Um, what?

The New Zealand Navy apparently does not know what led to the sinking of their research ship on a coral reef, but they are sure it's not the captain's fault. 

You know, that's perilously close, in my view, to flat out admitting that the captain was steering the ship and ignored the charts that clearly said that at low tide, there was no chance that ship was going to make it across that particular reef, along with "ignoring the $100 depth finder that pretty much every fisherman in Minnesota owns that would have told her it was getting really shallow."  And it's also very close to admitting "Well, her navigation scores weren't up to par, but we gave her the nod because, like Karine Jean-Pierre, she's a homosexual female."

Honestly, would it kill people in New Zealand to say "we're going to hold off on assigning, or denying, blame until the investigation is complete."?  What they're saying by doing otherwise is really incriminating.

More on trans athletes and DSD

One of the key questions regarding the participation of trans and "intersex" athletes, the latter being predominantly 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency, in women's sport is the question of what happens to the sport overall.  

A key issue here is that if you map out athletic performance by sex, what we'll find is that it takes far fewer "two sigma" athletes to find a "three sigma" athlete or "four sigma athlete" than it does to find a "five sigma" or "six sigma" athlete among a population of four sigma athletes.  To use a current example, if Olympic boxing does not reinstate sex testing--the famous "cheek swab" endorsed by Olympic athletes like Nancy Hogshead--national sports authorities are going to seek out trans and DSD males (XY) and make them into Olympic "womens'" boxers and such.

If--as is the case--a top high school male athlete (2 sigma) performs at about the same level as a top female Olympic athlete (say 3.6 sigma), we would have to find only about 17 top male high school athletes to find a D1 male athlete ability (3 sigma), and only about 100 top male high school athletes to get an athlete with Olympic male abilities.

The upshot of this is that as national sports authorities realize they can win by sorting through trans and DSD males to find top "female" Olympians, it won't likely take long before they find someone who's performing like a top college athlete (sort through 850 people) or Olympian (sort through 5000 people) among the DSD and trans males.  

Put bluntly, it doesn't take sorting through that many DSD or trans athletes to find someone who will box not like Imane Khelif versus Angela Carini, but rather Sugar Ray Leonard.  

A lesson for life

        In reading the book of Jeremiah, specifically chapters 27-29 this morning, I noticed that one could almost boil down his message to "You can do this the easy way, or you can do it the hard way, but the outcome will be your exile in Babylon."  It strikes me as applicable in any number of areas; there are times when you can do things the easy way, or the hard way, but the end result--aside from the trouble of going through the process--will be about the same.

On Harris and the filibuster

Further cementing her position as a "lawyer where nobody can quite figure out how she passed the bar", Vice President Kamala Harris has endorsed an end of the filibuster "just for abortion rights."  She figures she can get 50 Senators plus a Vice President to vote for a federal law protecting abortion.

Beyond the reality that ending the filibuster in any number of areas increases the temptation to do so in others--making things easy is a genuine temptation for any legislator--you have the reality that the reversal of Roe is a return of abortion law to the states, and hence a federal law that would override state laws prohibiting certain aspects of abortion would run into the exact same Constitutional issue that led to the overturning of Roe.  It is the 10th Amendment, noting that powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved by the states.

Really, by the logic Harris uses, the federal government could produce a law that would legalize all murder.  Hopefully we have jurists who are ethical and smart enough to stand against these stands of Harris that ought to have kept her off the bar. 

Say what?

Gun control groups, including the Brady Center, Giffords, and others, are apparently making the claim  in a Supreme Court case involving the state of Tennessee that somehow, making children transgender will reduce gun violence.

This, in a case involving the state that had Audrey Hale, transgender youth, shoot up an elementary school--and four months prior to the law taking effect?   Seems there is a wee little problem with their logic, to put it mildly.  Tennessee did indeed have a school shooting by someone who considered herself transgender in a time when reassignment procedures were legal in Tennessee.  (OK, she was 28, too, so she still had access to these procedures if she'd wanted them...)

I guess there probably is some reality to the notion that if you castrate a lot of boys, sooner or later you're bound to drop testosterone in one boy that will decide not to shoot up his school because of reduced aggression, but with about 40 school shootings per year, you're talking about castrating 50,000 young men for every school shooting prevented.  Seems like just a bit of overkill!

Plus, those who watch the "trans mafia" realize that some pretty vicious aggression from trans advocates is quite routine.  I'm not quite sure we can assume--as our ancestors in the 19th century did--that removal of male attributes will reduce male aggression.

