Bills Bills Bills

The bids to buy the Buffalo Bills are in, and one of them intends to bring the team to Toronto. Another comes from Donald Trump, and the third presumably comes from sane people.

I'm still on record as saying that the move to Toronto won't happen. But with so few people who think that the Bills are worth half as much as the Clippers, who knows?

Today on TSN, two of their designated experts discussed the question of just how big a team in Toronto would be. I'm sure I wasn't the only one surprised when Dave Naylor jumped right in with a claim that they would be as big as the Leafs (albeit with the "if they're competitive" caveat.)

That's not as crazy as it sounds. Toronto sports media occasionally reminisce with amazement about how in 1985, the Leafs had trouble getting any media to come to the press conference where they introduced first-overall draft pick Wendel Clark.

• Today, a Leafs first-overall pick would have to go into housing to avoid the media glare. But remember:
• This was in the darkest days of the Harold Ballard era, when finishing fourth-of-five in the league's worst division was the most they ever achieved.
• It was only 18 years since the last time the Leafs win the cup. Most of the fan base could remember the last win, and it all seemed less desperate.
• In the years before sports networks, blogs, and dedicated sports radio stations, there was less obsession with the Leafs
• This was during The Drive Of '85, the Jays' first playoff run, and that was by far the biggest sports sorry at the time.

The point is that Toronto can really throw itself behind a winning team, and that it's obsession with the Leafs in large part a product of the modern media environment. So, he does have a point.

Having said that, we've seen how a mediocre Jays team can fade into the background. And the usually-bad Raptors can fill seats, but not really enter the public consciousness. If a Toronto Bills were as successful as, well, the Buffalo Bills, they wouldn't put a dent in the Leafs' support.

The really shocking part of the debate was when they addressed the question of locals' dedication to other teams. There's plenty of NFL fandom in Toronto, but that didn't translate into success of the Bills in Toronto games. And that's largely because most of that fandom is spread among the league's 32 teams, rather than behind the Bills. Would that still be a problem if the team were permanently in Toronto? I doubt it, and Naylor did too. But the bizarre part was that he made the point by drawing on the experience of newer NFL teams, like Carolina and Jacksonville. That's strange, because Jacksonville has been the league's least financially successful team for years. They have famously had to tarp-over thousands of seats in their stadium so as to reduce the seating capacity, so the team will sell out and avoid blacking out their games locally. Indeed, I thought Toronto's best chance at getting a team would be if the Jaguars were also available. So the Jags were a terrible example to bring up, since they are the counterexample to the assumption that NFL teams will be successful everywhere.  If a team deep in the heart of football country is having so much trouble drawing fans, it has to challenge the assumption that a team will be successful in Toronto.

Let's Have Congressional Glasnost

I can't believe I'm only now hearing the phrase, "cold civil war" to describe the current state of the USA. Supposedly it comes from that master of naming modern things, William Gibson. It seems like such an apt phrase, especially if you've seen the various maps comparing current voting trends to nineteenth-century slavery laws.

But speaking of nineteenth-century slavery laws, America's civil war was itself preceded by a cold war of sorts, as they tried to find a compromise where there was none. That's one reason why so many of the presidents in the early 1800's are not too famous: they either failed to find a compromise on slavery, or found a temporary solution that has been long-since forgotten.  Well, that's the impression I get, having learned American history one sentence fragment at a time on Jeopardy.  And The Simpsons.

Sorry, I couldn't find a clip that just has The Mediocre Presidents song, so just fast forward the video to 3min, 48s.  To this day, I can't hear William Henry Harrison's name without adding to myself, "I died in thirty days."

Anyway, The Cold Civil War is an apt description. The division is deep, there's not much room for compromise, and the divisions are based around the same lines.  I'm not implying that the Americans are headed for another civil war. But the issues do seem intractable.

What's really weird is that when I went searching on the Internet to see if people were actually using the phrase, I found examples from both sides of the divide.  Since the Civil War didn't end well for one side, you'd think there'd be a reluctance to analogise current cultural conflicts to that one. 

California Cleavin'

There's campaign to split California into six smaller states. I'm sure I'm like a lot of people in that I only heard about it last week when it received The Colbert Bump. There have been a number of proposals over the years to split up states. It might be a big and diverse state like California, Texas, or New York. Or it might be a geographically separate part of a state, like Long Island or Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

As a geography nerd, this sort of thing really interests me. It's obvious that the subdivisions of countries often make no sense. Does it really make sense for Vermont and New Hampshire to be separate? And a number of people have tried to sort things out.  Here's a particularly detailed proposal for the U.S.

Here in Canada, I'd say our provinces make even less sense. Ontario and Quebec are not only much bigger than the others, they also have very different northern and southern parts. Manitoba and Saskatchewan don't game many differences, despite what they may say about each other. And P.E.I.? Really?

