Sports
oracknows | September 1, 2008Say it ain't so!
Skeptics' Circle host from earlier this year Rod Clark informs me that another celebrity has been sucked into maw of antivaccine propagandizing disguised as an autism charity. The one luring these celebrities in, of course, is that tireless, ever-Indigo campaigner against vaccines and for quackery Jenny McCarthy, flexing her D-list celebrity luster and snookering celebrities into supporting her antivaccine cause (unless, of course, that celebrity is Charlie Sheen, who's already an antivaccine loon and thus requires no deception). First, it was Britney Spears, Hugh Hefner, and…
oracknows | August 30, 2008Having grown up in an American league town east of the Mississippi, as a baseball fan it is my sacred duty to hate the Yankees. This is even more so given how badly my hometown team (the Detroit Tigers) and my second favorite team (the Cleveland Indians) are doing this year. Thanks to the Yankee organization itself and the NYPD, I now have yet another reason to hate the Yankees (as if I needed one), thanks to Stupid Evil Bastard. The Yankees actually ejected a man from Yankee Stadium for wanting to go to the bathroom during the seventh innning stretch (which, I always thought, was the purpose…
jlynch | August 23, 2008Irish boxer Kenny Egan is in the light heavyweight final against Xiaoping Zhang as I type. Naturally, I can't see it live in this country ... instead I get to see a bunch of overpaid millionaires play basketball against Spain. Here's hoping the Spaniards win.
Best I can do is follow the fight round by round on RTE (video not allowed outside Ireland, damn it!). We've two bronze medals already this Olympics (for boxing). A gold would be nice, given that it's only the fifth time in Olympic history that an Irish boy has made a boxing final.
Update: End of round 1 ... Egan is down 2-0.
Update:…
drorzel | August 17, 2008I am generally not hugely enthusiastic about the Olympics, and I really wasn't following the run-up to the Beijing games this year. The games turn out to be great mindless distraction while SteelyKid is between feedings, though, so I've ended up seeing a fair amount of them. I know you're dying to hear my comments, so:
-- There's this kid for the US, a swimmer, something Phelps? You may not have heard this, but he's pretty good...
-- Nobody who has met me will mistake me for a great runner, but I was on the track team in high school, so I have some small appreciation for track and field…
edyong | August 13, 2008Tune into the Olympic coverage over the next few weeks, and you will see many an athlete proudly raise their arms and head in victory, while a much larger number slump their shoulders and necks in defeat. We've all shown the same body language ourselves, and a new study reveals why - they are innate and universal behaviours, performed by humans all over the world in response to success and failure.
The discovery comes from Jessica Tracy from the University of British Columbia and David Matsumoto from San Francisco State University, who wanted to see how people across different cultures…
edyong | August 10, 2008For a sportsman, sometimes pay to have the referee seeing red. In some sports, a simple red garment can give an athlete a competitive advantage because the striking hues draws the focus of the referee. With a delightfully simple but beautifully crafted experiment, Norbert Hagemann at the University of Munster found that refs have a tendency to award more points to red-garbed competitiors.
Three years ago, Russell Hill and Robert Barton found that in boxing, tae kwon do and wrestling, contestants who wore red are more likely to win their bouts. They reasoned that red - the colour of anger…
evolgen | July 17, 2008
The Creation Museum is located in northern Kentucky, just across the Ohio border from Cincinnati. Answers in Genesis, the folks behind the so-called "museum", claim that their "museum" is within a 6 hour drive of 2/3 of the US population. This is not true -- Kentucky is in the middle of bumfuck nowhere (I'm an expert on cities in the middle of bumfuck nowhere), and most people in the US can't get there in 6 hours.
But the museum is damn close to Cincinnati -- it's in what people would call the "greater Cincinnati area", and it's closer to the so-called Cincinnati airport (which is actually…
jlynch | June 29, 2008
Happy to see that Spain beat Germany today. Better team definitely won. Perhaps the Germans should have fielded the squad seen above?
evolgen | June 23, 2008Dak at Fire Joe Morgan asks:
I've been watching a fair amount of SportsCenter / BBTN today, and every two minutes someone mentions that there are "seven teams going for a sweep in an interleague series!", as if this is some sort of big deal. There are fourteen interleague series this weekend. If every match were a coin-flip, wouldn't we expect exactly seven teams to be going for sweeps in the third game of a series?
We'll start by assuming each team has an equal probability of winning each game, and the results of each game are independent. After one game, you're guaranteed that one team…
jlynch | June 21, 2008Just finished watching the Dutch implode and get beaten 3-1 by Russia, making them the third group winner to lose.
