For most of history, A&M has claimed a single national title, in 1939, when German Panzers were rolling into Poland. This year, A&M decided it had won two more national titles, in 1919 and 1927, and added them to a display at Kyle Field. Let's look at the 1927 title. That year, judging by A&M enrollment data, the university had around 2,500 students. All of them were men. Dana X. Bible’s Aggies played a nine-game schedule, which included an impressive five shutouts. One of those shutouts was a 0-0 tie against TCU. When the season ended, various outlets — there was no AP poll yet — gave the national title to Illinois and Notre Dame.He doesn't even touch on the lunacy with vacating all of Penn State's results from 1998 because that is when people at the school found out an assistant coach was raping little boys. Or stripping Ohio State of a season's wins because Jim Tressel tried to cover up that his players were getting free tattoos. Anyway, we may as well ignore all college sports records, because most of the good teams will have their wins vacated anyway.
Nearly 60 years later, as Barry Petchesky notes, Jeff Sagarin created a computer formula to rank college football teams. He retroactively declared A&M the 1927 national champs over Illinois et al. So in 1927, Texas A&M won a national title, even though that title wouldn’t exist for almost 60 years and the Aggies wouldn’t brag much about it for 85 years.
It gets stranger. This year, the Aggies also claimed new conference titles, for 1997 and 2010. I was in college in 1997, at Texas, so I can testify about that one. A&M lost the December 6 Big 12 title game to Nebraska, 54-15. Readers of the next day’s Dallas Morning News would discover a headline that read, "Ineffective offense stages A&M’s loss." The Nebraska-A&M game was so uninteresting that it doesn't even rate a Wikipedia page — though that might be the result of UT fans and our co-conspirators in the media.
An A&M spokesman later said the school would add a “South” next to the ’97 and ’10 titles on the display. By this point, the Internet had noticed.
Making the past more glorious than it was is one way college football changes history. Another way is to make the past disappear completely. Thanks to Reggie Bush’s NCAA violations, USC did not win 12 games in 2005. I was at the Rose Bowl that year, so I must have been on a Dickian amphetamine binge when Bush lateraled the football to nobody. Also retroactively, Bush did not win the 2005 Heisman. And USC's athletic department has — forgive the Bidenism — literally painted Bush out of the program's history.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
The Malleable History of College Football
Bryan Curtis:
What's Up With The Polls?
Irrigation And U.S. Agriculture
Big Picture Agriculture:
This month the USDA came out with a report titled, “Water Conservation in Irrigated Agriculture: Trends and Challenges in the Face of Emerging Demands” by Glenn D. Schaible and Marcel P. Aillery.There's a lot more interesting stuff over there. With potential climate change impacts, I can't see how this continues.
What Did the Study Find?
• Based on the 2007 Census of Agriculture, irrigated farms accounted for roughly 40 percent ($118.5 billion) of the value of U.S. agricultural production; nationwide, the average value of production for an irrigated farm was more than three times the average value for a dryland farm.
• Irrigated farms accounted for 54.5 percent ($78.3 billion) of the value of all crop products sold and contributed to the farm value of livestock and poultry production through animal forage and feed production. Livestock/poultry products accounted for roughly a third of market sales for irrigated farms and 63 percent for nonirrigated (dryland) farms.
• Nearly 57 million acres were irrigated across the United States in 2007, or 7.5 percent of all cropland and pastureland. Roughly threequarters of U.S. irrigated agriculture occurred in the 17 Western States, although irrigation has been expanding in the more humid Eastern States.
• Irrigated agriculture across the Western States applied 74 million acre-feet (24 trillion gallons) of water for crop production, with 52 percent originating from surfacewater sources and 48 percent pumped from wells that draw from local and regional aquifers.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Remembering 11 Years Ago
Today's remembrances seem a little more muted than in the past. As I've said before, I think that is a good thing. For those of us who didn't lose anybody that day, it is past time to move on. For those who did, my prayers are with you. Now if we could remove the awful title of Patriots Day from the calendar for this day, and get rid of those tacky stars and stripes baseball caps they wear in the majors, and put away "God Bless America" from the seventh inning stretch in cities outside of New York City, I'd say we'd be well on our way back to normalcy.
