoration and reconstruction of this iconic structure. Additionally, they contributed €500,000 towards the restoration effort. As images of the cathedral's roof being consumed by fire began to circulate, Maxime Durand, the historian responsible for ensuring historical accuracy in the "Assassin's Creed" franchise, initially doubted their authenticity. In a phone interview with Business Insider, Durand shared that it took him a full day to articulate his feelings about this devastating event. Notre-Dame Cathedral held personal significance for Durand. He had spent four years overseeing the creation of "Assassin's Creed Unity," a game set during the French Revolution that featured a remarkably precise representation of Notre-Dame Cathedral as its centerpiece. In the days following the fire, Ubisoft, the French game developer and publisher behind the "Assassin's Creed" series, pledged €500,000 for the cathedral's rebuilding efforts and offered their extensive expertise. This offer made perfect sense as two Ubisoft team members had invested "over 5,000 hours" in researching Notre-Dame Cathedral, meticulously examining every detail inside and out.

18 years ago, a struggling actor named Bryan Cranston made a shift that changed his life. His mindset (and how you can use it to change yours): Bryan was going from audition to audition but not getting parts. He was trying to win the job each time. But he had the job wrong... Old mindset: The purpose of an audition was to get a job. New mindset: The purpose of an audition was to serve the script in a unique way that only he could do. Whether he got the job or not was up to someone else. This mindset shift was an inflection point in his career. Bryan has been busy ever since, starting with guest roles on Seinfeld to 6 Emmy awards for Breaking Bad. Takeaway: Attachment to outcome gets in the way of our best work. This is true in business, in art, in life. Goals are important because they set a direction. But goals are in the future. If you are overly focused on your goal in the moment, it will block your authentic best. As the Stoic Philosopher Seneca wrote: “The more you seek to control external events, the less control you will have over your own life.” If this resonates, comment below and follow @mattschnuck for insights on inflections in life, entrepreneurship and 25 years in business.

Based mother asks the teachers board why they are wasting all their time with touchy feely topics: "There is one goal, and one goal alone in the education system: To prepare children to enter careers to be productive members of society. It is not a counceling session, it is not a help self area, it is not a area to find yourself, and we should not be led by the children!"

You could say the auditions for a third ManningCast host did not go as expected.

The founder told me the training for this robot is done remotely by humans in VR headsets.

AI Breakfast @AiBreakfast

3 years ago

A janitorial robot developed by Somatic cleans a toilet by itself

189 689 4K 1.0M 597

@JoeyMannarinoUS Waz uppppppppp!

@Travis_in_Flint Hunter, call me the “Big Guy” again.

Mitt Romney is setting a Feb. 26, 2024 deadline for Republican presidential candidates to coalesce around an alternative to Donald Trump: “Our party and our country need a nominee with character, driven by something greater than revenge and ego, preferably from the next generation. Family, friends and campaign donors are the only people who can get a lost-cause candidate to exit the race.”

