Sports
drorzel | February 5, 2009As you may or may not have heard, the evidence in the upcoming perjury trial of Barry Bonds was unsealed yesterday, and includes a number of positive drug tests. And, really, my main reaction was "Oh, thank God."
It's not that I'm enthusiastic about hearing steroids-in-baseball talk again, but the alternative was most likely another day of talk about Michael Phelps's unfortunate picture. Tedious as the steroids talk is, it doesn't usually make me want to punch somebody, which makes it a major improvement over the last three days of "OMG, Michael Phelps smokes the dope!!!!"
I linked Radley…
ddobbs | January 27, 2009CNN has a fascinating and rather frightening story about the toll football (or the concussions acquired playing it) take on the brain:
But today, using tissue from retired NFL athletes culled posthumously, the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) is shedding light on what concussions look like in the brain. The findings are stunning. Far from innocuous, invisible injuries, concussions confer tremendous brain damage. That damage has a name: chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
CTE has thus far been found in the brains of five out of five former NFL players. On Tuesday…
ddobbs | January 25, 2009
The book opens so thrillingly -- a plane crash, a last-second Super Bowl victory, and a first chapter that comfortably reconciles Plato and Ovid with Tom Brady and John Madden -- that it spawns a worry: Can the book possibly sustain this pace?
"How We Decide" delivers. Jonah Lehrer, -- author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," blogger at Frontal Cortex, and (full disclosure) an online acquaintance and sometime colleague of mine for a couple years now (I asked him to take over editorship of Scientific American's Mind Matters last year, and we share blogging duties at VeryShortList:Science)…
drorzel | January 21, 2009I'm listening to "Mike and Mike" on ESPN radio, as I usually do in the morning, and they just spent the better part of five minutes talking about the point spread for the upcoming Super Bowl. The opening betting line has Pittsburgh favored by seven points, but some Las Vegas organization or another told them that the Cardinals would be underdogs to ten different NFL teams, had they made it to the game, including the Patriots and Cowboys, who didn't even make the playoffs.
I have no idea who provided this information, or why they would even have betting lines for Super Bowls in alternate…
drorzel | January 12, 2009Somebody really needs to arrange a game between the Giants and the Titans, so they can have an inept-off. Tennessee thoroughly outplayed Baltimore in just about every way, but coughed the ball up twice on stupid plays (LenDale White carrying the ball like the proverbial loaf of bread, Todd Heap trying to hurdle a defender), keeping them from scoring. And the Giants played an excellent defensive game, but completely blew it on offense, with some of the stupidest play-calling in history.
Giants Stadium is famously a terrible place to play on a windy day, and yesterday was a bad day for wind.…
drorzel | January 5, 2009It's NFL playoff time, which means that sports fans will be treated to the sight of the most high-stakes farce in sports, namely the ritual of "bringing out the chains" to determine whether a team has gained enough yards for a first down. We've all seen this: the play is whistled dead, a referee un-stacks the pile of players, picks up the ball, and puts it down more or less where the player was stopped. Then he tosses the ball into the middle of the field, to a second referee, who tries to replicate the spot closer to the center of the field. Then a guy on the sideline carrying a big stick (…
drorzel | December 31, 2008I generally enjoy Gregg Easterbrook's football writing-- he gets a little repetitive, and the shtick is starting to overwhelm any insight, but he makes some good points, and is usually entertaining. For example, I really enjoyed his take on the Dallas Cowboys at the end of this week's column (schadenfreude is a powerful thing).
Easterbrook's problem is that he insists on using his football column as a platform from which to launch bizarre digressions in all sorts of directions. See, for example, this week's weird and pointless foray into cosmology. Or, better yet, his lengthy excursion into…
pontiff | December 30, 2008Moving on to Chapter 1 in my ongoing pedantic plodding through Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. See here for what this is all about. Note that I really am doing this as I read the book (I'm reading it really really slowly), so what I say here may be outdated by the time I get further into the book.
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can't talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don't want the book's main ideas to be spoiled, don't continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I'm in no way qualified in most of the fields…
drorzel | December 30, 2008Inside Higher Ed has an article on athletics and admissions based on an investigative report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The report compares the SAT scores of football and basketball players to those of other students, but what it really highlights is the difference between science and journalism.
The basis of the report is pretty simple: the paper got the test score reports for 55 major colleges and universities, from data that they are required to file with the NCAA. They compared the average scores for football and basketball players to the scores of other athletes and students…
oracknows | December 28, 2008I rarely blog about sports, but I'll make an exception for today, given that football history is likely to be made later this afternoon. I'm not much of a football fan, at least not of professional football. These days, the games take even longer than a baseball game and all too often lack the excitement of even that.
Especially when it's the Detroit Lions playing.
