The Man Who Built Catan

“Collectively, all the rest of our portfolio doesn’t add up to Catan,” Mayfair’s Fenlon told me. The company originally sourced all of the materials for the game from Europe, but, when demand began to take off, the manufacturers didn’t have enough wood to keep up. Mayfair expanded to American companies for more resources. Today, every box of Catan that Mayfair produces is an international affair: the dice are tooled in Denmark; the more intricate wooden pieces are done in Germany; other wood parts are made in Ohio; the cards are from Dallas; the boxes, Illinois; the cardboard, Indiana; the plastic components, Wisconsin; finally, everything gets put together on an assembly line in Illinois.

Full story here.

big moon

Rainbow!

I'll keep going, just stay by my side

I think this song is beautiful.  Crisp and simple, no tricks or bells or whistles.  All created by the artist in her home studio.  And though it's specifically about Minecraft, you can pull the lyrics out of that setting and they still work beautifully.

to mars!

Just days after the launch of India’s Mangalyaan satellite, NASA sent off its own Mars mission, five years in the making, named Maven. Its cost: $671 million. The budget of India’s Mars mission, by contrast, was just three-quarters of the $100 million that Hollywood spent on last year’s space-based hit, “Gravity.”

From this NYT piece.

WE ARE THE ROBOTS

More here

SETI

An update on the search for life on other planets.

World War One Throwdown

This is rather awesome.  A caricature map of Europe at the time of WWI.  See here for more.

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Another Sesame Street classic...man, the music in these old ones was so chaotic and interesting compared to what you would get now...

For Poky...