Category: Writing

A warning in advance¹Mostly to my mom, who reads these and also doesn’t really care about sports in that way. Sorry ma!: we’re going very sports heavy today, because the sports world has gone heavy on its own. That prefaced, lemme check off the list of football stories in the last 48 hours:

• Pete Carroll is out as head coach of the Seahawks
• Nick Saban retires²Dan Lanning has already come out to say he’s staying at Oregon. I’m mildly concerned that Marcus Freeman might get poached for the gig, which would be a real gut-punch in a year that feels like Notre Dame might be lined up for a shot at the title.
• Bill Belichick “mutually separates” from the Patriots
• Mike Vrabel is fired from the Titans, a job no one thought he’d lose so much as potentially choose to leave if the previous point happened for that job
• Pat McAfee concludes his Aaron Rodgers segments through at least the end of the football season

2024 is gonna be one of those years, it feels like. Buckle up, we’re in for a long one!

Inputs

1: So, apparently, in order to give statues to the on-air talent for Emmy wins by the program (who are, by the rules for the award, ineligible to receive them), ESPN submitted fake names as parts of crews for College GameDay and other programs, then removed the name placards from the trophies and replaced them with the on-air talent. This story is both a bizarre and an amazing effort by the producers to circumvent Emmy rules to a) reward, and b) stoke the egos of, the people working on the show for, y’know, working on the show. In conclusion, awards are dumb and make people dumber³Which does not stop my wanting one. Because I am also dumb..

2: Stephen A Smith rode the wave off Katt Williams’ performance on Shannon Sharpe’s show and decided, fuck it, he’s opening the gates on “the fat bastard” for a full damned hour. Dan LeBatard has a great breakdown of the power dynamic behind this whole thing, with Smith coming up on contract renegotiations and the work he’s doing to build his own broadcasting empire as the legacy media continues to fracture and allow for a furthering of the Cult of Personalities era.

Broadcasting rights are essentially the glue holding a lot of these networks together, and as the personalities see this, there’s a scramble to build something for themselves that isn’t beholden to the network for continued existence. Whether sports is a precursor to a larger movement or is a special case due to inherent factors remains to be seen.

3: Ok, non-sports pivot: This story is going rather under the radar in the US, but has some significant lessons that we desperately need to learn, about privatization, the fallibility of algorithmic management, the continued need for common-sense actors to keep a hand on the tiller, and the, not merely deleterious, but actively damaging (to the tune of 4 suicides and hundreds of others convicted of erroneous crimes, their lives ruined, and the institution’s permanent stain). What happened? A poorly programmed algorithm was put in charge of the Post Office in the UK.

This article from 2021 does a good job of explaining some of the technological flaws, as does this appearance from its author on the YouTube series Computerphile. Essentially, entries into an accounting system weren’t handled correctly via software and human errors in how the entries were made into the system, leading to accusations of theft against the individuals running postal offices.

The new attention to the scandal comes at the premiere of a new series on ITV in the UK staring Toby Jones, which takes what is sort of a complex issue related to double-entry bookkeeping, database management, and CRUD issues in writing to said databases, and turns it into an accessible drama about the lives affected by this failure.

Projects In Progress

Actively fighting choice paralysis: the persistent condition of my life.

Notes:

• 1
  Mostly to my mom, who reads these and also doesn’t really care about sports in that way. Sorry ma!
• 2
  Dan Lanning has already come out to say he’s staying at Oregon. I’m mildly concerned that Marcus Freeman might get poached for the gig, which would be a real gut-punch in a year that feels like Notre Dame might be lined up for a shot at the title.
• 3
  Which does not stop my wanting one. Because I am also dumb.

Man, 2024 decided to go hard. Saban retiring, Pete Carroll not-retiring-but-retiring. Stephen A Smith bodying the fat bastard. We’re 10 days in, there’s still an entire Olympics and election cycle to come, and we’ve got a whole year of craziness to come.

Inputs

1: Katie Nolan crushed it on the Celebrity Jeopardy semi-finals! I was shouting the Final Jeopardy answer at the screen, but luckily she not only held the lead this time but did the math.

2: I was sold at transubstantiation of silicon into calculating matter. Directly reminiscent of the old school Stephenson jaunt Mother Earth, Mother Board, in which Neal followed the hidden pathways of undersea fiber lines across the planet, Virginia Heffernan writes a personal exploration of one of the most important places in the physical and digital world, the headquarters of TSMC in Taiwan. Great writing in the New Journalism vein, and worth the investment.

3: If you’re not watching this season of Fargo, you’ve got a week to fix it before everything comes to a head. I was a huge fan of Noah Hawley’s work on Legion, but Fargo might be more accessible, if no less mind-bending. Beyond which, the soundtrack is in-fuckin’-credible (including an amazing rendition of Britney’s Toxic).

Projects In Progress

Spent the day helping assemble a new TV, dispose of an old TV, and grabbing a burger. Not a lot else done beyond that.

Winter has most assuredly arrived. I took a halftime opportunity to clear the driveway when we hit around 3″ of snowfall. We’re projected for 7-8 overall by the end of this storm, so I’ll be back out there later this evening. Winter was late, it was not absent.

Inputs

1: Caught up on some of the insanity of our political system via the latest ep of Pablo Torre Finds Out, in which we learn about Ron DeSantis having aimed his petty, vengeful eye on the New College of Florida, where he threw out the members of the board of trustees, replaced them with right-wing sycophants, and destroyed the institution’s mission out of spite. Because it’s PTFO, the eye through which we see this effort is the lens of sport, where the new president of the university created a mission for the admissions department to replace their historically academically minded student body with as many athletes they could possibly jam into the school, which had previously had zero sports programs on campus.

Ron DeSantis is a small man, in both body and spirit, and while some see him as some alternative to the nightmare, he is merely a different shade of asshole. Florida is worse off for him, and America would be worse off with him in wider power.

2: Bit of a different video than the previous, wherein someone went through the leaked source code for Grand Theft Auto V and found the most amusing of the comments left in the code base at launch. It’s gratifying to know I’m not the only one commenting my code with this level of honesty.

3: DARPA is building a prototype of an airplane with no externally moving control surfaces (no mechanical ailerons, elevators, flaps, etc), the X-65. This harkens back to the bit from a week ago in the Journal, about the mankind’s pursuit of flight and the Wright Brothers’ development of their flyer. One of their early prototypes didn’t use any flaps or moving controls, but instead altered directions by bending the fuselage through the weight of the rolling pilot pulling on control ropes and twisting the airframe into a new shape to turn. The DARPA project will be a bit more advanced, “using jets of air from a pressurized source to shape the flow of air over the aircraft surface, with AFC effectors on several surfaces to control the plane’s roll, pitch, and yaw.” I’m fascinated by the approach, if quite curious about a number of factors inherent to the design¹What is the process for holding this pressurized air and delivering it to the surfaces? How is it regenerated during flight? If it isn’t, uh, what happens when it runs out? What do the nominal values for the airframe look like? Is it naturally a lifting body (and what does that mean for takeoffs and landings) or naturally not (and, then, same question) and so on and so on., and will keep an eye out for more information in the future post-testing.

Projects In Progress

Some more educational time and tinkering today, with the falling snow as a backdrop for staying indoors and staring at the laptop screen.

Notes:

• 1
  What is the process for holding this pressurized air and delivering it to the surfaces? How is it regenerated during flight? If it isn’t, uh, what happens when it runs out? What do the nominal values for the airframe look like? Is it naturally a lifting body (and what does that mean for takeoffs and landings) or naturally not (and, then, same question) and so on and so on.