Nobrainer’s Think Tank

For those of you who want to understand my research, read this article on MSNBC about making “water run uphill.”

These researches used high temperatures to create a thin layer of steam between a water droplet a ratcheted, brass surface. As the steam generated tries to escape, it pushes the droplet along the ratchets, which may be done uphill.

Instead of brass and high temperatures, I’m trying to use polymers and low voltage electricity. Making a ratcheted polymer surface is easy. Making that surface behave the way I want it to, and applying electricity is a bit more difficult. In the end, however, the polymer approach should have many benefits (such as not evaporating the fluid).

Why I still read College Football Resource is beyond me. Call me a glutton for punishment. That’s my way of thanking him for linking to the Gnomes, I guess.

Anyway, there are regular posts about why tournaments are bad for college football. No amount of logic has before worked, so I will post my fisking here, for your pleasure.

You Knew This Was Coming

There are two major flaws to college basketball, 1)the game itself and 2)the tournament [sic]

I hate the game, too. From there we diverge in our ability to agree.

From the CFR perspective, the tournament is a failure because it doesn’t coddle the allegedly great teams enough. Inasmuch, the supposedly great teams get beat and don’t win the championship. And this means the tournament, or any tournament, which does not let the best team win is flawed.

I’ll save the game rant for another day, but this year’s tournament speaks for itself:

UCLA, Florida, LSU, George Mason

That’s two schools from a football conference, a UCLA team that is a shadow of what they’ll be two years from now, and the big one, a school nobody’s heard of or cares about.

This is the prelude to the “the public should like you for you to be considered a good team” idea where image is as important as anything else. What that actually has to do with being a good team is well beyond me.

There isn’t a man or woman alive who can answer with a straight face that these are the four best teams in college basketball. I’m not sure many would argue that any of these four are even among the top four even taking the postseason into consideration.

Basically, the tournament’s a sham.

Basically, the championship tournament determines a champion - a complex thought to be sure. This is the basis of my disagreement. I don’t think that the champion should necessarily be the best team. The only thing you can do is build a system to declare a champion, with the winning team receiving that recognition. There are far too many ways to determine the “best” team. Most wins? Average margin of victory? Scoring offense? Scoring defense? Some combination of metrics? Therefore we end up with champions; “best” teams be damned.

People criticize the BCS because of the selection process, but at least we know that the majority of the game’s best teams are playing each other in the final games of the year. What has the NCAA tournament assured us? It assured us that the regular season #8, #10, #18 and an unranked team will play for the sport’s “championship”.

No, genius, it assured us that dozens of the “best” teams played for the sport’s championship. I may well define my “best” teams as those that don’t choke in the tournament.

I don’t mind a tournament at face value, but when stuff like this year’s tournament happens, it destroys its credibility in awarding a championship. What it really is, is Survivor gone sports, last man or woman standing wins whether they’re really the best or not. The regular season has long been rendered completely irrelevant, but this year’s tournament has turned it into a traveshamockery.

Last I checked, Survivor was dramatic TV gone sports. But Survivor may have come before modern day sports tournaments, I haven’t checked a calendar recently.

I’m also glad that the “regular season has long been rendered completely irrelevant.” Teams don’t have to play to get into the tournament or anything. Nope. Apparently none of the “best” teams from the regular season can fall back on their record to get an invite. Nope. Not in college basketball.

Bringing back the topic of games being “irrelevant.” Aren’t all but one of the bowl games irrelevant to the national championship? Survey says: TRUE! On the other hand, every one of the 64 games of the NCAA tournament is relevant.

And you wonder why I’m not in favor of a NCAA football tournament?

The problem with tournaments is that they’re not always great fits for the games they are attached to.

In my mind, the only accurate tournament of the sports I watch regularly is the NBA tournament and finals. There are enough games to where the better team almost inevitably emerges, whether it be a four game sweep or a grinding seven game series. However, college basketball’s tournament is one and done. It’s not very reliable given the random nature of single elimination basketball games.

You see, winning 5 games among the “best” teams in the country to advance to the championship game can only be construed as a fluke. Yeah, that’s it… A fluke! It’s all random!

The Major League Baseball postseason is also fairly unreliable. How else to explain two world series for the Florida Marlins? Baseball often gets it right (’98 Yankees), but not always.

