* “Nano Mechanics and Materials”:amazon by Wing Kam Liu, Eduard G. Karpov, Harold S. Park. Fairly dense text on modeling of nanoscale materials and composites. Best approached with a solid understanding of mechanics (not my strength) and finite element analysis (i’m ok on that), as the core idea is to meld macro-level FEA with nano-level mechanical analysis, paying careful attention to the bridging issues. Unrated on Amazon or Goodreads, a quality text. * “Digital Image Processing: An Algorithmic Introduction using Java”:amazon by Wilhelm Burger and Mark Burge. Decent introduction to basic image processing algorithms using Java and ImageJ. If you want a quick explanation of things like erosion, dilation, edge detection, spectral analysis, etc., this is fine. Amazon says 5 stars, I think this is just a good book. * “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris”:amazon by Graham Robb. I like Paris, adventure tales, and history books, so this should be a total winner, right? But it totally left me flat. Yawn. No emotional connection with the characters or stories. Amazon says 3.5 stars and Goodreads agrees but I find it totally uninteresting. * “City on the Edge: Buffalo, New York, 1900 - present”:amazon by Mark Goldman. A very thorough history of the last century or so of Buffalo’s history. The same tale could largely be told about any declining rust belt city, but the author has a clear love for Buffalo and does a great job telling the tale. Leaves one admiring the city that survives and wistful for what was lost. Way too much detail in some parts for a non-Buffalonian, but still excellent. Amazon gives 4.5 stars, Goodreads 4 stars, this is a very good book.

It’s increasingly obvious that powers-that-be in football at all levels have to make some changes to protect players from head trauma.

MEMS-based accelerometers are obviously super cheap now; why aren’t these in every football helmet made, along with necessary processing and memory to cache results both instantaneous and cumulative. And with results available to a trainer on the sidelines via wireless or some other means.

And if a player’s helmet records a certain level of instantaneous or cumulative impact, then that player is out of the game or practice until evaluated by a doctor.

Additionally this data is tracked over a player’s lifetime and if certain cumulative levels are reached, then the player is pulled for medical evaluation.

This is not some crazy new idea. VT trialed a system in 2007 based on Simbex technology. Riddell had a helmet design in 2007 with some of this. At that time the cost was quoted as $1k per helmet but with Wii controllers retailing at $20-40 MSRP, there is no reason why a lower cost system can’t be devised. Perhaps it won’t have the same level of accuracy and responsiveness as the $1K system but there must be a reasonable low cost version 1.0 compromise.

The game has to change. Measurement is a start. Rule and equipment changes must follow.

Every hour the NCAA spends chasing after athlete eligibility issues instead of chasing after helmet safety issues is an hour misspent, almost criminally so. Yes eligibility issues are important and the NCAA has to address the economics of college football, but the health of the players involved is much more important.

Congrats to them, they won a great game and got a nice pop in the polls and can dream of going to the championship game. Everyone is all like “OMG Boise might play in the championship”:http://bcsguru.blogspot.com/2010/09/boise-state-usc-two-paths-to-national.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+BcsGuru+(BCS+Guru).

But really this is it for them. The “rest of their schedule”:http://espn.go.com/college-football/team/schedule/_/id/68/boise-state-broncos dooms them. They have no chance to further impress voters, they only have opportunities to let voters down. Meanwhile the teams in the major conferences all have chances thru October and November to create buzz. Even if ‘Bama or OSU or other schools drop a game, they will still be able to make it up by clearing the rest of their schedules. Fair or not, I can’t imagine Boise holding a top 2 spot.

