Sports
drorzel | December 13, 2009I mostly try to avoid stupid celebrity gossip stories, but the last two weeks, it's been impossible to escape the sordid Tiger Woods thing. I still don't care about his personal life, but there's one thing that keeps coming up in the media coverage that's annoying me even beyond the stupidity of the whole business.
Tony Kornheiser is probably the clearest proponent of it, at least in the stories I've seen. He keeps saying that Tiger needs to "show himself," that he needs to make a public appearance and at least read a statement, if not take questions. He claims that Woods's public silence has…
drorzel | December 8, 2009... walk into a bar. No, wait, that's not what I want...
In the interval before this morning's Mike and Mike show became the Tiger Woods Scandal Hour, they were talking about Tim Donaghy and his allegations about the NBA, which basically amount to the league being just a few steps up from the WWE. Mike Greenberg in particular kept blasting these rumors as completely outlandish because the sort of game-fixing Donaghy alleges would be blatantly illegal, and if it was exposed, people would go to jail. "These are wealthy and powerful people," he said, more or less, "You're crazy if you think they…
drorzel | November 20, 2009Kate and I went to the two games of the "semifinals" of the 2K Sports Classic Supporting Coaches vs. Cancer, Your Name Here for a Prince pre-season "tournament" last night (the scare quotes are because the four teams playing last night were guaranteed to be playing last night, regardless of what happened in the earlier "rounds"). We were in section 329 of Madison Square Garden, which aren't great seats in an absolute sense, but are pretty darn good for a game-day impulse buy. Not that there was any trouble getting seats-- the lower levels were maybe 3/4 full.
The first game saw Syracuse beat…
drorzel | November 19, 2009It's not often that I regret having a cell phone that is just a phone, but this is one of those occasions-- I stopped by my publisher today to talk about marketing and publicity, and record a video for the web, and got a stack of finished copies of the book, hot off the presses. If I had a cell phone camera, I'd post a picture, but I don't, so you'll have to settle for a plain-text "Woo-hoo!"
On an only vaguely related note, our cultural activities in NYC will include some college hoops, as there's a preseason "tournament" taking place at Madison Square garden tonight. Syracuse vs. Cal, and…
drorzel | November 18, 2009It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views.
So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following:
The educational trends…
drorzel | November 17, 2009Sunday night, the Patriots lost a heartbreaker to the Colts 35-34. The talk of the sports world yesterday was Bill Belichick's decision to go for it on fouth-and-two on his own 28 yard line when he was up by six with just over two minutes to play. They didn't get the first down, and turned the ball back over to the Colts, who went on to score a touchdown and win the game.
Yesterday's discussion was a low point even by the standards of sports talk radio, with one idiot after another holding forth about how stupid Belichick's decisions was, and how he "disrespected his defense," and various…
drorzel | November 10, 2009Syracuse head basketball coach Jim Boeheim won his 800th game last night. Fittingly, it was a thirty-point win over an overmatched New York school.
Since winning the NCAA tournament in 2003, Boeheim has finally started to get some respect in the college basketball world. Before that, he was regarded as a choker who couldn't win the big games. Which is a little unfair, but that's the coaching business for you. And, of course, everybody regards that 2-3 zone as a bit of a gimmick defense, despite the fact that they consistently win with it. With a title under his belt, though, all of a sudden…
drorzel | November 6, 2009"It's a question of character, of friendship. Hell, Leo, I ain't afraid to say it, it's a question of ethics." --Giovanni Gaspari
I'm back to lunchtime hoops after a two-week layoff due to teaching responsibilities. And this has reminded me of one of the great character tests that sports provide. Imagine that you're playing basketball, but are too tired to keep running with the fast break in both directions. You can't quit without pissing everybody off, though, and there's no-one you can have sub in for you. What do you do?
What do you do when you're too tired to run the floor in a…
drorzel | November 5, 2009I have a lab all morning, so I won't get to more substantive blogging before this afternoon. The Yankees won their 27th World Series title last night, though, and given their status as the most polarizing team in baseball, this seems like a good excuse for a poll:
What do you think about the Yankees winning the World Series?(surveys)
Choose only one.
drorzel | November 3, 2009Over at the Mid-Majority, Kyle Whelliston (formerly of espn.com) has a great essay on the "Sportz" phenomenon:
Sports are great. Actual participation is awesome, but watching other people do sports can still be pretty good too. These days, people can watch sports anytime, anywhere and in whatever state of undress they choose. These are truly the days of miracles and wonders! All thanks to the Sports-Industrial Complex, which brought you mantertainment, lite beer and the Sports Bubble.
