- Georgia football is back, baby. No, not because the
Bulldogs posted a 10-4 record last season and played in the Outback Bowl.
Instead it’s the arrest of running
back Isaiah Crowell on weapons charges by Athens-Clarke County police early
Friday morning that indicates the program is back to its old ways and
traditions. Although coach Mark Richt has often bristled at suggestions that
his program has a discipline problem, the Bulldogs did have 11 players arrested
in 2010 and they will start the 2012 season with four defensive starters
suspended for discipline issues. They may be without Crowell for much longer
after he was charged with a felony count of possessing a weapon in a school
zone, a felony count of altered identification mark and misdemeanor count of possession/carrying
a concealed weapon. Oddly enough, his arrest came after 2 a.m., which is
bizarre because nothing bad ever happens when you’re out at that time of the
morning. Crowell was arrested around 2:20 a.m. ET after being stopped at a
vehicle checkpoint near the Georgia campus and booked at 3:37 a.m. Considering
he was in and out of Richt's doghouse as a freshman for various knucklehead
acts, maybe Crowell’s arrest isn’t so surprising. He spent the night in jail
after his bond was set at $7,500. Richt won't have a chance to let him off the hook
for his crime, as UGA Athletic Association policy stipulates that
student-athletes charged with felonies are immediately suspended from the team.
Crowell faces two felonies and a misdemeanor and Georgia senior associate
athletics director Claude Felton said the school was aware of Crowell's arrest.
The unusual altered ID-mark charge stems from a tampered serial number and that
the gun in question was a 9mm Luger. Either Crowell really likes guns or the
Georgia campus is much more dangerous than anyone knew, because rolling with a
Luger isn’t normal. Oh, and the reason police pulled his 2005 Mercury Grand
Marquis over in the first place was the smell of marijuana inside the vehicle.
"[Crowell] consented to a search of the vehicle, and officers didn't find
the marijuana," Athens-Clarke County Police spokeswoman Hilda Sorrow said.
In other words, he and his four passengers were at someone’s apartment or
off-campus house getting baked, maybe on their way to Taco Bell, and they were
pulled over. It certainly is good to have real Georgia Bulldogs football pride
back…………
- Who isn't fired up when science tackles and conquers
life’s most important issues? Researchers coming up with a cure for a fatal
disease, scientists finding ways to make cars more fuel-efficient, dieticians
creating a new pill to help FAT people lose weight or creating a robot that
cannot be beaten at “Rock, paper, scissors,” those are great feats.
Wait…..what? There is a robot that is unbeaten at one of the lamest ways to
decide who rides shotgun on the road trip to Niagara Falls or who gets the last
piece of leftover pizza from last night? Yes, yes there is. Scientists at
Ishikawa Oku Laboratory as the University of Tokyo have developed a janken, or
rock-paper-scissors robot, that wins every time. The artificial hand is part of
a class of robots that utilize human-machine cooperation. It wins its contests
by detecting which gesture will be thrown with vision-based motion detectors.
Hardcore RSP players would argue that this is cheating by one millisecond, but
the number of world problems this robot will solve should quell any dissent.
Its sensors determine the angle of the human’s wrist join and uses that
information to decide which motion the hand is about to make. What makes this
entire story even better is that the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory team built on
years of past research on optics
in computing to make the janken robot possible. If only those past researchers
had known the important discoveries their findings would be used to facilitate….they
probably would have burned all of their files. Perhaps the best way to forget
how ridiculous all of this is would be reading the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory
mission statement, which reads, “Interactions in the real world (not only
physical but also social and psychological interactions) are inherently
parallel phenomena. By constructing models and engineering systems that take
into account such parallelism, one can expect a better understanding of the
real world as well as enhanced performance of systems when dealing with
practical applications. These fundamental considerations lead us to concentrate
on parallel processing for sensory information.” Anyone still awake after
reading that is probably too confused and discombobulated to think about how
absurd an RSP robot is. Eventually, the application of a robot with such a
quick reaction time could range from assistance in surgical procedures to preventative
military technology, so maybe this train wreck can be salvaged eventually………
- Umm…..was someone counting on a large amount of weapons, including rockets and automatic machine guns,
to be transported to or through Egypt to fuel their uprising against their
fascist government? If so, it’s time for Plan B because Egyptian Interior
Minister Gen. Mohammed Ibrahim announced Friday that security forces have
confiscated this impressive cache of weapons smuggled into the country from
neighboring Libya. Ibrahim said security forces acting on a tip Friday stopped
a car and truck packed with munitions on the highway near the Egyptian coastal
city of Marsa Matrouh and after a brief firefight in which one of the
transporters was killed, security forces seized the weapons and apprehended the
transporters. It was a banner day for the Interior Ministry, as Ibrahim
described the bust as "the biggest" in the history of the
organization. The weapons were smuggled from the Libyan city of Sirte and
during questioning, one of the men arrested confessed that the weapons were
being taken to the Sinai Peninsula to be smuggled to the Gaza Strip. Smuggling
weapons out of Libya has become increasingly common since the country's 2011
revolution, but with additional smuggling comes the need for more smugglers and
the more smugglers one needs, the better chance some less-than-brilliant
individuals will be employed in this capacity. So to whoever was counting in
those weapons to be the muscle in their revolt, dial up another arms dealer and
see what kind of deal you can get for buying in bulk……….
