ASU Update
There's an update: Arizona State men's hockey players ask school to place coach Greg Powers on leave.
Most of what the coaches and university claimed in their "investigative" report is disputed by the players, which makes sense, because much of what was claimed by the university was total gibberish.
This will inevitably drag on. No actual charges will be filed, even though someone died through utter negligence. The coach will be dismissed but admit no wrongdoing. The Navy Seal will move on to put someone else's life in jeopardy. The parents will file a lawsuit and receive a large settlement that will never make up for any of what happened.
This old-school coach mentality bullshit where sports are equated with war has to stop. It gets people killed.
Rain Rain Rain
It's rained all day for the last three days. All day.
It's clearly gotten to me because last night I dreamed I woke up and it was sunny outside.
I did wake up. It was not.
It's still raining.
I Respect the Thorough Nature of Your Inquiry, Sir
Here's what I received a while back:
Hi Bill,
In About What You'd Expect (October 2016) you ran two online reaction tests and noted that one was "probably more accurate" - .21-.23 on one, .25-.27 on the other. That gap is mostly the input path, and almost every one of these tests hides it behind a single number.
I built a new benchmark tool around that problem. Results are ranked separately by device class - mouse, trackpad, touchscreen - and the per-device offsets are labelled as extrapolation rather than measurement, because they are. The baseline itself is fitted from Human Benchmark's published statistics (n=81,000,000), which pools every input device into one figure; splitting it is my extrapolation, and the page says so. There is also an audio mode, with the caveat that Bluetooth output adds its own delay.
Not asking you to edit a ten-year-old post. But if you ever revisit reaction time, or test Eli again, this is a fairer instrument than the ones that print one number and stop.
No account, no ads, nothing to buy.
https://benchself.com/
Both the test and the website around it are excellent. The email was also a masterclass in explaining why this tool is different and providing comprehensive information.
If you were ever interested originally, it's a good time to revisit. My best 5-test run (average) was 184ms. Reaction time is still strong, even with my "advanced" age. It makes me wonder what it was like when I was young.
Damn It
Due to ineptitude and indifference, an Arizona St. hockey player, Matthew Mayich, is in a coma and will not recover: Arizona State hockey workout review assigns no blame. Lawyer calls it 'mind-blogging'.
That "review" was performed by Arizona St. itself.
Here are a few excerpts from the story:
Carey said exertional heat stroke caused a lack of oxygen to his brain and there is no chance for a full recovery [by Mayich].
The workout was horrific in both its intensity and scope (the details are in the article). It was run by an ex-Navy Seal and was 100% in the "alpha male bullshit this will prove how tough you are" category. Safeguards were in place, they were totally ignored, and tragedy was the result.
The Seal has already lawyered up, of course. This is from a another article (Rake is the Seal's attorney):
The workout that Tim did was discussed with the coaches beforehand and with the training staff, and it was a mid-level, or what I would call a low-level, high school football workout
Yes. That is why you bring in an ex-Navy Seal to conduct a workout. So he can lead a low-level high school workout. That totally makes sense.
I remember when Eli 25.1 was playing AAA in 16U, which is the premiere junior age group. His time was in the top 15 nationally--and didn't have a trainer. The degree of disposability in athletes is astonishing. They're just pulp for the machine that pays coaches, and while there are exceptions, I would argue that in both football and hockey they're the rare exceptions.
To be clear, these kinds of bullshit workouts don't help you get in better shape. Any time you overload beyond capacity to that degree, absolutely nothing is achieved. Conditioning-wise, it's a waste of time. It's just peacocking for macho male moron culture, which continues to curse this country at every conceivable level.
I'm angry, in case you can't tell.
Yuck, For a While
I've been grinding along the last few days because I've been sick.
This time, though, I've been lucky. Only three days for a respiratory virus, and I was even able to walk several miles today. Not quite back to normal, but not feeling terrible, either.
There are common sense precautions to take when you live here and that I stopped during the summer, like wearing a mask when you're on mass transit. This has been a good reminder to start doing it again. I'm not crazy about wearing a mask because it can affect the fit of my glasses, but it's far better than being sick.
Cup (Oct. 5, 2019--September 21, 2026)
It didn't look like this when it was new:
The tiny bit of black was an entire football-related pattern I've long since forgotten that wore away over the years.
It probably shocks you that I do the same things each morning, even down to using the same cup, as part of a habit train to get me into my study and writing. The cup was part of it, as I had my glass of tea (Gold Peak Zero Sugar Sweet Tea, nothing else) in it every morning.
Over the years, little flakes of black peeled away. It was an image, at first, and then it became hundreds of different images over time, less and less recognizable.
