Sports
drorzel | June 8, 2010Ethan Zuckerman has an excellent round-up of selection strategies for who to support in the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament. Options include strategic support, support through spite, non-FIFA support, and aesthetic considerations. A couple he left off:
Flopping Artistry: To American eyes, one of the most notable features of international soccer is the way that players dive on the ground wailing at the slightest hint of contact. Inexplicable as this is, it is evidently an essential part of the sport, so why not select teams based on their players' ability to mimic a gut-shot Tim Roth in…
cagapakis | June 2, 2010The World Science Festival starts today in New York City with tons of exciting events from BioArt to The Science of Star Trek and all sorts of great stuff in between! If you can't make it to New York there's also a twitter page and a blog here on ScienceBlogs accompanying the event that you can follow along with, and I had the chance to write a post over there about how I got into science as a kid. So go check it out! "What if Science Were Like Sports?" Here's a little teaser:
gboustead | June 2, 2010Christina Agapakis joins us from the ever-inspired Oscillator, her synthetic biology blog at ScienceBlogs. When she’s not reshuffling DNA sequences in her lab at Harvard, she’s usually there making Lady Gaga video spoofs, or something obvious like that.
I'm almost embarrassed for eleven year old me, in my pink leggings, so enthusiastically raising my hand when Mrs. Foster visited our 6th grade class and asked if any of us wanted to be part of the Science Olympiad team. But then I get mad at myself for being embarrassed; first of all pink leggings are adorable, and second of all the chance to…
Gleanings from empathetic ravens, lying brains, dying converence, fading vocabularies, and new books
ddobbs | May 18, 2010
Ravens via PDPhoto
Ravens show that consoling one another is also for the birds, Yet another finding that other species have qualities previously thought uniquely human. Our greatest distinction is that we're highly social. Yet in that we've got a lot of company.  
Human brains excel at detecting cheaters. FMRI's, not so much, says Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks-- though in yet another court case, the fMRI lie detection industry pushes another story.
Bell also has a nice write-up of of scintillating RadioLab program on how early dementia shows up in use of language. A stellar program,…
drorzel | April 22, 2010Most weeks, I try to find some natural-looking way to get SteelyKid and Appa in the picture together. Sometimes, though, there's just no way to get it done, and we have to resort to Kate holding Appa near her:
She's hugging her jacket because it got kind of cold this afternoon, but she's in a phase where she refuses to put her jacket on, and also refuses to go inside. Life's tough with a willful toddler.
To compensate for the lack of elegance in this week's Appa picture, here are two much better shots taken by Matt Milless of Mahi Matt Photo at last night's charity basketball game. First, a…
ddobbs | March 18, 2010
The sky before Katrina struck, from Rense.com Correction: I been snookered. As alert reader Alex Witze pointed out, these photos were taken by stormchaser Mike Hollingshead in Nebraska and Kansas in 2002 and 2004, and have passed around the net in other guises ever since. For more amazing storm photos, go to Hollingshead's site, extremeinstability.com. He has some doozies.
You may be shocked but not surprised to hear that Insurance Company Dropped Customers With HIV.
We knew this, but The World Needs More Vegetarians.
Robert Kaplan ponders the challenge that is Man Versus Afghanistan.
I…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2010tags: British humor, cricket, sports, The Full Monty, silly, satire, parody, funny, humor, fucking hilarious, cultural observation, streaming video
I am not sure which form of torture would be most likely to make me crack first: being forced to watch paint dry, being forced to watch golf or being forced to watch a cricket match. This British film trailer parody is an amusing look at one of the world's most boring and inane sports.
I had to share this here since the person whom I share a flat with happens to be obsessed with this lameass sport.
grrlscientist | March 13, 2010tags: photography, sports, futbol, professional soccer, cultural observation, acting lessons, humor, funny, television, streaming video
I love futbol, but OMG, these boyz are such crybabies and drama queens! These soccer/futbol players demonstrate the reasons why I think they all are in desperate need of acting lessons: their ridiculous overblown theatrics.
drorzel | March 3, 2010It's been an absurdly good hoops week at Chateau Steelypips-- Syracuse won a big one to take over the (admittedly meaningless) #1 spot in the polls, and now Maryland beat Duke in a tough game to move into a tie for the top spot in the (admittedly down) ACC. If both Duke (home to UNC) and Maryland (at UVA) win this weekend, they'll split the regular-season not-a-title. Go Tar Heels!
Kind of a weird game. It was Senior Night for Greivis Vasquez, Eric Hayes, and Landon Milbourne, which is always a risky business-- especially for a player as volatile as Vasquez. They came out all fired up, with…
drorzel | February 27, 2010They pushed the curtain back a few feet at the Carrier Dome, opening up a few more seats so they could set a new record for largest on-campus crowd to see a college basketball game for Syracuse playing Villanova for a share of the Big East regular season title. This is the sort of atmosphere where I'm used to seeing Syracuse teams really tense up and play tight, something they really couldn't afford to do against the Wildcats, so I was kind of nervous about this one. When I came downstairs from putting SteelyKid to bed, and they were down six, that seemed totally justified.
