There Could be Another Reason

I’m not saying that the reasons given are irrelevant, but they do appear to leave out the very important factor of the observable thumb-on-the-scale that the NFL clearly utilizes to keep nationally-televised games close and favor certain teams in certain circumstances:

Blowouts are an unavoidable reality in college football, though. Of the 863 games played during the regular season, 355 of them (41.1%) were decided by at least 20 points, while 295 (34.2%) were one-possession games. Mismatches are bound to happen in the college game, and not just when power-conference teams schedule tuneup games against East Podunk State. The NFL can implement rules and policies to promote parity, like the salary cap and schedules based on a team’s previous season record—not to mention the much more consistent talent level of professional players—and that results in far fewer blowouts. There have been roughly one-third as many 20-point blowouts in the NFL this season (50) as there have been one-possession games (143, more than half of the 272 games played through 17 weeks). College football is far more decentralized and less regulated than the NFL. If Ohio State wants to spend $20 million on its football roster, there’s nothing to stop the Buckeyes from doing it (for now).

Speaking of Ohio State’s $20 million team salary, it’s fascinating to see that the professional NCAA teams are rapidly approaching the original NFL salary cap set in 1994.

The salary cap would take effect for the 1994 season. That year, the salary cap was supposed to be $32 million per team. But after the league sold expensive television rights to networks, the inaugural cap was set at $34.608 million.

And if the additional excitement produced by the expanded College Football Playoffs this year is any guide, the NCAA is going to need a salary cap soon just to maintain its competitive balance.

DISCUSS ON SG

Gomorrah Burns

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection listed five major active wildfires spread around the Los Angeles area as of Wednesday night.

  • The Palisades Fire began in the Pacific Palisades area of the city on Tuesday. It has so far burned 17,234 acres and is at 0% containment. More than 1,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed.
  • The Eaton Fire north of Pasedna began on Tuesday. It expanded to 10,600 acres and is at 0% containment. Up to 500 structures have been damaged or destroyed.
  • The Hurst Fire in Sylmar, northwest of San Fernando, began on Tuesday and has burned 855 acres. It is at 10% containment.
  • The Lidia Fire erupted on Wednesday on the northwest edge of the Angeles National Forest. It has grown to 348 acres and is at 40% containment.
  • The Sunset Fire broke out above West Hollywood on Wednesday. It is at 43 acres and 0% containment.

I wonder if the Democrats will finally be inclined to consider redirecting some of that massive Federal aid money being shoveled into Ukraine toward disaster areas in the USA now that the second capitol of their party is being literally burned to the ground. They certainly didn’t seem very inclined to help the people in Tennessee.

But LA residents have nothing to fear from the flames. Chief Crowley’s on the job! Talk about a portentous name…

UPDATE: In April 2024, State Farm—one of the biggest private insurers in the state—announced that it had canceled a total of 72,000 policies in California, 30,000 of which were homes. Many of those affected lived in high-risk, upscale neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, the area now affected by the Palisades fire. The move was justified by State Farm as an attempt to reduce the company’s overall exposure after two years of devastating wildfires in 2017 and 2018, and huge losses for the insurance industry in California. In Pacific Palisades, about 1,600 insured homes lost coverage following State Farm’s decision, as reported by ABC 7.

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Reject Diversity

There is absolutely no benefit to giving into the demands for diversity. If you don’t give in, you’ll take the heat but you won’t suffer the negative consequences of destroying your organization. If you do give into them, you’ll first suffer the negative consequences of destroying your organization, then you’ll take even more heat for trying to fix the new problems the diversity created for you.

Since two black NFL coaches were fired, one who was unprepared and abysmal and one who was merely overmatched, the social justice warriors on ESPN and social media are going crazy about how unfair it is that some white coaches who didn’t have good seasons weren’t… even though three white coaches and the only Arab coach were. This was a particularly stupid complaint:

Interesting how Black head coaches get 1 year to turn around terrible teams…. Meanwhile, Brian Daboll…

Brian Daboll of the New York Giants wasn’t fired after the 2024 season for three reasons. He’s already won a playoff game, he’s won Coach of the Year, and the Giants ownership is famously patient by NFL standards. He is also a very highly-regarded offensive coordinator who developed successful offenses at Buffalo and at the University of Alabama.

