so much for that
WolverBean
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Recent Comments
| Date | Title | Body |
|---|---|---|
| 2 weeks 1 day ago | Disagree 100% |
The difference between Michigan and, say, Alabama is that to us, it DOES matter how or why we get to 85. |
| 3 weeks 6 hours ago | Under The Lights |
UTL = Under The Lights = first night game at Michigan stadium. This year's Notre Dame game will also be a night game, and I've seen some folk referring to it as UTL II. |
| 3 weeks 14 hours ago | The opening pitch |
had better look like this:
|
| 4 weeks 1 day ago | Nice to see |
It's nice to see how many seemingly qualified candidates the Regents will have to choose from. Thanks for the detailed write-up. |
| 4 weeks 5 days ago | Ammonium nitrate |
Without knowing what the plant in Waco specifically makes, I can postulate that the "ammonia something" you refer to is ammonium nitrate, which is both an excellent fertilizer and an excellent explosive. 400 lbs of the stuff are best used to fertilize 9 acres of farmland for growing corn; that same quantity is also how much Timothy McVeigh needed to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City back in 1994. You can imagine that a fertilizer manufacturing plant has a lot more than 9 acres-worth of ammonium nitrate on hand... and that's how you get one gigantic explosion. |
| 5 weeks 11 hours ago | His wife |
His wife runs a cooking blog. If my wife blogged about cooking for a living I'd be freshman-year-AJ-Williams size by now. |
| 6 weeks 2 days ago | Cardinal Stew |
Great post. Now I'm ready for six recipes for how to grill Cardinal! |
| 6 weeks 5 days ago | fixed |
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| 6 weeks 5 days ago | Skip to 1:55 |
Embed code isn't recognizing start time for some reason. Skip to 1:55. |
| 10 weeks 13 hours ago | Your avatar |
makes your comment 100% more effective. |
| 10 weeks 5 days ago | zeroth round |
I propose that we refer to the play-in round as the "zeroth" round, and define the first round as that in which 64 teams play to advance to the round of 32. Who's with me? |
| 10 weeks 5 days ago | Clarification |
Just clarifying that my comment about "not believing anything in Nature until I see it somewhere else too" was directed at a discussion of the relative merits of scientific journals, not toward the actual topic at hand. I agree, it does seem that the evidence is indeed mounting that cumulative trauma to brain tissue, even sub-concussion level trauma, leads to bad news down the road. I guess I should also clarify that when scientists talk about what is and is not believable or credible in scientific journals, they tend to approach the conversation from a different perspective than laymen discussing believability of, say, a news report. Scientific skepticism is a nuanced thing, which usually amounts to "there probably is something to this, but being a cautious scientist, I'll wait for more research to fill in the gaps in the story rather than declaring 'this study proves that x is true." This isn't at all the same kind of skepticism as "well, they're just plain wrong about this." So, for example, when I state that I "don't believe anything in Nature until I see it elsewhere," I don't actually mean I think that the authors are fudging data or lying about their findings. The high impact factors for Nature and Science are because the work reported there is in some sense the "most interesting" work being done right now, or "most cutting edge." It's not, however, the "most correct" or "most rigorous." It's exactly as rigorous as all the rest of science -- which is to say, pretty damn rigorous, but limited by the fundamental problem that real life is complicated and not always easily condensed into "A causes B with 100% certainty" types of statements. People working in science generally get pretty comfortable with, even take for granted that, there are very few situations in real life where you can say "A causes B, for certain." I suspect most non-scientists live in a more certain world, and as a result it's easy for there to be miscommunication between scientists and non-scientists about "how true" a scientific finding is. And the more politicized the topic, the more problematic this miscommunication becomes. Since few of the people who watch football, and probably none of the people involved in running the NFL, have any training in scientific thinking, there's going to be a lot of "debate" about scientific findings regarding concussions and brain damage that sounds like scientific debate, but is really non-scientists misunderstanding what scientists have said and arguing with each other in a way that's ultimately damaging to turning actual research findings into productive changes in football rules. (The worst case scenario here looks like the "scientific debate" about climate change, where most of the conversation takes place between non-scientists who anyway aren't interested in 'debate' in the proper sense.) Brace yourselves: much of what you'll hear in the next few years about the "scientific discussion about brain damage in football" will be neither particularly scientific, nor particularly useful in creating sensible changes to the rules of football (should that turn out to be necessary). That doesn't mean there won't be good science on this matter; it just means most of the people expressing opinions don't actually know what they're talking about. Which I guess makes this like every other publicly discussed topic! |
