#but at least then you can always google ‘who wears [number] in nhl’ and find out who it is very easily

[muirneach]

sometimes tennis fans will say a string of numbers and you just have to deal with that. saying stuff like ‘omg 67162762726 was such a crazy match i love it’. like yeah thats normal sure whatever

[vsaucefanpage]

Hey Vsauce! Michael Here.

Hey Vsauce! Michael Here.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau right now, in America, there are 106 people named Harry Potter. 1 007 named James Bond and eight people named Justin Bieber. They're just aren't enough names to go around. There are more than 300 million people in America but a hundred and fifty thousand last names and five thousand first names is all you need to name 9 out of every 10 of them. When are we gonna run out of names? Perhaps it's already happened to you. If it hasn't, when? Ten years, twenty years, a hundred, a thousand. When will someone with your exact name become famous? So famous in fact that your legacy changes forever to just being not the person people think of when they hear your name. And for that matter, when will every reasonably memorable pronounceable band name or brand name be taken? When will authors have no choice but to just start reusing book titles? According to Rovi Corp, owner of AllMusic.com, the most used band name is 'Bliss', followed in order by 'Mirage', 'One', Gemini', 'Legacy', 'Paradox' and 'Rain'. In the past when fewer bands had already been created and you couldn't just Google up every single band, overlap was easier to get away with and one word band names were plentiful. But now, after years and years and years of band formation, well, we have The Who', but we also have 'The What?', The Where', 'The When', 'The Why', 'The How' and even 'The The'. In order to stand out now, and have your own unique name, you have to be a bit more creative. O', 'Diarrhea Planet' or 'Betty's Not a Vitamin', which, by the way, is no longer true. Betty became a vitamin in 1994. What about Twitter handles or email addresses? Have we already reached peak username? We already find ourselves often having to use abbreviations, initials, numbers or just choosing something completely different. Will our children or our children's children live in a world where the only remaining Gmail addresses is are just random strings of alphanumeric characters? Are we approaching a name crisis? And if so, should we even call it a name crisis, lest we use up yet another precious name? Maybe you already share your name with someone famous. But if you don't, how long will it be until you probably will? I mean, new famous people are popping up all the time faster now than ever before because of the Internet and they are gobbling up top Google search billing. Maybe it won't happen until long after you've been dead but shouldn't the reservoir names, not taken by notable people, eventually run out? Computer scientist Samuel Arbesman approximated how many famous people there are alive today and I think his calculation will be helpful. You see, he points out that if we allow "famous" to simply mean "being notable enough to have your own Wikipedia page", well, because there are 700,000 living people with Wikipedia pages right now, that means one out of every 10,000 people on earth today are famous. Assuming at the least that that proportion remains constant since 255 people are born every minute, that means every hour a future famous person is born. Their name destined to become primarily associated with them, not everyone else who shares their name. All of those people will be relegated to disambiguation or the post-nominal, not the famous one. Luckily, if you do the math, you'll find that even at a rate of one future famous person born every hour, it would still take dozens of millennia for most of us to expect a future famous person with our exact name to emerge. Plus names change. New ones become popular, others obsolesce, but for fun, let's not focus on names we popularly use and instead look at how many possible names there can be. The Social Security Administration allows up to 36 letters for a complete name. Now, including spaces, 27 letters filling 36 spots, with repetition allowed, means 3 sextillion possible combinations. That's more than Earth has atoms. So let's refine our limits. How many pronounceable names are possible? For that, I say we look at what Randall Munroe, the author of the fantastic 'What If?' did when asked about naming stars. If you want to give every single star in the observable universe a unique but pronounceable English name, how long would the names have to be? His approximation is really fascinating. If we define a pronounceable word as a word that contains consonant-vowel pairs, we can roughly figure that there are about 105 different such pair possibilities. 105. That's not too much different from 99. So, funny enough, there are about the same number of consonant-vowel pairs possible as there are two-digit numbers, which means we could give every star in the observable universe a sayable unique name with just 24 letters, the same number of digits it would take to just number all of them. So, the bottom line is we may each have to give up uniquely owning a word or name that's common today, but the potential number of names that can be made is really hardy. In fact, before we run out of those our species will likely evolve to communicate in a completely different way. Also, names aren't just labels. A name on a screen, a username, a handle, a screen name doesn't always act exactly like its owner. User names can travel more quickly and more widely than flesh-and-blood people and do things that their puppeteers wouldn't normally do away from the keyboard. It's called the online disinhibition effect. If you can't see the people you're interacting with and they can't see you, you're all just online hiding behind different names than usual, why hold back? I mean, clearly such a system can't be serious business. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog. Why be nice or tell the truth? The subreddit KarmaCourt investigates and uncovers people who may think that the less face-to-face nature of the Internet makes lies easier to get away with. Like this person, who posted an image suggesting that they've been single for a year but had users found out posted three months earlier a picture of my girlfriend's cat. These behaviors aren't just what humans do when they can be anonymous or can hide behind different names, these behaviors can also be caused by the names themselves. Studies have found that the username you use can impact how you behave. Your own pre-existing stereotypes and expectations of certain words, shapes, colors can be confirmed by your behavior, in the same way that studies have found NFL and NHL players play more aggressively when wearing black uniforms. Studies have also found that the more sexualized an avatar is you make someone use, the more conscious they will be of their own body image. And the more an avatar resembles you, the more correlated you watching it exercise is with you being more likely to exercise more. It's called the Proteus effect. The features of a cyberspace version of yourself, a username and avatar can actually change you, the meat space "IRL" you. Usernames and avatars then aren't just handles attached to us. Psychologically, we often interact with them as if they're friends, distinct beings we created. They help us out but they also can influence us, egg us on, dare us to do things we wouldn't normally do because they offer us protection, entertainment. Some make us feel safe, professional, funny, dangerous, attractive. We want cool ones. The cool ones make us look cool. As we go about our daily lives and vie for attention, we are more and more frequently doing so with another name and exclusively through that name only. So, it becomes quite interesting that we're not going to run out of them anytime soon. In fact, they might run out of us first and may, in many ways, run us. And as always, thanks for watching.

