Quotulatiousness

March 12, 2013

Vikings part company with Antoine Winfield

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:27

I’m a bit shocked by this one. Antoine Winfield has been a pillar of the Vikings defence since he arrived and still had one year to go on his current contract. He is, to put it mildly, popular with the fans. Here’s the brief report from Tom Pelissero:

Antoine Winfield is done with the Minnesota Vikings.

The veteran cornerback was informed on Monday afternoon he’ll be released, an NFL source said.

Winfield was due $7.25 million in base salary in the last year of his deal.

The Vikings wanted him to restructure his contract, but Winfield [turned] down the offer, per sources.

I understand the mathematics here … $7.25 million is too much to pay for a player who was supposed to be playing fewer snaps in the 2013 season. But it feels wrong.

In other Vikings news, wide receiver Jerome Simpson signed his offer to come back for another year after a disappointing 2012 season. That means the current receivers under contract are Simpson, Jarius Wright, Stephen Burton, Greg Childs (on IR for his rookie season), and Chris Summers (practice squad in 2012).

I’ll be updating this post with other free agent news as it trickles in:

  • Right tackle Phil Loadholt is reported to have signed a new multi-year contract. The expressed interest from divisional rivals in Chicago may have helped this deal happen.
  • Backup offensive lineman Joe Berger is also reported to have signed a veteran minimum contract for 2013.
  • A bit more information on the release of Antoine Winfield from 1500ESPN.
  • Safety Jamarca Sanford told his Twitter followers that he’s re-signed with the Vikings.

Update, 13March: After I logged off last night, the Vikings re-signed outside linebacker Erin Henderson to a two-year deal. They also re-signed fullback Jerome Felton to a three-year deal.

At the Daily Norseman, KJSegall pens a tribute to a great player:

You hear about Ray Lewis and how he would motivate a locker room, fire up teammates, blah blah blah. You hear about it because the guy is the biggest media whore since… OK, I sat here for no less than four minutes and really couldn’t come up with a good follow up. Winfield was so much like Lewis, and yet the total opposite at the same time. He was the heart and soul of the defense, an aging vet who cared far more about his teammates all along than he ever did himself. He bought into the idea that football is a team sport, and that football players are team players. Arif pointed out in the comments section that he himself watched Winfield coaching the very players who could take his job as deeply as an actual coach. Winfield was a Viking, and that was always first and foremost.

Last season, three times, Winfield put team before self as fiercely as any football player could have. First, after his younger brother died, he fought through the emotional agony that he surely must have felt and returned to play in a September game. Then, when things were looking bleak for the team, he silenced the locker room to even beyond a whisper, giving a fiery speech that spurred his team on, helping in a key way to propel the Vikings to an amazing finish and a playoff berth. And then, in the last, he suffered through a broken hand, playing in the season finale (before finally yielding to the pain halfway through) and then returning for the playoff game.

That speech, by the way- do you have any clue what was said? I don’t. No one really does. And there is the oxymoronic comparison between him and Ray Lewis. Sure, Lewis too could spark his team with a big speech. But then he wanted cameras around, he wanted reporters to know what happened and what was said. Winfield, however, had none of that. His words were for his team and his team alone. He didn’t want the glory or the adulation, he just wanted the win. That was always good enough for him.

A stunning technical achievement

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

No, not the tablet — the stunning ability to condescend to half of the human race:

The ePad Femme: for women everywhere who have no interests except their own bodies and having babies, which is apparently all of them.

The ePad Femme: for women everywhere who have no interests except their own bodies and having babies, which is apparently all of them.

At long last, a company has designed a tablet fit for the use of an entire gender that has, thus far, apparently gone unserved. The ePad Femme, designed and distributed by the Eurostar Group, is an eight-inch tablet that comes pre-loaded with apps concerning yoga, grocery shopping, and cooking. Thank the heavens, ladies may never trouble their pretty heads with such difficulties as finding and downloading their own apps ever again.

The tablet was first announced back in October but received a marketing push in February as “the perfect Valentine’s Day gift,” noted one site. The tablet runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, or as a woman might call it, “the Android screensaver.” Eurostar calls the ePad Femme “the first tablet specifically for ladies.”

Several sites highlight that the tablet “comes in light pink.” Despite our best efforts, we’ve failed to find an image verifying that the actual body of the tablet is pink, so we assume this is in reference to the home screen wallpaper. Just as well, since what woman is going to figure out how to configure that, am I right? Settings, right? What even are they?

Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, Eurostar associate vice president of marketing Mani Nair said that the tablet comes with the preloaded womanly applications so the user can “just turn it on and log in to cooking recipes or yoga.” He went on to state that the ePad Femme “makes a perfect gadget for a woman who might find difficulties in terms of downloading these applications and it is a quick reference.”

If consumers were 10% better off … why did they call it a “disease”?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

In Maclean’s, Stephen Gordon illustrates the classic case of burying the lede for popular economics:

    So Dutch consumers are roughly 10% better off than they would have been, but companies have been able to compete only by paring their profit margins.

    “The Dutch disease,” The Economist, November 26, 1977

Talk about burying the lede. That sentence appears at the end of the 10th paragraph of the much-referred-to but rarely read article in The Economist that coined the phrase “Dutch Disease.” In the normal course of things, a 10 per cent increase in consumers’ purchasing power would be the stuff of banner headlines, but, for some reason, The Economist chose to hide that point deep into the story and qualify it with a caveat about how hard it had become for companies to compete. (The answer to that, by the way, is: “So what if producers are struggling?” What really matters is consumer welfare.)

My take on the Dutch Disease debate can be summed up as follows: Why are we calling it a disease?

US Army to standardize on four current UAV models

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

The US Army reasonably expects their budget to be under strain for some time. Here’s at least one sensible economy move:

Faced with smaller budgets over the next decade the U.S. Army has halted evaluation of new UAVs and is standardizing on four existing models (Gray Eagle, Shadow 2000, Raven and Puma). All four of these were developed and purchased in large quantities over the last dozen years and will remain the primary army UAVs for the next 5-10 years.

The army currently has nearly 7,000 UAVs. Over 6,000 are micro-UAVs like the Raven and Puma, These tiny (under six kg/13.2 pound) reconnaissance aircraft have become very popular with the troops, anyone of which can become an operator after a few hours of training. These tiny UAVs are a radical new military aircraft technology that is took air recon to a new level. That level is low, a few hundred meters off the ground. The army has nearly 1,798 Raven and 325 Puma UAVs systems in use by ground troops. A complete system (controller, spare parts, and three UAVs) costs $250,000 for the Raven and over $400,000 for Puma. These tiny aircraft have changed how the troops fight and greatly reduced army dependence on the air force for air reconnaissance. The lightweight, hand launched Raven UAV can only stay airborne about an hour per sortie, but troops have found that this is enough time to do all sorts of useful work, even when there’s no fighting going on. This is most of the time. The heavier Puma can stay up for 120 minutes.

Reactions to the Percy Harvin trade

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:31

As reported yesterday, the Minnesota Vikings struck a trade agreement with the Seattle Seahawks, sending disgruntled wide receiver Percy Harvin and getting three draft picks in return (Seattle’s first and seventh round picks this year and their third round pick in 2014). Under the circumstances, the Vikings got a very generous deal for the extremely talented player. Just a few weeks ago, the guessing among NFL writers seemed to be that Minnesota might be lucky to get just a third-round pick in exchange for Harvin’s services.

1500ESPN‘s Tom Pelissero:

One veteran starter told 1500ESPN.com on Monday the trade ” is genius.” Another said he’s happy for Harvin but Spielman did “a great job” getting so much value for a player much of the league thought the Vikings were desperate to dump.

Harvin had demanded trades. He had clashed with coaches. He had complained about the offense and the quarterback. He once stormed out over a disagreement about medication.

He was, and is, one of the NFL’s most dynamic players for 3 hours after Sunday. It’s the other 165 hours a week the Vikings had begun to fear having a basket case on their hands.

Dressing down mild-mannered coach Leslie Frazier on the sideline in Seattle and again at the team facility weeks later was just the most overt signal Harvin had worn out his welcome and probably wanted out anyway.

Leslie Frazier is reportedly the most even-tempered coach in the NFL: if you can’t get along with Frazier, you probably can’t get along with anyone. Harvin has had arguments and confrontations with his coaches at college and in the NFL, so it will be interesting to see how long he can go in Seattle before the cameras catch him on the sideline giving a coach a dressing-down (or chucking weights at him).

All that, and Spielman still found — or perhaps created — a marketplace and yielded a better return than most around the NFL expected.

“Vikes got very good return for (a) player with no future there,” one NFL personnel man said.

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