Grumpy old guy finds something else to whine about

I don't like Thursday Night Football. I'll admit, I'm not a crazy obsessed fan, so I'm not the target market. But as a grumpy old traditionalist, I think Thursday pro football should mean Thanksgiving Day football, which means the Lions are at home and the Cowboys are at home and no other game after that. Now, there are three Turkey Day games, the last one aired on the NFL Network.

Grr.

I'd like to say the game is unfair to the players, but there isn't a hell of a lot of "fair" in football. When regular Thursday night games were added to the schedule a few years back, there were complaints by sportswriters of lackluster games, but last year, a lot of the Thursday games were high scoring and close, like 34-30 or 34-31. I don't know if this was because of quality offensive play or shoddy defensive play, because I almost never watch Thursday Night Football.

Thursday Night Football is shown on the NFL Network. Last time I checked, it was a premium channel. While I like watching pro football and I enjoy seeing highlights of games recently played, there is nothing I dislike more than listening to people yap about games that haven't been played yet.

As Johnny Unitas used to say, "Talk is cheap. Let's play football."

(Unitas reference used to show my credentials as a grumpy old guy.)

If a local team is playing and the game isn't blacked out because of poor ticket sales, some local channel will carry the game. UHF Channel 44, which is Cable Channel 12 on most cable boxes in the Bay Area, will be carrying the 49ers-Bears game tonight. I will see some of the game because La Estrellita, a local bar and grill, is having a board game night tonight and they will be showing the game on TV as well.

So let's review, shall we? Thursday Night Football is unfair exploitation of workers so that an otherwise useless premium cable channel can have 24 hours of watchable original programming IN AN ENTIRE YEAR. That's right, there are eight games on the NFL Network in a season, and the rest is just meaningless yapping.

Is this why you used the "corporate scumbags" label on this post, Matty Boy?

Yes, hypothetical question asker, that is the reason.
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Wednesday Math, Vol. 96: repeating patterns in decimals

Nowadays, people tend to like decimals more than fractions, largely because calculators give answers in decimals. Each system has its advantages. If two numbers are in decimal form, it's very easy to tell which one is bigger. That isn't always the case for numbers in fractional form. The advantages of fractional form are precision and compactness.

The difference between rational numbers and irrational numbers in decimal form is that eventually, a rational number will repeat some finite pattern of digits over and over forever. In standard math notation, we put a line over the repeated part, but that's hard to do in the editor for Blogger, so instead, I'm going to write the repeated part in red. For the fraction 1/2, the repeated part is a zero, so usually, we just write .5, but it's also correct to write .50 or .500 or even .50, with an infinite number of zeros after the 5. The repeated pattern is one digit long.

If we have a fraction, can we know how long the repeated pattern will be? Let's look at the fractions 1/2 to 1/13.

1/2 = .50
1/3 = .3
1/4 = .250
1/5 = .20
1/6 = .16
1/7 = .142857
1/8 = .1250
1/9 = .1
1/10 = .10
1/11 = .09
1/12 = .083
1/13 = .076923

As we can see, the repeated decimal pattern is only one digit long for many of these fractions, except for 1/7, 1/11 and 1/13. As you might guess, the thing 7, 11 and 13 have in common is that they are prime.

This question delves into number theory, and it was Carl Friedrich Gauss, genius and jerk, who figured out the basics. If p is a prime number, then 1/p will have a repeating pattern of length at most p-1. If the pattern isn't as long as possible, the pattern length will have to divide p-1.

Let's report on the primes on the list.

2: 2-1 = 1. The length of the repeating pattern has to be 1.
3: 3-1 = 2. The length of the repeating pattern has to be 1 or 2. In base 10, the length is 1.
5: 5-1 = 4. The length of the repeating pattern has to be 1 or 2 or 4. In base 10, the length is 1.
7: 7-1 = 6. The length of the repeating pattern has to be 1 or 2 or 3 or 6. In base 10, the length is 6.
11: 11-1 = 10. The length of the repeating pattern has to be 1 or 2 or 5 or 10. In base 10, the length is 2.
13: 13-1 = 12. The length of the repeating pattern has to be of length 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 12. In base 10, the length is 6.

Some primes have the longest pattern possible. The pattern for 1/17 repeats every 16 digits.

1/17 = .0588235294117647

Some are remarkably tidy. 1/37, which could have a pattern 36 digits long, has a pattern that repeats in 3 digits.

