Category: Uncategorized

Shut up and win your division

I hope the Seahawks’ upset of New Orleans yesterday stops all the stupid hand-wringing about seed advantages going to the division winners. Weak divisions and strong divisions are part of football and it is part of what makes the NFL season exciting. The whines of those who think that the teams with the best records should make the playoffs and be seeded in order of their record border on the moronic; they might as well do what the European soccer leagues do, throw out the playoffs altogether and crown the team with the best record the champion.

Destroying division rivalries and ensuring that even more teams are out of the mix weeks before the end of the season in favor of what can only be a childish sense of “fairness” or worse, a numerological fetish, would be ridiculous. There is nothing unfair about it and every team knew what the rules were going in. Who cares if a 7-9 team made it to the playoffs and a few 10-6 teams stayed home? If you want to be guaranteed a spot, win your damn division. Going down this route is a step towards the elimination of the divisions, the conferences, and eventually, the justification for holding a Super Bowl. I dislike the Seahawks intensely and I like Drew Brees, but I am very, very glad that the NFC West champions won their first-round game.

I never liked the expansion of the playoffs to include multiple wild cards and this call to further diminish the meaning of a division championship shows that I was correct to be suspicious of it.

The World of Doom

I’m not going to bombard the blog with videos, but since a number of you had some suggestions for improvement, here is a new one that shows off our favorite little device kicking it very old school style. I recorded the audio in Audacity rather than Camtasia and imported it this time… it worked better, I think, but I’m still having a few audio-editing issues. Anyhow, this is interesting because it shows how the keyboard can be entirely eliminated from a keyboard-only game.

By the way, does anyone know how the image that shows in the YouTube link can be selected or is it just random?

In which a prize is awarded

Olegt, a science professor who teaches physics to biology students, wins a Beezle for this prophetic gem which he assures us in no way indicates a blind faith in science:

“Scientific theories that are well established are with us to stay…. No amount of new research will change the age of the Earth from the current value of 4.54 billion years (plus or minus one percent). The age of the Universe won’t be adjusted much from 13.7 billion years.”
– olegt: 1/8/11 9:25 PM, Those brilliant butterfly collectors

Brave words indeed. I especially enjoyed the way in which the intrepid professor firmly asserted his immovable position with such confidence, then followed it with a fudge factor of 90.8 million years in parentheses. I can only conclude that he missed his true calling… he should be doing market forecasts on CNBC. Well-established scientific theories are immutable, stocks have reached a permanently high plateau, and the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.

Democratic Congresswoman shot

Arizona Democrat Gabrielle Giffords was shot and killed at a political rally:

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and six others died after a gunman opened fire at a public event on Saturday, the Pima County, Ariz., sheriff’s office confirms. The 40-year-old Democrat, who was re-elected to her third term in November, was hosting a “Congress on Your Corner” event at a Safeway in northwest Tucson when a gunman ran up and started shooting, according to Peter Michaels, news director of Arizona Public Media.

I have to admit, I’m a little surprised that Americans have begun shooting elected officials instead of bankers. I am even more surprised that it would be an Arizona Democrat that was shot. Of course, this could be the result of a personal issue, for all we know right now.

UPDATE: Now they’re saying that the Congresswoman isn’t dead yet and the shooter is a 22-year old Iraqi War veteran named Jared Laughner.

UPDATE II: Apparently the shooter is a schizoid atheist of some sort. And Rep. Giffords is making a miraculous recovery after being shot in the head and reported dead… now wouldn’t THAT be unexpected.

The Dread Ilk are smart

Well, by ESPN standards, anyhow:

The five smartest things I’ve seen from readers this week via comments, Facebook, Twitter and my mailbag.

In a Facebook conversation spurred by a radio appearance, NATE said: “As several NFL guys have pointed out… blowing a top 3 QB pick usually sets a franchise back years. Fisher was able to stave that off for years… but it finally blew up on him.

“In my estimation… the mediocrity of the last 5 years proves that Jeff Fisher is one of the three or four best coaches in the NFL.”

PK says: I think that’s overrating Fisher, but your broad point is a good one.

I never bought into either the Vince Young or the JaMarcus Russell story. In fact, I still don’t buy into Ron Mexico 1.0 or 2.0; running quarterbacks, (as opposed to mobile quarterbacks), hurt you as much as they help you in the long run. And I do think Fisher is a good coach, although I’d consider him more top ten material than top four.

