Quotulatiousness

January 11, 2016

Vikings lose wildcard game to Seattle 10-9 on failed field goal attempt

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It certainly wasn’t a pretty game to watch, and given the extremely low temperature at kickoff (tied for the third coldest playoff game in NFL history), nobody was expecting a high-scoring extravaganza. The game turned on two plays: a bad snap to Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson that he somehow turned into a big gain and a missed field goal by Blair Walsh that ended the Vikings’ hopes. 1500ESPN‘s Andrew Krammer:

They made the gap feel closer than 27 yards.

This wasn’t like any of the Vikings’ other five losses in the second season under Mike Zimmer. The same team that was thoroughly handled by San Francisco, Green Bay and Seattle proved to be the better defensive team in Sunday’s 10-9 loss and first-round playoff exit at the hands of the Seahawks. They were the better offensive unit up until kicker Blair Walsh missed a chip shot, shorter than an extra point, into the open, windy end of TCF Bank Stadium.

They showed signs of a potential NFC force turning the corner, giving traction last week to their shock-the-world mission by walking out of Lambeau Field with a division title. The first 59 minutes and 34 seconds through Sunday’s bone-chilling game put the odds in the Vikings’ favor — Walsh was 30-of-31 in his career from inside 29 yards.

But their shot at dethroning the reigning conference champions ended at Seattle’s 9-yard line, where Walsh pushed a 27-yard attempt wide left.

[…]

Though it was more than a missed kick that ended the Vikings’ season.

A botched fourth-quarter snap gave life to the Seahawks. Wilson chased the snap 15 yards behind the line of scrimmage, recovered and evaded a duo of Vikings’ blitzers in cornerback Captain Munnelryn and linebacker Eric Kendricks. Wilson scrambled right, and the coverage followed. That left receiver Jermaine Kearse wide open in the middle of the field. Kearse outran cornerback Xavier Rhodes and picked up 35 yards to the Vikings’ 4.

“Honestly, I thought the ball still was on the ground,” Munnerlyn said of Wilson’s recovery. “He had a knee down and I’m like, ‘Man, is he going to get up and run with it?’ He picked it up and [spun] out and found the open guy. At that point, I wish I could take that play back and go up field…I didn’t know where nobody was. I was just trying to make a play and that’s one play I regret.

(more…)

Pre-agrarian life

Filed under: Food, Health, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Cedar Sanderson guest posts at According to Hoyt:

I’m currently studying the history of the world, prior to 1500. In the first chapter of the book we were assigned to read, the point is made that humans have been around for a very long time, it took a long time to develop agriculture, but there weren’t many of them pre-agriculture. The crux of the matter is the ability to grow more food than you could hunt, or gather, in a small group. Large groups, which would build societies and cities, simply could not exist on a subsistence diet.

One of my classmates, in a discussion forum, stated that humans were desperate for nutrients and one of the main ways to get food was to graze which made me do a head-desk, and then start thinking. We take abundant food for granted. The child (in college, but still, a child) who seems to think that humans grazed on grass in pre-history has no doubt never missed a meal in their life unless it was by choice. The world we live in offers enough variety, enough abundance, that people can be ‘vegan’ and still survive, although thriving and being healthy are different matters.

The book tells me that women didn’t have as many children before agriculture, and that’s why population was lower. I snort and mutter something impolite under my breath. In reality hunter-gatherers have more in common with herds of animals, and again, it’s about the food. They were reliant on what was growing right there, right then. They had no way of producing a surplus nor of storing same. If they overhunted an area they were forced to move or die. If the tribe’s population grew too large, they starved or succumbed to disease, just like a deer herd or the snowshoe hare population collapses every few years to build slowly back up, limited by the supply of available food.

Humans lived that way for a very long time. Women having less babies? Probably, only it wasn’t through some kind of arcane desire to keep the population down. It was through the lack of food – nursing a child in the modern era is not terribly effective birth control, but in the time of subsistence the woman’s body simply couldn’t handle the dual load of nursing and pregnancy. I became pregnant with two of my children while nursing full time, I can speak to the enormous drain it is even on a well-fed body.

Because it’s fat. I have fat, on me, and in my diet. Fat is something you just don’t see prior to agriculture, and there’s a reason so many cultures revere the plump woman (just look at all the Venus statues from around the world). A fat woman could have babies and she could survive nursing and this meant the family could go on. And while we’re on the makin’ babies topic, here’s something: my history book laments the rise of the patriarchy alongside the rise of civilization after agriculture, constraining women and making them be under the thumb of the male. Well, that’s not patriarchy, that’s food. Men could hunt, and bring in the meat that was desperately needed for survival. Women gathered, but the men were the hunters.

Why didn’t the women hunt? Well, babies. Pregnant, nursing, malnourished…. The women were managing all they could, and the men were taking care of them. Women were better able to survive (yes, I am counting death in childbirth) in that harsh world than men were. Men were a valuable commodity in a time when hunting and protection of the tribe-family against others who wanted the same food they needed to live menaced the women and children. Female infanticide was practiced long before recorded history, evidence shows. Men were more valuable to the hunter-gatherers and it wasn’t even questioned it seems. But my history book complains that it was the rise of civilization post-agriculture that was to blame for the oppression of women and the gender inequality. Prior to ‘society’ it claims men and women were equal.

Dancer, Lover, Spy – Mata Hari I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 4 Jan 2016

Mata Hari or Margaretha Geertruida Zelle is one of the most fascinating women of the 20th century. Not only did the Dutch woman charm half or Paris with her exotic and erotic dancing. After several up and downs she ended up as a spy for love gathering intelligence for the German secret service. When she was caught by the French, her live ended as unglamorous as it started.

QotD: “[A]nnual health checks as carried out in Britain are a waste of time”

Filed under: Britain, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the same “Minerva” column, we learn that annual health checks on everyone between the ages of 40 and 75 are likely to be useless, at least as carried out in Britain, except possibly as a mild Keynesian stimulus to the economy. When the records of 130,356 people who had undergone such checks were examined, it was discovered that only about 20 per cent of those at high risk of cardiac disease were prescribed statins and even fewer of those with high blood pressure underwent treatment to lower it.

Since the beneficial effects of treatment with statins are a matter of controversy anyway, as being of value mainly to those who already have ischemic heart disease or have had a stroke, and since the treatment of high blood pressure is only marginally beneficial in the first place, so that the benefit of treating fewer than 20 per cent of those with high blood pressure is likely to be minuscule from the public health point of view, we can safely conclude that annual health checks as carried out in Britain are a waste of time — unless wasting time by occupying it is the whole object of the activity, in which case wasting time is not wasting time but using it gainfully. Gainfully, that is, to the person who wastes his time (the doctor) rather than has his time wasted for him (the patient). His time is well and truly wasted.

Part of the problem is the assumption that doing something must be better than doing nothing. Doctors of the past, because there was so little they could in fact do, employed a technique known as masterly inactivity: they assumed an alert watchfulness, giving the patient the impression, which was false but reassuring, that they would do what had to be done in the event that anything untoward happened. Since most people got better anyway, this seemed to confirm the wisdom of the doctor.

Masterly inactivity, however, is no way to increase your fee for service or gain a reputation for technical mastery. Patients too prefer to think that they are doing something rather than nothing to preserve themselves. That is why some of them are not merely surprised, but aggrieved when illness strikes them: for they have done all that they were supposed to do to remain in good health, from eating broccoli to regular bowel biopsies.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Dubious Cures”, Taki’s Magazine, 2014-11-30.

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