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Autumn doesnt boldly announce its presence but rather creeps in. Since schools are back in session in August and early September, many who consider these last few weeks to be the beginning of fall start consuming pumpkin-flavored treats, even in extreme heat. Astronomical season purists prefer to defer to the position of the sun. This Monday (September 22) marks the fall equinox, which is the official beginning of astronomical autumn. The day before, a partial solar eclipse will be visible to those in its path in the Southern Hemisphere. (The North got its turn in March.) Lets take a deeper look at what this all means. What is an equinox? The Earth revolves around the sun while simultaneously turning on its own axis at a tilt of about 23.5 degrees. These processes cause different parts of the world to get more sunlight than others, but what goes around comes back around eventually. The Northern Hemisphere experiences winter in December through most of March while the Southern Hemisphere takes its turn June to September. The term equinox is Latin in origin and is loosely translated to equal night. Biannually in March and September, the tilt and the orbit of the Earth line up. This causes day and night to be almost equal. Equinoxes also signal the changing of the seasons. In the Northern Hemisphere, this means summer to fall and winter to spring. What is a partial solar eclipse? Before you bust out your scarves and warmer clothes, the night sky is going to show off. Those located in parts of New Zealand, Antarctica, and some South Pacific islands are in for a treat. Sometimes on the Earths journey around the sun, the moon gets involved. It comes between the two for a while, just like a love triangle blocking the light of friendship. During a partial solar eclipse, as NASA points out, the entire sun is not obscuredjust parts of it are, making a cool visual. This time around, 86% of it will be covered, which is extra dramatic. Do not view this natural phenomenon in person without certified solar eclipse glasses. When is the partial solar eclipse taking place? If you find yourself in the Northern Hemisphere during this partial solar eclipse, never fear. The internet was made for moments such as this. The website TimeAndDate.com will live-stream the event from Dunedin, New Zealand. The full duration of the eclipse is from 1:29 to 5:53 p.m. ET, with the maximum moment occurring at 3:41 p.m. ET.
Category:
E-Commerce
Its 2025. Weve got cars that can drive themselves, robots that can program themselves, and all sorts of other mind-bogglingly futuristic tech achievements (for better or, erm, maybe sometimes for worse). And yet, somehow, I still find myself painstakingly entering stuff into my calendarwhen I get a long email about upcoming events from my kids school, for instance, or I see a flyer about something out in the world that I want to be sure to remember. Todays Cool Tools discovery is a new and improved sliver of sorcery that swipes away all the effort from those sorts of situations and makes managing your calendar laughably easyno matter what sorts of events you encounter. It might even, dare I say, be more useful than those futuristic robots. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Event addingwithout the effort So, first things first: This tool is actually one weve talked about before. Its called Agenda Hero, and I wrote about it in these very same Cool Tools quarters about a year and a half ago, when it was first getting off the ground. In the time since then, though, its gotten even bettermost notably with a nifty new feature that just came into mix and cranks its real-world usefulness up an extra measure. Well get to that in a minute. But first, what Agenda Hero is all about is taking the hassle out of creatingand, if you want, also sharingcalendar events from unstructured information. Specifically: You can send Agenda Hero an image or a PDF with info about events or even paste over entire paragraphs of text, and in the blink of an eye, itll identify and extract all the relevant details and put em into proper calendar event format. From there, you can add any and all events its identified into your calendar (Google Calendar as well as Outlook, Apple, or practically any other platform) with a single click. And, if youre feeling especially saucy, you can create a shareable page with all the event info for anyone else to see and add into their calendar in a similarly simple way. All of this takes roughly a minute, maybe two, to do. And now, in addition to all of that, you can also give Agenda Hero plain-text commands to tweak your extracted events to your specificationsadding in a specific location, setting a certain length, putting a particular name or even emoji at the start of each title, or making the events recurring in any way imaginable, just for a few fast examples. So, for instance, I took a roughly 500-word email newsletter update from my kids school and plopped it over into the Agenda Hero website. It had all sorts of information, with important dates and events sprinkled in here and there. And it wouldve been a massive headache to try to find all the date-specific tidbits and add em into my calendar on my own. With one click, though, Agenda Hero did all that heavy lifting for meand, in literally a few seconds, gave me a series of ready-to-roll events with all the relevant info extracted from the email. Agenda Hero easily extracts and formats events from text, images, and PDFs. But the text didnt mention any specific places, which meant none of the events had