then you’d agree that more laterals should be used in football. Here’ a video clip that proves my point. Trinity laterals so many times that the defense gets too tired to tackle.

NBA.com’s Pick One Challenge

Basic rules of the game:

# Pick one player for each day of the regular season that a game is played.
# Accumulate points based on that player’s Points, Rebounds and Assists (Fantasy Points = P + R + A).
# Earn double points when you select a T-Mobile Rookie [Rookie Fantasy Points = (P + R + A) X2].
# You cannot pick the same player twice.

You can make selections whenever, not just on game day.

If you want to play send me an email.

Are we doing this this year? The regular season starts October 30th!

I really want to. April is down. who else wants to make this happen? if we have the interest I’ll set up a leage ASAP.

Post a reply to this, so I know who’s in.

You see that guy? That’s me. You see that bummed look on my face? That’s because I’m in Lisbon, at some second rate modern art museum. Outside, they’ve got this Calder sculpture hanging out, by itself in the middle of a vast, ugly concrete expanse, as if it was an afterthought. Why bummed? Because pretty much the exact same sculpture is the signature piece of Seattle’s new Olympic sculpture park. Afterthought in Lisbon. Flagship piece in Seattle.

More pictures from my otherwise awesome trip are here.

Alas, if only President Bush took his advice. President Bush, during his press conference today, serving up a fat hypocritic sandwich:

On Turkey invading Iraq: We are making it very clear to Turkey that we don’t think it is in their interests to send troops into Iraq….

On Turkey surging its forces in Iraq: Actually, they have troops already stationed in Iraq, and they’ve had troops stationed there for quite a while. We don’t think it’s in their interests to send more troops in.

On Turkey’s intent to fight terrorism emanating from Iraq with military force rather than diplomacy: Iraq shares [Turkish] concerns about terrorist activities [emanating from Iraq], but that there’s a better way to deal with the issue than having the Turks send massive troops into the country — massive additional troops into the country…. There’s a lot of dialogue going on, and that’s positive. We are actively involved with the Turks and the Iraqis through a tripartite arrangement, and we’ll continue to — dialoguing with the Turks.

Cocaine is having a better year then the Dow Jones industrial average

Which begs the question: Isn’t Cocaine always having a better year than the DJIA?

The Onion story that could accompany this title pretty much writes itself.

Seriously though the article makes some decent financial arguments for why drugs should be legalized. It would be bizarre and interesting to watch the venture captial of the world scramble to get a piece of the action if the drug market suddenly became legal. I might not buy stocks in a cocaine company for ethical reasons, but I would totally buy stocks in a weed company.

I’ve complained a lot about obvious patents, especially the Amazon “One Click” patent. It turns out someone else did more than just complain

While we just scratched our head and laughed, blogger Peter Calveley went and did something about it. He filed a re-examination request last year. And now that the patent office has taken another look at the one-click patent they’ve rejected a large number of claims made by Amazon. In other words, while Amazon has a chance to respond, there’s a good chance this patent will be revoked.

While this is good news, I can’t help but feel like for every one of these that gets rejected there are many more new, lower profile patent applications approved for “inventions” that are obvious and/or vague. Maybe not though. Maybe this is one of those times where good policies will eventually evolve through trial and error and public feedback without the need for new legislation or court intervention. After all, if the patent office can’t keep up with the pace of technology, it’s probably too much to expect our elected officials to make sense of it.

Zach and Daniel have blogged about optical illusions before, so I thought you might like the one that Karl Posted over at LS-Ultimate.

Check it out here

Once you’ve seen it, you can check out my commentary after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Those quotes were great! I like that guy too, so much that I could hear his guitar in the background as I read the quotes. The last one, about “sort-of” touched on a post I thought about writing this weekend.

Have you guys noticed that “sort-of” is the academia/intellectual/elitist version of “um” or “y’know”? I first noticed it while in law school, but now it’s becoming as ubiquitous on NPR as “chipotle” (the seasoning, not the restaurant ) is to the food industry. Instead of being used in the sense I always understood it–as in “almost” or “of the same sort”, it’s often used as a filler for smarter people to not say “like”.

Am I crazy on this, or right on the money?

Some of my favorite quotes from funnyman Demitri Martin:

I think all board games can have the same title: which one of my friends is a competitive asshole?

I think it would be cool, if you were writing a ransom note in Microsoft Word, and it popped up, the paperclip and said, “It looks like you’re writing a ransom note… need some help? You should curse more.

You can say “I love kids” as a general statement, that’s fine. It’s when you get specific that you get in to trouble. “I love twelve-year-olds.”

I like fruit baskets because it gives you the ability to mail someone a piece of fruit without appearing insane. Like, if someone
just mailed you an apple you’d be like ‘Huh? What the hell is this?’, but if it’s in a fruit basket you’re like ‘This is nice!.’

Read the rest of this entry »

If I ever purchase a new car, It will hopefully be after plug-in hybrids are common, but if I were buying soon, I would probably consider the Civic hybrid,. One reason (and this is admittedly a bad reason to choose a car) I might choose a Honda over a Prius, is that their hybrids look just like the regular models. I’ve got nothing against Priuses, or most people that own them, it’s just that they seem to be the car to get if you want people to know you care about the environment.

