Sports
oracknows | November 17, 2016I’ve frequently written about what I like to refer to as “quackademic medicine,” defined as the infiltration of outright quackery into medical academia, particularly medical schools and academic medical centers. There’s no doubt that it’s a significant problem as hallowed institutions like Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center embrace nonsense, pseudoscience, and quackery in the name of “integrative medicine.” It goes far beyond MSKCC, however, with Dana-Farber and other elite institutions having apparently bought into the need to study prescientific vitalistic quackery.
One area that’s…
oracknows | August 8, 2016So, in case you hadn’t noticed, I was taking a brief vacation, a long weekend if you will. As a result, I hadn’t planned on posting new completely original material until Wednesday or Thursday. (Monday’s post, some of you noticed, was a modified crosspost from my not-so-super-secret other blog.)
Then something happened.
You know you’re a committed blogger when your vacation can be interrupted by an overpowering urge to write about something in the news. Longtime regular readers (or even not-so-longtime regular readers) can probably guess right away what I’m talking about. Of course, I gave it…
drorzel | May 17, 2016It's one of those days where none of the stuff I probably ought to be writing seems even slightly appealing, so instead I'm going to do something frivolous and morale-boosting, namely think out loud about an imaginary course. Despite being on sabbatical, I do still check my work email, and have caught the edges of a new round of arguments about whether we're providing enough "Gen Ed" science courses pitched at non-majors. The hardest part of this is always meeting the "science with lab" component, because those courses are pretty resource-instensive, and we have a limited set of them that we…
drorzel | February 7, 2016We spent most of Saturday at a taekwondo tournament-- the AAU Adirondack Championship, or some permutation of those words. This was held in the gym over at Hudson Valley Community College, and was fairly big:
The taekwondo tournmanet from way up in the bleachers.
It was, however, 99% waiting around. They did black-belt sparring in the morning, and said that staging for the colored belts would be at 1pm, so we were there at noon. But they did the forms competition before the Olymopic sparring (SteelyKid's event), so it was 3:45 before they called her group to be sorted into age and weight…
drorzel | January 9, 2016When schedules permit, I like to take the kids to home basketball games at Union. This works out well for everyone, as almost nobody goes to the games, so the kids can rampage all over the gym and get good and tired without upsetting anyone, and we add somewhat to the crowd supporting the home team.
(I'm not sure what the players made of The Pip yelling "DAAAAAAAD! You can't tickle me when I'm way up here!" from the very top of the bleachers, though...)
This also gives me a chance to shoot some different subjects, in keeping with the general goal of this photo-a-day business. Thus, a couple…
drorzel | December 13, 2015The topic of sports injuries is unavoidable these days-- the sports radio shows I listen to in the car probably spend an hour a week bemoaning the toll playing football takes on kids. Never a publication to shy away from topics that bring easy clicks, Vox weighs in with The Most Dangerous High School Sports in One Chart. You can go over there to look at their specific chart, which is drawn from a medical study of cheerleading; I don't find the general ordering of things all that surprising.
There was, however, one aspect of this that I found sort of surprising, namely the difference between…
drorzel | December 9, 2015As noted a couple of days ago, this was a big martial arts week at Chateau Steelypips, with The Pip's first-ever belt test on Monday, and SteelyKid testing for her brown belt tonight. Unfortunately, tonight was also a first, namely the first belt test she's failed.
This was, sadly, entirely predictable, as her teacher has really tightened the requirements for tests of late, and said a while back that they would be required to do not only the form for the belt they were testing for, but the previous belt, as well. And I've been trying for three days to get her to run through the red-belt form…
drorzel | November 10, 2015Over in Twitter-land, Rhett Allain drew my attention to this "Sports Science" clip from ESPN, about a wild 4th-and-25 play in the Arkansas-Ole Miss game. This is nominally because I've been writing about big hits and bouncing balls over at Forbes, but really, I think Rhett's just working on a "misery loves company" theory, here:
It's a cool play, but as science, this leaves a lot to be desired. It's less "sports science" than "sports technobabble"-- mostly, they seem to be going for a science-y air by quoting lots of largely irrelevant numbers. I'm not sure why it matters how far most of…
drorzel | August 12, 2015Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It's an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields:
And that raises and interesting question, since aside from the science section (and not even all of that), all of these apply to any other performance or production. So how do those people master all of those things? The short answer is that they don’t. Almost any production that requires a long, and more importantly disparate, set of…
drorzel | March 15, 2015It's the absolute peak of college basketball season, and it still seems weird to be almost completely disconnected from the game. This is not, by the way, the result of any principled objection to the manifest hypocrisies of the NCAA, or anything like that, but a practical effect of having kids. If the tv is on, it's either showing one of their cartoon shows or drowned out by the pleading for cartoon shows. And by the time they're asleep at night, I'm generally too wiped out to watch anything.