assigned locations. So I just asked the site to add that in . . . The service now lets you ask for specific adjustments, like adding a location to every event it identifies. And, booma couple seconds later: Locations added, thanks to a quick text command on Agenda Hero’s results list. Then, I thought maybe itd be helpful to put the word SCHOOL at the start of all of these events, so Id know at a glance theyre about the kids and not my own personal schedule. One more request . . . You can even add text or emojis into a series of event titles, all with a simple plain-text command. And there we have it. Agenda Hero will process any number of events at once, in a matter of seconds. You get the idea. From there, all thats left is to click the Add all to Google button to have all of these events instantly beamed into my Google Calendar. And/or, if I want to share it with someone else, I can use the Shareable page buttonwhich creates a nifty little page like this that anyone can open and then interact with in a similar way. And remember: The same exact thing works if you upload a PDF or an image that has any manner of event info within it as well. Its a massive time-saver. In my experience, its also much easier and more effective than trying to do the same thing with Gemini or any other such chatbot. Those services can perform some of the same tasks around basic event extraction, but you run into a wall pretty quickly once you start trying to update events or modify em en masse like we did here. And theres no real option for easily sharing with otherswhich is a super-practical power that could definitely come in handy in the right sort of scenario. So there ya have it. Agenda Hero may not be the flashiest high-tech tool out there todaybut my goodness, it sure is one of the most useful. And, as usual, all youve gotta do is remember to use it. You can access Agenda Hero right in your web browser on any deviceor, if youd rather, grab the Android app, iOS app, and/or Chrome extension for easy event adding on any of those fronts. The service is free to use without restrictions for all of its core features, and you dont even have to create an account or sign in, either. The new chat-based event editing ability is free to try a handful of times if you do sign in and then requires a $30-a-year subscription if you want to keep using it. Agenda Hero doesnt do anything disconcerting with the limited amount of data it sees, as per its privacy policyand it doesnt share any user data for any manner of AI model training. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Category:
E-Commerce
There are more possible NBA schedule combinations than there are atoms in the sun. That’s not hyperboleit’s the mathematical reality facing anyone trying to arrange 1,230 games across 30 teams over six months while satisfying TV networks, player safety rules, arena operators, and competitive fairness requirements all at once. This impossible puzzle is exactly what Fastbreak AI, a 30-person startup out of New York, has built its business around. Fastbreak’s AI software now powers scheduling for more than 50 professional leagues globally, quietly controlling when billions of dollars in sporting events hit your calendar. “I’m always amazed when we produce a playable schedule,” Fastbreak cofounder and CEO John Stewart says. “It’s a nearly impossible set of math problems. We’re considering billions upon billions of possibilities.” Map Anything Stewart’s path to sports scheduling began with a $250 million exit. His previous company, Map Anything, was acquired by Salesforce in 2019 for its field service optimization technology, which used the same mathematical principles that would later power Fastbreak. While still running Map Anything, in 2016, Stewart began recruiting two KPMG consultants, Chris Groer and Tim Carnes, who had built the NBA’s scheduling system, with the promise that hed eventually start a company dedicated to sports scheduling. When that occurred in June 2022, the timing was fortuitous. The NBA needed help scheduling its new in-season tournament, but the team they had worked with at KPMG was now at Fastbreak, making it easy for Stewart to onboard the league as one of the company’s first major clients. ‘If everyone hates you equally, you’ve done your job’ What the trio of founders discovered with the NBA schedule was a system of staggering complexity. The NBA has 30 teams, and each arena has different constraints. The San Antonio Spurs, for instance, are the fourth priority in their own building, meaning concerts can be prioritized over games. The Lakers’ venue hosts the Grammys and other marquee events each year, forcing the team to play on the road for certain stretches. Media partners pay billions for specific matchups to be in prime time and on marquee dates. Player safety rules prevent back-to-back games over 350 miles apart. And on top of that, each team is allowed to make requests. The Miami Heat, for instance, prefer to play at home during Art Basel. Still, not all requests can be granted. “It’s the art of managing disappointment equally,” Stewart says. “If everyone hates you equally, you’ve done your job right.” The challenge isn’t just mathematicalit’s diplomatic. Fastbreak’s platform gives different access to arena managers, media partners, and team executives, who can each enter requests into the system for consideration. When changes happen, the AI is designed to minimize collateral damage while accommodating whoever needs the adjustment. Schedule repairthe logistics game changer The traveling salesman problem is a classic mathematical and logistical