Buy much as of love to redraw the borders of North America, I have to point out that we should first decide what we want to accomplish with this layer of government. Should a state/province be a single, largely autonomous entity? That is, they are part of a unified country, but you could say that help from the central government should be avoided as much as possible. Or should it be a representative of a group of people with a lot in common?

The two approaches are kind of mutually exclusive. If you orient states around people with commonality, it will be economically weak. For instance: if a state is all rural farmland, it will be able to create policies that are great for farmers, and the state's presidential vote will be an undiluted voice of rural America. But, whenever times are tough for farmers, the state will be serious financial trouble.

Something that will really impact the direction to go, is how strong an ability the country has to transfer money around to mitigate localized economic problems. Right now, there's not a lot of appetite for equalization measures, so you'd be better off with states that have diversified economies.

So California - as it is now - is relatively well laid out due to its diversity. It's current financial problems ate mostly the fault of its overly-indulgent referendum system. Bit under the split plan, it would be split into a bunch of homogenous states. Some - particularly Silicon Valley - would be healthy, others not so much.  Overall, the state is better off together.  Though the San Andreas Fault may have other ideas.

Drivin' Online

There's been a lot of talk about self-driving cars. This week a study prophesied that in twenty years, most cars will come without a strong wheel or pedals.

I find that hard to believe. Self-driving had become a promising technology, advancing a lot in just the last decade.  So I'm sure it will be possible.  And a car that can take over for you would be very useful. But the study isn't claiming it will be possible, or even common, but that most people will be content with it as the only option.

It's easy to get carried away with predictions of technological progress. For instance, digital cameras have gone from unheard of to dominant in the past twenty years. But there are also examples of technology being slower to catch on; over the same twenty years, online shopping has gone from unheard of to common but not standard.

People tend to overestimate change involving technology, because of those situations where the change is so fast. A that any change involving technology will be as fast. But fast changes happen when:

• The advantages of the new way are complete and undeniable.
• There's no emotional connection to the old way.

I doubt self driving cars will be the only way because:

Lives are involved

It sounds nice to talk about self driving cars, but we still have to see how the public reacts to a fatal accident involving one of the cars. Even if we get to the point where self-driving cars are safer overall, they won't be perfect, and the thought of dying because of a bad decision by a machine you have no control over will be a powerful one.

Regulations are involved

There are a huge number of regulations involving cars. It's because - as stated above - lives are involved. The regulations-are-evil-job-killers crowd is surprisingly accepting of auto industry rules, since they have made cars dramatically safer over the years. So a major alteration to how cars work and are used will not be a matter of just making a new car and putting it on the road.

Companies will fight it

Often, fast technological change comes when new companies build around new technology overtake old companies with old technology. But that’s not likely here. To start a new car company, you need huge manufacturing facilities all over the world, and develop relationships with an army of parts suppliers.
And (relating to the previous two points) there’s a much higher bar when it comes to quality. Tech startups benefit from our low expectations of new developments. Or, to put it another way, look down at your Android phone and ask, would you buy a car from these people?

And the existing car companies aren’t going to want to build self-drive-only cars; taking away the driving aspect takes away a big differentiator between makes and models. A no-steering-wheel car is just an appliance, and is reduced to a commodity.

Fill 'er Up, Karl

The city of Somerset, Kentucky has combated high gas prices by setting up their own city-owned gas station, and selling their gas at lower prices. Of course, this has led to accusations of socialism.

That's pretty amazing, because for once, they're right. It is socialism. It's actually pretty rare these days that people even call political ideas by the correct putdowns.

I find that frustrating. Given the amount of anger the American right has at all things perceived as socialist, you would think that anything as Marxist as a communal gas supply would get a person run out of town for merely suggesting it. Yet, here they are putting that in practice in a bright-red state.

And it's not just the right. Whenever the price of gas gets high, you can count on the NDP asking for action, such as the government lowering its gas taxes. Never mind the effect on government coffers or the environment.

So what is it about gasoline that makes people abandon their usual beliefs?  It's an illustration that much of our political bickering is not based on ideology, it's people fighting for their self interests.  When large numbers of people have interests in common, it may look like they're fighting for the ideas that unite them.  But with a widely-relied-upon product like oil, people's personal needs are great enough to make them drop any high-minded ideals.

The Tragedy Of The (House Of) Commons

After the recent Ontario election, I wrote about the calls for election reform, in particular the problems with the First-Past-The-Post system choosing candidates that don't truly reflect the desires of the voters.  Author Cory Doctorow has proposed an interesting idea for getting around these problems without changing any laws.

