Make mine to go

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Better grab some headphones if you’re gonna fly with United, Brady Bunch house gets special status, and watch out for those lefties 💪

Let’s get into it!

There was a time not too long ago when airlines that offered headphones to their passengers were considered top tier carriers when it came to customer service.

Strange as it might seem, there are some fliers out there who like to listen to music or watch movies without headphones.

Understandably, most passengers find this annoying and United Airlines does, too. Last week, CBS News reported the carrier quietly rewrote a portion of its “contract of carriage,” which refers to the rules that govern passenger behavior.

According to the amendment, passengers watching or listening to content on their devices must do so with headphones connected. If they don’t, United reserves the right to "refuse transport”.

"This is in line with how the vast majority of travelers comport themselves and would like others to comport themselves," travel expert Scott Keyes told CBS News. "It's usually only a small number of folks on airplanes who are making noise by not using headphones, so this is a graceful way to handle those folks."

Aviation industry watchers say the amendment now makes United the only airline that could remove passengers and even ban them for life for refusing to plug in.

The James Webb Space Telescope focused its gaze on the Virgo constellation for a while and, in true JWST fashion, came up for air with a striking image of a spiral galaxy immersed in the majestic process of stellar birth and stellar death.

Called NGC 5134, the galaxy lives about 65 million light-years away, which—as the folks at Space.com aptly pointed out—is inconceivably distant to the human mind, but as far as the cosmic map goes, it’s actually pretty close to us here in the Milky Way.

What you see in the photograph above is the combined rendering capturing the glow of the galaxy that, frankly, makes it look like something straight out of Mordor. That hue is due to warm infrared dust in the stellar nurseries of its arms. The brighter parts of the glow are due to shorter infrared waves emanating from the living stars and star clusters within the galaxy’s arms.

The bright light at the center of the galactic spiral is almost certainly a disc of extremely hot light circling the outer edges of a supermassive black hole, similar to the one believed to occupy the center of our own galaxy.

A newly released study published in Scientific Reports suggests left-handed people are naturally more competitive—a trait possibly tied to survival instincts since southpaws only make up about 10.6% of the human race.

The study was conducted by researchers at the Department of Psychology at the University of Chieti-Pescara in Italy, who were curious how left-handedness survives while outnumbered nine to one.

Evolution dictates that the strong survive, though, which could explain the competitive edge seemingly characteristic of southpaws.

The researchers recruited 1,100 volunteers and isolated those who were strongly right-handed (483 participants) and strongly left-handed (50 participants), and had them complete questionnaires to identify which participants harbored traits of high competitiveness.

They took the most competitive 24 from each side, and had them compete to see who would place nine pegs into holes on a board the fastest. They found the lefties scored higher in hyper-competitiveness, but neither side was more physically effective than the other; 11 of the 24 righties were faster, for example.

The researchers concluded right-handedness is a group-level advantage, but in one-versus-one competition, lefties have the competitive edge.

Fun fact: Six of the last 14 presidents were left-handed, and all three major candidates for the office in 1992 were southpaws.

Like most sitcoms, the Brady Bunch was filmed at a soundstage in Hollywood, but TV magic had viewers believing it was a house located at 11222 Dilling Avenue in the San Fernando Valley.

The other day Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to grant the house landmark status, shielding it from ever being torn down or materially altered.

That said, if the owners of the 1959 home decide for whatever reason they would like to conduct such renovations, they could technically be permitted, but they’d require a design review by the Cultural Heritage Commission.

Luckily, those owners are the cable network HGTV, which drove the price up astronomically in a bidding war when the house was listed in 2018. It sold for $3.5 million—nearly doubling the asking price and securing the home’s future as a replica of the set that never actually existed inside it.

“If you watched the ‘Brady Bunch,’ you knew this house. People make a pilgrimage to see it,” said LA Conservancy CEO Adrian Scott Fine, who led the push for landmark status. “To have it designated like this, it makes it all the sweeter.”

Sitcom silliness

If you remember Schneider, the key carrying maintenance man, you’ll probably do just fine with today’s trivia.

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