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The timing of these two showing up in my twitter stream was great.
Don’t worry, boys. The Hot Potato is coming.
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notes Malcolm Gladwell: Football, dog fighting, and brain damage
via Rob.Research released the findings of an N.F.L.-funded phone survey of just over a thousand randomly selected retired N.F.L. players—all of whom had played in the league for at least three seasons. Self-reported studies are notoriously unreliable instruments, but, even so, the results were alarming. Of those players who were older than fifty, 6.1 per cent reported that they had received a diagnosis of “dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory-related disease.” That’s five times higher than the national average for that age group. For players between the ages of thirty and forty-nine, the reported rate was nineteen times the national average. (The N.F.L. has distributed five million dollars to former players with dementia.)
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In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt called an emergency summit at the White House, alarmed, as the historian John Sayle Watterson writes, “that the brutality of the prize ring had invaded college football and might end up destroying it.” Columbia University dropped the sport entirely. A professor at the University of Chicago called it a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.” In December of 1905, the presidents of twelve prominent colleges met in New York and came within one vote of abolishing the game. But the main objection at the time was to a style of play—densely and dangerously packed offensive strategies—that, it turns out, could be largely corrected with rule changes, like the legalization of the forward pass and the doubling of the first-down distance from five yards to ten. Today, when we consider subtler and more insidious forms of injury, it’s far from clear whether the problem is the style of play or the play itself.
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In one way or another, plenty of organizations select for gameness. The Marine Corps does so, and so does medicine, when it puts young doctors through the exhausting rigors of residency. But those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff—and dogfighting fails this test. Gameness, Carl Semencic argues, in “The World of Fighting Dogs” (1984), is no more than a dog’s “desire to please an owner at any expense to itself.”
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Professional football players, too, are selected for gameness. When Kyle Turley was knocked unconscious, in that game against the Packers, he returned to practice four days later because, he said, “I didn’t want to miss a game.” Once, in the years when he was still playing, he woke up and fell into a wall as he got out of bed. “I start puking all over,” he recalled. “So I said to my wife, ‘Take me to practice.’ I didn’t want to miss practice.” The same season that he was knocked unconscious, he began to have pain in his hips. He received three cortisone shots, and kept playing. At the end of the season, he discovered that he had a herniated disk. He underwent surgery, and four months later was back at training camp. “They put me in full-contact practice from day one,” he said. “After the first day, I knew I wasn’t right. They told me, ‘You’ve had the surgery. You’re fine. You should just fight through it.’ It’s like you’re programmed. You’ve got to go without question—I’m a warrior. I can block that out of my mind. I go out, two days later. Full contact. Two-a-days. My back locks up again. I had re-herniated the same disk that got operated on four months ago, and bulged the disk above it.” As one of Turley’s old coaches once said, “He plays the game as it should be played, all out,” which is to say that he put the game above his own well-being.
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notes"This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the ‘hyper-power’ as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration."Josh Marshall (via langer)
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"If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances."
I am frequently surprised at the average person’s lack of willingness to try to accomplish something potentially a little beyond their abilities.
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notes"When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard. We worked all waking hours, we didn’t stop. My Hunch cofounder Chris Dixon and I were talking about how hard we worked on our first startups, his being Site Advisor, acquired by McAfee — 14-18 hours a day. We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t — and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner."Caterina Fake - Working hard is overrated - Sept 25, 2009
Startups are hard. They require an insane amount of hard work and stress. But I like how Caterina calls out the difference between freaking out vs working hard.
(via bijan)
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"Most Infomercial-esque: Ajay Kulkarni from Sensobi, a company making a “personal relationship management” app for the BlackBerry, was so emphatic he could’ve sold a thousand ShamWows. (My neighbor was downloading the app while the presentation was still going on.)"
Boston.com article on TechStars Boston Investor Evening. My boy loves his blackberry. Go Sensobi.
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This is why I married them.
Reblogged because it made me smile for having married well.
Amen.
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notes Men, Women, and Parking SpacesSubtitle: Wherein I take my personal observations and consider them normative…
Yesterday, I wrote:
I just realized that the difference between the way men & women choose a parking place for a car has everything to do with public bathrooms.
I have long noticed a difference between myself and my wife when choosing a parking spot in a not-crowded parking lot.
I will leave at least one vacant spot between myself and the next car.
She will park right next to another car even if she doesn’t have to.
Yesterday I realized that our friend (also female) had done the same thing.
Maybe it was because the parking lot just had the lines re-painted, but suddenly I saw it just like each spot was a urinal.
Every man over the age of reason understands that when choosing a urinal, you choose the one as far away from any other guy as possible. There was even an email which circulated a few years ago which had ASCII drawings showing how to decide.
But the rules boil down to this:
Unless you are at a sporting event, concert, or other extremely-high bathroom-volume experience, you do not choose to stand next to another guy at the urinal. Ever.
I mentioned this to The Wife and at first she laughed—but then she added: “Well, see, we always choose a bathroom stall next to someone in case there isn’t any toilet paper.”
I rest my case.
Really, what more evidence do you need?
Coda: when not using the urinal, men might choose a bathroom stall next to another guy. Most guys will try to get some distance between them and the next guy, but really, our highest priorities for the sit-down are a) clean seat and b) no previous unflushed content. Also, if we look down and there is no toilet paper, there is exactly a 0.000000% chance that we would ask the guy in the next stall for toilet paper. Seriously, I would sooner use my underwear as toilet paper than stick my hand under another guy’s stall asking for toilet paper, because these are your options for what happens next:
1) He pees on your hand
2) He poops on your hand
3) He ignores you
4) He’s an elected Republican official and puts his dick in your hand because he thinks you gave “the signal”
5) He comes out of his stall, kicks in the door to your stall, and beats the crap out of you.
6) He actually gives you toilet paper.
Now I know that seems like a one-in-six chance, but really, that last option is like 2% because “getting your hand peed on” has about a 75% probability.
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notes"In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible."Michael McFaul, National Security Council by way of Signal vs Noise