The idea is to get people to agree to vote for third-party candidates the same way they agree to fund things on Kickstarter.  You sign up and agree to vote for the candidate, but only if a certain number of other voters also sign up.  If that minimum number is reached, each of those voters gets an e-mail letting them know.  Thus, they can vote for the candidate knowing that they have the amount of support that can make a difference.  If the support level isn't reached, then the few people who have signed up will know that this candidate doesn't really have a chance, and voting for them would be throwing their vote away.

It sounds like it could work.  Though there is quite an opportunity for fraud: you could have vote promises made by people from outside the district that's voting, or multiple one person signing-up several times.  A fringe party could inflate their vote promises, thus making them look more popular.  And even if you had some way of identifying people when they sign-in so that you could be sure that they are real people who live in the proper area, there's still a problem: one of the main parties could have their supporters promise to vote for a minor party at the other end of the political spectrum.  For instance, Liberal supporters could claim to support the Christian Heritage Party, making them seem more popular than they are.  That way, Conservatives would vote for the CHP, wrongly thinking they have the support to win.

But the bigger problem would be getting it big enough to provide voters with an accurate view of fringe party popularity.  For one thing, your pool of potential users is people who both vote and keep up with the latest things on the Internet.  I can't be bothered to draw out the Venn Diagram of that, but I think you can imagine that it's not the biggest group to draw your customers from.  The other problem is just trying to explain what you're trying to do.  A lot of people won't get it.  Not you. You're smart; you read my blog.  I even assumed that you know what a Venn Diagram is.  Or know how to use Wikipedia.

In spite of the difficulties, I'd be willing to use one of these services.  That is, of course, assuming that users' privacy and security are respected.  As I observed before, our voting system isn't likely to change any time soon, so we need to look for alternatives.

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #16

Which eighties musician is having the greatest success in 2014?  Weird Al Yankovic.

Uncommon Wealth

It's time for the Commonwealth Games again!  The Commonwealth Games are in that second tier of international sporting events.  In the first tier, you've got your Summer and Winter Olympics, and the World Cup.  Then in the second tier you've got your continental games like the Pan Am Games and a few types of Youth and University Games, the Gay Games (in Cleveland this year?) and so on.

The Commonwealth Games are pleasant enough; who doesn't like an excuse for international sports, especially if it's going to be less pushy than the Olympics.  But then you stop and think about what it is: A pleasant sports event open to places that have nothing in common other than being colonized by the same country. 

I can understand the existence of the Commonwealth: these countries do end up with some political and cultural commonalities.  It's just hard to believe we celebrate this history.  Well, we in Canada would; we love any excuse to revel in our British origins.  But India?  Didn't they go through a lot to get rid of British rule?  Why don't we just invite the Americans while we're at it?

The Games are a great example of the weird way we look at Britain in the world today.  There are plenty of countries that still have resentment and anger at them, and with good reason.  And at the same time, the British have achieved a reputation for being calm and civilized.  It's hard to imagine any other former empire having a sports event ("Former Subjects Of The Mongol Hordes Games.")  So the British really know how to craft an imperial legacy - Americans, take note.

Please Pay Me Before Reading This

Today I tried to buy gas. I lifted the nozzle, put it in the car, and then I waited for the screen on the pump to tell me to select the gasoline grade. I know that may sound submissive, but in the past when I do things out of order or before the pump expects it, it freaks out.

This time, it seemed to take forever to ask for the grade. I was starting to wonder it something was wrong, when I heard the attendant from the office saying something about Pump 4. I realized with a sort of horror that it was my pump. I pressed the button on the intercom and asked her to repeat herself, but it was useless trying to communicate over the din of the traffic on the subway-P.A.-quality speakers. So I headed to the office, in front of all the other motorists, like a kid called to the principal's office.

She explained that it's a pre-pay pump; you have to pay before getting the gas. Since I had declined to pay-at-the-pump with a credit card, I had to pay in the office first.

I'd seen some gas stations institute that rule, but it was usually only at night. I'm guessing they were doing it here because the recent spike in gas prices had lead to more people driving off without paying.

So I paid - thanks to her promoting me to guess how much I'd want - and returned to actually pump my newly-purchased gas. Of course, I want to check and see if there was some indication on the pump telling me about their new policy, a notice I had somehow missed. Sure enough, there was a sign on top of the pump explaining how little they trust us, in the friendliest way possible.

It was a bit embarrassing. But I feel a little justified in missing it for a few reasons:

• That's above most people's eye-level.
• It's nowhere near the screen, or anything else a customer is likely to look at.
• Honestly, when has anything important been placed on top of a gas pump?

But especially the last one: I'm sure I noticed the sign, but unconsciously ignored it. Usually any sign up there is just an invitation to get their points card, this month's special on antifreeze, or an explanation of why the high gas prices are really the government's fault.

