Eagle

@kranepool This seems so obviously true, but I suspect Mendoza would be roasted if he tried this. I, for one, would be thrilled. Overthinking, over-managing and overemphasizing power (pitching and hitting) have made the game less fun.

@irish_eagle Sometimes you just have to step back and let your instincts take over these players have played since childhood they’ve done great things throughout their careers to get them to the big leagues sometimes simple is the way to go

Maybe the Mets could try a moratorium on the overload of analytics for a while take all the iPads out of the dugout a pause on the lefty righty matchup instruct Mendy make out the lineup play the eight best players you feel you have and manage in game changes as you see fit let the staring pitcher go a inning or two longer let reliever last more than a dozen pitches in an outing call the players together and tell we have the worst record in baseball we can’t get any lower just go out a play for the enjoyment of playing baseball and let’s see where we end up

That picture was taken by a robot the size of a shoebox, sitting on a rock 186 million miles from Earth. The robot worked for 17 hours, then died. It will sit there for the next 40 million years. The rock is an asteroid called Ryugu. It has been drifting through space since the planets formed. In 2014, Japan launched a spacecraft called Hayabusa2 to go meet it. Inside the spacecraft was a tiny lander called MASCOT, built jointly by the German and French space agencies. For almost four years, the spacecraft chased the asteroid. When it finally caught up, it lowered itself to about 50 meters above the surface and dropped MASCOT. The fall took six minutes. Ryugu has almost no gravity. A person standing on it would weigh about as much as a paperclip. So MASCOT drifted down slower than a walking pace, hit a boulder, and bounced eight times before coming to rest. Then it had a single small battery and a job to do. It carried a camera, a thermometer, a tool that measures magnetic fields, and a small instrument that could figure out what the rocks were made of. It used a tiny metal arm tucked inside its body to throw itself across the surface, hopping a few different times and taking pictures along the way. Scientists later named the area Alice's Wonderland, because the rocks were stranger than anyone had expected. After 17 hours and 7 minutes, the cold of the asteroid's night drained the battery. MASCOT went silent. Seven years later, it still is. The rock is made of material older than Earth. In 2020, the spacecraft dropped a sealed capsule of asteroid dust into the Australian desert. When scientists opened it, they found all five of the chemical building blocks of life inside. The same molecules that, given water and a few billion years, eventually built every plant, every animal, every person you have ever met. That recipe has been out there in the solar system for 4.6 billion years. Our species has been around for about 300,000 of those. A small machine our species put together is now resting on a piece of the early solar system. Long after every pyramid has crumbled to dust, long after every cathedral has fallen, long after every word written by anyone you have ever known has been forgotten, that little robot will still be there.

Cherie DeVaux, a Saratoga Springs native, makes history as the first female trainer to win the Derby