Are you a curious human? If so, you should check out these bespoke Vsauce Tshirts >> http://bit.ly/vsauce-merchandise-low-poly http://ift.tt/2uUCf4B

[birlcholtz]

sin bin schematics

for @queercamilla | ao3 | part of the zimbits airport au | 1.3k

“Mashkov,” Lardo says, extending her hand in greeting.

“Duan,” Tater replies, shaking it. “I like your sunglasses.”

“Thanks. They’re mandatory for members of the Samwell High Court during trials. Ransom and Holster have them too. So do Dex and Chowder. I have a pair for you too.” The sunglasses she hands to Tater are fairly simple, exactly the same as hers, and they were only like two bucks. (And got paid for with Sin Bin money.)

“You have trials?” Tater asks, putting on his new sunglasses.

“Only for multiple offenses over a short period of time. We used to have more of them when we didn’t have the Portable Sin Bin, since we couldn’t bring the usual one with us on roadies and had to tally up all the fines for when we got back. Now we only need to hold trials when all the Sin Bins are full and nobody can find a Ziploc bag to use. Or when we just ran out of Ziploc bags. Like now.”

“We probably could find, but I want to try the trial.”

“You don't have those in the NHL?”

“No. Always bring Sin Bin with us on roadies, no point.”

“Isn't it really bulky, though?”

“I carry, is no problem.”

“Yeah, I've never carried our Sin Bin beyond the bare minimum.”

“Make team carry it for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Makes sense. You fine teammates how much for taking last slice of pizza without asking?”

“Oh, pizza was never much of an issue for us, but we would fine the shit out of people for doing that with pie.”

“Bitty’s pie?”

“Yeah, there were a few brawls over the last pieces. There still are, particularly whenever Bitty makes blueberry pie. Dex and Holster always fight over it.”

“How much do you fine for pie fighting?”

“Five bucks per person. Eight if it's blueberry.”

Tater laughs. “This is not big fine for Falconers.”

“Well, yeah, you all get your NHL salaries, while we were all broke college students when we set the amounts of the fines. Besides, the number of times that people fight over pie is actually ridiculous. Dex got fined almost a hundred dollars one semester just for pie, but Nursey offered to pay pie fines for him in the future, which I think was why Dex started limiting the amount of times he got into pie fights.”

“So Nursey does not have to pay much?”

“No, Dex refused, I think it was so Nursey wouldn’t offer again.”

“Ah. I... think I understand?”

“Their dynamic is confusing.”

“Yes.”

“Um, excuse me,” Chowder says. He’s wearing his High Court Sunglasses as well, as is Dex. Ransom and Holster aren’t, but they’re not on High Court duty tonight. “Aren’t we supposed to be having a trial right now?”

