Functional Ambivalent says goodbye

A blog that I read on an occasional basis (I'd drop in about once a week) was Functional Ambivalent. I say was not because I've stopped reading it, but rather because Funcational Ambivalent will no longer be a blog.

Fighting climate change really ISN'T like cheating on your spouse

The Atlantic tells us why the website CheatNeutral.com is operating from a flawed premise.

That premise is, as explained by Robert Frank in the NY Times:

A British Web site called Cheat Neutral (www.cheatneutral.com) parodies the concept [of carbon offsets]-- by offering a service under which someone who wants to cheat on his partner can pay someone else who will refrain from committing an act of infidelity. The site's founders say they wanted to use humor to demonstrate why the market for carbon offsets is a moral travesty.

But the Atlantic explains:

ne reason is that I don't necessarily think of the cost associated with consuming fossil fuels as moral. It's a market failure. The issue is that there is a social cost -- an externality -- that isn't internalized by the consumer. Ordinary consumers acting in ordinary, rational ways create the problem.

In other words, expect James Inhofe and Rush Limbaugh to be parroting this line of thought from

Why I don't care that Lebron James didn't go to the postgame news conference

OK, Lebron James decided not to go to the post-game news conference after the Cleveland Cavaliers' game six loss to the Orlando Magic. The loss meant that the Cavs were eliminated from the playoffs.

And now every sports talk radio host and commenter on sports websites are saying that James not going to the post-game news conference showed disrespect to the game, to the Magic to, blah blah blah.

I have to call BS on that one.

The Cleveland Cavaliers pay James to play basketball. And he does that very well. They don't pay him to talk to the media -- sure they'd like him to, but they'd live without it if he didn't. Nike and his sponsors pay James to promote their product (those Kobe/Lebron Crank Yankers ripoff commercials suck, though), not to go to post-game press conferences.

I think it's just a slow sports news day -- no one cares about the hockey playoffs (Detroit is up 2-0 in the Stanley Cup Finals over the Pittsburgh Penguins). No one cares that Andy Roddick lost again in the French Open (after being openly taunted by his French opponent to the delight of the crowd). No one cares about baseball in June (the Evil Empire New York Yankees are once again in first place in the AL East).

So the sports pundits and talking heads have to argue about SOMETHING. And they decide to argue about this. Give me a break.

These might be a bigger deal if anyone cared about college baseball

College baseball is not a powerhouse like college football or college basketball. Though baseball remains among the the top-three sports (along with football and basketball) on the pro level, college baseball doesn't inspire the same following as the major league version.

Even as I type this, my fingers keep wanting to type "college basketball" instead of "college baseball".

There are a number of reasons. College baseball's premier event, the College World Series is more confusing to follow than in other sports. About.com tells us how it works:

Each team is sent to one of 16 regional sites throughout the country. The teams are seeded 1 through 4 by the selection committee, with No. 1 facing No. 4 and No. 2 facing No. 3 in the first round. The teams then proceed in a double-elimination bracket.

After that round, the remaining 16 teams are then split into eight super regionals, where two teams will face off in a best-of-three series. The super-regional winners advance to the College World Series.

The eight teams that qualify for the College World Series are separated into two four-team, double-elimination brackets, playing the same format as in the first round. The winners of those tournaments will meet in one best-of-three championship series to determine the champion.

Of course, it's still better than the BCS.

Another reason college baseball isn't as popular is because even if a college baseball star is drafted with the first pick of the baseball draft, it could be two or three years before he works his way up the minor leagues to be in the major leagues. Sometimes they never make it there at all.

Also, many of the best players skip college completely and head straight for pro baseball when they graduate high school.

Finally, the draft, which has helped the hype for football and basketball players drafted by their respective teams, is much different in baseball.

Wikipedia:

Unlike most sports drafts, the First-Year Player Draft is held mid-season, in June. Another distinguishing feature of this draft in comparison with those of other North American major professional sports leagues is its sheer size: the 2006 draft lasted 50 rounds and 1,502 players were selected. In contrast, the NBA Draft lasts for only two rounds (60 selections) and the NFL Draft for only seven rounds (256 selections if no picks are forfeited).

So why do I mention this?