the best 3 minutes of video I've watched this year

For 28 years, Michael O'Leary ran Ryanair like a man who couldn't stand his own customers. People kept flying because the tickets were so cheap. Then in 2014 he tried being nice to them. Profits jumped 37 percent. The share price jumped 55. He told the whole story in a one-hour lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin in late 2015. It's the Carmichael Lecture, watch the full thing if you can, because there is more useful business teaching in that hour than in most full MBAs. On the third rewatch, these are the parts that stuck with me the most. The single biggest secret of Ryanair has nothing to do with marketing. It is a 25-minute turnaround. Once a Ryanair plane lands, the crew has it cleaned, refueled, reboarded, and back in the air in 25 minutes. Aer Lingus needs about an hour to do the same thing. After three flights in a day, Ryanair has banked two hours, which is enough time to fit in two extra flights. Every single Ryanair plane flies more flights per day than every single Aer Lingus plane. That gap is where the entire profit margin of European cheap flying comes from. Long flights to other continents don't work the same way. A faster turnaround at JFK doesn't let you squeeze another flight to America into the day, so the saved time gets wasted. This is why O'Leary thinks Ryanair will never fly across the Atlantic but will dominate short flights inside Europe for decades. The second thing he learned was that you can get unlimited free press by saying the opposite of whatever business school is teaching that year. Ryanair had no advertising budget through the 80s and 90s. So O'Leary went on television and said things like, "customers are always right? No, they're always wrong." And, "people are your most important asset? No, they're your biggest expense." Every interview produced more coverage than a paid campaign would have. The peak came in 2009 when The Sun newspaper asked if Ryanair would allow porn on the in-flight wifi. He said yes. Within 24 hours the website got 28 times its normal traffic, and bookings quadrupled for three days straight. The third lesson is the one he was slowest to learn, and it is the most painful. The shift to being polite to customers was led by his own staff. He was the bottleneck. A Dublin Airport survey found that when Ryanair gate agents pulled passengers out of the queue to size-check their carry-on bags, 77 percent of those bags ended up fitting just fine. His own gate agents had invented rules like "the bag must fit comfortably in the sizer" so they could reject bags that technically fit. Staff were exhausted from being forced into pointless fights with customers. They wanted permission to stop. Once O'Leary gave it, they started bringing him most of the new ideas. Lesson four is about admitting you were wrong, and treating that as a press strategy. After the change, O'Leary toured Ireland, the UK, and Germany telling journalists he had been wrong about customer service for 25 years. The coverage was endless because almost no executive ever does this in public. Owning a mistake loud enough becomes its own news cycle. Lesson five is the one I think every government should tape to the wall. Ireland brought in a tax on flights during the 2009 recession. It raised about 26 million euros a year. Visitor numbers fell from 30 million to 20 million over three years. The state lost roughly 250 million euros a year in sales tax it would have collected from the visitors who never came. So Ireland was earning a tenth of what it was losing. Once Michael Noonan repealed the tax in 2014, tourism boomed and Ryanair alone accounted for 74 percent of the new traffic to and from the island. The lesson goes way beyond Ireland. Tax visitors once they're inside your country. Don't tax them at the airport, because at the airport they'll just pick somewhere else to fly. The sixth lesson is the strangest one. The average Ryanair fare is about 35 euros. O'Leary's actual long-term goal is for the ticket to be free, paid for entirely by side revenue from bag fees, snacks, wifi, and on-board gambling. The cheaper the ticket, the more passengers fly. The more passengers fly, the more side money he makes. That side money lets him cut the ticket again next year. The wheel only turns one direction, and the gap between Ryanair and every other European airline gets wider every year. Lesson seven is about why public services keep failing. The Irish health service has a politics problem. Whenever the unions are unhappy, they bypass management and go straight to the Minister for Health, who has no real power to push back. American federal workers lost the right to strike in 1947, and the United States has functioning public services almost in spite of itself as a result. No government anywhere can run a real operation while its workforce can paralyze that operation on demand. The same logic explains almost every broken public bureaucracy. The eighth lesson is a pushback against doomsday thinking. O'Leary was openly skeptical of people warning that the world was running out of oil, and skeptical of climate-change politics. His reasoning was simple and pragmatic. People are extraordinarily good at working around shortages of energy and raw materials. He tells a story he half-remembers about General Motors commissioning a study in the early 1900s that concluded car demand would top out at 900,000 cars worldwide because there were not enough chauffeurs to drive them. Henry Ford solved that within a few years by making cars cheap enough for owners to drive themselves. Markets find new oil whenever the price climbs high enough to make new drilling profitable. American oil producers came online with new techniques, flooded the market, and replaced OPEC, the alliance of oil-exporting countries, as the force that sets global oil prices. Whatever the next bottleneck is, somebody will route around it. The trick is to never bet against human ingenuity over a long enough time horizon. The ninth lesson is about how leaders rot. O'Leary refuses awards, honorary doctorates, and invitations to the dinner circuit. His reasoning is that the moment you start believing you are irreplaceable, you stop listening to the people who actually run the business. Customers write to him every day complaining about Ryanair. Those daily complaints are the only thing keeping the company grounded. The deepest lesson in the talk is the one he drops almost in passing. He spent four years studying business at Trinity College in Dublin. At no point during those four years did anybody suggest that being nice to customers might be part of a winning strategy. The single most profitable change he ever made to Ryanair was something his entire formal education had trained him not to consider.

