May 2010
2 posts
Foul trouble and coach behavior/incentives
Basketball and economics: ah, a marriage made in heaven. In grad school, I had the privilege of taking a class from the late Amos Tversky (who would presumably have been the co-winner, with Daniel Kahneman, of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, had he not died in 1996), one of whose famous studies demonstrated that there’s no evidence for “hot shooting” in basketball. As...
Which one of these things is not like the others?
“Major League Baseball is the only professional sports league with broad antitrust protection. The National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, the NCAA, NASCAR, professional tennis and Major League Soccer supported the NFL in this case, hoping the high court would expand broad antitrust exemption to other sports.”
(from...
October 2009
1 post
Scientists (especially Ecologists) Behaving...
At the end of college, I became a member of an organization called Sigma Xi, “The Scientific Research Society”. Since that moment also pretty much marked the end of my career in (natural) science, my “membership” is perhaps a bit misleading. Nevertheless, I get one very cool perk: 5 days a week, I receive an email digest of summaries of top science stories across a broad...
August 2009
1 post
Happiness
My good friend Shri posted recently on the subject of success and happiness. I responded to her post by quibbling about her opening statement:
“What does every person on earth want? To be happy. But how people define happiness and therefore how they define success…”
I found it interesting that she assumes a connection between the two, and said that I think of the concepts as...
July 2009
4 posts
Tech timeline for the London Olympics
Only diehard Olympics nuts who want to read coverage about coverage (metacoverage?) of a Games that’s three years away will be interested… but since I’ve made a habit of posting stuff like this, here’s a timeline/project plan on the subject.
A few thoughts on economics and rationality
References in popular media to “irrationality” in human behavior seem to have increased in frequency in the last several years - a noticeable start to the rise coinciding with Kahneman’s Nobel Prize in 2002, and a flurry of squawking generated by the financial turmoil of the past several months. There seems to be some general tacit implication that the traditional (economic)...
Olympics coverage (offseason) news...
As a huge Olympics nut, media headlines/blog posts/etc. on the topic in non-Olympic years sometimes catch my eye - here a few recent ones:
More coverage: USOC and Comcast partner to launch the U.S. Olympic Network
The IOC’s inevitable response: USOC’s TV Network Quickly Stirs Dispute
A call for common sense from a few weeks ago: Reuters Tells Olympics: Reform Media Rules For The...
Back (!?)
Okay, it’s been a long time since my last post (though not as long as Marc Andreessen, who just posted yesterday after being silent since last August; and, yes, that may be the only time Marc and I are compared publicly).
I just returned from sabbatical (a marvelous benefit given by eBay after you’ve been with the company for 5 years), during which Melissa and I took a month-long trip...
September 2008
1 post
After a bit of a hiatus...
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted - I think I wore myself out with my Olympic blogging. (… or, more likely, my Olympic watching.) Things have been busy in the 4 weeks since, too. Hopefully, I’ll get back to posting every few days.
I never did get around to writing my “favorite Beijing moments” post, and it may not end up happening, but an article by...
August 2008
20 posts
Olympics: sympathy
Since I’m an Olympics nut, I can’t just let them go when the Closing Ceremony ends - I need a few days afterward to ramp down. So, I’ll be posting a few closing thoughts over the next few days - about the Games in general, favorite moments, NBC’s coverage, etc.
Today’s is the “downer” post. Proverbially, defeat’s agony must accompany...
Olympics highlights, Day 16
Top highlights: with not much competition left, there were still two. First, the Redeem Team (a name I said I refused to use - but, upon reflection, they earned the moniker) beat Spain for the gold medal in one of the more exciting basketball games I’ve seen in a long time. Spain ran with the US, shot the ball well, and - despite missing their starting point guard - was within 4 points...
Olympics highlights, Day 15
Top highlight: the US winning both men’s and women’s 4x400 relays. The men’s victory was a foregone conclusion, barring some freak occurence like a cramp, and they didn’t disappoint, winning in Olympic record time - Jeremy Wariner’s anchor leg was stupid-fast.
The women’s race was incredibly dramatic, with Sanya Richards catching and passing the Russian anchor...
Olympics highlights, Day 14
Top highlight: American Brian Clay winning gold to extend a strong US tradition in the decathlon. His performance in the first 9 events was so dominant (building a lead of more than 500 points) that even a last-place finish in the concluding 1500m still left him 200 points ahead of the silver medalist.