But as a long-time fan, though, I feel I would be remiss if I didn't say something about what's been…
drorzel | March 1, 2015Back on Thursday when I was waiting to be annoyed by a speech, one of the ways I passed time was reading stuff on my phone, which included This Grantland piece about Charles Barkley and "advanced stats". In it, Bryan Curtis makes the argument that while Barkley's recent comments disparaging statistical tools seem at first like just the same old innumeracy, it's really a question of ownership.
But Barkley was firing a shot in a second war. Let’s call it Moneyball II. This clash doesn’t pit a blogger versus a newspaperman in a debate over the value of PER. It pits media versus athletes in a…
oracknows | February 5, 2015
Yesterday was a very strange day, at least on the Internet.
I really should learn to remove Twitter from my iPhone on Wednesdays. Why? Wednesdays tend to be my administrative days. I'm not in clinic seeing patients nor am I in the operating room. That's why Wednesday tends to be one of the two days a week when I write grants, do administrative work, and meet with my lab people, among other miscellaneous tasks, such as working on upcoming presentations. So I tend to spend most of the day on Wednesdays sitting in front of my computer, and I'm easily distracted by Twitter or other things…
drorzel | February 2, 2015The ending of last night's Super Bowl couldn't've been more perfect as a demonstration of the point I was making about scientific thinking in football (and, you know, in that book I keep flogging...). First, on the positive side, you have New England's Malcolm Butler making the key play:
"I knew what was going to happen," said Butler, an undrafted free agent out of Western Alabama who said New England was the only team that gave him a chance to reach the NFL. "I don't know how I knew. I just knew. I just beat him to the point and caught the ball."
Perhaps Butler knew because he had seen the…
drorzel | January 30, 2015I wrote up another piece about football for the Conversation, this time drawing on material from Eureka, explaining how great football players are using scientific thinking:
Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman gets called a lot of things. He calls himself the greatest cornerback in the NFL (and Seattle fans tend to agree). Sportswriters and some other players call him a loudmouth and a showboater. Fans of other teams call him a lot of things that shouldn’t see print (even on the internet). One thing you’re not likely to hear anyone on ESPN call Sherman, though, is “scientist.”
And…
drorzel | January 27, 2015I know I said I was done with this story, but this was actually recorded last week: The Daily Planet show on Discovery Channel in Canada contacted me last week when all this deflated-football silliness was exploding, and got a cameraman to come over and record me talking about it. The episode aired Monday night, January 26th, and you can stream it from their archives at the link above (I think it should be episode 216, but when I looked just now, it was just "Episode 16," but the date is correct. My bit is toward the end, starting around the 35:00 mark, but you should totally watch the whole…
drorzel | January 25, 2015The low-level cold I've been nursing for a month now finally exploded into the full unpleasantness of my usual winter illness Saturday, or else I would've been more active following up on my Deflategate article and my ideal gas law post. As it was, for most of the day, I could barely keep on top of clearing comments from moderation.
Anyway, a few things deserve more prominent responses than a comment at the end of a long post, so:
-- I was in bed during the great Bill Belichick press conference, though I saw some mockery of it come across Twitter. While it may not have played well with the…
drorzel | January 23, 2015So, as mentioned yesterday, I got an email asking me about the weird scandal involving the Patriots and underinflated footballs, so I wrote a piece for the Conversation on the subject. since a few people had beaten me to citations of the Ideal Gas Law, though, I decided to bring my own particular set of skills into this, and did an experiment.
[UPDATE: I've added some follow-up/concluding remarks in a separate post from Sunday 1/25. So, if you care about my reaction to Belichick's big press conference, go over there.]
You can see the basic set-up at the link-- I got a couple of footballs from…
drorzel | January 22, 2015One of the cool things about working at Union is that the Communications office gets media requests looking for people to comment on current events, which sometimes get forwarded to me. Yesterday was one of those days, with a request for a scientist to comment on the bizarre sports scandal surrounding the deflated footballs used in the AFC Championship game this past weekend. Which led to me doing an experiment, and writing a short article for The Conversation:
News reports say that 11 of the 12 game balls used by the New England Patriots in their AFC championship game against the…
oracknows | January 2, 2015
Seven years ago I returned to Michigan, where I was born and spent the first quarter century of my life, after an absence of more than 20 years. In the interim, I had done my surgical residency and earned my PhD in Cleveland, a surgical oncology fellowship in Chicago, and worked in New Jersey at my first academic job for eight and a half years. Then I was lured back with a job in Detroit. One of the odd things about this return after such a long absence was the culture shock, how much I had forgotten about the Detroit area. One of those things that I had forgotten is just how crazy about…
drorzel | October 14, 2014It's baseball playoff time, so sport shows are full of one of the great mysteries of the season, exemplified by this .gif (from SBNation):
Raul Ibanez hitting a game-winning home run. GIF from SBNation.
No, not "Raul Ibanez, really?" but "How can he make the ball go that far?" After all, even very good outfielders are lucky to reach home plate with a throw from the warning track. Not even the hardest-throwing pitcher could stand at home plate and throw the ball into the second deck of a baseball stadium. Yet it's not uncommon for the ball to end up there after being hit by a bat. So, how…