Hal Stern's thoughts on sports, work, technology, food, and life in New Jersey
From the category archives:
No, not 3.14159 or circumference divided by diameter or even the real but irrational part of the natural logarithm of -1 (e to the i pi references rule). Something natural, real, rational and not subject to circular arguments.
It’s not even a thinly veiled reference to my favorite high school hockey goalie, best known for [...]
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Nick Swisher has renewed my faith in baseball players. For years I’ve thought of most baseball players as being too busy, too focused, or too impressed with their large contracts to pay much attention to the fans. Yesterday I attended the Nick Swisher autograph signing at Sports Express in the Livingston Mall, where [...]
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Disclaimer: I consider Justin Shaffer a friend, and have gone to Yankees games with him, but we bought our own food.
Justin Shaffer, former geek in residence at MLB Advanced Media, the digital arm of the nation’s pastime, is on the cusp of tossing a new entrant into the social media game with “Hot Potato”. [...]
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My “Jews For Jeter” t-shirt provided comfort, good luck and naches during the Yankees’ championship run. But if you’re a Mets fan, the off-season came early, without celebration or pre-holiday post-season splurges at the local Dicks or Sports Authority.
Take heart, fans of the injury-prone but get’em next year Amazins: New Rome Clothing has something [...]
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Sports fans most definitely mark time by sports seasons, and clearly associate events staggeringly good or bad with particular slices of our life. The 1969 Mets are what I remember from 1st grade; the 1972 Pirates-Reds National League Championship Series marked the beginning of understanding sadness in sports; the Devils won their last Stanley [...]
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It’s time for the Fall Classic, and this year it tramples the Garden State in multiple ways. Growing up in Freehold, NJ, I had the benefit of being located as close to the centroid of the state as you could be. We lived only a few miles from the boundary of the 201 [...]
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There’s a disturbing trend of parents pushing their kids into sports thinking far too long term. Elementary schoolers toting half-sized golf bags around the driving range are the next Tiger Woods. Pop Warner football players are Heisman material as soon as the other 8-year olds have trouble catching them on long [...]
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My intense and borderline unhealthy obsession with snowmen and their numerical equivalents (the number eight) stems from a childhood fascination with Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Willie Stargell. I remember liking Stargell because he was the de facto leader of the Pirates, and my best friends Scott and Glenn cheered for the Bucs so I followed [...]
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I adore Randall Munroe’s xkcd comic, mostly for the math jokes. I define “geek” as someone who uses epsilon in a sentence, so anything that references irrational number or NP-completeness is good for several laughs.
And here I thought I was the only one who made Erdos number jokes. Unfortunately, Erdos number [...]
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In t-shirt form, at least. After sitting shiva (electronically) for Jewish Fashion Conspiracy, the company that originated the “Jews For Jeter” t-shirt I was faced with a quandry about my favorite Yankees t-shirt: wear it and risk Premio sausage stains rendering it unfit for a trip outside, or retire it like an out-of-print [...]
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