Under a Gibbous Moon

Gmail considers itself spam. This could lead to a recursion that could destroy the universe!

Apparently, this is going to become something of a regular series. Everytime I get a new email from NCC NOW, I can expect another trip into stupidity.

Could you find the greatest happiness of your life after being fired, going through a divorce, and learning you have a serious illness? Best-selling author of “How Starbucks Saved My Life” Michael Gates Gill did, and he shared his remarkable story at NCC

Starbucks you say…

Don’t be afraid to try a math problem. No one is going to die or get hurt if you get it wrong!

See, this is what happens if you spend to much time at Starbucks. A short list of disasters caused by wrong math:

• Conversion errors doomed the Mars Rover.
• Last year, a math error cost the state of Maryland 31 MILLION dollars.
• A fuel miscalculation caused Air Canada Flight 143 to run out of fuel mid flight.
• After construction plans were changed, no one bothered to rerun the math, killing 114 people.
• Another calculation error kept a Patriot missile from intercepting a Scud during the First Gulf War, killing 28 soldiers and wounding another 100.
• A failure in an inertial reference calculation caused an European Space Agency Ariane 5 to explode forty seconds after take off.
• Bad math in calculating concrete and ballast requirements led to the sinking of Sleipner A offshore oil platform
• The flood walls and levees in New Orleans were built and maintained using some shady math leading to catastrophic failure during Hurricane Katrina.

This is hardly and exhaustive list, but I would like to point out that math is serious business and it would seem this Michael Gates Gill is not familiar with what he’s talking about. Not a great person to have come and talk to your students.

Football season has started again. It’s a horrible time when grown men yell at their television sets like they had some kind of prion disease and they tell anyone who’ll listen how they’re team won last night despite the fact that the most physical activity they’ve ever had was a sprint to the toilet after eating that entire jar of nacho chēz.

One thing that I’ve always found interesting is that when you listen to a sports fanatic, they know every detail about the teams, the players, and and who made the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl thirty-six years ago.

Despite this encyclopedic knowledge, they frequently show no aptitude for other learning and will often look at you funny if you mention reading that doesn’t involve fantasy football or the sports page.

On the other hand, you have nerds who also show extreme knowledge of the obscure when related to Star Wars, Star Trek, Joss Whedon, and/or comic books. Despite this similarity, outside of their obsession, these people show aptitude for learning and tend to obtain degrees in engineering, computer programming, and other hard sciences.

Why do such similar behaviors result in such similar outcomes? While sports fanatics do display the capacity to be quite intelligent, I would say that they suffer under the stigma that if they used their brains for anything other than learning sports statistics that they would be not be macho.

The overly sexualized behavior of sports players (the but smacking, dick grabbing, etc.) has often been interpreted as fear of being seen as homosexual or feminine. Unfortunately, in these circles, being intelligent is also seen as a symptom of not being a man. This leads to perfectly intelligent people hiding their intelligence behind a haze of beer and stupidity.

Further evidence that sports (particularly professional sports) do not do anyone any good.

Most centers for higher education pride themselves upon attracting the best and the brightest faculty to educate their students. They boast about their accomplishments and how they are working hard to advance our knowledge and understanding of the universe we live in.

Of course at NCC, things are different. Hence this email stared out:

NCC Prof to Star in Reality Show

Oh God.

Nope, it’s not Jersey Shore! (Sorry, Snooki). Find out who the professor is and what show he is appearing on here

I just saw a commercial for a product from Bayer. They have now made a wake up aspirin product for the mornings. It includes aspirin and the alertness aid caffeine. Congratulations boys! You have now combined a blood thinner and a vasoconstrictor. You can get the one step forward that you know and trust now with one step back! Next you can light your money on fire and cheer as it burns!