I originally wanted the winner to have to name six but apparently the Hotline staff does not have much faith in DC's intelligentsia.]]>
I have never seen the like of this sports competition. Every single player on the rink was a perfect acrobate on the skates, skated at tremendous speed without regard to himself or anyone else, jumped over sticks and players with ease and grace, turned sharply with perfect ease and without losing speed, and skated backwards just as easily as forwards. And during all this, the puck was held down on the ice and was dribbled forwards by means of short shoves of the stick. In bandy you often have to play the ball in the air to pass it, but here the puck was kept gliding on the ice without interruption, even though the space for each player was less than a third of that in bandy. How the players were able to rush forward at such high speed and thread their way through the attacking opponents together with the long stick and puck on this insignificant space, where the distance between team mates and opponents hardly ever reached one metre, is quite beyond comprehension and had to be seen to be believed.
In soccer and bandy you say that there can be much pressure on a player, but the worst situation in these games is as sitting in a comfortable armchair compared to what these players did to one another. The players attacked each other with a roughness that would have sent an ordinary bandy player far into the next week, and you might possibly have a notion of what it was all about when the small Canadian defender Johanneson at one time was pushed headlong into the barrier board, so that it was cracked. However, he happily continued to play on, as if nothing had happened.
The small puck was moved at an extraordinary speed around the rink at all directions, so that the spectators almost became giddy, and the players fought for it like seagulls, that flutter about after bread crusts from a boat. In the same daring manner the players dived for the puck and turned away in a circle if anyone else had retrieved it, so as to glide round and try to get into a better position for capturing the coveted thing.
And there were shots at goal! At the worst speed the players had such extraordinary control that they confidently could send the puck towards the goal so hard that you could not follow it with your eyes. When you previously had seen the goalkeepers in their thick leg-pads which almost covered half of the goal, you had imagined that they only had to stand still to deal with the shots. But in this game you could see that there really is such a thing as goalkeeping. Because not one of the shots were directed towards the goalkeeper, but instead aimed at the bottom comers of the goal, preferably a few decimetres above the ice. The goalkeepers had to dart about like mad, and be active all the time, sometimes using their feet and sometimes their stick, and they had an inconceivable ability to be in the right position to fend off the ball, even before the spectators had had time to realize there had been a shot. A few times the Canadian goalkeeper had to stop the puck with his hand, and despite his thick gloves his fingers were smashed until they bled. Those shots had great speed, and the puck is not soft.
But not this year. CBS has decided to politicize the Super Bowl by allowing a pro-life (or, at a minimum, anti-abortion) to air. While CBS has had a "non-advocacy" policy in recent years (even barring this hardly controversial UCC ad in 2004), they announced a policy change in allowing the anti-abortion ad:
CBS said Tuesday that the decision to air the Tebow ad reflected a change in its policies toward advocacy ads that has evolved over the past several years.
Of course, progressives immediately tested this new policy with a ad for a gay dating web site. CBS's response? Rejection.
No problem, CBS. I get the message. If you want only conservatives to watch this year's Super Bowl, I'm happy to oblige. My friends and I will be baking some desserts, playing Settlers of Catan, and popping in a DVD tonight at our anti-Super Bowl party.]]>
The United States' soccer team isn't the best in the world, and--despite it being 2010 next year--not a championship threat. Given our position, a World Cup campaign is judged to be successful is we make it from the group state (of 32 teams in 8 groups) to the knockout state (of 16 teams). To enter the knockout stage, you have to be one of the top two teams in your group. Tomorrow, the groups will be determined by a lottery and partial-seeding system. Succinctly put, this system screws the United States.
According to Nate Silver's new soccer rankings (called SPI), the United State is the 16th best team in the world, and the 15th best team to make it to the World Cup finals (Russia--ranked 14th--failed to qualify). So, if the groups were drawn randomly, about half the time would we be paired with two teams ranked below us and one team ranked above us. In these cases, we would expect to qualify. The other half of the time, we would be paired with two teams ranked about us and would expect not to qualify. For those doing the math at home, the actual probability of being in an easier group is 57.5%. (Also, if the official, but less-rigorous FIFA rankings were used, the US would be in an even better spot, as the 13th most-highly ranked team in the tournament.)
