Sports
drorzel | May 15, 2009Malcolm Gladwell has a number of public responses to the sort of thing I ranted about the other day-- not to me specifically, mind, but to the same general points-- on his own blog and on ESPN's Page 2. It's pretty much the same argument others made in the comments to my post. Taking a fairly representative bit from his blog post:
The press is not for everyone. But then the piece never claimed that it was. I simply pointed out that insurgent strategies (substituting effort for ability and challenging conventions) represent one of David's only chances of competing successfully against Goliath…
drorzel | May 5, 2009I'm never quite sure what to make of Malcolm Gladwell. Lots of smart people seem to be favorably impressed by his writing and ideas, but whenever I actually read anything by him, there doesn't seem to be much there.
Take, for example, this New Yorker piece on basketball as a metaphor for innovation. As seems to be his general practice, Gladwell frames the whole thing around an engaging anecdote, about Vivek Ranadivé, a Silicon Valley businessman who coached his daughter's team of twelve-year-old girls in a National Junior Basketball competition:
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and…
ddobbs | April 28, 2009
Brandon Keim, who is part of Wired's ace science writing crew also keeps a blog, Earthlab Notes, where he recently put this nice post on The Language of Horses:
In a few slender leg bones and fragments of milk-stained pottery, archaeologists recently found evidence of one of the more important developments in human history: the domestication of horses.
Unearthed from a windswept plain in Kazakhstan, the remains were about 5500 years old, and suggested that a nomadic people now called the Botai had learned to ride a creature that had captured mankind's imagination thousands of years earlier.…
drorzel | April 7, 2009Between the sleep deprivation caused by being home alone with the baby, and the new Jim Butcher book, I realized that I almost forgot to mention North Carolina's defeat of Michigan State for the NCAA basketball championship. I'm glad to see it for two reasons: their victory let me win two of the basketball pools I was in (neither involving money, alas), but more importantly, I like Roy Williams and I like this team. They play some really good basketball when they're clicking, and they absolutely dismantled the Spartans last night.
They're not going to displace Syracuse or Maryland in my…
drorzel | March 30, 2009Last week, the more annoying yelling heads on ESPN and its affiliates were all making a big show of brushing off the complaints of NCAA fans who felt the tournament was missing something due to the lack of a "Cinderella" team from a small conference making it to the round of 16. This was just foolishness from people who know nothing about basketball, they said. The chalk-y nature of the tournament was a Good Thing because it produced "compelling match-ups" in the second weekend.
And ten of the twelve games just sucked. There were really only two games that had any drama at all, both involving…
drorzel | March 21, 2009The good news is, I'm solidly ahead of Barack Obama in my NCAA pool. The bad news is, the success rate of my serious picks is distressingly close to that of the Physics Grad Programs backet...
Various and sundry thoughts on the first two days of NCAA tournament action:
-- Not that many big upsets, and six of the ten lower seeds to win were from power conferences, and thus deficient in charm. The USC win over Boston College, in particular, was quite possible the dullest close win by a double-digit seed that I've ever seen. Even the crowd seemed bored.
Compare that to, say, East Tennessee State…
drorzel | March 20, 2009I carry some of my gear to and from the lunchtime basketball game in a red and white canvas-and-mesh bag. The zipper doesn't work, and hasn't for years, and the logo on the side is almost worn off, but if you look closely, you can still make out the New York State Public High School Athletic Association logo.
The bag was a freebie when my high school basketball team played in the NYSPHSAA championships in my senior year. That was twenty years ago this week-- I'm pretty sure that bag is older than some of the students who play with us at lunchtime.
I should note that I was a deep bench player…
drorzel | March 18, 2009Over at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers gets into the March Madness spirit by reporting on a study of basketball games that yields the counter-intuitive result that being slightly behind at halftime makes a team more likely to win. It comes complete with a spiffy graph:
Explained by Wolfers thusly:
The first dot (on the bottom left) shows that among those teams behind by 10 points at halftime, only 11.8 percent won; the next dot shows that those behind by 9 points won 13.9 percent, and so on. The line of best fit (the solid line) shows that raising your halftime lead by…
drorzel | March 16, 2009The NCAA men's basketball tournament bracket was announced yesterday, which has kicked off the usual round of people "predicting" the outcomes based on totally silly criteria like the Academic Progress Rate of the schools in question.
This is, of course, completely frivolous. What you really need is solid, relevant information. Like predictions based on the ranking of physics graduate programs:
(Click for a slightly larger image.)
The algorithm used to fill this in was simple:
The school with the higher-ranked physics program wins
Schools with no physics program ranking lose to schools…
drorzel | March 15, 2009I've lost a lot of sleep this weekend staying up late to watch Syracuse games, so I'm only getting to some of the Friday articles in my RSS feeds now. I don't want to let this utterly worthless column by William Rhoden of the New York Times pass without comment though. It's ostensibly about the Syracuse-UConn six-overtime epic on Thursday night, but the actual description of the game is limited to two paragraphs at the very beginning that could've been written after twenty minutes of watching SportsCenter Friday morning.
