So lets talk about their comments... right?

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"To be, or not to be, that is the question."

How many characters is that?

Or, "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want."

Or, "Life is too important to take seriously."

Or, "Winning isn't everything. Striving to win is."

In the hands of a master of language, 140 characters can be an eternity.

And in the hands of the typical semi-literate, 3000 words merely says nothing at great length.

I understand why people Twitter. For the life of me, though, I can't understand why people follow the tweets of the Nick Barnetts of the world.

Or read academic journal articles written by most college professors.

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I just like to know what goes on inside Packer games and practices...

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I like to see player reactions to events in the NFL and with The Packers...

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I'm glad Einstein didn't feel the same way as you do. A lot of knowledge may be gleaned from journal articles. It is an ever expanding knowledge base which is peer reviewed.

Remember that it is the hard work and dedication of these professors and other researchers that you can read news reports on how smoking causes lung cancer, red wine reduces heart disease, whatever the case may be.

Twitter on the other hand is pure entertainment. It's an avenue for fans to talk to players without having to chat to them in the middle of a bathroom (wonder if anyone will pick up that reference). I don't hate twitter, but don't expect Barnett or Finley to write a dissertation on how or why the Packers lost. It's an emotional release, and if you view it as one, then it's tolerable.

I think the players have a right to vent the same way the fans on this forum are doing. If they choose Twitter as their medium of choice, so be it.

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Engineer:
I've written some of those articles. I've refereed some.

And read hundreds of them. And will continue to read them.

But they also illustrate that Sturgeon's Law doesn't just apply to science fiction.

Because 90 percent of them are crap.

And while "football tweets" may be pure entertainment, a lot of twittering is not done as entertainment. Its done, and listened to, by very very smart people.

People a hell of a lot smarter than those writing the 90 percent of "peer reviewed" articles.

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Sturgeon's Law is about as fundamentally sound as our offensive line. It's an adage, no more.

Of course you'll find twitter accounts which will be written by "very very smart people." You'll find NAPKINS with stuff written on it with more insight than some journal papers (or twitter posts, for that matter). That is not to say that journal articles are do not have a place.

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Did you read my posts at all?

WHere did I say that journals had no place?

And there's this funny thing about adages. They become adages because they contain bits of wisdom.

I don't stop reading science fiction because of sturgeon's law. (I have probably read a couple thousand sci fiction novels over the years, and most of them after I first heard Sturgeon's quote. I don't stop reading journal articles because a lot of them are crap. But that doesnt change the fact that a lot of science fiction books, and a lot of academic journal articles, are, in fact, crap.

And when someone comes up with a new way to process information that can replace some of that crap, I applaud.

Because the ratio of crap to non-crap is too high for my taste. At least in the disciplines where I've read widely (history, economics, law) or semi-widely (lit crit, business and management, pol sci).

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Nothing about these "pieces of wisdom" is statistically substantiated.

Furthermore, until there is a time when people begin to write mathematical derivations in 100 character tweets, forgive me if I'm skeptical that Twitter is a better scientific forum of discussion, even with the application of Sturgeon's Law.

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I don't remember who said it.. but I'll reiterate it: Those tweets are merely players venting about the loss. I know it's really hard for some to recognize, but said players ARE people too. Add to that passion, frustration, a character limit, and a cell phone as a medium to 'tweet', and you are bound on getting some misspellings and bad grammar.

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