Other highlights, most of which involve US teams:
Jamaican men winning the 4x100 relay and...
Olympics highlights, Day 13
Top highlight: Definitely two of them, the first being US women winning gold in women’s soccer. I won’t claim to be a soccer expert, so I can’t refute some of the after-match reports that Brazil dominated play, but my view was that the Americans had a clear game plan which they executed well: play a very disciplined defense, and send lots of long balls forward with the notion of...
Olympics highlights, Day 12
Top highlight: in possibly the clearest “top highlight” of the Games, it’s obviously Usain Bolt’s 2nd gold and 2nd world record, coming in the 200m. In marked contrast to his showboating and suboptimal finish in the 100m, he went all-out this time, even leaning at the tape when he was leading by several meters.
Before seeing Bolt, I didn’t think Michael...
Olympics highlights, Day 11
Top highlight: seeing Natalie du Toit from South Africa, who is missing the lower half of her left leg, compete in the inaugural women’s 10km marathon open-water swim - amazing and inspiring.
Other notes/highlights:
Shawn Johnson finally winning a gold medal, on the balance beam. Of all events in gymnastics - and possibly all of sports - this may amaze me more than any other: how...
Olympics highlights, Day 10
Top highlight: the US sweep of the men’s 400m. While their dominance of the sprints has faded, the US is still the leader when it comes to the 400 distance (with or without hurdles). Hopefully, this is a prelude to better performance by US tracksters for the rest of the Games.
Other notes/highlights:
US women win their soccer semifinal 4-2 over Japan after trailing early. They’ve...
Olympics Highlights, Day 9
Top highlight: the Jamaican women sweeping the 100m dash - a powerful performance by the suddenly-dominant sprinting power. Jamaica has been a force in sprinting for several Olympics now, but this kind of performance is what we Americans used to aim for. Now, we feel lucky to have won a single bronze in the men’s and women’s 100m. Hopefully, the US team will perform better in the...
Olympics highlights, Day 8
Top highlights:
1) Seeing Phelps complete his perfect run, swimming the decisive leg in the 4x100 medley relay. It’s possible to argue that there are other athletic feats comparable to Phelps’ performance in the last eight days; it’s very difficult to argue that there any feat clearly superior to his.
2) A breathtaking sprint by Usain Bolt in the men’s 100m, breaking the...
Olympics highlights, Day 7
Top highlight: Phelps’ amazing come-from-behind victory in the 100m butterfly, which almost defies explanation. Whereas the US victory in the 4x100 free relay was incredible, this one was… well, mystifying.
Other highlights:
The US women’s soccer 2-1, extra-time quarterfinal victory over Canada. I woke at 3am Pacific to see this live, and then endured a 90-minute lightning...
Olympics highlights, Day 6
Top highlight: Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson winning gold and silver, respectively, in the women’s gymnastics individual all-around finals. Shawn was very good and Nastia was slightly better.
Other highlights:
Lochte and Piersol winning gold and silver in the men’s 200m backstroke. In a Phelps-dominated swim meet, it was nice to see Lochte earn a gold medal (and set a world...
Olympics highlights, Day 5
Top highlight: Kristin Armstrong smashing the field to win the women’s cycling road race. A special shout-out goes to Christine Thorburn, who finished 5th, only 3.2 seconds out of 3rd place - she’s a doctor for my wife Melissa.
Other highlights/notes:
Levi Leipheimer, in the men’s road race, winning the bronze
Kosuke Kitajima, defending his Olympic titles in both breaststroke...
Olympics highlights, Day 4
Top highlight: Phelps winning the 200m fly (with goggles full of water) and participating in the 4x200m relay to become the first Olympian with double-digit gold medals.
Phelps’ performance so far is superlative - the only accomplishment I can think of that’s in the same class is Jesse Owens’ four world records in 45 minutes while at Ohio State. (Phelps’ 5 gold medals...
Olympics highlights, Day 3
Top highlight is obvious: the men’s 4x100 freestyle relay. It was absolutely spectacular. If you’ve watched it, I don’t need to say any more. If you haven’t, go to the NBC Olympics video site and see it. It’s the current candidate for top event at the Olympics.
Other moments:
Several great performances in the rest of the swimming events - Phelps in the 200m...
Olympics highlights, Day 2
Top highlights:
Michael Phelps’ 400IM world record - an absolutely astounding performance. Phelps may or may not match or break Spitz’ record of 7 golds in one Olympics, but he seems highly likely to break the record for most Olympic golds in career (9). He’s the best swimmer in history.