So now I'm worried: what other important things have I missed because they were in some place I've learned to ignore? You know, pizza flyers, phone vendors at the mall, downtown lampposts, the Weather Network.  The secret to happiness could be right under our noses, but we miss it, because they printed it on the public washroom hand-dryer instructions.  Now I'm going to pay attention to everything, even if it takes me twice as long to do everything.

Here's A Tip

Business is obsessed with growth.  Making money isn't enough: you have to make more money than last year.  That's unfortunate, since there are many products that are popular and profitable, but aren't successful, because they just bring in the same revenue year after year.  And that leads to bizarre improvements, as they desperately try to make a satisfactory product better.

Today's exhibit is Q-Tips.  It's likely a good money maker: lots of people use them, they don't have any competition other than generics, and they can't cost much to make.  But that's boring, so let's make them better:

Now, they're not your parents' Q-Tips.  Now they have precision tips.  No more accidentally missing your ears with those huge blunt swabs.  Of course, doctors - who tell us not to put them in our ears - will be pretty horrified by that.

And you have to love the shiny point.  They're so pointy, even cotton will glint in the sunlight.

Hollywood, You Got Some Splainin' To Do

I can't believe there's another movie about technology making a person all-powerful by harnessing the power of the mind.  I already complained about Transcendence, where Johnny Depp is uploaded into a computer, watched over by Morgan Freeman. And now there's Lucy, where Scarlett Johansson is given a drug to let here use all of her brain, watched over by Morgan Freeman.  So apparently this is Freeman's latest typecasting: providing exposition when someone becomes an superhuman ultramind.  How many character ruts has he been in now?  Grizzled detective investigating a serial-killer, thoughtful supporting character giving the star life advice, God, narrator.

And what's with having the hottest actors play the supermind characters?  I know, that will sell tickets.  And it makes sense that if you have a technology that gives someone great mental powers, you might as well use it on someone who's already above-average in other areas.  But still, using attractive people in a movie about minds seems like casting porn based on intelligence.

It's also directed by Luc Besson, who has made a bunch of movies with strong female protagonists (La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, Colombiana, and a Joan of Arc film.)  So I'd love to hear a Freudian interpretation of that.  Put him together with Joss Whedon and they might finally get a Wonder Woman movie made.

But what really bothers me about Lucy and its carpet-bomb advertising, is that it perpetuates the myth that we only use 10% of our brains.  It's an especially frustrating misconception, since it likely began with psychologist William James complaining that people don't use their brains.  So in a sense, it his remark proves itself.  And now that it's been hammered into our heads by a Hollywood marketing campaign, we'll never be rid of it.  For all the interesting science and technology in the world, they have to make "science"-fiction movies based on things we know to be false, and once again, you'll come out of it knowing even less.

One-Man's Land

Ever have an idea, then see someone beat you to it? That happened to me with North Sudan.

I read about this situation a few months ago: Egypt and Sudan have a border dispute. There were two different treaties marking out the border between them, and each country recognizes a different border. And surprise! They each wasn't the border that gives them the best land. Egypt says the border is a straight line, while Sudan says it has a kind of S-curve in it near the coast. Thus, there's a little bit of land on the Red Sea that they both claim.

Buy here's the weird part: there's another area further inland that neither country claims. According to Sudan’s border, it’s in Egypt, and according to Egypt’s border, it’s in Sudan. As far as I know, it's one of the few places on earth (outside Antarctica) that's not claimed by anyone. Of course, it’s not really surprising that no one wants it, since it's just desert. No people live there, and there are no resources. But still, you'd think someone would want it. And now someone does.  I thought someone should try claiming the unwanted land and declare their own country.

Someone in Virginia has done exactly that. He's claimed the land and declared independence. I have to admit, he has far more commitment than I do. I would have just issued a press release claiming the land. He actually went there and planned a flag, in spite of Sudan being nearly at war with South Sudan, and Egypt in a state of permanent revolution.  He's declared it "North Sudan," and installed his family as the royal family. (Though they rule from Virginia.)

This is far from the first oddball country to be created. Lots of people have tried declaring their own property to be a sovereign country, in varying degrees of seriousness. Sealand has become semi-famous.  There are a number of small places in Europe that cling to claims of independence. In many war-torn regions, there are de facto governments set up that rule small areas, such as Somaliland. And then there is Taiwan, which had existed in legal limbo for decades.

I'm actually surprised it doesn't happen more often, given the huge number of out-of the way islands there are. I suppose part of the reason we don't see it is that strange aspect of human nature whereby the people least satisfied with their own government are usually the ones who take greatest ownership of their country. For instance, The Tea Party may be angry with the American government, but they are the ones least likely to abandon their country and start again somewhere else.