- What would go through a person’s mind if they learned the
soil all around their town was laced with arsenic? Residents of Middleport,
N.Y. are facing that scary reality and the massive arsenic cleanup project in Middleport could affect the entire
village. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation has expressed
concerns that the soil in yards, gardens and even a school campus may have to
be dug up and carted away. The
DEC wants to remove soil from 101 properties in the village where previous EPA
testing has shown elevated levels of arsenic, including homes, commercial lots
and Royalton-Hartland Central Schools. While it is not a huge place, Middleport
is similar in size to about 500 football fields. "Our cleanup level would
be 20 parts per million, which is the background level in this area of Niagara
County," said DEC Engineer Robert Schick. Where did all of that arsenic
come from? The FMC pesticide plant in the village apparently has not done a
good job of being environmentally responsible and to clean up their mess, workers
would have to dig up and truck away the soil and dispose of it in a commercial
landfill or a special area on the FMC site. "It will take some time. We
estimate that it would be done in about five years. It may require multiple
crews," Schick said. Five years? In that time, the entire town could pick
up and move. Maybe there is a giant plot of vacant land elsewhere in the state
of New York where Middleport could be rebuilt and restarted. FMC isn't exactly
a willing and helpful participant in the process, not if spokesman Robert
Forbes truly represents their thoughts on the topic. "We've addressed the
major issues in Middleport already that need to be remediated. We've addressed
them and our risk assessment suggests that their isn't a concern here and there
is no benefit from further removal of the arsenic,” Forbes said. Some residents
are behind FMC and were swayed by different remedial plans presented by the DEC
Wednesday evening, which suggested that the only way for a person to be
directly exposed to the arsenic is ingestion, i.e. eating the soil. In other
words, parents of every child under the age of 6 in Middleport would be
infinitely terrified. The issue remains open for public debate through July 30
and after that, the DEC will go through the comments and make a final decision
by the end of the calendar year………..
- His band being back on the scene after a long hiatus and
releasing a solid album on their own label just wasn’t enough for Garbage
drummer/über-producer Butch Vig. Garbage recently released “Not Your
Kind of People” and he is renowned for producing Nirvana's seminal release
“Nevermind.” Vig should be living high (literally and/or figuratively) off his
rock success, but instead he’s venturing into the world of…..country music?
Sadly, it’s true. Vig's new country and folk music band Emperors of Wyoming will put out their debut, self-titled LP on
Sept. 17 and unfortunately, this is no joke. The band is made up of singer/
songwriter Phil Davis of Fire Town, Pete and Frank Anderson of Call Me Bwana
and Vig on drums. Although they have been together since 2009, Emperors of
Wyoming have never released any albums. Their sound blends bluegrass, country
and acoustic folk music using "cutting edge technology and ancient
instruments.”
Maybe Vig is stuck in an eff-you period where he wants to fly in
the face of everything that is expected of the man who helmed Nirvana’s most
iconic release, because a country album is not exactly good for his look. But
after Garbage self-released “People,”
their first release since 2005’s “Bleed Like Me,” because they didn't
like the experience of being on major record labels, Vig might be tired of
major-label and mainstream bullsh*t. "We started out on independent labels
both in the UK and in the US and then they ended up getting bought up by bigger
corporate labels. In the end, no one from those labels seems to care or know
who you are as a band and we just didn't like that experience,” he fumed.
"We wanted to embrace exactly who we are as a band and just make a Garbage record, we like to do what we
like to do and we'll do that and not give a sh*t about what anyone else
thinks." All right then……….
No comments:
Post a Comment