* Apparently “some Miami writers think that Ohio Stadium is not that loud”:http://www.thebuckeyebattlecry.com/?p=7515 and some Miami players think that “Everybody wants to come see us. They ain’t coming just to see Ohio State.” Yes that is correct, everyone will want to see the Miami Hurricanes, like they want to see a turkey on Thanksgiving or crabs in a crab boil – fully cooked, dismembered, bits of skeleton lying around. * “EDSBS’s take”:http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2010/9/8/1676569/writer-ohio-stadium-is-not-loud on stadium loudness. The caption on the Tressel picture is understated and OUTSTANDING. * Meanwhile the NCAA is hard at work “suspending players for selling jerseys”:http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/A-J-Green-s-only-crime-was-trying-to-make-a-buc?urn=ncaaf-268222. OK perhaps this player is not that innocent, he did “sell” the jersey to an agent. But when universities are shoveling in the money from licensing fees, it is immoral to whack on this kid for making a buck off his jersey.

Quality start for OSU last night. Diversified offense – tight end and fullback catching balls! Pryor looked Rose-Bowl sharp. Defense was solid tho not as aggressive as you might hope – but that will come as they gel. Special teams obviously need some work!

How optimistic should we be about Miami game? Miami also pushed around an overmatched opponent, winning 45-0 over FAMU.

* Marshall is a much stronger program than FAMU (see “Sagarin ratings”:http://www.usatoday.com/sports/sagarin/fbt10.htm). * Miami had a nice offensive outing, 405 total yards. OSU was even better, 529 total yards. * Miami gained 155 yards on the ground, 4.3 per carry. Nice but OSU gained 280 on the ground, 6.8 per carry. * And of course the game is at Columbus.

* “Rechargeable battery recos”:http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2010/09/battery-geek/. Rich overbrains rechargeable battery selecting. * “Rich on cables”:http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2010/04/cables-and-cables/. Good tip on where to buy cheap cables. Amazon cable pricing is pretty good too. Best Buy is ridiculous, someone should go to jail for Best Buy cable pricing. Always better to stop at Radio Shack first for emergency cable needs, tho their pricing is not fantabulous either.

Rich, please advise on shredders next.

Kicking myself totally on this one, “VMWare”:http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:VMW has been on a tear. Paul is a great guy, he has been hiring great guys (who wouldn’t want to work with Paul?), they’ve been acquiring lots of interesting assets. And fundamentally they are on the right side of history. Paul has always been insightful and articulate on strategy and he says it well in this “techcrunch piece”:http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/09/paul_maritz_microsoft_vet_and_vmware_ceo_spars_with_his_former_self.html : “The innovation in how hardware is coordinated today and the innovation in how services are provided to applications is no longer happening inside the operating system.”

This is dead on. You can debate whether VMWare will be the primary beneficiary of this trend versus other cloud providers, but the shift is undeniable.

* Firefox is feeling increasingly bloated, maybe because I’ve got a bunch of plugins jammed in. But trying out “Camino”:http://db.tidbits.com/article/11548?rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tidbits_main+(TidBITS%3A+Mac+News+for+the+Rest+of+Us)&utm_content=Google+Reader on the Mac, seems cleaner and lighter. * “Shuffler.FM”:www.shuffler.fm. Eh, streaming music just doesn’t work for me. My primary listening time is while driving and I need music that I can put on an ipod or cd. When I am at an actual computer I am too busy doing other things. But I like music discovery tools and guides, I just don’t want them bound into streaming. * “GIT for the lazy”:http://www.spheredev.org/wiki/Git_for_the_lazy. Perfect for me. * “Terminal tips and tricks for OSX”:http://superuser.com/questions/52483/terminal-tips-and-tricks-for-mac-os-x and in general SuperUser seems helpful. * I want to love “WiseStamp”:http://www.wisestamp.com/ but I don’t get email addins that assume you are only sending email from a browser. iPhone? iPad? OSX Mail? How can I commit to this thing if I can’t use it consistently? Sigh. * I’m super late to “Windows Live Sync”:https://sync.live.com/home.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0 but it is very useful. I do have a quibble with the naming, once upon a time MSFT was confident enough in its products to give them simple iconic names – Word, Excel, Windows. The company seems to have lost its confidence in products and jams these crazy names on them to try to ride on the coattails of other products. Mistake.