But you would think rich people would get in on it too. Consider: Britain and France are both deep in debt, and have a huge number of small territories around the world. Don't you think that if you offered France $20 billion for the Marquesas they'd at least think about it?  They're on the opposite side of the planet; they won't miss them. And Britain had an island called Inaccessible Island. Why would they want to keep that?

Some wealthy Libertarians have proposed building their own floating cities, where they can craft a government (or lack thereof) to their liking.  This has been especially pushed by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. He seems to share the ingenuous spirit of fellow founder Elon Musk, but not the politics.  A floating city with few rules would be entertaining to watch, but that's an awful lot of expense and technology, even for the people involved.  So I doubt that will happen.  Though you could make the whole thing into a reality show and it would pay for itself.

The fact that rich people rarely try creating their own countries would seem to betray the fact that they aren't as offended by their demonization at the hands of the Occupy types as they would have us believe. Or maybe it's because the sort of person who becomes super-rich has to be enough of a people-person that they don't want the solitude of their own country. Not even the quieter techie sidekicks like Paul Allen or Steve Wozniak feel the need for their own private nation.

The Award Goes For...

The ESPY awards are coming up.  They're often criticized for, well, for what they are: awards for accomplishing things in sports.  So it's winning things for winning things.  But I think the idea of sports awards could work.  But don't give them to the stars that are already celebrated everywhere.  Instead, give them to people who don't get fame and fortune, or for things that don't normally get rewarded.

Fan awards

• Coldest shirtless appearance
• Most embarrassing televised appearance in the crowd (disqualification for suing the network.)
• Bob Uecker award for staying in assigned seats the longest
• Most elaborate outfit (categories for Raiders and non-Raiders)
• Best original song (categories for vuvuzela and air-horn)

Fan Signs:

• Wittiest sign
• Best use of network initials
• Most sarcastic sign smuggled into stadium

Fanbase awards

(Awarded to a team's entire fanbase)

• Best hyping of bad team
• Most implausible rumour
• Best defense of racist team trademarks
• Steve Bartman award for best scapegoating
• fastest wave

Sportscasters

• Best deadpan asking a stupid question
• Best rewording of a previous question
• Most enthusiastic reading of the copyright notice
• Subtlest segue into a promo for a non-sports show
• Most women picked out of the crowd by a cameraman

Athletes and Coaches

• Fastest soccer player to get back on feet after injury
• Barry Sanders award for most restrained touchdown celebration
• Least-gratuitous use of slam-dunks when layups will do
• Vaguest injury description
• Most creative use of eye-black

Grounds Crews and Maintenance Personnel

• Most creative pattern mowed onto a baseball diamond
• Fastest basketball sweat-mopper

Special Technical Award for Contributions to Sports Technology

Presented to the inventor of the temporary soccer line spray

Not Another World Cup Post

I've been disappointed by the reaction to Germany's win at the World Cup.  In particular, it's the number of references to the World Wars.  No, I'm not offended by humourously touching on an emotional subject - I like dark humour as much as the next person.  It's just gotten tiresome.

There's only so many ways you can make veiled references to a major war.  It's gotten predictable.  And aren't there plenty of things to make fun of them for?  This is the country that dedicates a month to beer.

The same thing happens with France.  They have only a limited number of joke subjects that are rerun again and again.  They're rude, they like Jerry Lewis, and they surrender quickly in war.  That last one is especially galling, since comics can tell a France-surrendering joke and the audience will laugh, even though no one involved knows why France is associated with surrender.

(Bonus points if you noticed the "galling" pun above.)


There has been humour about Germans being humourless and over-organized, and they've actually seemed refreshing.  Also, Angela Merkel has been the but of some jokes, and really, her awkward-sternness can be pretty funny.  So there is hope for German ridicule.  I'll help out: sausage, Kraftwerk, the Porsche Panamera, reallylongcompoundwords, trying to pronounce "Goethe".

Domesticated Animals

I wonder: if a fly enters a house, does that increases its chances of survival?  On the one hand, it will have access to food, and protection from the elements.  But on the other, it is now locked in an enclosed space with one or more large mammals that will try to kill it.

I'm wondering this because we could be breeding them one way or the other.  I've heard evolutionary biologists say that if a mutation helps a living thing survive even one in a thousand times, that will be enough for the mutation to become standard throughout the population.  So given the short life-cycle of insects, you'd think that by now, we would have caused them to evolve either an aversion or attraction to our houses.

It's disappointing that humanity has caused so little evolution in animals.  You'd think that:

• Squirrels would be more decisive, either running across the road or staying away, instead of going into the road and then becoming uncertain.
• Insects and spiders would become cuter, so we'd be less likely to squash them.  Though it occurs to me that this could go the other way: the scarier they look, the more likely we are to run out of the room and hope they go away on their own.

