Ban college football?

This transcript of a debate on whether to ban college football (PDF), with Buzz Bissinger and Malcolm Gladwell arguing for the ban, Tim Green and Jason Whitlock arguing against, is a good read, not least for a few humorous zingers from Bissinger. John Donavan is the moderator.

Jason Whitlock:
 

Football, whether we like it or not, whether you understand it or not when I say it, but football is America. It is the melting pot. College football is the highest level of the melting pot. Football is the Statue of Liberty.
 

19:20:45
 

College football. Your huddled masses, your poor, your tired, people yearning to breath free. I was one of those kids. Football was my access into the mainstream and a better life. My dad didn’t graduate from high school, my mother was a factory worker. I was the first person in my family to go off to college. Football brings the poor and the rich, the black and the white, the Jews and the gentiles -- it brings everybody together, particularly at the college level. 
 

[...]
 

Malcolm Gladwell:

It's about money now? They have to get hit over the head because they can't get money otherwise?
 

John Donvan: [unintelligible].
 

Jason Whitlock:

In terms of funding all the other sports you're talking about that you like. Yes, they do have to get hit over the head on Saturdays to pay for that, absolutely.
 

Buzz Bissinger:

But Jason, Jason, you're --

Jason Whitlock:

To pay for the rowing team and the soccer team and all the other sports that no one cares about. Yes.
 

19:29:48
 

John Donvan: Buzz Bissinger.
 

Buzz Bissinger:

Your argument is a perfect argument for why football should not be at academic institutions. Make it into a minor league system then. You'll get the same benefits that you're talking about. The melting pot -- by the way, the melting pot also, I think, includes Latinos and Asian-Americans. And if you can name four Jews who played football, you win the debate.
 

[laughter] 
 

And later on:

Malcolm Gladwell:

Name the last time someone shot themself in the chest because of cell phone use?
 

Tim Green:

Malcolm, you're taking --
 

Malcolm Gladwell: No, no.
 

Tim Green:

No, you're doing -- you're taking -- you're taking, as Jason said, at aberration. You're --
 

Buzz Bissinger:

I did because I use AT&T. 
 

The audience was asked to vote on the issue before the debate, and then again after the debate, and they changed their mind from one side to the other. Read the transcript or listen to the audio to find out which way they swung.

(h/t @StartupLJackson)

The Kipsang Number

In this discussion between Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson about the World Track and Field Championships, Gladwell brought up a concept called the Kipsang Number.

I watched the marathon and was struck (as I always am watching marathons) by the same dumb, obvious point: they are fast. It’s worth dwelling on this a moment. Back when Wilson Kipsang set the world record (which was then promptly broken), my running friends and I came up with the “Kipsang number,” which represented how long could you keep up with Wilson Kipsang while he was running twenty-six miles. I am a devoted runner and my Kipsang number is less than a mile. If I’m lucky, fourteen-hundred metres. You are a really good runner, and I’m guessing your Kipsang number is two miles. The average, healthy, athletic, American, twenty-two-year old varsity athlete in a sport other than track probably has a Kipsang number of between 400 and 800 metres. To recap: you could keep up with him for a quarter of a mile, then you would collapse in exhaustion. He would keep running at the same pace for another twenty-six miles.
 

My cycling friends and I often ponder a similar number when out on group rides: on a flat road, how long can you bike at the speed that professional cyclists ride at in the flats in the peloton? Or how long can you hold the average speed of a professional climbing expert like Nairo Quintana on a cycling climb?

This would be a fun charity event, either on the track or in cycling, to invite average Joes to try to keep up with Kipsang or a strong pro cyclist like Fabio Aru for as long as possible, and soon as you fell behind, you'd be eliminated. Since that is logistically too complex to set up for all but a few people, perhaps fitness apps like Strava can add in virtual challenges like this.

Tales from the Afterlife

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
 

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.
 

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.
 

But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.
 

That's an excerpt from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman, emphasis mine.

I was so struck by this passage, this idea that the only thing that made our lives tolerable was the jumbling of all these events into a shuffled sequence that achieved some optimal variety, serendipity, and novelty.

Is the optimal sequencing of events in our lives one that allows us to construct narratives most easily, and is that a sequence that breaks up the monotony of repetition? Studies seem to indicate we are physiologically built for a certain volume of willpower each day, which argues for some optimal sequencing of critical tasks near the front of the day, while that reserve is high. Thus the recommendations to exercise in the morning, or to start your work day tackling the most critical, if least enticing, task on our to-do list.

But that's life hacking territory, and not where I meant to stray. What inspired this post was simply the arresting and elegiac thought exercise from Eagleman.

This is how technological progress works

Generation n-2: This is our save icon. It's for saving a file to a floppy disc.

View fullsize

Generation n-1: I don't use floppy discs anymore, I only save files to my hard drive, but I remember floppy discs, so the iconography still works for me.

Generation n: Why is that the save icon? 

Generation n-1: Because people used to save files to floppy discs, then later to hard drives, but the icon stuck around. That's a 3 1/2 inch floppy disc, which actually isn't really floppy. There was a 5 1/4" disc which was floppy, but no one uses that as the save icon.

Generation n: Why not update the icon? How about something like one of these instead?

Generation n+1: What does it mean to save a file? Why do we even need that function. I just update my files in Google Docs or Quip, they are always up-to-date.

Generation n+2: What are files?

The Passion of the Christ: Blooper Reel

Pulling links to old McSweeneys humor pieces, I couldn't help but think of one other classic humor piece when I was reading back through the Unused commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky for The Fellowship of the Ring, and that is The Passion of the Christ: Blooper Reel.

Christ, shackled to a stone, is being scourged by Roman soldiers. Blood runs down his gory back. His pain is palpable. 
 

Jesus: [writhes in pain, hands shaking]
 

[Cell phone rings.]
 

Jesus: [hands shake furiously]
 

[Cell phone rings. Caviezel looks up, sheepish.]
 

Roman soldier: Jim? That you?
 

Jesus: Yeah.
 

[Cell phone rings.]
 

Soldier: Want me to get it?
 

Jesus: Yeah.
 

[Roman soldier gingerly reaches into Caviezel’s blood-soaked loincloth, pulls out phone and opens it, then holds the phone to Caviezel’s ear.]
 

Off Camera: [laughter]
 

Jesus: Hey, Mom.

...

The Last Supper. Jesus is in the upper room with his disciples. Judas (Luca Lionello) is seated nearby.

Jesus: If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world—ah, Christ.

Judas: Hateth you. 

Jesus: Who’s on first, right?

Judas: [laughs]

Jesus: [rolls eyes at camera] John could write gospel, but, you know, could he write dialogue?

Off Camera: [laughter] Cut!