| 10 weeks 5 days ago | Wait, what? |
I think a strong argument can be made that Nature and Science are very much full of sensational but non-replicable findings. Admittedly, how reputable you think they are depends a lot on what field you're in (Nature, Science, and PLoS One are cross-disciplinary; most scientific journals are much more focused). In my field, I don't believe anything published in Nature until I see it published somewhere else, by someone else, at a later date. So to me, the difference between them is as much about how you feel about the open access model as it is about impact factors. But this line of conversation may rapidly approach the no politics limit, so I'll stop here. |
| 11 weeks 57 min ago | The danger with that is... |
So, it makes sense for the mods to be able to see who negged whom (which IIRC they can't do either right now), but there's a danger in letting individual posters see who negged them: some people take it personally when they get negged. Say justingoblue posts something that Magnus finds offensive, and Magnus negs justingoblue for it. If JGB can see that Magnus was responsible for that downvote, and he takes it personally, he may start auto-negging Magnus in future threads. If Magnus catches on that JGB is auto-negging him, he may reciprocate. Or maybe Magnus doesn't care (and I picked him for this example because I know he doesn't IRL), but His Dudeness gets offended on Magnus's behalf and starts auto-negging JGB. Pretty soon, Magnus's and JGB's point totals stop having anything to do with the quality of their posts, and become dependent only on lingering bitterness from previous downvotes -- which is counterproductive to the whole point of having a point system in the first place. And honestly, why do you need to know who up- or down-voted you? I can understand being curious, but on the whole, I suspect that knowledge will not generally lead to a more efficient, useful point system. |
| 12 weeks 2 days ago | angle? |
I don't think the "smart-guys-turned-football-junkies" thing is an angle. I think it's an accurate description of the people writing the blog. Brian has a Master's degree in EECS from Michigan, and a professed love of the writing of David Foster Wallace. I don't expect him to write about sports the way say, a former player would, or even the way a journalist would. Ace's power rankings are clearly meant to be witty (I happen to enjoy that; your mileage may vary), but his post-game columns are often more pure journalism in content and style than any actual newspaper is anymore. And Seth's old posting handle was "Misopogon." He named his internet presence after a satirical essay written by a roman emperor! It can't be shocking when that leads to non-sports cultural references like "Oklahoma!" in his writing. As far as the proliferation of internet memes on the site is concerned... well, you're on the internet. And a lot of people who read and post on this site (including the authors) spend a LOT of time on the internet, so it can't be a surprise when their current cultural references include I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER. Again, this blog was founded by an EECS nerd. That kind of stuff has been here since the beginning (been reading MGo since 2005). |
| 13 weeks 5 days ago | /obligatory | |
| 13 weeks 5 days ago | Dakich |
Did anyone else catch Dakich wandering off on some comment about the Minnesota Vikings near the end of the first half of the game that never happened but nevertheless pains your soul (and mine)? It was almost painfully obvious that he was reading twitter or something on his phone DURING A PLAY in a game he was a live commentator for (!!!). Tirico tried hard to cover for him, but even Tirico was stumped on that one (he redirected half-heartedly about Matthew Stafford being in attendance). And then a few plays later he turns around with some really salient analysis of how MSU is playing defense. If you're ESPN, how do you fire this guy? And yet, how do you not fire this guy? |
| 15 weeks 1 day ago | Interesting quote |
