Students once played a sport with a ball taller than they were
Students once played a sport with a ball taller than they were Popkin 8:14 am Mon Aug 3, 2026 pushball — Library of Congress / no known restrictions (via The Public Domain Review) Pushball is a sport that uses a ball six feet three inches across. Crane came up with it in the 1890s because he couldn't follow American football, a small brown ball moving across a mostly brown field. "If the ball were only made large", he thought, "yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators in watching the whole game".
- ▪Students once played a sport with a ball taller than they were Popkin 8:14 am Mon Aug 3, 2026 pushball — Library of Congress / no known restrictions (via The Public Domain Review) Pushball is a sport that uses a ball six feet three inches a
- ▪Crane came up with it in the 1890s because he couldn't follow American football, a small brown ball moving across a mostly brown field.
- ▪"If the ball were only made large", he thought, "yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators in watching the whole game".
Boing Boing files mainly under tech. We currently carry 388 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/08/03/pushball.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:14:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-03T15:45:42.943Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-03T15:45:42.943Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | I95jHX8HR14o · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Students once played a sport with a ball taller than they were Popkin 8:14 am Mon Aug 3, 2026 pushball — Library of Congress / no known restrictions (via The Public Domain Review) Pushball is a sport that uses a ball six feet three inches across. The Massachusetts inventor Moses G. Crane came up with it in the 1890s because he couldn't follow American football, a small brown ball moving across a mostly brown field. So he made the ball enormous. "If the ball were only made large", he thought, "yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators in watching the whole game". The first one, commissioned in 1894, was a leather-covered wooden frame weighing about 70 pounds and costing $175, roughly $6,775 today.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Boing Boing
