A weekly newsletter for all your intellectual, spiritual, and physical needs
Hello everybody! Welcome to Volume 155 of Dovi’s Digest.
It’s nearly 11pm on Thursday night, I’m tired, it’s been a long day, and I’m yet to write this intro that you’re now reading. All I should do is bang this out and go to sleep (maybe read a couple chapters of Indistractible, which is a bit ironic, as you’re about to find out). I’ve been putting this off the whole day but right now all I want to do is pick up my Nintendo Switch, which is rather distracting.
I enjoy the odd video game. As a youth (if you can believe I once was such a thing), I would spend hours playing FIFA or the Lord of the Rings. Most often alone, sometimes with my brother, sometimes with a friend, but only ever two of us. Our houses weren’t set up for real multiplayer games. Computers were big heavy things, and even if we could move them around, connecting them all up was difficult. The only place we could all access a PC which was connected to others was the school computer lab. So of course we would try play as many games together as possible. The problem was that not only were we not allowed to play games (even solitaire or hearts), anything we tried to install was swiftly deleted.
Enter JF (whom I’ve mentioned before), who, being the genius that he is, worked out a way to not only install the games, but keep them on the DL. It involved distracting Mrs Margo (if you’re reading this, I’m sorry, we were horrid) by asking dumb questions, while our techie went to work. He then removed all traces of the game by magic. The only way one could find it was opening MS Dos, and doing a search for .exe files. It turned into a bit of an arms race, with the school trying to delete the games, and us finding more convoluted ways to hide them.
I thought this was a thing of the past, but in this week’s headline article I was glad to read that it’s very much alive and well. Except that now developers are in on the fun too. The battles are much more sophisticated than they once were, but the principle remains the same: developers doing their best to entertain bored students while simultaneously hiding it from teachers, the students playing surreptitiously, and the teachers playing a game of Whack-a-Mole to try and stop said fun. It’s a great read and brought a big smile to my face. I hope it does the same for you.
Last week was World Penguin Day, so one of your added extras is this collection of award winning photos of rather cute penguins.
Your second added extra is this super cool interactive page about how bicycles work. I know it may sound boring, but I can almost guarantee that you’ll have fun making things go (and you may learn some physics in the process).
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There were THREE correct answers to last week’s brainteaser. Well done to Ariel Subotzky, Hazel Levine, and Chaim Ehrlich! The answer and this week’s puzzle are below.
In addition to secret computer games, find out how ridiculously overpaid your sports idol is, read about the soccer star whose stalker nearly cost him his career, how loud rocket launches are (the fact that people need to stand kilometres away should give you a clue), what it’s like to be colourblind, what music does to your brain, and go inside one of the secret clinics trying to find the key to immortality. Enjoy!
Keep those articles (and everything else) coming.
Have a great weekend,
Dovi
And now, the articles:
Inside the Chaotic World of Kids Trying to Play Video Games on School Laptops
Most school children have a Chromebook, and every day, it's a war between kids, teachers, and the developers trying to entertain bored students.
The World’s 10 Highest-Paid Athletes of 2023
The Middle Eastern money flowing into golf and soccer has sports stars making more than ever—an estimated $1.1 billion in one year for these ten, beating the all-time record set in 2018.
Inside the Stalker Hell of Italian Footballer Fabio Quagliarella
When Naples native Fabio Quagliarella signed for his hometown club, it seemed life couldn't get any better. But after only one season, he was sent to play for arch-rival Juventus. The Napoli faithful—once full love for their native son—proved they could express their unmitigated hatred with equal passion. What the fans did not know—what virtually no one, in fact, knew—until earlier this year was the torment Quagliarella was being subjected to during his time with the club.
Just How Loud is a Rocket Launch?
The massive thrust needed to launch a rocket into space creates a lot of noise. With the maiden flight of SpaceX's enormous Starship rocket, might it have been loud enough to cause damage to nearby buildings?
Chasing Rainbows
Apparently, the very idea of colour-blindness is hard to visualize. Take a shot at looking through my eyes.
How Music Affects Your Brain
We are wired for music. We bring the world into our bodies and brains through our senses. At its core, we feel music—and now we are closer than ever to understanding why.
Inside the Secretive Life-Extension Clinic
Longevity evangelists are injecting people with experimental gene therapies. There are no guarantees—and no refunds.
Quote of the Week:
“When you’re dead, you don’t know you are dead – it’s pain only for others. It’s the same thing when you are stupid.” – Ricky Gervais
Facts of the Week:
The world's largest key collection includes keys to the White House toilets, Mozart's wine cellar, and Hitler's bunker.
The credits for the film Airplane! included Adolf Hitler as “Worst Boy”.
Rescuing a damsel from the train tracks only ever appeared in films as a spoof.
Oscars are not given for stunts or casting.
The sound of the doors on the starship Enterprise was made by pulling a piece of paper out of an envelope.
The sound at one Deep Purple concert was so loud that three people in the crowd fell unconscious.
The Welsh mythical hero Culhwch had a battle cry so loud it was said to sterilise women.
Gulf corvina fish have sex so loudly they deafen dolphins.
Cartoon of the Week:
Tweet of the Week:
Headline of the Week:
Brainteaser of the Week:
Which name from Group B best fits with those in Group A?
Group A
1) Timothy Isaac Mathers
2) Jennifer Elizabeth Napier
3) Richard Ivan Christopher King
4) Susan Ursula Zoe Young
Group B
1) Fredrick Adam Thompson
2) Elizabeth Lorraine French
3) Jacob Alan Keegan Edwards
4) Zachary Oscar Otto Miller
5) Debra Alicia Tracy Elms
6) Zelda Irene Potter
Last Week’s Brainteaser and Answer:
Each of the sentences below is written according to a different constraint, i.e. a mathematical rule such as, say, “all words the same length”, or “no ‘e’s’ allowed”. Can you deduce what each constraint is?
1) I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting.
2) Pert Pete wrote “QWERTY”. Wry Rory wept. Quiet Tori quit.
3) Dennis, Nell, Edna, Leon, Anita, Rolf, Nora, Alice, Carol, Lora, Cecil, Aaron, Flora, Tina, Noel and Ellen sinned.
4) Shimmering, gleaming, glistening glow
Winter reigns, splendiferous snow!
Won’t this sight, this stainless scene,
Endlessly yield days supreme?
Eying ground, deep piled, delights
Skiers scaling garish heights.
(Note: these six lines are an excerpt from Winter Reigns, a poem written by Mary Youngquist, the first woman to get a PhD in organic chemistry from MIT, and later editor of the US National Puzzlers’ League newsletter. It hides a very simple constraint. )
Answer:
1) The first word has one letter, the second word two letters, and so on, with each word having one letter more than the previous word. It’s what is popularly known as a “snowball sentence.”
2) The words use only letters that appear on the top row of a standard English keyboard.
3) A palindrome – reads the same way back to front.
4) The last letter of each word is the same as the first letter of the subsequent word. i.e “shimmering gleaming…”