DBD 1.28.12: Pac-12 Streets

Highly touted recruits across the nation will be making their Signing Day decisions on Feb. 1st. Tune in LIVE at 3pm PT to Prime Ticket as elite high school stars; Jordan Payton, Bryce Treggs, Brandon Beaver, Randall Goforth, and Kenny Lawler announce their choice on where they will continue their remarkable football careers!

Treggs? Really?? There are questions surrounding most of them, but TREGGS?? The only people that will be tuning into his announcement will be Cal fans who are either looking to make a bad day good or a good day even better. Go Bears!

Hahaha your research money at work!

I knew that people somehow viewed the DBD without automatically seeing the pictures, but I didn’t bother to look into it too carefully. After the meat-gazing hullabaloo yesterday, though, I decided to investigate. Only then did I realize that you can view the DBD in a collapsed view. I UNDERSTAND NOW!

The DBD shouldn’t collapse! It should be in all its expanded glory!!!

Avi has pissed off Sark

At least eight sea lions have been found shot to death in the Puget Sound region in recent weeks, wildlife officials say.

The bodies of seven sea lions were recently found on the Nisqually River, south of Tacoma, all apparently shot, NBC station KING 5 of Seattle reported. On Monday, a mature male California sea lion was found dead on West Seattle’s Lincoln Park beach.

During a necropsy, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife removed a bullet from the left lung of that sea lion, according to the animal protection group Seal Sitters, which keeps watch over baby seals left on the beach while their mothers are foraging.

State and federal authorities are investigating, but they said they don’t know who killed the sea lions. The penalty could range from fees to possible jail time.

California sea lions are a protected species under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Stellar sea lions are a federally protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Almost two years ago, five sea lions were found shot to death on West Seattle beaches. In that instance, the Humane Society offered a $2,500 reward for information leading to an arrest.

But Google Maps is limited in that it doesn’t readily show city limits. You really have to use Street View to look for clues as to when a street crosses from one city into another. Such as when street signs change color (Oakland’s are white letters on green background; Emeryville’s are white on blue; Berkeley’s are white on brown; Albany’s are white on black, Kensington’s are black on white.)

Alternately, if you’re intimately familiar with the area, you might have better information than what Google Maps can or does provide. So, without further ado, here are some elaborations and clarifications.

UNIVERSITY AVENUE:
East Terminus: Technically, University Ave’s east terminus is Oxford St. on the west edge of campus. On the opposite side of Oxford St is The Crescent (The Crescent runs from Oxford St. (at University Ave) on its north terminus to Oxford St. (at Center St) on its south terminus).

UNIVERSITY DRIVE:
University Drive’s west terminus is the midway point on The Crescent; it winds its way through campus, past Memorial Glade, on the south of the Hearst Mining Circle to its east terminus at Gayley Rd.

CALIFORNIA STREET
North Terminus: Hopkins Street in North Berkeley. California St. doesn’t become Monterey Ave. so much as it meets Monterey Ave. at Hopkins. Monterey is one of many streets in Berkeley named for California counties when Berkeley was trying to persuade the legislature to move the Capitol to Berkeley. Several streets were named for States of the Union for the same reason.

STANF*RD AVENUE:
Mostly within Oakland, its western terminus is Horton St in Emeryville. The border between Oakland and Emeryville is somewhere between Beaudry St and Vallejo St.

As noted, there is also a Stanf*rd Ave in Kensington; its southern terminus is Yale Ave. There are a number of streets in Kensington named for famous colleges and universities. Kensington’s border with Berkeley is a little south of Yale Ave.

UCLA Bruins
LOS ANGELES AVENUE (Berkeley)
West Terminus: The Alameda in North Berkeley.
East Terminus: Spruce Street in North Berkeley.

LOS ANGELES STREET (Oakland)
North Terminus: Stanf*rd Avenue
South Terminus: Aileen Street

WASHINGTON AVENUE (Albany)
Washington Avenue is entirely within Albany. The east terminus is at the border with Berkeley, between Curtis Street and Neilson Street. San Lorenzo Avenue’s west terminus is at Berkeley’s border with Albany.

http://www.nba.com/warriors/tickets/run_tmc_bobblehead_series.html

i do! i do!

Does anyone have a stream to the Senior Bowl goin on right now?

Will keep you posted.

watched this today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh29_SERH0Y

Art of Flight.

Thanks, AndyHogan, for classing up the weekend.

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2012/01/sf_beer_weeks_coming_—_start.php

It was snowing.

yay for live sports at 1am!

nadal v djokovic.

NSW firm seeks brothel sex inspector

[1]

European Union leaders gather for their first summit of 2012 as a deteriorating economy and the struggle to complete a Greek debt writeoff risk sidetracking efforts to stamp out the financial crisis.

EU chiefs arrived in Brussels today to put the finishing touches on a German-led deficit-control treaty and to endorse the statutes of a 500 billion-euro ($656 billion) rescue fund to be set up this year. European finance officials yesterday discussed a deal that Greece and its private creditors expect to complete in the coming days after bondholders signaled they would accept government demands for a bigger cut in their debt holdings.

Efforts to hold the 17-nation euro area together with bolstered fiscal rules and a stronger firewall are colliding with stalled progress in Greece, where the crisis began in 2009. To prevent a financial collapse, Greek bondholders have been pushed to cede more ground after agreeing in October to take a 50 percent cut in the face value of more than 200 billion euros of debt.

