Cold Beats: So Long, 2011

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

So Long, 2011

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"Sherrod Wright swished a 25-foot forever moment at the buzzer to hand the Patriots a 62-61 victory over VCU. The teams will meet again in the regular season finale Feb. 25 at Siegel Center, then head into the CAA tournament a week later in Richmond."
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"Freshman Austin Rivers finished with 29 points, including the game-winning three-pointer, as Duke ended North Carolina's 31-game home winning streak."
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"Kris Joseph scored a career-high 29 points, including the decisive 3-pointer in overtime, and Syracuse beat No. 12 Georgetown 64-61 on Wednesday night to give coach Jim Boeheim his 880th career win."
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"Seth Greenberg on Miami center Reggie Johnson: 'Well, he’s a mountain masquerading as a man. He’s a massive mass of humanity. A lot of times there is a direct correlation between the size of someone’s rear end and their ability to score. But he’s like SpongeBob SquarePants. The guy is square. It is impossible to get around the guy.'"
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"ACTA may have been watered down and the U.S. government’s attempt to export DMCA rules to the rest of the world may have been a failure. SOPA and PIPA may have guttered out in congress for the time being. But the Trans-Pacific Partnership represents the latest present danger to internet freedom, and ACTA may still allow government’s to adopt more restrictive IP rules."
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"Alex Ovechkin has been suspended three games for his hit on Penguins defensemen Zbynek Michalek. He [...] won’t be back in action until the February 4th game against the Canadiens. He will forfeit $154,677.75 in salary for the three games."
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"Inside linebacker London Fletcher leads the NFL in tackles, and outside linebacker Brian Orakpo ranked among the top five in fan votes at his position. But neither made the [NFC Pro Bowl roster]. Fan votes counted for one third of the vote, as did the players’ votes and the coaches’ votes."
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"Check into the discount coming in the first half of 2012. Government-guaranteed student loans, including those issued through Sallie Mae or a bank, can be consolidated at a rate up to 0.5% lower than the average of your current rates if you agree to have monthly payments automatically taken from your checking account."
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"On Tuesday night against the Predators in Washington, 39-year-old Caps left wing Mike Knuble is slated to become the 267th player in league history to play in 1,000 games."
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"Last year in the U.S., roughly a million people signed up for events in the four most popular series: Spartan Race, Tough Mudder, Warrior Dash, and Muddy Buddy. None are more than ten years old, but already there’s talk of world domination in the air."
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"The first survey finds that only about 1 percent of children 17 and younger have texted explicitly pornographic images. That’s a significantly lower percentage than previous studies have found, such as one that reported as many as 20 percent of kids participate in sexting."
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"Excellent schools, combined with an affordable cost of living, relatively low crime, and plentiful amenities lifted Blacksburg to first place in Businessweek.com’s sixth nationwide ranking of best places in each state in the U.S. to raise kids."
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"Fittingly for a show with so much Internet-friendly comedy — pop-culture allusions, sight-gag Easter eggs, and hyperaware self-commentary — Community has attracted a spazzily enthusiastic online following. After every episode, the web is besieged with tributes and exegeses in the form of recaps, animated GIFs, and arcana-packed Tumblr pages."
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"In his four-plus seasons behind the Capitals’ bench, Bruce Boudreau posted a regular season record of 201-88-40 in 329 regular season games, recently becoming the fastest coach to record 200 regular season victories."
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Virginia Tech remained at No. 5 despite Arkansas’s loss to LSU on Friday as Stanford jumped from No. 6 to No. 4 in this week’s rankings. The Hokies were No. 3 in this week’s coaches’ poll — one spot ahead of the Cardinal — and No. 4 in the Harris poll, which make up two-thirds of the BCS formula."
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"Introduced last month, the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, would allow U.S. law enforcement officials to seek court orders to stop domain-name registrars, online ad networks, search engines and payment processors from doing business with websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement."
