Gary Hesse Personal Web Site

Shaun Alexander was released today by the Seattle Seahawks.

Thanks, Shaun, for eight seasons of great memories… for being a man of great character as well as remarkable accomplishment.

Link to Seahawks | Statement of Shaun Alexander on his release from the Seahawks | Seattle Times Newspaper

Have to admit, I didn’t see that coming. Former Sonics owner Howard Schultz must’ve read those e-mails detailing the Oklahoma Raiders’ plans to move the Sonics while they were publicly assuring him — and us — that they’d do all they could to keep the team in the Northwest.  Now we hear that Schultz is planning to sue them to get the team back.

The Seattle Times’ Jerry Brewer breaks it down pretty well; success in the lawsuit is a long shot, but with potentially positive results short of keeping the team in Seattle.

With the courts involved in two different suits (the other between the owners and the city of Seattle concerning the KeyArena lease), I don’t see how the team can be relocated in time for the beginning of the next NBA season.

The longer the issue lingers, the more visibility the story gets in national media, and the greater the black eye for the owners, and for Stern as well, who seems to be willing to do anything to get his crony Bennett into the NBA owners’ club. It should, at minimum, raise the cost of cancelling the current lease to release the team before 2010. And, depending how embarrassing the whole soap opera becomes to the NBA, may even shake loose an expansion team.

How many teams (with the possible exception of the Knicks) can say their front office creates more entertainment than the team they put on the floor?

I haven’t decided if this article which suggests that researchers have discovered a genetic link to ruthlessness says more about genetic research or journalism, since it casts a sorry shadow over both.

Researchers selected 200 volunteers to play what they called the “dictator game”, in which half were given money and the option to share it with an anonymous participant from the remaining half.  The conclusion drawn by the researchers: people were more likely to behave selfishly the shorter their version of the AVPR1a gene.

So far, so good. But instead of remembering their Intro to Logic class where they learned about post hoc fallacies (you remember, dear reader, that ‘correlation isn’t the same as causation’, don’t you?), the researchers lept to flights of wild speculation, such as this excerpt from the Nature article:

Ebstein suggests the vasopressin receptors in the brains of people with short AVPR1a may be distributed in such a way to make them less likely to feel rewarded by the act of giving.

Though the mechanism is unclear, Ebstein says, he is fairly sure that selfish, greedy dictatorship has a genetic component.

In other words, the end result of the research is, “I have no proof, but I think this is what is true.”

The journal covering the story has its own issues. The major one, of course, is that it starts with an affirmation of the fanciful speculation (note the headline) and waits until 3/4 of the story is past before acknowledging the premise is on shaky ground, and offering an alternative, less sensational interpretation of the data. You’d hope for more from a leading scientific journal, wouldn’t you?