Tomorrow (Sunday) is the much-hyped Super Bowl. I will not be watching it, just as I have skipped it in the past decade. In my earlier post about how little time is actually involved in play during a normal football game, some of the comments accused those critical of the game of being ‘haters’. It is true that I have come to dislike the game but it was not always so. If I am a hater, it is a fairly recent development. [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert has been having some fun at the expense of football and American’s obsession with things like the Super Bowl. One two successive days, he had clips where he tries out to be quarterback and pokes fun at the mentality that goes along with it. [Read more…]
Via David Pescovitz I came across this video of Zach King seems to be a master of video trickery. The Independent newspaper has a profile of King. [Read more…]
Today was supposed to be a very cold day with the predicted high to be only 0oF (-18oC) with winds making it seem much colder so they decided to close schools across the region, and my university did so too. Underlining the unpredictability of weather, in actual fact the day is very sunny and the temperature right now (at mid-afternoon) is 9oF (-13oC) and there does not seem to be any wind, making it seem quite balmy, at least while I was out briefly to shovel the walkway. Yesterday with its winds actually seemed a lot colder. [Read more…]
Although I have never banned anyone, I have had the occasion to delete one comment. This was in response to the post about spoiling film endings. In the discussion, commenters referred to various films that had surprise endings and discussed them without giving them away. Then someone came along and posted a comment that listed all the endings to every film that had been discussed. I deleted it so quickly that I suspect that most readers never saw it. [Read more…]
I have discussed before how frightening it must be for animals to learn how to go down steps, and how interesting it was to watch Baxter the Wonder Dog learn to do so when he was a puppy and how proud he was of his accomplishment. [Read more…]
Via Pharyngula, I came across this fascinating graphic from a study commissioned by the Wall Street Journal that shows how time is distributed in a typical 192-minute American football game. It turns out it is only 11 minutes or less than 5% involves actual play action. I think the instant replays (sometimes five or six at different speeds and from different angles) give the false impression of there being more action than there really is. [Read more…]
In the discussion following my post about the use bicycle helmets, many spoke about their own personal experiences with its use and how it influenced their decisions on whether to use them. An interesting side discussion then ensued about the use of anecdotal information in making decisions. [Read more…]
Making the decision to close schools for bad weather, as many regions in the US did last Tuesday due to the bitterly cold freeze, is not easy. The prime considerations of course are the temperature and snow and ice levels. As to the first, it is not the predicted daytime high temperature that should be used as a gauge, since that is usually reached only by the mid afternoon when students and workers are returning home in daylight and people have had time to do some clean up, but the low temperatures of the previous night, since that is closer to the temperature in the early morning when children are headed off to school. Last Tuesday, that temperature in Cleveland was -8oF (–22oC), which is pretty cold. [Read more…]
Rodd Scheinerman put some chicken nuggets in the toaster oven, turned it on, and left the room with the camera running. Why did he do this? A roast had disappeared out of the oven a few weeks earlier and while he had suspicions about who was responsible, he needed proof and so he set up a sting operation to catch the culprit in the act. [Read more…]