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Magus Ossis

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Posts posted by Magus Ossis

  1. I can help explain why Texas is such a ‘First Class’ and well-funded university. This is from Article 7 of an obscure document known as the Constitution of the State of Texas. Funny thing, though. None of that money goes to football.

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    Sec. 10. ESTABLISHMENT OF UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS; AGRICULTURAL AND MECHANICAL DEPARTMENT. The Legislature shall as soon as practicable establish, organize and provide for the maintenance, support and direction of a University of the first class, to be located by a vote of the people of this State, and styled, "The University of Texas", for the promotion of literature, and the arts and sciences, including an Agricultural, and Mechanical department.

    (Feb. 15, 1876.)

    Sec. 11. ESTABLISHMENT OF PERMANENT UNIVERSITY FUND; INVESTMENT IN GOVERNMENT BONDS. In order to enable the Legislature to perform the duties set forth in the foregoing Section, it is hereby declared all lands and other property heretofore set apart and appropriated for the establishment and maintenance of the University of Texas, together with all the proceeds of sales of the same, heretofore made or hereafter to be made, and all grants, donations and appropriations that may hereafter be made by the State of Texas, or from any other source, except donations limited to specific purposes, shall constitute and become a Permanent University Fund.

     

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  2. 6 minutes ago, slorch said:

    It's absolutely true.

    Who stayed in the Big XII that could leave.

    Fucking nobody.

    Of the 4 schools that left before Texas and OU, 2 have had the chance to vote to approve having Texas as a conference mate, and both did. One other went to a conference that fell apart, among other reasons because they ran off their own blue blood. The last one has a stable meal ticket at the B1G table worth far more than it could make in the 12. It is the same reason the new teams came. Their old digs were lousier. P2 > Next 2 > the rest. This is a story about more desirable conferences, not about teams fleeing big mean old Texas (except perhaps in part NU, whose lunch money we took on the field again and again). But carry on.

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  3. I certainly hope that those saying there is no reason to get excited about Yormark's comments are correct. That would seem extremely Pollyanna-ish to me, however. I challenge anyone with a brain to evaluate the penalty statistics of the crew that called the Baylor and OSU games last year and tell me with a straight face that bias against Texas played no significant role in those games. I repeat the question asked above: when has any commissioner of any serious sports league (let alone two senior officials) ever actively cheered publicly against member in good standing? This is how powerful men get their henchman to do bad things while maintaining plausible deniability. He doesn't need a conspiracy: he has already made his Henry II plea. It is a breach of his fiduciary duty, if not in law, at least in decency; there are literally millions of dollars on the line in multiple ways associated with success on the football field. Hospitals that do things like this regarding disfavored physicians in good standing on their staff lose or settle big suits. I'm no lawyer nor am I advocating suing the B12. I am saying that there is statistical evidence that Texas needs to watch its corn hole, and there is public oral testimony by the commish against himself.

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  4. Spoiler

    As those who wade through scientific literature will attest, a common benchmark for assigning statistical significance is 95% probability; if the null hypothesis (chance occurrence alone) explains the phenomenon of interest with less than 5% likelihood, we say that the event was most likely due to some cause or constellation of causes. Few who claim scientifically to believe that life on earth arose spontaneously have bothered to look at the reasonability of the null hypothesis of this occurrence with even marginal rigor. We could start with some extremely favorable (for random generation of life) assumptions:

    1. All of the earth’s carbon has been in a physical and chemical state amenable to reactions with other elements or chemicals for the entirety of earth’s existence. Let us ballpark the the number of carbon atoms at 2E45 and the age of the earth at 1E17s.
    2. 100% of all the earth’s carbon has always existed as nucleotides or chains thereof, resulting in ballpark 2E44 nucleotides
    3. The genome of the ultimate progenitor cell was less than 5% the size of the shortest known genome of an independent archaebacterium, so circa 2E4bp
    4. Each nucleotide was in such a fortuitous environment that it joined a stable, unbranched nucleotide chain every microsecond, only to disassemble immediately and completely upon reaching length of 2E4 if the resulting chain did not encode the desired proto-cellular genome. Thus the average chain length at any given time was 1E4, and the average number of chains growing at a given time was 2E40. Each chain grew for 2E-2 seconds, meaning that a new chain started roughly 1E42 times per second. This results in 1E59 candidate chains since earth coalesced (ignoring that life actually arose far earlier).
    5. There are as many micro-genomes of the length selected that would result in viable outcomes (100 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion = 1E80) as there are estimated to be atoms in the entire universe, despite none that short which fit the description ever having been found or suggested.
    6. The randomly assembled proto-genome did not degrade before causing the ongoing existence of a reproducing organism. Ribosomes and other cellular machinery necessary to protect, package, copy, interpret, and maintain the genome are unnecessary or magically provided; merely having the “instruction book” with no reader to follow the instructions is adequate to create a viable cell.

