brian

Perhaps Donald Trump could use an imaginary tiger friend.

The beloved 1980's comic strip Calvin and Hobbes features Calvin, a loud-mouthed 6-year-old, and his imaginary tiger friend Hobbes. 

Politically-minded redditors on the subreddit Donald and Hobbes — brought together by a love of comedy, comic strips and the 2016 election — have mashed up the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, with the classic comic.

Strangely enough, it's not hard to imagine Trump as a 6-year old.

Image: reddit, drforester

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More about Watercooler, Funny, Republican National Convention, Parody, and Politics

Peanuts by Charles Schulz for July 25, 2016

“Ghostbusters,” a revival of the 1984 original, hits theaters nationwide on Friday. As a reboot of a beloved, male-led science fiction film from the 1980s with a female-led cast, the reboot has proved somewhat controversial in the circles you would expect. But regardless of the quality of the film, it serves as a perfect demonstration of why internet movie ratings are inherently a problem.

Most fundamentally, single-number aggregations — like those used by sites such as Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and IMDb — are a pitiful way of explaining the diverse views of critics. More specifically, a vocal portion of men on the internet — shall we say — go out of their way to make their voices heard when it comes to judging entertainment aimed at women, and that appears to be happening with the new “Ghostbusters.”

But let’s back up. Last year, as part of an investigation into the inflated ratings on Fandango’s website, I looked at the world of online movie ratings in general. The moral of this story: Each site that aggregates ratings and reviews has its own skew one way or another, and it’s up to the user to determine which heuristic most accurately matches what they’d consider an ideal rating. (Also, don’t trust always-positive movie reviews from sites trying to use that review to sell you movie tickets. That, too.)

Here were the ratings curves for some of the most popular aggregators when I did this analysis in October:

Earlier this year, I also looked at IMDb’s user rating skew for television shows. Essentially, male users were more likely to rate television shows with a female-heavy audience lower than female users would rate male-centric television lower. Men were tanking the ratings of shows aimed at women.

But this “Ghostbusters” thing? It lays bare so, so much of what we’re investigating when it comes to the provenance and reliability of internet ratings.¹⁵ Namely, they’re inconsistent, easily manipulated and probably not worth half the stock we put in them.¹⁶ Here are a few stats I collected early Thursday for the new “Ghostbusters” movie:

• IMDb average user rating: 4.1 out of 10, of 12,921 reviewers
• IMDb average user rating among men: 3.6 out of 10, of 7,547 reviewers
• IMDb average user rating among women: 7.7 out of 10, of 1,564 reviewers

The movie isn’t even out in theaters as I’m writing this, but over 12,000 people have made their judgment. Male reviewers outnumber female reviewers nearly 5 to 1 and rate “Ghostbusters” 4 points lower, on average.

But it’s not just IMDb, there are serious disagreements on “Ghostbusters” across the whole universe of ratings aggregation sites:

• Metacritic score of 61 out of 100, based on 41 critics.
• Of the reviews aggregated by Metacritic, 24 were positive, 16 were mixed, 1 was negative.
• Tomatometer score of 74 percent “fresh” based on 138 reviews.
• Of those reviews, the average rating was 6.5 out of 10.
• Looking only at top critics, it had a Tomatometer score of 54 percent “fresh” based on 35 reviews.
• Of top reviewers, average rating was 6.3 out of 10.

What I find fascinating here — probably because it’s related to a larger story about Rotten Tomatoes I’m working on — is the difference between the average review on Rotten Tomatoes and the Tomatometer score. Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer uses a simple, binary heuristic to aggregate reviews: Did the reviewer like the movie or not. It doesn’t matter if they somewhat liked a movie or absolutely loved it, and it doesn’t matter if they left a theater somewhat dissatisfied or nauseated with loathing. The review is sorted into either the “fresh” or “rotten” bin regardless of intensity, whereas Metacritic — in addition to some other funky modeling — does try to capture those degrees of intensity.

So even though 74 percent of critics enjoyed the film, according to Rotten Tomatoes, “Ghostbusters” has an average score of 6.5 out of 10, so reviewers clearly didn’t love the film. A similar issue, only in the opposite direction, is apparent in the site’s top critics score. “Top critics” is a somewhat exclusive category on Rotten Tomatoes, encompassing prolific and experienced critics at top publications with high circulations. Contrary to the hoi polloi of the Tomatometer, about half of reviews of “Ghostbusters” from “top critics” were negative, but it earned a middling-but-positive 6.3 out of 10, on average.¹⁷

So, do you have a preconceived notion of how good or bad the “Ghostbusters” movie is going to be? Of course you do, you clicked on an article with “Ghostbusters” in the title. Well, there’s plenty of statistics to choose from here. But looking at them all, here’s the picture we get:

Based on the IMDb reviews, a lot of men on the internet (who may or may not have actually seen the film) really hate the new “Ghostbusters.” A lot of women on the internet (who may or may not have actually seen the film) seem pretty into it. Based on the Metacritic score and the average Rotten Tomatoes scores, “Ghostbusters,” like most summer movies, is merely a mediocre-to-good film, critically speaking. And based on the Rotten Tomatoes scores for top critics, professional critics are split on whether it’s worth seeing. But based on the larger pool of critics, three out of four of them think it’s worth a ticket.

I, like the vast majority of people on earth, have not yet seen the new “Ghostbusters” film. And to be honest, I don’t have a lot of skin in the game — based on my birth date alone, “Pokemon Go” is a bit more in line with manipulating my nostalgia for money than busting ghosts is.

The point is that this is a hugely instructive case for why internet ratings need to be approached with way more nuance than they currently are.¹⁸ People put far too much faith in numbers that are preliminary, decontextualized and, in the end, oversimplified.

One of the most surprising things about the Apollo 11 guidance computer source code isn’t just the sheer size of it, but rather the amount of in-jokes that scientists included with it.

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A 300-pound security robot at at the Stanford Shopping Center knocked down and ran over a 16-month-old boy. The parents of the injured boy are understandably pissed, claiming the autonomous machine is dangerous.

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Reinhard Radermacher has a vision: A person walks into a room hot and sweaty after exercising, and somewhere in the dark, tucked in a corner, a small robot notices and lights up. It moves forward and speaks. “I see you’re coming home from the gym,” it says in a pleasant voice. “I will give you maximum cooling now.” […]

One good flick of the wrist and a Frisbee is marooned on the neighbor’s roof. Save your precious energy with these slightly crappy homemade throwing discs. The post Got Cornstarch and Bacon Grease? You Can Make Your Own Homemade Frisbee appeared first on WIRED.

