Whipped Cream Difficulties

Pete and Repeat walk into bar in this week’s TMQ, after the jump…

The Seattle Seahawks are statistically unlikely to win the Super Bowl. 452 words down.

Seven of 17 weeks played might not sound like much, but history suggests many dies are already cast. Julius Caesar said “the die is cast” when he ordered his army across the Rubicon River in 49 B.C. The Roman civil war still had to take place, but Caesar felt he knew what would happen.

We admit that we’re not classical scholars. But when Julius Caesar said “iacta alea est”, we were under the impression he meant “there’s no going back now”; basically, he was saysing crossing the Rubicon was an irrevocable act, not that he knew what was going to happen.

We don’t have a lot to say about the University of Maryland proposal on coach performance bonuses. But we are wondering if TMQ’s going to devote any space in next week’s column to the UNC scandal, which broke after his deadline and looks like it may be as big as SMU.

Speaking of academic scandals, TMQ thinks Florida State’s 58 percent graduation rate for football players stinks.

Stats. Sweet: St. Louis, Best Manning. Sour: New Orleans. Mixed: Buffalo-Minnesota.

TMQ thinks there’s a chance that the first female president will be…Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island Democratic candidate for governor.

As Rhode Island’s general treasurer, she was the motive force behind a pension-reform initiative that made interest groups furious but prevented state pensions from veering into insolvency. In the Democratic primary, Raimondo, a liberal calling for strict fiscal discipline, defeated a do-nothing candidate who stood for kicking all cans down the road.

We think it’ll be interesting if Raimondo ends up winning the governor’s race, and Buddy Cianci ends up as mayor of Providence again. Especially in light of this ProJo editorial, which calls Buddy’s COLA adjustments for city workers “devastating”. (Hattip: Lawrence, whose timing is impeccable.)

Winter is here, and with it, TMQ’s creepy obsession with cold cheerleaders.

Three touchdowns. 73 seconds. Houston teams will always break your heart.

The new book “Our Mathematical Universe,” by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, supposes that as humanity begins to explore nearby star systems, we should hope to find only lifeless worlds. Why? If we don’t find any sign of other life, Tegmark supposes, that could mean we are not fated to destroy ourselves — others didn’t destroy themselves because there weren’t any others. By contrast, finding the radioactive ruins of once-great civilizations would be a depressing message about the human prospect.

Really? Because we’d think finding radioactive ruins of once-great civilizations might actually be a hopeful message: “Look at all these other civilizations that blew themselves up! Look at how far we’ve gotten without blowing ourselves up! Aren’t we exceptional?”

The Houston Astros are overstaffed. “The Panthers are on the cusp of a lost season.”

Wacky food of the week: high-end chicken wings. As it happens, we’re big wing fans. Mole wings sound real good to us, as does honey sriracha glaze. Crap. Now we’re hungry. And we also want one of those giant foam wing hats.

TMQ still likes the Colts.

Let’s talk about concussions.

Why doesn’t the NFL mandate internal helmet telemetry devices that include accelerometers? The league has been considering this for years but has yet to take action. The NFL seems to believe that if teams are aware of concussion symptoms, they become liable for any harm that later occurs, but if they are blissfully ignorant, they are not liable. And needless to say the message is the same. The NFL now talks a good game on concussion awareness. If it were really serious, there would be an accelerometer in every NFL helmet.

Let’s think about this for a minute. Obviously, those accelerometers can’t be wired. So we need accelerometers with built-in wireless technology. Bluetooth seems superficially reasonable; we have a Bluetooth GPS that’s not much bigger than a matchbook, so surely you could build an accelerometer in the same form factor, right?