I was very…
milhayser | February 23, 2010
Equations can hurt, although not as much as wiping out on the downhill or faceplanting in the halfpipe. On Dot Physics, Rhett Alain explains the amazing angles at which Apolo Ohno leans around the short track, writing "a skater wouldn't have to lean at all if the skater was stopped. As the angle gets smaller (approaching zero), the skater would have to be going faster and faster." On Built On Facts, Matt Springer investigates the somewhat more subdued sport of curling, where men with brooms lead forty pound stones to their targets. Crunching numbers, Matt concludes that "granite on…
drorzel | February 7, 2010It occurs to me that if you take the Super Bowl as a comment on the current state of the US of A-- which, you might as well, because it's as good as anything else-- we are totally screwed.
I mean, consider the fact that two-thirds of the ads were for Bud Light. OK, that may be a slight exaggeration, but I think every commercial break in the first half had at least one Bud Light ad in it. That basically tells you that the only company with the money to spend on Super Bowl advertising is one that makes its money from helping people drown their sorrows. That's an encouraging statement.
Worse yet…
drorzel | February 7, 2010We're mere hours away from the start of the Super Bowl, the biggest football game of the year. Obviously, the question of who will win has been the subject of much debate over the last couple of weeks on sports media and in offices around the country. What these discussions have lacked, though, is Science!!! (with any number of exclamation points).
So, let's employ science to determine the winner in advance, with a totally accurate Internet poll:
Who will win the Super Bowl?(polls)
The game kicks off around 6:30pm ET, so make sure you vote before then, if you want your vote to have predictive…
grrlscientist | January 27, 2010tags: Baseball versus Football, sports, social commentary, cultural observation, George Carlin, humor, comedy, fucking hilarious, streaming video
I despise baseball, but enjoy football (and futbol, too). My fellow NYCers were brainless drooling idiots when it came to the Yankees, and I reminded them of this as often as possible. The fact that I am still alive to talk about it means that all you religious wingnuts have yet another defensible "miracle" you can cite. (But that's another video). But here's George Carlin's commentary about baseball (which only serves to further elevate his status…
drorzel | January 19, 2010I watched most of Syracuse's win over Notre Dame last night. Two basketball games in the same week! Luxury!
The thing that really jumps out at me about this team as opposed to last year's is that they're calm. Last year Eric Devendorf in particular, and to a lesser extent Johnny Flynn, tended to panic a little when the other team would make a run. A ten-point lead would get cut to three or four, and Devedorf would respond by chucking up a thirty-footer, which would miss, and give the opponent a chance to tie, followed by another forced shot, and so on.
This group, on the other hand, doesn't…
drorzel | January 16, 2010It's been a while since I did a basketball game recap here, mostly because it's been a while since I saw a whole game. Thanks to the DVR, I saw the whole Syracuse-West Virginia game today, in which Syracuse narrowly escaped Morgantown with a win. They had a ten point lead with two and a half minutes, but after Andy Rautins fouled out, West Virginia made a bunch of threes, and Syracuse made a bunch of minor errors, and the final score was a one-point win for the Orange.
The minute Rautins went out, I had a horrible flashback to Maryland blowing a ten-point lead to Duke in the final minute…
drorzel | January 11, 2010Depending on what you read at ScienceBlogs other than this blog, you may have noticed a New Year's fitness theme. Blame Ethan. So, now, everybody's posting workout tips and the like.
Which means, of course, that I'm obliged to post my Fitness Secrets here for free, when I could be charging money for them to build a college fund for SteelyKid. Curse you, Ethan!
So, what's my secret infallible fitness program?
Um, I don't have one. Sorry.
I've never had much luck sticking to a workout routine, mostly because I am easily bored. Mike Dunford waxes rhapsodic about swimming, but after a few laps I…
drorzel | January 8, 2010Picking on stupid things that sports commentators say is the ultimate "Fish. Barrel. BLAM!" sort of activity, but this morning on the way to drop SteelyKid at day care, Mike and Mike kept repeating one of the absolute dumbest things that football commentators say. They were talking about Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals, and praising his ability as a receiver. In particular, they heaped praise on his ability to "go up and get the ball at its highest point."
That would be a pretty neat trick, if he could manage it. A football pass spends a second or two in the air-- let's call it two…
drorzel | December 30, 2009Today is Question Day when it comes to post topics, I guess. Over at Fine Structure, Nick asks about the effect of spotlighting brilliant scientists:
I can't help but think about the repercussions of looking at his clearly above average career as something that's normal in physics. It's a deterrent, I think, for all those students that aren't so completely brilliant that they do Nobel winning physics by 21. And it's not exactly uncommon to hear about these minds anymore. Is it a function of community density when we funnel all the supremely smart people towards math and science? What does it…
grrlscientist | December 28, 2009tags: Bikini Curling, Drinkers with a Curling Problem, curling, sports, parody, satire, funny, humor, fucking hilarious, streaming video
In a new made-for-mobile series, "Drinkers with a Curling Problem," award-winning Canadian director David Ostry explores deviant variations of the favorite winter sport -- curling.
You might recall my own fondness for the sport of curling.