Time once again for the EWM Yahoo! NCAA men’s basketball tournament pick’em – 10th annual. We’re using Fibonacci scoring this year (2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21). Everyone is welcome to join this pool, which will include some of the savviest pickers of all time. There’s little time for rocking back and forth in your chair out of trepidation and anxiety (well, okay, but make it quick). Sign up! Free, free, FREE to you: join this year’s group on Yahoo!,
Netanoia (ID#71855). If you have questions, elbow me gently in the sternum with an email at dmueller at earthwidemoth.com. Invite your friends, frienemies, arch-frienemies, Facebook friends, Twitter followers, colleagues, former classmates, bracketologists, bracket-oriented ontologists, etc. The group has space for the next 49 who sign up. Pride-ish stakes: reputations are made (and decomposed) right here.
Firm up your selections any time between the selection show on Sunday evening, March 17, and five minutes before the round of 64 tips off on Thursday, March
21.
March again: time to try your luck in the internet’s most regrettable, most metanoic NCAA pool. You could win a trophy of some magnitude or other (imagine it however you want as it’s a fiction). Twenty-twelve marks the ninth consecutive year for EWM Yahoo! NCAA men’s basketball tournament pick’em. The pool welcomes everyone to predict the tournament against the savviest basketball soothsayers around. There’s no time for rocking back and forth in your chair out of nervous habit (well, okay, but make it quick). Sign up! At no monetary cost to you, join this year’s group on Yahoo!,
Brackstang Sally (ID#54159). If you have questions, elbow me gently in the ribs with an email at dmueller at earthwidemoth.com. Invite your friends, frienemies, arch-frienemies, Facebook friends, Twitter followers, colleagues, former classmates, neighbors, and pets. The group has room for the next 50 humans/things who sign up. What’s at stake is more precious than than a properly re-set alarm clock on Daylight Savings Day: your rep as a predictor extraordinaire, or predictordinaire.
Yahoo! Tournament Pick’em
Group: Brackstang Sally (ID# 54159)
“Guess you better slow your prediction-maker down.”
Password: ewm
Firm up your picks after the selection show on Sunday, March 11. The latest you
can sign up is five minutes before the round of 64 tips off on Thursday, March
15.
Fourth reactor at Chernobyl exploded just before my twelfth birthday, late April, 1986–25 years ago yesterday. Is the math right? For me that’s almost a half-life ago.
Now, I’m no scholar of nuclear accidents, but I am interested in the emerging narratives about the Fukushima aftermath that position it in a family of catastrophes such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Certainly there has been a lot of speculative discussion since the Fukushima incident about leaking/leaching radiation, toxic mists, jet streams, ocean currents, impacts zones, and the various ecological slices that will be differently impacted by chemicals and hot metals. For example, there’s this Nancy Grace clip.
In the PBS clip above (above N. Grace), the portrait is grim–birds with smaller brains and strange tumors, etc.–and the discussion of sealed away clumps of radioactive material lapses into near absurdity, particularly at the idea of who will keep watch on the plutonium whose half-life is 24,000 years.
In “Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay?” Adam Higginbotham of Wired.com provides a look from multiple sides at the unsettled questions about how animals have responded in the wake of nuclear meltdown. First dealing with optimists who can find examples of resilient wildlife, the article includes those who turn to other forms of evidence to leverage claims about the welfare of the post-Chernobyl ecosystem.
But a pair of scientists are now calling these claims into serious question. According to US-based evolutionary biologist Timothy Mousseau, there is scant evidence to back up the idea of Chernobyl as a radioactive Wild Kingdom. “People say these things–they’re simply anecdotes,” Mousseau says. “It’s totally irrational.” Nonetheless, last December, the Ministry of Emergencies–the Ukrainian agency responsible for overseeing the Exclusion Zone–announced that it would formally open the zone to mass tourism in 2011. In January, meanwhile, the country’s parliament approved a multibillion-dollar plan to build two new Russian-designed nuclear reactors in western Ukraine, some of the first to be started there since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I am gathering tiny collections like these in anticipation of ENGL505: Rhetoric of Science and Technology, a class I will be teaching in the fall semester. And by no means am I thinking of these preliminary tracings as complete or even all that thorough. In fact, that these are incomplete–that the very possibility of knowing radiation’s reach in space and time–is part of what allows us to witness how scientific debate operates (not only in scholarly or researcherly circles but in popular ones, as well). It’s almost as if we can trace consequentiality itself as a matter of concern, and what I find surprising (or at least interesting) about this is that the temporal frame is many multiples of human lifetimes long. What I mean is that it’s curious to me not only how we talk about immediate threats (absent visual confirmation…as is the case with mildly radioactive carrots, for example) but also how journalists and scientists grace such an uncertain horizon as the one many, many thousands of years from now when the plutonium at Chernobyl falls irradiant.
March already: time to try your luck in the internet’s most fearboding, most kairotic NCAA pool. The trophy is tiny, so tiny in fact that the USPS will refuse to deliver it when you win. Nevertheless, for the eighth consecutive year the EWM Yahoo! NCAA men’s basketball tournament pick’em welcomes everyone to guess against the the savviest basketball futurographers around. There’s no time for biting your nail out of nervous habit (well, okay, but make it fast). Sign up! At no monetary cost to you, join this year’s group on Yahoo!,
Bracketurgy (ID#72844). If you have questions, elbow me gently in the ribs with an email at dmueller at earthwidemoth.com. Invite your friends, frienemies, arch-frienemies, Facebook friends, and pets. Just don’t invite Wisconsin Goobernor Scott Walker because I’d have no choice but to turn him down. The group has room for the next ten thousand people who sign up. What’s at stake is more precious than than a properly re-set alarm clock on Daylight Savings Day: your rep as a predictor extraordinaire, or predictordinaire.
Yahoo! Tournament Pick’em
Group: Bracketurgy (ID# 72844)
Password: ewm
Firm up your picks after the selection show on Sunday, March 13. The latest you
can sign up is five minutes before the round of 64 tips off on Thursday, March
17.
It is March again: time to try your luck in the internet’s most competitive, most hyperbolic NCAA pool. The trophy is small, so small in fact that you might not hear about it when you win. Nevertheless, for the seventh consecutive year the EWM Yahoo! NCAA men’s basketball tournament pick’em welcomes everyone from the fearless to the bored to pick against the the savviest basketball futurologists around. There’s no time for biting your nail out of nervous habit (well, okay, but make it fast). Simply sign up! At no monetary cost to you, join this year’s group on Yahoo!,
Brick-à-Brack (ID#21100). If you have questions, heave a three-quarter-court email my way: dmueller at earthwidemoth.com. Invite your friends.
Invite your arch-nemeses. But don’t invite that shady character who brought a spoiled pecan cheese log to the Superbowl party. The group has room for the next forty-nine who sign up. What’s at stake is more valuable than the cash in your pocket: your status as a basketball know-it-all.
Yahoo! Tournament Pick’em
Group: Brick-à-Brack (ID# 21100)
Password: ewm
Firm up your picks after the selection show on Sunday, March 14. The latest you
can sign up is five minutes before the round of 64 tips off on Thursday, March
18.