Published 5:30 pm Sunday, December 8, 2024 By Scooter Hobbs LSU won’t have to travel far for its bowl game and the Tigers will find a familiar face when they get to Houston. LSU was placed in the Kinder’s Texas Bowl for the New Year’s Eve game at NRG Stadium against Baylor. It will kick off at 2:30 p.m. on ESPN. The Bears (8-4) are coached by Dave Aranda, who was LSU’s defensive coordinator for the Tigers’ 2019 national championship team. He took the Baylor job shortly after LSU completed that season unbeaten. Aranda and Baylor won the Big 12 championship in 2021, but he was very much on the hot seat after going 3-9 last year and starting this season 2-4 before Baylor finished on a six-game winning streak. The Tigers, also 8-4, at one point were ranked No. 8 in the country, but fell down the bowl season’s pecking order with a three-game losing streak. They recovered, however, to win their final two games against Vanderbilt and Oklahoma. As always in the current climate, bowl opt-outs could play a factor in the game. LSU has had several non-starters announce they will enter the transfer portal, which opens Monday. Two others, left tackle Will Campbell and tight end Mason Taylor, have declared they’ll enter the NFL draft early. But neither has indicated whether they will play in the bowl game. Quarterback Garrett Nussmeier has not yet made a decision on the NFL, but said after the win over Oklahoma that he would play in the bowl game regardless. It will be LSU’s third trip to the Texas Bowl — with very different results thus far. Opt-outs were a major factor the last time LSU played in the Texas bowl following the 2021 season. The Tigers had an interim head coach in Brad Davis after the firing of Ed Orgeron and only 38 scholarship players available in a 42-20 loss to Kansas State. LSU used a converted backup wide receiver, Jontre Kirklin, at quarterback. LSU’s other Texas Bowl appearance was following the 2016 season when the Tigers won a very entertaining game, 56-27, over a Texas Tech team led by Patrick Mahomes. It was shortly after that game that LSU then under Les Miles, lost defensive coordinator Kevin Steele, which brought Aranda to Baton Rouge from Wisconsin. LSU leads the all-time series with Baylor 8-3, but two of the Tigers’ losses came in the only two bowl matchups between the schools. Baylor beat LSU 21-7 in the 1985 Liberty Bowl in Memphis and 14-7 in the 1963 Bluebonnet Bowl in Houston. Previous to the Liberty Bowl, the last meeting was a 31-10 LSU victory in Baton Rouge.Claim that 320,000 migrant children went missing during the Biden administration is misleadingOpelousas High quarterback Zack Malveaux, right, and Da’Shaun Ford, middle, continue to lead the Tigers' offensive attack. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save For the sixth time over the past two postseasons, the Opelousas Tigers are taking the show on the road in the football state playoffs. Coach Jimmy Zachery's team is 5-0 in those games, which include four upsets of higher seeds during the 2023 run to the state crown. Then last week, the No. 14-seeded Tigers took down No. 3 Jennings 30-19 in the Division II nonselect regional round. "We're playing decently," said Zachery, whose 8-3 Tigers travel to No. 6 Plaquemine in the state quarterfinals on Friday. "But it's never enough for the coach." The Tigers, who defeated district rival Cecilia to win last year's title, have won seven straight games since a 1-3 start that included close losses to Alexandria (11-0) and Teurlings Catholic (10-1) and a road loss at Zachary High where quarterback Zack Malveaux exited the game early. "No doubt about it," Zachery said. "Our non-district schedule got us ready by playing the Zacharys of the world and facing the doggone Teurlings Catholic's of the world." Under the new LHSAA playoff rules, the higher seed hosts every round. Although the Tigers would love to play a home game, Zachery says they're comfortable as road warriors. "I'm not going to lie. We're better on the road," he admitted. "It's something we're used to. The guys understand what's at stake, whether we're on the road or at home." Plaquemine (11-1), which has won 11 straight games since a 49-14 loss to Zachary in Week 1, eliminated No. 27 Grant and No. 11 Northwest, which reached the 2023 semifinals. Green Devils quarterback Nico Victorian passed for 1,570 yards during the regular season with 23 touchdowns and four interceptions. Tailback Tyrese Mosby was sixth in the state in rushing (159-1,762 yards, 27 TDs). "They're really good," Zachery said of the Green Devils, who scored at least 48 points in seven wins. "No. 14 (sophomore John Walker) is a good receiver. They have good skill players. Defensively, they're big up front with athletes on the back end." Opelousas will counter with size and speed of its own. The Tigers' defense, headlined by Jacobian Ardoin, Jonathan Ford, Travis Esprit, Kylen Young and Jaylon Breaux, was able to neutralize Jennings' running attack. Tailback D'Shaun Ford ran for over 265 yards against Jennings, Zachery said. The 6-foot-0, 220-pound senior also gained over 200 yards in a one-point district win over Cecilia. "Offensively, we had a few miscues," Zachery said. "We turned the ball over three times. But the offensive line opened holes for Ford. He had two touchdowns." The winner will face the No. 22 Cecilia/No. 7 North DeSoto winner in the semifinals. "There's nobody left who isn't good," Zachery said. "We can't take (Plaquemine) lightly. They're in their hometown. (Mosby) runs downhill and breaks tackles. The quarterback can scramble and throw it a country mile."
