Unknown Dog

My friend Nick Plastiras sent me a cool Excel spreadsheet containing the 2005 SEC college football schedule. Not sure if he was the creator or just a lucky recipient, but he said to feel free to pass it along.
Click to open, right click to save: [2005 SEC football]

National Geographic News has a cool blurb about a waterfall that has been “lost” for that last 40-50 years:
[“Lost” Giant Waterfall Discovered in California]

Could be considered not worksafe. I laughed until I cried. [Hillbilly Hijinks]

Maybe the NCAA is pulling a bait and switch. Maybe there is a huge scandal ready to be exposed in college sports, if only the light was shone in the right direction. Maybe not, because this stroke of genius was four years in the making, but it seems that the paper pushers behind this either didn’t have enough work or didn’t want to spend the time working on things like steroids or illegal recruiting.

The NCAA set new rules that slams roughly 18 schools for having Indian mascots or Indian names in their team name. Penalties include banning these schools from hosting post season play, banning Indian mascots from performing at tournament games, and the recommendation that other schools do not schedule games with the offending schools. That last sounds both draconian and laughable, but Iowa and Wisconsin already follow such a policy.

To make things worse, the lithmus test for punishment is any school with a nickname or logo that is considered racially or ethnically hostile or abusive. Taking four years to come up with such a weak, inconclusive test is just pathetic. The simple concept of treating each case equally must have never been the goal in the first place.

Wally Hall, a sports columnist who runs an editoral piece in my local Arkansas Democrat Gazette, points out that the team name “Fighting Illini” is going to be out, but “Fighting Irish” is just fine. That makes a lot of sense, right?

The SI.com article points out that “one school, North Carolina-Pembroke — which uses the nickname Braves — will also be exempted because Brand [Myles Brand, NCAA president] said the school has historically had a high percentage of students, more than 20 percent, who are American Indians.” I can’t even understand what precedent that exemption sets up. Is it
a) It is ok to have a racially or ethnically hostile nickname if you have enough Indian students.
b) It isn’t offensive if the students really are Indians.
c) Insert your own leap of logic here.

In honor of my recent science fiction book review, and because it is a cool picture, here is a link to an astronaut self portrait from outside the space shuttle: nasa.gov image. The detail in the image is awesome. I don’t know about the other browswers, but the image can be clicked in Firefox to see a full size version.

The picute is part of NASA’s Return to Flight web offering. There is an extended Flash-based feature covering all different aspects of the mission that may be worth checking out.

I like the Image Gallery better than the Flash. Some of the images are just spectacular.

The level of detail in the full size pictures is incredible. Today’s (8/5/2005) Image of the Day is so good at full size that one can easily read some of the identification numbers on the tiles that cover the space shuttle.

Tipped off to check out the NASA site by Boing Boing.

I made some changes to the dashboard page. I felt like there was too much information. What I wanted in a dashboard was something simple. To the end, I made some changes.
Continue reading →