The US/China game in men’s basketball. Notable not from a competitive perspective,...
Olympics highlights, Day 1
Top highlight: US women sweeping the sabre event in fencing. I’ll admit that I can barely follow, and certainly don’t understand, this sport. Basically, the fencers face off, then there’s a flurry of activity, then both fencers shout, and finally one of them is awarded a point. The referee even has to go to a video replay every third or fourth point to check that he made the...
Olympics highlights, Day 0
No sports today, but:
The Opening Ceremony: wow. (I’m watching the Parade of Nations as we speak.) Story, costumes, dancing, technology, fireworks - spectacular.
I loved the arrow-to-light-the-torch in Barcelona, and the ceremony in Athens 2004 had a wonderful connection to the ancient Games that no other country could replicate. For me, though, this is the most impressive opening...
Olympics highlights, Day -1
Not much to report today either, as only men’s soccer pool play was in action. The US men started off well with a 1-0 win over Japan - crucial for their medal hopes in a tough group.
The Opening Ceremony starts in a little over 7 hours. Woohoo!
Other than men’s and women’s soccer pool play, competition starts at 8:30 AM Saturday morning (Beijing time) with the women’s...
Olympics highlights, Day -2
My plan: over the next 19 days, post my personal highlights from the Beijing Olympics. I’ll freely admit bias in several areas:
Sports: swimming, combat sports, cycling, basketball, and especially athletics are great - performance sports (diving, gymnastics, synchronized swimming) not so much.
Nation: USA (without apology; I’ll generally root for Americans, and expect that citizens...
More details about NBC's online Olympics coverage
CNet offered several articles talking about Olympics coverage today:
An overview of the processes & systems being used for live online coverage
Notes on internet & journalism restrictions being imposed by the Chinese government
An overview of NBC’s online coverage plans
A few image previews
My top takeaways:
The “control room” portion of NBC’s specialized...
July 2008
11 posts
The oldest instrument and the Olympics...
As a fan of ancient Greek things and of the Olympics - ancient and modern - I loved this article: apparently, one of the functions of the world’s oldest-known scientific instrument was keeping a schedule of upcoming Olympic games.
Every Olympic year since at least 1992, I hear sports commentators (I listen to a lot of sports-talk radio during my commute) talk about how the Olympics...
NBC "live" coverage delay details...
Further details came out today about NBC’s Olympic live-coverage-that-isn’t-live. Apparently, “popular” events will be available online after the Pacific coverage of the event.
I’m probably reading too much into their wording, but I’m optimistically seizing onto their qualification of “popular” events, hoping that suggests that a large portion of...
Ghost Patrol
I haven’t posted about this before, but the puzzlehunt team that I captain, Meat Machine, spent a few weeks in late June/early July preparing an application for Ghost Patrol, a Ghostbusters-themed Game coming up in November (likely the only full-length Game of 2008).
A large part of the application was a “creative project” that could take one of three forms:
- building a...
Killing and Winning
Brad Feld posted today, adding to/agreeing with a sentiment expressed in an email by Jason Calacanis: basically wondering why, in the tech industry (and many other industries) competition gets framed as trying to “kill” other companies. Brad writes, “We as a industry are obsessed with death. And its a trap that clouds your thinking. Facebook did not kill MySpace, YouTube did...
Mark Cuban on small businesses
Mark Cuban wrote a post on small businesses today that resonated with a lot of people, myself included. The short version of his thesis is: to jumpstart the economy, remove the tax and regulatory/paperwork burdens on small businesses.
My wife Melissa ran a small business for five years, offering interior design consulting services. It’s currently dormant, primarily due to health issues,...
Tight security at the Beijing Games; US athletics...
This is too amusing not to post:
Included on the illegal items list for spectators at the Olympics next month are “crossbows and daggers”.
Also, I learned something new, which I thought I’d share, about qualifying rules for the USA Athletics (that’s the official name for what us Americans usually call “track & field”) squad, based on this story from...
NBC Olympic coverage, continued
More information coming out this week about NBC’s (TV and online) coverage of the Beijing Olympics: live coverage of every swimming final (nice) and live coverage of both men’s and women’s marathons (nice).
They’re reiterating that the 7-channel NBCU network will somehow average 212 hours of programming per day, which is more than 30 hours per day per network - somebody...
