Quotulatiousness

April 27, 2018

Minnesota Vikings 2018 draft – first day

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

The Minnesota Vikings started the first day of the draft holding the 30th overall pick, along with seven later draft picks. Vikings General Manager Rick Spielman has been a very active trader in previous drafts, so the odds of the team actually picking a player at the number 30 spot seemed slim. Spielman has said on several occasions that he prefers to have up to 10 draft picks, rather than the default seven each team is allotted. And yet, when the number 30 pick was due to be turned in, it was the Vikings making the pick after all, selecting cornerback Mike Hughes from the University of Central Florida.

First, I must admit that I didn’t know anything about Hughes until after he’d been selected by the Vikings, but I did suggest yesterday that I thought cornerback was the Vikings’ #2 need in this draft. If the team thinks they can get a quality guard or tackle in the second round (quality being defined as starter or close-to-starter level), then going for cornerback help makes a lot of sense.

Here’s the Vikings announcement on Hughes:

Bio

An all-state pick from Bern, North Carolina, Hughes signed on with home-state UNC for the 2015 season. He played in 11 games as a reserve that year, making 12 tackles and breaking up three passes. Hughes was suspended in October, however, for violating team rules after being part of an incident at a fraternity house. His time with the Tar Heels was over, so he attended Garden City Community College in 2016, earning national junior college All-American honors with 47 tackles, two interceptions, six pass breakups, and three return touchdowns. UCF Head Coach Scott Frost convinced Hughes to join UCF for the 2017 season, and his play was a big reason for the team’s undefeated record. He started 12 of 13 contests, garnering first-team All-American Athletic Conference honors as a defensive back (44 tackles, four interceptions — one returned for a touchdown, team-high 11 pass breakups) and second-team accolades as a returner (20 attempts, 635 yards, two touchdowns on kick returns; 13 attempts, 233 yards, one touchdown on punt returns).

Overview

Hughes simply hasn’t had the game experience he needs to put together the consistency in coverage that teams might like to see. He’s a projection-based prospect who has shown twitch, ball production and toughness in a small sample size. Despite being a little short, he is likely to stay outside in coverage. While teams wait for him to gain coverage experience, they can certainly lean on his tremendous talents as a return man. Hughes has potential, but there is still work to be done in coverage.

Update: At the Daily Norseman, Ted Glover considers the first day of the draft, both the sensible and the head-scratching.

The First Tank-on-Tank Battle in History – The Zeebrugge Raid I THE GREAT WAR Week 196

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 26 Apr 2018

At Villers-Bretonneux, German and British tanks clash marking the first tank-on-tank battle in history. In the same week, the most successful flying ace of World War 1 is shot down over France: Manfred von Richthofen dies after scoring 80 victories. Meanwhile, the British Navy attempts to eliminate the German U-Boat threat with a daring raid on Zeebrugge and Ostende.

The rise of the “sexbot”

Filed under: Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Jacobite, Diana Fleischman discusses the appeal of sexbots to young (and not-so-young) men:

Sexbots are usually woman-shaped gynoid machines. At the present time, sex robots are simple: they’re silicone sex dolls that have some capacity for movement and response. Manufacturers are rolling out new models and new promises: sex robots that respond to touch and penetration, sex robots with interchangeable faces and bodies and sex robots with different personalities. Future robots will have all the allure of the cues of fertility in a flesh-and-blood woman combined with the artificial intelligence that creates compulsive reward directed behavior.

Sex robots are overwhelmingly gynoid because heterosexual men drive the market for sexual products like prostitution and pornography. Across cultures, men desire more sexual partners, need to know someone for less time before they want to have sex with them, and have lower standards for a sexual liaison than women. Looking at gay men is instructive here. Their sexual interactions are not limited by women’s sexual choosiness and they, on average, have many more sexual partners than straight men or lesbians.

It isn’t hard to see the reason for this. Men don’t get pregnant and don’t lactate, and they have smaller, easier-to-produce sex cells than women. For a man, the cost of producing offspring is cheap. Getting one’s genes into the next generation is the engine of evolution. The low opportunity costs make men motivated to take every opportunity, even if it comes in the form of a robot. Ever think a dog is dumb for growling at his reflection in the mirror? Human men can become aroused looking at flat images of nude women in black and white, our evolved psychology can respond in maladaptive ways towards novel stimuli.

[…]

My view is that the uncanny valley is something analogous to Capgras delusion, a psychological disorder that causes sufferers to believe that someone they know has been taken over by an imposter, often inhuman. According to VS Ramachandran, there are two aspects to recognizing faces: the identification of the external familiar representation and the “internal” validation – the warm emotion that goes along with it. In the uncanny valley, you recognize a robot as humanlike, but it’s missing the facial movement or some other characteristic that gives you a warm feeling of recognition. Many men won’t experience the uncanny valley, especially with regards to sex robots. These men are going to be the early adopters. Men are worse at identifying faces than women and are far more likely to have prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.

Sex is weird. Sex is gross and awkward. Natural selection addressed this issue by causing arousal to attenuate the human disgust response. It’s worth noting that men have a much lower baseline sexual disgust than women, and that sexual excitement further reduces disgust sensitivity in men. In a classic paper by Dan Ariely, aroused men had much more positive attitudes about all kinds of unusual sexual acts. Sexually aroused men were more likely to say that it would be fun to watch a woman urinating or that they could imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal). 3-D pornography of video game or cartoon characters that might be creepy in a nonsexual context are popular genres. The most direct evidence that men won’t be put off by uncanny vulvas is from a paper that laments the “unabashed sexualization of female-gendered robots” in comments on YouTube videos of robots. Bawdy comments on gynoids – “you’ll have to replace it monthly due to semen corrosion,” for example – were more frequent than comments expressing unease.

