Two People Died...

By -
in running races last week.

As Woody would have put it... "IF only they had been home quietly doing bong hits, instead of engaged in a nutty sport like road racing, they'd be alive today!"

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:19 PM

    I suppose they could have found some other way to die. But it's true that I long been warning of the hidden costs of sports.

    I've worked with alcoholics who went on binges and missed a few days of work. It's not, in my opinion, any more excusable than the skier who breaks a leg and misses a few days. Well, except that the skier will get paid leave and medical care. It is clear to me that the capitalist system straining from the side-effects of sports, and yet everyone has been brainwashed into thinking high-testosterone activities like football and beer are as virtuous as apple pie.

    There's a whole branch of the medical profession called "sports medicine." How many bong institutes have we? How many bong related injuries have we? Torn rotor cuffs from reloading that Gatling gun?

    Do local governments invoke eminent domain to acquire fields for planting hemp and poppy? They sure don't mind condemning, taxing and spending to create sports complexes.

    Every time I see them create another golf course or ballfield, I think of it as a subsidy for the AMA and Anheuser Busch. When will we put and end to this madness?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wabulon3:35 PM

    "Panem et circenses." Been doing it for five thousand years, probably much, much longer, so it ain't likely for undoing any time soon.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Machine Learning"

By -
 The name is a misnomer. And a harmful one, because it interferes with understanding the process that is really occuring. What is really occurring is a search of a constrained program space. Let's say you want to be able to identify images of hot dogs . You begin with a plausible program for doing so, that is able to also search the space of nearby programs that might get better results on the problem. You then (in "supervised learning") provide scores that indicate how well one of these possible programs has done on solving the problem. After doing this for some time you settle upon a program that solves the problem "well enough." This is a great technique that can produce truly impressive results on a wide class of problems, such as identifying images of hot dogs. But notice that, except for the phrase in scare quotes, there is no "learning" in the description. Calling this "learning" is importing ideological baggage that just obscures what
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more