I love watching ALL the events – Downhill skiing, X-Country skiing, bobsledding, luge, hockey, speed skating, even curling. Truthfully, I could probably do without most of the figure skating. Apparently I’m the only one – because if the past several Olympics are any indicator, we won’t see hardly any of that. We’ll get a tightly packaged bundle from 8-11 PM that has about 1 hour of competition, 1 hour of athlete biographies and human interest stories, and 1 hour of advertisements.
Want to see curling? Unless the US makes the Gold Medal round – no way in hell. Want to see bobsledding? Unless Michael Jordan decides to make a debut as a pusher, you’ve got as much chance as seeing Michael Moore fitting into Michelle Kwan’s fluffy pink tutu. Likewise the Biathalon – apparently that’s more boring than NASCAR – so they won’t show it either. Actually – the Biathalon is better than NASCAR – it’s going in a circle repeatedly AND shooting. (side note: they should add shooting to NASCAR).
Assuming your event is actually covered – like the Men’s Giant Slalom – you’ll see the top two US athletes, plus whoever won the gold and silver (if it wasn’t the US athletes). I like watching Bode Miller quite a bit – but dammit, I actually do want to see who he beat!
This point was driven home four years ago during the Salt Lake City Olympics. I went skiing in Whistler (that’s Canada, FYI) during the Olympics. I saw coverage from 9 AM until Midnight – with literally every event being shown start to finish. I became the hugest curling fan – because all the nutty Canucks went CRAZY over it – unbeknownst to me. When I got back home – *poof* – back to the 8-11PM “Friends” treatment. Why can’t we get good coverage like the Canadians do?
Only two weeks to wait until my 8-11 timeslot gets eaten up – and I’ll love every minute of it. Well, except the ads, the bios, and the figure skating.
I caught this last night on Digg.com and it absolutely amazed me. Apparently the frequency of the number ’1′ can be used with great reliability to detect fraud, embezzlers, tax evaders, sloppy accountants, and much more.
It’s all based around the fact that many things really aren’t random. The late Dr. Frank Benford noticed that books full of logarithms were a lot more worn on the pages that started with 1. According to Dr. Benford’s research:
In a huge assortment of number sequences — random samples from a day’s stock quotations, a tournament’s tennis scores, the numbers on the front page of The New York Times, the populations of towns, electricity bills in the Solomon Islands, the molecular weights of compounds the half-lives of radioactive atoms and much more — this is not so.
Given a string of at least four numbers sampled from one or more of these sets of data, the chance that the first digit will be 1 is not one in nine, as many people would imagine; according to Benford’s Law, it is 30.1 percent, or nearly one in three. The chance that the first number in the string will be 2 is only 17.6 percent, and the probabilities that successive numbers will be the first digit decline smoothly up to 9, which has only a 4.6 percent chance.
It’s a good read.. and with tax season coming up, it might be very useful information.