Affentitten
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Posts posted by Affentitten
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oooh, ..., population/gdp/overfingies adjusted medal tables
http://c4news.com/livepages/olympics2008/c4/olympicsResults.html
That's an nice tool. Love the way that the medals below for the countries inlcude the events won etc.
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I often think of the subjectivity factor when I'm grading student essays. If I have to mark say 90 essays of 2500 words each, it gets a bit subjective. How can the essays that I marked on Monday morning after a nice breakfast be the same as the ones I marked on Thursday night at 11pm when I'm tired and just want to get through the ****ing pile and be over with it? How do mine compare with the 90 papers from the same subject marked by a colleague?
To some extent I am saved by only having to give a grade rather than a % score. So that puts papers into one of about 5 bandwidths. And it's pretty easy to judge those. A marginal pass is still a marginal pass, whether you score it at 52% or 53%. But those all add up at the end of the semester.
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I also read a report that one of the hospital ships is in the US and it would be five weeks before it showed up by Georgia, which if true would be so after the fact most Georgians will have probably forgotten why it is the Americans had showed up in the first place.
Stay tuned...
One of them (I think Mercy) was over here in the Pacific last week on exercises. I know that because a sick Australian hiker was evaced onto it from Papua New Guinea.
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My solution is to combine some of the events:
All archery, javelin and fencing together in one huge Battle. Last man standing wins the gold. Could also be combined with rowing and sailing for a trireme themed event more in keeping with Ancient Greek origins.
Again, all judo, tae-kwon-do, boxing, wrestling combined into one big hand-to-hand.
All shooting events likewise.
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thats because you ARE bad sports...
check it out heres a quote...
you do it so naturally you don't notice!
Boris
London
Yawn. All I see is the perennial paradox of British people whining about other people allegedly whining. How on Earth is my comment about bad sportsmanship? It's about over-celebrating to get over an inferiority complex. Yawn.
So, we see that all these accusations are a complete beat up. It seems that the only way the British can deal with sporting success is to moan about other people being jealous of them. How sad.
On another note, now the Kiwis are beating us too! In gentle mockery of our American cousins who list themselves as being top of the board thanks to the TOTAL medal count, one of our morning TV shows started running an "Australian corrected" medal tally, based on dividing population by medals. But now the Kiwis have overtaken us there!
But in mockery of the Aussie breakfast TV show, one of our breakfast radio announcers did a tally of gold medals using GDP AND popualtion as a factor. The idea being to see which country won the best proportion of medals according to their resources. Ukraine was top of the ladder a couple of days ago, but I'm not sure if Jamaica might not have gone past them now.
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Mate, you really are in dreamland. It's as regular as clockwork. England loses and the press bangs on about what whineing bad sports we are. England wins and the press bangs on about what whineing bad sports we are. You win a match and you all pile into an open-topped bus and close Trafalgar Square. That, my friend, is an inferiority complex.
I'm still waiting to actually show me some of this so-called bitterness in the Australian press. As opposed to the British press and columnists beating it up in some sort of circle jerk.
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Judging is a subjective thing. Personally I don't know how there can be any sort of consistency in something that takes place so instantaneously. Be aware also that unless you're an expert in the sport, it's hard to know what is being judged. eg. you might think a stumble on landing is a bad thing but it might only incur something like a 0.1 deduction. The fact that the girl as she went through the air didn't have her legs parallel or her arms properly tucked might be a 0.5 deduction. Most of us lay people tend to judge things like gymnastics on whether there are obvious falls or stumbles, but there is more to it than that.
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It wasn't the Aussie sports minister. That was John Coates, who is the head of the Australian Olympic Committee. The sports minister was a bit less creative than that, saying that the British were 'serial chokers' when it came to the big events.
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I don't quite see that either of those stories reflects "bitterness". Two sports ministers make a bet with each other? That's a fairly common inter-state thing down here. eg. If Qld wins the Sate of Origin rugby league series, we have to fly their flag from the Harbour Bridge for a week. If our sports minister was originally a bit harsh, she's certainly going to have egg on her face this time next week when she's wandering round in a Union flag tracksuit, hey?
As for the other stories about Britain out-medalling us, then that's true. But again, the example you've given doesn't show any bitterness. Just a bit of a lament and aimed internally rather than externally. And of course, the English media would never lament if its football team got beaten or failed to qualify for a European cup, would it?
It never ceases to amaze me how rabid the British press goes for any sort of slight an Australian makes. For god's sake, how many times has the "Lizard of Aus" headline been used? It seems to me the inferiority complex (in sport) is not on our side.
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I don't understand the bitterness in the Aussie press towards Britain over this. It's so immature. Comments like 'Brits have only won medals in stuff where they can sit down', and the whole class thing because they've done well in sailing. I had no idea the Aussies had such a chip on their shoulder. It's a shame.
As for the Phelps wins - people have been saying 'hey, look, that guy's got it easy because swimming's just swimming, right?' Well, the man's won one medal every day for eight days. The physical toll on him is extraordinary and critics should bear that in mind.
