Day four of the year, and day four of working out.  So far, so good. 

Another key learning, it's great to watch football while working out, and man was there some great football today?  I have to admit, I have not paid attention to pro football at all this year, until today.  I could not have told you who had made the playoffs - okay, I knew the Rams did not - but it was fun shifting gears from the Bowls and getting into the playoffs.  Onward.

Am I the only one who 1) admires the Patriots and 2) was glad to see them lose?  The end of an era, and we might not see such domination again.

Joe Papparlardo in Popular Mechanics: The SpaceX Decade: How One Company Changed Spaceflight Forever.  "Something very strange happened to spaceflight over the past 10 years: Commercial Space companies now have devotees. Like impassioned sports fans, their conflicts play out on social media, where detractors and worshippers swap insults and Delta-v rocket equations with equal invective."  And meanwhile government organizations like NASA have stopped launching missions! 

Don't you love the way we can't speak the truth anymore?  Powerline notes The Euphemism of the Decade.  "I suspect that once upon a time 'juvenile delinquent' was a liberal euphemism for 'young criminal.'  As often happens, however, eventually even the euphemism is thought to be too harsh, and so a better one has to be found. And so one has: This press release yesterday talked about 'justice-involved youth.'"  Nobody is fooled. 

And here we have the Epic Correction of the Decade:  "The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of 'Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies' American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51.  The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed."  Heh.  If we apply the [correct] interpretation of the study to the authors themselves, we find ... 

So, this was fun: Every joke from Airplane, ranked.  Makes you want to watch it again, doesn't it?  Well do; it's just as great as you remembered.  And most pleasantly un-PC.  For me the very best part was Lloyd Bridges' "I picked a bad week to give up X" running joke.  When he reaches "sniffing glue" I pretty much lose it. 

Apropos: Josh Newman: Basically, Darwinism.  "If you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good.  Why?  Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not.  The past wasn't better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit." 

And wrapping up for the day, reviving an important tradition; here's a baby Aye-Aye.  "Nocturnal primates with bushy tails and bony middle fingers, aye-ayes are endangered on their native island of Madagascar."  Let the puns begin!