Well, there have been two amazing games in the college baseball regionals in consecutive days. Today, Florida State beat Ohio State 37-6, the most lopsided game in college baseball history.

This came just a day after the longest game in NCAA history, 25 innings. One reliever pitched 13 scoreless innings and had 12 1/3 innings of no-hit ball.

And I bet that these stories were trumped by some regular season MLB games.

Going viral

Just about every time someone uploads a YouTube clip of themselves up on YouTube, somewhere in the back of their minds is that this might be a clip that goes viral -- that becomes the Next Big Thing on YouTube, a video that will bring them fame if not fortune.

Somewhere around 99.99% of people who upload videos to YouTube never realize this dream. But Brandon Hardesty was one who actually did realize this dream and parlayed his love of certain movies and his acting ability into, well, fame.

The Washington Post Magazine did a 6,000 word article on Hardesty and his videos.

I don't want to give anything away from the article, but go ahead and read it. It's worth it, trust me. I would never lead you wrong.

To the right is an example of one of his earliest videos, a reenactment of a famous scene from the '80s teen angst-fest that was The Breakfast Club.

Time lapse videos of change on Earth

A blog at the Wired magazine website has a series of interesting changes in the earth over the past decade, sometimes for good but usually for, well, not good.

For example, take a look at a time lapse of Lake Powell in Utah and the effects of a drought on the lake over the past ten years:

Southern Utah’s Lake Powell was once teeming with boaters, fishers and vacationers. But from 2000 to 2005 its water level dropped from 20 million to 8 million acre-feet, due to severe drought. Water levels have rebounded a bit, but are expected to plummet to levels even lower than those of 2005 during the next serious drought.

Fifteen word movie review for Fast and Furious

I saw Fast and Furious at the second run theater. Wasn't worth the two dollars.

Confessions of a non-serial killer

Imagine you're accused of being a serial killer. Specifically, the Zodiac Killer.

But, luckily, not by local authorities. Or the FBI. But by an amateur sleuth.

That's the position Michael O’Hare found himself in, and he shared the amazing story in the Washington Monthly.

I would put a blockquote here of an interesting portion -- but the entire story is interesting, and I highly recommend reading it.

Best sports commercials?

Maybe it's just because I'm such a big sports fan, but I think that sports commercials are consistently among the best on TV. While beer commercials may make you laugh once, they eventually lose their luster on repeated viewings (except for the Dos Equis commercials starring the "Most Interesting Man in the World").

So I had to wonder, what sport has the best commercials?

Here's hockey:



Football:



Basketball:



Baseball:



Soccer:



I think that soccer has the best commercials out of these. But basketball gets special points for their ad coming from the NBA and not a company that is promoting their own product (Nike for soccer, Fox TV for football, Playstation for baseball).

In fact, I couldn't even find a good baseball commercial (just looking around on YouTube) that wasn't a Playstation commercial. But you can decide for yourself.

Ghostbuster the video game

Ghostbusters 3 is still in the early stages of development. Rumors are flying around all over that everyone from the original cast is coming back (which is the only way to do it, really).

As long as Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Sigourney Weaver are in it and Ivan Reitman directs it, I think it will be fine.

But well before then -- in just about two weeks, actually -- Ghostbusters the video game will come out. And the New York Times has a great profile of the Ghostbusters franchise in advance of the new video game.

So should we be worried about the typical the-video-game-of-the-movie-nearly-always-sucks concerns (the same is true of books based on movies)? From the NY Times article:

Hoping to break with the decades-long litany of slipshod interactive movie tie-ins, Atari, the game’s publisher, has approached Ghostbusters: the Video Game as a major production in its own right. In a reversal of the traditional entertainment food chain, the game, to be released June 16, will come to market even as planning for the long-awaited third “Ghostbusters” film remains in the earliest stages. The expectation is that the game will both revitalize and expand interest in the franchise ahead of a new movie.

If their plan was to "revitalize and expand interest in the franchise ahead of a new movie" they would probably not release it three years ahead of when the movie is actually made.

So how involved were Ramis and Aykroyd (who wrote the first two Ghostbusters movies)? Well... kind of. But not as much as you might hear in the marketing.

“The crassest way I can put it is that they couldn’t have paid us enough to give it the time and attention required to make it as funny as a feature film," Ramis told the New York Times.