RSSThursday, September 2, 2010
Final Big Ten blah blah blah
So, divisions are set and I was completely wrong. The result is not bad overall, and specifically not bad for Illinois, which I think gets a very favorable schedule with Northwestern, Indiana, and Purdue every year.
Nebraska's 2011 and 2012 schedules, though - wow. I guess when you're the new guy you get hazed a little, but... Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio State, Penn State, and Michigan, all in the same year? With back-to-back road games against the Wolverines and Nittany Lions in 2011? Yikes.
Quick quiz: of Nebraska's first slate of conference opponents, can you name the only team that did not play in a bowl game last year?
... Read all of "Final Big Ten blah blah blah"
Posted by Dave at 1:02 PM | Comments (0)
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Organic milk: not as virtuous as you thought
Check out this article - the basic idea is that a cow that receives antibiotics at any point in its life cannot give "organic" milk. Therefore, when a cow on an organic farm contracts a bacterial infection, the farmer has to make a decision between withholding antibiotics (subjecting the animal to pain and possibly death) or giving antibiotics and losing the ability to use the animal for milk.
That's a pretty crappy choice. It's certainly not good in the long run for the cow, which runs the risk of turning out either dead or useless (which, in the context of farm animals usually also means dead).
There's already a rule that says that no animal with antibiotics in its system can give milk, even on non-organic farms. So why not allow farmers to treat sick animals and dump the milk for a while? The organic purists need to get down off their high horses (cows?) and allow a more sensible approach to animal health.
Posted by Dave at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)
Friday, August 27, 2010
Big Ten: Update
This news essentially confirms the North-South divisional split I suggested before as the way the Big Ten will be divided into divisions. Specifically the article says this:
... when a two-division format for football is unveiled by league officials next month, UW and Iowa will be separated.
Alvarez implied that it shouldn’t be hard to figure out how the 12 schools will be arranged in the two divisions. He said there are four distinct tiers of teams, led by the four that have won national championships in the past 25 years: Ohio State, Michigan, Nebraska and Penn State.
The next level has UW and Iowa “within a hair” of one another, according to Alvarez.
Using comparative data compiled since 1993 when Penn State made its Big Ten football debut, Northwestern and Purdue would likely lead the next grouping, followed by some mixing and matching of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan State and Minnesota.
The North-South groupings I predicted would evenly split teams on each of these tiers, with two top-tier teams, one second-tier team, one third-tier team, and two fourth-tier teams in each division. It might be possible to trade Penn State to the South in exchange for Nebraska, but that would rob Iowa of a natural geographic rival and not improve the situation significantly for the Nittany Lions.
So, I'm sticking with my previous prediction.
Posted by Dave at 3:52 PM | Comments (0)
Big Ten divisions
The big question for the Big Ten this fall will be what happens when Nebraska joins the conference in 2011. At that point, a conference championship game will be added, but that will require splitting into two divisions. Not only will this be the biggest change to football in the Big Ten pretty much since its inception (well, since the creation of the forward pass, anyway), but there is a tremendous potential to do it wrong, and in the process, ruin a bunch of really good, traditional rivalries.1
There is a consensus that the top six teams should be split fairly evenly. The big powers are Michigan (historically, anyway), Ohio State, Penn State, and Nebraska, and to a lesser extent Iowa and Wisconsin. With the assumption that Michigan will snap out of its slump soon, there are only two good ways to divide the teams that protect traditional and geographic rivalries and maintain competitive balance.
... Read all of "Big Ten divisions"
Posted by Dave at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)
Chinese and Japanese forget how to write.
Because both languages are (at least partly) pictographic, and because speakers of both use phonetic methods to enter words into their computers and mobile devices, speakers of Chinese and Japanese are forgetting how to write the symbols used to represent written words.
This isn't as much of a problem in Japan, where there are already two phonetic alphabets that can be used to write words. But in China, which has used its non-phonetic, symbol-based alphabet to unify a country in which there are dialects so different that they aren't mutually-intelligible1, this is a serious problem. I think in the end, the Chinese will have to adopt a phonetic alphabet or syllabary like the Japanese, and people will have to learn to read and write the standard language (Hàn) regardless of their native dialect.2
While there's a lot of resistance on cultural and nationalistic grounds, there's actually a big advantage to switching in the long run. First, you'll get an immediate increase in literacy. But it also gives people speaking the various non-Hàn dialects an opportunity to read and write their own languages and develop and preserve their regional culture. Having just been in Catalonia and learned a little bit about the history of the region, it strikes me as very important for a people like the Catalans - or the Guānhuà or the Wú to be able to have their own identity, even if they remain part of a larger nation.
1 Really, they're separate languages. But as someone once said, a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy.
2 It's not a big deal. Everyone in Europe already does this.
Posted by Dave at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
Random errors loading the page?
I'm trying to figure out why I'm getting random database errors. If you have a problem, just reload the page.
Posted by Dave at 9:55 AM | Comments (0)