The Creation of Kabaddi, postal rates, and geophysics

A few odds (oddball you say?) and ends today. Yesterday I was browsing the Hotstar app that I used to watch the Indian Premier League cricket season. I learned there was a new professional sport in the Indian subcontinent called kabaddi. It is kind of a combination of tag, dodgeball, and rugby. The YouTube channel People Make Games has an informative and entertaining introduction to this game. Since touching opposing players gets you points, the "divine" significance of the touch is portrayed in the video thusly:

A frame capture from It's Time You Knew About Kabaddi: The Ancient Game That's Gone Pro

Ha ha, it's a riff on The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel (see my last post if you missed that), with Quintin Smith replacing Adam. It's almost the image on the U.S. IGY stamp!

If you want to learn more about the game, you can watch the entire YouTube video:

Anyway, I received my first comment for my blog after the previous post. Thanks, Anonymous! One part of the comment was: "Would be interesting to see a graph of how postage rates have changed over time; does it scale with inflation?" Wikipedia provides a great graph, in which the dark purple is the actual issued price of the stamp and the light purple is the price adjusted for inflation and shown in 2019 U.S. cents:

Actual and inflation-adjusted first-class postage rates in the U.S. (Wikipedia)

You can see that increases in stamp prices themselves have an effect. When the first class postal rate went up from 3¢ to 4¢ in 1958 during the IGY, that was a 25% increase in the inflation-adjusted value. But you can also see the effective decrease in postage costs during periods of inflation in the 1920s and post-WWII.

Speaking of postal rates, some are proposed to increase in the U.S. in 2021:

Product                                   Current Prices    Planned Prices

Letters additional ounce(s)            15¢                     20¢

Letters (metered 1 oz.)                   50¢                     51¢

Domestic Postcards                        35¢                    36¢

Letters (1 oz.)                                55¢             55¢ (no change)

Flats (1 oz.)                                     $1                $1 (no change)

That announcement goes on to say: "The Postal Service has some of the lowest letter-mail postage rates in the industrialized world." That's true, as this graphic from an article by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones magazine shows:

Postal rates in some western countries (Mother Jones)

And Drum explains what we saw in the Wikipedia graph above: "federal law allows the price of first class stamps to rise only at the rate of inflation." He argues that, in these times of competition, that's not sustainable.

I was going to retire the NY Times crossword puzzle thing, but sorry ... today clue for 42A  of "Prefix to political or physics" was answered by "geo", i.e. GEOPHYSICS! 

NY Times crossword for Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2020