MWC II

Not that any experience in my life has lead me to expect voter consistency or logic or brain function at all . . . but here is another poll from ESPN today.


To summarize: 59% of the country thinks that the MWC is better than both the ACC and the Big East, but only 38% think that the MWC should get an automatic BCS bid. I suppose this could be consistent if a) the people feel that the at-large bid will be sufficient for the MWC or b) the people feel that this year is a fluke year for these three conferences, and that an auto bid would be a waste for other years.

MWC

For a few weeks now the football world has been abuzz with the idea that the MWC might be better than some of the BCS conferences this year. The Big East and the ACC are the top candidates, with a few people even willing to take shots at the Pac-10, given the numerous head-to-head matchups that have gone the way of the MWC. Good arguments can be made either way, and strength of conferences is always tough to pin down in a sport with so little overlap of scheduling. Not surprisingly, people in UT tend to be big MWC supporters. But as these things always go, the rest of the country is a bit more skeptical . . . or so I thought. This surprising poll is on ESPN today.


It might be a bit small to read, but 59% of the country thinks the MWC is stronger this season than either the ACC (26%) or the Big East (15%). As expected the MWC is getting huge results from the west where they are polling at 90%. But Pac-10 states are voting for them at about 80%, Big 12 states are at about 70%, SEC states are about 60% and Big 10 states at about 50%. The MWC is even winning in states that have ACC and Big East schools. Further, the MWC is second in every state except North Dakota, Vermont and New Hampshire, but those 3 have only combined for 14 votes, so that's a very small sample to make conclusions on. (Maine is the only other state with under 10 respondants.) (Also, MWC is tied with the ACC in Mass.)

Moving Time

I've been really impressed with the number of people who have been offering to help us move. I've been turning them away in droves. I may end up regretting that in the near future, but I've had at least 15 people already offer. We're trying to do a lot of the moving by ourselves during the week, and I keep going back and forth as to whether it will not be a big problem, or if we've got so much stuff that it's going to take WAY longer than we anticipated. Check back on Thursday and see which ones turns out to be true.

It's never to early to start arguing

So here are some (very) early BCS rankings! For those who can't wait until week 6 or so when the first official rankings come out, someone over at bcsguru.com has been nice enough to compile early results. They're not official, as the Harris Poll doesn't vote yet, and some of the computers haven't released results either. But where an offical piece is not available, the compiler has done a good job of having a reasonable replacement for it.

Item to remember: If it's hard for humans to make sense of who is good and who stinks after just 2 or 3 games, it's even harder for a computer, resulting in Nebraska being ranked #1 by one of the computers.

Item to remember #2: Computers are not allowed to factor in margin of victory. The idea is that this keeps coaches from running up the score to impress a computer. So, the computers don't know that USC beat OSU by 32 points.

Finally, it looks clear that 3 MWC teams control their own destiny as far as the BCS. BYU, Utah and TCU should each make it, provided they go undefeated. (TCU still has to face Oklahoma in Norman.) A reminder that a top 12 finish guarentees a BCS spot, and a top 16 finish also does, provided you finish ahead of a BCS conference champ. However, there is no way that a second team can also guarentee themselves a spot. Basically, an undefeated ECU team could finish 8th, but if an undefeated MWC team finishes 7th, they're likely going to miss out.

Of course, I could point out that there are 10 BCS spots, 6 of which are promised to conference champs. The SEC and Big 12 look like good candidates to get 2 teams into BCS bowls, but the Pac-10 looks like USC and a bunch of crud, the Big 10 is questionable, and the Big East and ACC are having serious problems this year. Could it really be the year that 2 teams bust the BCS? Probably not.

