- Well lookee here, what is this? A member of the Pittsburgh Steelers not siding with the NFL in its crackdown on the New Orleans Saints for their bounty program that incentivized injuring opposing players? Shocker. The one surprise is that the Steeler in question is not controversial linebacker James Harrison, but his linebacking corps mate Lamar Woodley. Even though most around the NFL are of the opinion that putting bounties on certain players and incentivizing defensive players to injure people is bad, Woodley has a different point of view and doesn’t see such bounties as being all that different from putting performance incentives into player contracts. “If you think about it, when you say there’s an extra incentive, the ‘bounty,’ that’s like people having incentives in their contract,” Woodley said. “You get a certain amount of sacks, you get an extra bonus. Is that considered a bounty? You’re still going to go out there to make the plays in order to get some extra money. Is that putting that much more pressure to go out there and want to hit a quarterback because you know you have a $100,000 bonus coming if you do this?” The underlying concept in Woodley’s logic is that players want to play well and money for a big hit isn’t going to make a big difference. However, his reasoning ignores the fact that dangling a carrot for players to get a sack or recover a fumble is drastically different than putting $10,000 on the table for anyone who hits the opposing quarterback hard enough to knock him out of the game. “When I’m going to hit the quarterback, I’m not thinking, ‘I should hit this guy soft,’ I’m thinking, ‘I’m about to take this dude down to the ground,’” Woodley said. “With a running back going through the hole, he’s trying to lay a hit on you, I think everybody is out there trying to lay a hit on somebody.” Trying to lay a hit on somebody, sure. But trying to make sure the guy spends the night in the hospital and can’t return to the game is something else entirely and even the Steelers should be able to understand that…………
- The world has been clamoring for it and the brilliant researchers from University of California, Davis and San Diego State University have come through. These well-educated thinkers have created a robotic squirrel the world has been lacking and used it to learn more about rattlesnake behavior. The struggle between California ground squirrels and their main predator, rattlesnakes, has long fascinated researchers. Psychology professor Donald Owings, an expert on animal behavior who died in 2011, undertook the quest to unravel this mystery and with Owings gone, Sanjay Joshi, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Rulon Clark, assistant professor of biology at San Diego State University, picked up the torch. Joshi built the original “robosquirrels” for Owings and is now working with Clark. At its core are two squirrel behaviors in reaction to rattlesnakes: a tail flagging movement and the warming of the tail. Owings initially observed that when adult squirrels detect a snake, they contort their body into an elongated posture and approach it while making flagging movements with their tails. He and colleague Richard Coss also noticed that when confronting a rattlesnake, the squirrels heated their tails. Snakes can “see” in infrared, so the researchers suspected that the squirrels might be sending a signal to the snakes. Unfortunately, with live squirrels, there is no way to separate tail flagging from tail heating. That’s where the robots come in. Joshi’s engineering lab built a squirrel with a heatable tail and a tail flagging mechanism, each controlled separately. Using the robosquirrel, researchers were able to show that the snakes responded to the heat signal from the squirrel. “It was the first example of infrared communication in the animal world,” Joshi said. He, Clark and their team ventured out into the wilderness in late spring and early summer when squirrel pups are born and rattlesnakes come hunting for them. Once the researchers find a snake, they lay down some track, set up the robosquirrel and a video camera to record the scene and retreat behind a blind. Their footage shows snakes reacting as if the robots are real squirrels and even biting the phony critter’s head. Adult squirrels are adept at dodging snake bites, Clark explained, but squirrel pups are much more vulnerable. Now, the world has a better understanding of the squirrel-snake dynamic, thanks to these researchers and the National Science Foundation, which funded the study............