The Pro Sports-Local Government Boondoggle
From The Atlantic:
In June, the city council of Glendale, Arizona, decided to spend $324 million on the Phoenix Coyotes, an ice hockey team that plays in Glendale's Jobing.com Arena.What the fuck were they thinking in subsidizing the team like that? Building stadiums is bad enough, but paying the league $25 million a year to run the team seems ludicrous. Now that these stadiums are all built (or almost all built), I hope cities have learned their lessons. The Bengals, and to a lesser extent the Reds, screwed over Hamilton County. They will pay an outrageous amount by the time the stadiums are paid off. But at least they aren't paying to operate the teams too. And the economic benefits of the teams being there won't ever pay for what the County laid out.
The team has been owned by the league itself since its former owner, Jerry Moyes, declared bankruptcy in 2009. For each of the past two seasons, Glendale has paid $25 million to the league to manage the Coyotes, even as the city faced millions of dollars in budget deficits. Now, Greg Jamison, who is also part of the organization that owns the NHL's San Jose Sharks, is making a bid for the team, and would therefore be the beneficiary of the subsidies.
To put the deal in perspective, Glendale's budget gap for 2012 is about $35 million. As the city voted to give a future Coyotes owner hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, it laid off 49 public workers, and even considered putting its city hall and police station up as collateral to obtain a loan, according to the Arizona Republic. (The latter plan was ultimately scrapped.)
Overall, Glendale is not only on the hook for $15 million per year over two decades to a potential Coyotes owner, but also a $12 million annual debt payment for construction of its arena. In return, according to the Republic, the city receives a measly "$2.2 million in annual rent payments, ticket surcharges, sales taxes and other fees." Even if the Coyotes were to dominate the league like no other in recent memory and return to the Stanley Cup Finals year after year, the city would still lose $9 million annually.
Robot Dog, Or Robot Cow?
Wired:
Previously we’ve seen AlphaDog, Darpa’s four-legged, autonomous robot wander the woods and play fetch. Now the Pentagon’s robo-beast, designed to haul supplies in rough terrain, has become smart enough to follow troops around like a loyal pet.That thing is creepy looking. I'm glad to know what kind of robot crap the DoD is working on to make killing folks easier. I don't think too many "sovereign citizens" can come up with the weaponry to fight off our military, 2nd amendment or not.
In the video above, released on Monday by Darpa, the AlphaDog – known as the LS3 or Legged Squad Support System – climbs rocks and trots after a soldier through wooded terrain. “We have been conducting tests to check out its mobility, perception and autonomy, and human-machine interaction,” Lt. Col. Joe Hitt, Darpa’s program manager, tells Danger Room. And a lot of what the robot is doing looks familiar. The machine, designed by Boston Dynamics, can stand upright, walk for 20 miles without a break and carry up to 400 pounds.
But this test has one important difference. Now the ‘bot can obey instructions to follow people. The Marines connected the robot to the Marine Corps Tactical Robot Controller (TRC), a 10-pound touchscreen device a soldier or Marine can use to send the robot orders.
Biomass Syngas?
From Big Picture Agriculture:
Since the golden years of refining margins seem to have disappeared, Licata expects that to meet new mandates to produce cleaner-burning fuels, refiners will be forced to add biogas “in a big way” to sustain revenue growth. Valero Energy Corp., the world’s largest independent oil refiner, has become a major ethanol player. Valero invested $60 million in Enerkem Inc. last year, a company that converts waste into ethanol.I'll believe it when I see it. Biomass syngas isn't as easy as fracking, and that's saying something.
The Northeast’s refinery sales and closures because of favored margins in the West Coast and MidAtlantic regions has led to a lack of distillate and gasoline production in this region. Licata thinks that opportunities for biogas development in the eastern U.S. are growing. Refiners would distill garbage, plastics and biomass such as wood chips, corn husks, wood residues, straw and switch grass into syngas which is rich with complex hydrocarbons.
Licata concludes:
While cellulosic ethanol is a promising fuel alternative, there are issues we must call attention to, namely high production costs and the potential environmental damage. The U.S. produces about 1.3 billion tons of biomass a year. Therefore, fuel derived from biomass could potentially offset 30% of our present crude oil needs. Progress in this area should be seen sooner than later, and more refiners will likely look to follow Valero’s lead to boost exposure to biogas without harming food crops or timber.
Shoddy Chinese Construction?