Of course, even though my interest in pro football is relatively weak, I do take in a game from time to time, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for my hometown team, despite their two decades of futility and never having…
ddobbs | December 10, 2008Now this is serious vertical drop.
wingsuit base jumping from doubleA on Vimeo.
omnibrain | December 4, 2008 A sports magazine writer asked me about the different techniques one could use to distract an athlete... here's what I said:
About a year ago another graduate student and I were planning on doing some research in my lab to determine what the best way of distracting a free throw shooter was. We have a pretty cool motion tracking system that would allow us to track arm and ball position as well as project distractions onto a wall - either real world video or computer generated distractions. But this is as far as we got since I saw some other research with a similar goal that didn't seem to be…
pontiff | November 22, 2008This is rivalry week
In a battle of two of the most craptacular teams in college football, Washington State turned out to be less craptacular and beat Washington 16-13 in double overtime. Congrats Washington State, you stink just a little less than the worst team in football (okay maybe Wyoming is worse?)
In the battle that really matters to me, my Cal Bears beat the Stanford Jr. University Red Thingees 37-16. Go Bears!
All right, here we go with the kickoff. Harmon will probably try to squib it and he does. The ball comes loose and the Bears have to get out of bounds. Rodgers is along the…
drorzel | November 19, 2008I got a bunch of really good comments to yesterday's post about athletes and attitudes toward education. Unfortunately, yesterday was also a stay-at-home-with-SteelyKid day, and she spent a lot of time demanding to be held or otherwise catered to, so I didn't have a chance to respond. I'd like to correct that today by responding to the main threads of argument in those comments.
Taking these in no particular order, Moshe writes:
Not sure there is a serious argument here, athletes are different in so many ways, but I'll bite - here is another difference. Some students and athletes have their…
ddobbs | November 4, 2008
As an avid tennis player (though it's been a while), I had to love this and do: The busy bloggers at Neurophilosophy bring their usual lucidity to a paper by David Whitney, of the University of California, Davis, on how inherent dynamics of visual perception make line-call errors by tennis referees virtually inevitable.
Check it out at You cannot be serious! Perceptual errors by professional tennis referees:
The Men's Final of the 1981 Wimbledon Tennis Championships is one of the most memorable events in sporting history. John McEnroe, who was playing against Bjorn Borg, famously challenged…
pontiff | September 30, 2008A quantum physics spotting in....rugby? An article about rugby player Jonny Wilkinson:
The experiment was conceived by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödin-ger to demonstrate a conundrum at the heart of quantum physics: that a sub-atomic particle exists in two states. However, the act of measuring it effectively forces it into one particular state, rather as England's discounted second-half try in the 2007 World Cup Final appeared to many fans to be both a try and not a try, until the referee called for a video replay.
Oye vey:
He realised that his entire world-view was bound up with a…
drorzel | September 26, 2008October is almost upon us, which means that we've been subjected to a bunch of long segments on Mike & Mike about baseball. These serve to remind me just how little use I have for baseball, and baseball statistics.
I've long thought that baseball fans are stat-obsessed dorks, but my opinion changed somewhat when I started learning the definitions of those statistics. Now, I think they're foolish stat-obsessed dorks.
It's a shame, because baseball is one of very few sports where you have a chance of doing meaningful statistical analysis, owing to the approximately three billion games…
ddobbs | September 5, 2008You want mail, write about cell phones and DNA.
Earlier today, when I posted a heads-up to a Science story about questions raised about data-tampering in what Science called "The only two peer-reviewed scientific papers" showing strong links between cell phone use and DNA mutations, I noted I was surprised at the lack of press coverage about this, given how heavily most papers on the subject are reported. Two hours later I got a note from Louis Slesin, who blogs on such issues at Microwave News, asserting that the Science story oversimplified the situation. Slesin pointed me to his Sept 3…
ddobbs | September 5, 2008
Roy Oswalt, bringing it.
Some good hits from the last week or so (but not too many off Roy):
SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT: Fraud Charges Cast Doubt on Claims of DNA Damage From Cell Phone Fields -- Vogel 321 (5893): 1144a -- Science
As shocking a story as the title suggests.
Oops, update: As that story is behind a pay firewall, I excerpt the first couple grafs here. It has received extraordinarily little news coverage since then -- an oddity, given how much press the papers in question generated originally. Time allows I'll post more on this later. In the meantime, from the Science story:
The…
drorzel | September 4, 2008We're in Boston to visit Kate's parents, and while we wait for SteelyKid to wake up and demand food, we're watching "Mike and Mike" on ESPN2 (the live simulcast of the radio show). They've been talking about how tonight's NFL kick-off (our long national nightmare is over...) was pushed up so as not to conflict with the Republican Convention.
I can't help thinking, though, that given John McCain's charisma (or lack thereof), the Republicans might be better served by having the football game run opposite McCain's speech. That way, their core audience will opt for watching the game live, and…