Probably not. But, as we’ve discussed before, he might be the worst boss in the NFL. (By worst, I mean “biggest jerk,” not “most incompetent.)

Now we have a new data point, concerning David Akers and the Eagles playoff loss.

So it turns out that two days before the Akers found out that his 6-year-old daughter had a tumor on her ovary which needed surgery–and doctors were not certain if it was benign or malignant.

Akers wasn’t a wuss–he sacked up and played, understanding that a bunch of his coworkers were counting on him. In the movie-version, he would have kicked the winning field-goal. In real life, the pressure got to him and he doinked two field goals that would have won the game. That’s too bad.

But after the game, Reid went and through Akers under the bus publicly, singling him out and blaming him for the loss.

You want to fire Akers because he couldn’t hold it together and perform his job to the highest level? Fine. But for Reid to publicly dump on him while knowing what was going on in Akers’ head?

That Andy Reid is pure class. No wonder his family life turned out so swell.

Galley Friend M.C. was kind enough to give me a copy of the Battlestar Galactica Series Bible.

Ruminations on the pro-life aspects of Cylon theology. A detailed explanation of how the FTL drive works. It’s okay. I mean, if you’re into that sort of thing.

In praising that Wired story earlier, I neglected to mention an even better piece on the subject by Paul Cella in last year’s New Atlantis. Shame on me.

Galley Friend A.W. sends along this link to a very promising service: The Boston WingWoman.

Genius.

And at just $60 an hour, totally worth doing.

(Surely some studio exec is buying the film rights to this idea right now. It’s ready-made rom-com.)

The snow gave me a chance to catch up on the last couple issues of Wired. Chris Anderson is, for me, a lot like Tina Fey. His book contains so much great stuff that when it lapses into simplemindedness, it seems inexcusable.

In any event, the last two issues exemplify how great Wired can be. In the January issue Felix Salmon and Jon Stokes write about how algorithms have taken over a large portion of the finance world. Maybe this is old news to people who work in the industry, but it knocked me flat:

On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Average inexplicably experienced a series of drops that came to be known as the flash crash, at one point shedding some 573 points in five minutes. Less than five months later, Progress Energy, a North Carolina utility, watched helplessly as its share price fell 90 percent. Also in late September, Apple shares dropped nearly 4 percent in just 30 seconds, before recovering a few minutes later.

These sudden drops are now routine, and it’s often impossible to determine what caused them. . . .

In late September, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission released a 104-page report on the May 6 flash crash. The culprit, the report determined, was a “large fundamental trader” that had used an algorithm to hedge its stock market position. The trade was executed in just 20 minutes—an extremely aggressive time frame, which triggered a market plunge as other algorithms reacted, first to the sale and then to one another’s behavior. The chaos produced seemingly nonsensical trades—shares of Accenture were sold for a penny, for instance, while shares of Apple were purchased for $100,000 each. (Both trades were subsequently canceled.)

This should scare us. Not for the obvious reasons–that we’ve built a machine and we don’t really understand how it works. (After all, the stock market was a black box even before we turned it over to the computers.)

But the rise of the algorithms is yet another example of how the world of finance is no longer a business of allocating capital. It’s just a money machine, not much different from a casino, which acts almost like a closed system. Which is why you can have spectacular stock growth even while the real world remains mired in serious economic problems. Maybe this disconnect isn’t the end of the world. But it’s not obvious to me why it should be sustainable and harmless.

PS: The current issue of Wired isn’t up on the web yet, but it’s got a 5-star story on how scratch-game lotto tickets can be cracked and how organized crime may (or may not) be using this public lottery to launder money. It’s crazy, crazy good.

Everything–and I mean everything–about this spot screams Michael Bay. And not the ludicrous, Transformers 2,Bay, but the iconic Bay from The Rock and the trailer for Pearl Harbor. From the cuts to the score to the framing–this ad deserves its own Criterion treatment. It just needs another explosion or two.

Oh sure, you can pretend you don’t love the awesome. But you’re only fooling yourself.

Because you can’t get enough dish talk.

David Brooks writes today that nations are now more like elite college competing for talent, as a result of globalization, open borders, the end of history, etc.

Whether or not most Americans agree that this analysis, I suspect you’d get a very high percentage of people from across the political spectrum to agree with his conclusion, that:

The nation with the most diverse creative hot spots will dominate the century.

I suspect that everyone from Tom Friedman to George W. Bush would sign off on this proposition.

And if it’s true, then it’s really good news for America, because it means that China is doomed! After all, China isn’t just less diverse than America. It’s less diverse than Switzerland and South Africa–in fact, China is nearly as racially and ethnically homogenous as Iceland!

Pity the Chinese. How can they ever hope to compete?