metacorrector

Advice to women: to prevent pregnancy, take a single aspirin tablet... and hold it between your knees

1. The code I wrote was to download the NSA database. Script really. 2. The army was the Russian Army.

signed

Ed Snowden

in other words, it's not giving you reCaptchas, it's giving you unCaptcha's yet so you can do work for them for google streetview.

I don't agree, the grenade that was thrown is not part of no-knock, it's because of the extreme violence that gang style criminals are apt to use.

You could have no-knock raids to capture evidence without needing to stun everybody.

<i>If the game goes to the best player with near certainty, then unless there's a lot of noise ...</i>

that's what the guy is saying, that in soccer, the best team does not win with near certainty. You understand now.

he may have said it wrong, but you seem more wrong: it is not silly that games should be designed to identify who is the better player.

I think you are confusing "the best team winning" with everybody knowing who is going to win a priori.

Sprinting, marathoning, horse racing, downhill skiing, etc., they all determine pretty clearly who won, and they do a good job to varying degrees of seeming fair. That doesn't mean you know who will win, and when happens as for example with skiing under certain conditions that later runs are disadvantaged compared to earlier runs, that can vary the outcome but not in a satisfying way.

Soccer could be a better game, but I get it, you don't like change.

sure, but as an analogy, can you see tic-tac-toe not as an obvious tie but as one round in an epic game of attrition? Would it be fun to see who could win a continuous stream of tic tac toe games, games played end to end for 24, 36, 48 hrs, maybe with no breaks for food? Cage Tic Tac Toe, where someone actually does start losing due to their weaker constitution?

While that could be imagined to be a fun sport, just as the soccer you describe is a fun sport, perhaps there is a way to play with some other rules that achieve more fun for the fan, for the player, and which give a sense that you know who is the best team in this tournament, rather than who comes from the country with the better long term immigration policy with respect to the game of tic tac toe?

Thank you for having an open mind with regard to a sport you are a fan of, many fans can't do this. I am as much a soccer fan as the next avg American is.

I think I agree with the article, not because I read the article, but because I arrived at the same conclusion myself.

Basketball and soccer are very similar sports, to the extent that we can say that they are mathematically "the same" sport in the same sense that all op amp circuits are the same, simply with differing amounts of time delayed positive and negative feedback.

I think what the author is trying to prove is what I came up with intuitively: imagine soccer without goalkeepers, or soccer with a larger net; that game would be very similar to current soccer (in terms of gameplay), but it would have much higher scores. Along with the higher scores would come, in my belief, a greater sense on the part of the fan that "the best team won". There would still be excitement, there would still be upsets, but the upsets would be based more on a cinderella team summoning their (admirable cheerable) "will to win" (or the champions failing due to hubris, cf tortoise and hare) and less due to statistical noise.

The sense I get watching soccer is, this is a good game with skill and athleticism, but something could be done to ensure that the best team wins more often; not that the outcomes would be more predictable, but that the outcomes would be more satisfying. And also, with fewer tie breakers.