Where are you getting this idea of "bitterness" from? I certainly haven't seen any of it in "the Aussie press". The praise for Phelps and the way in which the British cyclists have blown us off has been fairly universal. The main bitterness I have seen from people is a gnashing of teeth about the comparatively low level of funding our government is kicking in for sport and the fact that means so many of our best coaches are now helping win medals for other countries. But hey, that's pro sport.
It's often been my experience that comments about bitterness and whingeing that are made about "the Aussie press", especially to do with sport, are often the work of one or two British sports columnists taking one or two comments from one or two Aussie sports columnists and then beating them up. This then gets reported as news and the cycle continues. It's like Ian Botham quoting Ian Chappel but then referring to it as "some sections of the Australian media".
Don't believe everything you read in the "Pommy press".
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Oh I really want to click on that link he's embedded.....
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I did a story years ago about a boffin called Srinivasan who had:
1) Wired a living chimp up so that it could control the movments of a robot arm through thoughts.
2) Was using bee brains to develop flight control for UAVs.
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In Australia we love Teddy Flack.
He got to the very first Olympics under his own steam and competed before Australia was even an independent nation. He won gold in the 800 and 1500 and was leading the Marathon by a mile when he collapsed shortly before the end. A spectator tried to help him up and Flack punched his lights out before being escorted from the course.
Then he entered the tennis singles and doubles. He was knocked out of the singles straight away, but reached the semi-finals in doubles when his first round opponents failed to show up. Then he and his mate lost their semi-final, but were recently retrospectively awarded a bronze medal for the semi-final spot because bronze medals did not at the time exist.
A magic career!
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IMHO, one of the greatest athletes ever is Paavo Nurmi of Finland with nine (9) Olympic Gold Medals.
Who knows how many he would have had got, if not our Swedish big brothers gotten too envious and quite crookedly schemed to ban him for participating in the 1932 Games in Los Angeles,
How like the miserable and pernicious Swedes.
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There might be some truth to that, but also Thorpe is more of a middle-distance swimmer and raced some of his races in distances Phelps would not have raced in at all, right? According to Wikipedia Phelps' coach called Thorpe the 'best middle distance swimmer I've ever seen."
One thing I did find curious while watching the male swimming events... I saw a couple of events in which Phelps did not participate at all? Why is that? Is it b/c those events are not important enough? Or that Phelps knew his chances of winning were too slim? Or his grueling schedule was already too much for him? Or is there a limit on how many events you can swim in?
Herr Kruger
Phelps and Thorpe would have run up against each other in the 200m freestyle and the relays.
I saw at least one semi-final this time round where Phelps did not take his place to start because he had only minutes before been in the final for another event. So I guess he keeps his options open that way.
There is no limit to how many events you can enter, but I believe there is a limit to how many people from one country can enter an event (possibly 2?). So by entering and then withdrawing, Phelps is blocking another American from a chance. Also, IIRC the American freestyle relay team that qualified for the final in Beijing were to a man swapped out and replaced with an A-team for the actual final. You can do that with team events.
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He retired last year or the year before. Said his heart wasn't in it any more. Maybe he also saw the Phelps writing on the wall and decided to retire with gold medals instead of silver ones.
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So who's taxpayer dollars were funding this event?
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It depends on how much the ISI could be purged. Somehow I doubt that will be in the offing.
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And also because Georgia is a democracy. The USA can't go round evangelising and encouraging democracy and then not make even a token effort to back one up that's in trouble. Especially given that, by regional standards, Georgia is a pretty reasonable democracy.
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Phelps has almost single-handedly derailed Australia's Olympic medal tally this time round. For the first time in over 30 years our men have won a big fat zero gold in the pool. Hats off to the guy though. He must be part dolphin.
Also hurting is is Great Britain actually funding their sports for a change. They've killed us off in the track cycling where we usually manage to grab a couple of big ones. Thank god for our rowers and sailors.
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Let's hope for America's sake that they don't get to hold free and fair elections. Then someone unsympathetic to American democracy might get elected.
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Not familiar with the 1956 Olympics water polo match between Hungary and USSR?
Yes, I'm quite familiar with it, thanks. I was thinking about it when I made the post.
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So I think we're all agreed. Sending carriers to the Black Sea is a total armchair Tom Clancy fantasy.
For the record, the distance between the water and the bridge deck of the Bosphorous Bridge and the Sultan Mehment Bridge is 64m. As far as I can ascertain, a Nimitz class has a height of about 75m measured from the keel. They draw 10-12m though. So you could just scrape one under the bridge if you took some of the top arrays off for safety.
Then of course you need to have the poltical leadership willing to say "If Russian aircraft apprach we are prepared to shoot them down." Somehow I doubt that's the case.
As far as this goes, I think that when you have a great hammer like a CAG, every problem starts to look like a nail. Especially for the uninformed.
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Can you imagine sending a carrier up the freakin Bosphorous? What's the clearance on the bridges? Even then it would be a target for any nutjob packing anything from an air rifle to a Harpoon.
Would it be possible for US to park a couple of Carrier groups in the Black Sea ?
in General Discussion Forum
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Iran's naval capacity is zip (especially in the Black Sea!). Their navy has been pretty much in mothballs since the Revolution. The Revolutionary Guards took over most of the offensive duties in the Gulf and that's mainly just fast attack boats and a handful of Chinese model missile craft.