I kept it because it was the weekend Gloria and I went to Ann Arbor for Parent's Weekend when Eli 25.1 was just a freshman. Part of the weekend was attending a football game, and I saved the stadium cup. Hers, too, because I like cups that size for drinking water.
Our marriage was failing, but we were still together for Parent's Weekend, and no matter our troubles, we always united over Eli. It was the one thing we could always agree on.
I realized this morning that I don't have many things from when we were together. I don't have any jewelry because I don't wear any. Maybe a shirt or two, though I've long forgotten their provenance. Maybe a journal or two she gave me. Again, though, the provenance is fuzzy.
I still have the second yellow cup. But everything else is gone, and she is, too.
He Built This City
This is from the Museum of the City of New York website:
He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model celebrates the extraordinary vision and dedication behind one of the most ambitious handmade representations of New York City ever created. For the first time in New York—Macken’s muse—the artist’s monumental model will be presented to the public at the Museum of the City of New York.
Queens-born artist Joe Macken began the project in 2004. Over the next 21 years, working first in Middle Village, Queens and later in Clifton Park, New York, he devoted himself to crafting a vast architectural portrait of the city he calls home. Built entirely by hand using everyday materials—including balsa wood, cardboard, and glue—the model spans 50 by 27 feet and comprises over 340 individual sections. It renders the city’s skyline, neighborhoods, and landmarks with remarkable precision, character, and imagination. Macken started with the Comcast Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, infusing its familiar form with details that signal his personal artistic vision.
He wasn't an artist when he started, just a guy. Here's an article about him: A Truck Driver Spent 20 Years Building a Miniature Model of New York City. Then, It Went Viral.
We went today (along with seeing Museo de Barrio, which was fantastic) and I took some pictures. You'll have to zoom in because the scope is so massive it's difficult to photograph.
The second image was taken zoomed in with my camera. Our neighborhood is actually in there, and I was even able to find our street. Incredible.
Around the first image you can see small information pages, and on one of them he explained that he only wanted to do one building at first (the Rockefeller Center, I think, though it was called the RCA Center then). When it was done, he decided to do one more. Then he just kept working, day after day. "It's just consistency," he said.
The Strand and Shigeru Mizuki
While Eli 25.1 was here, we all went to the Strand bookstore in Manhattan.
It's one of the most famous bookstores in the world, with an inconceivably diverse collection of books.
I focused on the graphic novel section, which was the largest I've ever seen. And it was there that I found Shigeru Mizuki's four volume history of Japan, covering the years from 1926 to 1989. It's relatively famous, and given that it was right in front of me, impossible to resist.
I bought the first two volumes and have almost finished the first. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a dual narrative, both a general history of that time in Japan and a personal recounting of Mizuki's life. In the first volume, he's only a boy, and the stories are tremendously entertaining.
It's deeply informative, and the art style is terrific as well. Here's a link if you're interested (to the paperback edition, not the Kindle version, for obvious reasons: Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan.
Ode to a Sign
if you blast gas
with your ass
close the door
and let it pass
Some of my finest work, really.
The Psychopath Roundtable
Psychopath
: a mentally unstable person
especially: a person having an egocentric and antisocial personality marked by a lack of remorse for one's actions, an absence of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies
_______
Damn it, I didn't want to talk about this today.
I had no choice, though, after Sam Altman claimed losing control of AI was "keeping him awake" at night.
Sure, buddy. Sure.
The problem with interpreting anything a tech bro says is that they're often psychopaths, according to the definition provided by Merriam-Webster up top.
Jobs. Ellison. Zuckerberg. Musk. Altman. So, so many more. The tech sector is and always has been dominated by genuinely terrible people.
The single exception I can think of is Bill Gates, who has given billions and billions of dollars specifically to improve health in Africa, though even he is deeply compromised by Jeffrey Epstein.
This means that almost anything these people say is a lie, crafted specifically not to be honest, but to achieve an objective.
In this case, the logical way to interpret Altman's statement lies along three possible paths. First, the public backlash against AI (some of which is reasonable, and some of which is unfathomably stupid) is affecting the prospects of the Open AI IPO, so he needs to be seen as deeply responsible and reasonable as quickly as possible.
Second, that he perceives other companies are either catching up or ahead, and wants to regulate AI quickly so it's far more difficult for other players in the space to emerge.
Third, they're running out of money. Maybe the infinite money training funding development has run out of steam, and unless the IPO succeeds, they're cooked, taking the entire tech sector with them.
The problem has never been technology. It's always the people who control the technology. That's true whether it's railroads or robots or nuclear weapons or AI. As Walt Kelly famously said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
