Any question answered...

sign up to flickr

Yes, if you want your pix to be displayed temporarily. Flickr periodically changes the URL for download, so eventually all Flickr embeds end up as broken as any other shit pix host.

Interesting. Didn't know that or seem to have experienced that personally.

How is this tree still standing?

WW2 coastal defences reinforced concrete engine-room building, with a fully grown pine tree on the edge of the roof. I know pines are shallow rooted, but there's not much depth of topsoil and it's unsupported to one side.

2 Attachments

surface area of the root structure + size of tree + strength/ direction of weather

It's fake, it's actually a 5g tower disguised so people don't burn it down.

Clearly ignoring Ed’s advice.

Who's Ed?

Ed is really more of an idea than a person. In a sense, we are all Ed.

Can I just interject?
The "Paedo Prince", as some refer to him as, would insist on all his staff coming outside the front of his house to wave white hankies as he left. WAC.
As you were :)

Saw this and my eyes welled up a little and I spontaneously started saying the Pledge of Allegiance, thank you a beautiful moment for me.

God bless

Flickr periodically changes the URL for download, so eventually all Flickr embeds end up as broken as any other shit pix host.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not happy with what Yahoo turned Flickr into -
but it's a free image host, that actually gives you a link to an uncompressed .jpg of your photo¹.

Where have you heard that they change the URLs?
I have just checked posts I made on this fine forum 8 months ago, embedding pics hosted on flickr, they all show up just fine..
¯_(ツ)_/¯

¹
I do agree that the dance you have to do to actually get to that fucking URL is ridiculous though.

Professional basketball players in the USA are really tall.

Watching The Last Dance with my wife, she asked if this was all above-board. At the time the part where Scottie Pippen grew 5 inches over a summer between college years.

I know very little about basketball. Is it a sport with big whiffs of suspicion around it, or are there just a few genetic freaks between 6ft5 and 7ft who get spotted early and become amazing athletes?

“Don’t lean”

@HatBeard

Where have you heard that they change the URLs?

I've seen it happen. I don't know whether it's a policy to deliberately break embeds or just random housekeeping that moves resources from one farm to another, but it happens.
As I've said a hundred times before, the way to put images on LFGSS is to use either the LFGSS server or your own. Yes, the attachment device sucks (although it has been pretty good to me using drag-and-drop on Firefox), but at least you can have some confidence that if the post is still there, so will be the pictures.

I don't think the height is necessarily an issue, but the bit in there (in the early 90s) when Jordan insists the team all bulk up and come back hench and physically dominant certainly raises questions for me...

I've seen it happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARPCjp0ppEE

I like imgur.com

she asked if this was all above-board

Nearly all of it is below board even when they are jumping, since the bottom of the board is 9' above the surface of the court.

Lols aside, I think USA pro men are as high as god and nature intended, but the Chinese were suspected of breaking girls' legs and setting them at extended length in order to improve their women's basketball team.

are there just a few genetic freaks between 6ft5 and 7ft

Not freaks, just people at the end of the bell curve. About 1% of all US adult males are over 6'4". If 90% of that group are under 6'5", that still leaves something like 30000 men over 6'5" and aged between 20 and 40, compared with 450 active NBA players.

.

That's exactly the kind of statistical analysis I hoped someone would produce for me, thank you.

Is a growth spurt of 5 inches at 18-19 years old also relatively common?

Is a growth spurt of 5 inches at 18-19 years old also relatively common?

It's about 3-5 years late and 25-30% fast compared with median "peak height velocity", which isn't a freakish amount to be away from human development medians.

statistical analysis

More Fermi Estimate than statistical analysis.

Watching The Last Dance with my wife, she asked if this was all above-board. At the time the part where Scottie Pippen grew 5 inches over a summer between college years.

I didn't know that happened to Pippen, too. Jordan grew from about 6'3" to 6'6" (or thereabouts) in college. In Jordan's case, the late growth spurt was credited with enabling him to develop the skills and speed of a point guard, and retaining those when he grew. No idea if that's true, but perhaps something similar was the case with Pippen.

Some of the tallest players were also afflicted with growth disorders, e.g. Gheorghe Muresan :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_Mure%C8%99an

And, just to add to Tester's stats, quite a few of the tallest players in the NBA came from abroad, e.g. Manute Bol, Muresan, or Yao Ming, to name just a few of the super-tallest, i.e. way over 7'; a lot of bog-standard seven-footers were also from Europe or elsewhere (e.g., Olajuwon, Nowitzki, Divac). I may misremember it, but I think Mark Eaton was the tallest US-born player for a long time at 7'4". Edit: No, it was actually Chuck Nevitt, whom I didn't know about, and Shawn Bradley is the tallest US player, although he was actually born in Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_players_in_National_Basketball_Association_history

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/how-much-should-we-tax-7-footers/256757/