This handy list is making the rounds today, boasting of 57 different views of the Kick Six. I settled in to watch them all, but realized it was over two hours long. And it didn’t include this one, which is my favorite, not just because I made it:

Mixing the band’s reaction — a brilliant, brilliant, video unto itself — with the actual play was a bit inspired, if I do so say myself. I think about how the stadium felt, how everyone reacted and remain so impressed by how the band pulled it together and did their job when everyone about them was losing their heads. It was an impressive performance.

Sadly, you couldn’t hear them in the stadium just then. It was so very, very loud.

We’re going to watch that game again soon, come watch it with us.

A friend of ours wrote this about that game, and it is worth a read if you like football or romance:

I would later ask why. Why that night? What changed? I had been ready for a while but had been patient. She told me plain and simply that as she watched the Kick Six, as she hugged and celebrated with her friend that had attended the game with her, that something was missing. She told me she wished that I had been there with her to celebrate that unforgettable moment. That same feeling I was feeling less than 50 yards away.

Everything was incredible, everything was unbelievable, but something was missing. That something was one another. Now, we had finally found one another and we were never going to let go.

That’s not coincidence.

Sounds like that one has a happy ending, doesn’t it?

Put in a few minutes on the bike this evening, my last ride before the weekend. I spun my feet in tiny circles just long enough to start sweating. And I did that just as the sun started to hide behind the trees. An already mild day, with the breeze of an easy ride blowing into me, felt positively coolish. That’s a strange sensation for July in Alabama.

Never question mild weather. I was going to say here, but that philosophy probably applies everywhere. You start to doubt what is going on, or fundamentally disagree with the disproportionate amounts of whatever you are having relative to the seasons and the barometer will hear about it. Next thing you know there are arctic winds in the summer or heat blisters in February.

Just enjoy the mild weather, and compliment the green things for how green they are. Maybe it’ll all stick around for a bit longer that way.

I learned this evening that I can’t eat Jelly Belly on my bike. The company sponsors a bike team and some of their products are supposed to be halfway decent for exercise energy levels and provide a little bit of fuel in a nice, self-contained package.

I received some as a stocking stuff from my mother-in-law this year and I’ve been waiting to give them a try. I stuffed them in my jersey pocket and set out for the ride, got halfway through it, reached back, wrestled with opening the thing for an entire downhill stretch and finally was able to coax out them out one at a time over about four miles.

Sitting down, I’d eat jelly beans that way, and with a nod to some completely arbitrary color scheme. On the bike, just give me the food. But they were all jammed up in the packaging. Obviously that’s not good when the point should be a quick snack for nourishment. So, delicious, but not practical for me.

Things to read … because reading is always practical.

Air Force research: How to use social media to control people like drones:

Using Graph theory, Dixon and his fellow researchers created a model to find the mathematics behind how much influence a social media “leader” needs in order to exert power and shift behavior. Dixon’s research, like many of the DARPA studies, did not perform real-world research to confirm findings—it was all simulation. And that’s a tripping point for taking this work further, one that Cornell Social Media Lab researchers hurdled with Facebook, creating an outcry in the process.

“The problem is, how do you perform a closed loop experiment? That’s something DARPA has struggled with,” said Dixon.

To that end, the SMISC program has pushed for experimental environments that use “closed” social networks. On the DARPA project page, the SMISC project team wrote, “SMISC researchers will create a closed and controlled environment where large amounts of data are collected, with experiments performed in support of development and testing. One example of such an environment might be a closed social media network of 2,000 to 5,000 people who have agreed to conduct social media-based activities in this network and agree to participate in required data collection and experiments. This network might be formed within a single organization, or span several. Another example might be a role-player game where use of social media is central to that game and where players have again agreed to participate in data collection and experiments.”

So, the more “thought leaders” you have, the better.

I suppose that sentence works in a great many contexts.

Similarly, CDC: Two of every five U.S. households have only wireless phones:

About two-in-five (41%) of U.S. households had only wireless phones in the second half of 2013, according to a report released today by the National Center for Health Statistics. The center, the statistical arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimated that 39.1% of adults and 47.1% of children lived in wireless-only households.

The share of wireless-only households was 2.8 percentage points higher than the same period in 2012. That’s slower than in previous years. In 2010, the wireless-only share grew by 5.2 percentage points; 4.3 percentage points in 2011; and 4.2 percentage points in 2012.

Something to keep in mind when phone surveys are mentioned.

This isn’t a new story, but it is certainly an impressive one. Soldier Keeps Fighting After Being Shot In The Throat By Tracer Round:

As their dawn raid on a Taliban position commenced, Mononey and another machine gunner were positioned on a rooftoop overwatch position to provide support. Suddenly 30 Taliban fighters engaged the patrol from all directions in horseshoe ambush.

Moments into the fight Lance Corporal Moloney was struck in the throat by a tracer round which passed clean through. “It winded me like I’ve never been winded. I was thinking “I’ve been shot in the neck, it’s game over. I figured I had minutes left.”

The bullet passed just behind his windpipe, missing arteries by millimeters.

“When after a couple of minutes I was not dead and I could still talk I started to get a better feeling,” he said. “We had to crack on. They were pushing quite hard so it was either maybe die or definitely die because they would have over-run us.”

And, after being evacuated, he was back in the fight in under a month. So it came to pass that we all earned a great deal of respect for the gritty bravery of the Blues and Royals, a cavalry regiment of the British Army.

And today is, tragically, an important day to trot out the short version of the Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook, which is distilled down in to nine excellent points. I’d add “Wait, just a moment” which is a corollary to the Reporter’s rule of “Verify” and is most closely related to rules 1, 3, 7 and 9 in that excellent list.

Would that such a thing wasn’t necessary, but good that we have a way of sharing the information it contains.

Finally, Weird Al gets handy:

I have a feeling this one is going to stick around awhile.