The Face-Lifted Game

Earlier in the World Cup, Bill Nye The Science Guy got into trouble on Twitter for suggesting some changes to soccer.  These fell into the stereotypical criticisms of the sport from non-fans, like calls to create more offence.  So soccer fans weren't convinced. 

I'm far from an expert, but I do have some experience with the game, so I think I'm in a better position to critique it.  And I claim that I'm enough of an outsider to see the sport with objectivity that the vast majority of the world's fans won't have. So, as the perfect person to judge, here are the things I'd like to see changed:

Get a blue line

Okay, it probably shouldn't actually be blue, but I mean a hockey-style blue line. The fact is, the current soccer offside rule is just about the worst-called rule in any sport. I don't think the linesmen even do much better than chance. It's not hard to see why: for one thing, they have to keep track of the relative positioning of moving objects, whole a hockey linesman can just look along the blue line. And worse, the assistant referee has to judge the relative position of players, at the time the ball is passed from another position altogether. While sports officiating is impossible to get perfect, this is one rule where it's not even humanly possible to be good at it.

It's an example of a rule that was laid-out primarily to be fair to the players, with no consideration for whether it could be enforced, they'd be better off having a rule that is imperfect but enforceable.

Change penalties

For the most part, soccer's free-kick system is fair: because a foul in an important part of the field results in a kick from the same important part of the field, it seems just. But with penalties, not so much. Other than certain English players we could name, a penalty is a de facto automatic goal. But most things that penalties are awarded for are not worth that much. To put it another way, is hard to blame players for diving in the box, when the reward for trying to draw a penalty is much greater than the reward of a scoring chance by staying on their feet.

So I say:

• Narrow the area. Fouling someone halfway to the corner flag isn't worth a penalty.
• Move the spot back. Far enough that the goalie can react to the shot instead of having to guess. 

The one amendment to this rule: there should be an allowance for the referee to call an automatic goal for ridiculous fouls (say, a defender grabbing the ball out of mid-air to prevent a goal.)

Get a clock

The "referee's watch" approach to time keeping adds nothing to the game, but does open itself up to epidemic exploitation. So figure out how long, on average, the actual play of a soccer game lasts, and set the clock to that, stopping it whenever play stops, as in basketball or hockey.

Redefine handballs

The sport's most famous and most basic rule is also one of its most poorly defined. Handballs aren't supposed to be called if they are unintentional. Yet you still see it called against players who clearly didn't have time to move their arms.

Again, this is a rule that's fair, but too hard to enforce. We need a simpler-to-interpret concept. I've heard the suggestion that it should be a foul for any arm-ball contact, intentional or not; essentially putting the onus on players to not let the ball touch their arms. That seems to swing too far in the easy-to-enforce direction. And no one wants to see defenders running around the penalty area with their arms behind their backs.

A couple of possibilities:

• Say that players have a right to keep their arms by their sides, and no handballs are called if their arms are in that position, regardless of intent. On the other hand, it's automatically handball if their arms are in any other position.
• Base it on movement. Sort of like blocking/charging fouls in basketball, as long as the player's arm had come to a complete stop, there's no handball if the arm contacts the ball. But any case of a moving arm touching the ball is handball.

A new way to break ties

One of the most common and universal complaints is the use of penalties to break ties. How many problems are there with that?

• It's mostly random
• Lesser teams know it's not skill-based, so they play for ties
• It's an individual skill in a profoundly team-oriented support.

A simple alternative would be unlimited (presumably sudden-death) overtime. That would be exhausting, but the exhaustion would lead to mistakes and lead to goals. You could augment the overtime solution by taking players off the field occasionally.

Two referees

Hockey - a similar sport-religion - made the decision to add a second ref a few years ago. In that case, it was mainly a concession to higher-speeds and the greater body-contact that comes of bigger players. Soccer hasn't really been through such a change, but the epidemic of fakery and missed calls has demonstrated that one person simply can't competently officiate the game. Since professional and international games already have a fourth official, it wouldn't be difficult to do.

Get tough on diving

Speaking of hockey, people from outside Canada are always asking about why it has fighting in it. But the real question is, why is fighting tolerated? After all, all sports have fighting occasionally; but most of them have consequences that prevent it from happening often. I don't know how it happened, but in most of the world's sports someone, sometime, decided fighting was not acceptable, while hockey said, ah why not?

What's interesting is how attitudes have diverged. In hockey, most fans love the fighting, and couldn't imagine the sport without it, while in other sports - even similarly violent sports - hockey's acceptance of fighting is seen as strange and inexplicable.