More on the stinky weasels

Apparently Wolverine cheater-in-chief Connor "Did I really promise not to lie, cheat or steal at Navy?" Stallions has produced a documentary telling "his side" of the story, in which he's not apologetic at all, and just as the NCAA has served a notice of level 1 allegations with a side dish of "repeat offender" for their recruiting violations.

If I were a born Buckeye who became a Spartan by the grace of God (which I am) who wanted to get the Wolverines banned from football altogether for a few years, I don't know what I would do differently.  

Now let's do some math

With regards to the suspected condition of Caster Semenya and other Olympic athletes whose...crotches appear female, but their athletic performance appears to be male...one of the likely causes is something called "5 alpha reductase 2 deficiency".    Interestingly, the list of "intersex" conditions does not list a prevalence, but the other comments about it being a recessive genetic trait, and actual names given to the condition in the Dominican Republic, Turkey, and Papua New Guinea suggest that what's going on is good old fashioned inbreeding--cue "Dueling Banjos", I guess.  

And knowing a touch about what leads to inbreeding--poverty and social isolation--one would infer that as sports opportunities (and wealth) increase, the conditions for this syndrome will decrease.  So for the sake of young people being born, the world's increasing wealth is a boon.

But if we assume that about one in one hundred thousand live births has this, we would infer that worldwide, there are about 40,000 people with this condition, of which about 5000 are of the ages that would translate to Olympic athletic opportunities.  If we assume that 90% of those afflicted never get a chance to participate, we find that maybe 500 would be athletes, of which maybe 2% (two sigma) would be at the level of "good high school male".  This seems to correspond reasonably well with the few athletes that are clearly "male presenting sort of as female".

The thing that scares me, though, is the thought that some people with this disorder would find themselves at the three sigma (0.135%, D1 athlete) or four sigma (Olympic men's level, 0.003%) ability level, and in any sport that involves contact or combat, the size and strength disparity would go from "dangerous" to "lethal"--think Imane Khalif being replaced by Canelo Alvarez.

As far as I can tell, there is a marginal chance of an occasional D1 level athlete, but the Olympic man presenting as sort of female will be a black swan event unless there is a large mutation that greatly increases the number of people with this disorder, or something like that.  

So I would infer that the big hazard in Olympic sport is not intersex conditions, but rather "trans" athletes using the maximum allowance available for available testosterone.  That said, I still think it's time to bring back the cheek swab and take drug testing seriously.  Crazier things have happened than an XY 5 alpha reductase 2 deficient Canelo Alvarez, after all, and we shouldn't be expecting women athletes to die because we're unwilling to act on the fact that XY is, statistically speaking, bigger and stronger than XX.

Now there's some progress

Former Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh has been banned from NCAA coaching for four years,  and his attorney is reduced to insulting the NCAA instead of addressing the allegations.  This is really bad news for the stinky weasel football program.  For comparison's sake, when Michigan basketball boosters were found to have wrongly made large loans to Michigan players, the program was required to vacate all of its wins in which those players participated, but head coach Steve Fisher (who ought to have noticed his star players were living large and asked some questions) was not penalized.  Yes, I personally think that was a mistake.  Players shouldn't need to have monastic vows of poverty, but when they're spending thousands on tattoos, strippers, and the like, I'd have to argue that that NIL money is getting out of hand and preventing them from doing what they're there to do--"study".

I'm hoping that Michigan gets to give up all of its wins--and again, that "national championship"--along with five scholarships for the next five years.  And, again, that the NCAA follows the NFL and finally allows signals to be sent in via radio to the QB and middle linebacker.

Stretch goal is what Harbaugh himself noted in 2007 when he was coaching Stanford; admit that too many college athletes are taking cream puff courses to maintain eligibility, and remind coaches and athletes alike that they are primarily there to learn, not play sportsball.  It's long past time to end creampuff coursework for athletes.

Time to take some data

I saw the coverage of the women's boxing fight between Imane Khelif and Janjaem Suwannapheng, and most of the coverage on the starboard side was more or less "why are they allowing this man to beat this woman?"  I took a look at some of the pictures, and while Suwannapheng is a little bit more feminine-looking than Khelif is, and I understand that "secondary feminine characteristics" can be somewhat more subtle in southeast asian women than among others, I still have to say.....I'm not quite sure what a swab DNA test would find.

