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Wiigobot is a robot built out of Legos that can bowl a perfect game in Wii Sports bowling. Just another step on the way to total human obsolescence. See if you can stay awake during a video of a robot playing a computer in bowling. (via thih)
This is more than a week old but I just finished reading it, so stick it. Malcolm Gladwell says that the problem of finding good teachers is the same sort of problem encountered by scouts attempting to find good NFL quarterbacks.
The problem with picking quarterbacks is that [college QB] Chase Daniel’s performance can’t be predicted. The job he’s being groomed for is so particular and specialized that there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won’t. In fact, Berri and Simmons found no connection between where a quarterback was taken in the draft — that is, how highly he was rated on the basis of his college performance — and how well he played in the pros.
A group of researchers — Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications — as much as they appear related to teaching prowess — turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.
The upshot is that NFL quarterbacking and teaching are both jobs that need to be performed in order to find out if a certain person is good at them or not. For more, check out a follow-up post on Gladwell’s blog.
From a 1977 film called Gizmo, some urban tumbling from the 1930s that strongly resembles the contemporary sport of parkour.
The full film is available on Google Video. (via waxy)
It’s the 20th anniversary of the Billy Ripken “fuck face” card. Ripken explains for the first time how the card came to be.
Now I had to write something on the bat. At Memorial Stadium, the bat room was not too close to the clubhouse, so I wanted to write something that I could find immediately if I looked up and it was 4:44 and I had to get out there on the field a minute later and not be late. There were five big grocery carts full of bats in there and if I wrote my number 3, it could be too confusing. So I wrote ‘F—k’ Face on it.
At the time, it was assumed by many that Ripken had intentionally sabotaged his card with the obscenity. I still have one of these somewhere… (via unlikely words)
The Chicago Tribune gives us an update on the two young men featured in Hoop Dreams, the award-winning documentary about high school basketball stars trying to make their way through life and, hopefully, to the NBA.
Gates, the reserved one, has become an authoritative force who leads a church in the Cabrini area. He is married with four kids. Agee, a spirited charmer, doesn’t have a regular job but is launching a line of “Hoop Dreams” apparel. He has five kids by five different women.
Agee also spends time working on his non-profit foundation that works with underprivileged kids. Hoop Dreams is available in its entirety for US viewing on Hulu.
When the Seattle Supersonics up and moved to Oklahoma to become the Oklahoma City Thunder, Sonics fan John Moe became a fan free agent. He arranged recruiting calls and visits with several teams around the league to see if they would have him.
So was he welcoming me aboard then?
“I am absolutely welcoming you into our franchise. We could use some [Timberwolves] fans right now. You’re part of the blueprint. Absolutely.”
I thanked him for the offer but told him I had other teams to talk to.
At one of Michael Jordan’s basketball camps back in 2003, the NBA star was beaten in a game of 1-on-1 by John Rogers, the CEO of a Chicago investment firm. See also LeBron James getting beat at HORSE.
Update: Rogers also regularly hoops it up with Barack Obama.
Photos of women bodybuilders. If you cover up the faces with your hands, they look like men in bikini tops and if you cover up the bodies, meth addicts.
After a team sale was organized over the web, about 31,000 people have an ownership stake in a UK soccer team called Ebbsfleet United.
MyFootballClub has about 31,000 members/owners from all over the world (including the author of this article), all of whom pay an annual subscription of about $60 to be a member of the nonprofit trust that owns “the Fleet.” The club is run on the principle of one person, one vote for every decision, major or minor. Ebbsfleet recently made headlines in the British press when members voted to sell John Akinde, a talented young striker, for about $250,000, the first vote of its kind.
The NFL is showing their Sunday night game on NBC (traditional play-by-play broadcast) and online (traditional broadcast plus four other camera angles). Slate declares that the experiment may be the future of sports television.
The “Star” cam isolates on one player from each team-or, in the case of the Tampa-Seattle game, five different players. Other “stars” have included Pittsburgh wide receiver Hines Ward and safety Troy Polamalu, Jacksonville QB David Gerrard, and Cleveland wideout Braylon Edwards. For quarterbacks, this feature is a bit redundant-the camera’s always on the guy with the ball-but it’s fantastic for the other positions. Watching Polamalu fly around the field at full speed on every play is fantastic, and not just because his jouncing hair is hypnotic. Few athletes play with Polamalu’s reckless abandon, and it’s thrilling to try to forecast collisions by watching him bounce around the iso cam.
The Star cam works even better for receivers. After watching Ward and Edwards for three straight hours, I now understand why so many wide receivers are narcissistic-their job is to run one wind sprint after another with only the occasional ball thrown their way to break up the track workout.
