Relax Dude

alexdrude.substack.com. free to read and subscribe! mostly sports thoughts, but sometimes not...

.@BillHuberNFL: “How do you scout a kicker?” Brian Gutekunst:

Longest active NFL Draft streaks with a pick, coming out of the 2026 draft: Michigan / USC (1939, 88 years) Florida (1952) Miami (FL) (1975) Notre Dame* / Iowa (1978) *ND would be 1938 if you include the 1977 Supplemental Draft +Wisconsin's streak going back to 1979 just ended

A mathematician who shared an office with Claude Shannon at Bell Labs gave one lecture in 1986 that explains why some people win Nobel Prizes and other equally smart people spend their whole lives doing forgettable work. His name was Richard Hamming. He won the Turing Award. He invented error-correcting codes that made modern computing possible. And he spent 30 years at Bell Labs sitting in a cafeteria at lunch watching which scientists became legendary and which ones faded into nothing. In March 1986, he walked into a Bellcore auditorium in front of 200 researchers and told them exactly what he had seen. Here's the framework that has been quoted by every serious scientist for the last 40 years. His opening line landed like a punch. He said most scientists he worked with at Bell Labs were just as smart as the Nobel Prize winners. Just as hardworking. Just as credentialed. And yet at the end of a 40-year career, one group had changed entire fields and the other group was forgotten by the time they retired. He wanted to know what the difference actually was. And he said it wasn't luck. It wasn't IQ. It was a specific set of habits that almost nobody is willing to follow. The first habit was the one that hurts the most to hear. He said most scientists deliberately avoid the most important problem in their field because the odds of failure are too high. They pick a safe adjacent problem, solve it cleanly, publish it, and move on. And because they never swing at the hard problem, they never hit it. He said if you do not work on an important problem, it is unlikely you will do important work. That is not a motivational line. That is a logical one. The second habit was about doors. Literal doors. He noticed that the scientists at Bell Labs who kept their office doors closed got more done in the short term because they had no interruptions. But the scientists who kept their doors open got more done over a career. The open-door scientists were interrupted constantly. They also absorbed every new idea passing through the hallway. Ten years in, they were working on problems the closed-door scientists did not even know existed. The third habit was inversion. When Bell Labs refused to give him the team of programmers he wanted, Hamming sat with the rejection for weeks. Then he flipped the question. Instead of asking for programmers to write the programs, he asked why machines could not write the programs themselves. That single inversion pushed him into the frontier of computer science. He said the pattern repeats everywhere. What looks like a defect, if you flip it correctly, becomes the exact thing that pushes you ahead of everyone else. The fourth habit was the one that hit me the hardest. He said knowledge and productivity compound like interest. Someone who works 10 percent harder than you does not produce 10 percent more over a career. They produce twice as much. The gap doesn't add. It multiplies. And it compounds silently for years before anyone notices. He finished the lecture with a line I have never been able to shake. He said Pasteur's famous quote is right. Luck favors the prepared mind. But he meant it literally. You don't hope for luck. You engineer the conditions where luck can land on you. Open doors. Important problems. Inverted questions. Compounded hours. Those are not traits. Those are choices you make every single day. The transcript has been sitting on the University of Virginia's computer science website for almost 30 years. The video is free on YouTube. Stripe Press reprinted the full lectures as a book in 2020 and Bret Victor wrote the foreword. Hamming died in 1998. He gave his final lecture a few weeks before. He was 82. The lecture that explains why some careers become legendary and others disappear is still free. Most people who could benefit from it will never open it.

Former Kansas QB Jalon Daniels is signing with the Bucs on a deal that includes a $247,000 base salary guarantee and $25,000 signing bonus, source said.

Musicians, comedians, is there anything they can't do?

Quote of the year (-10000) ✅⛳️

Mr. Met beats Dinger in a push-up contest and Mrs. Met approved 😂

They traded back twice and he's still on the board going into round two....

Throwback to when Manny Ramirez made a running catch, high-fived a fan, and still hosed the runner

Fanatics bought an ad (now deleted) welcoming Fernando Mendoza to the “Last Vegas Raiders”. Their approach to quality control is at least consistent.

THIS IS UNREAL 🤣 The Knicks lose to the Hawks and the Jets take a tight end with their second pick of the first round at the same time 😭 (via joshuaringel/IG)

and there it is:

Dalton Rushing got plunked and then slid hard into Willy Adames at second base This came after it looked like he said "fuck 'em" when Jung Hoo Lee got hurt from sliding into Rushing on Tuesday

One of my favorite parts of the draft is looking at the mock drafts done the day after the previous year’s draft. Enjoy!

Fernando Mendoza and David Bailey both played in the 2023 edition of Big Game, the last game between Cal and Stanford as Pac-12 members. They just went #1 and #2 in the NFL Draft.

Simply the best to ever do it. A generational talent.

Hey @mrsmet, Dinger wants you to know he'll be in NYC this weekend 🤙

a guarantee based on past #nfldraft happenings: if Jermod McCoy, the Tennesee corner who missed all last year with an ACL tear, is still there at 27, the #49ers, who love drafting injured guys, will absolutely take him (frankly he may very well go before that. but still)

Here's what Lew Wolff was saying in 2013 about the A's relocating.

any update on a cure for cancer