☞ Sports Teams Named After Technologies

DALL-E for all your mediocre graphic design needs

Unlike animals or occupations, one group I don’t see represented in a lot of team names is that of technology. Is it because tech feels too new and not timeless enough? Or because technologies often lack the autonomy or agency of the Raven or the Raptor? Or even that people are just not excited about technology enough? Yes, many occupations that use technology are represented, such as brewing or drilling for oil, but only rarely are the technologies themselves given as a name for a team. Well, I don’t care. I want to see the Cleveland Robots play the Kansas City Pocket Watches.

In the meantime, I have compiled a list of all of the sports teams named after technologies that I could find. I am using technology necessarily broadly, as any sort of human-made device or tool. Because technology is far more than modern gadgets. It’s not just, as Alan Kay said, provocatively and presumably somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that “technology is anything that was invented after you were born.”

So the Buffalo Sabres make the list, as do the Los Angeles Clippers.

It also looks like the NBA wins with the the most tech sports teams of the American major sports leagues: Detroit Pistons, Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs, Los Angeles Clippers, Brooklyn Nets.

But there are also the Winnipeg and New York Jets, Lansing Lugnuts, Bowling Green Hot Rods, and Yolo High Wheelers.

While fire is a technology of a sort, it also is found in nature—lightning strikes, for example—and it’s really more about harnessing it, so sorry Calgary Flames, but I’ve decided you’re not on the list.

And there are a bunch of minor league team edge cases that I frankly don’t even know how to categorize and have therefore kept off the list. For example, Lehigh Valley IronPigs (a steel raw material), Akron RubberDucks (this is a toy), Motor City Cruise (I think it’s a car?), and Kannapolis Cannon Ballers (it might be referring to cannonballing into a pool?). Also, what’s the deal with the Detroit Red Wings? Any insights are welcome.

The complete list is here, and I hope to grow it as I learn of more. As part of this, I’ve done a bunch of searching both major and minor league teams in the United States, as well as teams outside the U.S., but if there are additional ones you are familiar with—particularly defunct teams!—please reach out and let me know.

And perhaps this list will even encourage more sports teams to be named after technologies, helping to incorporate excitement about these into all aspects of society. ■

Yolo High Wheelers

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By the way, for those who are new to my newsletter, I make lots of lists. Here is my List of Lists.

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The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and the prehistory of AI: “In an unpublished 1968 interview with Margaret Mead in MIT’s archives, however, we find that the polymathic Hungarian scientist John von Neumann was apparently toying with the idea [of the simulation hypothesis] in the years just after World War II.”

🝳 FloatCompMandelbrot: “A program to explore how Mandelbrot set images are affected by floating point precision”

🝤 Snakes and Singularities: “In evolutionary history, sometimes the key change is not in the underlying habitat, but rather the evolution of a single new trait that turns out to have enormous consequences.”

🜹 Weather forecasts have become much more accurate; we now need to make them available to everyone: “As the researchers Manuel Linsenmeier and Jeffrey Shrader report in a recent paper, a 7-day forecast in a rich country can be more accurate than a one-day forecast in some low-income ones.^”

🝊 Universities have a Computer-Science Problem: “None of the deans I spoke with aspires to launch, say, a department of art within their college of computing, or one of politics, sociology, or film. Their vision does not reflect the idea that computing can or should be a superordinate realm of scholarship, on the order of the arts or engineering.”

🜸 The Baffling Intelligence of a Single Cell: “Chemotaxis is a great slice: it’s a triumph of systems biology—we understand it holistically but also in fine detail at almost every level. It acquaints you with many of the most important motifs in biology, including the way in which protein structure determines function; how membranes control the information flow into cells; and how chemical modifications store and communicate state.”

🝖 The Internet Was Better When It Was Terrible: “What I learned surfing an emulation of the mid-’90s web”

🝊 Is Science Becoming Conceptual Art? “Another possible future, however, is that the concept of the laboratory is hollowed out, as the principal investigator no longer requires her own lab. Instead, the PI becomes a kind of conceptual artist, only needing to envision an experiment, which can then be split into procedural chunks by the AI and SLL, and executed by the lab bots.”

Until next time.