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Anthony Bourdain: "I’m well aware of how unique a situation that is and how lucky I am. And, of course, I’m milking it for everything I can."
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New Colbert Super PAC Ad
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Music Travels: The Evolution of Western Dance Music
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"I couldn’t help but wonder if the protests will yield meaningful reform or simply act as a short-lived escape valve for pent-up frustrations."
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President Obama calls for an end to NBA lockout.
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"The NFL is the only one of the major U.S. sports to give prospects an intelligence test."
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Bert Kreischer: “You ought to see her give oral sex. Wow! I’ll tell you right now!”
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Occupy Wall Street Covers
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50 Cent wants to feed a billion kids.
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"A California man arrested for throwing a hot dog at Tiger Woods during a tournament said he wanted to do something "courageous and epic."
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"It's basically a vision of the good life as prescribed by the '80s TV show Miami Vice — which, while Rick Ross was growing up in the shitsville Miami-metro ghetto of Carol City, he says, was the show that taught him what to want."
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"When a research team asked cocaine addicts to choose, hypothetically, between money now or cocaine of greater value later, "preference was almost exclusively for the money now," said Warren K., Bickel, professor in the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute."
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Emerging Markets
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The New Rave Generation
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Obama Turns 50 Despite Republican Opposition
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Stocking Is The New Planking
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The NCAA calculates an Academic Progress Rate that measures retention and graduation rates for every Division I team, reflecting the previous four academic years. An APR of 930 comes out to a 50% graduation rate, according to the news release.
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Wu-Tang Clan Name Generator: Irate Madman
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In April, hackers broke into Sony's PlayStation Network and stole data from more than 77 million accounts. That attack was considered the biggest in internet history and led to Sony shutting down the PlayStation Network and other services for almost a month.
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In general, the study found that a college degree is a good investment. It showed that a worker with a bachelor’s degree can expect to make 84 percent more in a lifetime than a colleague who has only a high school diploma.
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"A new report from the World Bank predicts that by 2025, China, along with five other emerging economies — Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Russia — will account for more than half of all global growth, up from one-third now."
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At 22, Chicago Bulls guard Derrick Rose is the youngest Most Valuable Player award-winner in the history of the NBA. He's the seventh player in league history to average at least 25 points, 7.5 assists and 4.0 rebounds, along with Michael Jordan, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Larry Bird, Dwayne Wade and Lebron James.
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"The worst case of hyperinflation ever recorded occurred in Hungary in the first half of 1946. By the midpoint of the year, Hungary's highest denomination bill was the 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (One Hundred Quintillion) pengo, compared to 1944s highest denomination, 1,000 pengo. At the height of Hungary's inflation, the CATO study estimates that the daily inflation rate stood at 195 percent, with prices doubling approximately every 15.6 hours, coming out to a monthly inflation rate of 13.6 quadrillion percent."
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"We have to go back," Jack insists. "The last twenty years have been filled with digital, technological crap that's taken the soul out of music. The technological metronome of the United States is obsessed with progress, so now you have all these gearheads who want to lay down three thousand tracks in their living room. That wasn't the point."