Since people now tend to keep our cars longer than we used to, there are still plenty of model year 2001, 2002, and 2003 cars from Honda and Acura still on the road. Recent tests show that each time one of the vehicles’ airbags deploys, there’s up to a 50% chance that it will rupture, posing a serious risk to drivers and passengers.

We know that hundreds of millions of vehicles out there have potentially hazardous airbags, so what’s the rush with these Honda and Acura cars, SUVS, and minivans? In an announcement today, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shared recent test results that eight out of the ten deaths in the United States attributed to Takata airbags occurred in Honda vehicles from this period.

Takata performed the tests at NHTSA’s request, and they showed that airbags ruptured as frequently as 50% of the time under test conditions. Ideally, you hope that a vehicle’s airbag never deploys, but it could be a serious problem for passengers if one of these does.

The vehicles were previously recalled between five and eight years ago, and most had their airbags replaced with a less dangerous model back then. However, NHTSA reports that there are still 313,000 of them still on the roads that haven’t been fixed, and the agency wants to get word out to their owners to repair them right away.

The U.S. Transportation Secretary, Anthony Foxx, is not messing around, saying in a statement that “folks should not drive these vehicles unless they are going straight to a dealer to have them repaired immediately, free of charge.”

Here’s the list of models that are in need of immediate repairs.

• 2001-2002 Honda Civic
• 2001-2002 Honda Accord
• 2002-2003 Acura TL
• 2002 Honda CR-V
• 2002 Honda Odyssey
• 2003 Acura CL
• 2003 Honda Pilot

Vehicles that have spent all or most of their time in warm, humid regions are the most susceptible to the defect, but all cars from these models are under recall. If an airbag from one of these models deploys, it poses a serious risk of rupturing and injuring the driver and passengers with shrapnel, which can kill them even when the crash that caused the airbag to deploy wouldn’t have.

NHTSA: New test data on particular subset of Takata air bag inflators shows substantially higher risk [NHTSA]

FURTHER READING:
Takata Airbag Recall – Everything You Need to Know [Consumer Reports]

Beware this new Los Angeles attraction if you’re afraid of heights. I know I am because nope.

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On a recent business trip, I asked the concierge at my hotel for advice about where to go running. “Are you training for a marathon?” he asked. Nope. I’m racing 5Ks, I told him. He gave me a puzzled look that said, but you look like a serious runner.

It’s an idea that has become fixed in our culture: The marathon is a serious race. A 5K is a “fun run,” a jog, a walk in the park. I get it. Five kilometers, or 3.1 miles, is a distance that almost any healthy person can complete without too much training. As running races go, it’s a nice start.

But not all 5Ks are strolls. The annual Carlsbad 5000 in California draws top runners and sometimes world records. And no one would give a pat on the head to the runners lining up for the 5,000-meter races at the Rio Olympics and say, “Enjoy your jog — someday you’ll be fast enough for the marathon!” (At the last Olympics, Mo Farah and Meseret Defar won the men’s and women’s events in 13 minutes, 41.66 seconds and 15 minutes, 4.25 seconds, respectively.)

“Everyone thinks the marathon is the Holy Grail, when a lot of people should really be doing the 5K,” Jason Karp, an exercise physiologist and running coach, told me in an interview several years ago. Some people aren’t suited to long distances — their natural talents tend toward power and speed rather than endurance. And if you’re exercising for health and fitness, several studies suggest that moderate mileage, which is typical in a training plan for 5Ks, might provide a better way to get there.

At the American College of Sports Medicine meeting in Boston this month, Paul Williams, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, presented findings from the National Runners’ and Walkers’ Health Study showing that running has a long list of health benefits — including reductions in BMI, improved cholesterol, reduced cancer risk and decreases in gallbladder disease, cataracts, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s mortality and respiratory disease. But here’s the thing: More isn’t always better. At the same session, Duck-chul Lee of Iowa State University presented data showing that after a certain point, additional mileage provided diminishing returns.

Williams’s research also found that the benefits of running might start to disappear at higher distances. People who exceed 30 miles per week may be at some increased risk of mortality relative to people who are at lower distances, Williams said, particularly if they have pre-existing health conditions. But it’s important to keep these findings in perspective: Among heart attack survivors Williams studied, runners never had a greater risk of a fatal heart attack than people who were sedentary.

Training for and racing in 5Ks isn’t just a reasonable way to improve health; it might provide more reward per effort than training for a marathon. When FiveThirtyEight contributor Dan Engber recently wrote at Slate that the marathon is a dangerous, expensive and meaningless pursuit, my initial reaction was annoyance — why do people get such smug enjoyment out of disparaging our sport? Yet I concede that he has a point about the glorification of the marathon. The race isn’t the only means to health, fitness or even bad-assedry. (Ethiopian runner Muktar Edris just ran a 5K in 12:59.43 — that’s three 4:10 miles strung together.) Typical 5K training plans call for something on the order of 10 to 30 miles of running per week or the equivalent in timed runs — in the optimal range for health benefits.

Keeping mileage on the lower end comes with another bonus — a reduced risk of getting hurt. “Injuries are typically related to training volume,” said Michael Joyner, a sports physician and exercise researcher at the Mayo Clinic. That’s not to say that you can’t get injured training for a 5K — but it’s less likely, especially if you take care to gradually increase your mileage and intensity.

So by focusing on the 5K, you’re optimizing health benefits and minimizing injuries, and if you’re deliberate about your training, you can maximize your fitness gains too. Training seriously for the 5K will get you close to your biological potential for aerobic fitness, Joyner said. “Seriously is the key though,” he said. The secret is high-intensity interval training, or HIIT — short periods of very hard efforts interspersed with easier recovery bouts. Studies show that these high intensity workouts produce greater improvements in VO₂ max than the kind of long, slow workouts emphasized in many marathon training plans.³⁰ Two-time U.S. 5,000-meter champion Lauren Fleshman has published a list of a dozen 5K-friendly HIIT workouts at Strava, most of which require no track, just a stopwatch.

Most HIIT workouts are short, and that means you don’t have to get up at dawn to fit them into your schedule. “The bummer thing about marathons is that you have to put aside so much personal time to train,” said Fleshman, who ran the New York City Marathon in 2011 and finished 16th with a time of 2:37:22. “The 5K is so much more sustainable — it’s a moderate event that you can bring intensity to, without it wreaking havoc on your life.” You can train and still spend time with your family or friends, and you might even have enough energy left to enjoy their company.

Still aren’t convinced? Consider this: Entry fees for a 5K are typically under $50 (I’ve done three this year that cost $25 or less), whereas the Boston Marathon costs $180 to enter. The international Park Run program holds timed 5Ks at local parks for free.

