Week 1 of fantasy football sees me up by 24 going into tonight's games. I'm done for the week, but my opponent still has Adrian Peterson left. Will 24 points be enough? I'm certain that AP is highly motivated to have an enormous game and I'm also certain that the Vikings management wants that as well. If he starts rolling they are going to go with it as long as they can. I want to see him have a good game, but let's keep it to 23 or under, okay?
Over the weekend I took a look at the latest allegations against the Patriots, that they deliberately screwed with the Steelers by piping the Patriots Radio Network into the headsets on the Pittsburgh sidelines. I had always figured that communication system was a fairly straightforward challenge, but it turns out that it is a lot more complicated than I thought. On game day there are more than just a couple of teams to worry about in the stadium:
Quarterbacks, defensive play-callers, coaches and game officials all depend on coordinators to ensure that their systems are interference-free. So do TV and radio broadcasters and reporters, medical and security personnel, staff who use the NFL’s instant replay and injury video review systems, concession operators, cleaners, halftime entertainers and many more.
That's from a very informative NFL web page about the NFL Gameday Frequency Coordinators.
Given the information from there and a few other stories I've read, it is doubtful if not impossible that the interference came from the wireless portion of the communication system. To be heard in those headsets it had to be mixed into the audio stream before it got to the wireless transmitters on the field. That would point to the wired "infrastructure" the NFL noted in its statement on Friday. It's likely that some sort of grounding or shielding problem in that wired infrastructure allowed the audio from the radio broadcast booth to interfere with the audio from the Steelers coaches booth, since they are probably in some general proximity to one another.
To throw a bone to the conspiracy theorists, it's not impossible for that interference to be introduced deliberately. However, given the complexity involved in game day communications, both wired and wireless, I think Occam's razor should apply. The problem can be explained reasonably without creating a conspiracy, of which there apparently is no evidence. Just because cheaters cheat doesn't mean they always cheat.
Great post by Robert Zubrin on the Malthusian underpinnings of the environmental movement in general and the climate change maniacs in particular. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here's the core argument:
The fundamental question boils down to this: Are humans destroyers or creators? If the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed, with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide.
But if we choose instead to have faith in the power of unfettered creativity to invent unbounded resources, then every new life if[sic] a gift, and every person, race, and nation becomes ultimately the potential friend of every other, and, rather than suppression, the fundamental purpose of government must be to protect human liberty at all costs.
As I've mentioned here before, the harnessing of fossil fuels has had enormous benefits for humanity and nature too, when it stops deforestation for example. The challenge is not to stop using them, it's to spread to the rest of the world the clean technology that has dramatically reduced real pollution in the US and Europe.
Hey, about that Northern border wall:
A convicted sex offender and international drug dealer from Ontario was caught with an equally soaking wet fellow Canadian after they swam from their homeland across a river and entered the U.S. illegally at the far northeast corner of Minnesota, a strategy the felon had used previously without detection, according to federal prosecutors.
As the story goes on to say, they got him because an anonymous informant rang up the Border Patrol and warned them. Allegedly the man had done that four or five times before.
I know that area and points west for 100 miles pretty well and it is not hard to imagine this being a successful strategy in a lot places. Scott Walker was misrepresented and took a lot of unfair heat for his comments about the US-Canadian border a few weeks ago, but those of us who know the area know how vulnerable it really is. After all, without that informant this guy would probably have gotten away with it again.
The Twins took 2 out of 3 at the White Sox this weekend and start a 10-game homestand tonight against Detroit. They are one game back of the Rangers for the second wildcard spot, who are only a 1.5 games behind division leader Houston. Those two start a 3-game series tonight. Kansas City looks to have the Central sewn up, but the rest of the postseason spots are still in play.
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