More or less, it's already extremely unlikely that those with 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency would, absent performance advantages due to male genetics, score the three top spots in the 2016 800 meter race, or two of 72 women's spots in the boxing competition in 2024.  If it's three or more of those 72 spots in boxing, the odds go from minute to infinitessimal, and we have to wonder what happens to women's sport if we don't fence it off with the cheek swab test they used until 2000.

It's less significant than allowing trans athletes in--that simultaneously allows perverts in to the locker rooms, and exposes women to the effects of full male strength--but if the difference between those with this intersex condition and elite women is even 2% in speed and somewhat more in brute strength, we are talking about lost medals for XX women in all events, and needless injuries or worse in contact and combat sports.

On those boxers in the Olympics

 A lot has been made, really, of the two "women's" boxers in the Olympics who appear to have XY chromosomes as manifested by their testosterone levels, as well as the 2016 Olympic women's 800 meters race, where all three medal winners had XY chromosomes, but presented externally as female.  Wikipedia actually keeps a list of "intersex" conditions and "intersex" Olympic athletes.  There are, interestingly, a fair number of them--I count 15.

So what do we make of this, statistically speaking?  All in all, intersex conditions seem to affect about one in 5000 people, so fifteen people in the Olympics (or banned from them) in the past 88 years seems to be about right--there are probably about 50-70,000 individuals who have competed in at least one Olympic Games since 1976.

But that noted, if one walks through the list of intersex conditions, only a handful are the kind we're interested in; XY presenting externally sort of as female and with male levels of testosterone.   If you've got one of the others, you're not going to the Olympics, and that's because you're going to be like me; just not that good in your sport.

The condition most likely is "5a Reductase 2 deficiency" and it's worth noting that the prevalence of this is unknown, and that its origins, genetically, seem to be a range of conditions as well.  All in all, though, a certain portion of those with this family of disorders seem to have athletic strength and speed about 0.15 standard deviations greater than that of XX women, and about 0.85 standard deviations below that of males.  The advantage may be somewhat greater vs. women, however, as there simply aren't that many of them.  You're simply looking at a different portion of the distribution--there simply aren't that many people (thankfully) with this condition.

It's not a "trans" issue per se, and since it's "intersex", the sexual assault issues of "trans" and more importantly "fake trans" athletes in the locker room are not there.  What does exist, however, is basic unfairness in competition--the best of these athletes appear to be on the level of good high school boys--and arguably a physical hazard in contact sports, especially combat sports like boxing.  

What to do about it?  The current approach since 2000 seems to be to wait until it's abundantly clear that there is a blatant unfairness or physical hazard.  That's merely irritating with track & field, but dangerous to lethal in combat sports.

You're stuck, really, with either administering a sex test (swab for DNA in the cheek), or if one really wants to get some data, let's take some of these athletes to the weight room and compare bench press, squat, and dead lift with the ladies in their weight classes, and then to a medical lab where their bone density and skull thickness can be compared.

My bet is that the differences are not as big as that between unambiguously developed males and females, but it'll be statistically significant anyways.  And the end result would be what we had prior to 2000; if you scored "XY" in your swab test, you competed as a male or not at all.

And the net is drawn in a bit?

Michigan football coach Sherrone Moore, the former offensive coordinator, was apparently in on the arrangement with Connor Stallions to procure opposing teams' offensive signals, indicating that it is almost certain that the defensive coordinators must have been in on the scheme, as well as former coach Jim Harbaugh.  

Was it effective?  Well, the Wolverines went from a 68% win percentage (perhaps a touch above 70% if the abyssmal 2020 season is neglected) to a 92.5% win percentage in those years, building a defensive juggernaut that persisted despite....a change in defensive coordinators in 2022.  So yes, it was effective, gaining them wins against Ohio State and others that they probably would not otherwise have obtained, and recruits that they would not otherwise have gotten.  

I don't know that it's worthy of the 1987 Southern Methodist two season ban, but I do think it's worthy of the penalty Michigan received for their recruiting violations for the "Fab Five"; a vacation of all wins those seasons.  

And really, it's long past time to allow quarterbacks to have a radio in their helmet to receive signals so this sort of thing is no longer possible.  

One final note is that it's appalling that Connor Stallions is a Naval Academy grad, and apparently his memory of the honor code--We will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those among us who do.-- has gotten a little bit rusty.  Naval Academy leadership might want to take note and ask if something is going seriously wrong with their students' ethics.