"The fact we’re still at the beginning of 2012 talking about Greece is a sign this problem hasn’t been dealt with," U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Chinese Turn Bullish on Booze and Caterpillar Fungus

With Chinese stocks falling, real-estate markets flat and bank deposits offering measly returns, Chinese investors have been looking for help in strange places. Besides traditional medicinal products, they are plowing money into art-based stock markets, homegrown liquors, mahogany furniture and jade, among other decidedly non-Western asset classes.

“On a micro level, speculation has appeared,” says Long Xingchao, president of the information center of the China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The association says prices of traditional medicines, including red ginseng and false starwort, have surged since 2010, partly because of speculators. Mr. Long insists, however, that a price bubble isn’t forming. “There’s nothing to pop,” he says.

No, that’s seriously the headline

One of these days men’s tennis is going to get boring again. There will be a fallow period. Greats will retire, get hurt, fatten up, open bad restaurants, babble on TV and buy vineyards. There will be a new, unremarkable No. 1. A murky two through 10. Maybe a U.S. player—a real-live U.S. player!—will crack the top five. Grand Slam finals will shrink to three uneventful sets. Tennis will return to that stale-aired foyer it got trapped in a while ago—dull, characterless, skippable.

That time isn’t now. Men’s professional tennis may be the most satisfying sport on the planet at the moment. There is no game with so much excellence currently swirling at its top, that so reliably delivers not just entertainment, but historic greatness. It isn’t to be missed. Conventional superlatives fail. Once-a-lifetime? Symphony of brilliance? Wicked good? It all sounds cheesy, inadequate. But what’s happening in the men’s game is as close as sports gets to unadulterated joy, the kind of outrageous viewer experience that leaves the audience gasping, as if anaerobic, as it did Sunday morning, in the men’s final of the Australian Open.

To be clear, when I say men’s tennis, I am really talking about the interactions of three players. Maybe four, if we want to be generous and include Andy Murray, who has yet to win a Grand Slam, and keeps grabbing for that glory, only to pull the doorknob off in his hand. The unquestioned top three are world No. 1 Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Between them, they have won 31 Slams, and Djokovic is still shopping in aisle one. They are as formidable and as entangled a trio as tennis has ever witnessed—as silly as it is to get into generational comparisons, it’s fair to say that the great three of Borg, McEnroe and Connors (26 combined Slams) are on the run, in their flowing hair and short-shorts.

Could a 60-minute Super Bowl equal this kind of drawn-out saga? An NBA Final? An Olympiad? (Please don’t say the Pro Bowl or the NHL All-Star Game.) Every spring someone trots out the claim that the flurry of buzzer beaters in the NCAA basketball tournament makes it the most riveting event in sports, and there’s always the World Cup, but what’s happening in tennis feels far more intimate, close up, personal. Djokovic, Nadal and Federer are deep in our pores. It feels like they have more to give, but you never can be sure, and that’s what makes it so….whatever word you want to use. On to Paris.

[1]

The upheaval that has roiled much of Syria for the past 10 months is seeping its way into the heart of the country’s capital, puncturing the sense of invulnerability that had until recently sustained confidence in the government’s ability to survive the revolt.

On Sunday, security forces launched a major assault to reclaim suburbs just a short drive from the city center that had fallen under the sway of rebel soldiers fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.

[1]

No law bans "Mein Kampf" in Germany, but the government of Bavaria, where Hitler officially resided at the time of his 1945 suicide, holds the copyright and guards it ferociously. German-language copies that were printed before 1945 are legal, although they command a premium price, and the book is available in translation elsewhere in the world.

But the question of whether to publish it in the country where Hitler plotted his empire has lost some of its edge in the Google era, when a complete German-language copy of the book pops up as the second result on the local version of the search engine.

"To say this is a very dangerous book, we must ban it, this is ridiculous," said Wolfgang Wippermann, a professor of modern history at the Free University of Berlin. "Maybe it was necessary once, but now it’s over, it makes no sense. You can find it so easily."

I’m going to see Nick Offerman (Parks & Rec) tonight, but I’m not sure if it’ll be stand-up or what. Hurray!

Also, for those of you who are into that kind of thing, my friends did a blind taste-test of vodka, and these were their results:

1. Level (11.3/15)
2. Grey Goose (10.7/15)
3. Russian Standard (10.1/15)
…
13. Rain (7.8/15)
14. Oyo (7.7/15)
15. Watershed (6.5/15)

Most disputed: Rain (Std = 3.6)
Least disputed: Level (Std = 1.7)

Three breakthroughs are poised to transform this century as much as telephony and electricity did the last..

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

Information technology has entered a big-data era. Processing power and data storage are virtually free. A hand-held device, the iPhone, has computing power that shames the 1970s-era IBM mainframe. The Internet is evolving into the "cloud"—a network of thousands of data centers any one of which makes a 1990 supercomputer look antediluvian. From social media to medical revolutions anchored in metadata analyses, wherein astronomical feats of data crunching enable heretofore unimaginable services and businesses, we are on the cusp of unimaginable new markets.

The second transformation? Smart manufacturing. This is the first structural shift since Henry Ford launched the economic power of “mass production.” While we see evidence already in automation and information systems applied to supply-chain management, we are just entering an era where the very fabrication of physical things is revolutionized by emerging materials science. Engineers will soon design and build from the molecular level, optimizing features and even creating new materials, radically improving quality and reducing waste.

Also, how about all these Iowa State upsets, huh?

That old Super Bowl office standby, the box pool, may seem like a glorified lottery: You pick the lucky numbers, you win. But what if some numbers are luckier than others?

It’s not CGB. But it’s @cali_showtime4

[1]

It’s like…[continued in the other DBD]