10 Thoughts for March 20, 2014

1. I just ran into someone online who offered an assertion of fact, to which I disproved, then two retorts later, responded that he never wrote such a statement...even though said statement is still posted inline.  #facepalm
2. No, I didn't fill out any brackets, and no, I'm not going to send my information away to participate in Quicken / Warren Buffet's challenge to build the perfect bracket.
3. After the Super Bowl, I wrote that, were any of the Seattle Seahawk free agent defensive linemen to leave, there was plenty of talent out there.  So imagine how big of a smile I have on my face, with the mention of Jared Allen as a strong candidate for Seattle.  If Seattle reaches the next Super Bowl, people will be calling them nonstop to get in the door.
4. Golden Tate expressed his displeasure with the offer he received from Seattle.  But the reality is, that Percy Harvin is the upgrade to Golden Tate.  If they really want another small receiver, they could always resign Doug Baldwin.  Besides, I think Pete really wants to find a big, physical receiver in the draft to replace the cut Sidney Rice, or maybe a dynamic duo to Harvin, with Marqise Lee?  Who'd you cover, if you had two dynamic receivers?
5. The other day I left a comment online about how Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight site with just one woman minority contributor and six white guys was a disappointment.  The point was, that greater diversity hedges against groupthink and surely there were many qualified minority / women to select from.  Today, this in-depth explanation from elsewhere.  The criticism doesn't disqualify the fivethirtyeight; it's just advice on improvement.  BTW, you should read some of the white backlash, with the false choice of either best-qualified or diversity (but not both); statistically-speaking, there should be roughly equally distributed women and minorities who are equally qualified.
6. Hilarious (to me) quote from a fivethirtyeight post regarding Russia's annexation of Crimea: "My Russian friends said they don’t remember, even in Soviet times, such intensive propaganda as on mass media in the last month."
7. Microsoft's legal team has just issued a tortuous explanation demonstrating the irony of its Scroogled campaign: "Courts do not issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves, since obviously no such order is needed."  Upon being outed for searching through someone's Hotmail account for evidence of pilfered Microsoft code, Microsoft then issued unilateral rules to apply more stringent restrictions to conduct such searches.  That kind of reminds us of someone else: THE NSA.  Which is why their Scroogled campaign is so ironic.
8. If you are a police officer in Hawai'i and under cover, you can have sex with prostitutes.  But hey, most people from Hawai'i already knew that a good number of HPD already followed the ethos of "do as I say, not as I do".
9. The moment you realize someone is smart and humble, having done a 180 and is now pushing to keep the Fed rate low until inflation rises above target level, rather than move ahead of inflation.  I'm not sure where Janet Yellen is headed, though.
10. You know, someone's going to have to pay for all of that money being thrown around to buy out TWC.  Are you a Comcast sucker customer?