That's what I thought...

 "Pro-Palestinian" protesters of Israel apparently changed "Heil Hitler" and gave the Nazi salute in the Olympics.  OK, I guess they're telling us who they actually are in the same way their compatriots in Hamas did on October 7, but I'd have thought that Nazis might prefer to, you know, keep that quiet.

That noted, it does not appear that the "Heil Hitler" spectators were ejected.  And if an endorsement of one of history's worst genocides doesn't serve to justify ejection, I don't know what does.  I'm very sure that if some clowns decided to wear their bedsheets to a game here in the U.S., they'd be shown the door, so I'm not quite sure why endorsement of far worse atrocities than anything the KKK ever did would get a free pass.

Put differently, if you want Islamic radicals to join the civilized world, you need to subject them to the rules of the civilized world.  That starts with walking them right out when they start chanting Nazi slogans.

I'm sure soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will be duly impressed

Apparently, a couple of the reasons for not having an officer on top of the building from where Trump was shot  are that it was "too dangerous" to have him on a sloped roof (as roofers scratch their heads, doing that for a living), and then when that was laughed out of the public forum as ludicrous, apparently whistleblowers claimed that someone was up there, but came down because it was too hot.

The temperature in Butler, PA maxed out at 83F.  I'm pretty sure that our soldiers who served in Iraq, where the mercury routinely hits above 110F, will be playing a song of compassion for the poor guy on the world's smallest violin.  Granted, a white roof will reflect heat, but dealing with uncomfortable heat is part of the job, and small town police officers deal with much higher temperatures while providing security around the beer tent at every county fair in the lower 48.

So either the culture of the Secret Service has significantly changed from "will take a bullet for the President" to "don't make me sweat for the President", or they're still lying, and actually were working to endanger a former President.  I'm guessing a little bit of both, because people who will still take a bullet for that role probably aren't going to back down on the truth.  

It's a scary time for our country. 

Brilliance from the Windy City

According to Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, culpability for horrendous murder rates in Chicago lies with.....President Nixon, who of course died about 30 years ago in 1994.  Although I suppose some of Nixon's policies might have something to do with crime rates today, I'd dare suggest that governmental actions of the past 50 years, starting with Chicago's longtime discrimination against gun rights and continuing to poor policing, might have a bit more to do with it.

Perhaps even more amusingly, Johnson extols the record of Lyndon Johnson, who during his first 20 years as a lawmaker (1937-1957) opposed every civil rights bill brought to his attention, enacted the "Great Society" laws that to this day are the bane of poor people of all races, and who of course got the country deeply into the Vietnam War, prematurely ending the lives of about 7000 black soldiers and maiming tens of thousands more.

Nixon, on the other hand, was a staunch supporter of civil rights throughout his career.  One might wonder whether certain portions of the progressive left are in fact trying to injure those they claim to be trying to help.

Charge your electric car? Maybe not.

            A new study indicates that an average of 20% of electric vehicle chargers will be non-operational at any given time.  Now as someone who's worked in electronics reliability for the past 25 years or so, I've got a few thoughts on this.  First of all, as you might guess, a 20% offline rate means that necessary margin is not built into the product.  It is analogous to the failure rate of race cars, really, and is something you would never accept for your Camry or Golf Sportwagen (my car).  This is especially bad when one realizes that a charger is not exactly a complicated piece of equipment; it's a heavy duty DC power supply with a meter, a microprocessor, a screen, and a few buttons.  The meter on your home, combined with the transformer on the pole or in the green box nearby, serves much the same function, just with alternating current.

So what is going on with electric car chargers?  Really, the same thing that I noticed 12 years back with CFL lightbulbs (rest in the toxic waste dump), that because getting the product out there was so politically important and urgent, they didn't do the correct reliability engineering or testing.  Then combine that with the fact that they're often in the worst possible setting, like a garage without ventilation, or worse yet in the sun with no active cooling for the transformer and power supply.  I'm guessing the inner components may be getting hot enough to "leave skin behind" if you were unlucky enough to touch them, and suffice it to say this kills electronics reliability.  The old engineer's adage was that 5C increase in temperature halved the life of any device, and we're talking probably five to ten times that amount.

In other words, electric car chargers are a lot like older Ferraris, looking very sleek and fashionable, but really bound to spend a lot more time at the repair shop than actually doing their job.  It's yet another reason to get government out of the business of deciding what we drive.