The death of voicemail

Most people I know and correspond with already have given up voicemail for good, but I do still get the occasional voicemail, enough so that it's useful to formally debate whether it's time to just shun voicemail for good.  It's hard to find something that you need to communicate via voicemail that isn't more effectively transmitted another way (SMS, email, some other form of mobile message like WhatsApp, Twitter DM, Snapchat, to pick a few popular ones).

By the way, let me tell you kids, it was hard to send a selfie back in the day. Selfies really meant something. First you had to take a self-portrait with an SLR mounted on a tripod, then you had to take a completed roll of film and get it processed, then you had to copy the photo to paper on a copy machine, then you had to fax that image from work when your coworkers weren't around.  From the time you began that process to the time the image finally was received on the other end, you weren't feeling too Carlos Dangerous anymore.

Spain's historical schedule

One of the things many visitors to Spain are bound to notice is the peculiar daily rhythm or schedule, with an afternoon siesta and really late-night schedule. One reason for the mid-day siesta might be as part of a more efficient sleep schedule, namely the "siesta" program of polyphasic sleep:

This sleep cycle is actually pretty common around the world in warmer countries such as Latin America, where the temperature is so hot during the middle of the day that people retire to take a short nap after lunch. It involves 6 hours of core sleep and one short 20-30 minute nap. You will find in these countries that most shops close during the early afternoon, as everyone is ‘busy’ taking their siestas! 

The first time I visited Madrid, I remember visiting a night club at around midnight and finding it largely empty, even on a Saturday night. I was about to leave after a half hour when suddenly the crowds started flocking in, and the place was packed until 5 in the morning.

It turns out Spain's late-night schedule may have its roots in World War II, when many European countries under German control switched their clocks to synchronize with Germany.

Now the Spanish government is considering switching back to British time. 

Until the 1940s, Spain was on the same time as Britain and Portugal, which are on roughly the same latitude. But when Nazi-occupied France switched to German time, Spain's Franco dictatorship followed suit.

"The fact that for more than 71 years Spain has not been in its proper time zone means ... we sleep almost an hour less than the World Health Organization recommends," the lawmakers wrote. "All this has a negative effect on productivity, absenteeism, stress, accidents and school drop-out rates."

 

Key different between men's and women's tennis

The key distinction between men's and women's professional tennis? The impact of the first serve. 

With so much else so similar around the court between men and women, the raw serving power to begin the point is the dominant theme. Only 20 women reached double figures in aces for the tournament, although it must be factored in that they were playing best-of-three-sets matches instead of best-of-five. Still, 10 aces are not a lot, and 67 men were able to pull that off.

Because the serve is not quite as venomous on the women’s tour, it makes sense that the return games would flourish. The women’s tour always gets heat because its players can’t hold serve as much, but that holds little weight because they don’t have an Isner or a Raonic fireball to rely on. Imagine giving players on the ATP Tour only one serve, which would automatically drop serve speeds, and you would start to see the men having substantial difficulty holding serve as well.

The game of tennis has changed overall in lots of ways in my lifetime. The advances in racket technology (synthetic gut strings, carbon fiber wide-body frames) has radically increased the power and spin of groundstrokes, meaning a huge spike in winners from the backcourt. Simultaneously, very few players come to the net anymore, it's just too easy to get passed unless you hit a near decisive approach shot. 

The other major shift is the convergence of the playing characteristics of playing surfaces, most notably the grass courts of Wimbledon which offer a much truer bounce than they once did, allowing Wimbledon to be won with great groundstrokes. Clay is the one court that has remained the most unique of the surfaces in pro tennis, and I'd say the biggest challenge in tennis is beating Nadal at the French Open on the terre battue.

 

A Man Digging

Jon Rafman's short film A Man Digging is a moody journey through the scenes of video game massacres. 

I've often thought it would be amusing to take a security guard from an action movie, one that gets mowed down by the bad guys, and then cast that actor in another movie, a Fruitvale Station-esque retrospective of the day leading up to the actor's death. 

Lobby security guards in action movies are so hapless. The assassins usually just walk up to them, pull a silencer and shoot the guard a few times in the head or chest before they even know what's going on.