You could spend four or more months training for a single race, or you can join Fleshman’s 5K revolution. Choose the 5K and you can easily race every weekend (even my tiny community has a 5K somewhere nearby most weekends). And if one race goes poorly, you can try again the next weekend. It’s a more sustainable plan. Rather than focusing on a one-time event, your training can become a normal part of your life — one that complements, rather than overtakes it. You may not get the bragging rights of having run 26.2 miles, but as your times drop and your pacing improves, you’ll get plenty of satisfaction. Instead of running to finish the race, you can run to master it.

This is Strength in Numbers, my column exploring the science of sports and athleticism. Got feedback, suggestions or a news tip? Email me, leave suggestions in the comments section or tweet to me @CragCrest.

Meals on Wheels is looking for summer volunteers. We asked one of their volunteers to share her story to give our readers an idea of how they can make a difference. 

For three years, I was a meal delivery volunteer with the same route. Every Wednesday, I would save my favorite client, Ms. Rice, for last so we could sit and talk. She called me Merry Sunshine, and she loved Andrea Bocelli. Once a week, she would have his DVD ready with a new song to share. She would walk up to the TV, touch the screen, and sometimes tear up. She taught me so much about music and life.

Delivering meals to older adults and persons with disabilities opened my eyes to the needs of the community. So many people have no friends or family to support them, but still have so much to share. I’m very grateful to Meals on Wheels and More for helping bring food and social connection to people in our community who are living with hunger and silence. I love MOWAM so much, I started working here.

We have so many wonderful volunteers and without their support we would never be able to reach so many people who are in need of help. With the summer upon us, we have lost many of our regular volunteers to vacations and other summer plans, leaving us in need for substitute volunteers to help out for the season.

Substitute drivers are responsible for delivering meals to our homebound clients when the regular volunteer driver is unable to take the route. Much like a substitute teacher, the substitute driver does not have a permanent weekly route, but is called as needed. If you would like to join our family, please sign up online at  or email us at volunteer@mealsonwheelsandmore.org.

• Make a difference in your neighborhood
• We have pick-up sites all over the Austin area
• Delivering takes less than an hour

•  

The post Meals on Wheels Looking For Volunteers appeared first on 365 Things to Do in Austin, TX.

So this edition of Austin Found represents an abrupt change of pace.

To toast Auri Auber‘s tasty story, “Paula’s Texas Grapefruit could make paloma your summer drink,” we dipped into the archives to find what we expected to be generous historical art of the pink-hearted fruit grown deep in the Valley.

Instead what we discovered was a bit more odd: “Weslaco’s annual Birthday Party fashion show. Organized by the Chamber of Commerce to highlight the fruit and vegetables grown in the Rio Grande Valley, area citizens created and modeled clothing made from local fruit, vegetables, and flowers.”

We couldn’t resist the outrageous apparel from the 1930s and ’40s. One could draw all sorts of sociological conclusions from their efforts — and urge to elitism — but we’ll let the dresses speak for themselves.

 

Contemporary Christian pop music might be taking Psalm 100’s command to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord” a little too far. Jamie Grace’s “Beautiful Day” was one of the top 10 Christian songs of 2014 and has a typically peppy chorus: “This feeling can’t be wrong / I’m about to get my worship on / Take me away / It’s a beautiful day.” Switch it out for Pharrell’s “Happy,” and a congregation might not be able to tell the difference.

The upbeat lyrics of “Beautiful Day” aren’t exceptional. I took a look at the last five years of Billboard’s year-end top 50 Christian songs²⁵ to see whether Christian pop is unrelentingly cheerful. I looked at pairs of concepts across the entire collection of lyrics²⁶ (life and death, grace and sin, etc.)²⁷ and calculated the ratio of positive to negative words. For every pair I checked, positive words were far more common than negative ones.

There were 2.5 times as many mentions of “grace” as “sin” in the songs’ lyrics. Other pairs were even more lopsided: There were more than eight mentions of “life” for every instance of “death,” and “love” was more than seven times as common as “fear.” (For the record, 1 John 4:18 — “perfect love casts out fear” — is advice for spiritual formation, not lyrics writing.) Parishioners may find too much positive language dispiriting. When Christian pop songs and hymns are “excessively positive or wholly positive,” they often “come across as cotton candy and inauthentic,” said Richard Beck, a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University and the author of several books on the intersection between theology and psychology.

But Christian music hasn’t always been so one-note. I wanted to compare the sentiments of modern songs with those of an earlier tradition of American Christian music: shape note.²⁸ Shape note was the popular music of its day, according to filmmaker Matt Hinton, a former religion professor at Morehouse College and the co-creator of “Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp,” a documentary about modern shape-note singers. Shape note is named for the way the sheet music is written, using shapes to make sight-reading easier. It was commonly sung across the American South in the mid-1800s and is still sung today by a mix of Christians and folk-music enthusiasts.²⁹

For most of the pairs of concepts, the shape-note hymns also had more positively associated words than negative ones, but the shape-note songs aren’t as unremittingly positive as the contemporary songs.

Hinton sees the darker themes of shape note as integral to Christian worship. Mixing in negative language makes it easier to tell the positive story of salvation, Hinton said. He sees shape-note texts as placing “a profound emphasis upon grace.” And because of that emphasis on grace, “there’s an emphasis on the reality of sin,” Hinton said.

Beck agrees and identifies one group of Christians who are particularly poorly served by uniformly upbeat themes in worship: “Winter Christians,” a group that Beck describes as having a relationship with God that is more touched by pain, distance or doubt. They can’t recognize themselves in the “Walt Disney-fication” of contemporary Christian music, Beck said, and when their experiences with Christianity aren’t reflected in hymns, they tend to assume that there’s something “wrong or diseased about who they are.” But Winter Christians aren’t alien to Christianity, Beck said: The Bible’s psalms of complaint reflect their struggles.

David W. Stowe, author of “No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism,” said that Christian pop wasn’t so “Jesus is my boyfriend-y” when it first began borrowing from secular pop music. In the 1960s and ’70s, Christian bands started to bring amps and drum sets into worship services but still included somber themes in their songs. In the Cold War period, singing about death and the Last Judgment didn’t put Christian singers too far outside the mainstream. Secular pop music, created under the specter of nuclear war, also had apocalyptic themes. But when that secular pop music moved on from this fear, so did the Christian music, Stowe said.

Sunny music, untouched by fear or doubt, may make it harder for congregations to lift every voice — including those of Winter Christians — and sing.