“Right, right,” Lardo says. She sets down her champagne flute, the better to seem menacing. “So, let’s see. How many fines did we tally up before the ball dropped in Times Square?”

“Fifty-seven,” Dex says.

“How many after?”

“Fourteen,” Tater says.

“How many of these due to Jack Zimmermann and Eric Bittle?”

“Not all of them!” Bitty says.

“True. Dex, please read off the list of charges.”

“We have adjusted fines for whether you are on Falconers or Samwell team,” Tater adds. “No eighty-dollar fines for college students.”

Dex starts going down the bullet-pointed list, which they had been contributing to in a Google doc and only printed out for the purpose of the trial. “By the way, these aren’t in order of when they happened, since we all just added them to the document wherever we could. Here goes. Snowy, staring at phone and texting with mushy smile on face for over an hour, thirty dollars. Chowder and Farmer, kissing one second before midnight instead of exactly at midnight, five dollars each. Holster, singing Auld Lang Syne obnoxiously loudly, ten dollars. Nursey, singing Auld Lang Syne obnoxiously off-key, fifteen dollars. Dex, staring at— hold it, what?”

Chowder takes the paper. “I wrote this one down,” he says by way of explanation. “Dex, staring at Nursey singing Auld Lang Syne with an obnoxiously fond expression on his face, as opposed to the wincing that would be expected from Nursey’s singing, five dollars.” Then he hands the paper back to Dex, who rolls his eyes at Chowder before taking it and continuing. Nursey doesn’t react to the maligning of his singing voice.

“Farmer, use of a pet name for significant other in public, two dollars. Marty, letting the champagne roll around so it overflows when the bottle is opened, ten dollars. Marty, opening a bottle of champagne so that the cork hits the ceiling— which was ‘swawesome, by the way, which is why the fine is lower than usual— five dollars. Ransom and Holster, calling each other ‘bro’ for more than five sentences in a row, ten dollars each. Lardo, dropping the forks for the pie, two dollars. Tater, not drying off shoes on the welcome mat, ten dollars... And the rest are all because of Jack and Bitty.”

“That would be fifty-eight fines because of Jack and Bitty,” Lardo adds helpfully. “Even allowing for the fact that both of you get individual fines for one collaborative offense, that’s at least twenty-nine fineable offenses. How do you even do that?”

“We are getting lots of money from tonight,” Tater says. “For both Falconers and Samwell.”

“And that’s not even counting Jack and Bitty’s fines,” Lardo agrees.

“Jack and Bitty are being fined for sixteen counts of pet names, eight counts of being overly mushy where other people can hear them, four counts of PDA, and one count of disappearing for an unexplained twenty minutes while everyone else watched TV,” Dex reels off.

“Impressive,” Holster says admiringly. “When did you manage that?”

“I didn’t notice that,” Lardo says at the same time that Tater says, “When Anderson Cooper was wrapped in the shiny foil.”

“Do any of you have anything to say in your own defense?” Chowder asks the room at large. “That goes for all of us, by the way, not just Jack and Bitty. Personally, I don’t have anything to say in my own defense, but if anyone wants to argue that they’ve been unfairly fined, go for it. The floor is yours.”

There’s silence. People have tried to evade fines before, but that was before Chowder became part of the High Court of Samwell. Whatever sympathy he might have had for people getting fined excessively vanished once he became the one paying most of those excessive fines, so even if someone tries to argue with Chowder about their fine, he’ll shut them down before they can say ‘unfair.’ It’s very helpful when Lardo has to collect fines, so she always makes sure Chowder is on duty when there are trials.

“Well? What are you all waiting for? Pay up.” She starts everything off by putting her own two dollars into one of the two bowls that Bitty located in lieu of a Ziploc bag, the one labeled SAMWELL AND ALUMS. (The other one says FALCONERS AND RETIREES.) Lardo has no idea what the money in the Samwell bowl is going to, but she’s sure Dex will find a good use for it.

While everyone else lines up to pay their respective fines, and Dex corners Jack and Bitty to tell them exactly how much they each have to pay for their fines, Lardo and Tater refill their flutes of champagne and snag the best seats on the couch.

“When we were still at Samwell, the rest of the team used to say I was the head of the Samwell Mafia,” she says to Tater.

“I believe that,” he replies. “Falconers do not have a mafia, just me and whoever sees something that should be fined. We should work together. Keep an eye on each other’s teams for fines.”

“We’ll need some more Sin Bins.”

“Is no problem.”