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St. Thomas secures 100-61 win over Crown (MN)On Friday the 13th, Bloomberg published a piece by Lynn Doan entitled ‘AI Wants More Data, More Chips, More Real Estate, More Power, More Water, More Everything.’ It’s an eye-catching screed that brings you into the conversation about how we’re going to sustain large language models with data centers in the years to come. Doan’s piece also asks a number of questions that I’ve heard people asking over the last weeks and months. Here are some of the highlights that I think are most relevant to what we’re dealing with right now in the artificial intelligence world. New Energy Solutions: We’re Serious, All of a Sudden Doan points out that a lot of the brand-new initiatives to invest in new kinds of power for data centers were languishing prior to AI creating this demand. Maybe the best example is nuclear power. We knew that nuclear power is clean, and the technology has advanced since the grim days of a potential Three Mile Island meltdown in the 1970s. However, for whatever reasons, America had been dragging its heels to develop new nuclear facilities, until this dramatic new need emerged in the past few years. Now Companies like TerraPower are rushing to put new nuclear solutions in place – and most of the country seems to be on board. In terms of overall power demand, Doan points out that data centers are projected to use up to 8% of all power by the end of the decade, and notes that this will require a significant shift in thinking about energy. As an interesting little side note, she quotes the CEO of Constellation Energy talking about corporate plans that seem “functionally impossible” – and points out that Constellation is in charge of reviving Three Mile Island for Microsoft. Data Styles of the Rich and Powerful Another point that the author comes back to more than once is that those with more resources will have more clout over the results that generative AI provides. There’s the reality of richer groups of people having better LLMs at their disposal, and then there’s the disparities around the data that systems need to function. Late in the essay, Doan shows how most available high-quality data is applied to English speaking societies with certain European heritage patterns. Experts are suggesting that if we don’t have more data for diverse and non-white society groups, they will lose out in the AI revolution. That leads back to discussions about bias, issues that engineers have been wrestling witgh ever since these technologies emerged. Thirsty Chatbots and the Water Problem Doan also estimates data centers will need 500,000,000 gallons of water per day by 2030, and shows how this conflict over water might hurt communities that need their own drinking water as well. In an interesting metric, she suggests that asking ChatGPT a series of 10 to 50 questions will require the equivalent of a 16 ounce bottle of water. You can imagine large language models quaffing their own Dasani or Fiji bottles the same way humans do in meetings. But the result is that we’re going to have some pretty strenuous demand for drinking-quality water. Networking Demands: Sending Data Where it Needs to Go Then there’s all of the networking capability that we need for these systems as well. Doan talks about companies like Verizon ramping up, and how the new data center demand is going to affect the market. She also mentions the corporate move to the cloud, and how that got companies used to anticipating greater networking needs even before AI came in to play. “Dramatic increases in computing performance over the years continue to be reflected in the network traffic they generate,” James Donovan wrote in April of 2020 at The Cabling Science Institute. “The potential of devices to utilize network bandwidth is still far from fully realized by current software, but the upward trend is clearly evident. (A device’s) growing ability to handle voice, video and multimedia, as well as data, is causing all these elements to converge on the same networks. This convergence, combined with rapid growth in the individual areas, is increasing demand for network capacity.” Quarreling Over Precious Metals Here’s another point that brings up something that I was covering last week... Amid all of the chip wars that we’ve seen regionally and globally, there’s also the hunt for raw materials and the geopolitical tensions that have an impact on demand and supply. Specifically, the U.S. and China are starting a kind of protectionism around technology, and that has led China to ban the export of rare earth metals gallium and germanium to the U.S. As Doan points out, China also has the lion’s share of silicon resources, and so American companies and administrations have to keep that in mind as they’re crafting policy. The Trouble with Brain Drain Finally, Doan also suggests companies are going to need a great deal of human talent. It’s not just a question of taking masses of unemployed people and making them data engineers. It’s getting access to the skilled professionals who will be needed to usher in the next era of AI. Think about all of these issues as we move forward. AI does indeed want a lot, and how it gets it will matter.
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