Sports
sa smith | May 18, 2012I have a some updates on a few stories I covered the past couple of weeks:
Some people who proclaim to have 'chronic fatigue syndrome' show everyone just how NOT CRAZY they are... by transcribing my entire interview with Conspiracy Skeptic by hand (they cant hold a job you see-- 'brain fog') and comparing me to a cheerleader/goat, and fantasizing about me getting my comeuppance for daring to speak negatively about St. Judy Mikovits (ie-- tell everyone the bullshit she and her comrades have been up to). Just to be clear, these folks are NOT CRAZY. THEYRE NOT FUCKING CRAZY GODDAMMIT!!!! We…
sa smith | May 15, 2012As a resident of the state of Oklahoma, I am legally required to publish the following post:
GO THUNDER!!!!!! WHOOOOOOOO!! WHOOOOOOOOOO!!!
drorzel | May 7, 2012Some time back, I reviewed a cool book about Fermi problems by Aaron Santos, then a post-doc at Michigan. In the interim, he's taken a faculty job at Oberlin, written a second book on sports-related Fermi problems, and started a blog, none of which I had noticed until he emailed me. Shame on me.
Anyway, his new book is just out, and he's running an estimation contest with a signed copy as the prize. So, if you're the sort of person who enjoys Fermi problems, read his post then grab a convenient envelope and start estimating on the back. You have until June 1.
drorzel | April 18, 2012Yesterday's post on applying intro physics concepts to the question of how fast and how long football players might accelerate generated a bunch of comments, several of them claiming that the model I used didn't match real data in the form of race clips and the like. One comment in particular linked to a PDF file including 10m "splits" for two Usain Bolt races, including a complicated model showing that he was still accelerating at 70m into the race. How does this affect my argument from yesterday?
Well, that document is really a guide to fancy fitting routines on some sort of graphing…
drorzel | April 17, 2012Over at Grantland, Bill Barnwell offers some unorthodox suggestions for replacing the kickoff in NFL games, which has apparently been floated as a way to improve player safety. Appropriately enough, the suggestion apparently came from Giants owner John Mara, which makes perfect sense giving that the Giants haven't had a decent kick returner since Dave Meggett twenty years ago, and their kick coverage team has lost them multiple games by giving up touchdowns to the other team.
Anyway, one of Barnwell's suggestions invoked physics, in a way that struck me as puzzling:
Idea 3: The receiving team…
drorzel | April 5, 2012While none of the college basketball teams I root for made the Final Four in their respective tournaments, I probably really ought to note that there is a team that might loosely be termed "mine" that's playing in the national semifinal. Then again, since they've gotten this far without me saying anything about them at all, maybe they'd be just as happy if I continued my benevolent neglect...
We're all science types here, though, so to hell with superstition: Union College, where I work, plays hockey at the NCAA Division I level, and has made it to the "Frozen Four," the semifinals of the…
drorzel | April 5, 2012Over in Scientopia, SciCurious has a nice post about suffering from Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that everyone else is smarter than you are, and you will soon be exposed as a total fraud. Which is nonsense, of course, but something that almost every scientist suffers at some point. The post ends on a more upbeat note, though, when she thinks about fighting it:
The more I thought about ways to combat imposter syndrome, either by myself or in academia in general...the more I came up with nothing. Until today, when I was working out.
I'm doing circuit training, and as I worked my way through…
drorzel | April 3, 2012While in the past, I've written a bunch about basketball here, I've been unusually silent on the subject this year, confining my commentary to the occasional Links Dump item from Grantland and other sites. This isn't because the past season was not noteworthy-- indeed, it was a rather eventful year for Syracuse basketball, with the best record in school history, but a good deal of turmoil off the court. It's just that I've been too busy to watch basketball, let alone blog about it. I did manage to catch all or part of several Syracuse games, though not as many as I would've liked, because…
jtoney | February 9, 2012
MetLife Stadium: NY Giants vs. Washington Redskins, Dec. 18, 2011 (my own photo.)
This may be a sign of football withdrawal syndrome, but the day after the NY Giants won the Super Bowl I was searching for 2012 season tickets (more on that later.) I was reminiscing about last December when I took my son to his first professional football game at MetLife stadium. It was a bright, freezing cold day and the stadium was packed with more than 80,000 fans. The NY Giants were having a bad day battling the Washington Redskins; several times the announcer excitedly reported "Touchdown!" followed…
drorzel | February 6, 2012So, my Giants edged out Kate's Patriots again in the Chateau Steelypips Bowl, in a game that was certainly not without its drama. I'm not going to gloat about it, because a couple of different bounces here or there easily could've changed the outcome. Also, I didn't see the third quarter at all, really, because it was SteelyKid's bedtime, and I was upstairs reading her stories.
