Month: March 2006

OK, so this isn’t actually about basketball. But being a former cheerleader, this kind of ticks me off: NCAA bans stunts for cheerleaders.

OK. Let’s say you play a game, like Football. Or Rugby. Or Basketball. You accept the fact that, as a player, you run the risk of injury. Possibly serious injury. People die or break their necks in sporting events all the time. It’s just a fact of life, and your number may be up as a statistic if you play.

Now imagine that, due to a few accidents, the NBA banned all touching of other players, even by accident. Imagine if college football was played with little belt flags rather than tackling, like we played in gym class in high school. Imagine banning Pole Vaults and High Jumps from track meets, field hockey with no sticks, gymnastics with no tumbling, fencing with rubber sabres, wrestling with no contact, or dance with no lifts.

That is like cheerleading with no tumbling, basket tosses, pyramids, or lifts. Great. Now college cheerleading is people just standing and shouting with megaphones. That’s excitement!

Dude, there was NOTHING like throwing Jennifer Wood thirty feet into the air to make the crowd scream their heads off. (It was Jen Wood, wasn’t it?) Pyramids are visually compelling and an integral part of the sport for decades. Spectacular lifts are part of cheerleading that makes it fun and challenging. And now you’re not allowed to do them without a pad underneath?

Yeah. That’s gonna happen. Let’s drag 2 foot thick mats out on the field to cheer on.

The main reason our co-ed squad was so popular and did so well, IMHO, is because the guys added grunt to the basket tosses and as bases for stunts. Fact is, guys are stronger, and we proved with with massive four-man tosses that could rocket a little 90-pound chick into the air like she’d been shot out of a cannon. And we could land her safely, every time. It’s called teamwork. It’s about knowing your limitations. It requires trust and coordination.

This is why it’s a sport, and not just people making idiots out of themselves shouting on the sidelines or from the stands. We have the Hogs for that.

I say, make cheerleaders sign disclaimers stating that they understand the risk. The risk of injury or death from cheerleading is lower than that of many contact sports. But, unfortunately, lawsuits rule the day, and a recently successful $2.1 million cheerleader injury lawsuit has made the NCAA uncomfortable enough to ban the very aspects of cheerleading that make it sportsmanlike, rather than just a sideshow: stunts.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: If our behavior is strict, we do not need fun!

An interesting stat that I heard on CSPAN that was broadcasting a briefing / discussion on the latest budget. They had pointed out that Bush (43) has accumulated more national debt then all of the other 42 presidents combined. They stated that at the end of bush’s first year we had about 5.8 Trillion in debt. at the current rate we are spending, we will be at 8.3 trillion by the end of this year with a projectory of about 11+ trillion by the time bush is ready to leave office. Fiscally responsible are we?

They stated that the current budget proposal does not have enough money in it to support the current operations in the “sand box”, which means that there will be another ammendment requested for this budget at a later time.

The current budget proposal reduces / cuts national programs and bolsters foreign and combat spending. I am all for supporting our troops, don’t get me wrong. When do we start to imporove our lives at home. I am lucky in the fact that I have made a good life for myself. There are many who suffer in this country. There are many schools which are underfunded (plenty in my area). When do we redirect funds to bolster our infra-structure rather than an infrastructure of another country who spits on our grand gestures?

(Me stepping off my soap box) 😎

Jon

In business, there are players with talent and there are those without talent who compensate for their lack of talent by gaming a system. In this case, it happens to be the U.S. patent system, a system which is broken.

Research In Motion, the Canadian maker of BlackBerry, settled last Friday its five-year patent dispute with a one-man Virginia firm NTP, averting a possible court-ordered shutdown of the BlackBerry system via a $612.5M payout. NTP was co-founded in 1990 by an engineer who claimed to create a system that sent e-mails between computers and wireless devices. According to NTP, RIM stole their idea. Throughout the dispute, NTP tried to play up the David vs. Goliath message in the media, because NTP was an office of two people.

Could it be more obvious that NTP wasn’t trying to build a business around its invention or licensing its invention? NTP was trying to cash in on one of many patents sitting in its arsenal.

Much like surveyors ran out across the great Western prairie and laid claim to whatever land they could grab, NTP is a firm that speculates in virtual estate. They collected broad ideas and pushed them through the docile U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. They build a catalog of patents for such things like, ‘send an email from a computer to a wireless device.’ Then they sit around and wait for someone else to develop a popular business and sick the legal dogs, claiming that sole right to the core invention in the form of a patent. And they are not alone.

