But Tressel’s comment got me thinking about a fact I’d read once years before. A decent chunk of the wins that make Michigan’s football program the winningest in the country came in the first half of the 20th Century. If college football has changed since the days of Woody and Bo, it has definitely changed since the time of Fielding Yost.

College programs and conference strength is cyclical so I don’t doubt that Tressel’s statement was true. But I wondered how Ohio State and Michigan have fared over the life of their programs.

Michigan is clearly dominant early in its history, and it went through several down periods in the 1930s and 1960s before its current troubles. Meanwhile, Ohio State seems to vary much more. Its record is more spiky. When the Buckeyes are good, they’re good. And when they’re down, they’re down. But the only time they’ve fallen as low as Michigan in the past 100 years was during the 1940s.

This left me with one further question. How do the teams look when compared to the entire Big Ten conference?

I grabbed the season winning percentages for the 11 teams currently in the Big Ten since they began football. I wasn’t trying to capture the time since the school joined the conference. I wanted to look at how dominant the programs were overall – even if they didn’t line up against each other every year. Finally, I added a 10-year moving average for Ohio State and Michigan.

While other conference teams have surpassed one (or both teams) for a year or two at different times, the moving average is clearly well above the normal season for the bulk of the Big Ten. It’s normal for the single best team in the Big Ten in any given year to keep pace with the 10-year average for the better of these two teams. I was really surprised to see just how dominant the two programs are. One team or the other is always at the top – if not both teams.

The other big thing I learned from my two weeks of number crunching? Tressel’s comment was a bit off base. Michigan’s 10-year average still has two 10-3 seasons (2002 and 2003) and an 11-2 season (2006). But it’s only recently began to drop its moving average and is only slightly below the period of the early 1990s that would include the Earle Bruce-John Cooper transition years in the Buckeyes 10-year average.

A lot of what I’ve read lately, however, is focused on the impact of energy use and the environment. Those stories are everywhere in light of the oil spill in the Gulf, but I’d been focused on my energy use for a while.

Maybe that’s why this article about the money you can save by saving energy caught my eye.

I’ve been interested in genealogy since I was young. I watched my father review the records he had, and I asked and learned what I knew from him. The Internet has made it much easier to post and share information online. I’ve been lucky to grasp this in a way that can be applied to genealogy, and I’ve continued to learn and grow as a result. I’ve taken what I’ve found back home to share with family – and now I do the same with my wife and other friends and colleagues.

I expect this blog will continue to carry a share – a growing share – of genealogy posts. But I’m about to get some other topics to delve into.

The past few months have been filled with research, analysis, and observation. It’s also set me down several new courses in life. I’ll have plenty to share as I publish what I’ve learned – and, hopefully, learn from what I publish.

Do you know where your money is?

I spent the past week starting training at a financial services company. Most of the 30-plus people going through training will be performing some version of customer service, and comprise a cross section of the area. The training began with an overview of the industry, and one of the interesting parts of the training was watching the questions that were asked of the trainers.

I remember being taught how to figure interest while in high school math. Reflecting on my memories, I remember the senior seminar teacher was much more concerned with teaching us how to write checks and balance and checkbook. Beyond teaching us where to sign our names, write the date, and how to make out a check, the focus on personal finance lessons in my school was an emphatic dictum to read everything in a mortgage agreement carefully. That may not have been much of a waste – high school students may not be ready to really learn personal finance.

It’s scary to realize how many people struggled to figure out how to compute interest. I was surprised that there were both younger people and older people who didn’t seem to understand the concept. It made me wonder what people actually know about personal finance. I turned to the Internet and spent a few minutes searching Google and Bing to see what turned up. I was looking for a study that showed how much people know about personal finance. Maybe I was using the wrong keywords, but the closest that I came were the studies that show that people aren’t saving enough money for retirement. (I wanted personal finance studies – you won’t have enough money to spend at an age that you may never reach stories. I believe it’s important to save for retirement, I just think it’s difficult to understand what standard of living I’ll expect, what my living situation will be, and what will happen with tax rates, inflation rates, etc.

More interesting was the people who offered their personal finances to the world on their blogs. It’s an interesting idea, but one I don’t expect to do. Perhaps I’ll keep reading their blogs for an idea of what people in the world know about the money they spend and save.

Image is Creative Commons licensed content from Flick’s borman818.

In the meantime, Franchise and I have welcomed a new member to the family – an HP laptop. My files have been migrated and I’m doggedly pursuing one of my New Year’s resolutions – being more organized – by getting rid of duplicates and unnecessary files. Once that’s wrapped up, you’ll see me on here a lot more.

