Quotulatiousness

September 4, 2017

After the waiver period, the Vikings sign players to their 10-man practice squad

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Vikings only received one player off the waiver wire, former San Francisco tight end Blake Bell. Bell was coached by current Vikings OL coach Tony Sparano during his rookie year. The team freed up a roster spot for him by waiving/injured tight end Bucky Hodges.

Among the Vikings’ waivered players, offensive lineman Zac Kerin was claimed by the Detroit Lions, linebacker Edmond Robinson was claimed by the New York Jets, and (showing just how desperate teams are for offensive linemen) former starting tackle T.J. Clemmings was picked up by the Washington Redskins. Both Kerin and Robinson had standing invitations to the Vikings’ practice squad if they cleared waivers (Clemmings almost certainly did not).

The following players have been added to the practice squad:

  • LB Elijah Lee (drafted by the Vikings in the seventh round, initially claimed he didn’t want to join Minnesota’s PS and hoped to be picked up by another team instead)
  • QB Kyle Sloter (Played the preseason in Denver, going 31 of 43 for 413 yards with 3 TDs and 0 INTs … with Taylor Heinicke going to IR, the team definitely needed another quarterback for the scout team. The Vikings are paying him serious money for a PS player: $340,000 … NFL minimum for a rookie on the 53-man roster is $465,000.)
  • RB Bronson Hill (free agent who spent time with the Bengals and Jaguars in 2016)
  • DT Ifeadi Odenigbo (drafted by the Vikings in the seventh round of the 2017 draft)
  • CB Horace Richardson (undrafted free agent, spent the preseason with the Vikings)
  • DT Dylan Bradley (undrafted free agent, spent the preseason with the Vikings)
  • TE Kyle Carter (spent time on the Vikings PS in 2016, undrafted in 2016)
  • WR Cayleb Jones (free agent who was on the Eagles PS in 2016, then signed to the Vikings PS in December)

Two spots on the practice squad remained open, as of Sunday night.

Update: The Vikings signed two players to fill the remaining spots on the practice squad on Monday:

  • C Cornelius Edison (was on Chicago’s roster and appeared in six games and spent the preseason with Atlanta)
  • OT Cedrick Lang (spent the preseason with Denver)

The mental health crisis on campus

Filed under: Education, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Spiked, Naomi Firsht shares the concerns of Jonathan Haidt about the rise of mental health issues at US universities:

The heightened vulnerability of college students has had a chilling effect on discussion in the academic world, and Haidt sees this in his day-to-day experience on campus. “There is a rapidly spreading feeling that we are all walking on eggshells, both students and faculty. That we are now accountable, not for what we say, but for how anyone who hears it might take it. And if you have to speak, thinking about the worst reading that anyone could put on your words, that means you cannot be provocative, you cannot take risks, that means you will play it safe when you speak… This is what I’m seeing in my classes when topics related to race or gender come up – which we used to be able to talk about 10 years ago, but now it’s painful and there’s a lot of silence.”

This is disastrous for academic life, as Haidt points out: “A university cannot function if people will not put their ideas forth, will not contest ideas that they think are wrong, will not stand up for ideas that they think are right.”
He is keen to emphasise that this is not a right-left issue. “Several people on the left are noticing that college students are less effective politically as activists, as progressives, when they have this morality and this ethos with such heavy concept creep.”

Haidt believes there is a mental-health crisis on campus: “I have never seen such rapid increase in indicators of anxiety and depression as we have seen in the past few years”, he says. But his suggested approach is unlikely to find favour with student communities fond of Safe Spaces and therapeutic puppy-petting. “If you think about it as a mental-health crisis”, he explains, “then you might be tempted to say: we need more help, more counselling, more protection for those who are suffering from mental illness. But if you look at it that way you will miss the broader pattern, which is that for 20 to 30 years now, Americans have been systematically undermining the development of resilience or toughness of their children.” Referencing the work of Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-range Kids, he concludes: “We have made our children too safe to succeed.”