The player with talent, RIM, worked to build a business. RIM demonstrated in court how their engineers created their Blackberry system in isolation. No matter. Because of the U.S. patent system the legal right for using that system belonged to NTP.

Maybe we should be doing the same thing. Maybe we should join the group of patent-mongers scrounging to gain exclusive control of what seems like a non-obvious invention today, much like downloading music from the internet was provided a patent several years ago. After all, we wouldn’t have to work at actually providing a service or growing a business, but instead wait for another fool enterprise to do all the dirty work. How about: Patent Squatters, Ltd.? First patent: receiving telephone calls through a car steering wheel. I’ll get the paperwork started.

NTP didn’t build anything. They didn’t grow anything. They didn’t spend years creating consumer value. NTP simply gamed a system.

Never one to bemoan an issue without at least trying to provide a solution, I would first start by limiting the validation of patents by stricter first use clauses. Then, I would carve out sub-industry classifications for patents, so that an invention or process wouldn’t blanket the entire universe. Finally, I would limit the life of a patent by instituting a continued use clause, so that a patent holder would have to continuously demonstrate economic gain from use of the patent.

Homer: Are you saying you’re never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon? Lisa: No. Homer: Ham? Lisa: No. Homer: Pork chops? Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal. Homer: Heh heh heh. Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

🙂

I wish more news were like this bit: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-818944862742874918&q=autistic

Simply. Awesome.

Marge: Homer, the plant called. They said if you don’t show up tomorrow don’t bother showing up on Monday. Homer: Woo-hoo. Four-day weekend.

Hey, everybody! South Dakota just passed a bill banning abortion!

What do y’all think?

(FIRE IN THE HOLE!)

In the last 40 years Space Travel has grown more and more distant and less important to most of the human race. “Yes, it’s a great idea” most investors would claim, “But it’s too expensive” and the dreams of people like me, who have been reading SF and fantasy since they were kids, were dashed on the rocks of reality by the true mother of invention, profit. However, despite the recent success of private enterprise in attaining orbits that, while not quite ‘in space’ are certainly landmarks on the way, the spectre of financial feasability has always been there, threatening to take it’s scythe to the whole concept of leaving the planet that we, as a race, are turning into a poisoned womb unliveable by any species. But recently, there was a flash of hope to combat the dream destroying reality of that huge sixty-two thousand mile gravity well we all live in, and it’s called the carbon nanotube. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/03/01/8370588/index.htm I am no physicist, but I do agree with the article’s assessment that the way they are talking about nanotubes could mean a beanstalk-style transit to orbit on par with anything Arthur C. Clarke could dream up, within the next 20 years. My 50th birthday party could be held in earth orbit! This could open up potential undreamt of for colonising other worlds, creating spacecraft that would never have to enter a gravity well, and all sorts of other ideas that until now were little more than the writings of creative futurists.

Well, it got me, I am excited 🙂

Does anyone have any comment on the following thought:

Doesn’t it seem like humans, as a collective, are growing up, with respect to religion and science? Before, we belived in religion as the answer to our questions. Why do we die? Because God made it that way. What are lightning and thunder? God’s bowling. Where did we come from? God made us.

But suddenly, we start to challenge that authority. Hey, lightning and thunder aren’t God bowling, or even God being mad at us. It’s a function of the powerful energy in the atmosphere as convection occurs which charges the atmosphere. Once the atmopshere has a high enough charged, a path to the oppositely charge ground can be made and the energy discharges as electricity (simplified answer). Thunder is just the atmosphere expanding rapidly from the heat generated by the electrical discharge.

It seems to me that we’re outgrowing religion for MOST of what it provides. Not all, but most. It seems to me that religion is now only appropos (sp?) to personal beliefs. Who cares if God created the world? Who cares if He parted the Red Sea? What’s important is how God relates to you personally. Sorta like growing up to realize the you parents teach you simple things to make it easy for you when you’re young, but they don’t apply when you’re 21. When you’re 21, you find your own rules and your own way, but you find your parents were right on most of the time.

The silly things in religion are like that. Creationism, meat on Friday, bans on birth-control, these are things which we’ve outgrown as a society, as a people. Love your neighbor like you love yourself, this we should keep forever.

Does this make sense? Weed