I always figured Honda could play to it’s strengths by marketing to people like me who don’t want their car to seem like any kind of statement. It seems, though, that the pretentious statement-maker market may actually be what honda is aiming for. In the ad, a civic hybrid owner picks up a regular person’s litter over a period of months. Eventually the good guy gives the slob back all his trash in the form of a lovely trash sculpture with a smug note that says “you dropped this.”

Check out the ad here to see if it’s pretentious or if I’m just a jerk.

Even though Radiohead is my favorite band ever, I wasn’t expecting too much from In Rainbows, their seventh album and first in four years. Stupid me.

The long-awaited studio version of Nude is great enough to satisfy even the song’s biggest fans, e.g. Mohsen,
and it’s an average song on this digitally acquired masterpiece.

It reminds me more of Thom Yorke’s solo album, Eraser, than of any single Radiohead album. It’s more accessible than Eraser and there’s a greater variety of instruments and sounds, but on the surface it sounds more like Eraser’s layers upon layers of electronic beats than the long ailing guitar screams of The Bends and such. However, all of their albums come to mind during In Raindbows’ 42 minutes, and they have definitely evolved to stay ahead of the curve - they continue to be pioneers carving out a musical space that many others are surely to follow.

So pull out your best pair of headphones, not just because In Rainbows features plenty of sounds that most speakers won’t want to make, but also because this album deserves your undivided attention.

May I never doubt Radiohead again.

My car alarm went off while I was driving this morning and it wouldn’t turn off, even after I pulled my keys out and ran away. So instead of driving to work, I drove my honking car to a repair shop. The repair lady called me around noon to tell me that… (drum roll please)… someone plowed into my parked car. Fortunately my insurance agent, who works next door to the repair shop, saw the accident and confronted the idiot who initially claimed that he didn’t put the giant dent in the side of my car. I got a free rental car out of the deal. - it’s a Ford 500, a.k.a the new cop car.

1) It’s being released on October 10, and no one knew about it until today;

2) It’s being released online only, in MP3 downloadable from their website (it’ll eventually be released as a CD– in early 2008);

3) And you get to choose how much you want to pay for it! You name your own price!

I think Pitchfork put it nicely: “Only a band in Radiohead’s position could pull a trick like this. Well played, gentlemen.” Indeed, well played. Let’s just hope it’s good.

I’ve never met Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In fact, I didn’t even know her office existed. But evidently, she has a problem with me.

To quote Ms. Cagan, “I hate all Iranians.”

All? Really, Ms. Cagan, all Iranians? Well, I hate all Deputy Assistant Secretaries for Coalition Affairs. Yes, all of them.

I’m liking Mark Steyn lately. And I think his recent article — Democracies talk, tyrannies act — gets at the absurdity of what passes for liberalism in academia today. Some quotes so you don’t have to click the link:

The same university that shouted down an American anti-illegal-immigration activist and the same university culture that just deemed former Harvard honcho Larry Summers too misogynist to be permitted on campus is now congratulating itself over its commitment to “academic freedom.” True, renowned Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is not happy. “They can have any fascist they want there,” said professor Zimbardo, “but this seems egregious.” But, hey, don’t worry: He was protesting not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presence at Columbia but Donald Rumsfeld’s presence at the Hoover Institution.

and

So much of contemporary life is about opportunities for self-congratulation. Risk-free dissent is the default mode of our culture, and extremely seductive. If dissent means refusing to let the Bush administration bully you into wearing a flag lapel pin, why, then Katie Couric (bravely speaking out on this issue just last week) is the new Mandela! If Rumsfeld is a “fascist.” then anyone can fight fascism. It’s no longer about the secret police kicking your door down and clubbing you to a pulp. Well, OK, it is if you’re a Buddhist monk in Burma. But they’re a long way away, and it’s all a bit complicated and foreign, and let’s not “confuse the very dire human rights situation” in Hoogivsastan with an opportunity to celebrate our courage in defending “academic freedom” in America. Ahmadinejad must occasionally have felt he was appearing in a matinee of “A Chance To Hear [Insert Name Of Enemy Head Of State Here].” Could have been Chavez, could have been Mullah Omar, could have been Herr ReichsfuhrerHitler himself, as Columbia’s Dean John Coatsworth proudly boasted on television.

This doesn’t only concern the invitation to/visit of the totalitarian Ahmadinejad to Columbia, but I do wonder what you guys think of this. I personally can’t decide. I would be radically against his visit, but seeing all the protesters, Ahmadinejad make a fool of himself, and some of the decent anti-Ahmadinejad cartoons published after the visit has made me reconsider — perhaps this visit was just what Americans needed to realize the true threat/backwardness of the Iranian leadership.

Just a few days ago in my post About Smashing Magazine I mentioned a video they linked to on image refocusing (as opposed to cropping and resizing). Well it’s already available via a web app called Rsizr. Here’s an image I “refocused” to change it’s orientation from landscape to portrait:

(Click the thumbnails for the full sized files)

The reshaped image has some artifacts and distortion, but if I needed those dimensions, it’s a lot nicer looking than what I would have come up with by cropping. Also the effects are much more subtle when you ask Rsizr for a less dramatic change in dimensions. If you try it out, be sure to play around with the remove and protect brushes. They let you keep things like people from getting distorted, and let you squeeze out certain parts of the photo, respectively.

There’s also a Gimp plug-in available, but I’m a photoshop man myself. With any luck, though, someone will make a photoshop plug-in that might produce higher quality images.

via: Lifehacker