CORRECTION (June 4, 2016, 10:15 a.m.): A previous version of this article misstated the New Testament book that was the source of the phrase “perfect love casts out fear.” It comes from the First Epistle of John, known as 1 John, not the Gospel of John.

In early May, I asked FiveThirtyEight readers to send in their wedding reception set lists, and good God, did you deliver. I received 163 playlists¹⁵ with 9,281 songs among them.

As a result, I’m pleased to introduce FiveThirtyEight’s ultimate wedding playlist, based on the most popular songs among the reception set lists people sent in:

The ultimate wedding playlist

	SONG		SET LIST APPEARANCES
1	Hey Ya!	69	–
2	I Wanna Dance With Somebody	57	–
3	Uptown Funk	55	–
4	Shout	54	–
5	Crazy In Love	50	–
6	Don’t Stop Believin’	45	–
7	Billie Jean	44	–
7	Get Lucky	44	–
7	Twist and Shout	44	–
10	Shut Up and Dance	43	–
11	September	41	–
11	Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough	41	–
13	Yeah!	40	–
14	I Want You Back	39	–
14	You Make My Dreams	39	–
16	Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)	38	–
17	Sweet Caroline	36	–
18	Happy	34	–
18	We Found Love	34	–
20	Call Me Maybe	33	–
20	Ignition (Remix)	33	–

Before we dive into the data, let’s go back to those responses, because they were really something else. There were winery weddings and ski lodge weddings, destination weddings and barn weddings. There were big weddings, small weddings, straight weddings, same-sex weddings, secular weddings and big church weddings. I heard from the top live wedding band in California — all three of them. I received playlists designed for Polish weddings, Indian weddings, French-Canadian weddings and Brazilian weddings, along with the necessary musical additions for weddings in Buffalo, New York. I heard from someone who distributed my analysis of the proper rate of descent during “Shout” at his nuptials, which was pretty rad. I had someone send me “The Rains of Castamere” from an anonymous email account, which as a “Game of Thrones” nut I should have seen coming. One person sent me a 20-song playlist composed entirely of “Rock Lobster,” which is a far longer song than you likely recall. My heart was warmed by all the stories that couples sent in and then re-frosted when I saw how few of them played “Danza Kuduro.”

And the variety of responses really came through in the data. Even though the list of the most popular overall songs suggests a consensus, there was far from total homogeneity. There were 3,358 unique songs in this set. The top 359 songs accounted for just half of the plays. The point: Wedding playlists consist of a core of songs that appear very regularly, plus several more unusual songs that are informed by the choices of the couple and — based on what people told me in their emails — the often emphatic recommendations of family.

It’s very much the same way with the artists:

Top wedding playlist artists

	ARTIST		SET LIST APPEARANCES
1	Michael Jackson	202	–
2	Beyoncé	130	–
3	The Beatles	120	–
4	Stevie Wonder	108	–
5	Outkast	94	–
6	Queen	88	–
7	Rihanna	85	–
8	Van Morrison	74	–
9	The Jackson 5	73	–
10	Justin Timberlake	71	–
10	Whitney Houston	71	–
12	Daft Punk	69	–
13	Prince	64	–
14	Pitbull	63	–
15	Lady Gaga	59	–
15	Mark Ronson	59	–
15	Usher	59	–
18	Journey	58	–
19	The Isley Brothers	57	–
20	Elvis Presley	52	–
21	Earth, Wind & Fire	50	–
21	Frank Sinatra	50	–
21	Kanye West	50	–
21	The Temptations	50	–
25	The Rolling Stones	49	–
26	Daryl Hall & John Oates	48	–
26	Madonna	48	–
28	David Bowie	47	–
29	Jay Z	46	–
30	Flo Rida	45	–
30	Taylor Swift	45	–
32	Walk the Moon	44	–
33	Katy Perry	43	–
33	Sam Cooke	43	–
35	R. Kelly	42	–
36	Billy Joel	40	–
36	LMFAO	40	–
36	Neil Diamond	40	–
39	The Black Eyed Peas	39	–
40	The B-52s	38	–
41	Bruce Springsteen	37	–
41	Kesha	37	–
43	Carly Rae Jepsen	36	–
44	Elton John	35	–
44	Miley Cyrus	35	–
44	Missy Elliott	35	–
47	Notorious B.I.G.	34	–
47	The Beach Boys	34	–
47	The Cure	34	–

Michael Jackson appears most often, but even that understates his essential role in wedding dance parties given that the Jackson 5 are No. 9 on the list.

Just as important as the stuff that gets played, though, is the material that couples make unambiguously clear will not be played under any circumstances. We didn’t get “do not play” lists from everyone, so take this with a grain of salt, but a few trends appeared. Line dances are a big presence: Guess some people got burned by the “Cha-Cha Slide” and don’t want to mentally go back there. Other polarizing songs include Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” “Sweet Caroline” and the detestable “Blurred Lines,” as well as the entire catalogs of Dave Matthews Band,¹⁶ Maroon 5¹⁷ and the Village People.¹⁸ Hey, it’s your party.

There are several distinct eras evident in the data. You’ve got your Motown and oldies: “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours),” by Stevie Wonder; “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell; and “At Last,” by Etta James. There are hits from the 1970s and 1980s, including Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” — the song with the most interesting popularity trajectory in pop music¹⁹ — and the B-52s’ “Love Shack.” There’s a robust contemporary contingent — “Uptown Funk,” “Shut Up and Dance,” “Happy” and “Shake It Off” are hot right now — plus some established modern icons, including “Get Lucky,” “Ignition (Remix),” “Hey Ya!,” “Single Ladies” and “Yeah!”

One thing this data doesn’t tell us is how wedding playlists have changed over the decades. When new songs join the canon every year, we don’t extend receptions to accommodate them: There’s a finite amount of dance floor time, and all we’ve got is a snapshot here. Still, I am endlessly curious about how these generic set lists would change over time.

My first thought was that different songs get phased out survival-of-the-fittest style. In 10 years’ time, perhaps “Low” will be the sole vestige of 2007, and its contemporaries — “Cupid Shuffle,” “Paper Planes” and “Electric Feel” — will be lost to time. But then I saw the distribution of release years, and I contrived a new theory.

There are peaks centering on the mid-1960s, the early 1980s and (obviously) the last few years. Now, I don’t have any hard proof for this theory besides [expressively waves hand at that chart], but here’s what I think is causing the funky trimodal distribution above: Everyone at the wedding — the couple, their parents, their parents’ parents — gets a few songs from when they were in their late teens and early 20s. Let’s do some back-of-the-napkin math. According to the U.S. census, the median age at first marriage for the bride is about 27, so for a 2016 wedding, we can approximate that she was born around 1989. That means her parents would have gotten married in the late 1980s — let’s just say 1986. Mom would have been 22 or so back then based on the census data, which would place her birth around 1964. That would put the 2016 bride’s grandparents’ wedding around the early 1960s, when the median marriage age for women was 20.

