In which I get a little ranty about basketball. ———– Over at Slate, Matt Yglesias has a column about why everybody ignores the Spurs.: America—at least in its own imagination—stands for certain things. For the idea that hard work and sound judgment bring success, and that success deserves celebration. That winners should be celebrated as […]
Category: Sports
For Extra Credit, Estimate Your Chances of Winning: Ballparking Giveaway
Some 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, […]
More Physics of Sprinting
Yesterday’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 […]
The Physics of Sprints and Kickoff Safety
Over 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 […]
Union College in the “Frozen Four”
While 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 […]
Impostors, Underdogs, and the Status of Science
Over 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 […]
On Basketball
While 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 […]
Wacky Football Mishap Poll
So, 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 […]
The Best of All Possible (Football) Universes
Proving 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 […]
Incredibly Serious Sunday Poll
Like 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 […]