Article in today’s WSJ about “Fasting Dying Cities” and Ohio is all too well represented (though Canton is growing, what is the story there??).

So let’s look at the big picture – college football competitiveness. It is not so much that Ohio and neighboring states are losing population – in fact they are staying pretty constant. So on the one hand, there is no reason to think that the talent pool will get any worse for the recruiting grounds that OSU tends to dominate.

However…the population in Texas, Florida, California continues to grow significantly and therein is a problem. Assuming that physical skills and coaching quality is distributed similarly in both sets of states, the top of the bell curve in the southern states will just continue to have even more great candidates while the midwest states will be flat.

Thankfully we are in a scholarship cap regime, so the leading schools in the southern states just can’t sweep all these kids up – OSU has 8-10 kids on the roster from Florida this year, a couple more from Georgia and Texas. And as population countrywide grows, while scholarship limits stay flat, you have to believe that talent will continue to spread out as it has done in basketball, creating greater parity throughout Division I in the long run.

Also, the southern states are not dominated by a single school the way Ohio is – Florida has UF, Miami, FSU, and all the up and comers like FIA, FAU, UCF, etc; Texas has UT, A&M, Texas Tech, Baylor, SMU; California has USC, UCLA, Cal, Stanford, SJSU, Fresno State, etc. And every neighboring state is trying to poach from these states – Oklahoma and OSU and LSU poaching into Texas, Arizonas and Oregons and Washingtons poaching into California, etc. This happens in Ohio too of course, Michigan and ND and PSU poach into Ohio, and increasingly Pitt and MSU and Cincinnati. Thankfully IU and Kentucky are kind of moribund.

So long term – I suspect OSU can hold its own; however, you have to assume that the lead institutions in the fastest growing, high population states will have a builtin advantage due to a greater talent pool around them – UF, UT, and USC. OSU will have to work hard to maintain at this level – continuing to dominate Ohio recruiting, picking up great talent from neighboring states, and having a healthy flow of kids from Florida, Texas, California, etc. The pipeline from Florida seems to be working, and there is some representation from Texas though we could do better there. California is thin, and boy that is a long way culturally and geographically for an 18 year old to travel.

Oriented Assembly of Metamaterials – Stebe et al. 325 5937: 159 – Science – good article.

“Such metamaterials may, for example, be used to create cloaking devices or light-based circuits based on manipulations of local optical electric fields rather than on the flow of electrons.”

“The challenge now is to move from hit-or-miss assemblies of academic interest to the creation of technologically relevant devices that combine particle and patterned assembly via large-scale processes.”

It is this latter challenge I find most interesting.

* Possibly the most ill-considered travel item ever – those TSA agents love a good joke. Ha ha ha, strip your clothes off sir. * Vex robotic kit. Never had robot love, but if i did… * Sticky tripod. No idea why but seems like I should have in my camera kit. * I don’t know why I don’t have an eye-fi yet. * Cooling bandanna. At less than $2 I should certainly get * Dramm fogg-it hose nozzle. Doesn’t the name sound like a spoonerized curse phrase? * Dynomighty wallet. If they had a buckeye one i’d be there * Digital rachet wrench. Seems like a horrible idea. * Traverse switchplates. Nice, I hate generic plastic switchplates.

* World’s busiest ports * Fractal Nature of Legal Systems. Human systems/societies/cultures are capable of pretty much unbounded complexity. It is not just legal systems. * Kid solves rubik’s cube while playing guitar hero. Ah, youth. * Why are cheap airlines so cheap. Love the “passengers per employee” stat.

This picture is downright scary, I think I’ve had this dream. From coolhunting

• Currently Browsing: http://4snvj.tk #
• RT @johnhcook Glenn Kelman takes on vicious anonymous commenters on TechFlash, and wonders why we can’t all get along. http://bit.ly/YPCuf #
• New blog post: Getting US Citizens Out Of Trouble http://bit.ly/oxXng #
• New blog post: Another blow to ND’s independent status http://bit.ly/b8Ejf #
• New blog post: Kudos to Sea Ray and Lake Union Sea Ray http://bit.ly/UsXBP #
• @rickeames you can just see unreads in googlereader. Unread or all selection in upper left (from memory) in reply to rickeames #
• Not sure how I missed “Most Retarded Horseshit Written In Defense of Goldman Sachs” but u shouldn’t http://bit.ly/Vi8ps (via @niubi) #
• Phrase I’d never imagined writing – I am driving to Cle Elum for a dog’s birthday party #
• Early trails this am http://twitpic.com/d9w6t #

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Rich discusses the apps he likes. Some good ideas here, and I’ve made a few changes as well since I last talked about apps. Here is what I am using right now:

