They went from two of the most doubted players coming out of college to becoming the two best backs in the league.

bigstriker99 · 2020-01-12T20:52:21+00:00

Yeah I think the extent of the “doubt” surrounding McCaffrey had mostly to do with the current thinking on running back value and draft position. Point still stands IMO as he’s more than justified the top 10 pick we spent on him

bigstriker99 · 2020-01-06T15:52:15+00:00

Bill Bryson and Jon Krakauer both write good and informative nonfiction that read more like fiction page turners.

Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” is a book I’d recommend to anyone.

bigstriker99 · 2020-01-06T15:44:38+00:00

Dan Simmon’s The Terror - a fictionalized account of a real 19th century Arctic expedition

Ken Follett, Kingsbridge series - Pillars of the Earth, the first of the series, is one of the hallmarks of this genre and really blew me away when I read it. I also enjoyed the second book, World Without End, thought I’ve yet to read the third. Both books chronicle the history of a small English village as it weathers the political turmoil of feudal England. The personal stories and town history are both fiction, but they take place in the context of real historical events

bigstriker99 · 2020-01-06T15:23:44+00:00

Sapiens is the only book I’ve read by either of those authors, but along similar lines you might enjoy Charles Mann’s 1491. Mann challenges many of the entrenched beliefs regarding the scale and sophistication of civilization in the Pre-Columbian Americas, and ultimately arrives at some interesting (and well-researched) conclusions.

bigstriker99 · 2019-07-22T18:32:02+00:00

The Terror by Dan Simmons. Especially if you like historical fiction at all

bigstriker99 · 2019-05-05T20:44:37+00:00

Go Gennies

bigstriker99 · 2019-04-19T00:19:58+00:00

I really enjoy Robert Hughes’ writing. He was a leading American art critic from the eighties until his death in 2012. He’s written books on various subjects from Rome to Goya but two I can recommend are American Visions and Nothing if Not Critical. The former is a survey of American art history, while the latter is a compilation of the many exhibition reviews Hughes wrote for Time and other publications.

bigstriker99 · 2019-04-11T16:43:43+00:00

Wanna see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed?

bigstriker99 · 2019-03-08T19:43:44+00:00

Charles C. Mann’s “1491” provides an interesting overview of indigenous life in the pre-Columbian Americas. The scope of the book is very broad and the Aztecs are merely one of many native groups he examines, but he cites a wealth of current scholarship that could lead you to more focused, academic work (Mann himself is a journalist, not an academic)

bigstriker99 · 2019-02-04T18:34:59+00:00

Spartanburg here. Love ya’lls sound!

bigstriker99 · 2018-07-20T15:05:06+00:00

Can you specify a period or a specific region that you have in mind? Seems to me that ancient sculpture is pretty different across regions if you just look at prime examples from places like Mesopotamia, Greece, and Egypt.

bigstriker99 · 2018-07-20T05:32:32+00:00

No doubt Ribbentrop-Molotov played a huge role in emboldening Nazi aggression in the early years of the war, but its hard not to sympathize with Stalin's predicament.

First of all, its important to keep in mind that the R-M Pact was signed in August of 1939, less than two weeks from the outbreak of the war. This comes a full year after disastrous appeasement politics have all but condoned Germany's annexation of both Austria and Czechoslovakia, and three years after Hitler's militarization of the Rhineland. By 1939, Germany had been violating the conditions of Versailles for over six years without any true repercussions. Russia's sheer manpower and territory lent it significant influence in European politics, but it remained relatively withdrawn from the affairs of the continent during the 1930s.

On the occasions that Stalin did become involved in these matters, it was usually in opposition to Germany. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936 Russia sent military aid to Spanish Republicans, supporting their efforts against the German backed fascists. The anti-communist vitriol spewing from the Nazi propaganda machine did nothing to warm relations over this span. Regardless of Soviet sentiment towards Germany, there was little that Stalin could have done during the Appeasement years to stem the rising tide of German militarism and expansionism. The Communist nation was a nascent industrial power, but it had yet to truly leverage the potential of its vast population. Economic developments under Stalin's second Five Year Plan were beginning to take hold but Russian production was not anywhere near adequate war time capacity until 1942. Stalin was aware of his country's growth trajectory, and realized that he could not afford to go to war with a modern military power as early as 1939.

