Links for 2011-01-23

“White People Food has nothing to do with the relative melanin level of the person eating it. There are plenty of black and Hispanic foodies happily gorging themselves. They, too, in this case, are White People. And it has nothing to do with cuisine or the chef. In fact, Momofuku, the very quintessence of a White People restaurant, serves Asian-themed food and is run by David Chang, who is Korean. White People Food does, however, have a lot to do with money. Are you wealthy enough to afford cuts of [insert farm name] [insert special breed of pig] slow poached in [insert another farm name’s] [insert special type of milk] served with greens from [insert urban rooftop garden]? Then you are eating like a White Person. Do you feel really good about yourself while you’re doing it? Then you are a White Person.”

“As always in these cases, there are HUGE problems with all of this.  The would-be paper is “published” in an online journal run by one of the claimants.  The claimants won’t let independent people examine the apparatus.  They also don’t do the completely obvious demonstration – setting up a version that runs in closed cycle (that is, take some of that 12 kW worth of steam flow, and generate the 400 W of electrical power needed to keep the apparatus running, and just let the system run continuously).  If the process really is nuclear in origin, and the hydrogen accounting is correct, it should be possible to run such a system continuously for months or longer.  The claimants say that they’ve been using a 10 kW version of such a unit to heat a factory in Italy for the past year, but they conveniently don’t show that to anyone.”

Hey!!!

“Payment would not be small monthly stipends. The idea that pocket money solves all the problems is disproven by last summer’s agent cases. $1,000 watches, trips to South Beach, and expensive personal training on the other side of the country are all things elite student-athletes want. They’re also all things that cannot be funded on a couple hundred dollars a month.
It would also not be major league contracts. By that I mean player compensation would likely not vary widely, and would not be tied to a percentage of revenue. This is for a couple reasons. First, a college football league is going to fight hard to keep the parity that exists due to the NCAA’s standard grant-in-aid amount. Second, this would be very a much a minor league and minor leagues tend to have much more standardized player contracts than major leagues.
So what would it look like? Inspiration comes from two sources: the minor league baseball contract and Generation adidas.”