September 30, 2005

Somewhere Between 'Tic-Tac-Toe' And Chinese Calculus

One of the problems with posting 'Discuss'-type entries to a blog with only a handful of regular readers is the potential for a deafening silence broken only by the chirp of cyber-crickets. But life is fraught with risks, so here I go.

Rank the four major sports in terms of their overall complexity as you see it.

I submit:

  1. Football (by an order of magnitude)
  2. Hockey (the unwritten rules involving fighting are more complex than either baseball or basketball)
  3. Baseball (if not for the pitcher-batter interface, this would be #4)
  4. Basketball

Discuss.

Posted by Chris at September 30, 2005 01:18 PM

Category: Sports
Comments

You would get a heck of a lot more comments if your individual post pages in either Opera or Mozilla had the comments either enabled on the individual page itself, or a link to a comments page. On my Mac, I had to go to the main page of your site to get to this comments page, and now I've forgotten the point of the post I wanted to comment to...

So...

:-P

Comments depend upon how easy they are to make. If you don't want the crickets chirping in deafening silence, you should make sure it is *very*, *very* easy to leave a comment.

Posted by: Jack at September 30, 2005 02:57 PM

Huh. You never used to have to do that. I must have broken that when I tried to secure against spammers last summer (when I was gone for two weeks). Thanks for the heads-up.

And now I'm wondering why none of my coworker readers, some of whom comment themselves, ever told me about it.

Posted by: Chris of Dangerous Logic at September 30, 2005 06:08 PM

1. Hockey
2. Who cares
3. Who cares
4. Who cares

I use a Mac and have never had any trouble posting comments with Safari!?!

Posted by: 2!3054). at September 30, 2005 06:24 PM

The problem Jack talks about happens to me when reading individual posts in IE (pronounced "Aiiiieeeeeee!"). I'm pretty sure I broke something in an MT template. I'll try to fix it this weekend.

Posted by: Chris of Dangerous Logic at September 30, 2005 07:17 PM

The same thing happens when I go directly to an individual post page from the RSS feed. btw, I use Firefox on a a Wintel machine.

Posted by: Jim of St. Grimblefig's Monastery at October 1, 2005 11:48 AM

What were we commenting on, if we can manage to find the comments page? Oh, yeah, sports, that's right.

In the spirit of Mr. Unintelligible, I submit:

1. Football
2. Who cares?
3. Who cares?
4. Who cares?
5. Soccer

I'm a Texan; there is no other sport but football. :)

Posted by: Boyd at October 1, 2005 01:39 PM


1. Football - Complex for everybody, teams, fans, management, referees.

2. Hockey - Complex for the fans, not quite so for the competitors.

3. NASCAR - Very complex for the teams and drivers, easy for the fans

4. Basketball - Not nearly as complex as football, but the multitude of plays, patterns, posts, picks, and personalities rank it above baseball.

5. Baseball - YAWN!!! I'm sorry, I must have fallen asleep. Just like when I watch baseball.

Posted by: jim in MI at October 1, 2005 02:41 PM

Oh, this is too easy.
1. Baseball (The greatest sport ever!)
2. Football (The other sport)
3. Naked Crisco Twister (Not really a sport, but closer than anything else)
4. Visiting the library

Posted by: Two Dogs at October 1, 2005 03:53 PM

Oh, this is too easy.
1. Baseball (The greatest sport ever!)
2. Football (The other sport)
3. Naked Crisco Twister (Not really a sport, but closer than anything else)
4. Visiting the library

Posted by: Two Dogs at October 1, 2005 03:53 PM

I think that "complexity" as a blanket term lends itself to many more list variants than what you've got here. Football, I agree hands down. Because it's 11-on-11 all the time, and because there are so many different situations that occur throughout the course of the game, it's definitely the highest in complexity.

But hockey over baseball in complexity? I don't think so... how many ways are there to get on base without actually hitting the ball? What are the all the rules concerning balks? I think the number of situational variances in baseball outweigh the complexity brought about by the rules, written or unwritten, in hockey.

...so I'll switch your order:
1) football 2) baseball 3) hockey 4) basketball 5) soccer 6) luge.

This by no means indicates my order of preference. Luge is WAAAY above baseball on that list.

PS: Is NASCAR really a sport?

Posted by: chess h at October 1, 2005 06:33 PM

Yay! Commenting from an individual page works now!

Hey, where'd everybody go?

Posted by: Chris of Dangerous Logic at October 13, 2005 12:55 PM

1. football
2. women
3. baseball
4. cricket. should really be number 1. does anyone understand that bs?

Posted by: mlah at October 17, 2005 11:03 PM