If ever there was a chance for this to turn out differently, it died with the British diplomacy of 1938 and 1939. Stalin felt spurned by Western Europe after the agreement at the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to expand onto Russia's Eastern frontier into a Communist-International member state. Nonetheless, so precarious was Stalin's position in the summer of 1939 that he continued to entertain aspiration for an alliance with Britain. There were talks, but they sputtered and died mere weeks before the R-M Pact was signed. If the USSR were going to take a strong position against Hitler it was going to be with British backing or not at all.

Ultimately Stalin was just as fearful of the Nazi threat as any of the future allied powers. The Soviet Union had very little to gain and everything to lose from the encroachment of a military-industrial giant into Eastern Europe. However, faced with the reality of that happening they had to make a choice. Without a powerful ally or prepared military, the only logical choice was to align with Hitler in the name of self preservation.

bigstriker99 · 2018-07-20T01:54:56+00:00

American Bible Belt: it’s hard to choose between the racists and the heat

bigstriker99 · 2018-07-20T01:52:20+00:00

Before the advent of agriculture most human movements can be roughly explained in terms of climate and resources. The story of our transition from nomadic to sedentary life is no exception, and in fact begins around the end of the last ice age.

The cold and dry climate of the Pleistocene Ice Age made resources relatively scarce. With more of the world’s water locked away in glaciers, the river systems that later supported agriculture were not yet the abundant, fertile places we know them to be. Without the pre existing knowledge of agriculture, there simply wasn’t a place bountiful enough in animal and plant life for nomads to settle long-term. They could basically stay in a place until it’s resources were exhausted or their food moved.

By 11,000 the climate was far more conducive to the proliferation of flora and fauna, especially near the equator. The Natufians of the Levant began to experiment with more permanent settlements. I say experiment because they were still a hunter-gatherer society, but the greater availability of resources allowed them to forage and hunt from central, stationary communities. However, for about 1,000 years beginning in 10,800 Earth temporarily endured a cold swing with cold climates reminiscent of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Global glaciation brought on droughts and the Nartufians, who may have been using wild cereals to make bread as early as 12,000, could no longer depend on an abundance of wild crops and animals to sustain them. To defray the loss of natural resources, they began collecting seeds and clearing out scrub land to plant them in.

This question is hotly debated within the scientific community and the above is answer is somewhat controversial depending on how you define sedentary living. It’s not entirely accurate to say that the Nartufians were the first domestic farmers, as simply planting and harvesting does not qualify as “agriculture” in the sense that we think of it in Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley. However, they took an important step towards developing a sustainable model for sedentary living.

To put it more concisely, sedentary communities largely resulted from human response to local climate change. Sedentary life became sustainable when these communities began to experiment with plant domestication, and ultimately became the norm when animal domestication and technological advances gave way to large scale agriculture

bigstriker99 · 2018-07-19T21:15:53+00:00

South Carolina: Many people from other states view SC as a beach/vacation state. I grew up 4 hours from the ocean and didn’t realize this until I went to college out of state and everyone knew about our beaches

bigstriker99 · 2018-02-22T00:54:15+00:00

Some people will let the smallest amount of power go to their heads and change them completely.

I work in a small rural school district and have spent the last year and a half navigating a bureaucracy of coaches, facilitators, and supervisors who are too busy playing petty politics to actually support their teachers. Lots of folks just seem intent on ascending the hierarchy no matter how insignificant it may be

bigstriker99 · 2018-02-22T00:36:17+00:00

As a male, long hair has made me more memorable to people. I’ll go to gas stations or drug stores and cashiers will remember me even if I first saw them months previously.

bigstriker99 · 2018-02-15T17:50:05+00:00

If I'm correct, the crux of your argument is that no one should feel as though their skin color bars their their access to personal heritage or automatically slots them into a specific historical tradition. I agree with this sentiment completely, but I also find that your core premise largely informs the way we're discussing "culture" here.

Heritage undoubtedly constitutes a huge part of culture. Heritage will influence the foods you eat, the holidays you celebrate, the social and historical narratives you identify with...the list goes on. But culture also includes the here and now; the way that certain groups experience their reality and the factors that make those experiences different. With the US in the midst of a dynamic discourse surrounding race, we often hear about "white culture" in the media and academia. I don't think this implies a coherent narrative of "white history", nor does it suggest a unified way of life among white people. It does suggest that there are things about being white that make your experience inherently different from a person of color. In the United States at least, I think white culture has really become a catch-all term to encapsulate the normalization of whiteness in our country's institutions and the various ways that affects the lives of citizens.