TBS did this for the baseball playoffs too, except that they omitted the actual broadcast online and provided only extra footage/angles. Adding to Slate’s complaints of no replays (it’s streaming video only, no pausing, etc.) and no stats info on the other angles, I’d add that based on my experience watching the game online last night, they need something other than a test pattern and piercing tone to indicate that the video player is lagging and buffering. Perhaps a silent “please wait, buffering…” message instead?
Tucked away in this profile of Brett Favre is a description of the contemporary NFL quarterback as a cog in complex coaching systems:
…regional distribution managers in a coach’s yardage-acquisition scheme.
At the end of the day, if the QB hits the ground running, is on the same page as the coach, gives 110%, and has all his ducks in a row, that’s all that matters.
TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott makes a list of all the “next Michael Jordans” that have come into the NBA in recent years. Harold Miner! I haven’t thought about that guy in years.
Fun evening activity: type whatever crazy shit is happening on TV into Twitter Search and watch the wittisicms and not-so-witticisms roll by. Example: in game one of the World Series tonight, someone stole a base and every single person in the United States won a free taco from Taco Bell. Instant tweetalanche.
A fake tilt-shift photo of Fenway Park in Boston makes the ballpark look like a scale model. I seemingly will never tire of this gimmick. (via let’s go mets)
The NY Times reports that a growing number of women are taking up parkour.
“There are certain disadvantages to doing parkour as a woman,” Zanevsky said. “The most annoying is if you’re training alone, as I do in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the unwelcome attention from guys. You get catcalls, because you’re doing these weird movements.
And there’s a video! (via fimoculous)
In a recent column, ESPN sports writer Bill Simmons shared his list of best sports pieces ever written. Max from The Millions took Simmons’ list and found many of the articles were available online for your complementary reading pleasure. Authors include Gay Talese, Roger Angell, George Plimton, and David Foster Wallace.
Conventional wisdom and prevailing opinion among hardcore Boston Red Sox fans is that LA Dodgers left fielder Manny Ramirez finally sulked his way out of a Boston Red Sox uniform by basically phoning it in and causing trouble for his team for a couple of months earlier in the season, which phoning and trouble resulted in a trade of Ramirez to LA for very little in return. Two rebuttals have surfaced recently that seem more plausible to me. The first is Facts About Manny Ramirez by Joe Sheehan. Sheehan uses some of those pesky facts to illustrate that on the field, Manny played as well or better during the supposed phoning-it-in period than he has in the past.
When he played, Ramirez killed the league. He hit .347/.473/.587 in July. His OBP led the team, and his SLG led all Red Sox with at least 25 AB. The Sox, somewhat famously, went 11-13 in July. Lots of people want you to believe that was because Manny Ramirez is a bad guy. I’ll throw out the wildly implausible idea that the Sox went 11-13 because Ortiz played in six games and because veterans Mike Lowell and Jason Varitek has sub-600 OPSs for the month.
Four days before he was traded, Manny Ramirez just about single-handedly saved the Red Sox from getting swept by the Yankees, with doubles in the first and third innings that helped the Sox get out to a 5-0 lead in a game they had to win to stay ahead of the Yankees in the wild-card race.
In Manny Being Manipulated, Bill Simmons attempts to answer the question, Ok, so why did Manny suddenly want to be traded and, more importantly, why did the Red Sox actually oblige? Simmons’ answer: Scott Boras, Ramirez’s agent and “one of the worst human beings in America who hasn’t actually committed a crime”. According to Simmons, it all boiled down to mismatched incentives and following the money.
Manny’s contract was set to expire after the 2008 season, with Boston holding $20 million options for 2009 and 2010. Boras couldn’t earn a commission on the option years because those fees belonged to Manny’s previous agents. He could only get paid when he negotiated Manny’s next contract. And Scott Boras always gets paid.
Boras could only get paid for representing Ramirez if Manny signed a new contract. Which he will next year because as part of the trade, the Dodgers agreed to waive his 2009 option and allow him to become a free agent. And the Red Sox went along because they decided they’d rather have a good relationship with Scott Boras going forward instead of a weird relationship with Ramirez. As for Manny, he gets paid either way, rarely appreciated the weird pressure/adulation put on him and every other Red Sox player by Boston fans, and, I get the feeling, likes swinging a bat, no matter what team he plays for.
The high school football team in Euless, TX (population 52,900) starts their games by performing the haka, a chanting dance used to intimidating effect by New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team. What’s odd/interesting about this is that the Maori chant was appropriated by the team’s contingent of Tongan players — whose parents moved to the town to work at DFW airport — and has led to a greater sense of acceptance of the Tongans into the larger community. How’s that for multiculturalism?
