Sports

Thing: Some Thoughts On The Three Amigos from A VC. Very many great things have been written about this week’s LeBron James sideshow — if you missed it, let’s just say it combined all the most spectacular elements of a two-year-long infomercial, a Derby horse auction, and Alexander’s invasion of India. It’s become almost cliche, but it’s true: the problem isn’t what he did, it’s how he did it. Not since Ron Burgundy has a city so unmistakably been told to go **** itself. But let’s get beyond the question of whether we’re mad at LeBron or just disappointed.

The freshest piece on the matter (the one linked to at the beginning of this rambling) frames LeBron’s decision as an experiment being conducted by LeBron. It’s like nothing we’ve seen in the sports history of America, though the word sports is superfluous — a household-name for-profit organization’s labor has taken total control of its own factory.

In X’s and O’s terms, it’s not likely to work. The team won’t have any money to afford depth, James and Dwayne Wade don’t complement so much as duplicate each other, and this might be the biggest foursome of egos since… I don’t know, the Beatles (?), if you count Heat general manager Pat Riley. But let’s say it does work… will sports ever be the same? (ht Rafi Kam.)

Thing: Woot Asks AP To Pay Up For Quoting Woot Blog Post Without Paying from Techdirt and AP Not Amused By The Woot Story, Tries To Play The Oil Spill Card from TechCrunch.

Thing: As a Gentile, it’s hard to know how to approach this video. A Holocaust survivor, his daughter, and two grandchildren tour former German concentration camps and Holocaust memorials — where they dance to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

After watching, people tend to either feel goose-bumpy or uncomfortable. Rationally, the presence of an able-minded-and-bodied Holocaust survivor should dissuade any concerns of whether the montage is tasteful and appropriate — if he’s ok with it, you should be too. But it’s still unsettling.

And it’s all because of the song they’ve chosen. It’s an instantly mockable karaoke throwaway, for whatever reason. If they’d gone with a traditional Hebrew song, any traditional Hebrew song, even one we’ve never heard of, the video would be cool but unremarkable. Or you’d expect something like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, whatever — no problem (since apparently men with guitars know more about the joy and power of survival than an African American woman born in the 1940s).

But because “I Will Survive” somehow has become the definitive disco song, it feels like it’s not just the wrong song, it’s almost blasphemous.

But, of course, it’s the best possible song. This man is almost literally dancing on his own grave.

THING: Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure from Wired. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who’s made a life of using the power of algorithms to “organize all the world’s information,” is using that same kind of power in an attempt to cure Parkinson’s Disease. Since discovering he carries a gene mutation that puts him at risk of contracting the disease, Brin has sought “to bypass centuries of scientific epistemology in favor of a more Googley kind of science. He wants to collect data first, then hypothesize, and then find the patterns that lead to answers. And he has the money and the algorithms to do it.”

THING: Travel itineraries from Flickr photo trails from Geeking With Greg. Greg Linden links to a paper by American and Israeli researchers on “cleverly [using] the data often embedded in Flickr photos (e.g. timestamp, tags, sometimes GPS) to produce trails of where people have been in their travels.” It makes sense that the most interesting points along a path would also be the most photographed, so this could be a great way to note can’t-miss spots, common travel routes, and typical trip durations. An inspiring quote from the paper:

By aggregating such timed paths of many users, one can construct itineraries that reflect the “wisdom” of touring crowds. Each such itinerary is composed of a sequence of POIs, with recommended visit times and approximate transit times between them.

THING: How Rap Tears Up the Boring Art Vs. Commerce Argument from The Awl. Selling out has a different connotation in hip-hop than it does in other spheres. Though punk and hip-hop grew up at the same time and place and in the same socioeconomic conditions, the two have had very different ideas on mass appeal. (Yes, this is lumping thousands of musicians and millions of fans into two groups. I’m sorry.)

We can all agree the Black Eyed Peas sold out — they completely changed everything about their sound and image, conscious of their brand and marketability the whole time, and wedding receptions will never be the same. I’m sure they weep into their pallets of Franklins every night, thinking about all the underground respect they lost in the process. But many rappers have been able to market themselves without significantly changing their sound. None of this is new information, but the Awl article certainly presents a worth-reading take on the issue.

A Video of Americans Pretending to Care About the World Cup

Even though the U.S. lost its knockout round match against its nemesis Ghana, this World Cup still produced one of the best moments in American soccer history, and certainly the most widely experienced — Landon Donovan’s last-minute, life-or-death goal against Algeria did the kind of Twitter damage unseen since Michael Jackson’s death. An amazing montage of Americans from Arkansas to France celebrating the score:

It may seem Americans are the world’s lone gunmen when it comes to using the word soccer instead of football, but Canda, Australia, and New Zealand are guilty of soccrilege (anybody?) as well. In fact, at least one-fifth of the English-speaking world calls it soccer, not football:

All data from Wikipedia. I broke the countries down as follows:

Football countries: England, Wales, Scotland, India, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guyana, Madagascar, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Malta, Singapore, and Belize.

Soccer countries: Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, and South Africa.

I tried to avoid English-speaking countries where there’s no clear winner — for example, the Philippines. There may be some debate over including South Africa as a soccer country, as its national team calls itself the South African national football team. However, the domestic league is called the Premier Soccer League, and the 2010 World Cup flagship stadium is called Soccer City.