Season kicks off tomorrow, so let’s class up the joint:

_American Football by Harold Pinter

Hallelullah! It works. We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass And out their fucking ears.

It works. We blew the shit out of them. They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelullah. Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit. They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust, Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth._

Awesome on so many levels. From “HaroldPinter.org”:http://www.haroldpinter.org/poetry/poetry_football.shtml, worth reading the discussion there.

“Gelaskins”:http://www.gelaskins.com/. No idea if they are effective on antenna woes, but the artwork is way cooler than many of the skins out there.

* “Wire Bender”:http://toolmonger.com/2010/01/07/wire-bending-the-easy-way/ is a genius little thing. Cheap, rarely used, but the exact right tool for certain jobs. * “Air hose swivel”:http://toolmonger.com/2009/11/10/stop-fighting-with-your-air-hose/ is another simple little thing that is exactly the right solution. * “Rollo Knife”:http://toolmonger.com/2010/02/23/roll-o-was-its-name-o/. Rolling utility knife, purportedly a knuckle saver. * “Butt splicers”:http://toolmonger.com/2010/03/30/fast-electrical-butt-splices/. I am the suck at splicing wires so these might be useful. * “Skoobawraps”:http://www.skoobadesign.com/product/skoobawrap-large-86/. Trying to decide if these are awesome cool, or kind of stupid. * “Fab@Home”:http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/04/11/fabhome-make-anything/ 3d printers. Seems cool but honestly, the constraining factor on my manufacture of 3d items is not lack of a 3d printer, but is my complete inability to design/draw anything.

Finally, the first week of college football. And the first week of servicing my addiction. Here is the plan for this year:

* In person attendance at games: We’ll make the November Penn State and Michigan games at Ohio Stadium. 4 tickets to each game at $70/pop comes to $560, we are able to easily sell the unused portion of our season ticket books. Oh of course to get the rights to buy 4 tickets and a parking pass, we had to join the “Buckeye Club”:http://www.ohiostatebuckeyes.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=17300&ATCLID=1398165 at the appropriate level, and make ongoing scholarship donations which qualify us to join the “President’s Club”:http://giveto.osu.edu/donorsocieties/presidentsclub/index.html. But we will pretend those aren’t related – in fact we would donate the scholarship money anyway, to help Marion County students with demonstrated need make it through Ohio State. Oh and we will ignore the travel expense to Ohio as well, since we are going to be there primarily to visit family. Oh and I may sneak to a USC or UW game in addition but we will see. And depending on how the Buckeyes do, we may go the bowl game, count on another $2500 for tickets/travel/accommodations in Glendale (hey, go big or go home!).

* Watching all other weekends on TV: Sports, and particularly college football, are at least 50% of the driver for our cable/dish subscriptions. We subscribe to enough of a tier on cable to get ESPN, Fox Sports, and the Big-10 network in HD. And since we are splitting time between Seattle and Ohio this fall, we have to maintain subscriptions in both locations since cable and dish subscriptions are not portable. We’ve tried a variety of ways to get around this, but there are no quality solutions – ESPN3 is low quality, the various pirated feeds are even worse, slingbox doesn’t really work for HD content. So say half a cable bill monthly in two locations is attributable to football, that is $50/month * 2 locations * 6 months == $600.

* Tracking on the PC/iPad. When I’m at home watching game A, I want to track other games on a medium sized screen. ESPN, ESPN3, and SI are the best of a bad lot – all crammed with ads, tend to have load issues on Saturdays, tend to lag the real action, etc etc. I used to use Sportsline but investment in that site seems to be trending down. I’m not going to allocate any of our internet costs to sports, we would have the same connection if sports didn’t exist.