- How bitter are most people if some tool drives off the road, plows into a utility pole and knocks out power to their neighborhood for a few hours or a storm downs power lines and keeps them in the dark for an evening? Take that bitterness and multiply it by about 800,000 and you’ll begin to grasp what life was like on the island nation of Cyprus as Wednesday dawned. The entire country woke up without electricity Wednesday after a problem at one of its power plants resulted in the entire grid shutting down. Thanks to a malfunction at the Mediterranean nation's main Dhekelia power station in the early hours of the morning, the entire system was hit with breakdowns and a massive blackout swept across the island. Waking up without power was predictably chaotic for Cypriots, who tried to go about their business and failed miserably. With traffic signals not functioning, there were massive traffic jams during the morning rush hour, leaving outmanned police scrambling to control intersections where lack of traffic lights confused and angered motorists. The power grid was already over-taxed in Cyrpus, where electricity resources were already stretched after its main power generating facility at Vassilikos was all but obliterated in an accidental explosion in 2011 that left 12 people dead. That explosion occurred in containers full of munitions that Cyprus had confiscated from a vessel sailing from Iran to Syria. To cope with Wednesday’s outage, authorities were pressed into putting aging stations back online and begging for supplies from the breakaway Turkish Cypriot state which lies north of a ceasefire line splitting the war-divided island. Sounds like a great way to spend a Wednesday…………
- NBC has built its weak primetime empire largely on the strength of its sitcoms. When a star on one of those shows storms off the set of the season finale, that might be a problem. The Peacock has that problem with “Community” after star Chevy Chase stormed off set last month on the last day of filming for a scene in the season finale after a disagreement over the dialogue. The finale was still completed somehow, but producer-writer Dan Harmon was unwilling to let the incident go and later roasted Chase with some harsh language at the show's wrap party — in front of Chase's wife and daughter. Not content to stop there, he piled on by encouraging the rest of the crew to join in a derogatory chant aimed at Chase. For some reason, an egotistical actor didn’t respond well to being humilated in and return, Chase made the ill-fated decision to leave a now-infamous voicemail calling Harmon "an alcoholic" and his script "a f— abomination." As Alec Baldwin can attest, voicemail is not the best place for an angry rant unless a person doesn’t mind their profanity-laced tirade being replayed and laughed at for all of eternity. "I don't get talked to like that by anyone. Certainly not in front of my wife and daughter, you g— a—," Chase can be heard saying in the clip. Harmon quickly went to town on the golden chance Chase had given him, playing the voicemail at one of his recent monthly "Harmontown" comedy gigs in an L.A. comic store. He mocked Chase, saying the actor was an “ass—" who broke his contract and suggesting the actor's rant was recorded "after what I'm guessing is two bottles of Beaujolais." After getting his jokes in and plenty of mileage from the drama, Harmon has now decided he’s done with the feud and issued a very sincere apology on his personal blog. "I’m really not supposed to be commenting on the situation, because anything I say will extend the story’s life and cause more fans discomfort," Harmon wrote. "It was in that venue, months ago, that I made the horrible, childish, self-obsessed, unaware, naive and unprofessional decision to play someone’s voicemail to me. He didn’t intend for 150 people to listen and giggle at it, and I didn’t intend for millions of people to read angry reports about it." Whatever you say, d-bag…………
- Way to miss the point, parents in the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn. The mothers and fathers of this working-class area of the greater New York area have seen a very real menace to their children and rather than sit back and let it run unchecked, they’re stepping up. What menace? The ice cream truck, of course. Ice cream trucks and more specifically, those who operate them, are a major threat to children around the world. One look at a Park Slope parents message board (yes, one exists) shows that dozens of parents recognize the threat. They argue that ice cream vendors need to leave the area, especially places around the playgrounds and parks – just for the wrong reasons. According to these discipline-lacking, weak-willed moms and dads, the reason ice cream vendors need to leave is so they, the parents, can avoid afternoon meltdowns and temper tantrums from children craving frozen treats. “Go somewhere else, go on another corner because…it does make it too tempting for them,” said Debbie Markovic, mother of a lactose-intolerant daughter. Trucks are commonly seen on most corners in the area and parents are none too happy about it because they lack the parenting skills and disciple to tell their children no and punish the little brats if they throw a fit about not eating ice cream. Of course, banning ice cream trucks would have to be done legislatively citywide or statewide and the odds on that are zero. What’s sad about the situation is that ice cream trucks should be banned, but it has nothing to do with bratty kids throwing tantrums. It has everything to do with the pedophiles who operate ice cream trucks and vans. After all, there is a reason the music coming from those vehicles is so loud and everyone knows it’s to muffle the screams of the children being molested in the back of those rolling pedophile wagons. When was the last time anyone saw a non-creepy ice cream man rolling around blasting “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” from his speakers? Ban ice cream trucks, but do it for the right reasons…………
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