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Want to play in the NFL? How good is your memory? It’s very rare for people not directly involved in the game to ever get access to pro playbooks. This copy of the Oakland Raiders’ 1998 June mini-camp (a sort of short training camp before the main one) playbook was leaked / released recently. Yes, it’s a bit old (dating back to when the Raiders were good…), but it gives you some idea of the intellectual pressures placed on NFL players. 216 pages, thousands of formations and audibles and routes and options. Quarterbacks will have to learn every single permutation. Other positions will need to learn large parts.

Oxford rape and trafficking: Who were the abusers? Not long after political correctness was shown to have led to the gang rape of 1,400 young girls by muslim gangs in Rotherham, we have this. The names of the Oxford gang were Mohammed Karrar, Bassam Karrar, Akhtar Dogar, Anjum Dogar, Kamar Jamil, Assad Hussain and Zeeshan Ahmed. Yet, at no point in this BBC article, even though it is clearly relevant to the story, are these men referred to as ‘muslims’. When someone tells you that political correctness does not exist or that it isn’t anything to be ashamed of, show them this.

Question: How vain is Cristiano Ronaldo? Answer: Very, very vain.

"Fewer large companies are run by women than by men named John." Well, yes, but there's a good reason for that.

The racist and eugenicist history of the American minimum wage.

239 years of 'The Wealth of Nations'. Smith’s “greatest breakthrough was the realisation that we do not have to conquer people or make things in order to increase our wealth. We can also increase it by simply exchanging things.”

5 Economic Myths That Just Won't Die

Great image of the same supernova appearing four times because of the gravitational lens effect. (Thanks to louisedennis.)

The British charity that named the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff "Islamaphobes of the Year". Makes you proud to be British…not.

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It took Jeremy Clarkson slapping an assistant producer to get there, but I think we've now reached 'peak Guardian' with this article. I mean, surely they can't get any more ridiculous...can they?

Shocking news about fitness - "a nightmare that never ends".

The Age of Man began in 1610. Probably.

Shaming pretentious restaurants that can't bear to use plates.

Did Josef Mengele and other NAZI medical researchers produce any useful medical research?

If 200,000 christians each donate $300, then Pastor Creflo Dollar can buy "the biggest, fastest and overall best private jet money can buy". Is that not an amazingly brilliant name for this cleric? I can see an argument that says that this isn’t that different from tithes to pay for medieval churches and cathedrals, but they have rather better depreciation.

A modest proposal to reduce income inequality.

"Peter King Realises Fight With Wife Really About Disappointment in Raiders' Offseason Moves."

The minimum wage is too high, much too high.

Texan sports pundit Dale Hansen (rightly, righteously and angrily) rips into the Dallas Cowboys for signing convicted domestic abuser Greg Hardy.

Educating people about economics

Long-term readers of this blog may remember that a few years ago, I wrote a series of posts about economics with the intention of educating my fellow humans. After all, most people would consider knowledge of economics to be important - especially when deciding who to vote for - but few people study it at school or university.

I haven't done any of those posts in ages - mostly because I'm busier at the moment than I was back then. This post isn't one of my own, but it is a link to a remarkably good article that someone pointed me at. It's a post about economics on (of all places) an arts blog. The writer is "beseeching" art people to learn economics. He could just as easily beseech everyone else. Fab article.

http://www.artblog.net/post/2015/03/economics/

Genetic makeup of native British people

This Oxford University study is fascinating. I've read books on this subject before that came to similar conclusions, but I think I'm right in saying that this is the most detailed study so far:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11480732/Britons-still-live-in-Anglo-Saxon-tribal-kingdoms-Oxford-University-finds.html

There's all sorts of interesting stuff revealed. For example:

• There's no real 'celtic' ethnic group. There is more genetic diversity between different culturally celtic groups than you'd expect.


• Bernicia was clearly a thing, Rheged definitely so. Perhaps more surprisingly, so was the Kingdom of Elmet.


• Cornish and Devonian populations are genetically distinct, and the boundary is pretty much the River Tamar (the modern boundary between the Duchy and the county). We live just on the Cornish side of the border. Most people I know from Devon wouldn't dream of living in Cornwall and vice versa. Clearly these attitudes have been around for almost 1500 years!


• I wonder to what extent this signifies that the Cornish are an earlier population and to what extent they are Breton immigrants.


• North and South Welsh populations are similarly distinct.


• However, there seems to be an English marcher population stretching from the Severn Valley right up to the Wirral. Wasn't expecting that. Interestingly this population (marked with a purple cross on the map) also has three other very specific locations away from the Welsh frontier - one on the Isle of Wight, one in Kent vaguely near Maidstone and one in what might be Scunthorpe. Interesting.


• Vikings can't have fancied local women much - there are almost no Norse genes. The one exception is (predictably) Orkney. (I'm assuming from the map that they didn't include Shetland and possibly also the Isle of Man.)


• There's a clear link between Catalonia and North Wales.


• There is a distinct 'English' ethnic group, but it only covers part of modern England. The line between the 'English' and the rest of the country is broadly where it was in 600AD which perhaps suggests that areas of 'England' beyond that line are conquered territories that were never truly settled.

Something that makes me despair about LiveJournal

Generally I like LiveJournal and wish it was more popular. But there are one or two things that I don't like. One of those seems to be by far the most popular community on LJ - 'ohnotheydidnt .

I don't know if this works for all possible configurations of friends feeds, but on mine, there is a section on the right hand side of the page called LiveJournal Today which shows the most popular posts. Most of them (if not all) on most days will be posts in this community. Have you ever clicked on it?

If you're ever trying to convince a friend to give LJ a go, don't go near this community. It's like the worst kind of sub-tabloid celebrity gossip mixed with twitter/tumblr style extreme SJW political correctness. You rarely see a comment of more than a sentence in length. Most of the commenters seem to be illiterate. And just to top it all off, most of the userpics you'll see are animated gifs with a duration of no more than a second featuring some film star blinking or just moving slightly. No more than a second might be the attention span.

Urrgh.