Football

I'm certainly not the first one to get a post about the weeks happenings out there. And the fairly obvious didn't escape the grasp of Tyler or Brett. Basically, the MWC had a very good weekend, particularly OWNING the PAC-10. (a.k.a. USC and the 9 dwarfs.) Brett covered the whole spread for the conference well, but I just want to add:

BYU over UCLA -- I missed the game, as we went to Grand Canyon for the day. (Note, it isn't The Grand Canyon. This is one of the things I learned there.) As BYU utterly destroyed UCLA, and the middle/bad portion of the rest of the conference beat up on ASU and Arizona State, maybe I'll be spending all of my Saturdays down south. Also, I've been pronouncing UCLA as "Uck-luh" for some time now. I'm now appending this to "Yuck-luh". BYU clearly more than met expectations in this game.

Utah over USU -- Utah unfortunately could not have surpassed what was expected of them without winning 70+ to nothing. Against a team so bad all you can do is not screw it up, which they didn't.

UNLV over ASU -- If you watched UNLV play Utah last year, and ASU this year, you'd think they were pretty good. If you watched any of their other games, you'd think they're terrible. I don't understand. Also, this was at ASU.

SDSU/San Jose State/North Dakota State/Wyoming -- Brett points out that Wyoming escaped vs North Dakota State, and SDSU lost to San Jose State, but "at least it wasn't North Dakota State." Actually, The gap isn't that big. A few notable teams from the tail end of Sagarin's rankings:

• #93: Northern Iowa (I-AA)
  
• #96: San Jose State
  
• #105: Washington State
• #113: North Dakota State (I-AA)
  
• #121: San Diego State
  
• #135: Utah State
• #167: Idaho

My point is that bad I-A schools (USU/SDSU/ISU/etc.) can be worse than good I-AA schools (UNI/NDS/App St. [#73]). It's certainly hard to compare the relative strength of the ends of what are really two different spectra, and we're judging off of 2 or 3 games worth of data, but according to Sagarin, North Dakota State is the 14th best I-AA team, which places them ahead of 21 I-A teams.

Professional soccer leagues in Brazil have a system where the worst teams each year move down a division, and the best teams from the lower divisions move up. This would be the equivalent of a good AAA baseball team (the Bee's for example) becoming a major league team next year while a bad MLB team (Mariners) would get pushed down to AAA. You can always earn your way back up the next year. Obviously in baseball this wouldn't work, as the minor league teams aren't independently owned and operated, but you get the idea. You actually earn your place, but we all know that college football frowns on that sort of concept.

Physics Man to the Rescue

So, the internet has been a flutter with stuff about the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) which was fired up for the first time yesterday in Switzerland. Specifically Ben has wondered if this could lead to the end of the world, (not an idea he made up) and Carrie has thought that it may be effecting my pens. I don't really know much about the LHC, or tiny black holes, but I suppose I know more about it than a lot of people, so I might as well comment.

First off, particle accelerators and colliders have been around for decades. A problem we have with atoms and other tiny things is that we can't look inside them. We can't disassemble them; there aren't screwdrivers small enough. So instead, to look inside an atom you smash something into it, bust it into all it's consituents and take a look at those as they come flying out. Then you try to guess what was going on before all the destruction. Its the equivalent of trying to figure out how a VCR works by dropping one off a tall building and examining the rubble. Or maybe it would be more like dropping a VCR off a cliff onto a rocky beach where the remains are only there long enough for you to take a few pictures before the waves take the parts away. All you have to look at are some photos of what was inside. With both particles and VCRs, the harder you smash, the more the little parts inside come flying out and the better idea you get of what was inside. Dropping your VCR from the top of your bed isn't likely to be very informative.

Hadrons are things made of quarks. Quarks are the things that make up Hadrons (and tend bar on DS9). Seriously, that's the only definition for hadrons and quarks that will mean anything unless you take a handful of physics classes (which will in turn offer only slightly more knowledge on the topic, little of which is useful for this discussion). Hadrons which you are most familiar with would be Protons, Neutrons and perhaps Mesons. Typically in colliders it is the Protons that are accelerated, because they aren't virtually impossible to push (like Neutrons) and they have a lifespan of greater than a billionth of a second (unlike Mesons).

So, the LHC is a gazillion dollar contraption to get those protons moving just a little bit faster than colliders in the past, to hopefully get a little more information about what protons are made of, and stuff like that.

