2012-08-24 Olympic Roundup 2: Olympic Phrases

Olympic Roundup 2:  Phrases Associated With the Olympics

This summer, the Olympics received some criticism for a rather exhaustive trademark protection effort in London that successfully excluded phrases such as “Summer 2012” from being posted by London advertisers not associated with Olympics.

Thankfully, with McDonald’s, Visa and Coca-Cola sponsorships, Summer 2012 was allowed to continue and we were not all forced to skip from June to September.

Anyway, I decided to use Google’s verbatim search to find phrases closely associated with the Olympics that the International Olympic Committee probably should have trademarked but did not.  I define the Olympic Phrase Index as the proportion of the time the phrase is associated with the Olympics.

Some of my favorites.

Phrase	#Google Hits of the phrase	#Google Hits when ‘Olympic’ and/or ‘Olympics’ is excluded	Olympic Phrase Index
Children under so much pressure	45800	41700	0.09
1980 Invasion of Afghanistan	11400	9590	0.16
Ran out of condoms*	21700	18000	0.17
East German judge	39100	29100	0.26
Tape-Delay	3950000	2680000	0.32
By one-one hundredth of a second	69000	33200	0.52
First three-time host	49200	21800	0.56
Doves were incinerated	5	2	0.60
Barefoot through the streets of Rome	5960	1610	0.73
Competed in the nude**	695000	30800	0.96

*Google SafeSearch set to ‘Strict’

**Google SafeSearch set to ‘Moderate’ as the ‘Strict’ setting filters results with the word ‘nude’.

2012-08-23 Olympic Roundup (Finally!)

It took a while to get around to it, but finally:

So that now that the greatest* spectacle** on earth is over with***, what precisely will we remember?

This Olympics is always a memory of sights.  In no particular order:

We saw the Queen of England in a James Bond skit,

Phelps win lots of swimming medals by doing the same thing over and over again,

a gymnast needing only to land on her feet to receive the gold medal, but landing on her butt instead, and

the country of South Sudan participate without recognition or a flag. 

We saw a runner with no legs in a final,

random East German world records broken,

the long jump result continue to regress, a US 16-year-old nearly beat a Chinese player in table tennis as Bill Gates watched, and

1/400^th of Mitt Romney’s property compete.

We saw Usain Bolt continue to be the world’s fastest 100 m jogger,

Britain celebrate destroying its landscape to make way for factories,

Britain’s four football associations finally managing to cooperate long enough to assemble a football team together, and

said football team ritually losing in PKs to an underdog and vowing to never play together again.

We saw two teams playing in each other in badminton both try to lose the game,

a player get struck 4 times with one second on the clock to lose a fencing match by 1,

that the current Olympic appeals process now involves officially handing over Benjamins rather than unofficially handing them over, and

that someone important enough to handle the scoreboard at an Olympic event doesn’t know the difference between the North Korean and South Korean flags.

We saw McDonald’s grudgingly allow fish and chips at the concession stands,

a Phelps interview dubbed over a tribute to victims of terrorism,

all 302 events, as long as we could stream them at 6 am, and

announcers openly admitting to rooting for temperatures to warm so that female beach volleyball players would be required to wear bikinis.

We saw anti-aircraft guns atop apartments and the locals wondering why they have no Third Amendment,

a constantly updated count of the number of condoms distributed to the athletes,

announcers criticizing a poor relay performance by a US runner before learning that he ran the second half of his race having broken his leg, and

a 2-hour race decided by thousands of a second.

We saw countries win their first ever medals:  Guatamala, Cyprus, and Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago,

another Olympics with no medals for the 150,000,000 people of Bangladesh,

five days pass before the host nation won a gold medal, and

85 countries win medals.

 All in all we saw a pretty good show.

*Greatest number of events

**Or long series of interviews, depending on your broadcaster

***For two more years until the next Winter Olympics

2012-07-11 FIFA scores a hat trick for common sense

FIFA's rules committee, the IFAB, put out three alterations to the football rules, each of which made sense.  Two of them were gimmes, but the third was significant.

1.  Goal line technology implemented:  Excessive and expensive to use Hawk-eye, could have been just fine with high-speed cameras, but it is  much, much better than no replay.  As long as no red light and siren are installed, it is a win.

2.  More officials:  The physical demands on them are considerable, so probably a good choice.

3.  The interesting one:  Modification to the kit/uniform to allow Islamic headscarves so that woman's football can be better promoted in the Middle East.  They were previously banned due to safety concerns, as well as being a religious symbol, but are now classified as a cultural element of dress rather than a religious element.  The safety issue was solved through the development of sports headscarves that use a Velcro arrangement of some sort to prevent injury.  It seems silly, but they should be applauded for doing whatever they can to encourage participation for anyone and everyone.

12-06-25 Bad Day at the Office

How else can one describe a situation where a guy's only job is to watch a line and see if the ball crosses it, and then potentially decide an entire tournament by screwing it up?

That's what happened in the Euro 2012 in the Ukraine-England match.  To make matters worse, the bad call helped cause the elimination of the host nation.

Then you have the poor called out on Twitter by the FIFA president himself.  Ouch.

Update 6/24...England go out on penalties...again.  I feel for Joe Hart, wanted him to save Mario's kick :)

12-06-09 Greeks Rate Themselves Hardest Workers In Europe

Pew Global's review found that alone of any country in Europe, Greeks consider themselves the hardest workers in the EU.  Every other European country polled chose Germany.

Sometimes it does not require sophisticated analysis to determine why a country is in trouble...

12-05-26 Once in many lifetimes?

How do you calculate odds for something that only one instance is known to have occurred?

A few days ago, a fan at a baseball game caught two home run balls hit by consecutive batters, as has been widely reported.

Calib Lloyd’s amazing day at the Cincinnati Reds’ game earlier this week had me wondering what the odds were, but there were no mentions that I could find of anyone else having this happen.

That does not mean we cannot give an estimate of the likelihood of the event, it just suggests that the estimate will be lousy.  Anyway here’s my take:

There are 2430 regular season games per season, and maybe ≈5,000 seats or so in the outfield, and each team averages roughly ≈1 home run/game.  Last year it was .94 HR/team/game, whereas in 2000, the steroids era, it was 1.17 (STATS LLC).  Then, using Poisson to inform us the likelihood of various numbers of home runs by a team in a game is simple.

There are about 40 plate appearances per team per game (baseballgurus.com). A little bit of math tell us the number of consecutive home runs in a game per team would be about 0.013.

We guess the odds of a ball being caught by someone is ≈0.8, since some leave the stadium and some land in the bullpens or in the area in center field where there are no seats.

Thus, in a given game, the odds that this might happen to someone is about

So, in a hundred years of baseball (yes, there were formerly fewer games per year, but this will only affect the calculations by a factor of two at most probably) this would happen roughly once.  That it would happen to you at a game would be about 1.5 billion to 1.

Of course I am not the only one to ask this question, so we can compare it to others’ calculations:

http://www.morethanafan.net/2012/05/24/off-base-percentage-what-are-the-odds/

Here, using an slightly higher average number of home runs per game and a different methodology gave about twice the likelihood of its occurance.  That is not atypical for this type of calculation, and either calculation does suggest that there is a good chance that Caleb Lloyd is the only person to ever catch home runs hit by consecutive batters.

12-05-13 Is a Pythagorean Triple

That is all.  Cheers.