How Marshall McLuhan Became Prophet Of The Digital Age

 Long novels offer pleasures that come from having traveled with a character over time. Can gimmicks reproduce that in shorter books?  

How Marshall McLuhan Became Prophet Of The Digital Age

It is fascinating to realize that McLuhan only becomes more of a prophet the further our world turns to the digital. As Paul Levinson notes, McLuhan’s metaphors were extravagant and malleable because they had to be. - LitHub

How heritable are various sports abilities?

 Tyler Cowen 

Let us start with data from identical twins:

Take wrestling.  Of 6,778 Olympic wrestling athletes, there have been something like thirteen pairs of identical twins.  This implied that the identical twin of an Olympic wrestler has a better than 60 percent chance of becoming an Olympic wrestler himself.

That is from the forthcoming Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life.  From such reasoning you can divine the relative import of genetic factors for success in various sports.  Here are the derived calculations, with the number indicating “Percent of Same-Sex Siblings Who Are Identical Twins” (when both make the Olympics, or achieve some other status):

Track and field: 22.4%

Wrestlers: 13.8%

Rowers: 12.4%

NBA players: 11.5%

Boxers: 8.8%

Gymnasts: 8.1%

Swimmers: 6.5%

Fencers: 4.5%

Shooters: 3.4%

NFL players: 3.2%

MLB players: 1.9%

Alpine skiers: 1.7%

Divers, equestrian riders, and weightlifters: All zero percent.

Humans bred dogs to have puppy-dog eyes CNN

Okay, Caesar, Let’s Go Home Werk-In-Progress

The hidden world of octopus cities and culture shows why it’s wrong to farm them The Conversation