But as good as the game was, we now have to turn toward the future, and specifically what wacky thing will go wrong to prevent the Giants from doing anything significant next year. "What do you mean?" you ask. Well,…
jtoney | February 6, 2012
NY Giants net wins 2011 season (source.)
Everybody loves an underdog winning the day.
Congratulations to this year's Super Bowl Champions! Will the US economy follow suit?
Source: BarackObama.com
drorzel | February 5, 2012Proving that you can find physics in everything, Sean Carroll points to a strange anomaly in the Super Bowl coin toss: the NFC has won 14 coin tosses in a row. The odds of this happening seem to be vanishingly small, making this a 3.8-sigma effect, almost enough to claim the detection of a new particle, and certainly enough to justify the generation of a press release.
Of course, there are two problems with Sean's analysis, one classical and one quantum. The classical objection is that what we have a record of is one team winning the toss every time, which does not mean that the coin is doing…
drorzel | February 5, 2012Like many Americans, I'm going to be hugely preoccupied today. Thus, a poll for your blog-like entertainment needs:
The Super Bowl is today. Who's going to win?
If you choose the last option, please arrange to have contacted me in the past to tell me who to have laid a significant bet on so I will have won a large sum of money.
jtoney | January 24, 2012
Photo: :The New York Giants in a December 2008 game against the w:Cincinnati Bengals (Flickr tedkerwin)
In 2004, I had a memorable evening dining with NY Giants player Michael Strahan (see "Football Helmet Hits and Brain Injury - What Should Be Done?") With a repeat match of the NY Giants battling with the New England Patriots coming up in the Super Bowl on February 5, I was reminded of this:
From Michael's Facebook page:
New York Giants Fans, remember this?
Will history repeat itself?
jtoney | January 22, 2012
Penn State Nittany Lions head coach en:Joe Paterno on the sideline during warmups prior to the 2006 Homecoming game versus the University of Illinois on Friday, October 20, 2006.
Joe Paterno at Penn State was one of the most successful, and controversial, football coaches at the University level. What will his real legacy be?
From The New York Times:
Joe Paterno, whose teams won more games than any other major-college football coach, who became the face of Penn State University and a symbol of integrity in collegiate athletics only to be fired during the 2011 season amid a child sexual-…
jtoney | January 16, 2012
MetLife Stadium: NY Giants vs. Washington Redskins, Dec. 18, 2011 (my own photo.)
The New York Giants-Green Bay Packers divisional playoff last night had a whopping 40.1 million viewers, with numerous commercial breaks, some amusing, some annoying, some dull. What is the value of those commercials? Do they really allure new customers to their products?
I have a confession to make. I'm not really a football fan, at least not in the usual sense. This all changed when my son began to approach his teenage years. This post is about a common but idiosyncratic little tale about fathers and…
jtoney | January 15, 2012
Photo source, Stephanie Taylor.
Denver Broncos Quarterback Tim Tebow, as discussed in my last post has captured America's attention because of spectacular athletic skills and his - some say - shameless display of his religious faith.
Such a public display of piety has brought out mean-spirited commentary from my fellow bloggers, referring to Tim Tebow as "impotent," "obnoxious," a "militant evangelical Christian" (quotes below.) Really?
From "There is No God:"
This is what happens when you vaingloriously give your deity responsibility for carrying a stupid little football game: his…
jtoney | January 14, 2012
Tim Tebow Foundation
Tim Tebow with Jacob Rainey, one of the many people dealing with health problems Tebow hosted at Broncos games this season.
Photo source.
Denver Broncos Quarterback Tim Tebow has become a popular culture phenomenon not only because of his extraordinary athletic skills but because he lives out the values of his religious faith - displayed publicly and shamelessly - everyday (more on that later.) But something that has not received much coverage in the news media is that three years ago, Tim Tebow had a "mysterious pain in his throwing shoulder" and he sought out some…
drorzel | January 11, 2012Jonah Lehrer has a big article at Grantland on concussions in high school football that paints a fairly bleak picture:
The sickness will be rooted in football's tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.)…
jtoney | January 1, 2012
Photo source.
Happy New Year's! Today my son and I are anticipating the match between the NY Giants and the Dallas Cowboys, and I am reminded of the risk that all football players accept when they battle on the field. Head injuries are of particular concern because of the quantity and force of head strikes, sometimes approaching that of a severe car crash. What is the best design for protection?
One NY Giants player, Chris Canty, uses a unique design to minimize risk of head trauma and eye injury, because of a severe eye injury he suffered off of the playing field. From today's NY Times…