The 2011 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship officially started Tuesday, with the first of the “First Four” games, formerly known as the “play-in” game. It gets going in earnest today, though, which means that once this posts, I’ll be shutting the Internet down and working like crazy for a few hours, so I can justify moving […]
Category: Sports
Annual Mis-Reporting on Graduation Rates
It’s NCAA tournament time, which is time for everybody to break out the moralizing stories about the pernicious aspects of college athletics that they’ve been sitting on since the football season ended. The Associated Press (via the New York Times) clocks in with a particularly discreditable entry, a story on a study of racial disparities […]
Your Can’t-Miss NCAA Bracket for 2011
Even though the really important Final Four has already been decided, the Division 1 NCAA basketball championship starts this week, which means it’s time to fill out your championship brackets. And so, as usual, I present the guaranteed-can’t-miss-sure-thing method of picking the winner based on the rankings of Ph.D. programs in physics (excerpt displayed; click […]
Championship Basketball Thoughts
I stayed up way too late last night, watching televised basketball and reading Steven Erikson (about which more later). It wasn’t a good night for my teams, with both Syracuse and Maryland losing, but this is the most hoops I’ve watched all season, and I have a few miscellaneous comments: — How about that Big […]
Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman to Wreck My Productivity
As has been mentioned numerous other places, ESPN is backing a new Bill Simmons project, which basically sounds like a pop-culture blog network kind of thing, headlined by Simmons and Chuck Klosterman. I saw this a while ago (I think I may have tagged a press release for a Links Dump), but was reminded of […]
Hoops and Abstract Principles
Brigham Young University dismissed one of its best post players, Brandon Davies, from the basketball team for violations of the university’s honor code. Reportedly, this was for sex, which is one of many enjoyable things forbidden by the school’s rules, which stem from the principles of the LDS church. This really kind of sucks, as […]
The Trouble With Foul Trouble (Syracuse-Georgetown)
Last night was Syracuse versus Georgetown in basketball, which is THE great historical rivalry in the Big East– these are the teams that made the league great in the 80’s, and while the Hoyas had a down stretch in the late 90’s/ early 2000’s, they’re good again, so it’s a huge game. Because of that, […]
Sports Reported Like Science
the Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a profile of college basketball analyst Bill Raftery and how he prepares to call games. This would be nothing more than Links Dump material, save for the fact that bits of it appear to have been written for the benefit of visiting aliens who have never seen […]
Presidential Hoops Challenge
Barack Obama will be visiting Schenectady next Tuesday, and local notables are suggesting things he might do. Particularly notable was this: Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, R-Glenville, a basketball enthusiast like Obama, suggested that some hoop should be organized for the occasion. “I’d like to challenge him to a two-on-two game .â.â. at the new YMCA in […]
Thursday Toddler Blogging 120910
SteelyKid is off spending a weekend at Grandma and Grandpa’s, so this week’s picture was actually taken early Wednesday morning: The early hour accounts for both the pacifier (she wasn’t willing to give it up yet) and the frizzy hair (bed-head toddler!). I’m pretty sure she hasn’t grown measurably since yesterday, though. This photo is […]