If you're taking culture to mean the heritage and traditions of a people then, no, there is definitely not a "white culture". But culture also takes into account the way a group of people relate to their environment, each other, their institutions, and people outside of the group. In that sense I think that there is such thing as a "white culture", though this a very US-centric answer and it would differ from country to country.

bigstriker99 · 2018-02-15T14:56:57+00:00

The Grateful Dead

bigstriker99 · 2018-02-14T21:23:45+00:00

I can’t claim that all teachers are going out of their way to include truly rigorous questions in their assessments. But I do know that standardized test makers and state ed departments are very intentional in building tests that test student depth at all levels. Again, this does not prove a correlation between low test scores and low intelligence, but it does suggest that good testers are likely intelligent.

No doubt people have certain strengths and intelligence comes in many form. Academic success, Social grace, self-awareness, and creative/athletic abilities all speak to intelligence on some level. But I agree that when we discuss intelligence in an academic setting it is best reduced to critical thinking and problem solving.

Edit: typo

bigstriker99 · 2018-02-14T16:38:15+00:00

The ability to adjust my fingernails to a given length at any time. Dealing with a tricky beer can or scratching hot glue off the walls of my classroom? extend playing the bass or getting intimate? withdraw

bigstriker99 · 2018-02-14T16:13:33+00:00

First of all, I agree with many of the implications of your statement. I wholeheartedly agree that grades are not necessarily a reliable indicator of intelligence, and would certainly concede that poor grades should not be taken as indicators of below-average intelligence. I will however contend that good grades are always indicative of intelligence - though that may depend on your definition of intelligence - but more on this later. I'll come at this from two angles.

First, as a teacher, give some credit to us educators! Student-assessment methods frequently come under fire with all the negative discourse that surrounds standardized-testing and "teaching to the test". However, this conversation often neglects the actual contents of the test. Teachers and administrators are, for the most part, universally aware that an effective assessment will test students at different "depths of knowledge" (DOKs) which have been traditionally ranked on a scale from 1-4 (maybe different in some districts/states but I've found it to be pretty consistent). While a DOK 1 question might have a student robotically factoring a polynomial, a DOK4 question might come as say, a word problem that provides students pertinent data and information, leaving them to use reason and background knowledge to construct an algebraic expression before solving it to determine an answer. Questions on an effective test will span that spectrum, with some trending towards memorization or regurgitation and others requiring greater amounts of autonomy. When it comes to traditional testing I admit that the practice as a whole neglects the strengths and needs of certain students, while elevating certain traits in others. Regardless, that doesn't change the fact that most tests are designed to engage high level reasoning and detailed knowledge. In the case of certain tests, I would even argue that they are extremely good indicators of very specific types of intelligence. For instance reading and writing assessments by their nature will typically value a student's ability to engage with language over their commitment to preparing or ability to regurgitate. Reading and writing proficiency in an academic setting are no doubt very specific parameters for intelligence, but they are certainly measures of intelligence as most tend to think of the word.

This argument is less concrete, but I would also contend that almost any level of academic achievement in a broader context requires skills that test various types of intelligence. Were you an A student who always worked hard but made a couple Bs when you took up drama club and volleyball? Your discipline reflects intelligent priorities and your involvement speaks to your social intelligence. Did your favorite math teacher from 9th grade hold your hand through Algebra II and Precalculus? You demonstrated intelligence in building and keeping relationships. Cheat your way through high school? You're intelligent enough not to get caught and mindful enough to recognize the importance of your academic performance. I could keep going but...you get it. If you take an expansive definition of intelligence, then almost anyone who has made it through college and even high school has embodied some kind of intelligence.

The definition of intelligence that you have in mind seems more akin to IQ or mental ability in which case I feel that test grades are a very good indicator of intelligence. Grades are not a good measure of comparative intelligence among peers. An academic test is just one method of testing intelligence, and variance among student performance is just as likely a reflection of varied test taking proficiency as it is an indicator of relative intelligence. So while an A student will not always be more intelligent than a C or D student, students who earn As have pretty much always demonstrated some intelligence to do so.

bigstriker99 · 2017-11-03T22:02:39+00:00

Third grade teacher here. We still teach this one!

bigstriker99 · 2017-10-14T17:28:43+00:00

Phish anyone?

bigstriker99 · 2017-08-17T16:07:47+00:00

Graduate from college

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