{"id":4758,"date":"2010-06-11T14:22:18","date_gmt":"2010-06-11T14:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/06\/11\/belated-world-cup-contest\/"},"modified":"2010-06-11T14:22:18","modified_gmt":"2010-06-11T14:22:18","slug":"belated-world-cup-contest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/06\/11\/belated-world-cup-contest\/","title":{"rendered":"(Belated) World Cup Contest"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was supposed to go up earlier, but it turns out that thinking<\/em> you selected “Scheduled” in the MT back end is not, in fact, enough to schedule the post to appear. So this is showing up after games have already begun, but nothing of consequence has happened yet, so it’s no biggie.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the soccer World Cup has begun, making this one of the rare summers with sporting events worth watching on television. And time for the quadrennial spectacle of Americans pretending to know\/care about soccer.<\/p>\n

So, anyway, there’s a big tournament<\/a> going on, and it seems only fair to offer space to discuss it. And, just to add a little competitive element to it, we’ll run a quick contest:<\/p>\n

\n

The entire FIFA World Cup tournament will involve 111<\/s> 64 games. How many of these games will end in ties?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Because this is posting late, we already know that the answer is greater than or equal to one. There are still an awful lot of games to be played, though, so we can still run with this.<\/p>\n

For the purposes of this contest, elimination games decided by penalty-kick shootouts count as tie games. Enter by posting your guess in the comments of this post, along with a guess as to the total number of goals scored in the tournament, for tie-breaking purposes. Entries will be accepted until 11:59 pm Eastern time Sunday. The person whose guess is closest to the actual number without going over will receive a signed copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog<\/cite><\/a>. One entry per person, and you must provide a valid email address with your comment that will be used to contact you in the event that you win.<\/p>\n

Feel free to use this as an open thread to talk about the opening games, which team ought to win, the physics of a great corner kick, or any other topic that appeals to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was supposed to go up earlier, but it turns out that thinking you selected “Scheduled” in the MT back end is not, in fact, enough to schedule the post to appear. So this is showing up after games have already begun, but nothing of consequence has happened yet, so it’s no biggie. Anyway, the… Continue reading (Belated) World Cup Contest<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,37,24,43,27,105],"tags":[168,326,327,108,328,329],"class_list":["post-4758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-pop_culture","category-silliness","category-soccer","category-sports","category-world","tag-contest","tag-how-to-teach-physics-to-your-dog","tag-soccer-2","tag-sports-2","tag-ties","tag-world-cup","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}