Perhaps we should encourage some men to use sex robots. Men who get environmental cues that they’re evolutionary dead-ends disproportionately menace society. In the 1980s, evolutionary psychologist couple Wilson and Daly found that perpetrators of violence and homicide had something in common: they were young, single and didn’t have access to the kinds of resources with which to win mates. Polygynous societies in which wealthier men have access to multiple women are more violent and less stable because they have a class of young men without the prospect of getting a mate. Monogamy, rather than being the state of nature, may have been an important cultural technology for reducing violence.

What is fire? | James May Q&A (Ep36) | Head Squeeze

Filed under: Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Earth Lab
Published on 30 Aug 2013

Discover the scientific nature of fire with James May in this Head squeeze video Q&A.

Fire, pretty essential really and something we often take for granted, but what exactly is it? Well to create fire you need three things – some fuel, a heat source and oxygen. If we remove any one of these, then the fire will go out. When we apply sufficient heat to the fuel for it to reach its ignition point, the material will combust in the presence of oxygen.

Combustion is actually the process by which the fuel decomposes, its molecules breaking down, releasing and recombining with the oxygen to produce water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and all sorts of other things.

The flames which we see are composed of incandescent soot, this is not fire, as ethanol for example, can produce fire without visible flames. Incandescence increases with temperature and so we can estimate the heat of the flames moving from red, through orange, to the hottest of all – white heat.

There’s much more to fire than this and James May explains all in this fantastic head squeeze video. If you enjoyed it as much as we did subscribe for more, like, share and give us your thoughts in the lively comments below.

To find out exactly how things burn check out Fran Scott’s Live Experiment: http://youtu.be/PKtfh8aHXQo

QotD: Understanding apparent contradictions in Islam

Filed under: Quotations, Religion — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Center for the Study of Political Islam is a group of scholars who are devoted to the scientific study of the foundational texts of Islam — Koran, Sira (life of Mohammed) and Hadith (traditions of Mohammed). There are two areas to study in Islam, its doctrine and history, or as CSPI sees it — the theory and its results. We study the history to see the practical or experimental results of the doctrine.

CSPI seems to be the first group to use statistics to study the doctrine. Previous scientific studies of the Koran are primarily devoted to Arabic language studies.

Our first principle is that Koran, Sira and Hadith must be taken as a whole. We call them the Islamic Trilogy to emphasize the unity of the texts.

Our major intellectual breakthrough is to see that dualism is the foundation and key to understanding Islam. Everything about Islam comes in twos starting with its foundational declaration: (1) there is no god but Allah and (2) Mohammed is His prophet. Therefore, Islam is Allah (Koran) and the Sunna (words and deeds of Mohammed found in the Sira and Hadith).

Endless ink has been wasted on trying to answer the question of what is Islam? Is Islam the religion of peace? Or is the true Islam a radical ideology? Is a moderate Muslim the real Muslim?

This reminds a scientist of the old arguments about light. Is light a particle or is light a wave? The arguments went back and forth. Quantum mechanics gave us the answer. Light is dualistic; it is both a particle and a wave. It depends upon the circumstances as to which quality manifests. Islam functions in the same manner.

Our first clue about the dualism is in the Koran, which is actually two books, the Koran of Mecca (early) and the Koran of Medina (later). The insight into the logic of the Koran comes from the large numbers of contradictions in it. On the surface, Islam resolves these contradictions by resorting to “abrogation”. This means that the verse written later supersedes the earlier verse. But in fact, since the Koran is considered by Muslims to be the perfect word of Allah, both verses are sacred and true. The later verse is “better,” but the earlier verse cannot be wrong since Allah is perfect. This is the foundation of dualism. Both verses are “right.” Both sides of the contradiction are true in dualistic logic. The circumstances govern which verse is used.

For example:

    (Koran of Mecca) 73:10: Listen to what they [unbelievers] say with patience, and leave them with dignity.

From tolerance we move to the ultimate intolerance, not even the Lord of the Universe can stand the unbelievers:

    (Koran of Medina) 8:12: Then your Lord spoke to His angels and said, “I will be with you. Give strength to the believers. I will send terror into the unbelievers’ hearts, cut off their heads and even the tips of their fingers!”

All of Western logic is based upon the law of contradiction—if two things contradict, then at least one of them is false. But Islamic logic is dualistic; two things can contradict each other and both are true.

No dualistic system may be measured by one answer. This is the reason that the arguments about what constitutes the “real” Islam go on and on and are never resolved. A single right answer does not exist.

Dualistic systems can only be measured by statistics. It is futile to argue one side of the dualism is true. As an analogy, quantum mechanics always gives a statistical answer to all questions.

For an example of using statistics, look at the question: what is the real jihad, the jihad of inner, spiritual struggle or the jihad of war? Let’s turn to Bukhari (the Hadith) for the answer, as he repeatedly speaks of jihad. In Bukhari 97% of the jihad references are about war and 3% are about the inner struggle. So the statistical answer is that jihad is 97% war and 3% inner struggle. Is jihad war? Yes — 97%. Is jihad inner struggle? Yes — 3%. So if you are writing an article, you can make a case for either. But in truth, almost every argument about Islam can be answered by: all of the above. Both sides of the duality are right.

Bill Warner, interviewed by Jamie Glazov in “The Study of Political Islam”, FrontPage Magazine, 2007-02-05.

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