Old-Time Sports Day

Today, the three big professional sports in the U.S. are baseball, basketball, and football. But it wasn't always that way. For most of the first half of the twentieth century it was baseball, boxing, and horse racing.

Because the sweet science and the sport of kings have faded from previous highs, their place in modern culture is hard to understand. But we'll get a chance to examine it next Saturday, when the Kentucky Derby and the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will take place within hours of each other.

The Kentucky Derby is the one chance for horse racing to shine. Of course, all marginal sports get that one event where everyone pretends to pay attention and care. But with the Derby, we get the sports world going a step further and pretending they know something. Usually that something is just the fact that there hasn't been a triple crown winner in years. What's odd is the lack of grounding for the one big event: the mainstream sports media pays attention to NASCAR for the Daytona 500 then it drops into the background for the rest of the year. But there is at least a background awareness, with reports - or at least acknowledgement - of the rest of the sport.  Horse racing pretty much drops off the map outside of the big three events.  And if the same horse doesn't win the first two, the third only gets token mentions.

Boxing's place in current society is harder to understand. For the most part, the sport seems to be a spent force. It doesn't get much time on mainstream sports talk shows. Among the secondary, non-team sports, it has nowhere near the profile of golf, or even tennis.

Of course, there are sports that have a sort of cult following, in that they have lots of dedicated fans, but not enough mainstream appeal to get in on mass-appeal shows. I'm thinking of things like NASCAR, extreme sports, MMA, or curling in Canada. These sports get hours of programming on sports networks, but nary a mention on the news and discussion shows or your evening news.  But boxing coverage is often just shoehorned around other programming to fill in. I haven't really been looking for the "boxing nation," but I don't see much evidence of it.

And yet, when a big fight occurs, it turns into a massive event. Seats for this fight are going for prices similar to the Superbowl.  True, there are fewer of them, so supply and demand etc.  But that still shows a tremendous desire for boxing is out there.

And this is all for a fight that isn't really a marketer's dream. It's not for the heavyweight championship of the world, it's two "best pound-for pound" boxers (the sort of thing that usually appeals to purists) and of course, they're both past their prime. And then there's the boxers themselves: one of them won elected office then did very little except campaign against rights for gays and women, and yet he's far and away the good guy.

So I don't get it. There's obviously a lot of boxing enthusiasm out there, but I don't know where it goes between big fights. Perhaps one explanation is that boxing is the most hyped sport there is.  I found one article calling it one of the top three fights of all time.  So this is essentially the Derek Jeter of boxing matches.  And maybe that baseball reference brings this discussion full circle, explaining everything: sports that have a long and proud history have some extra aura of importance beyond what other sports can deliver.  Even after they decline, we can think of the current participants as being similar to the legends, even if they don't really measure up.

We Come From The Land Of The Ice And Snow

There's an election coming up in Britain.  Any election means there's going to be a variety of campaign handouts to promote the parties' platforms.  Here's one from the left-leaning Labour Party that's been getting a lot of attention:

When you see that, a number of questions may occur to you.  Can a liberal party win over the centre successfully with a few highlighted promises? Will they lose the support of their base?

But probably, you're wondering what kind of a stupid campaign gives out mugs?  Whatever happened to pamphlets?  You'd think that if you were going to use any beverage vessel to win over xenophobic Britons, you'd go with a teacup.

As an aside, here are some of the other images that came up when I searched for the mug picture.  I don't know how Bieber got on there, though Google might just group all the embarrassing mug shots together.

As political strategy, it (the promise, not the mug) doesn't make sense. At a time when the Conservatives are facing a big vote split with the even-further-to-the-right UK Independence Party, Labour just needs to get its base to turn out in big numbers.  Instead this has really alienated them.

But more to the point, it's incredibly bad timing.  While Labour is trying to harness the fear of foreigners, Europe's migration problem has taken a turn for the tragic.  Europe and its constituent countries have scaled back patrols of illegal migration in the Mediterranean this year, and at the same time the situation in Libya and other parts of Africa and the Middle East have gotten worse.  The result has been a huge increase in deaths during attempts to cross the sea.

