Maybe my favorite part is getting an MIT professor involved:
- On a phone call from her office at MIT, Professor Peko Hosoi analyzes Kelly's throw. She has wrapped a rubber band around a triangular-shaped notebook and attempts to re-create the whole thing. She walks back about 10 feet, picks out a target and tries to replicate Kelly's throw.
She nails it on her first try. "Bull's-eye," she says, as the sound of a flying notebook clangs off the wall in the background.
But when she is told some of the exact circumstances -- that Kelly was closer to 15 to 20 feet away, that the wind was 15 mph at Kelly's back, that he had to grab the pizza and throw it in a span of just a second or two -- she runs her experiment again. She starts talking about lift and drag, and she mentions Newton's second law of motion, that force equals mass times acceleration, and she ultimately figures Kelly must have thrown the pizza at roughly 11 mph.
Now, for her official attempt under more exact conditions, she tosses the notebook and ... no luck this time. She tries it a few more times before she finally hits one.
"Oh yeah, that was hard," says Hosoi, a co-founder of the MIT Sports Lab who teaches engineering and mathematics. "I got some more fluttering action that time. That's a tough throw. I'm not going to lie."
You know those terrible cooking blogs that feel compelled to tell a long-ass story (I know, ad money, CPM wizardry, doesn't make it less annoying) about the thing that, if true, would make most amateur cooks into some sort of food-synesthets hit with compulsive, intrusive memories each time they're exposed to a pie? I recently had an idea where instead of that, you dish out some solid sci-fi in media res hook, string the reader for a page or three, and just when the action peaks, you blindside them with "which reminded me of Zorblaxian apple salad mah momma used to make," making the reader pissed at the recipe coming up at a moment like that. What am I on about? Well, if it wasn't for the title and graphics, I'd have no fucking clue what's the story, and still don't know more nine paragraphs deep. It's written in a tad over the top investigative journalist style of this: while talking about a no-longer-sad tosser. Baseball, man, can't get a clue. Far from bad read (EDIT: finished), but even math papers don't need this much of a setup.
LOL, totally. Leave it to ESPN to monetize the transcription of an entire YouTube video. Only some of the follow up reporting was necessary. "Necessary" being a generous word for non-residents of Boston. I would read an entire compilation of short sci-fi stories with #ruinedClimaxes. What? Yeah, of course I know what I'm doing, we're desperate for paigeviews, here. Hey bfx, can you imagine if Jomboy was around back then to lip read and clown on this? I'm actually not sure that there'd be enough demand to sustain his channel if all of the announcers of that era were this fun to listen to. Have the commentators become more boring in the last 15 years? Genuinely asking, I don't watch broadcast baseball but for like one game a year. But I did make my annual trip to watch my local minor league farm team last week. Not great baseball. Still fun.
I’m probably our resident baseball fan at this point, so for me, this was a fun article to read on one of the more memorably funny moments in baseball in recent years. That said, yeah, it’s still an ESPN article...Jomboy and his media channel are easily the most in touch with younger audiences when it comes to baseball. I’m not an NBA fan but I’ve heard positive things about announcers and commentary for that sport.
Ah, my comment sounds snarky, on re-reading. Sorry! Didn't mean it like that. I shared the post, I thought it was interesting. On top of actual ESPN journalism interesting me, it's a fascinating look backwards/earlier into this era of internet-based shared experiences. If pizzagate 1.0 [Fenway] happened today, I probably woulda heard about it. ---- To pay accidental snark tax, and since absolutely nobody asked, and since hubski almost never talks anything sport-related, and since I'm down $120 so far: Every year, I pool $30 into a fantasy football league with 10 other people, winner takes all. First season, I was learning the mechanics, but then I really played. My team name changes every season, but it's always been a pun on "Watson", because I make decisions almost exclusively based on IBM's AI named "Watson" 's point projections every week during the season. The projections are integrated into the fantasy framework, and trusting them kinda weeds out some of the rumors and speculation, imho. Because yeah, I don't actually watch football, or football news, I just check into the ESPN fantasy football app once to thrice a week real quick to make trades, shuffle around my active roster to maximize projected points, etc. ... ANYWAY. Though I may try, I don't know how I'll top last year's scheme. My team name was "WHOSON FIRST WATSON SECOND", in tribute to the Abbott and Costello comedy bit, and my football team's icon was a baseball, appropriately. Even though I scored the most offensive points during the regular season, I got stuck with an unfavorable slot in the playoffs (don't get me started on this). The Grand Plan was to make it to the championship game (playing for 1st or 2nd place) and then bench my entire team shortly before the opening round of games on championship game day, thereby finishing second and forcing a $300 "WATSON SECOND" joke, and also changing the "WHOSON" in my name to the name of the team I forfeited to. And THEN, hopefully my team, the team I benched/dropped, would have otherwise won, to further underline the ridiculousness of it all. Either way, all I had to do was make it to the championship. I narrowly missed it :(. The upcoming season? Well, I've got a new web crawler, and big plans.