@michaelallen.bsky.social
IR Scholar Professor• War, US Foreign Policy, Basing, Troop Deployments, Data, and Political Economy • @boisestate • International Relations • SciFi • Gaming • www.ma-allen.com • https://tinyurl.com/GoogleScholarAllen
"We cannot solve the end of this season by blowing something up. We cannot solve the end of this season by enacting violence against our enemies. We simply have to use the values of Star Trek to outwit our opponents."”
and does a ton of violence and it's bigger violence than the original violence that they're trying to counteract. And so I think it was really important to us in our writer's room: we have a lot of just-dyed-in-the-wool Star Trek fans who said,
Co-showrunner Landau on the finale of Starfleet Academy:
“I heard someone saying this yesterday on a podcast: I think that we're living in a time where we've been inundated with so many stories where the answer is that there's one lone wolf superhero who basically just lays waste
They show the upper and lower bounds of the confidence intervals in the graphs, but not where they overlap in the middle. Where they do, we only know that drinking something helps, not what helps better. More observations, different drinks, would be useful given how big the gamer drink market is.
Of these, 14 participants (22.9 ± 2.4 years old; 1 female) were included in the final analysis, with one excluded due to data recording errors (Table 1)."
The data are interesting, but given the small population, the confidence intervals are not very informative for reporting the difference here.
any of the following criteria: “participates regularly in eFootball competitions to win”, “belongs to an esports team, whether professional or amateur”, “has an eFootball 2021 in-game rank of top 10 % tile or higher”, and “plays eFootball for more than 3 h a day on average”.
included 14 people. The demographic included casual gamers and mostly males:
"We recruited 15 casual players from the student population at the University of Tsukuba who reported regularly playing video games. According to Matsui et al. (2024), we defined casual players as those who did NOT meet
However, the actual comparison is sparkling versus still water. In the article, they want to see if carbonation makes a difference in focus. That could still be an interesting result if the results hold, but digging more into the data (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...), we see that the study
-packed beverages like coffee or energy drinks, which present potential health risks when consumed in large quantities. A team led by researchers from the University of Tsukuba in Japan wanted to see if sparkling water could provide a healthier alternative."
A friend shared this article with me that is making the rounds: www.sciencealert.com/a-simple-dri...
"The press version of the article gives the appearance that sparkling water may be a substitute for energy drinks for focus by leading with this: To stay in the zone, gamers often turn to caffeine
U.S. sending USS Tripoli, thousands of Marines to Middle East
www.axios.com/2026/03/13/m...
My comic pulls for this week. Most excited for D'orc #2 and United #1.
Congress setting a floor of 76,000 troops in Europe, the NDS pivoting away from US forces on the Korean peninsula, and new military adventurism in Latin America and the Middle East ensure the relevancy of overseas deployments. There is a tension here that was absent in the first administration.
Super MAR10 to those that celebrate it. Happy Luigi Day to those 2Ps out there that do not.
Newspaper Interviewer (phone interview): How long do you think this war will last for?
Me:
My best card yet from: wikigacha.com
We have been playing Feed the Kraken as the starter for our board game night for the last few months (having exactly 11 people show up is perfect). A friend offered to paint my minis, and I am in love with the job he did. #boardgames #socialdeduction
I read this to my daughter.
The best joke I read and shared this past week:
Where do bad rainbows go?
To Prism.
They get a light sentence.
It gives them time to reflect.
My daughter was brought to violence by the end. May require some suspension of knowledge over reflection versus refraction.
Updated .gif of US troop deployments from 1950-2025. Feel free to use it for lectures, conference slides (I use it for almost every talk), or whatever. The Troopdata package includes the latest quarterly report for December 2025!
#internationalrelations #polisky #politicalscience #poliscisky #irsky
I think I am in need of an academic friend who lives near the US Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, PA. I think there are 2-3 books in their archives that may help resolve a missing data issue in the overseas troop data for 1951 and possibly 1952, but you can only access them in person.
Publish or Perish: A Text Adventure of Academic Survival
A few weeks ago, I listened to Matt Grossman's interview with Andy Hall, in which he discussed how he and Graham Strauss used Claude Code to extend a previous study. While Claude did make mistakes, they were correctable for an informed user.…
I have been testing out Claude Code this past week and made a silly International Relations/social science publishing text adventure game. It's silly, but was a use-case for me to better understanding Claude a bit more.
#int-rel #int-rel #polisky
Me: I need to write as soon as I get in the office.
Also Me: This person asked a decision theory problem in the game theory subreddit, how dare they. Also, I am going to do the math to answer their question.
1097 words so far this month. I have a modest goal due to admin stuff, but it is progress!
docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
Trying to commit to productivity in #AcWriMo 2025.
zubrin.substack.com/p/acwrimo-2025
It was worse than I imagined. Time to close that account.
What the hell?