In his forthcoming book Misguided Minds: How Three Bad Ideas Are Leading Young People, Universities, and Democracies Toward Failure, Haidt claims that certain ideas are impairing students’ chances of success. Those ideas being: your feelings are always right; what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; and the world is divided into good people and bad people. “If we can teach those three ideas to college students”, he says, “we cannot guarantee they will fail, but we will minimise their odds at success”.

So how can we resolve the problem of vulnerability among young Americans? Haidt says part of the solution must begin in childhood and will require parents to give their children daily periods of “unsupervised time”. “We have to accept the fact that in that unsupervised time there will be name-calling, conflict and exclusion. And while it’s painful for parents to accept this, in the long-run it will give them children that are not suffering from such high rates of anxiety and depression.”

Hollywood facing the worst box office returns in years

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ryan Faughnder reports on the bad summer movies season:

As Hollywood wraps up the all-important summer box-office season this Labor Day weekend, a sobering reality has gripped the industry.

The number of tickets sold in the United States and Canada this summer is projected to fall to the lowest level in a quarter-century.

The results have put the squeeze on the nation’s top theater chains, whose stocks have taken a drubbing. AMC Theatres Chief Executive Adam Aron this month called his company’s most recent quarter “simply a bust.”

Such blunt language reflects some worrisome trends. Domestic box-office revenue is expected to total $3.78 billion for the first weekend of May through Labor Day — a key period that generates about 40% of domestic ticket sales — down nearly 16% from the same period last year, according to comScore. That’s an even worse decline than the 10% drop some studio executives predicted before the summer began.

The usual suspects are being blamed: unlike previous years, moviegoers have other calls on their entertainment time and dollars, including the rise of gaming platforms, streaming sites like Netflix, and the attraction of watching freshly painted surfaces dry. The online critics at Rotten Tomatoes also come in for their fair shame of blame for Hollywood’s plight.

Update: Fixed broken link. Sorry for any inconvenience.

How to Pronounce UK Place Names – Anglophenia Ep 23

Filed under: Britain, Humour, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 21 Jan 2015

Anglophenia’s Siobhan Thompson teaches Science Friction’s Rusty Ward — and the rest of America — how to pronounce difficult British place names.

Learn how to pronounce even more British place names here: http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2014/01/pronounce-deliberately-offputting-british-place-names/

Visit the Anglophenia blog: http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia

QotD: Even a world of perfect abundance would not be a crime-free world

Filed under: Books, Economics, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So, when I woke up this morning I woke up thinking of how time is different in different parts of the world, which is what the people (Heinlein and Simak included) who pushed for the UN and thought it was the way of the future didn’t seem to get (to be fair, in Tramp Royale it becomes obvious Heinlein got it when he traveled there, and realized it was impossible to bring such a disparate world under one government.)

A minor side note, while listening to City, there is a point at which Simak describes what he might or might not have realized was Marx’s concept of “perfect communism” where the state withers away because there’s no need for it.

Simak thought this would be brought about by perfect abundance. There are no crimes of property when everyone has too much. There are no crimes of violence either, because he seems to think those come from property. (Hits head gently on desk.)

This must have seemed profound to me when I first read the book at 12, but right now I just stared at the mp3 player thinking “what about people who capture other people as sex slaves?” “What about people who covet something someone else made, including the life someone made for themselves? Just because everyone has too much, it doesn’t mean that they don’t covet what someone else made of their too much.”

Which is why I’m not a believer in either Communism or for that matter big L Libertarianism. I don’t believe that humans are only a sum of their material needs and crime the result of the unequal distribution of property. (There is also the unequal distribution of talent, or simply the unequal distribution of happiness, all of which can lead to crime — after all Cain didn’t off Abel because he was starving.) And I don’t believe humans are ever going to become so perfect we can get away with no government, because humans will always (being at heart social apes) lust for power, recognition and heck simply control over others (which is subtly different from power.) So we’re stuck with our good servant but bad master.

Sarah A. Hoyt, “Time Zones”, According to Hoyt, 2015-06-23.

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