More on NBC's Olympics coverage
A funny statement about NBC’s coverage of the upcoming Olympics caught my eye today:
“NBC has scheduled 3,600 hours of Olympics programming on its main network, along with Telemundo, USA, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC and Bravo. That’s the equivalent of eight days of programming packed into each day.”
That’s impressive - not just the number of hours, but the fact that...
Trials coverage
Okay, instead of moaning about NBC’s online Olympics coverage before I actually see it and find out whether it’s any good or not, I’m going to complain about something I have seen: their Trials coverage.
The actual event broadcasting isn’t terrible. There are things I’d like see differently:
- I’d like to see more of the field events. I understand that live...
Online Olympics coverage: too good to be true
A week or so ago, I was getting excited about the rich online coverage NBC was going to offer for the upcoming Olympics. That coverage is apparently going to be a lot more restrictive than I had hoped. Two points to highlight:
1) Olympic video cannot be displayed on any website other than www.nbcolympics.com.
Sigh. Implications for NBC: your online viewership probably decreases (e.g.,...
June 2008
3 posts
Pining for the Triplecast, but glad for online...
When I saw that various blogs have quoted John Malone as predicting that NBC’s plan to stream thousands of hours of live and recorded video during the Olympics this summer will fail, I took note, since ths subject was at the intersection of my industry (the consumer internet) and one of my top passions (the Olympics; one of my dearest friends noted long ago that my “Olympics fetish has...
Yahoo and Microsoft
I’m a big fan of Fred Wilson’s blog A VC, but I can’t agree with his latest post, where he says about the announcement that any Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition possibilities are finally and totally dead:
Now Yahoo! will do what it needs to do. Clean house, get lean, get out of businesses it shouldn’t be in. Focus on what it’s good at. And start making money and growing again.
They...
eBay's ad marketplace
eBay’s closing of a marketplace for TV and radio ads has been reported pretty widely in the last day or so. First, let me be clear: though I’m an eBay employee, I wasn’t involved with this initiative, and I don’t have any real inside information about it, so my opinions are basically those of an outsider.
Reading some of the reports, however - and this one in particular -...
May 2008
9 posts
My data belongs... to whoever has it
Last Friday I read, with significant bemusement, a lively debate between Arrington, Scoble, and others related to the recent Friend Connect/Facebook Connect/Data Availability announcements by Google, Facebook, and MySpace. (For the full debate, read deep into the comments…) The beginning of Arrington’s post - that the announcements, and the Facebook/Google “scruffle” (as...
Pure entertainment IS a purpose
Though I’m all for games of all sorts - chess, poker, puzzle hunts, etc. - the articles in the last day or two about GWAP (“Games With a Purpose”) struck me as odd. (GWAP includes things like the ESP game, which is supposed to use human input to advance automated image search, and various CAPTCHA-improving exercises.) … but I find odd the implication that games...
Abstract vs. concrete
This article, from my daily science digest, is an interesting one. It describes an Ohio St. experiment suggesting that using “real-world examples” - like measuring cups or pizza slices or trains heading toward each other - actually inhibits mathematics teaching. Students who were taught abstract principles only performed better than those taught using concrete examples - and also did...
Web 2.0: not a sector and not an activity
I can be amused by semantic debates, especially in cases where people somehow confuse semantics with some kind of universal, moral truth. One prime example is the age-old question “what qualifies as a sport”? … which is clearly a purely definitional question that somehow nevertheless inspires heated passion about the level of required physical skill/exertion or the presence of a...
Great Urban Race: recap
Game season is starting with a bang.* A few days ago I posted about Coed Astronomy’s leisurely mini-game, in which Meat Machine participated on April 19th. Last Saturday, Chris (friend from Stanford and former eBay colleague) and I competed in the Great Urban Race. (… and tomorrow, if we can field our team, Meat Machine will be playing in Shinteki.) The Great Urban Race is sort of a...
Marc A. on dual-class stock structures
Marc Andreessen - currently near, and possibly at, the top of my “favorite bloggers” list - has a fascinating post today praising the virtues of dual-class stock structures. The really short version: they’re good because they allow the founders (or whoever has the voting power) to ignore short-term market noise and incentives and stay focused on long-term objectives, thus...
Patents
Two interesting posts by Brad Feld regarding patents today: the first hoping for a “grass roots movement of experienced software engineers around software patents for defensive purposes only”, even going so far as to make it part of some official contract (whether between the company/patent owner and the USPTO, or between the company and the employee who is named on the patent,...