1. Belichick. No question.
2. Sean Payton. Not much history, but what is there is good.
3. Hmmmm… Mike Smith? He’s pretty new. The Ultimate Leader is overrated. Reid is good but flawed and can’t control the clock. McCarthy has promise, but ditto. I’m not convinced about Tomlin yet while Caldwell is Art Shell 3.0 and coasting on the Manning and the Dungy legacy. Haley and Morris have started off well, but it’s just one year. Coughlin is really the only one I can think of that compares favorably to Fisher with a Super Bowl win as well as taking the Jags to the AFC Championship game. Maybe Fisher is top four after all.

You may now return to contemplating the Eschaton.

Those brilliant butterfly collectors

Not only has it been confirmed by their university curriculums that scientists learn next to nothing outside their chosen disciplines, but it now appears that biology students don’t even know much about their own scientific specialty or understand how some of its basic functions operate:

The researchers assessed the fundamental science knowledge of more than 500 students at 13 U.S. colleges in courses ranging from introductory biology to advanced ecology. Most students did not truly understand the processes that transform carbon. They failed to apply principles such as the conservation of matter, which holds that when something changes chemically or physically, the amount of matter at the end of the process needs to equal the amount at the beginning. (Matter doesn’t magically appear or disappear.)

Students trying to explain weight loss, for example, could not trace matter once it leaves the body; instead they used informal reasoning based on their personal experiences (such as the fat “melted away” or was “burned off”). In reality, the atoms in fat molecules leave the body (mostly through breathing) and enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and water. Most students also incorrectly believe plants obtain their mass from the soil rather than primarily from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “When you see a tree growing,” Anderson said, “it’s a lot easier to believe that tree is somehow coming out of the soil rather than the scientific reality that it’s coming out of the air.”

The researchers say biology textbooks and high-school and college science instructors need to do a better job of teaching the fundamentals – particularly how matter transforms from gaseous to solid states and vice-versa. It won’t be easy, Anderson said, because students’ beliefs of the carbon cycle are deeply engrained (such as the misconception that plants get most of their nutrients from the soil).

Needless to say, these brilliant biologists-of-the-future are primarily concerned that little kids might not be indoctrinated with pseudo-scientific fairy tales about the origin of the species, despite the fact that they themselves quite clearly don’t even understand how the various species live and grow today. Keep this in mind the next time a biologist is attempting to lecture you on history, politics, philosophy, religion, or pretty much anything more complicated than red + yellow = orange. Not only are they largely uneducated outside a very narrow range of information, they’re not very intelligent either.

I’d love to see those same researchers assess the fundamental science knowledge of 500 biology professors at various colleges and universities across America. If Mr. Myers is a reliable guide, they won’t fare much better.

The science of cuckoldry


I don’t mean to suggest that women are not biologically programmed to be ruthlessly deceptive cheating machines who only manage to surmount their programming by rigid self-control, religious dedication, or cliterectomies and the threat of stoning, but I think the scientistry on display in this video is less than entirely convincing. Seriously, what can reasonably be concluded from a woman who is self-consciously attempting to gyrate in front of a blue screen and an elderly German scientist armed with a camera? And there is a serious self-selection bias as well, given that the great majority of women who were not choosing to go out on the town were excluded from it. It hardly seems surprising that attached women who go out clubbing sans mate are more inclined to cheat than the average single woman… no doubt science will next tell us that recently divorced women are more readily available than the norm too.

Anyhow, it would be a rather more informative metric to combine the skin display percentage with observations of which women a) got physical with someone in public and b) left the club with a man rather than their friends. The observed connection between skin display and ovulation/attachment is potentially significant, but it’s incorrect to assume that skin display is necessarily tantamount to an increased interest in sex.

Perhaps it is a sign of the science fetish that pervades modern society, but the thing that too many men and women alike tend to forget is that we are not at the mercy of our biology. It can be a powerful influence, yes, of course. But the more we intellectually understand these various biomechanical influences, the more we can reduce their ability to dictate our behavior. Or, alternatively, make use of them to manipulate other people.