It seems to me that diving in soccer is on the cusp of such acceptability. Diving happens in all sports, but in most it's seen as unacceptable, and something - whether rules or just referees' scepticism - stops it from getting too commonplace.

In soccer too, diving is generally considered a bad thing, but I've noticed a creeping acceptance of it. Players practice it at the behest of coaches. Fans defending the sport to non-fans have started implying that it is a sort of skill. And don't even get me started about how big a part of the sport it's become in Central America.

Something needs to be done now before some charismatic Italian soccer analyst stays convincing fans that it's an integral part of the game. I would hope that adding the second ref (see above) would help. But I think the best change that could be made would be retroactive justice. So many dives are obvious on replay; I'm not asking for gridiron-football-style replays during the game - that would slow things down far too much in a sport that had no natural breaks. But throw the book at people after the game.

Unimpeachable Sources

Today there were many news stories about Sarah Palin joining in the effort to impeach Barack Obama. It's on the basis of not protecting the borders or something. Most of the articles I read were rather flippant in dismissing the campaign and Palin's participation in it as silly and futile.

Much as I hate Palin, my first reaction was that the articles were unprofessional. I have an old-school approach to news, that outside of any articles clearly marked as opinion, you just keep to the facts.

But now I wonder how realistic that is. I've noticed that my less-politically-aware friends often miss subtleties about which happenings are important, and which are the silly things everyone is laughing at. For instance, If you just report that there's going to be an attempt to impeach the president, they have no way of knowing it's a long-shot effort that's mainly a publicity stunt.  So you could argue that tongue-in-cheek reporting on this story conveys more information.

A way out of this journalistic quandary would be to quote someone opposed to Palin.  This quoted person would deliver the sarcastic put-down illustrating the desperation of the impeachment call.  But the problem is that: first, the journalist is just handing-off the dirty work to someone else, and secondly, there will always be someone willing to offer supportive or dismissive quotes on any given action.  For instance, let's say Palin had broken from her bombastic style and called for a bipartisan effort to find a pragmatic compromise on immigration reform.  You could easily find a politician willing to offer a quote calling her statement delusional and far-fetched.  So perhaps my high-minded principles of unbiased reporting are naive in today's hyper-politicized world.

What An Impressive Loss

I already noted that the Brazilians have surprised me with their lack of enthusiasm for the billions spent on the World Cup.  Now they've impressed me with their ability to take a loss.  It can't be easy to take an embarrassing loss, in the sport that means the most to them, at home, while the world is watching.  Here in Canada, we've lost at hockey, but at least we know no one else cares. 

As the game was going on, I saw numerous tweets worrying of violence on the streets in Brazil, as people take out their frustrations.  But that doesn't seem to have materialized.  I saw one TV report that mentioned fear of violence, given the protests against the World Cup.  That seemed like odd reasoning: there's been violence over government spending, so there'll be violence over losing a soccer game. 

So maybe that's why the Brazilians have been able to deal with the loss more maturely: they've been forced to examine their priorities.  There were lots of sad people on the streets, but most were keeping it in perspective.  Again, I don't think we in Canada compare well, considering Vancouver's riots over their Stanley Cup loss a few years ago.

Fancy Meeting You Here

In our connected world, we often see mash ups similar things.  But it's rarer to see very different things put together. And it's really odd to see two normally-separate areas of your life come together.  It's like finding out that two people you know already know each other.

I got another of those moments when I read an on-line article about Linux, in Car and Driver.

Weirdly, they don't even go through the awkward explanation of what it is, or even what the penguin has to do with it.  Though they do avoid defining what the Linux community is, instead making vague statements that "Linux wants..."

This is the strangest cultural collision for me since Dan Savage tweeted an article in my home-town Woodstock Sentinel Review.

Let's Agree You Disagree

Like most people, I hate it when people disagree with me.  But it actually bothers me more when people disagree with themselves.  We've seen an example of that in the World Cup.  Brazilian star Neymar is out of the tournament with a fractured vertebra.  Since he sustained the injury getting kneed in the back by a Colombian player, we're now hearing complaints that referees aren't doing enough to protect the star players. We know that teams focus their defence on such star players, and there seems to be a blurry line between "playing physical defence" and "hoping for a lucky injury."

I welcome the concern for players' welfare, as well as the acknowledgement that talented players make the game entertaining.  But while I may agree with these urging a crackdown on rough play, I doubt that the people making doing the urging agree.  If you listen to sports people talk long enough, you'll notice that for every claim that talented players aren't protected, there are at least ten pleas to "let them play," keep the game physical, let the defence do its job, or other polite ways of asking for the rules to not be enforced.