     

    Of all the assumptions made above, it is #6 that may be the most problematic. Expecting a project to build itself because a set of instructions appears without any tools or materials would be unimaginable, and yet that is what #6 grants. Nevertheless, with all these unrealistic assumptions granted arguendo, we fall a bit short of the 95% probability needed to say that our thought experiment supports the null hypothesis, viz. the random appearance of primitive cellular life. The chance we reach is about (1 - (1 - 1E-13300)^1E59). This number is so small that scientific calculators will simply report it as zero. The calculated probability of the null hypothesis is not only less than 5%, it is almost unimaginably less than one trillionth of one percent.

     

    In science and in endeavors that lean on common tools of scientific study, we do not offer absolute proof. We evaluate (leaning on our reason) whether data support a given hypothesis. It is always possible for our worldview to lead us to reject what the data seem to suggest. The above thought experiment is not irrefutable proof that life on earth did not arise by chance. Following, however, the usual criteria, one would reject the null hypothesis. Depending on which definition of deity one means (distinguishing, e.g, between Aristotle’s and Brigham Young’s), one might consider the implausibility of stochastic forces’ leading to life as we know it as a reason to consider an external cause.

    A brief thought experiment regarding spontaneous versus caused origin of life on earth.

  5. 5 minutes ago, Park Gothic said:

    Maybe I’m wooshing here, but wasn’t the problem that they used “dominate” which is a verb, when they meant “dominant” which is a noun? I don’t think anyone questioned whether “dominate” was a word. 

    It is less commonly seen in formal writing, but it is a synonym when used as an adjective. Some people disapprove of using either predominate or dominate as adjectives, but etymologically, they were verbal adjectives before they were verbs. 

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  6. 2 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

    Dominant…not dominate. Either that motherfucker is trolling surly hard, or he’s a fucking idiot. Going with the latter, but if we ever see him say regarded or reference South Austin’s mom I’ll happily take the L. 

     

    2 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

    I see dominate so much in tweets that I have to assume it’s some autocorrect fuckup. Same with lightening instead of lightning. 

    Actually both ‘dominant’ and ‘dominate’ are correct. It goes back to the Latin dominor, a deponent verb. It has passive forms (like the pp dominatus) that have active meaning. And then we have the expected active participial forms that give us the more customary -ant ending.

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  7. If espn wants to keep big 10 out of the SE, they should tell acc to make unequal revenue deals with the prime prospective escapees, throw more money into the deal for those schools, and tell those schools this is their payoff to let the cali schools in and to wait out the GOR.

  8. 5 minutes ago, satyanash said:

    Baylor, Houston, TCU and Iowa State? None of them should be scaring us this season. A weaker 2022 squad handled Baylor with relative ease. Houston is going to be bottom-of-the-barrel. TCU lost a huge amount of experience from last season. And Iowa State is in total disarray with the gambling scandal revelations.

    blOU is the toughest challenge away from home but it's neutral-site, and Venables is still a year away from having the squad he wants.

    Yes! Who is this typing at Satya's keyboard, btw?

  9. 7 hours ago, TKthunder2 said:

    ISU to Colorado was what 10 hours? Back when they took buses and not planes.

    I get where you’re coming from (and the regionally is one of the reasons I’m glad Texas landed in the SEC while Texas is it’s own region we share some traits with the PAC/B8/SEC but nothing with the Big Ten) but when LA to NYC takes around 5 hours it’s a different landscape than when these regional conferences that primarily traveled by bud were formed.

    I thought travel by bud was part of the attraction of CU.

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  10. 1. Of course fans tend to notice calls unfavorable to their team as suspect with greater frequency. Put the straw man down. No one here is claiming otherwise.