In other words, the games should be played until the “right” team wins. “Hey man, let’s go best two outta three… three outta five… four outta seven… five outta nine… one thousand nine hundred thirty-two outta three thousand eight hundred sixty-three…”

I have a mixed reaction to the NFL playoffs, mostly because of the lopsided nature of the conference winners of late (Patriots getting to face the Carolina Panthers? The Steelers facing the Seattle Seahawks?). Often the division title games are the de facto championship games, robbing the Super Bowl of its prescribed title-bearing duties.

Which leaves us at NCAA football. Amateur football is far less reliable in a one game situation. We see wild upsets happen like West Virginia over Georgia, or Florida State nearly toppling a far superior Penn State, and that’s in BCS competition! At least those games are treated as bowls, and not playoff games where the winner advances to a title shot.

This is always where I love the analysis from CFR. How good a team is has nothing to do with winning, losing, or margin of victory. No. The “best” teams are determined before, not after the game. It’s apparently all about talent, potential, appearance and reputation. I suggest CFR go ahead and declare the 2007 national champs based on the recruiting classes of the last 4 years.

At one point a few weeks ago, CFR specifically addressed the 2005 Clemson football team. The point was that had Clemson pulled out a couple more W’s, sorrow should have been felt for teams it would have leapfrogged in the rankings. Because despite a 10-2 or 11-1 record, they would still just have been a “good” team. Because knowing the record alone wouldn’t have accounted for the “wild elements” such as “such as home/road, early/late, the natural ups and downs of the season, soft vs. strong OOC slates, weak vs. strong schedules.”

The BCS has all kinds of flaws and other issues, but the playoffs are not the direction to go for college football. There’s [sic] too many variables going on with college student athletes. College football isn’t this land of parity as displayed by the NFL where fairly even teams are playing each other. At the highest levels there are gaps that exist. Imagine if USC or Texas had an off day and never won a college football playoff last year? Yet it was brutally obvious, even beyond the media hype, that those teams were far and away the best in college football. Yet I wouldn’t have put money down for both to have made it to a championship game if there were in fact a playoff, and that’s exactly the problem.

His logic is working against him here. If one game situations in one-and-done tourneys aren’t good enough, a single championship game by itself must also be insufficient. Gee, what if USC had an off day when it played Texas? They should get a do-over? Right? As an engineer would suggest, if you want to smooth over the “gaps,” you should take many more samples and take an average. In other words, you have a playoff, albeit among only two teams.

It’s not about fairness, or letting everyone play and giving everyone a chance. Save that for a meaningless postseason tournament that doesn’t award meaningful championships (read: NIT). It’s about getting it right, and college football isn’t well suited to having its best teams survive a playoff. We’ve seen that already in the NCAA basketball tournament, and it will happen in college football as well if we go that direction.

Do you see why I get pissed off?

Honest to God, how can I take this statement seriously, “college football isn’t well suited to having its best teams survive a playoff.” In other words, we can’t have a playoff because the “best” teams might lose.

I’m surprised we let the best teams play at all.

Unfortunately, I got caught up in a comment exchange about the collapse of the World Trade Centers. There are certainly some intriguing questions, and parts of the official story that seem fishy. Scores of stupid questions and ideas are also present. The answers are simple and straightforward. Yet they aren’t accepted. Folks harping on those details are doing a grave disservice to their cause. Unless the cause is to maintain a conspiracy theory. In that case rationality has no place in the discussion.

So what really bugs me?

1.) “The temperature of the fire wasn’t hot enough to melt steel.” True and fine. But you don’t have to turn steel into a liquid for it to be weakened significantly.

2.) “The buildings fell into their own footprint, which shouldn’t have happened.” Why not? For them to have fallen over (think of a tree cut at the base), you’d need a moment (ie. rotation force for you non-engineers) and a point for rotation. This works for a tree, because the wood is fairly incompressible. But when you try to apply that principle to the buildings, I bet you’ll find that the elements needed to provide rotation, will be completely overloaded. Thus they will fail due to compression and be unable to be the pivot. Thus, with the force of gravity and no other external forces applied, the building will fall… anyone? anyone? Straight down.

3.) “It looked like a controlled demolition.” Has anyone seen an uncontrolled demolition of a skyscraper? I didn’t think so. But in a controlled demolition, you’ll usually see explosions starting at the bottom of the structure and moving up. Did you see any explosions anywhere in the building? I didn’t think so.