So it isn’t so much that “‘Uptown Funk’ will be absent from weddings within 10 years,” but rather “‘Uptown Funk’ may be absent from weddings within 10 years, but it could make a hell of a comeback in 25 years when the 2016 couple’s offspring starts getting married.”

In the end, receptions are another reflection of the whole point of weddings: starting something new and uncertain and kind of frightening, but beginning it in something traditional and established and fundamentally familiar. As the old saying goes, “something old, something new, something borrowed, to the window, to the wall, ’til the sweat … [redacted],” or some crap like that.

The top 200 are here:

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It’s the oldest laugh in sports: Some poor schmoe takes a sports ball to the crotch, keels over and, once we’re reasonably sure no lasting damage has been done, the TV announcers deadpan some dad jokes while the camera pans around to giggling teammates. It’s as much a familiar sports yuk as other not-all-that-uncommon oddities, like a field player on the mound or the fat guy touchdown, only with funnier GIFs.

At least, that’s how things work when the hit comes in a relatively low-stakes setting. But what happens when the stakes are raised? And just as important, when reporters are forced to write about sportsmen kicking each other in the nuts, what do they write? This week has provided some answers.

In the hours after Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals, the entire NBA-watching universe found itself poring over various angles of Draymond Green kicking Steven Adams right in the penis. Green was at risk of being suspended for Game 4, and suddenly the punchline was vital to the outcome of the NBA playoffs.²⁸

Just as suddenly, reporters had to describe what had happened. Different outlets have different comfort levels when writing about the crotch. The New York Times, for example, threw idiomatic English out the door on first reference: “Exhibit A was that Green picked up a flagrant-1 foul — while hacked in the act of shooting — with 5 minutes 57 seconds left in the half by flailing a leg between those of Steven Adams, who wound up doubled over.” The New York Daily News, writing after the situation had resolved itself, was less weighed down by compunction: “Green will not be suspended for kicking Thunder center Steven Adams in the nuts during Game 3 of the Western Conference finals on Sunday, the league indicated in a release.”

Clearly, a more thorough linguistic examination is in order. Out of practicality, when searching for the terms used by news outlets to describe the incident, I limited the search to online articles, and not broadcast or radio. I used Google’s advanced search function to look for articles in the last week about Adams or Bismack Biyombo, who was punched in the genitals by Dahntay Jones in the Eastern Conference Finals the night before Adams crumpled, and counted up who wrote what.

The sample includes articles from mainstream sports news sites such as ESPN, Yahoo, CBS Sports, Fox Sports and — for strictly liberal-media, East-Coast-bias reasons — a few of the New York tabloids. I threw in some old media standbys (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press) as a control group, as well as general sports blogs like SB Nation and Bleacher Report for more or less the opposite effect. I also sought out the most partial participants: local newspapers for each team, plus dedicated blogs for each team — Daily Thunder (the TrueHoop Network’s blog for the Thunder), Golden State of Mind (SB Nation’s for the Warriors) and Deadspin, a Warriors fan blog based in New York City.²⁹

Here it is, in table form:

He kicked him where?

PHRASE	CBS SPORTS	S.I.	ESPN	FOX	OLD MEDIA*	NEW MEDIA*	ALL OTHERS	TOTAL
“Groin”	22	19	18	15	9	23	42	–
“Below the belt”	4	1	2	4	0	2	4	–
“Nuts”	0	0	0	1	0	5	9	–
“Low Blow”	6	0	1	0	0	3	4	–
“Private area”	5	1	0	1	0	0	5	–
“Balls”	0	0	0	0	0	6	3	–
“Between the legs”	0	3	0	0	0	4	2	–
“Dick”	0	0	0	0	0	8	0	–
“Groin Area”	1	0	5	0	0	0	0	–
“Crotch”	1	0	0	0	0	2	2	–
“Junk”	0	0	0	0	0	4	1	–
“Nether region”	1	0	1	1	0	0	2	–
“Midsection”	1	0	0	0	1	2	0	–
“Penis”	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	–
Other phrases	8	2	2	4	1	13	41	–

*Old media: NY Times, WSJ, AP, Reuters. *New media: Deadspin, SB Nation, Bleacher Report

In 96 articles, totaling a little more than 50,000 words, “groin” was used 148 times across headlines, body and photo captions. Of course, in sports, groin injuries can mean something very different from your basic knee to the crotch. So at best, this creates unnecessary ambiguity in order to demur from coarser language. The next most frequently used was some form of “below the belt” with 17 appearances, followed by “nuts” with 15, “low blow” with 14, a few variations of “private parts” totaling 12, “between the legs” with 10 and “balls” with nine. “Other” variations appeared 71 times, though this number is heavily skewed by a single Yahoo article that used 30 non-standard variations. This category includes a wide range of phrases — “nads” and “cobblers” and “Adams’s apples” alongside recitations of Green’s own softening quote, in which he repeatedly referred to the penis area as “down there.”

But the taxonomy of dong euphemism goes beyond basic totals. ESPN, for instance, is almost uniformly “groin” and “groin area,” while CBS clusters around “below the belt” and “low blow” and SB Nation is heavy on “between the legs.” Deadspin carries both “dick” and “balls,” frequently daisying the two as a complex noun.

Omission is just as much a function of the editorial hand as diction. In six articles appearing on NewsOK.com and Daily Thunder — both Thunder-leaning publications — some term for genitals was used 21 times; in six on SFChronicle.com and Golden State of Mind — Warriors rags — there were 14 mentions.

Perhaps most concerning, the word “penis” appeared just once, in an SB Nation article; the lone appearance of “testicles” came from a CBS podcast teaser; “scrotum” appeared once, pluralized. Any of these, and many of the others, would be preferable to “groin.”

CORRECTION (May 24, 5:45 p.m.): A previous version of this article misidentified the publishing network affiliated with the Daily Thunder blog. It is part of the TrueHoop Network, which is owned by ESPN, and is not an SB Nation blog.

It's a simple tool, but it's wildly effective at granting a new perspective on the size and shape of the world's various land masses. The post Fascinating App Shows You How Misleading Maps Can Be appeared first on WIRED.

Tyrannosaurus rex is the most extensively studied fossil creature ever known. Every year, new research is added to the towering list of papers that try to draw new secrets from old bones and dispute what others have said before. This ongoing conversation has given us a glimpse into how T. rex lived.

