hot hot hot

I went home to LA for the weekend for my dad's birthday. it was actually kind of nice there compared to here, even though everyone in my family said it was awful. I was like, look it's 112 in phoenix, 94 and a bit muggy isn't bad at all. they didn't get it. anyway, after driving back last night, I was hoping to come home and just crash. but, of course, it's never that easy. the air conditioning in our apartment seemed to be non-functioning. the fan works and is blowing air, but it's not cold. it is currently 89 degrees inside my apartment! ick. it is a bit cooler in my room with the fan running, but it's still not great. ugh. they are going to try to fix it tonight. let's hope they can get it to work. I guess the only good news is that it's a little bit cooler outside today since it looks like the start of monsoon season. a bit of rain sounds good to me (even if accompanied by dust and wind). it's hot!

update: it is now fixed. hooray!

the I hate Bruce Arena fan club

um yeah. so I am going to blame two people for the outcome today: Bruce Arena for many many bad decisions and Landon Donovan for being a wanker and playing horribly (and then again Bruce Arena for letting him play horribly). so there.
considering all that, we played ok. there were a lot of good opportunities in the second half. but that penalty at the end of the first half really pissed me off. such a bad call. and I hate blaming refs for game outcomes (although, see my post on the last game). whatever. I am disappointed. we should have done better. but I am happy for Ghana. I think it's great that they advanced and proved everyone wrong about them. (and what happened to the Czech Republic? craziness.) anyway, the US is done with the world cup, but I am not. there are still many great games left to watch. and I will continue to watch my favorite sport throughout the tournament.

if only...

um yeah. so why is that no one else seems to care that the U.S. National Team tied Italy while playing a man down for half the game? (I had to convince people at work today that this was good news, after reminding them that we played a game over the weekend.) le sigh for sure. anyway, here's a hilarious article about our loss to the Czech Republic from The Onion, imagining quite a different world.

Devastated By U.S. World Cup Team's First-Round Loss, Nation Grinds To Halt

Taliesin West

so yesterday morning, Hwi, Angel, Angel's sister (who is visiting from Puerto Rico) and I went to see Taliesin West, one of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs. it houses his school of architecture among other things. it was really cool. we went on one of the 90 minute tours and saw pretty much everything there. our tour guide was very knowledgeable and explained all sorts of things. it was very interesting and I got lots of great pictures. here are my favorites.

aaargghh!

wow. what a game. that ref was ridiculous. I just still can't believe what happened. that last red card was totally insane. we should have been playing 10 men each, which would have made it a better game. but, still, I must say, I think it is great that we were able to pull off that tie against Italy playing a man down most of the game and having that ref hate us for some reason. he better hope he stays in Uruguay and never comes to the U.S. because there are some really upset people here. the good news is that a) we played well (when the ref let us) and b) there is a chance of making it to the next round IF we beat Ghan AND if Italy beats Czech Republic. now, considering the what happened in the Ghana/Czech game this morning, I have no clue how Thursday will play out. but needless to say, there will be two really interesting games to watch. go USA!!

They don't run!

so I couldn't really sleep last night. after reading a couple chapters of "How Soccer Explains the World: an (unlikely) theory of globalization" (which is very interesting) I decided to play with my new MacBook a bit; namely: iMovie. I remembered that I had this hilarious video clip from my trip to Puerto Rico last spring break with Katie and Angel and Adam. Katie wanted to chase some birds near this old church in San Juan, but something was not just right with the birds. anyway, here's the video (make sure your speakers are on). hope you enjoy it. :)

world cup

so, due to the magic of my dvr, I have been able to watch almost every single world cup game so far while only missing a small amount of work (luckily I can reschedule things to the afternoon. :) ). I must say, though, I was very disappointed by the US's appearance yesterday against the Czech Republic. although I figured we would lose this game (the Czechs are ranked 2nd right now), I really didn't think we would have such a poor showing. it was like they weren't even trying or something. I don't know. I just hope that they get their act together for the game against Italy on Saturday. we really need to win that game. and the one against Ghana after that. we'll see what happens. I can only hope.

soccer and physics

so, today while I was eating my lunch and reading my Physics Today magazine, I came across a short article that combined two of my favorite things: physics and soccer. if you have a subscription to PT, you can look at the article here: http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-6/p26b.shtml

for those of you non-physics people, here is what it basically was about. it was titled, "Soccer obeys Bessel-function statistics", so right away I knew it was going to be good.
Metin Tolan, an experimental physicist at the University of Dortmund, did a study of about 34,000 professional soccer games and looked at number of goals scored and probability of winning based on this. "We approximated a soccer team by a radioactive source. A soccer team emits goals according to Poisson statistics." as it turns out, for soccer, a Bessel-function (a modified Bessel function results from summing over products of probabilities expressed as Poisson distributions) is a good fit for all the data. therefore, based on this and looking at simulations and past performance of teams, he says that Brazil has a 15% chance of winning this year's World Cup, and Germany a 10.5% chance. however, when factoring in home field advantage (which usually gives you 0.6 to 1 extra goal), Germany is moved up to a 33% chance.
we'll see what happens. the first game is this friday!

ursprache

the national spelling bee is so exciting. this is the first year it was on network primetime (normally I have to watch it on espn during the day). the top three finishers were all girls, including one canadian, and it was quite exciting. the winning word was ursprache (which she knew). some of the other interesting-sounding words from the final round were: tmesis, weltschmerz, tutoyer, izzat, and koine.