When sports became industrialized in the latter part of the 20th Century, the S.I.C. became the conduit…
drorzel | October 30, 2009It's fall, which means that the major American sports are all ramping up (baseball is in its brief period of being interesting, the NFL is nearing the middle of its season, the NBA has just gotten underway, which means that real basketball will start soon). This also means that the major advertisers have rolled out the commercial that will be annoying the hell out of everybody for the next several months.
Sports are really the only place that I see commercials-- I tend to watch sporting events live, but use the DVR to time-shift other programming, allowing me to fast-forward through the ads.…
drorzel | October 22, 2009I've been up late all this week grading things, and I have lab all morning, so I'm not going to do any detailed blogging about subtle aspects of physics. So here's something from the pop culture side: I was listening to Bill Simmons's ESPN podcast with Chuck Klosterman yesterday, and at one point, they talk about the question of what modern act will be deemed sufficiently old and safe to play the Super Bowl halftime show. Klosterman has some amusing things to say, but this also seems like a perfect topic for a blog poll:
Who will play the Super Bowl halftime show in 2020?(polls)
Klosterman…
drorzel | October 13, 2009The baseball playoffs are upon us, which means that most of the sports media are consumed with baseball talk. I find this faintly annoying, as I'm not really a fan of baseball. And, really, I can't be a fan of baseball, for the same reason that I can't be a conservative Republican activist-- I don't have the mental circuitry necessary to passionately believe self-contradictory things.
For example, being a baseball fan apparently requires one to simultaneously believe that a four-and-a-half hour game three hours of which are just players standing around scratching themselves is part of the…
neurophilosophy | October 12, 2009ATHLETES who are on a winning streak often claim that they perceive their targets to be bigger than they actually are. After a run of birdies, for example, golfers sometimes say that the cup appeared to be the size of a bucket, and baseball players who have a hit a few home runs say that the ball is the size of a grapefruit. Conversely, targets are often reported to be smaller than they actually are by athletes who are performing badly.
Research carried out in the past 5 years suggests that these are more than just anecdotes, and that performance in sports can actually affect perception. A…
ddobbs | October 11, 2009Charlie Houston, right, in 1936 with Pasang Kikuli (center) and British climbing legend Bill Tilman
I used to do a bit of climbing and a lot of climbing reading -- a deep and rich literature.
If you read much about American climbing history, you'll read about Charlie Houston, who made one of the most dramatic and tragic attempts at K2 in 1953, pioneered the modern study of high-altitude physiology, practiced and taught medicine for decades, and at one point ran the Peace Corp. Amazing man. He was one of many physicians and scientists who have loved climbing and made huge contributions in…
ddobbs | October 5, 2009Ruth may or may not have called his. But former player and Mariners announcer Mike Blowers, asked before the game for his prediction of the game, predicted a rookie player would hit a homer -- his first in the bigs -- into the second deck in left-center in his second at-bat on a 3-1 fastball. Man did it.
drorzel | September 21, 2009Well, that kept me up way past bedtime-- my 9:15 lecture is going to be fantastic-- but at least my Giants pulled out the win at the end. I couldn't think of a better way to open the Cowboys' new stadium...
And really, there's no better metaphor for the Cowboys in the Jerry Jones era than that gigantic video screen: hugely flashy, ridiculously expensive, and liable to interfere with the playing of the game at any moment. If Jerry was setting out to build a scale model of his own ego, he nailed it.
While the end result was good, from the perspective of a Giants fan, this still left plenty to…
drorzel | September 17, 2009They're discussing stupid playing-through-injury stories on Mike&Mike this morning-- Golic talked about injuring his shoulder badly enough that he couldn't lift his arm above shoulder level, and using a wall to push his hand up higher than that, so the trainer would let him go back in for the second half. Having separated both shoulders playing rugby (at different times), I know just how that feels. One of my senior-year games against amherst, I had to have my fellow second row lift my arm up for me a few times in the try zone, to loosen it up enough to keep going. (We lost the game, but…
edyong | September 15, 2009
You may have seen rowing before, but I guarantee you that you know little about the sport unless you went to university at Cambridge or Oxford. There you will find a subspecies of human known as the "boatie" who seem perfectly happy to gather en masse at godforsaken times of the morning to paddle about on a river. In the rain. In winter. With a hangover. Later, in the pub, they will spend innumerable hours discussing their training schedules, talking about "catching crabs" without a hint of irony and comparing blisters.
For those of us who wondered what could possess grown men and women to…