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Full Version: Confuse football opponents via animal kingdom + New Monopoly game celebrates women
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Want to confuse your opponents in football? Learn from the animal kingdom (sports)
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/want-t...l-kingdom/

EXCERPT: Football teams playing in stripes could learn from the animal kingdom and bamboozle their opponents – if they can run quickly enough. Scientists have conducted studies to show that species with stripes can confuse predators by appearing blurred when they move swiftly. [...] The research, published in Current Biology, showed that the mantises found it particularly hard to spot the patterned bugs with narrow stripes moving at faster speeds. This is believed to be because their stripes quickly become blurred to the predator and harder to see.

Lead author, Professor Candy Rowe, professor of Animal Behaviour and Cognition at Newcastle University explained: “We wanted to answer a puzzle that scientists have been wondering about for a while – can a pattern lower the chances that moving prey is seen by a predator? “If you’re standing still, then looking like the background is one of the best ways to not be seen, whilst having high contrast stripes is just about the worst thing – you can really stand out. For moving prey, we find that the opposite is true: stripes are much better than matching your background.

“So the answer is yes, if you’re stripy and move fast enough, then the blurring of the pattern can make it harder for the predator to spot you. While we did this experiment with praying mantises chasing rectangular bugs on a computer screen, the same principle should apply in the wild. So maybe stripes help to hide zebras running on the plains, or hoverflies flitting from flower to flower.” (MORE - details)



A New Monopoly Celebrates Women. But What About the Game’s Own Overlooked Inventor? (games)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180973106/

EXCERPT: . . . In “Ms. Monopoly,” a new version of the iconic board game that, according to the company, “celebrates women trailblazers" [...] On Tuesday, Hasbro announced the launch of game, which seeks to both spotlight women’s innovations and call attention to the gender wage gap. [...] At the start of the game, female players get more money from the banker than guys—$1,900 versus $1,500—and also collect $240 each time they pass go, rather than the usual $200. Instead of investing in real estate properties, players sink their money into inventions created by women, like “WiFi ... chocolate chip cookies, solar heating and modern shapewear.”

[...] “With all of the things surrounding female empowerment, it felt right to bring this to Monopoly in a fresh new way,” Jen Boswinkel, senior director of global brand strategy and marketing for Hasbro Gaming, tells Kelly Tyko of USA Today. “It’s giving the topic some relevancy to everyone playing it that everybody gets a turn, and this time women get an advantage at the start.”

But as Antonia Noori Farzan of the Washington Post reports, critics have been quick to point out that the game does not acknowledge Lizzie Magie, who, at the turn of the 20th century, created the game upon which Monopoly was based. In fact, Charles Darrow, the man widely credited with inventing Monopoly, copied Magie’s idea and sold it to Parker Brothers, which later became a Hasbro brand...

[...] Ironically, the game that Magie invented was anti-monopolist in sentiment. She subscribed to the principles of Henry George, an American economist who believed that “individuals should own 100 percent of what they made or created, but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone,” Pilon wrote in the New York Times in 2015. Magie’s game, which she patented in 1904, sought to spread George’s ideas about the injustices of a system that allowed landowners to grow increasingly rich off their holdings, while the working classes poured their money into rent.

It was called the Landowner’s Game, and it consisted of a rectangular board with nine spaces on each side, along with corners for the Poor House, Public Park and Jail, where you would get sent if you landed on the “Go to Jail” square. Players would move around the board, buying up various franchises, earning money and paying rent. But there were two sets of rules for the game: one “anti-monopolist,” in which all players were rewarded when wealth was generated, the other “monopolist,” in which the goal was to accrue wealth while crippling the other players. “Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior,” Pilon wrote in the Times. (MORE)
More like new Monopoly game infantilizes women. Apparently they need an advantage, instead of a fair playing field.
Lol There’s nothing “empowering” about treating women like we can’t play on equal ground as men. That we need a hand out. Kind of insulting, actually.