“Until this tournament, I never fully realized how much Nadal means to tennis. I knew he was a great player, obviously. But I’m a goner for Federer, and Nadal has often felt to me like an infuriating obstacle, a berserk dervish with the demonic power to out-frenzy Roger’s grace and lucidity. His tennis was a bludgeoning adrenaline rush, a Ramones song that lasted four hours. Had he never been born, Federer would have won the 20 majors he seemed destined for in 2007. I admired what Nadal had done, and I loved the insanity at the top of the men’s bracket. But deep down, in some atavistic corner of my sports fan’s heart, I kind of wanted him gone.”

—

Brian Phillips writes about the epic Australian Open Final between Djokovic and Nadal and manages to lay out my exact thoughts on good ol’ Rafa. Go read the rest of the article for Phillips’ apt comparisons of our tennis greats to the ancient Greek warriors of the Iliad.  (via chels)

I can’t help but agree. Were it not for Rafa, Federer would arguably be considered the greatest player of all time. The confusing thing about Federer here is that by the time Nadal began challenging for majors Roger could hardly be considered ‘past his peak’ - almost like the two had development curves that looked like a pair of Table Mountains back-to-back like a chubby Venn diagram. And then 2011 came along and Djokovic blew everything out the water, for now at least.

chels:

(via petervidani) 

future-timelines:

The Wiki

• 2035 - A research group in Wales create bacteria in the lab that form crystals which resonate with radio frequency.
• 2041 - The same group demonstrates that they can modify a percentage of the glia in a mouse brain to resonate with RF, opening up the possibility for biological radio receivers.  These glia are dubbed “radiocytes” 
• 2043 - Examining data, the researchers find proof that the mice can respond to RF as a sensory stimulus.
• 2047 - Transgenic mice pass genes for creating radiocytes on to offspring.
• 2059 - Researchers in India announce that they have a “grammar” of radio signals that mouse brains interpret as information.  At the same time they show that these signals are only perceived by the areas of the brain nearest the radio receivers.
• 2060 - Radio transmitters are implanted in some of the mice.  Within 1 week, the implanted mice are communicating with each other using the grammar discovered by the Indian team.
• 2112 - The first humans to be born with radiocytes enter school.
• 2128 - The Wiki, a human exomemory, is born when a radiocytotic teenager discovers how to store and encode knowledge in an external repository.  
• 2131 - Radiocytotic people connected to the Wiki begin spontaneously sleeping only 3 hours a night.  It is found that the presence of unlimited external storage radically improves the brain’s ability to reorganize and consolidate, reducing the need for sleep.
• 2201 - 98% of humanity alive has either been born with radiocytes or has had them implanted through stem cell therapy.  Electronic devices can be controlled by a thought.  Experience, perception, and emotion can now be encoded in The Wiki as humanity refines its new abilities. No-one remembers what it’s like to not have the sum-total of humanity’s knowledge on hand.

Following.

This might be the greatest text-only Tumblr I’ve ever read. 

What a vibrant, imaginative mind, I’ll be following this too.