Courtesy: Biology Department, The Chateau

The Home of the Banks

It will be interesting to see how the White House and the Congress intervene to keep their masters in business and out of prison:

“The Massachusetts Supreme Court just dealt a negative ruling to the banks in the closely-followed Ibanez case, which challenged securitization standards. It’s pretty straightforward: The banks didn’t have the proper parwork to foreclose, says the court. Hence, no legitimate foreclosure.”

Oh oh. That’s exactly what I argued at the time.

If the details look like what this appears to be, the banks are totally ****ed on their securitized paper. This decision is from the State Supreme Court and thus is final within the State, and makes it likely that MBS holders will now sue en-masse for the sale of fraudulently-constituted securities (that is, there are no mortgages in the MBS they were sold!)

It’s perfectly clear that the mortgage banks and sellers of “mortgage-backed” securities that were not, in fact, backed by actual mortgages have committed the second-biggest financial fraud in American history. The amount of money that they have stolen from investors and the IRS absolutely dwarfs the amounts that are enough to imprison smaller fish for more than a decade.

Needless to say, it is highly unlikely that a single banker will ever do any prison time despite the fact that they are absolutely and provably guilty of massive criminal fraud and tax evasion because the USA is now an aristocracy with democratic trappings. The financial elite are, quite literally, above the law. If you steal $100 from a convenience store, there is no question that you will be punished much more severely than a banker who steals billions of dollars.

It is hard to escape the observation that America has become the Land of the Frauds and the Home of the Banks. But in the meantime, Zerohedge has more details on the Massachusetts bank-slapping.

“Plaintiffs’ claims that the Land Court’s ruling will cause widespread confusion or significant cost to innocent parties are greatly exaggerated, and such reasoning does not warrant ignoring the plain requirements of the law designed to protect Massachusetts consumers. Indeed, it is the foreclosing entities themselves who will bear the greatest cost of clearing titled from their invalid foreclosures. Having profited greatly from practices regarding the assignment and securitization of mortgages not grounded in the law, it is reasonable for them to bear the cost of failing to ensure that such practices conformed to Massachusetts law.”

Cue the Commerce Clause….

Disarm the police!

Clearly this is evidence that police guns are too dangerous to be permitted to the police:

Robert Butler Jr. walked into Millard South High School Wednesday just before 1 p.m. and signed in to speak to Assistant Principal Vicki Kaspar. It was his second visit to Kaspar’s office that day. The first hadn’t been a pleasant one, the 17-year-old senior slapped with a 19-day suspension for taking part in a Jan. 1 incident where a car was driven across a school football field and track at the school. But on this four-minute visit, Butler had a gun. It was a Glock .40, believed to be the service weapon of his father, an Omaha police officer. Butler shot the 58-year-old Kaspar, mortally wounding her, and then fired on Principal Curtis Case. He fired seven shots in all, the last a missed shot at a school custodian, before fleeing the school by car.

What do you want to bet that we don’t see the usual “guns must be banned” blather after this school shooting? The thing that is so stupid about gun control is that the decades of failure of the drug war make it perfectly apparent that all gun bans are going to do is create a very profitable illegal trade in them… and a lot of them are going to be purchased or stolen from the police and the military.

Perhaps you could try not being a wimp

I have zero sympathy for this loser:

Haywood was trying to transfer to the Yellow Line around 7:15 p.m. when the assault happened. He was headed home to Fort Totten after working out at Results on Capitol Hill, a gym bag slung over his shoulder and a book in his hands. As he read with his back to the station wall, “all of a sudden someone whacked me on the back of the head really hard,” he recalls.

Haywood turned around. The boy looked to be about 11 or 12 years old. Baffled, Haywood asked, “What the fuck are you doing?” The boy stood there laughing. Then someone else cracked Haywood from the other side. He turned around again. This time it was the girl in the video above. She didn’t stop swinging for more than a full minute, chasing Haywood around the platform as other kids egged her on.

As seen in the video, Haywood repeatedly asked the girl why she was attacking him, pleading with her to end it. “Stop it! Stop it! Goddamn it! You stop this shit right now! I did nothing to you!”

No wonder the nation is swirling down the drain. Little bastards like this wouldn’t be attacking strangers for kicks if they knew that they’d get their faces shattered in immediate response. Can you imagine Chuck Liddell or any MMA fighter begging a 12-year old boy or girl to stop hitting him? If you’re a man, you simply do not take that from anyone, let alone a child.