@michaelbd 80,000 Irish fans could sing God Save the King. They would NEVER do it, but they could. I dare say probably no bother for Belgians to sing La Marseillaise,if they could be bothered.

Besides American NHL fans what other subgroups on Earth are likely to know another nation’s anthem in its entirety?

@LennickTim11301 @KeithMillsD7 irishtimes.com/sport/other-sp… He seems to have spent some time in America in the 1930s.

@KeithMillsD7 Dr Pat did not move to the USA , where in the world did you get that information from ? He became a GP in Co. Tipperary Like it would have taken you less than 90 seconds to find out this info

As I have previously mentioned, I love rediscovering history by enhancing and colourising old photos. Here's a fascinating one from 1932. The photo is from late August of that year and was I believe taken at the quayside on Dun Laoghaire harbour. The trio are waiting for the return of the Irish team from the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. The man in the centre of the photo is WT Cosgrave. Cosgrave had led the Irish Free State government from 1922 to 1932 but had lost the General Election a few months earlier. At this point he was leader of the opposition. A couple of years later would be one of the driving forces in forming Fine Gael a party he would lead from 1934 to 1944. Standing beside him are two young women awaiting the arrival of their fiancées, both of whom had won Olympic gold medals in Los Angeles, in one of Ireland's most successful games. Beside Cosgrave is Josephine Gutridge, the financée of Bob Tisdall. Tisdall was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) before moving to Nenagh and had an extremely colourful life before and after representing Ireland in the 400m Hurdles in the Olympics. Despite spending most of his life in Britain he became an Irish national hero. Tisdall died in Australia at the age of 97 in 2004. He married but later divorced Gutridge. On the right is Kitty O'Reilly, the financée of Dr. Pat O'Callaghan, two time gold medalist for Ireland. He was a shock winner of the Hammer in the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam and defended his title in Los Angeles. He later became a professional wrestler in the USA. O'Callaghan and O'Reilly who married in 1934 had four children. He returned to Ireland and died in 1991. By coincidence Tisdall and O'Callaghan won their events on the same day, 1st August 1932, one of the greatest days in Irish sport. UPDATE. I have now added colourised photos of Tisdall and O'Callaghan from that famous day.

@culexintexas @jpodhoretz I AM stuck in the 1970s musically, but I love this album.

@jpodhoretz Damn John, I love that too. I woulda thought you were stuck in the 1970s with your musical favs 😝

Welcome Interstate Managers by Fountains of Wayne

@Clearpreso When you haven't practiced the speech with someone first.

Not ideal

On tonight's show: The first Irish language newspaper. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile talk to us about An Gaodhal, published in the US between 1881 and 1898. Every edition of the paper is now digitised and made available online by the University of Galway: universityofgalway.ie/angaodhal/#

@TheStalwart Try using this while you drive. It's infuriating that you can't take it off.

(I like the cap!)

Absolutely fascinating. And terrifying

Thank God @mets

I have just realized that @Ticketmaster is like the @nhl in insisting that Albany NY is in the Buffalo area. They are promoting Sabres tickets. Well, why not the Bruins, Canadiens, Flyers or Senators? All of those teams' home arenas are closer to Albany than the Sabres'.

@TheStalwart You're going to talk to people in London about Guinness? Hmm. I take it you're not following @shitlondonguinn

We're going to spend 30 minutes on stage, just talking about the perfect cooling environment for storing Guinness. If you're in London, and this interests you, get a ticket. I think there's like 35 available left for the show.

As a Buffalo meteorologist I must say that’s not technically snow. It’s just Sabres fans in Heaven spilling their beers.

@old_world_exp @markhumphrys Brunelleschi's Done Great book. #idiq=6104905&edition=7510001" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">thriftbooks.com/w/brunelleschi…

Florence Cathedral

The Irish Language Officer (Oifigeach Pleanála Teanga) for Inis Oirr is from Kentucky! Read about fluent Gaeilgeoir Davis Sandefur's life on a remote Gaeltacht island in this week's @CTribune #Galway "Beatha teanga í a labhairt"