Friday Summary Report, August 10

I’ve read several blogs where, at the end of the week, the author will post an assortment of links and/or random thoughts that didn’t really merit their own individual post. After resisting the impulse to do something similar for quite a while, I finally decided to just go ahead and do it.

During a given week, I do a lot of reading (both on the Web and in books), and come upon several things that I would like to share, but I hate to write posts that are just 8 words long. So primarily, these end-of-week summaries will consist of links and quotations that I thought were interesting, but will also include random items that didn’t fit elsewhere. I’m not promising to do this every Friday, but I bet it will happen frequently.

(1) Although this article has been out for a while, I just came across it this week. Basically, a couple of ethicists (apparently it doesn’t take much to be an ethicist these days) have proposed that after-birth abortions (i.e. infanticide) should be permitted on newborns, because a newborn is not a person in the sense of being a “subject of a moral right to life.” This is obviously repulsive, but not surprising, and is really just an extension of the arguments that are already made to justify pre-birth infanticide. At least these people are honest enough to admit that no great change happens in the state of the infant at birth.

(2) Here is a somewhat scary article about a tech guru who had his online identity mercilessly hacked and had his iPhone and laptop wiped clean as a result (losing all the pictures of his infant daughter in the process!). I recommend reading the entire article, but a couple of takeaways: (1) Be very careful about linking online accounts together (using same usernames and/or passwords); (2) Back up all of your computer data on an external hard drive; (3) hackers are jerks.

(3) This week, I successfully finished translating 1 John from Greek (the word successfully is used somewhat loosely here). I do feel some minor sense of accomplishment in doing this, but mostly, I feel a great debt to those who have gone on long ago and translated Scripture from original texts into the vernacular.

(4) As this post remains one of my most-read, most-commented on, and most-disputed from this year, I updated it at the end, to make my intentions in writing it as clear as possible.

(5) Over the last two weeks, I’ve been watching as much of the Olympics as I possibly can. Perhaps I will have a post related to that next week.

Scattered Thoughts on the Winter Olympics

I am pretty much an Olympics junkie. I definitely prefer the Summer Olympics to the Winter Games, but I have still tried to watch as much as possible over the last several days despite being pretty busy with other things.

A few scattered observations:

While there are some sports that I don’t care much about, and others that I don’t even think are remotely sport-like (I’m looking at you Ice Dancing), there are a few Winter Olympic events that I really enjoy:

• Curling is an easy sport to make fun of (“Ooh, the way he swept that ice was so impressive”), and if you randomly decided to take up a sport so that you could go to the Olympics, I think it might be your best bet, but I really like watching it. I think there is a good deal of strategy involved, and I’m probably somewhat impressed with it because it combines elements of three other sports/games that I like but am not good at: pool, horseshoes, and shuffleboard.

• I think short track speed skating is maybe the most intense event to watch because at any time any of the competitors can fall without even making a mistake (if someone else collides with them). I certainly don’t understand all of the rules (I still don’t know why J.R. Celski was disqualified the other night instead of the Canadian guy who was trying to spoon him), but I think it’s a lot of fun to watch and the drama of Apolo Ohno vs. the South Koreans just adds to the excitement.

• I really enjoy all of the snowboarding events as well. I’ve never been snowboarding before, but I know it’s not easy, and the way the athletes are able to maneuver around turns and over jumps or, alternatively, perform tricks in the halfpipe blows me away.

• • •

Speaking of snowboarding, Shaun White seems to dominate his sport about as much as Usain Bolt dominates his—basically, if either of these guys perform anywhere near their best, no one else seems to have much of a chance.

White already had the gold medal locked up in the halfpipe by a wide margin when he decided to try out a new trick—a “Double McTwist 1260”—in his final run. He landed it successfully (the first time it had ever been done in competition), scored a 48.4 (out of 50), and took home his second consecutive gold medal in the event.

In addition to his innovative tricks, the thing that sets White apart is how high he gets on his jumps. At one point NBC overlapped footage of White with another top rider to show how much higher Shaun gets and it wasn’t even close.

• • •

I know that the only ice involved in basketball is what comes in the cups at the concession stands, but it is technically a winter sport (at least in the U.S., but we invented it so we should know), and I think it would be a great addition for the Winter Games.

In the Summer Olympics, despite showcasing some of the greatest and most famous athletes in the world, basketball is pretty much an afterthought and takes a backseat to the other events like Track and Field and Swimming. If you moved it to the Winter Olympics, though, it would be huge, and would immediately become one of the premiere events.

I realize doing this would interrupt the NBA schedule, but it works with the NHL, so it seems like it could work with basketball too. Besides, who cares about the NBA until after March Madness is over anyway?

• • •

Was anyone else really happy when the U.S. beat Canada in hockey?

Canadians care about hockey more than any other sport, and within the context of hockey, care more about beating the United States than any other team. Americans, on the other hand, rarely think about hockey, and most of us didn’t even realize that the entire 2004-2005 NHL season was canceled because of labor disputes (no really, it was).

And still, we won.

I know I probably shouldn’t have experienced so much smugness from the victory, but I really couldn’t help myself.

Nadia Comăneci

After my last post, you might think I’m becoming a gymnastics junkie. I’m not, but I thought this deserved a post of its own.

While watching gymnastics in past Olympics, I’ve always heard about the amazing Nadia Comăneci, who won the all-around gold in 1976 while scoring something like seven perfect tens.

In this day of YouTube, I thought I’d be able to find some video of her, and I wasn’t disappointed. Watch this clip of her two perfect ten routines on the uneven bars:



The routines are somewhat different from what you see today, and seem to be quite a bit shorter, but I see why they still talk about her—I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so graceful in my entire life.

Gymnastics, And Other Olympic Thoughts

Americans Nastia Liuksin and Shawn Johnson took gold and silver in the women’s all-around competition last night despite what seemed to be some shady judging.

I say that to introduce the main point of this post: gymnastics is not a sport.

Don’t get me wrong—gymnasts are amazing athletes. I consider myself to be fairly athletic, and I can’t do even the easiest parts of most gymnastic routines.

But here’s the problem: any sport whose winner is determined by the selective opinion of a group of people, is not a sport (that would include other athletic events as well, including some I really enjoy like platform diving).

How does a real sport determine a winner? Through objectivity. Fastest time, greatest distance, most runs scored. Officials are a part of sports, but their job should be to make sure that rules are followed, not to choose who the winner is.

• • •

What do Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Togo and Tunisia have in common? They’ve all won more Olympic medals thus far than our beloved neighbor to the north. Canada has yet to grace the medal platform a single time.

I know it can get cold up there, but surely they could find a heated pool somewhere and practice swimming laps or something, right?