Now a question and answer session between me and me:
Q: So, will any cool discoveries come from all the money spent on the LHC?
A: If by 'cool discoveries' you mean something potentially useful to the average person, then No. If by 'cool discoveries' you mean something potentially useful at all, then No. If by 'cool discoveries' you mean something in any way useful to anyone, or anything even remotely intelligible to anyone without a Ph.D. in physics, then the answer would still be No. This is not the space program bringing us plastics, microwaves, cool pens and tang. This is particle physicists trying to understand how subatomic particles work. It will not affect your life at all. (Of course, I could always be wrong, but I bet I'm not.)

Q: So why did we (humanity in general) spend all this money?
A: The same reason we put up the Hubble Telescope, we study handedness patterns in polar bears, and we have sociologists. I guess we're curious, or at least willing to help pay for others' curiosity.

Q: So what about these black holes coming to destroy the earth?
A: Not gonna happen. Again, I could be wrong, but it won't. I haven't reviewed my Hawking books lately, but current theories for how everything works allows for the existance of tiny, tiny black holes. How tiny? They would have pretty much an infinately small event horizon. And they would have a super tiny mass (much smaller than the mass of a dust particle). So, there remains a possibility that these super tiny black holes could be created by the LHC. If they are, because of their tiny size, they could actually fly all over the place without even colliding with anything. Also, black holes evaporate. Big black holes could take billions of years to evaporate, but small ones go much quicker. So, these tiny black holes should be disappearing almost immediately even if they are created.

In summary, a tiny black hole, which may be possible (but may not) could potentially be formed which would be unlikely to hit anything, or to last for much time at all. Basically, I'm not worried.

One final point: Yes, the turned on the LHC the other day, but they didn't even collide anything yet. If anything causing the end of the world were to happen I would think that the actual collisions would be causing it, but of course the media won't be covering that which isn't likely to happen for a few weeks.

Alert! Warning! Alert!

We've got a big problem brewing here. I'm running short on decent pens. My last purchase of Zebra clicky pens has all fallen to a small design flaw. The plastic piece that screws into the metal shaft 2/3 of the way toward the tip is not as strong as it ought to be and is prone to breaking. Now today I've had the ink cartridge in my expandable pen self destructed. That leaves me with zero fully-functional high-quality pens at work. I'll have to dig around at home and see what sort of stocks I have there.

"Upgrades"

Last Friday my computer at work was "upgraded" to Office 2007 from Office 2003. Why? I honestly don't know. I had zero issues with Office '03. Others at work have been using 2007 for some time, but I have had zero compatibility issues. But I was, nonetheless, "upgraded" despite my protests. The result? In a few short minutes, I went from being the guy who everyone comes to with Excel questions to the guy who can't make a graph. Years of experience wiped out, because I can't even find the button to make a graph. Then I can't find the button to add a title, or label the axes, or DO ANYTHING!

So, is Office 2003 better than Office 2007? No. Nor is '07 better than '03. What Microsoft apparently can't understand is that I don't care where the buttons are, or what they look like, or how they are labeled. All I care about is that I be able to use the program. Once I've learned where all the buttons are, why on earth would you move them?

It's dangerous, I know, but I'm foraying into presidential politics on the blog today. Yikes.

We all know that much of the country doesn't thing very highly of President Bush. Pollingreport.com indicates that through the many polls done this year, Bush's approval rating has varied between 22 and 38 percent. Most of the results tend to fall in the 27-33 range. Congress, on the other hand, has an approval rating between 13 and 33 percent. (The second highest poll was only 28%.) My quick glance indicates that the average results are in the high teens or low 20's, and that in the last 3 months no result has been higher than 23%. The two major party presidential nominees and their running mates have a combined 63 years experience in congress. (35 for Biden, 25 for McCain, 3 for Obama and none for Palin.) Now my point: as we come closer to electing a new president, why have we chosen all of our options from a group of people that we nearly all agree are doing a terrible job?

(Possible answer #1: We are idiots.)