1/37 = .027

On the other hand 1/1369, where 1369 = 37*37, has a pattern that is 3*37 = 111 digits long. I'm not printing that one out, if it's all the same to you.

If we dealt in bases other than base 10, the digit representations change and so do their lengths, but not the rules about primes and the length of the pattern for 1/p having a length that divides p-1.

Having called Gauss a jerk a few months back, I want to re-iterate that he is clearly a genius first and a jerk second.
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The coin kerfuffle.

In the United States, it is very rare to get any coin with a value higher than a quarter in change. When I was a kid, the Franklin half dollars, followed later for a few years by the Kennedy half dollars, were common currency, but once the U.S. Mint stopped using any silver in half dollars and quarters, collectors hoarded the old coins and the half dollar faded into obscurity.

Silver dollars were discontinued in 1935, so when I was a kid in the 1960's, getting a silver dollar was a special treat. I became a very sporadic coin collector, going to the local coin shop anytime I got a silver dollar to see if I could make a profit, no matter how small.

The U.S. has been trying to bring back the dollar coin since the 1970's, so far with no success. The Eisenhower dollar was supposed to be a companion to the Kennedy half dollar, but without any silver content, public interest was minimal. Later attempts with the Susan B. Anthony and the Sacajawea dollars have been met with a mixture of resistance and boredom.


Given the success of the "state quarters", the U.S. Mint decided to try the same idea with dollar coins, putting the presidents on the front and the Statue of Liberty on the back, cycling in a new presidential portrait every three months or so, starting with George Washington in 2007. To make more room for the portrait, the mottos, date and the mark of the Mint (P for Philadelphia, S for San Francisco, etc.) were moved to the edge.

Suddenly, there was a stink. "In God We Trust" was removed from the dollar! It was another insidious atheistic trick to remove the Almighty from public life! When it was pointed out that it was NOT removed, only moved, the new attack was that on the edge it would wear out, just like the way God was fading away from the public discourse.

Yeesh.


If this "controversy" wasn't stupid enough, enter Sarah Palin. In a speech last week in Wisconsin where the jackals of the press were barred, some devious ink-stained wretches got in anyway and reported the highlights/lowlights.

She was "disturbed" by the moving of In God We Trust to the edge of a coin nobody ever sees anyway, and wondered who gets to make such a decision.

Well, the coin was released in 2007 and the decision was made according to accounts in 2005. In both years, that Marxist-Satanist Islamofascist George Walker Bush, also known as Prince George of the House of Saud, was president. There's been enough fuss that on the coins being minted now, such as this one with the asterisk president William Henry Harrison staring out at us, In God We Trust is back to a place where everyone can see it, but in actuality nearly everyone ignores it. This is happening under the watch of that upstanding Christian gentleman, Barack Hussein Obama.

There are places in this world where certain religions are being suppressed and the rights of the faithful are being violated in egregious ways. Not here in the United States. If I may paraphrase Phil Gramm, the religious in the United States have turned this country into a nation of whiners. Depending on how fine a point you put on the definition of Christians, the Christians are a solid majority of Americans, but some think that means they have the right to force their views on everyone, regardless of the fact that those who call themselves Christians rarely agree on any point in the public forum.

Sarah Palin is trying to make a career of being a martyr. If real persecution was ever her fate, she would fold like a table at a bake sale. Besides making a mountain of a molehill, her whining is both pointless and late to the tea party. God has blessed this country mightily, for in Her infinite wisdom, it is now God's will that Sarah Palin no longer holds any political power over anyone, and I will bet anyone a shiny Godless dollar that Palin's manifest lack of intestinal fortitude makes it nigh impossible she will ever rise to a position of power again.

From my keyboard to God's ear. Insha'Allah.
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Fantasy Football update - Week 9

The Mutant Mercenaries stood tall, winning by 79 points, the largest margin of victory from this week's schedule. Our opponents, Favre's Return, relies heavily on Vikings running back Adrian Peterson and the Minnesota defense, but this week, Minnesota had a bye and my opponent forgot to replace these players on the roster. Playing against a less than full team made this an easy week.

As for the rest of the family, nephew Adam's team was playing his dad's team, and the younger generation came out on top. They were watching the games together on Sunday, and when the trend became obvious, they had this little exchange.

Adam: You know what's better than beating your dad at fantasy football?
Michael: No, what's better than that?
Adam: Nothing.

