The Olympics is a good time to realize that there are some great sports out there that we in the US never get to see played at a high level.
One of them is the reputed fastest sport in the world: Badminton. [Read more…]
As everyone knows, Jamaican Usain Bolt won the 100m with a new Olympic record. Caity Weaver reports that just before the 100m final began, some jerk among the spectators had been hurling abuse at Bolt and that just before the starter gun went off, he threw a green bottle at him that fortunately fell behind the athletes and did not distract him or cause a false start. [Read more…]
Todd Canady, 23, of Waco, Texas may want to seriously consider enrolling in firearms safety training classes. [Read more…]
Eight badminton players (four doubles teams) in the Olympics have been booted out because of charges that they deliberately lost their games. Why might they have wanted to lose? Because these were pool games in qualifying rounds and whom one played in the subsequent round depends upon your ranking in your qualifying group. Being second in your group may sometimes provide a better path to getting to the finals than being first, depending on how teams in the other groups fare. This kind of tactical maneuvering for group ranking is a common problem in any sport that has round-robin qualifying group matches before going into the sudden-death final rounds. [Read more…]
I first watched the Olympics on TV in 1976, when I was in the US as a graduate student, and quickly became fed up. The inane chatter of the anchors and commentators, the frequent long breaks for commercials, and the excessive focus on only showing events in which Americans had hopes of winning medals, were all annoying. [Read more…]
Via Jerry Coyne, I came across this story about a New Mexico couple Tom and Shirley Schenk who came to the rescue of some bear cubs who had fallen into a dumpster and couldn’t get out. The cries of the cubs and of their mother who had waited by the dumpster all night touched the couple who came up with a clever plan to get the cubs out while minimizing the danger to themselves. [Read more…]
The first American woman in space let it be known in her obituary that she was a lesbian who had been in a relationship with her childhood friend that spanned nearly three decades, although she had been married at one time to a fellow astronaut. Andrew Sullivan criticizes this reticence on her part. [Read more…]
Those of us who were appalled by the Jerry Sandusky affair tend to feel that no punishment, from whatever quarter, is sufficient to make amends. But Dave Zirin argues that while what Penn State allowed to happen with Sandusky was terrible, the NCAA should not be the body that exacts monetary punishments for things that lie outside its jurisdiction, and that this represents a dangerous over-reach by a purely private and unaccountable and process-free body into the financial affairs of a public university. [Read more…]
I am extremely conservative in my food tastes, tending to favor a few favorite things and eating them over and over again, rather than experimenting with new items. I am not particularly fond of sweet foods but once in a while I get the desire for them and on those occasions my selection has always been for Breyers cherry vanilla ice cream and Cadbury’s chocolate. [Read more…]
One of the organizers sent me an email about it:
I’d like to ask you to plug or mention our conference on your blog. The Midwest Freethought Conference is coming up (all too quickly) on August 3-5 in Omaha, NE. We have a GREAT lineup of speakers, and, due to the OmahaCoR’s billboard invitation to non-believers (the first atheistic billboard in Nebraska), a huge amount of publicity. The speakers are, in (more or less) order of appearance: Brian Dunning, Adam Brown, Dave Muscato, Amanda Knief, PZ Myers, Amanda Brown, Hemant Mehta, Jerry deWitt, Sarah Morehead, AJ Johnson, Dan Barker, and Fred Edwords. [Read more…]