challenge about finding the most efficient route through multiple cities. Computer scientists can solve that for hundreds of thousands of locations. But even a simplified sports scheduling problem featuring just 10 teams? “People have written many PhD dissertations on it and still not solved that problem to optimality,” Groer says. But even after clearing that mathematical hurdle, the job isn’t done. When the LA wildfires and Gulf Coast hurricanes disrupted games this year, forcing the NBA and NHL to reschedule, it triggered what experts call cascading optimization crises. A single venue change can force adjustments to hundreds of other games due to ripple effects across team travel schedules, TV contracts, and competitive balance requirements. Fastbreak’s schedule repair function suggests optimal fixes in minutes using what Stewart calls “warm starting”beginning from the current state rather than rebuilding from scratch. Think of it like GPS rerouting when there’s traffic, but infinitely more complex. When one game gets moved, the AI instantly recalculates how that affects every other game and the 500-plus other rules, then suggests the least disruptive solution to minimize collateral damage to uninvolved teams. The art behind the science Fastbreak’s breakthrough isn’t just computational power. It’s incorporating machine learningteaching AI systems to understand the subjective art of what makes a good schedule. League executives manually rate thousands of past road trips on a 110 scale, teaching the system what constitutes quality travel patterns. A trip hitting multiple East Coast cities in logical geographic order might rate an 8 or 9. A chaotic journey ping-ponging across time zones could get a 3. “You actually have to give business users a user experience where they can train this model and teach it the meaning of ‘good,'” Groer says. “You can never just provide all these trips to an AI model because it would immediately bias to ‘this trip’s been done in the past, therefore it must be acceptable.'” The result is that the AI has become more consistent than human experts were with each otherwhen multiple league officials rated the same trips, the AI’s ratings were closer to each expert’s opinion than the experts were to each other. Fastbreak’s AI uses a sophisticated scoring system to balance competing demands, weighing different violations based on league priorities. A hard constraintlike preventing teams from playing back-to-back games over 350 miles apartmight carry infinite penalty points, essentially making such schedules impossible to generate. Softer preferences, like avoiding Monday home games, carry smaller penalties that can be traded off against other benefits when the AI is trying to optimize the overall schedule. All told, professional schedules can have more than 500 different “rules,” each with carefully calibrated penalty weights to ensure accurate prioritization, and teams get point allocations for special requests. They might have 2,000 points to distribute across their wish list, creating a market-like system where they must prioritize what matters most. Beyond the big leagues Fastbreak now powers scheduling for the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NHL, and Major League Soccer, plus top college conferences like the SEC, ACC, and Big East. But Stewart sees an even bigger opportunity in youth sportsa $40 billion annual market where parents juggle multiple apps and constantly changing schedules. “I bet on your phone you’ve got nine different apps for those different sports, and I bet yu hate them all,” Stewart says, describing a frustratingly common experience for sports parents. In June, the company launched Fastbreak Compete, which has integrated the same AI scheduling engine it offers professional leagues. As of June, the software is used by 12 youth sports organizations, with commitments from over 40 more for 2026. Fastbreak’s strategy is to use its professional-grade technology as a hook, then expand into adjacent services. Fastbreak Compete creates schedules, but also serves as a one-stop shop for parents, as it consolidates scheduling, communications, travel booking, and payments into one platform, eliminating the app-juggling nightmare and providing real-time updates when tournaments inevitably change. Fairness, not perfection When the NBA season tips off, Stewart and his team will already be preparing to work on next year’s schedule, starting with arena availability collection in November. Its the first step toward the ultimate goal of building a schedule that is not just operationally efficient, but also fair. Fastbreak’s algorithms continuously monitor dozens of metrics: total travel miles, home weekend games, back-to-back frequency, rest advantages, and countless other factors that could create competitive imbalances. The extensive fairness metrics help ensure that when schedules are released, every team has roughly equal advantages and disadvantages across multiple dimensions. “If you’ve done your job right, everyone will find something to complain about, Stewart says. But the complaints will be equally distributed.” As leagues continue evolvingadding tournaments, managing global events, negotiating increasingly complex media dealsthe optimization challenges only intensify. For an industry built on competition, perhaps the ultimate victory happens behind the scenes, in algorithms that ensure the playing field remains level, one perfectly balanced constraint at a time.
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E-Commerce
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