P.S. We’re now breaking down the answers at the end of each edition, so you get a little more insight.

A baseball is just five ounces of leather and cork. Harmless enough until you throw it. At 100 miles per hour it is already almost impossible to hit. At the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second, it no longer exists as a ball. It becomes an extinction event. The instant it leaves the pitcher’s hand the atoms cannot hold together. It explodes into plasma and radiation before it even clears the mound. The release point becomes ground zero.

The explosion does not wait politely for the catcher’s mitt. It happens right in the pitcher’s hand. The result is not just a lost at-bat. The pitcher is erased along with the dirt under his feet. What you get is not a strikeout but a crater.

At normal speeds a baseball pushes air molecules out of the way. At light speed the molecules have no time to move. They are slammed together with such force that they fuse. That is the same reaction that powers stars. The space between the mound and home plate becomes a nuclear chain reaction. What began as a pitch turns into a fireball that destroys everything around it.

The kinetic energy of motion is calculated with the formula:

E = ½ m v²

For a baseball with a mass of 0.145 kilograms and a velocity of 3 × 10^8 meters per second:

E = ½ × 0.145 × (3 × 10^8)²

≈ 6.5 × 10^15 joules

That is roughly equal to the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb. All from a single pitch. (The book What If by Randall Munroe goes into this extensively. It is a great read and I highly recommend it if you enjoy questions like this.)

Imagine standing in the batter’s box. The pitcher winds up and releases. You do not see the ball. You do not even flinch. You and everyone around you are gone instantly. The catcher and umpire share the same fate. The at-bat never begins.

Fans show up expecting baseball, beer, and hot dogs. What they receive is the end of the stadium. The shockwave from the explosion would flatten everything for miles. Parking lots, city blocks, mascots, and souvenir cups would all disappear without a trace.

Thankfully this scenario is impossible. Einstein’s theory of relativity explains why. Anything with mass cannot reach the speed of light. As it approaches that limit the energy required to push it further increases until it becomes infinite. Physics itself prevents pitchers from ending civilization during a game.

Randall Munroe, once a NASA roboticist and now the creator of xkcd, worked through these calculations in his book What If. His conclusion is simple. The ball never reaches the plate. The instant it is released everything nearby is vaporized. He called it the end of baseball. That description feels accurate.

If a pitch could be thrown at the speed of light, the box score would read:

Pitcher: vaporized

Batter: vaporized

Catcher: vaporized

Stadium: crater

City: gone

The game ends before it begins. Baseball is finished. Humanity might be too. At least the hot dogs would finally stop costing twelve bucks.

The word “nerd” feels like it has always been around. You hear it in classrooms, in movies, in every high school comedy ever made. But the term is not ancient slang or some relic from Shakespeare. It was invented by Dr. Seuss.

In his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, a kid imagines all the bizarre creatures he would collect, including “a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too.” That throwaway rhyme introduced the word into pop culture. Within a decade, “nerd” was being used to describe people who were bookish, awkward, or obsessed with science and math.

Think about that. One of the most loaded words in modern culture, a label that went from insult to badge of honor, started as a nonsense word in a children’s book.

It shows how quickly language can shift. A single whimsical rhyme, tucked into a Dr. Seuss page, created an identity that millions of people now embrace proudly. “Nerd” went from Seuss’s imagination to high school hallways to Silicon Valley boardrooms. That is quite a career for one made-up creature.

This one comes from my mom, who told me I need to stop stressing about everything. 100 Years by Blues Traveler is not their usual harmonica-heavy jam. It is slower, more reflective, and hits you with the kind of lyrics that feel like advice you did not ask for but probably needed. It is about time slipping by, and how we waste too much of it worrying about the wrong things. Not exactly stadium rock, but sometimes you need a song that tells you to chill out and zoom out. Blues Traveler might be better known for Run-Around, but 100 Years is the reminder you put on when life feels too loud.

Give it a listen 👇

Click here for Spotify

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The Undertaker and Mankind – 1998

In 1998, wrestling fans watched one of the most infamous moments in WWE history. During the “Hell in a Cell” match, The Undertaker sent Mankind crashing sixteen feet through the steel cage roof and down into the ring. The spot was not scripted, the fall was real, and the crowd thought they had just witnessed a tragedy. As medical staff rushed in, The Undertaker stood above it all, stone-faced, while Mankind somehow got up and kept fighting.