Sports
drorzel | January 7, 2011Barack Obama will be visiting Schenectady next Tuesday, and local notables are suggesting things he might do. Particularly notable was this:
Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, R-Glenville, a basketball enthusiast like Obama, suggested that some hoop should be organized for the occasion.
"I'd like to challenge him to a two-on-two game .â.â. at the new YMCA in Schenectady," said Tedisco. He floated Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan, or state Supreme Court Judge Barry Kramer as possible teammates.
Given that Tedisco is a Union alumnus, and was at one time a regular player in the noon hoops…
gregladen | January 2, 2011But that isn't always how it goes.
On today's radio show, Steve Borsch was talking about the way in which social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is playing out -- as an extension of social interaction more than as a new form of shopping mall or marketing environment -- and an observation I made a couple of weeks ago during the Vikings game congealed like mucus in the back of your throat when you are getting over a cold (See Pandemonium Looms in Minneapolis). So, since I have a blog, I thought I'd hack it up for you.
Chris Kluwe is the beloved kicker for the Vikings. I don't really…
drorzel | December 9, 2010SteelyKid is off spending a weekend at Grandma and Grandpa's, so this week's picture was actually taken early Wednesday morning:
The early hour accounts for both the pacifier (she wasn't willing to give it up yet) and the frizzy hair (bed-head toddler!). I'm pretty sure she hasn't grown measurably since yesterday, though.
This photo is in honor of SteelyKid's sporting activities, as part of the SoccerTots program. Several weeks ago, before the time change, I was lamenting the fact that cold weather and early sunsets were going to make it harder to tire SteelyKid out by letting her run around…
drorzel | December 9, 2010SteelyKid is off spending the weekend with her grandparents, so Kate and I went out to a nice restaurant last night (we love SteelyKid dearly, but miss eating in restaurants without a kids menu). I was kicking myself for forgetting to set the DVR to record a basketball game, though. Not the Duke or Kentucky games on ESPN, but the much more Mid-Majority friendly BYU-Vermont game up the road, on the local cable system.
Why? Because the game was being played in Glens Falls as a tribute to Jimmer Fredette, BYU's star point guard, and a local legend. Fredette started to get national attention…
drorzel | December 3, 2010Lance Mannion has a good post on the fake outrage of the moment in sports, where Derek Anderson, the terrible quarterback of the godawful Arizona Cardinals, was caught on camera maybe laughing with one of his receivers during their drubbing by the not at all good San francisco 49ers. When questioned about it at a press conference afterwards, Anderson blew his stack at a reporter, then stormed out of the room.
The whole thing is pretty farcical. As Mannion notes:
Listen. Soldiers under fire laugh. Sailors going down with the ship laugh. Pilots watching engines fail laugh. Firefighters,…
omnibrain | December 2, 2010Find out right here via the Christian Science Monitor:
For many years, the National Football League has given the Wonderlic aptitude test to rookie players. The test has 50 questions with a 12-minute time limit. Put three minutes on the clock and try our shortened version of the test, created with sample questions from espn.com and testprepreview.com. Multiply the number of right answers you get by 3.85 to compare with full test results. Can you do better than NFL quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers (35) or Tom Brady (33) or Peyton Manning (28)? The average NFL quarterback scores 24 on the test,…
omnibrain | December 1, 2010Just to get you ready for tomorrow's sports post (are you smarter than a quarterback?)
Athletes' Experiences of the Psychological Effects of Poor Coaching
The purpose of this study was to describe the psychological effects of poor coaching reported by collegiate, professional and semi-professional athletes.
The present study employs a qualitative research design. Existential phenomenology is a contemporary qualitative research method that seeks to describe lived experience. This research design provided the framework for understanding athletes' effects of poor coaching.
Participants (N=16)…
drorzel | November 29, 2010I'm a big fan of (American) football, but a lot of people are surprised to learn that I never played organized football. It was largely a matter of timing-- the coaches when I was in junior high were not people I'd've been interested in playing for, and when they hired a good guy to run the program when I was in high school, I was already playing soccer. And in college, I played rugby
One of the lingering consequences of not having played organized football is that I really haven't internalized all the rules. Which means that, when I watch the game, the one major weakness I see is that it…
drorzel | November 6, 2010Having written in defense of analogies in physics yesterday, I should note that not all of the analogies that are brought out in an attempt to clarify physics concepts are good. For example, there's this incredibly strained opening to a Science News article on entanglement:
If the Manning brothers were quantum physicists as well as NFL quarterbacks, one of them could win his game's opening coin toss every time. The night before they played, the brothers would take two coins from a special quantum box to use the next day. If Peyton's game came first, after learning the outcome of his coin toss…
drorzel | October 26, 2010Last night's Giants-Cowboys game was not one of the finer displays of football you're ever see-- the score makes it seem like a close game, but the Giants turned the ball over five times and gave up a punt return for a touchdown, basically handing the Cowboys 28 points. Other than that, you know, they played really well.