4.) “It fell in 9 seconds, as if there was no resistance. A fall of that speed is impossible without explosives.” A fall in that amount of time is of course just about impossible. The simple response is that the fall was timed wrong. (Junk in, junk out ya know.) Let’s pretend the the building was rigged with explosives (which would be a major undertaking in and of itself). To bring the towers down as quickly as the time above suggests, each floor would have to be weakened to zero by explosions before the impact of the floors above. This means that all the exterior columns, as well as those on the interior, would have to be rigged with explosives and detonated. Any explosions on those outer columns would have to be easily visible.

5. Bonus) “Eyewitnesses said…” An extreme minority of eyewitnesses does not make a convincing argument. As an exercise, consider a sporting event with 100,000 attendees. Without the benefit of replay, try to get everyone to agree on every call made by the referees. It won’t happen. Why should we expect a better performance from people in other situations? Oh yeah, I forgot. People are SO perfect at making observations.

Another weekend, another thousand miles.

What have I learned?

• When on the road, I cannot count on my friends to let me follow them. (Hint, running through lights at the last minute and turning right-on-red in front of traffic are bad ideas.)
• You cannot safely fit two cars into the same space on the interstate simultaneously. At least 3 people between Columbia and Charlottesville don’t grasp that concept.
• I can play golf as well, or better, than normal when I use only a 7 iron.
• The blue sedan doing the speed limit or slower in the fast lane is not some old, confused codger. No he’s a cop that I almost passed at 20 over once the other would-be imbeciles got out of my way.
• I still hate strip clubs. Naked women are great, but not when I can’t touch them, they want my money, and I’m surrounded by a dozen other drooling idiots.
• I’d like to thank Fatty McMooMoo for exiting her truck, pausing to catch her breath and cough, then leaving the door open so that I couldn’t pull into the empty spot in front of the convencience store.

That is all.

In case you missed the post from a few days ago on Cafe Hayek, I want to point out a few things.

The post, which focuses on an unlinked to NYT article, is interesting. But the first comment by Slocum was the best part. Pulling some quotes from an article on ReasonOnline:

The FLO defines a fair farm as a family farm that is a part of a large democratic cooperative. Farms cannot be “structurally dependent on hired labor,” which means that hiring even one laborer year-round makes a farm ineligible for certification. Even more controversial is the cooperative requirement. Rather than deal with individual farms, the FLO exclusively certifies large cooperatives composed of hundreds of small land-owning farmers, each with a single vote on how to best spend the Fair Trade profits.

Sayeth Slocum:

In other words, only coffee farmed according to collectivist ‘Dennis the Peasant’ rules of production are eligible.

The interesting thing here, is that Fair Trade was initially set up to eliminate the middle men who were shortchanging small farmers and to produce a transparent conduit for getting coffee from the farmer to retailers. Technically they are successful. Small growers who adhere to the strict rules and join the collective do get a better price for their beans — $1.26/pound. So by displacing up to 5 middlemen, the net cost of coffee goes… up? Yup, by perhaps 66%. The Fair Trade administrators are sucking up a huge amount of the revenue stream here.

And it appears from the articles that Fair Trade coffee isn’t known for even being particularly good. There’s not even any incentive for any farmer to improve quality, as he is only paid based on quantity. In this regard, the system is very much like the UAW pushing a “Buy American” campaign. Workers are being overpaid for an inferior product, which we should buy to feel better about ourselves.

This can — and I suspect will — be successful as long as good marketing strategy can maintain the information asymmetry among the American coffee consumer.

This is very anecdotal, but still:

“Going to a bar is not an opportunity to go get drunk,” TABC Capt. David Alexander said. “It’s to have a good time but not to get drunk.”

TABC is the acronym for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, who apparently went through 3 dozen Irving bars last week. Only 30 people were arrested for public intoxication. As Texas-born comedian Ron White is famous for saying:

I was drunk in a bar. They THREW me into public. I don’t wanna be drunk. In. Public. I wanna be drunk in a bar. Which is perfectly legal. Arrest them.

Apparently it’s not perfectly legal to be drunk in a bar.. in Texas anyway.

The TABC is just trying to prevent drunk driving.

TABC officials said the sweep concerned saving lives, not individual rights.

But it gets better.

At one location, for example, agents and police arrested patrons of a hotel bar. Some of the suspects said they were registered at the hotel and had no intention of driving.

This leads me to some questions. Such as: what is the statute for being publicly intoxicated? Is it based on your actions or BAC?

And this is a bit of an odd search for data, but I’ve been wondering if anyone has ever correlated car crashes involving drunk drivers and their previous sober driving records. I’d like to see if there is any data that says that drunk drivers who cause accidents are also usually the ones causing accidents when they’re sober.