I can now only hope that Spain beats the Italian Diving Squad tomorrow to avert any possibility of a Germany v Italy final.
Spain v Turkey would be more fun.
Thoughts?
pontiff | June 18, 2008David Brooks, has an op-ed in the New York Times about Tiger Woods and his astonishing string of triumphs in the golfing world (including last weekends U.S. Open which I watched the end of on both Saturday and Sunday: my wife was right he did make that last put.) Brooks piece waxes on and on about the Tiger's ability to concentrate
And for that, in this day and age, he stands out. As I've been trying to write this column, I've toggled over to check my e-mail a few times. I've looked out the window. I've jotted down random thoughts for the paragraphs ahead. But Woods seems able to mute the…
jlynch | June 10, 2008
It happens every two years ... a veritable orgy of high-quality soccer. In 2006 it was the World Cup, this time around it is the European Championship.
So far, the Germans look efficient, the French were underwhelming, the Italian Diving Squad choked (badly), and the Dutch ... well they just dominated the Italians in their 3-0 win yesterday.
So, any predictions on the finalists?
oracknows | June 4, 2008...the Stanley Cup series is finally over.
I'm not much of a hockey fan, but with Detroit as my hometown it's hard for me not to acknowledge the victory of my hometown team the Detroit Red Wings. Way to go!
ddobbs | May 30, 2008A particularly nice post by the Times' Tyler Knepper, who keeps the
"Bats" blog: Luke Scott explains why hitting is so very difficult.
http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/why-baseball-really-is-a-game-…
evolgen | May 22, 2008
On Tuesday night, the National Basketball Association (NBA) held their annual draft lottery. In the draft, each team is given the opportunity to select a few players that have declared themselves eligible for the draft (either after completing at least one year of college in the United States or being from another country and over 18 years old). The order of picks in the NBA draft is determined with a goal of awarding earlier picks to teams that performed the worst the previous season. However, rather simply giving the worst team the first pick, second worst the second, etc., the NBA takes…
ddobbs | May 21, 2008My (very short) story on a new omnidirectional treadmill for spatial cognition research is up at the Wired site:
An Omnidirectional Treadmill Means One Giant Leap for Virtual Reality.
...This April, a team based at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, unveiled the CyberWalk, an omnidirectional treadmill designed to serve as a VR-capable movement platform.
Treadmills have been tried in VR before, of course, but early models were unconvincing -- either too small to keep goggled wanderers on the platform or too slow, bouncy, or gap-ridden to feel the least…
oracknows | May 11, 2008The ignorance and stupidity, they burn:
Why, yes, actually, we did "allow" Nazi Germany to host the Olympics back in 1936. Hitler even presided over some of the ceremonies. The sign is so wrong that at first I wondered whether it was a Photoshop job, but apparently it's legit.
I realize this photo is from around three week ago, but I didn't see it until Ed pointed me to it yesterday. Given my interest in World War II history and the Holocaust, you just knew I couldn't resist it once made aware of it. True, it's not as hilariously dumb as Tony Zirkle, but it does reveal a shocking level of…
drorzel | May 8, 2008The video that accompanies this PopSci.com article is pretty impressive. A bunch of college kids show off their ability to hit trick shots with ping-pong balls, bouncing them off walls, doors, floors, moving skateboards, people, and items of furniture and into beer cups. As the PopSci piece notes, there's a good deal of physics in this-- if every student put half as much effort into learning the material as these guys put into practicing trick shots, the world would be a better place.
The title of the piece, however, is "The Physics of Beer Pong," which brings us to today's non-dorky poll…
drorzel | May 5, 2008The sports talk shows today were all abuzz with chatter about the death of second-place finisher Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby, with no end of hand-wringing and moralizing about the nature of horse racing. I have to admit, I find the whole thing a little puzzling.
I'm not puzzled that people are upset-- I get that bit. What has always baffled me about this is the sheer fragility of horses-- I've never understood why the "Horse" chapter of the vet textbook is all "Shoot," as the famous Far Side cartoon has it.
So, bio types, help me out, here. Why is it that a broken ankle is fatal for a…
drorzel | April 29, 2008Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of the connection between college athletics and alumni giving, with some interesting findings:
First, they find that male alumni who played on teams while they were undergraduates are more likely to donate more (to the athletics department and to the university as a whole) when the teams they played on win conference championships (the researchers' chosen measure of on-field success) in later years. The same is not true for women.
Second, male alumni who played on teams as undergraduates tend to donate more if the teams they played on won conference…