Jared Mayo and Antonio Pierce were both promoted too soon and they were put into positions where their failure was all but guaranteed in the name of diversity. That’s what promoting diversity in the place of competence, let alone excellence, does. It puts unprepared and incompetent people into positions where they cannot possibly succeed. Hiring Mike Tomlin is not promoting diversity; Mike Tomlin is a great coach and I was very unhappy when he was hired away from the Vikings by the Steelers before the Vikings could replace Brad Childress with him. Hiring Kwesi Adofo-Mensah isn’t promoting diversity either, as based on the way he overcame an incredibly difficult preseason, he may be the best young general manager in the entire league as well as one of the smartest.

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Mailvox: Fixation and Physicists

Frank Tipler, the Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane, did a little digging and found a claim by Richard Lenski to have observed fixation in a virus taking place 10 times faster than he observed in his famous experiments with E. coli bacteria.

It occurred to me that the fastest rate of genetic fixation should occur in viruses, since they are the least complicated organisms that be considered “living.”

Here’s a post by Richard Lenski, in which he SEEMS to claim that his students observed fixation of a group of four mutations in the Lambda virus in 8 days. The life cycle of the Lambda virus is 45 minutes, so 8 X 24 X 60/45 = 256 generations. In a replication experiment with a larger population, he SEEMS to say it took 3 weeks, or 21 X 24 X 60/45 = 672 generations.

Either is faster that Lenski’s E. coli fixation time of 1,600 generations per mutation.

But since there are 4 mutations fixed, we have, for each mutation, an even faster rate: 256/4 = 64 generations per individual mutation, or 672/4 = 168 generations per individual mutation. Lenski argues for strong selection pressure to account for the rapid rate.

I think that these numbers would be the true fastest observed mutation fixation rate. Still too slow to account for the human-chimp fixed gene difference in 9 million years.

Duly noted and much appreciated. Just to keep things in perspective, while this faster observed rate theoretically reduces the minimum number of years per fixed mutation from 32,000 to 3,360, that only increases the maximum number of fixed mutations since the Last Chimp Human Common Ancestor to 2,679, which is still considerably short of the observed 15,000,000 fixations required.

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Burn Hollywood Burn

Chuck D truly is a Prophet of Rage. As he predicted, the Hellmouth is in flames.

A massive wildfire whipped up by extreme winds has swept through a Los Angeles hillside dotted with celebrity homes – with a state of emergency declared. The enormous blaze in the Pacific Palisades forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people, some of whom abandoned their cars and fled on foot to safety with roads blocked.

Firefighters battling the blaze, which is burning through about five football fields a minute, warned they were running out of water and supplies, as evacuation warnings spread to Malibu and Calabasas. Tankers full of water had been dousing the inferno from the skies all afternoon, but all aircraft were later grounded amid deteriorating wind conditions and visibility. Residents were warned the worst is still yet to come as the raging wildfire burns through more than 2,900 acres of Los Angeles land at an extraordinary rate.

At least 30,000 residents are now under mandatory evacuation orders with more still warned they should be prepared to leave, after a fire that broke out in the foothills near Eaton Canyon has grown to 1,000 acres in just six hours since it began. A third brush fire has broken out in Sylmar in the San Fernando Valley which recent estimates is around 100 acres big.

Perhaps now people will start looking into who is starting these massive fires and why the government is involved in spreading them. We still have virtually no information about what happened on Maui.

UPDATE: Things are looking decidedly suspicious if what actor James Woods is saying happens to be true.

Actually one of the major insurance companies canceled all the policies in our neighborhood about four months ago.

