Linked List: June 16, 2014

Monday, 16 June 2014

The Late Tony Gwynn’s Incredible Hitting Numbers 

Jayson Stark on Tony Gwynn, who died of cancer last night at age 54:

• Gwynn had six straight seasons (and eight altogether) in which he struck out fewer than 20 times. Did you know there were 97 hitters in the big leagues who whiffed at least 20 times just last month?

• Finally, what does it mean to have piled up a .338 batting average over a 20-year career, over 9,288 at-bats? It means Tony Gwynn would have had to go 0-for-his-next-1,183 to get his average to fall under .300 (and even then, it would have “plummeted” to a mere .29997). We kid you not.

So sad. Gwynn was everything: an amazing athlete, great competitor, and a nice guy.

‘That’s Not a Platitude’ 

Jony Ive, in an interview with The New York Times:

The core creative community is very small but is also very close — there’s been changes there, but the change isn’t perhaps as dramatic as you might assume.

One of the values of things I learned absolutely directly from Steve was the whole issue of focus. What are we focusing on: focus on product. I wish I could do a better job in communicating this truth here, which is when you really are focused on the product, that’s not a platitude. When that truly is your reason for coming into the studio, is just to try to make the very best product you can, when that is exclusive of everything else, it’s remarkable how insignificant or unimportant a lot of other stuff becomes. Titles or organizational structures, that’s not the lens through which we see our peers.

The Buckyball 

Erik van Rheenen, writing for Mental Floss:

But the ball most commonly seen today — the one with black and white pentagons and hexagons — was first designed in the 1960s by architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose forte was designing buildings using minimal materials. Previously, leather soccer balls consisted of 18 sections stitched together: six panels of three strips apiece. The soccer ball Fuller designed stitched together 20 hexagons with 12 pentagons for a total of 32 panels. Its official shape is a spherical polyhedron, but the design was nicknamed the “buckyball.”

Can’t believe that great NYT piece on the history of World Cup ball design didn’t mention that it was Fuller who designed that iconic pentagon/hexagon ball.

Update: Perhaps the reason they didn’t mention Fuller is that he didn’t actually design the soccer ball, Adidas simply took inspiration from Fuller’s general buckyball structural concept?