The crazy finish to the 1908 baseball season, which was decided by an obscure rule, Christy Mathewson’s dead arm, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown’s pitching, and Fred Merkle’s decision not to run all the way to second base. Things got ugly.
“From the stands there was a steady roar of abuse,” Brown said later. “I never heard anybody or any set of men called as many foul names as the Giant fans called us that day.” Foul names might have been the least of their worries. The New York Journal reported that Cubs catcher Johnny Kling, chasing a pop foul, had to dodge “two beer bottles, a drinking glass and a derby hat.”
The box score of the first game and a bunch of other juicy details are available in the original 1908 NY Times article.
Censurable stupidity on the part of player Merkle in yesterday’s game at the Polo Grounds between the Giants and Chicago placed the New York team’s chances of winning the pennant in jeopardy. His unusual conduct in the final inning of great game perhaps deprived New York of a victory that would have been unquestionable had he not comitted a breach in baseball play that resulted in Umpire O’Day declaring the game a tie.
It’s also interesting to look at the statistics for that season. Merkle is listed as the league’s youngest player, and Honus Wagner won nearly every single batting category, the Brooklyn Superbas (no, really!) topped the league with only 28 homers (for the entire team), and Mathewson won a whopping 37 games. Here’s that NY Times article again:
Up to the climatic ninth it was the toss of a coin who would win. For here is our best-beloved Mathewson pitching as only champions pitch, striking out the power and the glory of the Cubs, numbering among his slain Schulte in the first, Pfeister in the third, Steinfeldt in the fourth, Pfeister in the fifth, Haydon in the eighth, and Evers and Schulte in the ninth — these last in one-two order. Proper pitching, and for this and other things we embrace him.
With such headings as “The Fatal Third Inning”, the 1908 Times story about the second game is worth a look as well.
A nice short appreciation of John Madden and how his insistence on telling and showing people how the game of football is played has had an impact on how the game is played and watched.
Thus, the first tenet of Maddenism: a football game can be understood only by analyzing all its complexity. As he once put it: “Football isn’t nuclear physics, but it’s not so simple that you can make it simple. It takes some explaining to get it across.”
This is also the rare profile that mentions nothing about Madden’s bus and fear of flying.
LeBron James gets beat in a game of HORSE by a mere mortal. The crowd’s stunned silence when James loses is amazing. (via mr)
Writer Mark Bowden sits down with Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid to watch film from a classic football game, the 1958 NFL championship game. At several points during the session, 1958 football and contemporary football don’t even seem like the same game. Perhaps the biggest disparity is the difference in pay:
Most pro players in the 1950s held down full-time jobs off the field. Huff was a salesman for the textile company J. P. Stevens. Unitas and many of his teammates worked at Bethlehem Steel. Art Donovan, the Colts’ hilarious defensive tackle known as Fatso, was a liquor salesman. Most of the men earned less than $10,000 a year playing football. The highest-paid stars made between $15,000 and $20,000 — enough to support a middle-class lifestyle in 1958, but nothing like today’s hefty paychecks. Players who took off from their full-time jobs to play were often expected to make up the time by working long hours in the off-season.
(via df)
Surreal Nike commercial featuring British sprinter Nicola Sanders and her talking body parts.
I don’t mean to link to every single thing on The Big Picture, but Alan’s knocked it out of the park again with these fantastic photos of the 2008 Summer Paralympic Games. These sports look more difficult than the ones at the regular Olympics. Take, for instance, goalball:
Participants compete in teams of three, and try to throw a ball that has bells embedded in it, into the opponents’ goal. They must use the sound of the bell to judge the position and movement of the ball. Games consist of two 10 minute halves. Blindfolds allow partially sighted players to compete on an equal footing with blind players.
The Games aren’t being broadcast on American TV but you can catch them on the web at Universal Sports.
Some physicists have worked out what Usain Bolt’s time in the 100 meters in Beijing would have been if he hadn’t started celebrating before the finish line: 9.55 seconds. The original paper is here. I tried doing this the day after the race but even the HD footage wasn’t good enough to see the tick marks on the track and I didn’t want to mess around with all the angles. (via justin blanton)
Update: The folks at The Science of Sport lay out a much more sensible case relying on split times that Bolt would have run somewhere between 9.61 and 9.69. (thx, jim)
Vanity Fair confirms: Lance Armstrong will return to cycling with the goal of competing in and winning the Tour de France in 2009.
Tennis fan and still stuck at the office? USOpen.org is streaming the men’s final (Federer vs. Murray) live. Right now. Go!
Sources are saying that Lance Armstrong will come out of retirement to race the Tour de France in 2009. (via clusterflock)
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