Any disparity introduced by including South Africa as a soccer country is more than outweighed by this: not everyone in India speaks English as a first language — many Indians don’t speak any English. The same goes for many of the African countries listed as football countries. So if we were to get particular and exclude South Africa, we’d also need to ding India’s football population by a significant percent.

An 80/20 split means everybody should be happy. Football proponents can rest easy, knowing the beautiful game’s traditional name is securely dominant. And there’s comfort for users of soccer in knowing we’re more than just a handful of stubborn Americans.

Though it’s often confusing and inefficient, there’s no real harm done by using two different names for the same sport. It’s just the way language works. Sure, the game hails from England, but Americans invented trucks, and you don’t see us getting mad when English call a truck a lorry.

The obvious, as John Cleese states, is that the game Americans call football involves at least as much hand as it does foot, and its principal object isn’t exactly shaped like a ball. (As Americans, we’d eventually retort by pointing out cricket doesn’t involve insects. But first we’d run a monster truck lorry into a wall of fried chicken, because so what?)

Some Extra Charts

For no good reason at all, let’s also look at the same two groups, using combined GDP as our metric:

And finally, an even less relevant chart:

THING: Map: Where Americans Are Moving from Forbes. Cool clicky infowidget (filled with stats and numbertainment) that shows migration patterns for each county in the United States. Our county, Cherokee in Georgia, is pulling tons of people from Florida, Los Angeles, and New York City, while losing residents to places like east Texas, the other L.A.(Lower Alabama), and Chicago. Sadly but accurately, Detroit looks like it’s bleeding dry, with its only new residents coming from very poor areas of east Virginia. Our favorite finding? Nobody ever enters or leaves Iowa; they just shuffle around within its well-gridded counties. Click your county! Why not!

THING: If sports got reported like science… from Items of Interest. For some reason, it’s ok to nerd out when talking sports in polite company, but science discussions have to stay around a fourth-grade level. Have you noticed this?

THING:WordPress 3 is out. We’ve only started to try out its new features, including custom post types (which brings it one step closer to Drupal’s versatility). Of course, learning the old stock WordPress theme’s days are numbered is pretty exciting too:

World Cup Vuvuzela Bonus

You know, if there was a Forbes migration map for sports noisemakers, the vuvuzela would already be cutting loud, flavorful lines into the U.S. They’ve already emerged at a Florida Marlins baseball game and the College World Series in freaking Nebraska, and every Southern college football fanbase is talking big about going into total vuvuzela-arms-race mode. This might all blow over by next week, or America might be in for it. Either way:

Via SB Nation and @Jose3030

As usual, three means more than three.

THING: Eat Your Words: Anthony Bourdain on Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz. Anthony Bourdain, host of the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (first four seasons currently streaming on Netflix), is notorious for challenging his own strong opinions. In this interview he discusses the value he’s gained from his willingness to be wrong, whether by traveling the world or preparing for fatherhood, and what doing it wrong can teach us:

There’s enormous respect and a romanticized reverence for what’s considered the “right” way—meaning, the classic way—and I think most chefs feel powerfully that one should know that before moving on. Like, “I’ve researched this, this is the way they were making it in 1700, goddamn it, and that’s the way it should be made.” Or: “This is the way they make laksa in Kuching and Borneo; that stuff I just had on Ninth Avenue is definitely not the same; ergo it’s wrong.” But, you know, what does “real” or “authentic” mean? The history of food is the history of migrating ingredients and occupation and foreign influences and accommodation.

Somebody who’d be very interesting to speak to on this is Grant Achatz [one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy]. Here’s a guy who’s been trained in the classics, who knows the quote-unquote “right” away to do everything, but made a very deliberate decision to subvert it all. I think that’s admirable. We need people like that. We would never have had Jimi Hendrix if he’d stuck to the right way to play guitar.

THING: Wooden and Love by Joe Posnanski. John Wooden, the most successful coach in major American sports, died this week at 99. Though he once won 10 college hoops national titles in 12 years, he was even more beloved away from the game. Wooden famously wrote a love letter to his wife every month after she passed 15 years ago, his former players talk about him as if he’s their own grandfather (mixed with Moses or Ben Franklin), and his thoughts on life have become a rolling motivational quip factory over time. Posnanski looks through the lens of Wooden’s coaching style at the Pyramid of Success, a fifteen-block pile of Wooden aphorisms that appears to be a stack of pure cheese at first glance, and finds nothing short of a life plan.

THING: Clay Shirky: What I Read from the Atlantic Wire. Clay Shirky, described by WIRED editor-in-chief Chris Anderson as “a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies,” details his reading priorities as part of a great series on media consumption by people you’ve heard of.

THING: Great African Singularities by Appfrica. Appfrica, a Ugandan software company, shows how African presence, language accommodations, and representation are alarmingly absent from otherwise globally focused pages by tech giants like Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Facebook, and more. Blogger Jonathan Gosier sees one solution:

The business world (and in this case tech companies) needs to be constantly reminded that they need you with cold hard facts. There are no other arguments. Show them the numbers, the patents, the inventions, the talent, the enthusiasm, the courage…the success stories. Don’t open your mouth to tell anyone anything or ask them for anything ever again…show them.