For the second week in a row, the best team of the week beat the second best, this time by the razor thin margin of 250.26 to 249.96. The best team was the one managed by Adam's girlfriend Liz, and her team has now improved to 9-0 and clinched a playoff spot with four weeks left on the schedule.

For the first time since the beginning of the season, if the league ended as of this week, I would barely make the playoffs. I have a tough test this next week, matching up against my nephew Adam's team. In the battles of blood relatives so far, Adam beat Michael and Michael beat me, so I have to pull off some rock-scissors-paper magic or I will fall backwards in the standings.
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Special standalone Flags Of Many Lands™ post! (With bonus pretty girl re-runs.)

Yay, Flags Of Many Lands™! Yay, Marshall Islands!

Why would someone from this Pacific archipelago show up at Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do?

This person typed in "women's butts pictures of".

This person could do a lot worse.
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The other shoe drops.

I got the rejection note from Y Combinator on Thursday. They were my Plan B for how to get by next year, so I'm back to Plan A.0, which is not enough work and slowly going broke, working towards Plan A.1, which is finding a little more work and getting by.

On the positive side, Y Combinator got back to me on the day they promised and the e-mail was well formulated and encouraging.

It was a dream, and like dreams, now it's gone, but sometimes a dream comes back. I want to thank all the people who told me about the opportunity and helped me get the application together, most especially Ken Rose, Michael Strickland and Tony Hurd.
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random 10, 11/8/09

Down On The Riverbed Los Lobos
Choo Choo Ch'Boogie Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five
Soldier's Things Tom Waits
You've Got The Look I Like Nick Lowe
Love Child Diana Ross & The Supremes
I'm Only Sleeping The Beatles
Spanish Bombs The Clash
Street Fighting Man The Rolling Stones
All Along The Watchtower The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Losing True The Roches

The girls dancing at The Cavern Club means an appearance from The Beatles on this week's Random 10. We also have a visit from London's Answer To The Beatles, those scruffy boys The Rolling Stones later in their career. It's from the album Stripped, where the guitarists go acoustic. But seriously, if you've got Charlie Watts on drums, you can make a rock and roll song no matter who else shows up.

Eight out of ten from The You Tubes, which used to seem great, but I've been spoiled by recent weeks where ten of ten is just a given. There's plenty of Los Lobos, just not this one, but there isn't nearly enough Nick Lowe. We have Louis Jordan and his band just to keep this from being an all rock era list, but The Tympany Five still rock out pretty good.

Have a nice Sunday.
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Getting undeserved credit in a world gone mad.

From left to right, we have Christina Hendricks and Miracle Laurie, actresses currently working on TV shows. Ms. Hendricks plays Joan on the AMC series Mad Men, and Ms. Laurie (no relation to Hugh Laurie) plays Mellie on the Fox show Dollhouse.

Whenever I read something about these actresses, or hear someone from the movie industry talk about them, it is considered a great stride forward for women everywhere that they are allowed to play young, attractive women despite the fact that they are considered "heavy" by today's standards.

Mad Men is set in the early sixties, and the male characters on the show consider Joan the pinnacle of va-va-voominess, which of course she is. Back then, Audrey Hepburn was considered a breath of fresh air, since she didn't have to conform to the ideal of beauty personified by Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren and the bevy of busty wannabes that movie moguls hoped might become the next Marilyn or Sophia.

Dollhouse is set in the present day, and Miracle Laurie's character isn't as sexually confident. She plays the girlfriend of one of the main characters, and she has to apologize for not meeting the current Los Angeles standard of beauty. All the other young women in the cast are much more slender, and the guys in the cast are also from the zero percent body fat set. We now have this idea that attractive women should look like thirteen year old boys on the cross country team, with breast implants as standard features, just so you can tell what gender they are from across a room.

Since I am on the high side of fifty years old, I have been looking at pictures of women with pretty faces and large breasts for the better part of four decades now. This is the first time I've gotten credit for being a feminist for doing so.
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Lazy blogging Friday

Yesterday, I posted a celebrity lolz, which is not my usual.

Today, I post a comedy Venn Diagram, which are relatively common on the Interwebs, though not at common as lolz cats. I think is the first time I've put one up.

I'm going to work on these. Some of them are excellent. Obviously, since I posted it, I think this one is pretty excellent. I laughed out loud at both spife and knork, as will all right thinking Americans.

More lazy blogging tomorrow, when I return to a mighty pillar lazy blogging, pretty girls.
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