- Orioles bring back the cartoon bird! Tom Scocca approves, but grumpily. What word describes my formerly retro hat that is now no longer retro?
- Old Skull was a punk band of Madison 9-year-olds that opened for Sonic Youth and got airtime on MTV in the late 1980s. The rest of their story is pretty damn sad.
- The Inverse Symbolic Calculator, aka “The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, but for real numbers” works a lot better than it did a few years ago. (Via the Notices)
- It’s interesting to read a 1987 version of the New York Times’s annual “Asian-Americans: why are they so mysteriously good at school?” article; in some ways it’s exactly the same article they might run today, but it’s somehow tonally very antique. For instance, I think in a 2011 article Sylvain Cappell would not be identified as “Professor Cappell, a Jew.”
- Memories of William Sleator. If you have a child age 10 or up whose outlook on life is too sunny, make sure they read House of Stairs and The Green Futures of Tycho right away.
And it’s worth noting that this article led to Sylvain appearing on the Oprah Show and discussing why Asian-American students do so well.
It appears, based on a high-res photo I saw, that either (a) the resolution of hat stitching is too low to distinguish the quote from the apostrophe, or (b) the artist at the cap company corrected the error even though the error is present in the Orioles “identity guide” and the high-res online images.
That is, a closeup of the actual HAT appears correct, even though the hat artwork is wrong.