I'm not quite sure how much I should be reading between the lines here, but to me, this parses as "From Michigan's perspective, adding Maryland and Rutgers was not something we needed." Which in turn suggests that it was schools other than Michigan who were driving for this. I sometimes wonder - Brandon is so politically savvy in how he talks that I'm pretty sure he'd always speak positively in public about decisions he was vehemently against in private. That leaves us fans wondering "why did he support this thing we think is idiotic," when in fact he may not have been in support of it at all. And I think it makes sense to suspect that Indiana, Minnesota, MSU, etc were bigger drivers in the move to 14 teams than Michigan and OSU were. Michigan and OSU view adding Nebraska as adding to the competitive strength of the conference, and getting us a championship game we otherwise wouldn't get. Adding more schools does nothing for us. Whereas from Minnesota's perspective, adding Rutgers helps add competitive balance more than adding Nebraska did, because it adds another school they can actually be competitive against. I think this is also why there's less push for having "competitive balance" in the divisions this time around: the less competitive schools are less worried because any way you slice it, they'll see more beatable schools on their schedule going forward. |
| 16 weeks 6 days ago | Every single player |
who's seeing significant minutes gives an adjusted point per initial possession value greater than 1.30?! Am I reading this right? I guess that's how you end up with the #1 offense in the country. I have no way to put these numbers in context (what would they look like for Duke, or tOSU, or Northwestern, or Western Michigan?), but they seem incredible. All hail Beilein! |
| 17 weeks 1 day ago | Illinois |
has a 14-2 record but three losses? I haz a confuzed. |
| 17 weeks 4 days ago | "bugs and shit" |
I see what you did there. |
| 17 weeks 4 days ago | Popovich sure |
but when it comes to NBA coaches, does Popovich strike you more as the rule, or as the exception? I think NBA coaches can be pretty neatly cleaved into basketball gurus who superstars don't necessarily care for, and players' coaches who aren't necessarily that savvy on X's and O's. I think this dichotomy is what makes someone like Phil Jackson so legendary: he was the rare bird who was able to be both. |
| 17 weeks 6 days ago | Part show |
is the right description. In the NBA they aren't even pretending otherwise; witness the fine on Gregg Popovich earlier this year. |
| 22 weeks 1 day ago | *rises |
The Dark Knight Rises. Sorry. Hadn't had my morning coffee yet, and now I can't edit my mistake. Please accept this picture as my penance. |
| 22 weeks 1 day ago | Well put: |
"A man headed into Juarez against his will." Gold! |
| 22 weeks 1 day ago | What is this site for? |
I think any conversation about creating an OT board must squarely face a question that I don't think has ever been explicitly addressed by Brian et al: what, exactly, is and is not appropriate content for the premier site for discussion of Michigan athletics? I understand that a site like this builds its own community, and that certain posters begin to feel "close" to other posters in some cyber-friendship sense. I understand also that much of the demographic of this blog's readership shares interests in other topics besides just Michigan sports (e.g. I bet a larger proportion of MGoReaders saw "The Dark Knight Returns" than folks in the population at large). However, I would argue that if you want to discuss movies, good beer recipes, or (God forbid) politics, there are far better venues on the internet than MGoBlog for those discussions. With rare exceptions, it seems to me that the threads people would post on an OT board are threads that probably shouldn't be posted to MGoBlog in the first place. Now if Brian, Seth, etc disagree with me, I'll happily shut up, stay off their OT board, and be happy about it. But it seems to me that part of MGoBlog's strength is its focus on delivering one particular type of high quality content. I have my doubts that it can retain that level of quality while venturing into topics unrelated to Michigan sports. And a low quality OT board will in turn reflect poorly on the larger blog. TL;DR: don't turn MGoBlog into Reddit. |
| 22 weeks 5 days ago | Upvoted for supplying an |
Upvoted for supplying an interesting picture. Downvoted for incorrect spelling of the name of the head coach of our in-state rival. (Apparently you can't both upvote and downvote anymore, so I think the upvote is what stuck.) |
| 22 weeks 5 days ago | Normally distributed |
"That looks like a normal distribution to me." Yup:
Shown is the fit of pace data to a cumulative normal probability distribution function with average pace 30.66% of shots taken in the first 10 seconds, and standard deviation 7.97%. The r-squared correlation coefficient is 0.9971. I'd say that fits a normal distribution pretty damn well. Good eye, Brian. |
| 22 weeks 6 days ago | The bottom half |
of this press release is you making a joke, right? I mean, the man doesn't actually say "WOW moments," does he? |
| 22 weeks 6 days ago | Cal vs UC |
The CAL logo is used only by UC Berkeley's athletics department. Both the old seal and new toilet bowl logos in the OP's post are University-of-California-wide, meaning all 8 campuses, and aren't sports-related.
As a current Cal student, I went to sign the petition against the new logo at change.org and discovered that 47,000 people had already signed it. The new logo is a failure of truly epic proportions. |