Something that's really bothered me about the coverage of the migration crisis is the way the recent history of it has been explained.  The usual story is that Europe cut-back on patrols in the hopes that the lack of a safety net for desperate, dangerous journeys in the Mediterranean would discourage attempts.

To put it in terms the locals will understand: Bollocks.  This wasn't some clever strategy to discourage migrants, it was European leaders doing the only thing they ever seem to do: ignoring a problem and hoping it goes away. Usually that just makes a few investors nervous, but this time a thousand people died.  With their economy still poor and far-right anti-immigrant parties making gains, spending money on illegal immigrants isn't popular, so they did the easy thing, whatever the results.

Europe is going to have to face the fact that its bigotry is dangerous.  Usually we think of the problem as caused by a small number of Neo-Nazis. I have no idea how prevalent they are, so I can't comment on the seriousness of that problem.  But the fact is that the mainstream fear of foreigners is beyond what you should see in a civilized society.  Of course, this is an issue everywhere, but the amount of social-acceptance of it, the quickness to scapegoat, and the number of politicians cashing in on it, is a serious problem with real consequences.

Please Forward This Post To Demonstrate What Happens When People Forward Posts

It was many months ago - maybe a few years - that I saw a picture passed around on Facebook, of kids demonstrating how far things can spread online. They had a sign saying that as part of a school assignment they were asking everyone to keep forwarding the picture, to see just how many people it would reach.  That seemed like a cute idea.  By the time I saw it, it had already been shared and liked thousands of times.  The point was made, to the kids and the many who saw it.

Get that?  The point was made.  There's no need to keep repeating the same experiment.  I keep seeing more and more of them.  Frankly, I didn't think this really needed demonstrating in the first place.  To see the power of social media, you don't need to set up a photo with pleading children, you just need to watch what you are consuming online.  Just in the last 24 hours, that bad Robert Downey Jr. interview has gone viral.  So don't set up your own demonstration, just imagine he's holding a sign asking you to consider how stories spread on the Internet.

The irony is that the copycat viral media demonstrations are casting doubt on their own thesis.  If these pictures were so widely spread, people would realise just how redundant they've become.  You want to show kids how far viral stories go?  Then you must not have seen the last twelve people who did the same thing, which means they didn't really spread that far.  It's sort of like those ads you see on benches and bus shelters that say, "You Just Proved Advertising Works."  Yeah, and you just proved that you're having trouble selling ad space.

London Mauling

A few days ago the people of London, Ontario got rather upset over an article published on line.  Wait, "upset" doesn't seem like the right word.  What do you call that feeling when, after years of anonymity, someone says something mildly bad about you, and you're not sure if you are glad about the recognition, or angry at the insult?  There probably isn't a word for it, since it's only experienced by introverts and Canadians.

Anyway, the mildly bad thing was an article titled, "10 Problems Only People From London Ontario Will Understand" at the website WhatCulture (a Buzzfeed wannabe.) Of course, as a resident of nearby, similarly-sized Kitchener-Waterloo, I wanted headed straight for the list as soon as I heard about it.

The main thing that strikes me upon reading it is that it’s not exactly a hard-hitting list. You’d think a genuinely critical shot at London would include its notorious east-west class divide. (We in Kitchener-Waterloo at least have the decency to maintain our archaic two-city setup to make our class divides less obvious.) Most of the items in this list apply to all of Southern Ontario, if not all of Canada.  Really, cross-border shopping is inconvenient?  How about "your newspaper makes Fox News sound neutral"?

The only one that applies specifically to London is the shot at its unoriginal name. I totally agree, but I realize that naming your city after a more famous place is one of those things that makes sense to Canadians, but that I’ll never understand. It’s right up there with the monarchy, Don Cherry, and Hedley. You might think that the London name is just a matter of tradition, but here in Kitchener - where we dodged the same bullet by dumping the name “Berlin” during WWI - there’s still a significant part of the population that wants to go back to the Berlin name, despite London’s teachable example.

