johnbowman.net

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.