dburow

My nervous system thinks I’m laying in an artillery hole in No Man’s land in 1916 France but really I’m kinda hungover and have to send an email tomorrow

An updated traffic flow will be tested next month for two major events at Neyland Stadium. This revised traffic pattern is designed to ease post-event congestion toward Alcoa Highway, I-40, and Kingston Pike. Read more » 1tn.co/4u2Ss0N

United States Drought Monitor: 2000-2025. Made by Jared Rennie.

i always go back to this

Johan Santana That guy rocked.

If you're thinking about a summer road trip, here's one that actually delivers: Medora, North Dakota sits at the western edge of the state, right off I-94, at the entrance to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The town has 121 year-round residents and draws hundreds of thousands of people every summer. The reason is simple: the Badlands are staggering, and there's nowhere else like this in America. Here's what a long weekend looks like: Day 1: Drive in. Settle into your cabin or hotel. Walk the town — it's small enough to cover on foot and charming enough to make you want to. Dinner at one of the local spots. Day 2: Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the morning (Scenic Loop Drive, Wind Canyon, prairie dogs, bison). The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in the afternoon — opening July 4. The Medora Musical at the Burning Hills Amphitheatre that evening. Day 3: Bully Pulpit Golf Course (one of America's top 100 public courses, carved right out of the Badlands), or a hike, or Chateau de Morès, or just more time in the park. There's no wrong answer. Start planning at trlibrary.com/visit. #Medora #NorthDakota #RoadTrip #Badlands #TRLibrary #VisitNorthDakota #NationalPark #TheodoreRoosevelt #OpeningJuly4 #TravelUSA

Meanwhile in Knoxville, Tennessee

Artemis II from Port Orange, FL

All right maybe this is a time for me to tell my story about Pete Hegseth. Peter Hegseth is close to my age. We went to high school around the same time. He's also from Minnesota (as I am), and our schools were maybe 20 miles apart. In high school, I inadvertently became infamous for "bullying the football players." I was on the Math Team, which is exactly as nerdy as it sounds, and our school (Mounds View High School) had a very strong math team. We habitually took either #1 or #2 in every regional competition, vying with our main rival, the nearby Irondale High School. The math teams collected the best math students across all the grades, and you'd compete at different levels at the meet: the meet would have Algebra, Geometry, Trig, and Advanced Topics sections, and each student on the team would do two events. This made it so that freshmen could compete in Algebra+Geometry, while seniors could compete at Trig and Advanced. Sometimes people did a straddle, like Algebra and Advanced, and Geometry and Trig. Each team was comprised of 8 students. The totals were computed from your individual score (5 problems per event; you got 1 point for each problem you solved). Since everyone did two events, you could get a total of 10 points max. The team's score would be the total of the 8 designated scoring students (80 points max), followed by a team event to try and solve 6 problems jointly (5 points each) for a potential max of 30 more points. The school's total was therefore the sum of the individual scores (10 * 8 individual + 30 points for the team event, for a max possible of 110 points). We were pretty good, in my senior year I was even the top-scoring member of the team, but the problems were always quite hard, and it was very rare to actually score a full 10 points on the individual portion. I'm going over the point system because it matters for this story. As I mentioned, our school routinely came in either #1 or #2 at each meet, vying with our main rival Irondale. There were maybe 5-6 other schools in the region, and it was always Mounds View and Irondale neck-and-neck at the top of the leaderboard, often a nailbiting near-tie going into the Team Event. If you're wondering why it was so tense, it's because they ratcheted up the tension using time limits: all the events were timed, and you could only get all the points if you quickly realized how to get the solution, and then did the computations super-fast without making any mistakes. This left many opportunities for lost points we'd otherwise be able to get with less time pressure. The leaderboard was always Mounds View or Irondale at the top, with the other one right behind them and then often a 20-30+ point gap, followed by the other schools in a middling cluster. And routinely at the bottom, one of the schools was Forest Lake High School, and they'd routinely have laughably low single-digit scores, like their entire total at the end of the night would be like... 6. We'd laugh at them sometimes, like "Oh wow, their entire school scored less than one of our team members, hahaha Forest Lake" or like "Haha, [our teammate] Nathan Doble beat Forest Lake - good job, Doble." So it was a bit of a joke. We never *met* anyone from Forest Lake - there were hundreds of students at the event - maybe they only sent one student, or a handful, each getting 1-2 problems right (the first of the 5 problems on each set was always "easy"). Sometimes we speculated that maybe they had one kid who was kinda good at math in the whole high school or something. One evening, after we had returned to our school after a math team meet, we ran into some football players returning from their game, looking exhausted. I think I said something like "Hey guys, how's it going?" and one of them (this is Minnesota, so the guy was huge) answered, "Ohhhh man, not so well. We lost to Forest Lake." ... and without thinking I just blurted out, "Forest Lake??? Pfft! MATH TEAM never loses to FOREST LAKE!" and waved him off contemptuously and turned away. Later on my friend who witnessed this said that as I walked away, what I didn't see was that the football player got REALLY MAD and looked like he was going to come after me and beat me up. This later turned into "Yishan was bullying football players." (I actually feel quite bad about this - looking back on this, I feel like I should've said something supportive like, "Don't worry, you'll get 'em next time. Math Team always crushes Forest Lake, so don't worry, we got your back." But high school is kind of another world) What's the point of this story? Well, Pete Hegseth went to Forest Lake.

Robbing your competition of sleep and/or focus is the oldest trick in the books. I knew a scientist in a race to publish that would suggest The Wire to his competitors.

There is something unironically exhilarating about flying through wide open spaces under 180 degrees of blue sky, which is something you really only experience on the northern and western plains. Driving is a joy when you're the only one out there.

Finally got to the bottom of important question in my universe. Asked @JonRothstein why he capitalizes VALPO instead of using Valpo. He said he had a college professor who wore a Valpo polo with all caps. Valparaiso Basketball. A Thing of Beauty.

Great Smoky Mountains is the most biologically diverse national park in America. 19,000 species have been identified in the park. Scientists estimate up to 100,000 more haven't been discovered yet. It has nearly as many tree species as all of Europe. And it's free to enter.

I have always been convinced of this, even back to my senior year of high school. I wonder if it helps explain geographic disparities in higher ed enrollment trends.

In America, a serf may be let free if he picks 64 basketball games correctly

@kpottermn Similar from MCO. Two cancellations today, earliest they could confirm for me is Thursday

Heard from several flyers that after all the cancellations in/out of Minneapolis today (and full flights this week), Delta is saying the soonest they can get passengers from Atlanta home to MSP is Thursday. Woof.

Here's a map of traffic fatalities per 100M vehicle-miles. Florida's roads all seem ludicrously dangerous.

🚨 The Bryce Drew Shot 🚨 On this day in 1998, 13-seed @ValpoBasketball upset Ole Miss with @BryceDrewCoach's legendary buzzer-beater 🔥 #MarchMadness

None of you know how to use commas or apostrophes