Nobody seems to realize that there is no easy or obvious solution here.  We have to find a balance between physical play and player safety, or between empowering the defence and letting the offensive stars perform.  If you want the stars protected, you have to learn to bite your tongue when the game is slowed by the referee's calls.  Or, if you want a sport that doesn't really have rules, you have to expect that star players are going to get injured.  If only we could get more countries to watch hockey, they'd understand this.

We Can Never Get Away From The Sprawl

Maclean's has a graphic showing the relative density of Canadian cities.  The premise is that it shows how much space the population of Canada would take up if it was packed in with the same density as various Canadian cities. It's probably inspired by this map comparing cities around the world.

The around-the-world version is more informative, since it's comparing similarity large cities that differ only in their location and age. They're not much that can be gleaned from comparing the density of Toronto and Iqaluit.

But it brings up a pet peeve of mine when people start comparing different cities. Often, large cities are held-up as paragons of environmental virtue because of their density and reliance on public transit. There is some truth to the concept, and the point is important because many people - including environmentalists themselves - often assume that big and artificial things are always worse.

The problem is that when it comes to environmental righteousness, Toronto and Vancouver kind of cheat. That's because the political entities known as "Toronto" and "Vancouver" are really just the centres of much larger cities. The suburbs of those cities spread out with miles of suburbs (just as any Canadian or American city does) but those suburbs aren't officially part of the city.

I looked it up, and if you include the entire Greater Toronto Area, Toronto's density drops from 4,149 people per square kilometre to only 850. That's actually less dense than here in the city of Kitchener.  In contrast, they give the impression that Halifax is some sprawling, empty place.  But that's just because it's city limits stretch far beyond the actual developed area.  If you only count the urban area, the density again turns out to be more than 1,000 people per square kilometre.

Mr. Roe, Throw Out This Wallet!

Well, I'm finally getting rid of my wallet. I've had other wallets that I've used for the proliferation of cards we've had over the years, but for the last twenty years, this has been my main wallet.

And here's what's so remarkable about it.

Yes, it says, "Made in German D. R." And if you know your twentieth-century geopolitics, you'll know that is the German Democratic Republic. And you'll further recognize that as the official name of East Germany. Yes, my wallet was one of the few products made during the eleven months between the fall of communism and the German reunification. I'm sure there couldn't have been much produced in that time. Say, a few hundred wallets, some watered-down beer and three-and-a-half Trabants.

But I appreciate the work of those semi-socialist workers and leather from The People's cows. Aside from the historic curiosity, I've enjoyed the irony of getting my money out of a communist wallet.

Giving Away History

Are you looking for more reasons to hate the New York Yankees? I don't know how you could be in the midst of the Derek Jeter season-long retirement/canonization. But if you do need a reason, I'll point out today's big giveaway to the first 18,000 fans.

Yes, it's Lou Gehrig bobblehead day. It's not merely a posthumous bobblehead of a revered athlete and tragic hero, it's depicting him during his tear-jerking retirement speech.

That got me thinking about what other highly emotional moments in baseball history might be commemorated with a bobblehead:

• Jackie Robinson breaking the colour barrier
• Dave Dravecky's comeback
• Babe Ruth promising a home run to that kid in hospital
• Ford Frick announcing the asterisk on Roger Maris's home run record
• Kirk Gibson limping to the plate in the 1988 World Series
• Armando Galarraga getting cheated out of a perfect game
• Casey striking out

An Exceptional Game

The USA was knocked out of the World Cup today. That's a shame; I was cheering for them. That was partly out of the novelty of American underdogs, and to represent North America well on the world stage.

The US in soccer is always surreal, but it seemed extra weird this time around as Americans started to take notice, and even care about their team.

Of course, you don't want to read too much into the fandom of one tournament. Ann Coulter's screed against soccer has made the rounds of the internet, with much laughter at its Colbert-esque hyperbole. This article in The Atlantic is more analytic, but also bites off more than it can chew by paralleling soccer and Obama support. But it does summarize the uniqueness of soccer amongst American sports: it's not the sport itself, but America's place in it. The US is just another country in soccer, not unique or dominant. Today's massive clash was against Belgium. Where else had the US ever been on even terms with Belgium? And their nemesis over the last three World Cups has been Ghana.

This may not seem like a big shift, but it's it's remarkable how unusual it is for Americans to see themselves as being on a level with other countries.  We have a tendency to think American exceptionalism is exclusively practised by far-right thinkers like Coulter.  But really, the attitude infects all parts of the political spectrum, with the more international-friendly pundits seeing themselves as friendly but still special.

Accepting the World Cup and the U.S. role as just one of 32 shows that many Americans are ready to take a less-hierarchical international perspective.  Losing in the Round of 16 may challenge that new-found acceptance; we'll see if it sours their view of the competition, or if they see their team's good-play-but-no-championship as the positive achievement that it was.