Paleontologists have extracted a slew of tyrannosaur secrets from old bones: T. rex went through a teenage growth spurt, packing on almost 5 pounds a day until it reached its full stature by age 20; it started reproducing by 18 years of age; it walked at 6 mph and ran at 15 to 25 mph (far slower than the fictional speed demon chasing the Jeep in “Jurassic Park”); when it caught up to prey, it had a maximum bite force of 12,800 pounds, the most powerful of any terrestrial predator; its neck muscles were estimated to be strong enough that it could have thrown a 110-pound chunk of meat about 15 feet into the air before catching it.¹⁶ I could go on — it’s estimated that T. rex could see about six times as far as an animal with eyes just 3 feet off the ground — but let’s leave it there.

Despite all that, much remains unknown about this famous flesh-ripper. For example, paleontologists are still trying to figure out how T. rex went about getting its daily bread.

At first glance, the question “What did Tyrannosaurus rex eat?” would seem simple enough to answer. A dinosaur whose name translates to tyrant lizard king must have been able to gobble up anything it wanted, and a mouth bristling with thick, serrated teeth makes it clear that meat was always on the menu. The tri-horned Triceratops and the duck-billed Edmontosaurus are the traditional tyrannosaur favorites in artistic renderings of the past, with Hollywood throwing in a few cowardly lawyers for good measure. But regardless of what T. rex consumed, these visions of the dinosaur skirt around the edges of a persistent mystery in the Cretaceous celebrity’s day-to-day — how did a 40-foot-long, 9-ton carnivore get enough meat to fuel its hot-running body?

From the time the first known skeleton was described by paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1905, T. rex has been considered the ultimate apex predator. Nothing was bigger or more ferocious. When the legs of the first T. rex ever found were put on display at the American Museum of Natural History in December 1906, The New York Times wrote that the owner of those fossilized gams must have been “the prize-fighter of antiquity,” adding speed to an animal “who ran with great agility on his two hind feet and could play frightful havoc with his savage canine teeth.”

And that’s the way it stayed for decades, up until 1994, when paleontologist Jack Horner took a swipe at the popular dinosaur by suggesting that T. rex was nothing but a filthy, lazy scavenger. This kicked off a long and, to some paleontologists, tiresome controversy about whether T. rex was an active predator or subsisted only on rotting flesh. Paleontologists eventually found solid evidence that the dinosaur caught live prey as well as gorged on carrion when the opportunity arose. Healed wounds from tyrannosaur bites and bones bearing frightful punctures from feeding told the gory tale. Yet the question remained as to how much of its daily life T. rex spent trying to ambush prey versus sniff out what was already dead.

Given that time travel and genetically engineered tyrannosaurs are still in the realm of science fiction, researchers have tried to find alternate routes to envision how T. rex would have behaved. That’s what led Trinity College Dublin ecology graduate student Kevin Healy and his colleagues to model just how a full-grown T. rex would have fared if the dinosaur was restricted to a diet of dead meat.

Short a living T. rex to study, Healy and his collaborators instead created a virtual landscape where about 8 pounds (4 kilograms) of meat would randomly appear. “We then let loose different-sized theropods on the landscape, ranging from 1 kg to 15,000 kg, with simple foraging rules that make them move towards food items, eat until stomach capacity is full, move away if a bigger individual arrives, and so on,” Healy said in an email. With each dinosaur’s estimated metabolic rate and daily needs in mind, Healy and his colleagues were looking to see how each would fare on a diet of easy, dead meals.

For an adult T. rex, the stakes were high. “A 6-ton T. rex,” Healy said, “would need the same daily calories as 80 people” on a diet of 2,500 calories per day. That translates to about 140 kilograms of meat, which the virtual T. rex had half a day to track down in the model. It did not go well. “It costs so much to move around the huge mass of an individual,” Healy said, “that the payoff when they do find a carcass would be pretty small in comparison.” He said the much smaller, juvenile T. rex were more in the “Goldilocks zone” where searching for meat was likelier to pay off. In general, though, grown-up T. rex were just too big to live like vultures. They certainly had the equipment to dismantle any carcass they happened across, but a T. rex the size of the Field Museum’s famous SUE couldn’t just wait for a meal. She’d have to make her own luck by ambushing thick-skinned prey.

University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz Jr., who has made a career learning everything there is to know about tyrannosaurs, cautioned that “the kind of broad-stroke ecological energy studies” that Healy and colleagues performed “have to be taken with pretty significant error bars.” It’s not as if dinosaurs were optimized only for hunting or scavenging, or even finding food. “They need to function in all walks of life,” Holtz said, “and thus we wouldn’t expect them to exactly track mathematical models that concern only a single function.” Nevertheless, Holtz said, the big-picture conclusion for T. rex seems to fit. The uncertainty of finding scattered dinosaur carcasses would prevent the evolution of a supergiant scavenger. T. rex had to hunt to survive.

There’s more that remains mysterious about T. rex than its feeding habits. For starters, Holtz said, no one knows how much T. rex snoozed. “Big hypercarnivores such as big cats do spend a lot of time sleeping,” Holtz said, so it’s possible that T. rex did the same. And what about their sense of smell? A 2011 study by paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky and colleagues tracked the proportion of the brain devoted to processing smell, finding that a significant part of tyrannosaurs’ brains was dedicated to interpreting scents, but precisely how sensitive T. rex would have been to smells is difficult to work out.

All of this helps to revive T. rex not as a Spielbergian monster, but as a real animal. The dinosaur walked, chomped, mated, pooped, breathed and more during the 2 million years its species was around. And given the popular and scientific interest in this beloved superpredator, new insights into the days of T. rex will surely keep coming. Long live the king.

Since we recently dipped into the archives for photos of Barton Creek and Barton Springs, why not go deeper into history’s picture book?

“Algorithm Blues” - More comics on Graphic Culture

Demolished in 1999 after nearly a quarter-century as one of Austin’s most vital and vibrant music venues, Liberty Lunch is perhaps second only to Armadillo World Headquarters in gone-but-not-forgotten sentiment among longtime locals.

Thus it’s no surprise to see “I Still Miss Liberty Lunch,” a public Facebook page with thousands of members, giving rise to a benefit show of the same name. It’ll go down on June 18 at ABGB, the South Austin music venue, pizza joint and beer garden that has felt like the most natural successor to the Lunch’s aesthetic since opening a couple of years ago.