Often, to prevent the uncertainty of match-ups described above, tournaments will seed teams so that the best teams play the weaker teams in early matches. In soccer tournaments (e.g., Euro 2008) often the top quartile of teams will be seeded in "Pot A", the next fourth of teams in "Pot B", and so on for pots "C" and "D". Each group comprises one team from each Pot. Under this scheme, the US would be in Pot B and be guaranteed to have two weaker teams (from Pots C and D) in its group.
A potentially even smarter systems would used the specific ranking of each team to assign groups. The highest ranked team would be paired with the lowest ranked team as well as the two middle rankings (16 and 17). Sports fans would recognize this type of ranking from the NCAA basketball tournaments' regional groups. In that case 16 teams are split into four groups of: (1,8,9,16),(4,5,12,13),(3,6,11,14), and (2,7,10,15). Again, under this formula, the US would be guaranteed to have two weaker team in its group.
But does the World Cup use either of these systems? No. Alas, the Euro-centric FIFA powers that be have conspired to stack the deck against the U.S. and other teams in our position. The World Cup Seeding system uses Pots (as described in the Euro 2008-scheme) but only sorts Pot A by ranking (these eight teams are called "seeded"). The other Pots are determined by geography (i.e., continent). Here's the breakdown:
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Check out how many worse-than-U.S. teams these scenarios take out of contention for being in the same group as the U.S. In scenario 2, every team in our Pot is worse than us, and the median SPI of the other teams actually leapfrogs the U.S.! What ridiculousness. And yet, because of the way soccer/football is spread across the continents, this will happen every World Cup until: (1) the U.S. becomes a seeded team or (2) the balance of soccer power is significantly altered across the globe. For the short- and medium-terms, we just have to get used to tough draws.
So who wins with this seeding system? European teams (e.g., Slovenia and Slovakia) who barely qualify. They get to rest easy know that they won't have both a seeded team and a very good unseeded European team (e.g., France) in their group.
As for this World Cup specifically, FIFA determined (randomly? by fiat? who knows...) to go with Scenario #2, which really dampens our hopes of a decent draw. (It also means there won't be a U.S. v North Korea match -- too bad.) So that 57.5% chance of being favored to advance that would result from a completely random system? It drops to a 31.5% chance under this absurd, geographically-based system.
So no matter which balls Clarlize Theron pulls out of the hat tomorrow, I have just one thing to say: Go to hell, FIFA, and take your WC seeding system with you!
(I just noticed that the NY Times has a similar article up, but of course it goes into much less depth.)
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The Boston Globe has an interesting piece from Obama's native country on attempts to cash inI was really hoping that Kurtz had confused Hawaii with a nation...]]>
Right after the group picture I shouted for joy and executed a secret plan that was about two years in the making: jumping in the fountain!
Of course, I probably should have taken my cell phone out of my pocket first! Well, at least it didn't take me long to get the mindless professor role down pat :)
Thank you to everyone who made getting a PhD in four years possible -- I couldn't have done it without you!
]]>Closer You are to Done
I'm trying to tell you something about voters
And what makes some of them party floaters
The best thing you've ever done for me
Is to make me take inference more seriously,
There's just one truth after all
Procrastination is a monster that's insatiable
And rigor has a call that's hard to hear
I pretend that my fear is just writer's block
and keep watching DVDs til two o'clock
Now I'm asking for your signatures
I went for a doctorate, they made me climb a mountain
While watching townie children play in the fountain
There's more than question you can answer
That will get you out the door.
The less you seek the source of imperfections,
The closer you are to done.
The closer you are to done.
On the road to a doctorate of philosophy
I tried to split my life between Princeton and DC
Never could sit still or waver from life's purpose
Visited Hong Kong and Thailand, Petra and Darwin's tortoise
I spent four years learning how to frame problems, wrote my thesis
Now I'm free!
[Chorus; instrumental]
I stopped by the dbar at one a.m.
To drink four pints of ginger ale and visit all my friends
I awoke with renewed spirit to finish a thesis section
As soon as I'm done working on this election
...which one should take precedence?
I went for a doctorate, they made me climb a mountain
While watching townie children play in the fountain
We go for a doctorate, we do climb that mountain
We watch townie children who play in the fountain
We go to Chicago, we stress out over generals
We read up on Arceneaux, and fake our way through orals
There's more than one question you can answer
That'll get you out the door
The less you seek the source of imperfections,
The closer you are to done.
The closer you are to done.
The closer you are to done.