But there’s three classes of Bluetooth devices. Class 3 devices have a range of about 1 meter, so that won’t work. Class 2 devices have a range of about 10 meters. A football field is 360 feet long and 160 feet wide; a Class 2 device would still have range issues. Class 1 Bluetooth devices have a range of 100 meters, so that could possibly work. But how much is the range attenuated by the helmet shell? And do you really want a 100mw transmitter sitting next to your head for three hours sixteen times a year, plus practice? We’re not EMR paranoids, but we do feel like it is worth asking what the risks are; it’d be a shame to trade brain tumors for concussions.

And how do you monitor 11 (or 22, depending on whether the teams or the league are doing the monitoring) devices at once? Apparently, the maximum number of devices you can connect and have actively communicating in a normal Bluetooth network is seven. So you’d need a minimum of four networks, probably two on each side. Can a single modern laptop with two Bluetooth adapters keep up with bursts of data from 11 devices at once?

We’re not EMR paranoids, and we’re not saying these problems can’t be solved. We just think it would be nice if TMQ considered the possibility that there are technical issues that make this a hard problem to solve, rather than constantly suggesting the NFL is being obstructionist.

Quoted without comment 1:

[Henry Louis] Gates finds that in 2012, the most recent year for which statistics are available, “There were more black neurologists (411) and black cardiologists (690) by far than all of the black men playing in the NBA (350).”

Quoted without comment 2:

But he’s [Best Manning – DB] not even halfway to the professional football touchdown pass record of 1,336, held by Arena football’s Aaron Garcia from his seasons with the Arizona Rattlers, Connecticut Coyotes, New Jersey Red Dogs, Iowa Barnstormers, New York Dragons, Jacksonville Sharks, San Antonio Talons, San Jose SaberCats, Orlando Predators, Jacksonville Sharks and Los Angeles KISS.

Quoted with comment:

Want to try out for the KISS? Auditions cost $85 in advance, $110 at the door.

And for that, the LA Kiss doesn’t even provide water or tape. Seriously, $85 and you don’t even provide water? That’s weak sauce, Gene and Paul.

Chicken-(salad) kicking: San Francisco, Carolina.

If Clinton falters, Martin O’Malley, governor of Maryland, might enter the conversation for the Democratic nod. O’Malley has been mayor of Baltimore, then Maryland governor.

Both Baltimore and the Maryland statehouse have reputations for corruption. In 2010, Baltimore’s mayor was convicted of stealing from a fund intended to underwrite gifts to the poor, while this good-government organization ranks Maryland near the bottom for government graft. It seems unlikely O’Malley could have run both Baltimore and the Maryland statehouse without skeletons in his closet.

Percy Harvin is “More Evidence Mega-Trades Don’t Work“. Oakland and Tampa also don’t know how to pick players.

Skip TMQ’s “Madam Secretary” item, as it is another example of TMQ thinking he’s a better joke writer than he actually is.

Touts have been wondering if former Seahawks defensive coordinator Gus Bradley can turn the Jaguars into Seattle South.

Yes, but only after the Jaguars move to Los Angeles. (Also, one of the definitions of “tout”, and the one that seems to fit here, is “a person who offers racing tips for a share of any resulting winnings”. Isn’t TMQ opposed to gambling?)

The Jets. Da Bears. The 500 Club. Also 600, 700, and 800 Clubs.

(A baby harp seal walks into a bar. The bartender says, “What’ll you have?” The harp seal says, “Anything but a Canadian Club.”)

John Carroll University, which plays in Division III, is a bunch of poor sports. Nick Saban is a poor sport, too. More on the physics of bullet impacts and recoil.

More chicken-(salad) kicking: Oklahoma State. Sour college play: Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains…

California of Pennsylvania 21, Indiana of Pennsylvania 13. Mercyhurst 45, Slippery Rock 23. Remember, the Slippery Rock/IUP game is this weekend. Augustana of Illinois 7, Illinois Wesleyan 2.

Next week, TMQ asks, “Would a theme song help the Oakland Raiders?” To which we say: de do do do, de da da da.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2014 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Geek, Neuroscience, NFL, Rhode Island, Sports, TMQ watch, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.