Undead Astronauts

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.

The military has picked up on the idea of using games to train top soldiers in keeping track of multiple moving objects. The system was already being used by top athletes to help them keep track of things moving on the playing field, and the military has picked up on it too. The game as it currently exists shows players 8 balls moving in 3D space and asks them to keep track of 4 of them while ignoring the others. There’s an evaluation session and further training is based on how well you tested in that session. The better players perform, the faster the balls move. There’s also a pvp mode and they plan to integrate physical conditioning into it too.

In addition to training, the military is going to use the game as a tool to see which soldiers need to work harder at brain training. I wonder if there’s a future where soldiers who have consistently poor performances will get cut from the program, just as if they had repeatedly failed physical tests. It would be interesting to see how progamers performed at the game. My guess is that SC2 players’ scores would be off the charts, but it’s also possible that top QB’s like Manning or Brady would naturally score well.

Imagine what could happen if this game became a widely available cognitive evaluation tool. Kids could get tested at a young age and adjust their sports/gaming expectations accordingly. As an athlete, if you’re terrible but physically fast, run track. If you’re decent and fast, play runningback. If you’re amazing and fast, you’re Cam Newton. If you’re a gamer and terrible, stick to Farmville or the Sims.

Research has shown that D&D has predicted another truth about the world. Artifacts are real. Or they’re real insofar as improving one’s performance if you believe it was wielded by a famed user. Pros already do well for themselves by selling items they’ve used for profit or charity. This will only add to their legend and increase prices. Imagine… the ability to grant +1 or +2 to any equipment you touch! Hell, if you’re Jordan, your shoes probably grant +3 or more!

  Sheesh.

1. As I’ve mentioned previously, sports will increase brain efficiency even in cases like walking across the street. Athletes process and make faster decisions than non-athletes. The interesting thing is that researchers tested this with what amounted to a video game. I predict that pro gamers would fare just as well as the athletes if given the same test.
2. Can you spot criminals just by looking at their face? It turns out that sometimes you can. Out of 32 random young white guys with half having been convicted of a violent crime, most people will do better than chance in guessing which of them have committed a crime. I got 11 of 16 where the expected rate would be 8. They should repeat this study with other races and see if the results hold. Can non-blacks tell a convicted black criminal from a law-abiding one? What about Asians? I wonder if a study like this would even have much meaning in other contexts – like in Japan, the home of no looters ever. I don’t think China or Taiwan had much looting after their quakes either.

This is a crazy downhill street race, can’t believe how narrow some of these pathways are. Feels like a real-life Crazy Taxi when you watch it.

SI has published an article perilously close to saying that genes are accountable for SEC dominance in college football and its annual crop of huge, fast defensive linemen in particular.

Anthropology may help explain why so many good linemen developed in certain areas. Many of the linemen from west of the Rockies are of Polynesian descent. Polynesian cultures tend to produce large men capable of generating massive amounts of force. And with good reason. “Big, fast males sound like what ought to come out of centuries or millennia of social systems where there is direct male-to-male violence, but not where there are standoff weapons used in war like bows and arrows,” University of Utah anthropology professor Henry Harpending wrote in an e-mail. “There was certainly this kind of violence on Polynesian islands, which were demographic pressure cookers.”

Harpending is one of the authors of The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, which argues that, contrary to popular belief, the advent of advanced societies didn’t stop human evolution but actually kicked it into a higher gear. In a phone interview, Harpending called the development of the Polynesian islands “a unique experiment in human history.”

“They were fighting for land,” Harpending said. “There just wasn’t enough arable land in most places. The records and the archaeology both show that there was just a lot of warfare, violence, turnover of chiefs.”

Harpending wrote that it might be more difficult to explain the anthropological reasons for the explosion of players in the South without knowing more specifics about their ancestries. Most would be classified by the U.S. Census Bureau as black, and Harpending said most black Americans are descended from ancestors who lived in the tropical regions of central Africa. He wrote that throughout history, most violence in those areas tended to be “hand-to-hand,” which would have produced large, fast, muscular males through natural selection. Like the Polynesians, ancient people in central Africa never favored the bow-and-arrow as a hunting or warfare tool. Harpending said archaeological evidence from central Africa shows the ancient residents preferred spears and bludgeoning instruments. In other words, the biggest and strongest would have survived the fighting to reproduce. “Bows and arrows kept the distance between people,” Harpending said. “It decreased the premium on being big and strong.”

We have a mainstream sports site talking about people being genetically more suited to hand-to-hand violence. That’s like… wow.  The crime rate in American Samoa is high for petty crime, but lower for violent crime except rape. Polynesian IQ is estimated at 87.

The corollary to this is that less muscular groups like whites and Asians are more suited to long range violence. It may or may not be pertinent to note that the composite bow is thought to have been developed first by nomads on the Asiatic steppe more than a millenia before the birth of Christ.