The 5 p.m. show, labeled as “a celebratory hoot night of the music of Liberty Lunch,” will benefit Health Alliance for Austin Musicians and will include members of Fastball, the Reivers, Wild Seeds and Pressure, plus “very special guests,” according to an ABGB statement.

Also in the works is a live auction with Kerry Awn and Drew Bennett of Liberty Lunch memorabilia that owners Mark Pratz and Jeanette Ward recently have been digging out of storage and posting to the I Still Miss Liberty Lunch Facebook page. The mementos include Liberty Lunch T-shirts, with the possibility of new shirts being printed featuring one of the old vintage designs.

 

UPDATE: Ticket giveaway is no over.

Austin City Limits will be taping a performance by MY MORNING JACKET on Monday, May 2nd, at 8 pm at ACL Live at The Moody Theater (310 W. 2nd Street, Willie Nelson Blvd). We will be giving away a limited number of space available passes to this taping. Enter your name and email address on the below form by 9 am on Thursday, April 28th. Winners will be chosen at random and a photo ID will be required to pickup tickets. Winners will be notified by email. Passes are not transferable and cannot be sold. Standing may be required.  No photography, recording or cell phone use in the studio. No cameras or recording devices allowed in venue.

Jason Sabala, owner of the lumberjack-themed coffee shop Buzz Mill, is expanding his rustic, ax-slinging empire. Sabala says the coffee shop will soon add a location on South Congress as well as franchises in San Marcos and New Orleans. He’s also revamped the club adjacent to Emo’s on East Riverside to create a new 500-capacity music venue and event space with a log cabin motif, Grizzly Hall.

Sabala’s plan for the space, which has previously housed Beauty Ballroom, Antone’s and, most recently, the sports bar, Midway Field House, is deliberately flexible. He plans to book a mixture of all genres of music, comedy, film and sports events while also renting the space for private events.

A longtime employee of Emo’s who began saving his bartending money to buy ownership shares of the club in 1996, Sabala wants to recapture the sense of scene that long defined the iconic Red River haunt with eclectic and carefully curated programming. In the ’90s, a diverse group of Austinites gravitated to the club regardless of who was playing. “It had that ambiguous feeling of, ‘Just show up dude, it could be crazy,'” he says. 

When Emo’s moved to East Riverside in 2012, Sabala went along, but after promotion company C3 Presents took over the venue he shifted his focus to the club next door. With the neighborhood in flux, he struggled to find a formula that would appeal to both the working class folks who had long occupied the apartments next door to the club and the more transient, young professional transplants who were moving into the upscale condos across the street. Beauty Ballroom’s focus on EDM and hip-hop came “five years too early” and Antone’s blues programming was too niche to bring out a regular crowd.

When the sports bar also failed to take off he decided to circle back to what he knows best, creating a solid, mid-capacity club that offers patrons a meaningful experience. He also hopes to recapture the intimate relationship between artists and their fans he observed in the early days of Emo’s. Some of that connection is lost when artists move to bigger stages or festival set ups which generally have some sort of barrier between the stage front and the crowd. “I don’t want to have anything between the venue and the band or the bands and the fans,” he says.

In a hat tip toward the old Emo’s, one of the club’s first bookings is influential noise trio the Unsane with Honky (led by old Emo’s hand Jeff Pinkus) and the (expletive)Emo’s opening. The club’s grand opening is on May 28 with High on Fire, Eagle Claw and Bridge Farmers. 

Sabala says the programming right now skews slightly toward metal, including a show from Mongolian Folk Metal band Teggner Cavalry, but he’s looking to book all genres of music. Hip-hop promotions juggernaut, Scoremore is using the space for a JMBLYA pre-party next month and he has NYC DJ Jonathan Toubin on deck for a summery “Soul Camp Party” in late July.  

Mostly, his goal with the programming is to keep it unique and interesting.

“Don’t just fill the calendar with cookie cutter stuff,” he says. “Let’s make every aspect kind of fun and exciting.”

More info. 

 

Tiny Pies will celebrate the opening of its second location, at 2032 S. Lamar Blvd. (next to Henri’s), with free coffee and pie on Tuesday night. The mother-daughter-owned shop, which serves sweet and savory pies, also has a shop at 5035 Burnet Rd. and the pies are available in freezer sections at retail outlets around the state.

Midway Field, the short-lived sports bar that set up shop in the space next door to Emo’s on East Riverside, has closed.  The following note, signed “Coach” was posted on the club’s Facebook page this morning.

No word yet on whether the club, which was also briefly the least successful iteration of Antone’s, will re-emerge as a music venue.

The team behind the lumberjack-themed coffee shop Buzz Mill (who trace their roots back to the old Emo’s downtown location) is taking over. Buzz Mill is also located on East Riverside.

 

How much did you spend on your lunch today?

I spent $11. That $11 could have provided 44 meals for Austin families through the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas.

Why the guilt trip? For the second year in a row The Capital Area Food Bank has had to cancel the last day of Reggae Fest, the non-profit’s biggest fundraiser. Heavy weekend  rains forced the cancellation leaving the organization about $100,000 short, which officials say is the equivalent to about 400,000 meals for the area’s families. So, now food bank officials are asking Central Texans to help to fill the gap.

Food insecurity is an unfortunate fact of life in Central Texas. More than 477, 000 Central Texans 21-county area served by the food bank could not afford adequate food at all times in 2015, according to Map the Meal Gap, a study on food insecurity conducted by Feeding America.

According to the study, in Travis County the rate of food insecurity is 17.6 percent, and in some of the further flung counties like Bell, Lee, Milam and McLennan, that rate is closer to 20 percent.

In Austin, we like to talk about our food scene almost as much as we like talking about our music scene. We have a bounty of choices: Farm-to-table, fusion, sushi, Mexican, Thai and Ethiopian. We can have our meals delivered to our homes and offices in less than five minutes. We have the choice to add a dessert, a high-protein smoothie or a craft cocktail.

The Capital Area Food Bank serves 46,000 people a week, according to spokesman Dave Shaw. So if you break the numbers down another way, that is nearly four weeks of meals. That’s a long time to be hungry.

We’ve written before that most of the people helped by the food bank are not homeless and most of the families have at least one working adult. These are people earning minimum wage or on fixed incomes whose monthly budgets are overwhelmed by the cost of housing, childcare, medical bills, transportation and utilities. Their reality is one of skipping meals and empty cupboards.

So, give to the food bank. They’ve got a lot of ground to make up. Just think, if you give $25, that’s 100 men, women and children who will not go to bed hungry. That’s two lunches and a coffee. It’s not quite the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but it is awfully close.