The vast majority of the article-- seventeen of the twenty paragraphs--…
drorzel | March 15, 2009I haven't written much about basketball this year, for the simple reason that I haven't watched much basketball this year-- between SteelyKid, the book, and my day job, I just haven't had time. This weekend, though, I watched a whole bunch of hoops, mostly involving my two teams, Syracuse and Maryland. Yesterday was a bad day, as both lost, but they each had a good run leading up to that.
Various and sundry comments in no particular order:
-- One thing I have not missed in my non-hoops-watching winter has been the "announcing" team of Mike Patrick and Dick Vitale. I swear, these two reach a…
drorzel | March 13, 2009My plans to write long and smart blog posts today was thoroughly derailed last night by a combination of a slightly sick SteelyKid (she's had a runny nose for a while because of teething, but it seems to have slid into a bit of a sinus infection) and an incredible basketball game. Syracuse and UConn played an extra thirty minutes, with Syracuse finally winning in the sixth overtime. The game started at 9:30 pm, and ended at 1:30 am, and in the final OT, both teams were playing walk-ons who were seeing the court for only about the tenth time this season.
This was a good old-fashioned Big East…
drorzel | March 11, 2009One of my coaches, back in the day, always used to say that basketball was a game of quickness. Usually when he had just stolen the ball from somebody thirty years younger than him.
It's true, quickness is a big asset in basketball. But it's also a game of timing-- knowing when to shoot, when to pass, when to cut to the basket, and when to step into the passing lane and steal the ball to secure Cleveland State's first NCAA bid since 1986.
And, if you're talking pick-up basketball, there's also the important question of when to show up at the gym.
Arrival time is a major issue in places where…
drorzel | March 7, 2009It's March now, which means that we're at the absolute peak of the college basketball season. Small conferences have already started their tournaments, playing for the one shot those teams have of getting into the NCAA's. Big conference tournaments start next week, with the Big Dance the week after.
So, of course, ESPN and all its variants are devoting all of their energy to... speculating about Terrell Owens and Alex Rodriguez. Because, apparently, those two have signed-in-blood contracts with Satan ensuring that not one week passes without one or the other being the lead story on…
drorzel | February 21, 2009Maryland 88, North Carolina 85 (WARNING: Auto-playing video):
Greivis Vasquez did something no Maryland player had done since 1987, and the Terrapins pulled off an upset that was almost as remarkable.
Vasquez had a career-high 35 points and 11 rebounds and 10 assists -- Maryland's first triple-double in 22 years -- and the Terrapins rallied from a 16-point deficit to shock No. 3 North Carolina 88-85 in overtime Saturday, ending the Tar Heels' 10-game winning streak.
It wasn't on up here, so I don't have anything else to say.
ddobbs | February 20, 2009A roundup of wonderful stuff I won't get to. Then again, many of these need no help:
"Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4 p.m. Bring wine and caviar only.". Woman emails party invitations while asleep. Hat tip: BoingBoing
Obviously, the drug and medical device industry is not looking forward to independent research that compares expensive new drugs or procedures to older and less expensive treatments. Alison Bass on objections to (and spirited attacks on) the stimulus bill's funding of comparative effectiveness studies -- a subject I hope to write more about soon…
drorzel | February 17, 2009My cold from last week has shifted into a bit of bronchitis (and here I thought my virus-fighting strategy of staying up really late drinking beer would clear everything up), so I'm kind of groggy and lethargic. And I have book edits to work on, which precludes taking a long time to write blog posts about science, so here's some babble about card games.
Saturday night at the Tor party, a bunch of people started playing poker using Tor.com buttons as chips. They were playing the obligatory Texas Hold 'Em, and there were a couple of guys standing off to the side (one of whom reminded me of…
drorzel | February 12, 2009I watched (bits of) a couple of basketball games last night for the first time in ages: Syracuse put up a good fight for a bit more than a half before being put away by a really good Connecticut team, and North Carolina blew Duke away late to win their fourth straight in Durham. These were two impressive performances by two terrific teams.
So I flip on Mike&Mike this morning, and they have Jay Bilas on. Who talks for two minutes about UConn and UNC, then Greenberg asks him, essentially, "You have a law degree, so would you care to pontificate about Alex Rodriguez?" And they spend the rest…
drorzel | February 6, 2009Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt got her 1000th win last night, a record that will probably stand for a good long while. Nobody else in college basketball really has much of a shot-- the record for men's basketball coaches is Bob Knight at 902, and the most wins by an active coach is Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, somewhere short of 800.
I'm not a big follower of women's college basketball-- it doesn't really have the competitive balance of the men's game, and I'm not a huge fan of watching 30-point blowouts-- but what little I do know suggests that Summitt is a class act. I haven't…