"The point," says Meg, "is being a live band."
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Jay-Z in 2009: "I deal with mature and relevant topics for my age group -- it has to all be based on true emotions. The more diversity and the more mature we make hip-hop, the bigger the net you cast."

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A 20-ft high backside air, to double cork stalefish 1080, to cab double cork 1080, to front stalefish 5, to double McTwist 1260, to backside alley oop rodeo. And Shaun White four-peats.
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"The latest surveys of the universe indicate that only 4% of it is made of ordinary matter. Nearly 23% is made of dark matter, which some physicists suspect consists of wispy subatomic particles that may someday be caught in a detector. And the remaining 73% is made up of an energy that is causing the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Scientists call it 'dark energy,' and they have no idea what it is."
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"While attracting start-up capital can be a challenge, Lohr conceded, the government is helping to mitigate this difficulty by pumping federal stimulus money into entrepreneurial endeavors through grants and small-business loans, particularly those endeavors in emerging sectors that help solve problems, such as green technology. For a business idea to be successful in attracting any kind of funding, Lohr said, the potential business has to fill some kind of need."
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"That something happened and meant anything at all is important, regardless of how long it lasts. All joys in life are temporary, but they are joys nevertheless, and they are most important. A joyous life is better than a joyless one, even though both come to an end."

"Not all work is noble. What is noble is to be striving toward the best we can accomplish, not toward just any accomplishment for its own sake."
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John Lennon:
"Where are we going, fellas?" he'd ask, to which Paul, George, and Ringo would respond, "To the toppermost of the poppermost, Johnny!" Within two years they were there. The problem was that the "toppermost"—defined as the airspace above Elvis—turned out not to be the pleasantest of places.
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Paul McCartney:

"I really can't believe it's thirty years since the sixties. I find it staggering. It's like the future, the sixties. The sixties to me, it hasn't happened. I feel like the sixties are about to arrive. And we're in some sort of time warp and it's still going to happen."

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The "Haynesworth Headache":

The two-time All-Pro skipped offseason workouts, boycotted a mandatory minicamp, needed 10 days to pass a conditioning test at training camp, did all he could to resist a change in the defensive scheme and is now a part-time player with a $100 million contract because, by his own admission, he's not good enough to play nose tackle in a 3-4 defense.

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Puffer Fish are the second most poisonous vertebrate on earth (the first one is golden dart Frog). The meat of some species is a delicacy in both Japan (as fugu) and Korea (as bok-uh) but the problem is that the skin and certain organs of many puffer fish are very poisonous to humans.

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As our information-age appetite for "reality" grows more insatiable, so does Kanye West's desire to deliver it.

"If I was more complacent and I let things slide, my life would be easier, but you all wouldn't be as entertained. My misery is your pleasure."

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Anti-lock brakes and air bags were standard on European cars first; Japanese automakers put the first crash-sensing brake system on the market in 2003, nearly 25 years after the RSV sported it.

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Within 24 hours of going on sale, Call of Duty: Black Ops sold more than 5.6 million copies in the U.S. and U.K., breaking the record set by its predecessor Modern Warfare 2 by some 900,000 copies.

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AMC's The Walking Dead premiere ratings were enormous: The 90-minute Halloween night debut delivered 5.3 million viewers and a 3.3 adults 18-49 rating.

That's the largest demo audience for any series premiere on any cable network this year, and the highest numbers for any series in AMC's history.

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When the density of matter reaches gargantuan proportions (more than about 1,050 kilograms per cubic meter) inside a black hole, torsion manifests itself as a force that counters gravity. This prevents matter from compressing indefinitely to reach infinite density, so there is no singularity. Instead, says Nikodem Poplawski, matter rebounds and starts expanding again.

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"All of this bad news, I really think, is making us feel weak—oil spills, never-ending wars, unemployment stuck near 10 percent, a different politician in trouble every day. Yankee ingenuity and can-do spirit used to be an American hallmark; now all we seem to produce are credit-card debt and crazy pop stars. We like Steven Slater because he made us feel, for one minute, as if we could take control of our economic destinies from the big companies that act more and more like casinos and the politicians who act like VIPs, not public servants."
-Raina Kelley, Newsweek

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"The truth is that just about everyone underestimated the headwinds that continue to beat the economy down: state and local budget crises, European austerity, consumer and housing anemia, and a political debate that is still tethered to the somehow-not-debunked idea that deficit cutting should be priority one, despite the dangers of deflation and double-dip recession.

'No one had any idea of the depths of the recession we were in for,' says Shierholz. 'Nor does anyone have a good idea for how to get out of it, beyond a lot more government spending that the government itself has declared a political nonstarter."
-Michael Hirsh, Newsweek

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

So Long, 2011

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