Undead Astronauts

I just creamed my pants.

Ok, now I gotta get this game.

Today is national signing day for NCAA football, and of course the SEC is racking up the recruits. As of mid-day there are 11 SEC programs in the top 25 signing classes in the nation according to the recruiting site Rivals.com. No other conference comes close.

Pac 12 – 4
Big 10 – 3
ACC – 3
Big 12 – 3

The Big East isn’t even represented (Notre Dame football is independent). The recruiting sites rank signing classes with points, so I wondered if the point distribution had a gradual slope or an inflection point or two. It turns out that there is indeed a major inflection point.

The rank at which the inflection occurs is around 20-22. Before that, there is a very steep drop off in terms of recruiting points as you progress from 1-21 or so. From 20 onwards, the slope is more gradual. Recruiting top ranked kids doesn’t always work out, but sometimes a 5 star recruit is a 5 star recruit. See Cam Newton. That’s why getting a top 20 recruiting class is so important. The point differential between 1 and 21 is the same as the point differential between 21 and 108. That, my friends, is what makes the SEC the toughest conference in the nation.

1. If you’re a single guy looking for a girl, you might prefer to live in an area where there are lots of single girls relative to single guys. If so, then according to this chart, you’d probably like to live in Massachusetts where the ratio is around 51% of guys to girls. Only Delaware is lower and just slightly at that. The chart is also interesting because it shows only 5 states in the US with the ratio trending upwards with more men. The reason the majority of states are trending lower is that so many single women are delaying marriage.
2. A new study reports that hetero guys are signaling strength when they dance. The same researchers had previously reported that girls preferred the dance moves of males who were more symmetric (an indication of gene quality). The new study indicates that dance also signals strength to other guys who see them dance.

Researchers at Northumbria University filmed 30 males, aged 19-37, as they danced to a basic drum rhythm. Participants also completed a fitness test and assessments of upper and lower body strength. The dance clips were converted into virtual humanoid characters (avatars) and rated by women and men on perceived dance and physical qualities. The ratings were then correlated with various biomechanical indices.

The results showed that both sexes found significant positive associations between an individual’s hand grip strength and their perceived dance quality, these qualities were picked up by the size and vigour of the movements of the upper body and arms.

I’m slightly skeptical of their results from seeing how they conducted their previous study, but it’s at least plausible. I’ve certainly been impressed at how much strength and control certain bboy moves require.

I was reading a Locus poll of the top 20 20th and 21st century SF and fantasy novels intending to make a post about some of the novels on the list and was surprised by a name I hadn’t seen before. Ted Chiang. I’ve reviewed the list of award winning novels in both genres going back decades several times but had never seen his name before. Yet here was this Asian American writer who was listed 9 times in different categories, 3 times earning first place, and I’d never seen his name before because his writing has so far been limited to novellas, novelettes and short stories.

He’s not prolific. From his first work in 1990 until now, he has only 13 works in publication and 1 collection, but he has 13 awards among them including Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. That’s about as highly efficient and effective as writing gets. I purchased his collection yesterday and started reading, and guess what? He’s good. His day to day occupation as a technical writer shows through in what I’ve read so far because of the technical details in his descriptions. I encourage you to read some of his freely available works:

Division by zero

Seventy-two letters (Sidewise Award)

What’s expected of us

The lifecycle of software objects (Hugo and Locus Award)

One of the coolest marketing experiments I’ve ever heard of. There had to be some ringers in there though. I mean, how likely is it that you would randomly come across multiple people that could correctly mimic power moves like freezes, windmills, flares, and 1990s? I mean seriously.

As part of a experiment conducted in South Korea, a Coca-Cola vending machine coaxed people to copy the dance moves of the country’s popular boy band 2 PM, in order to score free soft drinks.

Thanks to Microsoft Kinect technology, the machine registers what the dancers do — and the more moves they copy correctly, the more Cokes the machine doles out.

Watch as everyone from teens to toddlers try to keep up with the rapid-fire movements, including some impressive breakdancing.

Via 8asians.

This is the next Monty Oum project and it looks like a novel take on fairy tales. For those that remember, he made the Deady Fantasy videos and he’s now the Red vs Blue lead animator.

The stylistic touches in this video seem new to Monty Oum, as his past work has been mostly focused on insane action scenes while this has a very distinct art direction. RWBY will have what I assume to be 4 heroines representing 4 colors – red, white, black, yellow.

R is a given for Red Riding Hood. W might be for Snow White? B for Beauty from Beauty and the Beast? Don’t have a guess at who Y would be though.

The grave is engraved with “Summer Rose Thus Kindly I Scatter” which is a reference to the Celtic Woman’s Last Rose of Summer song.