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The Only Skull

As you may or may not be aware, George Gordon Byron is one of my favorite poets. And his “Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull” is my favorite poem that wasn’t written by a particular friend of mine, Dante, or A.A. Milne. And while it’s not well known, but I am actually a published poet, as I wrote a poem that was published in Bucknell University’s poetry journal when I was studying there.

Of course, as always seems to be the case, the combination of my talents with my iconoclasm not only caused the poem to be accepted for publication, but also caused half the staff to quit in protest after it was published. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

In any event, I put the Byronic poem to restrained nu-metal, took the liberty of changing the two instances of “quaff” to drank/drink since it just didn’t work, put together a chorus that fit the context, used the final verse as a pseudo-chorus, and threw on a lyrical outro. The poem is well worth reading, and if you want to hear the musical version, you can hear The Only Skull on UATV. When I put the album out in the spring, this will definitely be on it.

Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I drank like thee;
I died, let earth my bones resign:
Fill up thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Why not? Life is rapid sped.
Why not? Nothing’s left unsaid.
Why not? Will you rest instead?
Why not come and revel with the dead!

Better to hold the sparkling grape
Than nurse the earthworm’s slimy brood,
And circle in the goblet’s shape
The drink of gods than reptile’s food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shown,
In aid of others’ let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?

Why not? Life is rapid sped.
Why not? Nothing’s left unsaid.
Why not? Will you rest instead?
Why not come and revel with the dead!

Drink while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not—since through life’s little day
Our heads such sad effects produce?
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs to be of use.

Drink while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Now rhyme and revel,
Rhyme and revel,
Why—not rhyme and revel?
Rhyme and revel with the dead!

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The Crisis of Clown World

It simply cannot be swept under the rug or sugar-coated any longer: the Western order is in literal crisis. The people have had enough, and the avalanche is picking up inertia because the process is a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the more wanton elites fall, the more that citizens are energized to rise up against them. And when that happens, the elites are forced to clamp and double down on their lies, hypocrisy, and repressions in a futile attempt to stem the flow; this leads to even more ill-will, resentment, and revolt against their destructive policies.

Simplicius observes this. Peter Turchin predicted this. I predicted this. It’s becoming really freaking obvious to everyone now, everyone except the lunatics still trying to cling to power.

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The End of an Era

Life is not a 1980s fantasy novel. Sometimes, the Dark Lord triumphs. After giving up writing science fiction in favor of cat porn, my onetime blog traffic rival, John Scalzi, has laid down his blog pen and passed on the Whatever torch.

In 2012, John Scalzi’s blog was the place to be for anyone interested in science fiction. His blog popularity and traffic as an influencer led to him getting massive multi-million dollar contracts at Tor Books and industry insiders giving him multiple Hugo Awards. In 2016, Scalzi revealed a small chink in the armor of his online presence, as he reported his blog traffic as falling, coinciding with the first election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. With his push toward extreme liberalism and social justice, Scalzi turned off a portion of his originally military sci-fi reading audience as he pivoted toward what he perceived to be mainstream clout.

His blog saw an 11% traffic drop from a 2015 self-reported number of 5.8 million site visits (close to 500,000 a month) in that year, but it seems to have gotten far worse in recent years as his online persona has made sure that half the country or more is not interested in what he has to offer with his extreme political takes. It’s gotten so bad that he doesn’t report his blog stats at the end of the year anymore, instead giving updates about his life in general. He vows in 2025 he will “spend more time on friendships and community,” which is usually a self-reflection that things are not going very well.

Despite his not posting his stats, using online statistical sources, Fandom Pulse estimates his monthly traffic to be anywhere from 150,000-200,000 on an average month, less than half of what it was only eight years ago. Fandom Pulse, by contrast, is doing well over 300,000 per month in our first month full time, making this Substack the most trafficked blog in science fiction.