Dr. Ed's Blog, via Ritholtz:
I've linked to previous stories about shitty construction in China. I really wonder how much of it is true. It is pretty hard to get worried about China and India taking down the U.S. when getting bridges to stand up and keeping the power on are real challenges for them. We have some of the same problems, but not nearly on the same scale, and we don't have the outrageous poverty those countries do. Maybe things aren't as bad here as we tend to believe. Of course it would help if it looked like there was any way we could start fixing our comparatively modest problems.All these developments certainly explain why the Shanghai-Shenzhen 300 stock price index dropped last Wednesday to the lowest readings since March 3, 2009. On Friday, it rebounded by 5.3% on news that the government approved 25 new subway and inter-city rail projects worth $126 billion.
That’s not much, really. Why aren’t China’s leaders spending much more as they did in late 2008 and 2009 to boost economic growth? It might be because much of what they built was defective as a result of widespread corruption. The 8/4 issue of the London Times reported there were 99 road cave-ins in Beijing between July 21 and August 21 of this year. Roads and bridges are collapsing in other cities as well. Most are relatively new including a bridge that was built just 10 months ago.
The country's former railway minister, Liu Zhijun, was expelled from the Communist Party of China for corruption in May following the high-speed train collision that left 40 people dead and 172 injured near the eastern city of Wenzhou last year. In March of this year, part of a high-speed railway line due to open in May between the Yangtze river cities of Wuhan and Yichang collapsed after heavy rain. Engineers working on some projects have complained of problems with contractors using inferior concrete or inadequate steel support bars. Consider this excerpt from the 2/17/11 issue of the NYT:
“The statement underscored concerns in some quarters that Mr. Liu cut corners in his all-out push to extend the rail system and to keep the project on schedule and within its budget. No accidents have been reported on the high-speed rail network, but reports suggest that construction quality may at times have been shoddy. A person with ties to the ministry said that the concrete bases for the system’s tracks were so cheaply made, with inadequate use of chemical hardening agents, that trains would be unable to maintain their current speeds of about 217 miles per hour for more than a few years. In as little as five years, lower speeds, possibly below about 186 miles per hour, could be required as the rails become less straight, the expert said. Strong concrete pillars require a large dose of high-quality fly ash, the byproduct of burning coal. But the speed of construction has far exceeded the available supply, according to a 2008 study by a Chinese railway design institute.”
Study Shows Swine Flu Potential
Scientific American:
Choi wanted to assess the pandemic potential of Korean strains. His team tested two H1N2 and two H3N2 viruses isolated from pig abattoirs before the 2009 pandemic. Most of these viruses did not cause any signs of serious disease in ferrets.The outbreak of swine flu in people at county fairs is slightly concerning. At least it hasn't shown any potential for transmitting from human to human.
Sw/1204 was the exception. It replicated in the airways and lungs of three infected ferrets, killing one and causing such severe disease in the others that they had to be euthanized. The virus also spread through the air to infect three healthy ferrets that were housed in cages next to infected ones.
The virus gained two new mutations in its trip between the cages — one from aspartic acid to glycine in the haemagglutinin protein (HA225G), and one from serine to asparagine in neuraminidase (NA315N). The mutant virus was better at infecting and growing in human lung tissues and airway cells than the parental strain, and could still thrive and spread among swine.
The HA225G mutation allows the virus to bind more effectively to receptors in the lungs of its hosts, and has been linked to greater pathogenicity, but not transmissibility, in the pandemic H1N1 strain. NA315N has also been found before, but its role is less clear. Choi suggests that it stabilizes the neuraminidase protein, which is involved in viral break-out from host cells.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Strange Fact Of The Day
Diana Diroy:
Loud flashes of yellow are all around you in this city—46,000 taxi sedans, vans and S.U.V.’s streaking across the streets of New York. Yet, only about 170 of them are driven by women, a percentage even lower than the national average. In all my years of hopping into cabs here, and elsewhere, I never met a female driver until I shot this documentary. I needed to find them.Wow, 170 out of 46,000? Zoinks.
I went from one taxi garage to the next, the only woman in a sea of men, and the drivers would look at me like I was crazy. For weeks I had no luck. Then one evening, a good friend of mine hailed a cab—and there was Shonna Valeska behind the wheel. He told her about my project, wrote her phone number down on a record sleeve, and texted me right away.
In November 2010 I began filming Valeska, and Elena Tenchikova, to whom I’d been connected via the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission. They graciously brought me into their world—one of late nights, early mornings, and forgotten corners—and a year and a half later, I caught up with the women for an update.
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