This morning, the sports-radio people are all wondering why the Cowboys are so much worse than expected, and the Giants are looking better than expects. The answer to this is really simple: The offensive line. It's probably the least glamorous position on the field, but the…
drorzel | October 8, 2010On the way to get SteelyKid from day care last night, I flipped on ESPN radio in the vain hope of getting a baseball score, but wound up listening to former Mets manager and freelance jackass Bobby Valentine talking about how difficult batting is, which included the statement:
And the whole thing is over in a mega-second!
A mega-second, of course, is 1,000,000 seconds, or a bit less than twelve days. That's awfully long for an at-bat in baseball, though it might not be unreasonable for cricket.
Subsequent comments made clear that Valentine was trying for "millisecond," though it remains…
drorzel | September 14, 2010While waiting for SteelyKid to stop bouncing off the walls long enough to be put to bed last night, I watched a bit of the Jets losing to the Ravens on Monday Night Football. I saw most of the first half, and the end of the fourth quarter, and I noticed the announcers talking a lot about two things:
Rex Ryan's Jets blitzing all the time, especially on third-and-long, and
The Ravens converting an incredible number of third downs (11 of 19), especially long third downs
It was actually kind of amazing to me that none of them thought to connect the two. Because here's what I saw: the Jets played…
rallain | September 7, 2010You can call it football if it makes you happy. Anyway, this is a popular story going around. The physics of the magic curving soccer kick. Here are two ends of the spectrum.
First, there is the lower, easier to consume version from io9.com
Physics forced to come up with whole new equation to explain "impossible" soccer kick
I will summarize this article for you:
"Have you seen these crazy soccer kicks where the ball curves? It happens because the ball spins and physics. Here is a video"
Oh, and they have a diagram - which doesn't seem to come from the original paper and they also have…
drorzel | August 25, 2010New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie is getting mocked for a clip where he takes some time to name all his children (the clip isn't as bad as the description makes it sound-- he's slow, but he doesn't struggle all that badly). Cromartie claims that HBO manipulated the footage to make him look bad.
Of course, there's an easy way to avoid this kind of mess: simply give all the kids the same name, thereby reducing it to a previously solved problem.
In discussion on a mailing list where this came up, someone wondered about how many children Wilt Chamberlain would've fathered, given his…
rallain | August 13, 2010You know I have trouble letting stuff go, right? I am still thinking about these crazy long basketball shots. Here are some more thoughts.
Really, there are two things I am interested in. First, commenter Scott Post suggests that the drag coefficient might be around 0.25 instead of 0.5. I don't know. For the discussion before, it doesn't really matter. My point was to see a numerical model for a falling ball would be similar to the time and distance from the video. Changing the drag coefficient to 0.25 gives values that are still close to the video. So, I still think the video is real…
drorzel | July 18, 2010SteelyKid has clearly inherited her father's fondness for basketball. Unfortunately, she doesn't quite understand how to play, yet. She does know that involves throwing a ball up in the air and jumping, though:
She'll get the rest of it eventually.
drorzel | July 14, 2010I'm not much of a baseball fan, but as a New York resident and Williams alumn, it seems I'm contractually obligated to say something about the death of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. He was a fixture in New York sports for as long as I've been aware of them, and his impact on baseball and sports in general was gigantic-- Steinbrenner and Al Davis are the template for all the meddlesome modern sports owners (Mark Cuban, Jerry Jones, Dan Snyder, etc.), for good or ill.
He could be kind of a crazed asshole-- he was suspended by Major League Baseball for a few years in the early 1990's after…
grrlscientist | July 13, 2010tags: The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health, humor, funny, comedy, fucking hilarious, sports, science, technology, invention, public health, gas mask, brassiere, streaming video
I know this is a little late, but the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health Prize was awarded to Dr. Elena Bodnar for her invention of a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to a needy bystander of her choice. Her acceptance speech is absolutely hilarious (which is the reason I am sharing this with you today…
drorzel | July 12, 2010I missed the first 15 minutes of yesterday's World Cup final because it was inordinately difficult to find a tv showing the game at BWI airport. There are tvs all over the place, but they're all locked into playing a pre-recorded loop of CNN programs, without even a news ticker that could give score updates. I did eventually find a spot at the bar in a Mexican restaurant, and managed to watch the middle portion of the game. I missed the last 15 minutes of regular time and all over the extra time because I was on a plane back to Albany.
I was planning to write up a recap of what I did see, but…