johnbowman.net

I won’t say explicitly that Sean Monkman of CBC Arts Online is a huge nerd.

All I know is that I’ve been kicking ass in the quizzes lately: Superman, Superheroines, Cartoon voice actors.

I’ll agree that the robber is very annoying in the first few turns of Settlers of Catan.

But figuring out how to build a pair of dice that never roll 7 seems like a lot of trouble.

My wife and I are moving, and our new landlady has offered to paint the new place. So, of course, we’re up to our armpits in paint chips.

“Yes, ‘Navajo white’ is much better than ‘Cornerstone,’ honey.”

Maybe she can cut them into strips and sew me a colourful wallet.

Watch this For Better or For Worse for a while.

Creepy, isn’t it?

There’s more than a few things wrong with Andrew Coyne’s column Why hockey rules (and other sports suck).

“There is more action in five minutes of hockey than in your average 90-minute game of soccer…”

I think this misconception has to do with the size of the soccer pitch. Hockey players skate much faster that footballers run, but the pitch is up to 120 metres long, twice as long as a hockey rink. That’s a lot of running.

Also, hockey players change shifts all the time. When footballers substitute, they’re out for the rest of the match.

“Only hockey combines frequency of scoring chances with the difficulty of actually scoring…”

Not true. Lacrosse does, too.

“One of the oddities of soccer is how light the penalties are. You trip a guy as he’s about to kick the ball, and … he gets to kick it again. If it’s a particularly flagrant foul, the referee might show you a yellow card. You trip a guy in hockey, and you lose 20% of your skating manpower for two minutes or more.”

Not true. The worst you can get is a red card, meaning that you’re kicked out and your team is down a player for the rest of the game.

“The Stanley Cup, I have observed, is the object of some considerable fascination, even reverence, among Americans. You can see why: it’s the oldest of the major sports trophies, and the classiest.”

Can’t argue there.

Martin O’Malley has more insight comparing hockey and soccer, without being, y’know, wrong.

The lengths that people will go to to refute 0.99.. = 1 are truly astonding.

A poor math teacher wrote the proof on his blog, Polymathematics, and got linked from all over the place, including digg and reddit. Digg went so far as to bury the link to his proof because so many of its users wouldn’t believe it, thus proving that democracy doesn’t work.

Polymath does a good job to address the common refutations in a subsequent post.

diesel sweeties (June 2 news entry) nicely sums up my opinion of 06/06/06 and 06/05/04 3:21 and all such nonsense:

The universe cares not one whit for our numbers.

So nice to see the good people of the internet grinning and joking about the death of me and my colleagues.

Reminds me of something Ann Coulter once said:

My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.

And I mean some of the commenters here, not the bloggers. Kate’s free to point out the irony of CBC’s policy to not use the word “terrorism” even as people are accused of planning to take over or blow up our building.

This Diet Coke and Mentos thing started out as a interesting little viral video meme, but now it’s in the realm of performance art.

(Found on /.)

Bonus: The science explained, somewhat. Apparently, it’s not a chemical reaction.