* Bottom Row: Mail, Messages, Calendar, Safari. Mail, Messages, Safari get heavy heavy use. Calendar less so but still need it at hand all the time. * First Page: ** Weather, Stocks, Maps, Camera, Calculator, Settings, Clock, Phone from Apple. Stocks sees the least use, I wonder if I should kick it down a page. Or maybe I should replace it with a better portfolio report app. Calculator doesn’t see much use in summer here but will earn its spot this fall. Settings is only there for me to turn airplane mode on/off and wifi on/off – is there something simpler to do this? ** Twitterfon and Facebook. Recently replaced Tweetie with Twitterfon, just looks a little fresher. Tweetdeck seems like overkill on the iPhone. ** Tripit. Love Tripit. May even kick up to the paid pro version. ** 2 Across for my NYT crossword fix. ** Wordpress for blogging. ** Appigo Todo for todo lists, integrated with RTM on the backend. ** Shazam for identifying music. I am doing this less and less tho (still listening to music a ton), so it may get pushed off. ** ESPN Scorecenter. This one has not earned its spot yet but I am thinking it will during NCAA Football season and I have it configured and ready to go. If it gets score updates as quickly as the website it will be a winner. * 2nd page or later apps that still see some use: ** Amazon.com of course. Though it doesn’t seem as easy to find kindle items in the app as it is on the website ** Flight Update for checking on inbound family members. ** Kayak. ** MiGhtyDocs for accessing google docs. ** Urbanspoon. ** Air Sharing and Air Contacts. Not used that often but lifesavers every once in a while. ** WeFiFoFum. Not essential but a nicer way to see wifi nets around you. ** Smugshot for dealing with smugmug ** Starmap because every once in while I haul the telescope out, mostly to look at planets * Stuff I am trialing: ** Pogoplug. Don’t know yet if It will stick ** CardStar. Trying based on Rich’s reco * And finally, casual games: ** DoodleJump. Stupidly entertaining ** ParaPanic. Ditto ** Robot Master. Annoying, how do people get those high scores?

Your Zune device is not detected by your computer or the Zune software. The hard reset of the Zune tip did it for me.

PogoPlug Buggy With Drive Letters: Pogoplugged. Trying out pogoplug, key note here – you can’t control which drive letter pogoplug will grab easily.

Two meaty books this week, a strange but natural pairing:

* “The Power Of Myth”:amazon by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. On the shelf forever, a great book about some of the deep issues of life and humanity. One sentence of this book has more insight into humanity than all of Kurzweil’s book. Not a light read. * “QED”:amazon by Richard P. Feynman. Simple (to the degree that anything quantum can be simple) explanation of the basics of quantum electrodynamics. When you read this, you have to wonder why we continue to stuff deterministic models of chemistry and physics down the throats of high school students, only to have to rip it out when they get to higher level sciences in college. There is no reason we can’t start with quantum science at the beginning, this stuff is very approachable.

Together these two books provide nice bookends on the nature of the universe – at one end, the squirelly but true behaviour of the universe at the quantum level; at the other, the squirrelly behaviour of humans and the deep motivations of our behaviour.

Preseason coaches poll is out, OSU at 6th, SC at 4th. Man I am fired up for the opener against Navy in less than a month, and for the SC rematch.

Other teams and stories I’m excited about:

* Michigan. Can they take steps back to respectability? The best rivalry in sports needs drama to sustain itself. * SC. How good how fast, and will they learn to win the games they ought to win? * UW. My adoptive hometown team, will a new coach get them off the mat? * Florida. Hoping the rest of the SEC mans up and pins a couple losses on them. * Denison. Go Red Raiders! Only because a member of extended family is on the team.

BTW, big kudos to Sea Ray and Lake Union Sea Ray for their help this last weekend with my stupid battery issue. The Lake Union service guys were very gracious on the phone talking me through things, even tho the last time they got revenue from me was in 1996 or so. And the Sea Ray customer service website had an issue with downloading manuals, and the Sea Ray guys were super responsive in debugging and also in getting me the manual out-of-band. All this on a weekend, and a very busy boating weekend at that. Appreciated.

Journalists Rejoin Relieved Friends, Family in U.S. - washingtonpost.com – it is awesome that these folks have been freed, and it is generally a good thing that we have found a way to talk to North Korea and have a success at something, here’s hoping that this event will contribute to calmer relations with the country.

But as a country we have expended a lot of dollars and diplomatic chips to get these folks free. I hope that we present the folks with a big bill for services rendered – if you go poking around in dangerous places in the world (like these folks, who goes hiking in Iraq/Iran for gosh sakes, was that really the only place you could think of to go hiking??), you should not expect that all the other taxpayers in the country are going to carry the cost of rescuing you. Yes we will rescue you, but there will be a reckoning for services rendered.

UConn (after signing a home and home series last week with Michigan) doesn’t feel like they have to bend over for Notre Dame anymore. ND has been able to stuff a schedule full of lower rank Div I opponents, but these are the teams that are exactly in demand by the top tier of Div I teams. So the price in dollars and return visits for all these games are heading up. It will be interesting to see how this plays out for ND, as the price rises for them to maintain their schedule, though obviously they still are doing fine economically as an independent.

The UConn/Michigan linkup tho is especially pointed, as teams from the two conferences which have been most desirous of ND inclusion have joined up to put a hole in ND’s schedule.

Some more serious non-fiction – two good, one drivel:

* “The Post-American World”:amazon by Fareed Zakaria. A little dated by financial events of the last year and, like all nonfiction books, really ought to be a pamphlet. But still some great core points about the US and it’s place in the world. The future is not to be feared because of waning US influence, but to be embraced because of the growth and development of so many other parts of the world. Amazon says 4 stars, I ding it a little bit for length but still a good book. * “The Only Three Questions That Count”:amazon by Ken Fisher. One successful investor’s view on how to invest. Insightful and worth a read, the discussion on national debt levels alone is worth the book. Successful investing is clearly not something done as a hobby, it takes a serious amount of discipline and analysis to follow his guide – not surprising. Oh the book is way too long though, where was the editor? Amazon says 4.5 stars, I would agree that there is great content in here. * “The Singularity Is Near”:amazon by Ray Kurzweil. I found this to be nearly unreadable. First the early nonsense about the knees of exponential functions (a bogus notion), then the unending blather about order and information (where was the editor?), and I just gave up. Maybe there are genius ideas in here but I suspect the author vastly underestimates the complexity and sophistication of our evolved biological structures. Feels like Wolfram’s “A New Kind Of Science” – the author is all fired up about his “insights” but didn’t bother to get any critical review. Amazon says 4 stars, I give this a 1.