Daniel Hernandez, an investigator for the state’s Child Protective Services agency, left his South Austin home at dawn on a recent Thursday holding a stack of folders. Their contents detailed troubles facing the children and families Hernandez was scheduled to check on that day: a starving infant, parents using drugs in front of a child and a teenager's suicide attempt.

The Texas foster care system in which Hernandez works has been giving off increasingly desperate distress signals for months. Officials are scrambling to find homes for an influx of traumatized children, sometimes having them sleep in state office buildings or parking them in psychiatric hospitals. A recent federal court ruling condemned the state's long-term foster care as an inhumane institution in which children "often age out of care more damaged than when they entered." 

In Grand Prairie, the death of 4-year-old Leiliana Wright last month led to the firing of two state workers and the resignation of another. And on Friday, news broke that the 17-year-old suspect in a homicide case on the University of Texas at Austin campus is a runaway foster youth.

It falls to people like Hernandez — a 27-year-old Texas State University graduate making roughly $43,000 each year, who's logged 125,000 miles and countless hours in his Toyota Corolla over the past four years — to try to keep the system from collapsing.

On this Thursday, first came an 8 a.m. meeting with lawyers from the district attorney’s office who had come to a Travis County children’s forensic services center. They were there to interview a 7-year-old and a 3-year-old about their infant sibling, who was apparently being starved at home. Hernandez watched from behind one-way glass. Four weeks earlier, Hernandez had discovered the infant, who at that point was “basically just bone,” he said, and accompanied the child to a hospital, staying until 2 a.m. The infant remains in the hospital and is gaining about a pound of weight each week, Hernandez said.

His investigation led Child Protective Services to find a home with relatives where the infant’s older siblings could stay while the case continued. But these days, he says, those homes are harder and harder to find.

“It’s been a lot more difficult to find placement,” Hernandez said. The Department of Family and Protective Services, the state agency overseeing foster care and CPS, is struggling with new policies and a lack of funding that have made both temporary and permanent homes for children scarce.

Advocates for foster children say the system is in crisis. If the state can't find more money to ensure good homes, they say, children will continue to endure hardships that rob them of a chance at success: no permanency, no sense of belonging and recurring trauma. In recent months, the state's ability to find temporary, out-of-home placements for children with friends or relatives has fallen dramatically, leaving an already strained foster care system to pick up the slack.

“You cut back on kinship placements, and what do you think is going to happen to your conservatorship workers and your foster parents — and these kids, who we don’t have that many good placements for them to begin with?” asked Katherine Barillas, a policy fellow for the advocacy group One Voice Texas.

“The role of advocates is, we’ve been trying to increase their capacity because it is unrealistic for us to just wag our finger in their direction and say, ‘You just have to do better,’” she said. “The system is set up to fail.”

On the way to Hernandez’s second visit of the day, at a budget motel on the interstate where two adults known to CPS had reportedly used drugs in the presence of a child, Hernandez described some of the difficulties the placement shortage had created for his team of caseworkers.

The Travis County Child Protective Services office had started a rotation, he said, for workers to be on call when they had to put a child in a placement of last resort: on an air mattress or cot in the office. In those cases, CPS workers must stay overnight with the children. It's one more duty added to the list of extra responsibilities caseworkers face when their wards cannot find a home. Hernandez has never overnighted at the office, but he said his coworkers have.

“It’s a huge ask" of the workers, said Julie Moody, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

It’s a big ordeal for the children, too, said Leroy Berrones-Soto, a 21-year-old former foster youth now at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He recalled sleeping with his six siblings in the visitation room of a Child Protective Services office in McAllen in 2011.

“I think it was an air mattress where we were sleeping,” he said. “It was really uncomfortable.”

The next day, Berrones-Soto said, the children were taken to a different CPS office, in Edinburg, where they showered and were given a change of clothing. From there he went to an emergency shelter in Laredo and shuffled through two foster placements before landing in a permanent home in Brownsville.

“It was very annoying, adjusting to new schools and friends,” he said.

April McWilliams, now a caseworker and child advocate, recalled a similar story of moving from home to home when she was in foster care from 2000 to 2004. McWilliams never spent the night at a CPS office, but she said the foster care system struggled to find placements for her with families who were a good cultural fit. At one point, McWilliams said she spent an extra week living at a juvenile detention center after her sentence had ended.

“Some things are different from when I was in care, but the overall issue — that never changes no matter how much time passes,” she said.

Adding capacity to the system is crucial, she said, but it can be difficult to line up a child’s needs with homes that can adequately serve them. She recalled stories in foster care in which her English-speaking friends were placed in homes where the caregiver only spoke Spanish. McWilliams said she lived briefly with a friendly woman who only spoke Korean.

“She was not in a position to enforce rules with me because we were not able to communicate,” McWilliams said.

Hernandez said the agency's troubles have been compounded by the state's difficulty keeping staff around.

Facing long, unpredictable hours, caseworkers leave their jobs at a high rate — turnover hovers between 25 and 30 percent a year. Hernandez, with five years at the agency, is an outlier in his office; Moody, the agency spokeswoman, said CPS routinely has difficulty filling jobs. Texas caseworkers in 2015 had an average of 28 children to keep track of at any given time, according to the agency’s latest figures. The Child Welfare League of America recommends that social workers handle no more than 17 children at any given time.

Hernandez calls himself the “reassignment worker” of the office because his job is taking over cases left behind by coworkers who quit.

At the motel room, Hernandez got no answer. His next trip was to a home where police had recently visited on a domestic abuse call. (The Texas Tribune is withholding identifying information about the children and families involved in CPS cases, which the agency keeps confidential.)

At the home, Hernandez asked the mother about her relationship with her boyfriend and whether they had issues disciplining their child. While an enthusiastic puppy rubbed herself against Hernandez’s legs, the mother gave him a tour through the house to show where she kept her prescription medication and the room where the child slept.

His next stop was a psychiatric hospital, where reporters were forbidden. Hernandez was going to visit a teenager who had attempted suicide.

Texas has seen significant growth in the number of kids who’ve had prolonged stays in psychiatric facilities because the agency has struggled to find homes for them when they leave. Between June 2009 and August 2015, the number of days foster care children together spent in psychiatric facilities past their initial 8 to 10 days of treatment rose from a total of 10 extra days in the facilities to 768.

Hernandez, who studied psychology and criminal justice at Texas State University, said the work could be tragic but also fulfilling. The day before, he said, a father had thanked him for getting involved and ensuring his child's safety. Hernandez said he was motivated to take this job because of his love for children; he hopes to have children of his own someday.

But to raise a family while continuing to look out for kids as an employee of Child Protective Services?

“I’d be neglecting my own children,” he said.