The Supreme Court case
25th anniversary of Title IX, President Clinton
Lamar Alexander re: Title IX
Not aired yet as of Apr. 14--Georgetown University on Title IX
Yeah--in view of Women's History Month, in view of laws, it's worthwhile to check out the history of Title IX, isn't it. There was a lot of male piss-n-moan when that got passed, and then down the road we got the WNBA--which caused more piss-n-moan from the male peanut gallery. But we can thank Title IX for the fact that we can haz WNBA, and for the fact that despite all the pissery-moanery, we STILL have the WNBA long after the independent men's leagues (non-NBA) faded into the sunset.
Now, as to the brackets. I think Obama's a shrewd bracket picker (and no, time travel isn't going to help anybody succeed with bracket picking: as I said before, there is no such thing as predestination of the future; time is fractal, not linear, all you linear people who think otherwise). Sir Charles thinks he's hot stuff picking brackets, but he thought he was hot stuff as a forward, too--so much for Sir Charles, who thinks he's hot stuff no matter what.
Where I would depart from Obama's choices is that I think the Jayhawks are most likely to go to the Final Four, over Purdue. I also think that Arizona and Louisville are gimmes.
Now, let's see what actually transpires.
Sunday UPDATE: How about that rout by IA State, hm? If I was gambling, I would have bet on UNC myself...but I know better. People are STILL captains of their own fate, and the future is NOT pre-destination. Time is just as fractal in the future as it has been in the past. Seeds? I never have paid attention to those.
Monday UPDATE: Well, so much for the Jayhawks. :P
Monday UPDATE 2, Nate Silver Edition: I mentioned him before as someone who had a handle on time travel to the future, but a handle is all he has. That's all my TARDIS students have when they rely on mathematics alone, and it's why I mentioned in a previous post that getting a grasp on the principles until they are intuitive is the thing that's important. The future is not predestined--you cannot simply let stuff happen and figure that it was already carved in stone somewhere because the future is simply a reverse concept from what the past is. Not in the least, sorry. If Nate was using seed rankings in his mathematic models, he was doomed to failure from the start. When you're doing bracket predictions, keep in mind that you're predicting a future that people other than yourself are in control of, and you cannot predict the path of other people more accurately than you can for yourself.
Tuesday AM UPDATE: I might have been wrong about the Jayhawks, but I was certainly right about Purdue. Commencing to be half-smug for the rest of the day, although I know that the Purdue in question in this Update is Women's.
Friday UPDATE: ***Unfrigginbelievable*** about Baylor and Stanford. But it's like I keep saying--there's no such thing as a certain future because there's no such thing as predestination. Imagine what sports would be like if all teams just sat back and let the future transpire according to what must be carved in stone to happen. Nah. The fixed point in time is the scheduled game. Where it goes from there are a number of fractal options in the progression. Deal with it. I hate to be the one to break the bad news to ESPN, but their faith in Nate Silver to prognosticate game outcomes is misplaced. Badly misplaced. Mathematics may look like wondrous magic to some, but it's nothing more than just another language whose business it is to express relationships between entities known and unknown. It expresses the relationships in a manner that lends itself to human analyses. Advanced mathematicians are only linguistic experts, able to read the relationships put before them using agreed-upon symbols. And that's all there is to it. Nothing and no one can predict which path will be taken progressing from a fixed point in time because there are many of them, and the failure of the human being to understand this is the fact that human beings persist in thinking in linear--even when there's nothing linear about it.
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Wow--within a space of a minute of posting the above, this blog got a lot of hits from the UK. I know that the Beeb got its knickers in a knot when I posted about Clara Oswald, and I'm sure that the latest outrage now is that I'm actually giving actual TARDIS flying lessons. Suck it, Brits--I know how a TARDIS works, I know how to operate a TARDIS, I happen to be the ORIGINAL Clara the Impossible Person, and I even know the Doctor's name, so THERE.
Very late Monday UPDATE: I noticed the hits on my old posts about Egypt in the blog stats today and yes, I did hear about the death sentences for many members of the Islamic Brotherhood. Yes, I am alarmed, particularly because of Egyptian friends who did express support for the Brotherhood, and who have gone silent online for what I think is too long. I have no further news on Egypt, unfortunately, and I do fear for my friends there. Do not construe this as any endorsement for the Brotherhood, though. It's just that I pass no judgment on friends that do and still consider military rule of any sort to be out of place in what's supposed to be a civilian government. Every military should be subservient to civil authorities.
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