FIGHTING At a private conference this week, I was asked what I think of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) training, Elon Musk’s challenge to a cage fight, and public reports that a Zuckerberg/Musk MMA fight may well happen later this year, perhaps in the actual Roman Colosseum. I said, “I think that’s all great.” And in this post I explain why. First, while the extraordinary Dana White and his Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) have elevated MMA into a highly popular public sport over the last 20 years, it’s important to understand how important – how primal – MMA is in the story of our civilization. MMA is the original combat sport – it was introduced to the actual Greek Olympic Games in 648 BC (!). The Greeks called it “pankration” (παγκράτιον), but it is the same thing – a combination of boxing and wrestling. To quote Wikipedia: “In Greek mythology, the heroes Heracles and Theseus invented pankration as a result of using both wrestling and boxing in their confrontations with opponents. Theseus was said to have used pankration to defeat Cercyon of Eleusis in a wrestling match, as well as the minotaur in the labyrinth. Heracles was depicted in ancient artworks subduing the Nemean lion using pankration.” “Pankration, as practiced in historical antiquity, was an athletic event that combined techniques of both boxing and wrestling, as well as additional elements, such as the use of strikes with the legs, to create a fighting sport similar to [MMA]. Although knockouts were common, most pankration competitions were decided on the basis of submission – yielding to a submission or joint lock. Pankratiasts were highly skilled grapplers and were extremely effective in applying a variety of takedowns, chokes and joint locks.” “However, pankration was more than just an event in the athletic competitions of the ancient Greek world; it was also part of the arsenal of Greek soldiers – including the famous Spartan hoplites and Alexander the Great's Macedonian phalanx.” If the hair on the back of your neck isn’t going up as you read this… MMA isn’t just a sport, it’s the sport. And today, like then, it has not only sporting elements but also real world utility. I’ll come back to that. I was also asked whether I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting, and I said, enthusiastically, yes. And I further recommended to the audience that they have their children trained in MMA, as my wife and I are. Kids as young as 8 and maybe even younger are totally capable of learning both the striking and grappling dimensions of the sport. MMA teaches not just combat skills – and it does teach those – but also discipline, emotional control, respect, and a deep sense of responsibility. The message to kids is not, this is how you beat people up. The message is, this is how you protect yourself – and as important, this is how you protect your family, your friends, your community. You use these combat skills in the service of others – you never start a fight, but when someone is threatening someone you love, or even an innocent bystander, this is how you end a fight. To a lot of people, this sounds like a message out of time. Surely in the modern world, one would never need to protect oneself or one’s family with actual interpersonal physical violence? I would love for that to be the case, but unfortunately, the world is evolving in such a way where that is becoming less true every day. Many of the biggest and most important cities in the United States have decided they don’t need law enforcement, and street level violence is on the rise, as anyone in those cities with functional eyes can see. People get attacked in the street, or in carjackings and home invasions, daily, in plain sight, and little to nothing happens. It’s terrible, but it’s true. And so, yes, if there aren’t going to be police to protect you and your loved ones from real world violent assault, there is a practical need to know applied self defense. And hand-to-hand fighting – MMA – is the core self defense skill. Another benefit of MMA training, for both children and adults, is physical fitness. We all know our culture is in the grip of an obesity crisis – according to the CDC, “Obesity in the United States now affects 100.1 million (41.9%) adults and 14.7 million (19.7%) children.” This is a terrible situation that curses people to shorter and unhappier lives. President John F Kennedy saw this coming in his time (!): “We are underexercised as a nation. The remedy, in my judgment, lies in one direction. That is in developing programs for broad participation in exercise by all of our young men and women, all of our boys and girls. The sad fact is that our national sport is not playing at all, but watching. We have become more and more, not a nation of athletes but a nation of spectators. There are more important goals than winning contests — and that is to improve on a broad level the health and vitality of all our people.” We did not listen to him in the decades that followed, but we can now. MMA training is likely the best path for widespread gains in physical fitness, particularly for children. MMA training itself is both effective exercise and motivates one to improve one’s strength and endurance. And not just in the abstract, as a pointless hamster wheel process, but for a purpose – to win fights. Finally, consider the combination of physical fitness and the ability to defend one’s loves. The result is self-respect – not the self-respect of armchair therapy and wishful thinking, but real self-respect, the earned realization that one is strong and useful and of merit, and of value. Skilled fighters carry themselves differently, and this is why. In our present time, where many young people are suffering from anxiety, depression, and what can only be described as anomie – again, from the Greek, ἀνομία, “lawlessness”, a collapse in the code of expected adult behavior – what could be better than a return to earned self-respect? One more thing: Lest this be taken for some kind of gendered argument, let me say clearly that I think MMA is just as useful and relevant for young girls as it is for young boys. So yes – I think it’s great that MMA is the rising American national sport, that Mark is training so hard in it (and getting jacked), that Elon, a past martial arts aficionado in his own right, is challenging Mark to a fight, and that both Mark and Elon are top-end role models for children in our society, including my own – whether they end up fighting in the Colosseum or not! If it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us. Fight!