Another sign John Scalzi doesn’t view his blog traffic as doing well is that he’s now conscripted his daughter to take over Whatever. She posted, “Hello, everyone! If you saw my father’s post yesterday, then you know that some changes that have been in the works for a while now are finally here. Mainly, I have been passed the torch that is Whatever, and I plan to carry it proudly.”

I wish both The Artist Formerly Known as… well, in the spirit of leaving history in the past, let’s just call him Neil Gaiman’s good friend, and the new Whatever blogger well. No, don’t laugh. I have absolutely nothing against Athena, and it was always Scalzi’s fans who used to infest the blog comments here that were more in my sights than the man himself. He mostly served as a useful metric, given Whatever’s onetime status as The Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction.

It’s a little sad, actually. Beating up on Brandon Sanderson is redundant; the man self-flagellates more than one can possibly kick him, and I couldn’t even name most of the SJW pets and never-weres that have replaced Scalzi as Tor’s Award-Winning authors. The transformation of Whatever truly represents the end of an era, a stupid and mediocre era, to be sure, but an era nonetheless. David Weber is gone, Neil Gaiman is done, George RR Martin is done, John Scalzi is petering out, Brandon Sanderson has gone rogue and is nuking his fan base; the genre publishers simply never developed my generation of fantasy and science fiction writers and there is very little coming up behind them in the mainstream.

And yet, we not only survive, we thrive. Whatever is gone. Tor Books is next. But you can be absolutely certain that the dark empire of Castalia will continue to grow and expand.

The silence was the most terrifying thing. Not the absence of sound, but the absence of life. Birds no longer sang, their vibrant melodies replaced by an eerie stillness. Laughter, once a common thread weaving through the tapestry of human existence, had vanished, leaving behind a chilling emptiness. The whispers of the wind through the trees, once a comforting lullaby, now sounded like mournful dirges. Even the gentle hum of the world, the subtle symphony of existence, had been extinguished, leaving behind a suffocating vacuum where hope and joy once thrived.

And somewhere beneath his black velvet hood, in the shadows where no one could see, the dark lord smiled.

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Achieving Faster Fixation

A few SGers were confused by the way in which the 2009 paper for the e. coli experiment didn’t provide clear numbers regarding what was, and what was not, a fixation event. And, as it turns out, considerably more work has been done in this space since 2009, and it’s evident that at least a few scientists are growing concerned about the obvious implications of the time, in generations, that is required for mutational fixation, presumably due to its obvious implications for the impossibility of evolution by natural selection. In fact, some are even attempting to prove that fixation is not required for adaptation, in a quixotic illustration of the way in which they still don’t truly understand the extant nature of the problem MITTENS poses for TENS.

Any understanding of an evolutionary process requires the understanding of the particular components that make up that evolutionary process. Darwin wrote about these evolutionary processes in his book, “On the Origin of Species”[1]. From this text, we get a particular quote that describes these processes: “For it should be remembered that the competition will generally be most severe between those forms which are most nearly related to each other in habits, constitution and structure. Hence all the intermediate forms between the earlier and later states, that is between the less and more improved state of a species, as well as the original parent-species itself, will generally tend to become extinct. So it probably will be with many whole collateral lines of descent, which will be conquered by later and improved lines of descent. If, however, the modified offspring of a species get into some distinct country, or become quickly adapted to some quite new station, in which child and parent do not come into competition, both may continue to exist.” Darwin recognized that two processes can occur during evolution, competition (what Darwin also calls the struggle for existence) and adaptation. Many papers have been written about the mathematics of competition. Some of the many examples were written by Haldane et al. [2-5]. Here, we will address both the mathematics of competition and the mathematics of adaptation. In this paper, we consider a particular experimental evolutionary model, the Lenski E. coli long term evolution experiment (LTEE) [6] and the particular evolutionary components which cause the experiment to act in its manner. And to address why it takes so many generations for each fixation and adaptation step. A model for fixation was presented in the following paper BH Good, et al. and edited by Richard Lenski where they discuss these issues [7]…

