Saturday five, 12/27/14.

This is up a bit late, due to the holiday, travel, and a visit with family that includes seeing my grandmother, who is now in hospice after renal failure and is not expected to live more than a few more days. She turned 100 in June and in many ways was a third parent to me, there for most of the significant events of my childhood, the person I woke up to see when I was three years old and my mother had left for the hospital during the night to give birth to my sister. I’ve known this day would come for a long time, but it hasn’t made seeing her like this any easier.

I haven’t had any ESPN content this week, but my top ten new boardgames of 2014 ranking is up for Paste. There’s some overlap with my overall top 60 boardgames ranking from November, but the Paste list includes a few I hadn’t played enough to include in the global list.

This week’s links:

• Quantum physics just got less complicated. That might be overselling it – we’re not about to start teaching it in kindergarten – but the study discussed here claims that wave-particle duality (that a particle can behave like a wave, or a wave like light can behave like a particle) is just one manifestation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
• An amazing video collage of twisted snowmen from Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson’s strip was brilliant across the board, but I don’t think I enjoyed anything as much as Calvin’s demented snow sculptures.
• This woman collected all her trash from a single year and fit it into a mason jar. I think it’s amazing that anyone could cut down on her trash production to this extent, although the woman also clearly has no kids or pets, and she must go through a lot of water to clean all of the reusable cloths she has to use. It’s still a great thought experiment – you can recycle more stuff than you think, and you can absolutely cut down on your trash with some effort. I’d even argue, based mostly on my own experience, that the 80/20 rule applies: 20% of the effort will cut down on 80% of your trash. Composting, better recycling, and smarter shopping do it pretty painlessly.
• The science behind catnip’s effect on cats. The best part here was the embedded video of big cats getting high off the stuff.
• Twitter doesn’t think these rape/death threats are harassment. I love Twitter for a lot of reasons, but their response to obvious harassment of women is inadequate if not embarrassing. The company has every right to sweep these trolls right off their service, but they hide behind a vague concept of free speech. Save that stuff for anti-government activists fighting autocratic regimes, not for anonymous cowards trying to scare women.