    2. Of course there were procedural penalties on Texas and again no one is arguing otherwise. Curious that OSU including its freshman OL committed zero such penalties.

    3. Of course there were two calls Texas declined-- they were calls that didn't hurt OSU, a fact not lost on the refs. They ended up changing nothing.

    4. While the other B12 crews that officiated Texas games could be argued to have made errors potentially explained by bias, the real argument from last year is about the OSU/Baylor crew. To argue that they called the game neutrally in the face of the overwhelming statistical and replay evidence to the contrary is the pinnacle of futility. To argue such is either supremely disingenuous or catastrophically fatuous.

    5. The league COO is on the record mocking Texas. Just wow.

    6. The officials will be biased against us because they are human. I think most will work hard to call a fair game and therefore will not have their thumb heavy enough on the scales to change anything but the closest of contests. If we get the monkey crew, watch out.

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  11. What must be accounted is to what degree having a conference school in a given region/ state/ market/ city delivers viewership and interest. SE Texas and Houston metro are bigger both geographically and by population than many states. This “state” of “around Houston” is not delivered by Rice and not very well by Houston. More people there would tune in to see LSU or Texas by quite a margin. How many people in Phoenix would rather watch Bama or tOSU than ASU? As more people cut cable, the geography of the audience may well slide significantly further behind the brand name of the school on TV. Cities and states don’t watch games— fans do. ESPN/SEC maximizes viewers by maximizing the strength of its brand, both in reality and in perception. 

  12. 4 hours ago, LTtxfan said:

    Below tweet comment just reminds me of...

    • Social Media... The Death of Society
    • Adapt or Die

     

    The Seattle/Tucson region is getting torn apart, I tell you. Now instead of having drives of just over 1600 miles, conference mates will be scattered all over,

  13. The whole 100-year of history of the PAC is revisionist BS. The AAWU was founded in 1959 by refugees of the old PCC after that conference crumbled in the aftermath of a cheating scandal involving Washington, UCLA, and USC. After going by Big 5 and Big 6, it settled on PAC 8 in 1962. The PAC has to survive until 2059 to have 100 years of anything. As of yet, it has not matched the longevity of the SWC.

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  14. I could see as few as 9 regular season or as many as 12. I think 10-11 is most likely. Sark hasn’t distinguished himself as a great game day coach, but he isn’t a total moron. The b12 refs will screw us, but that’s not a new thing. We aren’t as good as the 05 team, but we’re the best team on the field at least 11 of those games, and usually by a lot. We have an experienced OL. We have a receiver room I expect to be night and day better than last year. We’ve gained experience, talent, and some transfer help on D. No win would surprise me, and most losses would.

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  15. 34 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

    No worries folks; the Cal braintrust has got this.

     

     

     

    Madame Chancellor might wish to review the rules for correct use of parallel structure and of commas. Maybe not— how well does one expect the head of a notoriously supercilious university to command the English language anyway?

  16. 52 minutes ago, Mitch Cumsteen said:

    I know it's a bit unseemly for some of you, but all of this is good for college football. We have been fed dogshit matchups for decades and told to shut up and like it. As much as all of this is a money grab, there is no bigger money grab than the bullshit schedules we have been fed and told to shut up and like it.

    Every week in the fall, I check the schedule and there are a handful of great matchups that are must see TV for me. The teams that are getting left behind are rarely, if ever, on that must see list. Yes, please, for the sake of nostalgia give us more Texas games against Baylor and Tech and TCU when we could be playing Bama and Georgia and Florida. Who is more excited to see Oregon play Cal or Washington State instead of Michigan or Penn State? 

    Also, nostalgia tends to overlook a few other minor details about the “good ol’ days” of cfb. Like the lack of a national championship game, like extremely limited availability of tv viewing of most games, like our hands tied behind our back while fedex and the pony cash express bought players, like segregation, like no helmets. There was never a time when cfb was “right” back to which it needs to revert. 

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  17. 20 minutes ago, Frank Drebin said:

    Rather them be Big 10 than Big 12.  So good.

    USC probably not too happy with Oregon add.

    If Big 10 was smart, it would process Maryland and Rutgers.

    I'm sure USC is going to feel like the aliens in ID4 when Russell Casse (Oregon) shows up saying "I'm back!" I for one am glad that the Ducks won't have regular conference games in Texas to help their Nike player shopping in our neighborhood.

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