April 24, 2007

Bush loves Cheney

This is via Vantage Point

Why does George Bush needs Dick Cheney on his team?
Because without a Dick, a Bush is just a pussy.

Muhahaha (Evil laughter)

April 17, 2007

Baramati

The best part about being unemployed is that you have loads of time and zero money to spend. So when any of your friends need company, being the good friend that you are, you can just agree to go along.

Last weekend, it was Bombay with Bund and Kunal. This weekend, it is going to be Baramati with Rahul and Bund. Anyways, if your drinks are paid for; is there anything that you would ever need?

I have completely no idea about the direction this trip is going to take. It could be the one that I will tell my kids about, or this could be an outright bummer. Though expectations like always are high, since our plan is tried and tested. The idea is to leave at four in the morning, and finish all the beer which has been stacked up before we get there at seven. We leave all the rest to drunken creativeness. Cheers.

April 02, 2007

Why I never made it to the football team


Stephan J Dubner and Steven D Levitt, of Freakonomics have written an article in the New York Times about the birth month-Soccor Anomaly which explains why I never made it to the football team.

The Anomaly can be stated thus:

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months.

The rest of the article goes on to say that genes and environment or rather talent is not a very big factor in the elite class in any field, with which I don't quite agree. But I concur with his explanation of the anomaly for more than just divine logic. His explanation goes like this:
Since youth sports are organized by age bracket, teams inevitably have a cutoff birth date. In the European youth soccer leagues, the cutoff date is Dec. 31. So when a coach is assessing two players in the same age bracket, one who happened to have been born in January and the other in December, the player born in January is likely to be bigger, stronger, more mature. Guess which player the coach is more likely to pick? He may be mistaking maturity for ability, but he is making his selection nonetheless. And once chosen, those January-born players are the ones who, year after year, receive the training, the deliberate practice and the feedback — to say nothing of the accompanying self-esteem — that will turn them into elites.

Now I don't need to tell you that I was born in December.

link (via)

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