Breaking The Neck - 5323
Fool me once, strike one. But fool me twice ... strike three days of posting. - The Honorable Michael Scarn, who never said this.
Day three and we’re all learning things that we’re going to share with unsuspecting people in a group setting at some point or another. Let’s jump in to today …
The Daily Rabbit Hole: Giraffe’s Necks are actually too short.
Also they … “only need 5 to 30 minutes of sleep in a 24-hour period!”
One of my favorite anecdotes is that when the NFL measures speed, they test how fast prospective athletes can run 40 yards using a FAT system. It’s like an elementary school yard joke that doesn’t quite connect the dots, but is still kinda funny. Fully Automatic Timing has been used to determine official records of how fast a person is for a while now, but in an almost intentional irony, it takes forever by today’s standards for the official number to post.
Take Tyquan Thornton in 2022 for example:
For TWO HOURS, he had set the record for the fastest time ever recorded at the NFL combine - running 40 yards in 4.21 seconds. Then the Fully Automatic (lol) Timing number came to light and it turns out that he was “only” 9th all time. We know the Internet (or are starting to, since you’re here now), so it took weeks if not months for people to unlearn that he had the fastest time ever recorded.
So the simple question is: how on earth does it take that long to get the automated 40 yard dash number?
Apparently I am the first to ask the question.
The ‘Wait, What?’ Vortex: Universe Expansion
“The universe is expanding faster than it should be”
Ah, I love a National Geographic headline to prompt an existential crisis I don’t even understand.
Why is everything so fast, yet so slow?
I’ve used the phrase “slow as molasses” on many occasions, even to describe myself. Turns out, if I was as slow as molasses, I’d be the fastest man in the world. In the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, historical accounts document that the sugar blob, notorious for frustrating anyone who has ever tried to unclump brown sugar, was moving at t-h-i-r-t-y—f-i-v-e miles per hour. 35!!
For reference, Usain Bolt topped out at 27.33 mph.
All this to say, does it feel like everything is moving at break neck speed and yet not moving at all, at the same time? Or is it just me?
Here is the Google Trend line for the search, “it feels like yesterday and a year ago at the same time.”
Now this is not an accurate reflection of people searching for something like this, since it’s such a specific variation of the thought and not posed as a question. What I find interesting about it is that the spikes are loosely correlated with the Covid 19 pandemic. As we learned on day 1, correlation is not causation, but I will certainly still use it to make a prognostication:
The Internet, and therefore culture and society, is moving too fast and too slow at the same time. Look no further than the US elected officials trying to govern the Internet asking questions that make you wonder if they’ve ever seen it. We’re starting to recognize that technology, and therefore life, is breaking our necks over and over as we incur the incessant whiplash of something new to learn, but recognition of this pace itself is what needs swift action. The more we recognize the pace of our day, the more we understand how to correct it.
We need some balanced speed. Cruising 42 in a 45. A toddler lumbering to the next toy …
Maybe we really even need to just touch grass and forget about it.