Ryan Jackson taking some swings.

Dan Descalso rippin’ ‘em.

I thought with Illinois’ win over Wisconsin, plus the strong showing against 2-seeded Ohio State yesterday, (plus wins over ‘Nova, Clemson, Michigan State, etc.) that Illinois was in the NCAA tournament. I was wrong. Less so than the selection committee.

This means Illinois will be playing in the NIT for the first time since 1996. What a shame. March Madness would’ve been more fun with my team in there. Hopefully the B10 teams that made it in represent the league well.

Mark Tupper has our first NIT opponent and some background.

When Congress was considering passing TARP when the mud was hitting the prop a year and a half ago, I wrote a lengthy post advocating for its passage, which was uncharacteristic for a self-described libertarian, especially considering what an abomination it turned out to be. I’m not ashamed of what I wrote then and still think it would’ve worked better if they’d done it like they said they would. It didn’t make it in that post, but I hoped later that they’d use the TARP assets sell-off to dismantle the GSE’s. My motivations were long-term libertarian.

My view is that there’s a lot of blame to go around, but some goes to the Nobel committee. Paul Krugman was advocating for basically what ended up being done, and the conversation changed tone when he won a belated prize for his old work in economics. Hank Paulson blinked and it became a purely inflationary money-printing game. Fortunately, those effects have only been seen so far in stock prices, to a degree in housing prices (with a lot of other help), but not in general consumer goods.

I asked a few days ago whether the Gyration Air Mouse Elite is as awesome as I hoped it was, and apparently it is, according to this negative video review.

It looks quite responsive on the video. For $85, I bet I could convince my superiors to buy me one for use on live-mix shoots.

A graph of Edmonton’s water usage during the US-Canada Olympic Hockey Finals Hockey may be the perfect spectator sport in that it takes about a period to leisurely down a 24 oz beer and you get 20 minutes to hit the head, step outside for some civility, and get back to your seat.

Onion story making fun of Google Give it a few years.

Gyration Air Mouse Elite: Has anyone ever used one? I’m looking for something like a Wii-mouse to use on field shoots. We use a Canopus Twinpact100 to record powerpoint presentations live; it’d be great if we had something that’d cast the mouse pointer on the screen instead of a laser-pointer, which the canopus obviously can’t record. If that’s what I’m looking for, and it works at least half as good as a wiimote, the price is a steal.

The Worldwide War on Baby Girls A story in the Economist about gender demographics and problems ahead.

UPDATED: Richard Sproat comments on the above article in a guest post to Language Log.

Aroldis Chapman Debuts The Cuban southpaw hits 100 mph on a scout’s radar gun in his first taste of Spring Training (and professional baseball). Exciting until six paragraphs in, when you remember that he’ll be managed by Dusty Baker.

Which technology makes you feel like you’re living in the future Asked of seven sci-fi authors. Nisi Shawl answers Basecamp, a product we use at the office for managing workflows among the different staff. My answer would definitely be the Droid. David Levine has the most creative answer, “techno-snot,” the gooey stuff that holds stickers onto things so they can be peeled away without leaving residue. That stuff is pretty awesome. Thinking about it harder, it’s probably those massively dense jump-drives or SD cards that blow my mind most often. Take one of those back in time three years and they’d appear to be magic, even with similar technology available.

Adobe is releasing Flash 10.1 in the first half of this year. One of the exciting things about it is that it is being designed to work well on Smartphones.

I don’t know when they released this, but you can now download both the beta version of the new player plugin for X86 hardware (not smartphones, yet). And finally, I have the new API, too, which is available from the same page down at the very bottom under Global Player SWC. It’s nice to see things like: flash.events:GestureEvent or AccelerometerEvent.

I need to finish my dissertation in a hurry, because programming this stuff is gonna be a ton of fun.

Master Techniques Before Recipes.

I’d take it a step further and suggest you master techniques, not recipes. But that’s only because I don’t bake.