There are actually two methods: one for the NFL and one for the NCAA. The college one is even more irrational and confusing, but what do you expect from a league that refuses to adopt a playoff system, like every other normal sport on earth?
The passer rating was started by three NFL guys in the 1970s.
60 Minutes recently had an interview with Jimmy Carter, who is regarded by many, particularly conservatives, as one of the most unsuccessful presidents in history. But did you know that he "normalized relations with China; brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt [I already knew that]; [and] deregulated railroads, trucking, airlines, and telephones"? And his "energy conservation programs resulted in a 50% cut in imported oil, down to just 4.3 million barrels a day." (He actually installed solar panels on the roof of the White House, which Ronald Reagan later removed.) Carter had more of his programs passed than Reagan, Nixon, Ford, Clinton, and both Bushes.
So why, then, do people generally think his presidency was a failure? See what he says in the interview:
On the NewsHour today, a guy named Jack Hough laid out why it's dumb to give tax credits to new homebuyers, and why it would be better in general to rent as opposed to buying. This point, especially, really stuck with me:
If the three of us decided to go in together on a real estate investment and I said, gentlemen, I have a plan, we will build a 3,000-square-foot house that will fit only one family, you would say to me, that's not a very good plan. We should build a building where we can maximize the amount of rent that flows through it, and have people with just as much living space as they need.
The single-family house in America is almost a poor investment by design. Go back 30 years, and you had houses that were 1,700 square feet. Today, they have come down over the past year a little bit, but they're still 2,400 square feet, even though the size of the average American family has gotten smaller over that time.
Kevin Kolb, quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles, "became the first quarterback in NFL history to pass for 300 yards in each of his first two career starts." Doesn't matter now since Michael Vick seems to be doing very well.
I'm a huge Eagles fan, by the way. And I live in Dallas.
Not that George Washington. This one was a Belgian who was living in Guatemala at the time he invented the first mass-produced instant coffee in 1906. It helped WWI soldiers kill enemies better.
The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is an actual cemetery. It was called Tarrytown Cemetery at first, but after Washington Irving died it was named after the poet's most notable work. The cemetery, which is located in Sleepy Hollow, NY (also a real place, located just a short drive north of NYC, and also originally called North Tarrytown until 1996), houses the dead bodies of Irving, Andrew Carnegie, Walter Chrysler, and William Rockefeller, among many other important people.
Yep, at least for this year. It's probably because of their outdoors lifestyle. For some reason a lot of people I know, almost all of whom have no connection to each other, all vacationed there this past summer and hiked the mountains. One person said it's the perfect time to be there, I guess because of the low off-season lodging rates.
Dino diggers have found two new species of dinosaurs, both living in modern-day Utah, and both having horns on their heads. They are related to the famed triceratops. One species, Kosmoceratops richardsoni, had 15 horns on his head, the most pimped out dino head ever found. The other, Utahceratops gettyi, had a huge head with a huge horn on its nose.
The Hindu milk miracle occurred on this day in 1995. A Hindu at a temple was randomly offering milk to a statue of Ganesha, which Ganesha, though having the obvious disability of being inanimate, accepts kindly by drinking from the spoon. Mass Hindu hysteria ensues across the globe. Of course, the "miracle" can be explained rationally, but you can't tell religious people that.
About a decade ago, this was Amazon's form:
Fields: Email address, Password
Buttons: Log in, Register
Link: Forgot password?
Simple, right? The article's too good to summarize, but read on to discover how Amazon changed the layout with an extremely easy but extremely useful fix: creating a checkout button and letting users buy stuff without having to create an account. This is what happened afterward:
The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.
Although it might sound like a person's name, Bryn Mawr is actually Welsh for "big hill." It's the name of several cities, colleges, and streets across the country.
Yuto Miyazawa is in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the world's youngest guitar player at 8 years old.
The Wall Street bombing happened on this day in 1920. A horse drawn cart loaded with 100 pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of cast-iron slugs exploded on the corner of Wall and Broad, right across from the J.P. Morgan headquarters. Thirty-nine people died, most of whom worked in the financial institutions. The attackers were never found, but a note found after the act suggested anarchists:
Remember. We will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be death for all of you. American Anarchist Fighters!
Dipendra was the prince of Nepal until he snapped in June 2001. Because his parents opposed his marriage to a girl of lesser status, he decided to kill his parents, brother, and six other relatives before killing himself.
