soapbox

This evening we had a prime example of why soccer in the US is struggling to gain/keep/improve its standing in the American sports scene. The MLS “game of the week” was hosted by ESPN2, not a top-end network but pretty much ubiquitous in cable/satellite packages. The game was even moved from 8pm PST to 7:30, perhaps in an attempt to be more family friendly (90 minutes of game time with ~20-30 for halftime) to the national TV audience… but it’s not a national audience if it’s starting at 10:30pm Eastern, so oh well.

But, through bad luck and perhaps poor contingency planning on the ESPN programming department, the previous time slot on ESPN2 was devoted to the Arkansas-Virginia College World Series (baseball) game. Neither one a powerhouse, but when a horrible call from behind the plate (Orel Hershieser was beside himself) in the bottom of the 9th inning sent the game into extras, the network was stuck. So, nobody except for the 73 people who paid for the MLS satellite special package got to see a very entertaining first half between DC United and the Seattle Sounders, a team that sold out for the entire season in something like the first month that tickets were available.

So in a sport mocked for boring, low-scoring games, a 2-1 halftime score was promising, except that nobody got to watch it on TV. Finally, the stupid baseball* game was done and ESPN2 switched over to the feed from Seattle just in time to see a brilliant third goal for the home team. Good stuff, right? just what the network and the home crowd wanted. Then, even better for the producers, DC United scored against the run of play to narrow the gap and set up and exciting finish.

And it WAS a good finish, if you are a fan of open-play soccer with aggression overcoming smart play: Seattle continued to attack even though it was a up a goal, frequently getting caught with too many man up the field, and narrowly dodging an equalizing goal even as it was clearly the better side. Then with 5 minutes to go, the visiting side finally scored the seemingly/cynically inevitable tying goal, setting up a very frantic last 10 (5 minutes of stoppage time) minutes of soccer.

But here’s the other reason why soccer gets slammed – no overtime. A great game, 6 goals, plenty of end-to-end action, but then after a seemingly arbitrary number (90 + x) of minutes the ref blows the whistle and that’s it, game over. 1 point for each in the standings, no overtime, no shootout, no winner. Seattle played entertaining but stupid soccer and wasted two points, DC got lucky and had enough skill to earn a valuable away point, good for them… but many fans, at home and on TV, were probably left with a sour taste in their mouths. All in all, a very ironical and perfectly-titled “MLS Game of the Week.”

* don’t get me wrong, I love baseball. And I love the drama of the double-elimination tourney, I liked watching the “upset” championships of Fresno State and Oregon State in the past couple years, but the sub-pro level of play and the ugly “clank” of metal bats just doesn’t do it for me. I’m sure I’ll get sucked in again this year, but for #&$%’s sake, ESPN was busy reshowing a taped NFL Live on the mothership channel… are we not saturated with Brett Fahv-ruh stories? Do we need to know exactly when/where T.O. picked his new apartment in Buffalo? don’t you think they could have done some switching around? Seriously, bleh.

An imbalanced gender ratio is not a surprise to any physics conference veteran, and I’d imagine that the female-depletion phenomenon is common across the non-biology sciences. Or maybe that’s generalizing too much?

Anyway, at this week’s conference I was really surprised by the demographics; I’d guess not more than 15-20% female, and 50+% were 50+ years old… which meant that between session breaks the lines stretched out the restroom door.

Perhaps unrelatedly, I’m wondering if the inter-session snacks were sponsored by Medicare, since I’ve never seen a more calorie- and saturated fat-intensive collection of cookies, brownies, ice cream bars, cheesecake, etc at any conference. Meanwhile, the CS conference in the other side of the complex got to have fresh fruit and muffins: maybe not an upgrade in the eyes of some, but some variety would be nice. I almost ate something that had 87% of the daily saturated fat requirement, yikes.

Finally, I really wish my phone had a better camera, since I’ve seen some truly spectacular fashion mistakes this week. Many of the usual three-inches-too-short khakis with white socks and black sneakers, but also some impressive attempts at hair, including a rather quality mullet on an otherwise normally-attired attendee. But I really wanted to get a shot of George McFly’s twin brother and his slicked-down, icky-feeling-inducing bangs.

In addition to the overuse/misuse of antibiotics and Nathaniel’s suggestion about stocking up on said items, here’s another doomsday scenario to keep you up at night: Ug99

One consequence of the farce that is the current US Agricultural “plan” is the horrible dependence on pesticides combined with the use of hyper-genetically-modified grains. Monsanto has done a great job of marketing and as long as no foreign plagues are introduced, we’re all good – but between global warming and what stem rust, there’s reason to worry.

“A significant humanitarian crisis is inevitable,” said Rick Ward, the coordinator of the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

The solution is to develop new wheat varieties that are immune to Ug99. That’s much easier said than done.

After several years of feverish work, scientists have identified a mere half-dozen genes that are immediately useful for protecting wheat from Ug99. Incorporating them into crops using conventional breeding techniques is a nine- to 12-year process that has only just begun. And that process will have to be repeated for each of the thousands of wheat varieties that is specially adapted to a particular region and climate.

“All the seed needs to change in the next few years,” said Ronnie Coffman, a plant breeder who heads the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project. “It’s really an enormous undertaking.”

So, it looks as though my current work computer has bitten the proverbial dust. I was having overheating problems all last week, and even before then the fans would spin up excessively – and this is a G5 tower, mind you, so 5 cooling fans at 3000 rpm made my office sound like an aircraft hangar.

So now the question comes to the replacement machine. Assuming I can get the “corp” to pay for it, what features are necessary and what can I do without? I’m tempted go for a bare-bones 8-core tower and then add RAM and hard drives separately, especially since being able to run calculations on 7 processors in parallel would be only/almost half as efficient as running on some of the “slow” 16-processors-per-node NAVO machines. Anyway, here’s hoping, and I welcome any insight/suggestions.

So, another item that was stuck in draft purgatory for a month or so before I was able to actually post it…. a circle of iPhones that are both listening to and playing a very abstract kind of “music.” Each one picks up ambient sounds, runs that through a series of software filters to make it sound more musical, and finally plays the result back (with rhythm).

As each iPhone is picking up the tune from the other iPhones it’s playing it back through the same filters, and so on and so forth. All while the software is “judging” each “cell” of sound, to see if it’s interesting or loud enough or so forth, and cells will live or die based on that criteria — in essence, a musical organism.

a warning: it’s not exactly friendly to the ears, especially the first one – don’t use headphones.

If any of you all come out to the Seattle area, this is the place to visit. The roses are really coming out nicely right now.

The new house in Edmonds is close to a road variously called Aurora/99/Evergreen way. It just happens to be the road you’d drive down to get a hooker and a motel that rents by the hour, but I think it’s also really an example of what powers the US.

No, not the hookers. It’s the thousands of small used car lots, vacuum repair shops, small box stores, etc. They don’t seem like a lot until you realize that each one of them represents something like two to five solid jobs and the road stretches for 20 miles.

So, huge economic power. Ugly as hell though.