I was going to write a list of legitimate bad things about London, but I don't have enough venom. One of the entries was going to be that you couldn’t make a list of top ten tourist attractions without padding it out by including White Oaks Mall. But then I realized that to pad my list out to ten entries, I would have to add something about how hard it is to find your way around White Oaks Mall.

But I do have to take issue with the part about the embarrassment of former mayor Joe Fontana.  For one thing, it was hard for anyone in Canada outside of Toronto to be embarrassed of their mayor over that time period.  But my problem is that the article makes it sound like he was a good mayor who made one perplexing mistake. It even says "he was able to get some things done". Actually, if his term is known for anything other than scandal, it will be for U.S. Congress-style division and paralysis in city council.

Syntaxality!

I've seen an ad for the new Mortal Kombat game in which it says the game is "available digitally and in stores." We sometimes talk about digital downloads of movies, so it took second to remember that we're talking about a video game here. And that's when it hit me: available digitally and in stores. Does that mean that if I buy it in stores, I get an analog version?

Apparently they have decided that because the word "digitally" is applied to downloads, so the word will now be used to mean "downloaded with no physical copy." This, even though all copies of the game are, like all software today, digital.

It's sort of like how we in Canada refer to the electricity supply as "hydro" because we started with the term “hydroelectric” and generalized the wrong part of the word. Or it’s like “film” in reference to a feature-length movie. The word “film” originally meant the celluloid the movie was recorded on, but it is now used to refer to movies that go from studio to audience without using any film or tape.

In contrast, sound recorded on grooved vinyl was called a “record” because it was a recording. Yet somehow, we came to think of “record” as meaning the physical thing itself, so no one would call a collection of audio computer files as a “record,” even though it’s still a recording. I don’t know how society decides on these things. Why is this thing I’m writing called a “blog” and not a “glorified diary shoved in the public’s face”?

It Keeps Going And Going And...

This week was the fiftieth anniversary of Moore's Law. If you're not familiar with it, Gordon Moore is an engineer who was involved in the creation of the first microchips. Early on in the process, he noted that their progress in making newer and improved chips was going at a steady rate of improvement: the amount of circuitry they could fit on a chip doubled every 18 months. The concept has become notable for a couple of reasons:

• It's continued at a similar rate since then. That's odd, given that microchip design and manufacturing has changed so much. It's gone from a small number of researchers working on a little-known technology, to a huge business that the world depends on, pushed by a duopoly of multinational tech companies.
• People have been predicting it demise for a variety of reasons - both technical and economic - for years. And yet, like a microchip-powered Timex, it just keeps ticking. Even Moore himself predicted that it would eventually be no longer economically feasible to keep upgrading manufacturing equipment to keep making chips smaller and faster. That was almost twenty years ago.

But the weird thing about Moore's law is that for all the false predictions of doom, we know it has to end eventually. If we just keep making the circuitry on chips smaller and smaller, eventually, we'll get to the point where the wires are just a line of individual atoms, and we can shrink it no more. And thanks to the weirdness of quantum mechanics, it would stop behaving like any normal wire long before we can get it that small.

So claims of the end of more Moore's law are like the predictions of a bad psychic: if we make enough of them, we'll eventually be right.

And that's led to the strangeness of people celebrating the anniversary of Moore's Law with discussion of what happens when it ends.  It may not seem like a big change, but for many of us, constant and fast growth of computing power is all we've ever known.  Our devices have always been getting faster and more powerful.  But what if our kids just used the same apps we do now?  One article posited that we'll have heirloom computers handed down from one generation to another.  I don't see that happening; if new computers are no better than the old ones, we'll just start emphasizing their design and style.

But lack of computer improvement could be positive: without constant power increases to cover up bad programming and design, there'd be more pressure to get software right.  And we the users would probably start to refine the way we use computers into something more effective and intelligent, instead of just bouncing from one start-up service to another.  Gaming would surely improve too, since the developers couldn't just rely on greater realism to convince audiences to replace old games.

But seriously, computer engineers, keep the new chips coming.

Russian Modernism

This architect is terrible at Tetris.