jsackmann's comments

This article outlines some of what you remember (though not, afaict, anything about getting Nazis interested in his medical 'experiments') https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/vik...

Per the article, he spent years in concentration camps, but only a few days at Auschwitz.

I have no idea whether this applies to Lex, or if there are better explanations, but... he probably just asks. In my limited experience with my little podcast in the sports analytics world, I'm consistently surprised by who says yes, and how few people say no. ~90% of the people I've asked to be a guest have said yes, and those who have said no haven't done so because they're "too famous" or something like that.

Not OP, but they're referring to situations when players call their own lines. (Virtually all amateur matches.) If you are horrible (or blatantly biased) at calling lines, your opponent can call the tournament referee, and you may end up with a line judge. But that takes time, and only happens after you aggravate your opponent. If you wait until a key moment to make a bad call in your favor, your opponent won't be able to reverse it, even if they call the referee and get a third party to call the lines for the rest of the match.

This is a particularly big issue in competitive junior tennis, unfortunately.

Those Antarctic islands are the Balleny Islands. I took a cruise a couple of years ago from NZ to Antarctica, and we were able to land on Borradaile island [1], one of the Ballenys. I can't find my notes for the exact figure, but the historian on board said that, including us, only a few hundred people had ever set foot there. Many expeditions pass within sight of them, but landing is treacherous--IIRC, we went onshore for about an hour in the morning, and by lunch it no longer would've been possible to do so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borradaile_Island

Shot-by-shot stats for almost 6,000 pro matches, including over 300 of Nadal's and 400 of Federer's: http://www.tennisabstract.com/charting/meta.html

Raw data for a large subset of those matches: https://github.com/JeffSackmann/tennis_MatchChartingProject

The headline currently says "Nate Hentoff" but it's Nat, not Nate.

Broadly speaking, major chords sound bright and happy. Minor chords sound dark and sad.

The C major scale consists of C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. The A-minor scale consists of A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A. Those are the same notes, but if you play each of those patterns on a keyboard, the first one sounds happy, the second one sounds sad.

A C-major chord (technically, triad) is made up of C-E-G, the first, third, and fifth notes of the scale. Again, sounds happy. The A-minor triad is A-C-E ... sad.

But if you play a melody -- that is, one note at at a time -- it isn't always clear whether it's happy or sad. In most western music, though (including virtually all pre-1900 classical music and the vast majority of modern pop), the piece will end ("resolve") with a clearer "happy" or "sad" type of chord. That final chord is what determines the key.

(In a huge amount of classical and popular music, the final chord is the same as the opening chord, but not always. When they're different, the final chord tells you the key.)

Where I grew up (eastern WA): "Eight is great; nine, you're mine."

>the chicken earned US$4,500 per month ($47,700 today)[5] and was valued at $10,000

Not a very generous multiplier, but then again, the actuarial tables for a headless chicken wouldn't be all that favorable.

Yep. I drove a cab for about a year (2003ish, college town of ~200,000 people), and the company I drove for did this. It wasn't a big business, but there were a few substantial accounts, notably the local university hospital system, which sent around a lot of specimens in very serious-looking containers. Pre-ubiquitous GPS, shared taxi dispatching and routing involved a lot of yelling and guessing.

I traveled for about two years. I was able to work remotely, so I didn't have to worry too much about a tight budget or finding employment upon return.

It was a great experience, and here's what I'd change:

- spend more time in fewer places; be less of a tourist. (bonus: for the most part, the less you move around, the less expensive it is.) I would particularly try to do this in places that aren't typical tourist destinations. Think of stops of 1-3 months (perhaps with side trips) rather than 1-2 weeks.

- if you're traveling with someone else (particularly a significant other): (a) be really, really confident that you want to travel together for that long; (b) do whatever you can to find destinations that you both are interested in; (c) explicitly acknowledge that you will want to spend time apart during your travels; and (d) expect the relationship to get rocky at times even if you do all of the above perfectly. It's hard.

- Plan to return to your current home, if at all possible. I didn't do this, and re-adjusting to 'normal' life was much more difficult without an existing set of family and friends around. Even if you do go back 'home', re-entry won't be seamless. One of my friends spent two years in Japan and claims that she was more homesick upon returning home (USA) than she ever was in Japan.

In my experience: Amazon automatically discounts some books, a certain time after their release. I've published several through their subsidiary CreateSpace, and the two that sold more than negligible amounts were discount the same ~28%. One eventually went back to my 'retail' and the other stayed discounted.

Again in my experience, Amazon's discounts do not effect the author's take. At least in CreateSpace, the author's royalty is based on the retail price the author sets.

The economics are true of just about anything that scales -- startups and anything in the arts both come to mind. There's no guaranteed route to six-figure comfort (like there is with, say, dental school), but the potential rewards are enormous.

And, as other responses have pointed out, in all of these fields, people really, really want to do them. The number of writing jobs that are 'comfortable' (pick your number, $60k?) has sharply declined from the glory days of the newspaper industry, but it still has the same non-monetary attractions, and there are the still the same opportunities to become, say, a bestselling nonfiction author.

It's not talking about success rate of items that are mailed; it is talking about the number of pieces that are mailed in the first place. The latter number is declining.

In a sense, that's what an active blogger does before going blog-to-book. True, the author is the one putting the sentences together, but the market has a lot of say in the direction future articles go, and what of the blog content goes into the book version.

I've gotten my last couple places on craigslist and been happy. Look for apts that are truly 'by-owner.' Plenty of them do exist.

Astoria is relatively cheap (as noted above) and safe; other nearby neighborhoods in Queens can be even cheaper, if not quite as safe (Sunnyside, Long Island City), and if you are commuting to midtown (or in my case, not commuting at all) you're looking at <30m.

IMO, Brooklyn apts tend not to have the same value, taking safety and commute time into consideration, but plenty of people would argue with me on that point.

Does anyone here have first-hand experience testing w/ the VeriSign seal? The parent link gives an example of a very substantial sales increase thanks to the seal. For $299/year, though, it's a bit beyond the range of "eh, what the hell, I'll give it a try."

It would seem that there's almost always more to the story, and his overall message ("you, too, can have financial freedom all by yourself...now go have fun") might be stronger if he acknowledged that, yes, it's hard to build a company to that point.

What I think is valuable is the constant reminder that the business/income-building is a means to an end, and there's a wide world of choices out there for what the "end" is.

Yep, I love that one too.

In case you (or others) don't know, the movie Gettysburg is based on The Killer Angels, with the same focus on Lee and Chamberlain. It's very long, but good -- much was filmed on site, and Pickett's Charge is done in real-time. Harrowing stuff.

Also, let me plug the battlefield itself -- I just visited a couple of weekends ago for the first time as an adult. If you've read about it or seen the movie, it's a fantastic place to see. Unlike some Civil War battlefields, standing there really makes it clear -- you can look down from the top of Little Round Top, and you can look across the field of Pickett's Charge from both directions.

Don't be so quick to discard CreateSpace.

I recently published my first book through them [1], and imho, it looks good. I formatted the book itself in LaTeX and had a graphic designer do the cover, which cost me a couple hundred bucks. It doesn't look exactly like a typical textbook, but that's much more because of some first-time mistakes of mine than anything about the production process.

Also, not sure what "a lot of upfront fees" are in this case. I paid for my cover, but that's not required. They offer a plan for $39 (iirc) that gives you a better royalty deal. But that's it.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1453772316/8631&pf_rd_i...