In this study, we make the simplifying assumption that the distribution of variants in the entire 10ml test tube is identical to the distribution of variants in the 0.1ml sample. The other selection process is the natural selection process that occurs as the different variants replicate where the more fit variant ultimately substitutes for the less fit variants over generations. This is due to the differences in the relative fitness of the different variants in the population. These two selection processes must be combined to correctly describe the fixation process in the LTEE. But the fixation process does not describe the adaptation process. Adaptation (an improvement in fitness) occurs when another beneficial mutation occurs on the more fit variant. The improvement in fitness of a particular variant is dependent on the absolute fitness of that variant to replicate because the random trial for improvement in fitness is the replication and the frequency at which the beneficial mutation occurs is given by the mutation rate. This is a binomial probability problem, that is, does the beneficial mutation occur or does it not occur with that replication. The mathematical model to describe this part of the evolutionary process is given by the mathematics of random mutation and natural selection [10]. The probability of that beneficial mutation occurring on the more fit variant is dependent on the number of replications of that variant. This value will be tabulated in the mathematical model of fixation. The key point to understand in the evolutionary process is that fixation is not a requirement for adaptation. If the carrying capacity of the environment is sufficient to allow for the number of replications required to give a reasonable probability of a beneficial mutation occurring on some variant, then fixation is not needed for adaptation.

Have you spotted the problem yet? Anyhow, the experiment provided a way to test how long it took a mutation to fixate, and the results were considerably faster than the 1,600 generations previously indicated. In fact, they managed to reduce the number of generations to fixation to a range between 119 and 497!

However, the table raises an obvious question. What is this k that appears to be directly related to the number of generations required? And aye, there’s the rub.

 If that weight factor is 2, that means that variant is doubling in number every generation.

So, k=2 is a very strong replication weight factor. And yet, even with it cranked up to an unnaturally high rate, it’s still insufficient to reduce the number of generations to fixation to a sufficient level. And a more realistic replication weight factor that is more reflective of the genetic changes we can observe in real-time from one generation to the next is obviously going to be much lower, and in line with those previously reported.

But all of this frantic activity to prove that fixation is not necessary for adaptation is misplaced anyhow, because the problem is not adaptation, but the observable genetic distance that consists of historical fixation events separating one species from another. One can certainly prove that it’s not necessary to travel from point A to point B in a boat in order to cross a river, but that proof will never change the previously measured width of the river.

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Sen. Graham Demands Mass Deportations

It’s fascinating to see how the Clown World puppets simply change their tune in order to maintain their political viability as well as Clown World’s monopoly on positions of power and influence:

The US needs to fortify its border with Mexico and start mass deportations as soon as possible, in the name of national security, Senator Lindsey Graham has warned. The South Carolina Republican, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, spoke to Fox News on Sunday about the pending budget reconciliation bill.

“I’m very worried that if we don’t put border first and get it done, it’s going to be a nightmare for our national security,” Graham told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo.

“We’ve got millions of illegal immigrants that President Trump has promised to deport, and he should. Why are we doing mass deportation? Because we had mass illegal immigration,” he added.

My best guess is that Clown World will embrace mass repatriations of illegal immigrants in what will probably be a futile attempt to prevent the mass repatriations of legal immigrants and dual-citizens. Graham has been a U.S. Senator since 2003, and to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time he has ever publicly called for mass deportations.

Notice how all the “nationalists” who receive coverage are civic nationalists who never even mentioned the word except to disavow it until 2020 or so, while all of the overt and outright nationalists are ignored, when they’re not still being denounced as “extremists” and worse. Now the fake “nationalists” are talking up a storm trying to defend their “idea nation” and denouncing “illegal immigrants” despite the fact that the core problem isn’t, and has never been, either the ideas or the legality of the invaders, but rather, the fact that they are not part of the American nation, they are not part of the American posterity, and they never will be.

But the pendulum is definitely swinging back, and it’s going to go a lot further than Clown World or its fake nationalists would prefer.

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