Now for something really important, Major League Baseball. The key matchup between the A’s and the Anaheim team looks like it’s going to tilt in favor of the A’s this year; the machine predictions back this up, even if the human predictions don’t. Last year the A’s suffered from an acute lack of offense, which [...]
If you watch Numb3rs on CBS, you’ll have noticed a rather bizarre discussion last night of Simpson’s Paradox, which was alleged to say that combing two series of numbers into a single series can change their order (it doesn’t really say that, but that’s beside the point.) The example given was David Justice’s and Derek [...]
A million fans came to the parade in Philly on Friday. I’d say baseball is still the National Pastime. This was a pretty decent World Series, apart from the Philly weather and the inept umpiring. I wanted the Rays to win, but the result’s not exactly heart-breaking either. Comcast had a lot to do with [...]
The LA Times boils China’s Olympics down to their real essence: Yet what planners in Beijing miscalculated is that no matter how well you teach performers to smile, the strain behind the lips is still detectable. The near-hysterical drive by Chinese leaders to put on the biggest, most spectacular sporting event ever, and to engineer [...]
I hate to say “I told you so” (actually, I love it, but play along), but the director of the Beijing games’ opening and closing ceremonies touts the obedience of his countrymen in boosting his own work: China’s most famous film director, Zhang Yimou, who directed both ceremonies, said only Chinese performers were skilled, disciplined [...]
Another day, another deception from the People’s Republic of China’s Olympics. Remember the cute assemblage of children in colorful ethnic dress carrying the flag in the Opening Ceremony? They weren’t what they appeared to be: Media reports said the children were from the Galaxy Children’s Art Troupe, which involves young actors and actresses mainly from [...]
So our best gymnasts are now Nastia Liukin and Sasha Artemev, offspring of highly-decorated Soviet gymnast dads and moms. It’s funny how things work out. Twenty years ago, during the height of the Cold War, Valeri Liukin and Vladimir Artemev were slugging it out for the Marxist-Leninist system, and now their children are defeating its [...]
What if you threw a spectacle and nobody came? That’s China’s Olympic dilemma: Two weeks after announcing they had sold every one of the record 6.8 million tickets offered for the Games, Olympics officials expressed dismay at the large numbers of empty seats at nearly every event and the lack of pedestrian traffic throughout the [...]
Not content to slip under-aged girls onto their gymnastic team, Chinese officials also engaged in some sleight of hand in the Opening Ceremony. We’re not talking about the Clone Army that performed all the synchronized drumming, but the little girl who sang the cute song. It was lip-synched fakery: One little girl had the looks. [...]
Downloading Olympics programming in HD from NBC involves using a private P2P network, some DRM, and a little bit of luck. After a few mishaps, I’m finally subscribed for some automatic Olympic programming updates. I had to use Explorer to do this, as Firefox 3 isn’t supported by the DRM plugin NBC uses, and neither [...]
Twitter: iPolicy