Thursday Links

Weird week here. It was in the 70s Monday, high 60s Tuesday, then the wind chill was in the teens all day Wednesday. The sun is bright and dazzling today, but it is still very chilly. That combined with some other things has thrown my body clock off.[1] I’m having trouble sleeping at night then struggle all day to avoid taking a nap, usually unsuccessfully, so I can go to bed tired. The cherry on top was our tornado sirens going off at 2:00 AM Wednesday morning as severe thunderstorms blew through. Pretty sure I got less than four hours of sleep that night.

So rather that write about the Jayhawks and get mad again, finish up a Reader’s Notebook post, or share some more thoughts on the car-buying process, here are a few pretty solid links.

Sally Jenkins with a fantastic piece about how the NCAA’s stance on Lynette Woodard’s scoring mark – which Caitlin Clark passed last night – is just another hypocritical stance in its long history of them.

There is nothing trivial about this. It’s an act of erasure. Example: the NCAA regards Michigan as the holder of the record for most college football victories of all time, with 989. Yet the NCAA didn’t come into existence until 1910, and Michigan began playing football in 1879. The NCAA doesn’t strike or asterisk anything Michigan won “pre-NCAA.”…The NCAA wouldn’t dream of ignoring those years.

Yet they do so with women’s basketball.

The NCAA erased an entire generation of women’s sports

If someone writes about the Voyager spacecraft, I’m obligated to share it. I loved the opening line of this piece about Voyager 1’s impending death.

Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die.

Death, Lonely Death

You know those sketchy texts you get occasionally about some package that can’t be delivered unless you do X or Y? In this piece, the author did a deep dive and learned that a text he thought was a phishing attempt was actually legit. Things are just going to get more confusing as AI takes over more and more of the logistics/customer service stack.

Thanks FedEx, This is Why we Keep Getting Phished

I dig stories about submarines, so this was pretty awesome. Well, other than the fact the Navy signed off on it because the world is as unstable and close to major war as it has been since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Life Aboard a Nuclear Submarine as the US Responds to Threats Around the Globe