Quotulatiousness

January 9, 2016

Your get-on-the-bandwagon guide to the NFL playoffs

Filed under: Football, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:51

If your favourite team isn’t in the NFL playoffs (that’d be 20 of the 32 teams), Draw Play Dave is here to help you figure out which of the lucky playoff teams you should be supporting:

The 2015 NFL Playoffs ARE FINALLY HERE! Playoff football is the most fun part of the entire year, except if your team is actually in the playoffs, because then the stress is unbearable. But this isn’t for those fans of (twists face into sheer contempt) “good teams.” Not all of us were so lucky to have our team actually do well this year. For most of us, our team sucked, and we need someone to fill that hole for the remainder of the year. It’s time to sidle up and pretend to be friends with a winner so you can save what’s left of your sports emotional state.

This is a difficult process. Which team is so deserving of your love? Why should any of these teams win if your team had to sit at home? Which of these teams winning would piss off people you hate the most? Well, there are a couple of guidelines to follow if you need assistance:

  • Root for the underdog, unless they are a hated rival team
  • Root for the team with least amount of historical success, because those fans deserve some happiness, unless they are a hated rival team
  • Root for the team that annoys you a little less
  • If you are a glory seeking butthole who doesn’t care about anyone but you, root for the team with the best chance to win

With those guidelines in mind, let’s take a look at every team in the playoffs, with pros and cons for bandwagoning each team.

Preparing for 1916 – The Year of Battles I THE GREAT WAR – Week 75

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 31 Dec 2015

1915 was a year for the Central Powers except on the Western Front where the stalemate continues. But plans are being made on both sides to gain an advantage. Preparations for huge offensives are on the way and one French fortress is the focus of the German Army: Verdun.

QotD: Humans and apes

Filed under: Quotations, Science, Tools — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

On what separates us from the apes:

    Michael Tomasello, one of the world’s foremost experts on chimpanzee cognition, [said] “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.”

On what doesn’t separate us from the apes:

    Acheulean tools [a style used by hominids 1.8 million years ago] are nearly identical everywhere, from Africa to Europe to Asia, for more than a million years. There’s hardly any variation, which suggests that the knowledge of how to make these tools may not have been passed on culturally. Rather, the knowledge of how to make these tools may have become innate, just as the “knowledge” of how to build a dam is innate in beavers.

Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Scott Alexander in “List Of The Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind“, Slate Star Codex, 2014-06-12.

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