* Tracking on the iPhone. A real weak spot. The ESPN app is the best score tracker – customizable for just my teams, reasonable UI. But massive load issues on Saturdays, something has clearly been engineered poorly in the transaction model for this app, since it is way more load-sensitive than the web site which makes no sense at all. Backup are the websites for SI and ESPN. Twitter also critical since every major sportswriter/sportsblogger is active on twitter. Of course everyone of these data services fails totally when at a live game, as 100K people all try to hit the same cell tower at once. Google SMS is the fallback of last resort, it can sometimes work when the 3G/Edge networks are failing. You can certainly allocate half my cell phone data plan to sports for the 6 months of college football, so let’s say another $300. Yes I would look harder at a different data plan if I didn’t track sports. Overall the lack of a great app to track sports teams on the iPhone is a little surprising.

OK so $3100 in costs to attend games and bowl, $900 in telecom costs, so $4K in direct costs a year to watch college football. Plus the opportunity cost of time – at least 16 weekends, 8 hours of time, 128 hours. And I am probably not being honest with myself about that time commitment. But eternally hopeful that the Buckeyes will win the national championship, thereby justifying all of it!

…College football kicks off this week! Finally.

Getting ready for the season:

* “Live odds”:http://www.bangthebook.com/football-betting/live-football-odds.php. Not that I bet, nor do I believe that odds have much to do with expected outcomes, but still interesting to peruse. * “CFB stats”:http://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/ – awesome site with comprehensive stats. For when you need to spew them at someone to prove your school is better. * “Senator Tressel held in high regard by coaching ranks”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/collegesports/2012722914_survey29.html?syndication=rss. Pretty awesome. * “Blogpoll”:http://www.sbnation.com/ncaa-football/rankings/college-football-blogpoll-top-25.

* “Against a Dark Background”:amazon by Iain M. Banks. Banks has a unique and entertaining voice, in his universe advanced technology is just a little perverse and contrary and darkly witty. Fun read although a little long. Amazon says 4.5 stars, Goodreads 3.8, I would definitely comtimnue to read more Banks. * “Ancestor”:amazon by Scott Sigler. 4.5 stars on Amazon, 4.1 on Goodreads, but utter crap. Derivative Crichtonesque garbage with 1D cartoon characters. Not finishable. * “Ariel”:amazon by Steven R. Boyett. Terribly inconsistent tale of a young man and a unicorn in a post-apocalyptic world, but something endearing about the protagonist and his trials. 4 stars on Amazon, 3.53 on Goodreads. 3-3.5 seems about right, a good tale wrapped up in a kind of a sloppy book. * “The Company”:amazon by K. J. Parker. Odd parable of a group of veterans in a vaguely Nordic country who come together years after a war. Their lives have come to be defined by their wartime experiences and their personal forms of cowardice and betrayal. Amazon says 3.5 stars, Goodreads says 3.2. I can’t highly recommend the book but it was interesting enough to finish.

Wow this is an underwhelming list to end the summer on.

I don’t think I will be doing any substantial halloween setup this year, just too much going on in life. But if I were, here are some things I’d be looking at – and it is almost too late to order some of this stuff, but if you act fast:

* “Haunt Toys”:http://www.haunttoys.com/ – Kurt’s first four posts are great items that I have used and loved. A webshooter and a good lightning controller are critical. The i-zombie lightning controllers have been rock-solid for me. * “The Skull Shoppe”:http://www.skullshoppe.com/ via “Grimvisions”:http://www.grimvisions.com/products/the-skull-shoppe. Kind of pricey but great looking skulls. * “Style Your Garage”:http://www.style-your-garage.com/. OK none of these really have a great Halloween theme but the idea is awesome and maybe I could craft something up for Halloween. * “Lightform”:http://www.grote.com/LightForm/ sheet LED lighting. Has to be good for something. * “Pumpkin Carving”:http://tangleofwires.blogspot.com/2010/07/pumpkin-carving-nice.html from Scott. Man these are impressive. My pumpkins suck. * “Rear-lit Book”:http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20100708/book-lamp-lights-unused-books/. A nice idea that could look nice in a halloween scene. * “LED eyeballs”:http://shop.minispotlight.com/category.sc?categoryId=9. Must have.