Jessica always has ravioli for the holidays

The daily calendar that sits on my desk is getting thin. Another year is wrapping up. Jess suggested including our blog addresses in the Christmas letter and writing our own notes online. You must have liked the idea.

As I first starting writing this post, Jessica and I just finished making ravioli for Christmas Eve. You can see some of our results pre-clean-up. The homemade goods are a family tradition that we’ve kept up – along with my family’s meatballs when we put up the tree.

This past year has been one filled with hard work. I dove into the remaining coursework I had to do to complete my graduate degree – finishing almost 60 percent of my classes this year. I’m looking forward to reading for pleasure again – and tackling projects that aren’t due at the end of the semester.

We cut back on trips – visiting Washington, D.C. twice, Columbus once, and Atlantic City once. We also returned to St. Marys for Thanksgiving. Yes, that’s a light year of trips – only five states, counting the one where I live. This might be the fewest number of states I visited in a year since high school.

I completed my second term as president of the local chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution. My final meeting brought out the largest turnout of chapter members in the last decade. We elected a new slate of officers, and they’ll do a great job taking over the chapter. I’m glad that I was able to stablize the chapter’s finances, recruit a new team of officers (and provide them with all the relevant information about the duties of their office), and overhaul and update the chapter roster. I’ve also continued and expanded my work with the Lackawanna Historical Society. I produce the Society’s quarterly newsletter, and I helped organize a database of previous newsletters as well as preparing program brochures for several events this past year.

Want to see more of what we did this year? Check out Jessica’s holiday post.

Hulu has changed its plans. Kings will remain online until Sept. 19, 2010. That gives me some more time to get around to watching some of the episodes.

Thanks for the tip, Dan.

Bad customer service at Target. (I walked down to the aisle in time to catch the stock boy take the sale sign down. He told me he took it down. Not shopping there anymore.

What’s up with the Haiti seeds in Farmville?

You’ll have a long walk if you go to the Penn State game.

A worthwhile experiment – if you can remember to do it for a full month.

Pennsylvania’s new budget cuts funds for environmental projects.

Expanding on their website launched in 1999 (actually, expanding on the book published that expanded on the website), the four authors add additional commentary to their original work(s) and review how the Internet has changed business.

There are some good nuggets aboard this train.

First, you have to get past the voices. Oh, the writers are very proud of their voices. They explain how humanity hid its voices for The Corporation. They explain how the Web will free voices – has freed voices – and how if you don’t find A Voice and talk in A Voice, then your business will fail.

Perhaps they’re making up for lost time for their many years of hiding their voices. The voices must be stretched to check for their limits – the same way a 42-year-old at his college reunion tries to tailgate the same way he did as a senior.

You must also get through the tone, which can rail against business the same way a jilted lover proclaims all the failures of his or her beloved.

At times, the authors strike a tone similar to teenagers who sneaked into the office, turned on the P.A. system, and barricaded the doors – determined to have as much fun as they can squeeze into their minutes in the Sun.

That said, I’m convinced that markets are conversations. I’m convinced that conversations sound humans, and that ignoring those conversations means missing opportunities. I’m convinced that hyperlinks mean that networks can be as powerful as hierarchies within organizations. That smart companies can connect conversations that occur inside and outside the corporate firewall. That one of the changes wrought by the Internet and the World Wide Web is the lack of scarcity. That this abundance and this connectedness offer unique possibilities and challenges for all of the “people of Earth” – business and market.

So don’t misread my warning about voice and tone. Set those aside as you read it. This book offers four viewpoints (eight, now, with the new chapters and forward) of how to use the power of the Web to listen and to speak with your customers.

But it’s an area that sometimes struggles with keeping these attractions in top condition. Old mine water runs into the rivers. Abandoned buildings sit in ruins hoping to be renovated or removed for a new building.

The region’s environmental legacy just took another hit.

The EPA recently filed suit against the Scranton Sewer Authority. For dumping more than 1 billion gallons of raw sewage into the Lackawanna River last year. The entire city’s infrastructure needs to be improved, and the sewage lines are no different. The authority submitted a plan in 1998 and has not updated the plan (I assume that means they haven’t started either!)

The authority director may claim “substantial progress” in upgrading the sewage system, but we’re at a time when we need more. Nature is one of this region’s strongest assets. The area’s leaders shouldn’t be satisfied with progress, but in preserving its assets (oh, and meeting the law). That’s what makes for a livable community.