Prelim report released – NCAA RELEASES INTERIM REPORT ON THE EFFECTS OF SPENDING IN INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS. The most interesting points I saw, not mentioned in the press release, have to do with the increasing inequality of spending:

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• A common measure of inequality is the Gini coefficient, which would equal one if one school accounted for all spending and zero if spending were the same across schools. Increases in the Gini coefficient represent increased levels of inequality and vice versa.
• Between 1993 and 2001, the Gini coefficient for Division I-A football spending rose from 0.26 to 0.29. To put that increase in perspective, it is approximately equal to the increase in income inequality in the United States during the 1980s. The Gini coefficient for Division I-A basketball spending rose even more sharply, from 0.26 to 0.31.
• Inequality also increased among top-spending schools. The Gini coefficient for football spending among schools in the top 25 percent of the spending distribution, for example, rose from 0.08 in 1993 to 0.11 in 2001.
• We conclude that the football and basketball markets exhibited increased levels of inequality between 1993 and 2001.

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From Yahoo! Groups : MethodzOfMadness, the basic lighting tip for the day: Instead of lighting an area with a solid color, try lighting it with more than one color from different angles to give the same effect. He used the color blue as an example. Lighting an area in blue to simulate moonlight tends to wash out everything. I know this, since I’ve done it in my haunted yard every Halloween. It makes it very hard to read epitaphs and just seems to make everything blurry. Instead, the article suggested using 2 different light sources, each with a color on either side of the color wheel from blue: cyan and magenta. The combination of the 2 gives the same blue effect, but with interesting shadows, where one color shines but the other doesn’t. I’m going to try it this year, assuming I can find some outdoor lights in cyan and magenta!
And: Generally you would use a white light with a color gel. Gel is available in a couple hundred colors and can be purchased at your local Theatrical Supply Company. If you must use a colored bulb, Satco (A light bulb manufacture) has about a dozen different colored flood lights. Most hardware stores or Electrical supply places should be able to order then for you in case quantities (usually 6)

Back from Banff. Great time, wonderful weather. A little smokey some days due to the forest fires in BC, Alberta, and Montana. As always, got some reading done on vaca. Did Monkeys Invent The Monkey Wrench – moderately entertaining, I know more about the origin of such classics as the Vise-Grip wrench now. The Left Hand of Darkness – this has aged very well, still a great read. Blood Meridian – couldn’t put it down, what great language, how did I miss this all these years? The Calcutta Chromosome -- a good read, not your normal scifi fare, but personally I think Tim Powers has done the supernatural-world-spanning-conspiracy-all-around-us better.

Where to go when you need an image of a football helmet – The Helmet Project. I like the helmet of the St. Francis Xavier X-Men of Antigonish, NS (in addition of course to the Buckeyes).

I found my GSM/GPRS roaming experience while in Alberta to be a little flakey. My ATTWS phone roamed onto Rogers and I had problems getting missed call notifications, vmail notifications. The T-mobile users in the family roamed onto another service (? MTS) and service was even flakier. If we did this regularly I guess the ATT/Rogers solution would be the best but I would look harder for better solutions.

The exploding cauldron here is a cool idea – Blue Point Engineering - Special Effect Props

Via Mark, a comparison of Web Sites That Shorten Long URLs. These things are proliferating like weeds. And a basic system can be done easily, I guess it won’t be long til we are all running one of these services as part of our blogs.

Good weekend at – The Gottman Institute - Marriage- Weekend Workshop – During this weekend workshop, gain new insights and learn research-based relationship skills that can dramatically improve the intimacy and friendship in your relationship

Amazon.com: Books: Bioinformatics for Dummies – I guess “Dummies” is a relative term. In this case it means “People with advanced degrees in molecular biology who want to learn how to use the various internet-based bioinformatics analysis tools”. An interesting read but the terminology was way beyond my high school biology. Basically tho bioinformatics seems to be an amalgam of db programming, string processing, and some probability/statistics. I certainly understand better now why people would want to create a Bioperl project.

Haunted Creations - Talking Skull

Joel on Software - Rick Chapman is In Search of Stupidity – According to Rick Chapman, the answer is simpler: Microsoft was the only company on the list that never made a fatal, stupid mistake. Boy there is a lot of truth in this. During my tenure at MSFT I watched competitor after competitor blow their own foot off – Lotus, Novell, Netscape, AOL more recently, IBM, etc. MSFT pushed these companies hard in the marketplace but more often than not, it seems like the competitor did themselves in.

Halloween Products and Kits – I’ve used some of these before. Good stuff.

Michael Winser points to this great site – Social Security’s Office of the Chief Actuary – all kinds fo tables and data about baby names. I am sad to see that “John” seems to be in freefall over the past century – It was #1 in the first decade of the 1900s but is slowly trending downward over the last decade. I hope that I have not been a negative influence on new parents.

ESPN.com: NCF - Clarett says he inflated value of stolen items

Cool, everyone at Jupiter has a blog – Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs