Goal of the Century: Maradona vs Messi
Split-screen view comparing Diego Maradona’s 1986 Goal of the Century with a very similar goal by current Argentinian star Lionel Messi.
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Typographic World Cup tshirts
I love these World Cup soccer shirts…here’s the Brazilian one:
Another one for the list.
Crazy underwater base jump
Guillaume Nery is a world champion free diver; here he is “jumping” from the top of Dean’s Blue Hole and falling towards the bottom. No tanks or anything.
Insane. According to the info on YouTube, Nery’s jump was filmed by free diver Julie Gautier, who was also holding her breath the whole time. Insaner!
High-brow World Cup blog
The New Republic has started up their World Cup blog again.
This spring, we recruited Aleksandar Hemon to write a monthly column about soccer and encouraged him to write without pandering to a broad audience. And that’s the same spirit that we’ve embraced for this enterprise. Our cast of bloggers is filled with many eminent novelists and journalists (and a Deputy Mayor of New York City). They will write about the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of this tournament, I’m sure. But they will also write about tactics and players and coaches. They have a green light to be as wonky as they want.
Write the future
If this doesn’t make you feel a little tingly, you’re probably going to want to go on vacation from June 11 - July 11.
J.P. Morgan chooses England to win World Cup
If I was a fan of England, this wouldn’t make me feel too confident. J.P. Morgan’s quant team used FIFA Ranking, historical results, and something called “J.P. Morgan Team Strength Indicator” to predict the winner of the 2010 World Cup. Their results:
Ultimately our Model indicates Brazil as being the strongest team taking part in the tournament. However, due to the fixture schedule our Model predicts the following final outcome: 3rd: Netherlands, 2nd: Spain, World Cup Winners: England. Alternatively, we point out that the 3 favourite teams (from market prices recorded on 30 April of 3.9-to-1 for Spain, 5-to-1 for Brazil and 5.4-to-1 for England) represent a 52.5% probability of winning the World Cup.
If you’re more of a UBS (wo)man, they have it as (1) Brazil, (2) Germany, (3) Italy.
Foul trouble
Q. When should NBA coaches take players out of games because of fouls? A. A lot less than they actually do.
Conventional wisdom seems to regard foul management as a risk vs. safety decision. You will constantly hear something like, “a big decision here, whether to risk putting Duncan back in with 4 fouls.” This is completely the wrong lens for the problem, since the “risky”* strategy is, with the caveats mentioned, all upside! Coaches dramatically underrate the “risk” of falling behind, or losing a lead, by sitting a star for too long. To make it as stark as possible, observe that the coach is voluntarily imposing the penalty that he is trying to avoid, namely his player being taken out of the game! The most egregious cases are when a player sits even though his team is significantly behind. I almost feel as though the coach prefers the certainty of losing to the “risk” of the player fouling out.
(via mr)
World Cup! World Cup! World Cup!
World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup! World Cup!
Starts one month from yesterday. Can. Not. Wait. And it seems as though the TV coverage might be decent in the US as well:
Yesterday ESPN also confirmed that:
1. All 64 matches will be broadcast live.
2. In high definition.
3. On either ESPN, ESPN2 or ABC.Of those 64 matches, 52 will be simulcast online at ESPN360.com. Which means many many Americans with be able to either secretly or not so secretly watch games at work 100% legally and in high quality (although the service is only available via certain internet providers).
Some of the games will also be broadcast in 3D, which…I don’t even know what to say about that.
Horse names from The Wire
Some of my favorites are Prezbo, My Name is My Name, Hamsterdam, Always Boris, Fuzzy Dunlop, and Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. Glaring omissions? Hit Me on My Burner, Snot Boogie, and Pack o’ Newports. The full list. (thx, tash & nathan)
Player Drafted At Linebacker To Start At Realtor
The Raiders organization welcomed sixth-round draft choice Travis Goethel Wednesday and said the Arizona State linebacker would more than likely be asked to start as a Bay-area Realtor by the beginning of next season.
Insanely great at ultra-endurance races
This story is so crazy I don’t even know where to start. For one thing, Jure Robic sleeps 90 minutes or less a day when competing in ultracycling events lasting a week or more…and goes crazy, like actually insane, during the races because of it. Because he’s insane, his support crew makes all the decisions for him, an arrangement that allows Robic’s body to keep going even though his mind would have told him to quit long ago.
His system is straightforward. During the race, Robic’s brain is allowed control over choice of music (usually a mix of traditional Slovene marches and Lenny Kravitz), food selection and bathroom breaks. The second brain [AKA his support team] dictates everything else, including rest times, meal times, food amounts and even average speed. Unless Robic asks, he is not informed of the remaining mileage or even how many days are left in the race. “It is best if he has no idea,” Stanovnik says. “He rides — that is all.”
During one race, Robic hallucinated that mujahedeen on horseback were pursuing him; his support team pretended to see them too and urged Robic to outrun them. Read the whole thing…this is an awesome and disturbing story. A recent episode of Radiolab on Limits has more info.
Fidel Castro playing baseball
False: Fidel Castro was recruited to play professional baseball in the United States. True: after taking over Cuba in 1959, Castro played in a few exhibition games with his fellow revolutionaries.
Cubans know that Fidel Castro was no ballplayer, though he dressed himself in the uniform of a spurious, tongue-in-cheek team called Barbudos (Bearded Ones) after he came to power in 1959 and played a few exhibition games. There was no doubt then about his making any team in Cuba. Given a whole country to toy with, Fidel Castro realized the dream of most middle-aged Cuban men by pulling on a uniform and “playing” a few innings.
Here’s Fidel pitching in one of those games:
Here’s more information about Fidel’s baseball career. (via slate)
Competitive recreational jogging
Even when jogging for fun, many male runners won’t let themselves be passed.
When I asked a male friend what he feels like when he’s passed, he said, “I don’t get passed.” Then he admitted that the reason he’s gotten in such good shape recently is so he won’t get passed. Another friend says that if he hears someone on his heels, he sprints. And if he passes someone, he also has to sprint, to keep from getting passed back.
Usain Bolt profile
This month’s Esquire has a profile of Usain Bolt, a man ahead of his time.
It’s worth keeping in mind that there is a significant difference between the final seconds of Usain Bolt’s gold-medal run in Beijing in 2008 and the final seconds of his victory this afternoon in Call of Duty. In the video game, right up until the moment Sadiki took out the final terrorist, Bolt was on edge, nervous, uncertain. It taxed him. He almost lost.
Beating the video game was a challenge for him. Executing the most dominant and effortless performance in the history of the Olympic Games was not.
Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist at Lewis & Clark College, recently charted a graph to demonstrate that, judging by the incremental progression of the 100-meter world record over the past hundred years, Bolt appears to be operating at a level approximately thirty years beyond that of the expected capabilities of modern man. Mathematically, Bolt belonged not in the 2008 Olympics but the 2040 Olympics. Michael Johnson, the hero of the 1996 Olympic summer games, has made the same point in a different way: A runner capable of beating Bolt, he says, “hasn’t been born yet.”
That 100-meter final at the Beijing Olympics still gives me goosebumps when I think about it. But all this business about no one being able to touch Bolt’s pace for another 30 years, that’s just bunk. The mark is out there. People are going to go for it. My prediction: Bolt will continue to break his own mark but someone else will approach or equal Bolt’s current record in fewer than five years, if not three.
Bill Simmons on sabermetrics
Bill Simmons has finally accepted the gospel of sabermetrics as scripture and in a recent column, preaches the benefits of all these newfangled statistics to his followers. The list explaining his seven favorite statistics in down-to-earth language is really helpful to the stats newbie.
Measure BABIP to determine whether a pitcher or hitter had good luck or bad luck. In 2009, the major league BABIP average was .299. If a pitcher’s BABIP dipped well below that number, he might have had good luck. If it rose well above that number, he likely had terrible luck. The reverse goes for hitters.
(via djacobs, who has an extremely high VORF)
Baseball play of the year
We’re only a game or two into a long baseball season, but you might not see a better play all year than this one. Here’s a YouTube embed, although I don’t know how long it will last.
40 yard dash: average dude vs pro athlete
Video from the NFL Combine showing just how fast prospective NFL players can run compared to normal people.
It is almost unbelievable how quickly Jacoby Ford (the top performer in the 40 this year) covers that distance.
New NFL playoff overtime rule
The NFL has approved a new overtime rule for the playoffs. Each team will now get at least one overtime possession unless the team winning the coin flip scores a touchdown on the opening drive.
In 1994, the spot of the kickoff was moved to the 30-yard line from the 35, allowing for longer returns that put the receiving team into field-goal range with just a few plays or a long penalty. Since then, the team that won the toss won 59.8 percent of the time, because even if it did not win on the first possession, it often controlled field position. The team that lost the toss won just 38.4 percent of the time. And before the kickoff was moved, teams won with a field goal on the opening possession just 17.9 percent of the time. After the kickoff moved, it rose to 26.8 percent of the time.
I’m pretty happy about this. Like I said after the Saints/Vikings game in January:
Congrats to the Saints, but the coin-toss sudden death OT thing has to be the worst rule in sports.
DIY rally racing
A “racing freak” named Bill Caswell bought an old BMW off of Craigslist for $500, fixed it up, and entered it in a rally car race against teams with new $400,000 cars and support crews. He came in third in his class.
Some kids threw boulders in the road on a transit and I punctured my gas tank losing nearly a half tank in 24 km on the next stage. Best part, the officials pointed out our leak and showed a handful of gas to us when we asked how big it was — I knew we were screwed, but they said we could start the stage so we did. I patched it with just stuff in the trunk — RTV and balls of duct tape — twenty feet after the stage finish, on the side of the road, with the officials watching. Didn’t have time at service to fix it so five stages tomorrow with RTV patch.
History of freestyle aerial skiing
From the early 80s, a video history of freestyle aerial acrobatic skiing.
Note the smooth-skiing gent in the first minute and the almost aggressive lack of helmets.
Photos of the 2010 Winter Paralympics
The Big Picture has an awesome set of photos from the 2010 Winter Paralympic Games in Vancouver. Handicapped my ass…most of these events look much tougher than their regular Olympic counterparts.
The physics of free throw shooting
Attention @THE_REAL_SHAQ: it’s all about parabolas and backspin.
Free-throw success is also improved by adding a little backspin, which pushes the ball downward if it hits the back of the rim. The North Carolina State engineers calculated the ideal rate of free-throw backspin at three cycles per second. That is, a shot that takes one second to reach the basket will make three full revolutions counterclockwise as seen from the stands on the player’s right side.
(via mr)
Skiing down Mount Everest
Forty years ago, Yuichiro Miura skied down Mount Everest.
“When I planned to ski Everest, the first thing I faced was ‘How can I return alive?’” he recalls. “All the preparation and training was based on this question. But the more I prepared, I knew the chance of survival was very slim. Nobody in the world had done this before, so I told myself that I must face death. Otherwise, I am not eligible.”
Miura’s exploits were the subject of The Man Who Skied Down Everest, which won the Oscar for best documentary.
Shaq: the big art curator
Shaquille O’Neal curated an art exhibition that opened this weekend at Flag Art Foundation in Chelsea.
Do you ever get time to visit museums?
I used to go a lot with my kids. Donald Trump is a great friend, and he has four or five Picassos on his plane. And that’s where I would look at them. One time, I was at a museum and tried touching a Picasso. You break it, you buy it, they said. I was told it would cost $2 million.
The auteur’s Super Bowl
What if the Super Bowl was directed by Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino? You’d get something like this. The Werner Herzog bit at the end is great.
Super Bowl art bet
The Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art have a Super Bowl bet…the loser loans a significant piece of art to the winner for three months. The directors of the two museums trash talked back and forth via email and Twitter before agreeing on the paintings to be loaned.
“Max Anderson must not really believe the Colts can beat the Saints in the Super Bowl. Otherwise why would he bet such an insignificant work as the Ingrid Calame painting? Let’s up the ante. The New Orleans Museum of Art will bet the three-month loan of its Renoir painting, Seamstress at Window, circa 1908, which is currently in the big Renoir exhibition in Paris. What will Max wager of equal importance? Go Saints!”
(thx, stuart)
Norgay and Hillary not the first up Everest?
Efforts are underway to find and recover a circa-1924 camera from near the summit of Mount Everest. The camera may contain photographic evidence that George Mallory and Andrew Irvine reached the highest point on Earth almost 30 years before Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953.
From the archives: a panoramic view from the top of Everest. Still wow.
Gridiron time
Actual football played in a 60-min NFL game: about 11 minutes.
So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps.
Predicting Olympic medal counts
Economics professor Daniel Johnson makes accurate Olympic medal predictions using a handful of indicators that are unrelated to sports.
His forecast model predicts a country’s Olympic performance using per-capita income (the economic output per person), the nation’s population, its political structure, its climate and the home-field advantage for hosting the Games or living nearby. “It’s just pure economics,” Johnson says. “I know nothing about the athletes. And even if I did, I didn’t include it.”
For the upcoming 2010 games in Vancouver, Johnson predicts that Canada, the US, Norway, Austria, and Sweden will end up with the most medals. (thx, brandon)
Update: Johnson’s predictions were a bit off.
The dark side of Marvin Harrison
Did former Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Marvin Harrison shoot a North Philly drug dealer and later have him murdered?
The cops also thought it was wrong to drop the case just because a piece-of-shit famous person might be guilty of shooting a piece-of-shit unfamous person in a piece-of-shit part of the city. If prosecutors required every witness to have a pristine record, one detective says, “most of the cases in the city wouldn’t be solved.” None of the cops doubted for a second that if Harrison was a plumber or a UPS driver instead of a famous athlete, he’d have long since been arrested.
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