Our players report today! Time to take the next big step on Rice Football’s trek to a new legacy.
Only slightly less important: it’s time for your third install of 3TT:
- Latest cool thing I learned about Houston: Space Center Houston
There was a time, like a lot of kids, that I wanted to become an astronaut. I witnessed the Challenger explosion in person when I was eight years old. I even went to Space Camp when I was thirteen.
Last week a visiting friend and I drove to Johnson Space Center to tour the astronaut training center and Space Center Houston. The Space Center is a big museum, showing the past and future of space exploration. It’s accredited by the Smithsonian, which should tell you all you need to know about the quality of the displays. Most of the “future” displays were geared toward the current goal of landing on Mars. NASA hopes to send astronauts to the red planet by 2040. It they reach that target, the astronauts that make the trip would currently be 7-16 years old.
Especially cool for me were the artifacts from the early years of space flight — Gemini & Mercury capsules, a moon rock, and a piece of Mars that crashed to Earth from a meteorite. You can touch both of the rocks.
- Technology I’m Psyched About: Our New Virtual Reality Training System
Check out this tweet. You all probably new that we use STriVR Virtual Reality to train our QB’s. Last week, we took it a step further. In the past, we filmed the VR and had our QB’s watch it without a systematic learning structure in place. Working with my friend, Dr. Dutch Franz and his TierOne Performance organization, we’ve implemented a training regimen for VR based on scientifically supported performance psychology. Dr. Dutch uses the same VR training strategies used by U.S. Special Forces soldiers.
Other D-1 and NFL teams have VR, but don’t know how to use it to it’s fullest capability. We just catapulted right past them.
- Podcast I Binged On While Vacationing: Revisionist History
Malcolm Gladwell is a writer who has worked for the Washington Post and the New Yorker. You made have read or heard about his bestselling books: The Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink, and David and Goliath. Revisionist History is his podcast where he investigates things forgotten or misunderstood. The episodes aren’t very long, and many are facinating.
The former English teacher and grammar nerd in me were riveted by Season 3 Episode 1: Divide and Conquer. It’s “The complete, unabridged history of the world’s most controversial semicolon.” Sound boring? It’s not. Don’t believe me? Well, did you know that Texas has special permission to divide itself up into up to five different states whenever it chooses?
As always, I’m looking forward to your responses and suggestions.
