Author Archive: Paul Epps

Another Reason Notre Dame Has a Terrible Football Team

 

Officers reported that several people began jumping over a fence when they arrived and, specifically, they observed a group of five men attempting to jump over a fence and ordered them to stop, said Capt. Phil Trent, South Bend police spokesman. — Notre Dame quarterback, linebacker arrested Thursday morning – wsbt.com Police arrive to break up a party, five guys jump over a fence and the only two who get caught are Notre Dame football players. Read more →

Backup Quarterbacks

 

Oakland Raiders sign Matt Leinart to back up Carson Palmer — ESPN Deja vu! Here’s a picture of Matt Leinart backing up Carson Palmer 10 years ago. Backing up both of these guys was Matt Cassel (#10), who has so far had a better NFL career than Leinart, despite a college career in which he threw zero touchdown passes and never started a game. I don’t know who the other two kids are. The coaches are current Washington head coach Steve Sarkisian and current Hawaii head coach Norm Chow. Read more →

Junior Seau, 1969-2012

 

Junior Seau Dead in Apparent Suicide — ABC News Seau was a legend in San Diego, where he lived and played most of his career. He was also a legendary member of the USC Trojan Family. The number 55 is now synonymous at USC with great Trojan linebackers, but Seau was the player who made the number famous. It has since been worn by Willie McGinest, Chris Claiborne and Keith Rivers and is only assigned at the head coach’s discretion. This picture was taken just a couple of weeks ago at the USC Spring Football game. He doesn’t look like someone ready to end his own life, but you never really know what someone’s life looks like from the inside. R.I.P. Junior Seau #55 Read more →

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. — William James

Alternative Uses for Beer

 

I’m picking up a few things at Trader Joe’s — some Clif bars, a couple boxes of cereal and a bottle of IPA. The checker points to the bottle and says, “That’s good. Have you tried it?” Like he’s the beer expert and I don’t know anything. “Yeah, I’ve tried it.” Not to be outdone, I pointed to the cereal boxes and said, “Have you tried it on cereal?” “No.” “Well . . . think about it.” Read more →

Steal Like an Artist

 

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. I think the same thing is true of idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with. — Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist Read more →

It may look like a crisis, but it’s only the end of an illusion. — Jerry Weinberg

The Buffalo Bridle

 

“Well, if you’re going to control buffalo, you got to know two things, and only two things: First is, “You can make buffalo go anywhere, just so long as they want to go there. “And second, “You can keep buffalo out of anywhere, just so long as they don’t want to go there. — Gerald M. Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting Read more →

No difference plus no difference plus no difference plus … eventually equals a clear difference. — Jerry Weinberg

Intelligence in the Cloud

 

IBM Watson, the Jeopardy champion, runs on 90 IBM Power 750 servers, with eight 3.5 GHz cores per server. Currently on Amazon EC2, eight extra large compute instances will cost you $2.40/hour. If you want to run 90 of them, you’re looking at a shade over $200/hour. This brings up a couple of questions: For what tasks could artificial intelligence be as good or better as a highly trained person at $200/hour? What would this mean for society? Thanks to David Patterson at UC Berkeley for bringing this to my attention. Read more →

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