August 13, 2003

Tuesday Morning Quarterback is back,: with, distressingly, even more non-football commentary than has been usual lately. And then there's this picture of an insane-looking Winona Ryder.

posted by kirkaracha to football at 02:05 PM - 7 comments

Does anyone read all the way to the end of one of his columns anymore? Is it even possible?

posted by rcade at 03:01 PM on August 13, 2003

I do! I almost posted this yesterday but wondered if anyone else cared. TMQ gives new meaning to my tuesday morning. And more importantly, means it's almost football season! Sweet. I think the non football commentary is mostly just because there's not a lot to talk about yet, he was just sort of stretching out and getting ready for the real content. I just have to get my satellite shipped back here and get a card reader so I can have full sunday ticket (and porn too, of course) access, then my fall/winter will be complete.

posted by Bernreuther at 03:05 PM on August 13, 2003

I read the whole damn thing, because I was pretty sure that there would eventually be something worthwhile. I look forward to his in-season columns, but the offseason stuff is just a tease.

posted by mbd1 at 03:13 PM on August 13, 2003

Weirdly, I've been reading a book that gets into a lot of physics, including the search for a wave/particle manifestation of gravity. And then I saw Easterbrook's: Scientists Said They Would Need Millions More in Tax Funding to Determine Whether the Sky Is Blue: Researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, a $365 million government mega-project consisting of two buried four-kilometer-long lasers in Louisiana and Washington state, announced that so far, the device has been unable to detect the existence of gravity. which convinced me that he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about and should stick to football.

posted by cobra! at 03:24 PM on August 13, 2003

please allow this never-took-physics person to ask why that is worth 365 million dollars to find.

posted by Bernreuther at 10:34 PM on August 13, 2003

Well, gravity's the only one of the four fundamental forces that propagates in a completely unknown way. The effects are understood quite well, but the mechanism isn't. Until that gets nailed down, there's a disquieting gap in the standard model of the universe... detecting gravity in wave or particle form (the experiment Easterbrook slags is an attempt to detect a wave) not only lets us say that yep, we _do_ have a pretty good idea of how the universe is put together, it also gives us a leg up on figuring out the inner mechanisms of gravity. And it's not too tough to imagine some pretty cool shit being done with a refined model of how gravity works. I can totally see debating whether this expermient's worth $365 M. I'd say it is... large chunks of our technological society are based on quantum-mechanics research that seemed pretty impractical at the time), but sure, I can see arguments about whether there are better places the money could be going right here and now. But either way, it's pretty lame to just fall back into "hyuck hyuck! Them kooky scientists!" Especially when Easterbrook always works so hard about being the thinking man who also happens to like football and cheesecake pics.

posted by cobra! at 09:45 AM on August 14, 2003

Lay off the pharmies for a while, hon, you look cracked.

posted by garfield at 04:45 PM on August 14, 2003

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