Oregon State 27, USC 21 (USC being ranked #1 going into the game)
Way to go, Beavers! (Of course, they couldn’t do this sort of thing when I was there; they were busy having something like 30 straight losing seasons)
Category Archives: Sports
On the Topic of Unstable Equilibrium
Most of what follows falls (as it were) under the heading of “what happens when you fail to keep the center of mass above the supports.” The “ooh, that’s gonna leave a mark” cringe-o-meter registers noticeably in some scenes.
(The male gymnast’s vault at about 2:30 looks faked. Is that just me?)
Bwahahahaha
CBS sues NFL Players over fantasy football
CBS has filed a federal lawsuit in Minneapolis to clarify who can use the statistics that underlie fantasy football leagues.
The lawsuit filed earlier this week claims the NFL Players Association has threatened to sue the company if it does not pay licensing fees for the statistics.
CBS Interactive seeks a ruling saying that the players cannot control use of the publicly available numbers and cannot demand that CBS pays for their use.
Baseball has already lost a suit in which they wanted leagues to pay for the right to use players’ names. How freaking greedy can these millionaires get? One can argue that fantasy leagues promote more viewership — especially of otherwise uninteresting games, where you have a stake in the performance of a player or two but care not a whit for either team.
My New Best Friend
Maps showing what games are scheduled to be televised in that area.
What do the grey areas mean?
Welcome to the world of blackout rules. The short answer is: no game at all. This can be due to one of two rules: a) no games can air at the same time as a local team’s home game on another network, or b) if a game is blacked out because it doesn’t sell out, the network with the doubleheader can only show one game. Don’t shoot the messenger, I think the rules are stupid too.
Preach it, brother. I’m glad the Redskins have improved to the point that they will have some prime-time games, because that means no blackout on Sunday.
via Daring Fireball
Bringing Home the Gold
From Google Maps to Gold Medal
Kristin Armstrong, who won gold in the Women’s Individual Time Trial in Road Cycling, got a GPS track when she rode the Beijing Olympic course in December of 2007
After returning home to Boise, Idaho, I exported the GPS data to several different formats, one of which I was able to launch with Google Earth. I was then able to trace the entire course from the comfort of my home half a world away and find a similar route to train on back in Boise. This capability along with having the elevation profile proved invaluable in my preparation for my Gold Medal race.
GPS relies on precise time, provided by some colleagues of mine, and knowing where the satellites are relative to the earth, which is aided by some other colleagues of mine. Woohoo! We won gold!
Nobelmetrics
Can you predict Nobel Prize winners by counting citations?
Short version: Previously, Yes. Currently, no. Like sports.
In some sense this is like the “parity” many sports fans talk about. Making good predictions in an NCAA tournament bracket or fantasy football league can be pretty difficult, because there has been an increase in the number of high-quality players and teams. Further, the teams now must be compared across conferences or leagues. While Gonzaga might have won its conference tournament, it may not be strong compared to teams from the ACC, and the fifth-place team in the English Premier league might still win the European Cup.
Sports has better merchandising, too. (Can’t find an “I’m a Hänsch-man” (2005) hoodie anywhere)
Olym-pics
Beijing 2008 – It’s a wrap at The Big Picture (39 photos)
If you look at the high jump of Blanka Vlasic, you can see how it’s possible to do a high jump with your center-of-mass (focus on the physics) never rising above the bar, though I think in this jump it is higher, since she’s clearing the bar by a bit. But I would guess that her COM is below her torso.
And that last one is going in my desktop picture rotation.
It Only Looks Bad
I know water polo is a taxing sport, and it’s great that the US took a silver. But watching the players walk along side the pool, I couldn’t help but thinking their headgear looked like baby bonnets, and that they looked like giant infants.
That First Step is a Doozy
And they expect you to go head-first.
They're There, and You're Not
In a similar vein to finishing last in the Tour de France, there’s a website chronicling the last-place finishers in the Olympics. DFL
And if you’ve asked yourself, “Self, I wonder if I could compete in the Olympics?” The answer is almost certainly not.
During the 2006 Winter Games, I embarked on a study of the qualifying rules — how hard, I wanted to know, was it to qualify in each sport? As it turned out, very hard. Quotas on the total number of competitors per event. Minimum standards, including a certain number of points earned in international competition. And, even in the more open events, a basic requirement that you be a bona fide competitor with a record of participation. (I didn’t have time to check the summer events this time around, but I imagine the situation would be similar; apart from the wild card lottery, which is very limited in scope, it’s very very hard to get to the Olympics.)
These people are very talented, and train really long and hard. Even the ones who finish last.