What I’m Thinking:

Writers write.

People crave legibility. They want to be able to read a situation and understand it– or at the very least convince themselves that they do. The sensible mind recoils from ambiguity. So when people ask me what I do (as they always do, sooner or later), I tell them that I’m a writer.

In truth that’s a pretty small aspect of my contributions to Footballguys, but “maintaining team pages” and “summarizing training camp reports” and “projecting return yardage” and “researching and projecting variance” and the like are incomprehensible to my grandmother and my doctor and the friendly neighborhood mom at the park. But everyone knows what a writer does. Writers write.

Sometimes I’ll have to correct misapprehensions. No, not like a novelist or anything. As fantasy football has penetrated the public consciousness more and more, I’m often able to be more precise (if not more accurate) and say I write about fantasy football. But most people never follow up past “I’m a writer”; they wanted the situation legible, and once it is they’re content to move on.

Investors invest, singers sing, inventors invent, fingers fing, managers manage, and writers write. It’s simple. It’s legible. And it’s a problem because I haven’t been writing. And if I haven’t been writing, then what am I?

I’m correcting that, that’s what.

So that’s what this is. A new blog, a new post. Updates on social media to improve accountability. Time to either get busy writing or figure out some other answer for the next time I see one of my dad’s cousins for the first time in a decade and she asks me what I do.

What I’m Reading:

Humans Are All More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think (Scientific American)

My parents met at some sort of family function. They’re cousins (though by marriage rather than by blood). My mom loves telling their meet-cute to get a reaction. Listening to it again recently I was reminded of the fun(?) fact that we’re all more closely related than we would probably prefer to think about.

Consider: genealogically, everybody on the planet has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. Number of forebears n generations back = 2^n, it’s a mathematical law. The average generation is somewhere around 25 years, which means going back 1,000 years ago (40 generations), you should have over 1 trillion great, great, great(…), great grandparents. But while my knowledge of history is a little rusty, I’m fairly sure that the total population of humans on earth a thousand years ago was a tiny bit less than a trillion. (Google gives me an estimate of 300 million.)

How to reconcile your mathematical trillion+ Great^38 Grandparents with the fact that there were only 300 million humans? Easy– each human occupies several spots on your family tree thanks to the magic of inbreeding. Actually, each human has to occupy close to 4,000 spots on your family tree on average. (Higher, really, since many of those humans were genealogical dead-ends, genetic lines dying off at some point in the past thousand years.)

Anyway, here’s a fun read on genetics, genealogy, isopoints, and inbreeding. And a reminder that we’re all related to our spouses, it’s just that some of us have to go back a little bit further than others.

What I’m Working On:

• Updated returner projections for Footballguys
• Article: “Are Dynasty Leagues the Right Fit for You?”