I went to the eye doctor today, mainly to get a pair of really dorky-looking glasses, kinda like the one I saw Jay-Z wearing on Jonathan Ross.
The Mosquito is an electronic device that you can set at different levels of frequency. In Europe it's used as a way of getting misbehaving teens off your property, but here most people like to put it on their cell phones. We did this in class today and the pain of the high frequencies was damn near unbearable.
What the hell's a Beelzebub? I had seen the word a few times, probably as I was reading Lord of the Flies in high school. That's because a Beelzebub is an ancient Semitic deity whose name literally means "lord of the flies" in Hebrew and Arabic.
Yesterday I learned the real meaning of "begging the question." There's another phrase where you do the begging, and that is when you want to differ.
But I had a hard time trying to find out the real meaning and origin of the phrase, and went back to the site where I looked up the meaning of "beg the question." This was one the paragraphs:
This usage is understandable and has presumably come about by interpreting the 'beg' of 'beg the question' as 'request' or 'humbly submit'. This is the meaning of the word in the similar phrase 'beg to differ'.
Normally, when people say the phrase "beg the question," they mean that the issue they're talking about raises an interesting question. So one might say this: "The fact that Brett Favre is still playing begs the question: When the hell will he retire?"
But this is not technically how to use the phrase, although most linguistic purists have all but given up trying to pound it into the heads of the great unwashed (because there are too many of them). To beg the question is actually to "assume the truth that one is attempting to prove." This is quite common in circular reasoning. So a correct example of begging the question might be:
Bill: "God must exist."
Jill: "How do you know?"
Bill: "Because the Bible says so."
Jill: "Why should I believe the Bible?"
Bill: "Because the Bible was written by God."
Google Scribe is one of Google's newest toys. It's a word processor that feels it should help you out by autocompleting every fucking word and sentence you type. It's really annoying. Their other new thing, the Google Instant search, is based on the same concept, but that one's actually pretty cool. The difference is, you type in a search query for 3 seconds and you're done, as opposed to seeing an endless amount of drop-down lists on your page when you might be trying to get something important done. Good thing they didn't pollute Google Docs with this garbage.
But wait. They already have Google Docs, which can do a lot more than just a simple word processor like Scribe. So what's the point of Scribe? Is it just to waste time typing in random movie quotes and seeing if the system has it? I'm confused.
I'm a programmer, and this reminds me too much of the autocomplete function on integrated development environments (IDEs) like Eclipse and NetBeans. Most other programmers would laugh at me, but I refuse to use an IDE simply because of that. I don't want the fucking thing telling me what I might be thinking of doing. Just give me a good ol' fashioned text editor and I'll type away unmolested.
I guess the term wheelie bin is the British version of a garbage bin. They have other interesting and stupid terms for things.
Convergent evolution happens when two different species find similar solutions to the same problem. For example, even though bats and birds are not closely related, both evolved wings to adapt to their environments. Neither knew what the other was doing, but both parties ended up with a similar answer.
You know how in a lot of eastern countries, the women carry things on their heads? What are the pros and cons of that practice?
Pros
* You can carry about 20% of your body weight on your head and expend as much energy as you would by just walking around with nothing to carry.
* And that's about the only pro.
Cons
* It only works for people who have been practicing for years. For the rest of us, carrying groceries on your head requires more energy than using a backpack.
* A permanently disfigured skull.
* Neck pain.
* A funny gait that's much less efficient than regular walking.
Main point: get a cart/backpack/bag/car and put stuff in it.
The phrase "call the shots" originates from target shooting, where the shooter announces where their next shot will hit. It also comes from billiards, where the player calls the hole in which they'll sink the next ball.
I always thought it came from basketball.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister of Israel, lived in a suburb of Philly for six years, where he graduated from high school. He then attended MIT and got a B.S. in architecture and a master's in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Later, he studied political science at Harvard and MIT.
Original source from The New York Times: Israeli Peace Effort Rests on Netanyahu
There seems to be a lot of confusing debate as to whether alcohol is good for your health, but a new study gives more support to the idea that moderation is key. After controlling for a wide variety of potential confounds, the researchers discovered that people who don't currently drink tend to die quicker, even earlier than heavy drinkers. The moderates--those who consume about two drinks a day--seem to live the longest.
Most researchers also agree that regular drinking is good for HDL, which is the good cholesterol.
