World Cup Soccer

[only_human]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

My Comment: Question: Imagine you are a world-famous football-match-predicting octopus. You find that a village in a country you correctly predicted would win the 2010 World Cup wants to honor you by making you an honorary citizen, and wants your home aquarium to loan you to the town so you can be "guest of honor" at an upcoming gastronomy festival. As sheer happenstance would have it, said town happens to live from octopus fishing. Should you go?

And when Paul appears at the festival we should not be surprised if he has only 6 or 7 limbs -- because -- an octopus as special as that, you don't eat all at once.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by only_human

And when Paul appears at the festival we should not be surprised if he has only 6 or 7 limbs -- because -- an octopus as special as that, you don't eat all at once.

:)

[davieddy]

Spain deservedly top.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYY_1...1&feature=fvwp

David

[only_human]

Breathes there the cephalopod mollusc
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/SPORT/fo...d.2018/?hpt=C1

Paul has spent the last two years of his life in Germany, but he is definitely a proud Englishman and is therefore delighted to put his support behind England 2018," Weymouth Sea Life Center manager Nicola Hamilton said on Wednesday. "We have had a number of football approaches from around the world but Paul was only ever going to choose his homeland."

[davieddy]

Originally Posted by only_human

Breathes there the cephalopod mollusc
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/SPORT/fo...d.2018/?hpt=C1

Perhaps he could play in our team?

David

[cheesehead]

"'Sinister Motion' May Bias Soccer Referees"

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceno...tion-may-.html

World Cup referees may not care about which team wins, but they do care about the direction in which players are moving. Motion, it turns out, looks more ominous going from right to left than from left to right, at least to people raised reading left-to-right languages. (It's a twisted phenomenon that film directors and comic book artists exploit.) To find out if this phenomenon could bias soccer referees, researchers showed photos of potential fouls to 12 college soccer players. They found that players were 5% more likely to call a foul if the pictured player was moving (or stumbling) to the left rather than to the right. Thanks to the referee's diagonal system of covering the field—from the bottom left corner to the top right—they see right-to-left attacks much more often than they do left-to-right attacks. The partiality tends to favor whichever team is on the offense, the researchers report online this week in PLoS ONE. That because, in the penalty box, more fouls equal more penalty kicks—and thus more chances to score.

"A Sinister Bias for Calling Fouls in Soccer"

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%...l.pone.0011667

Abstract

Distinguishing between a fair and unfair tackle in soccer can be difficult. For referees, choosing to call a foul often requires a decision despite some level of ambiguity. We were interested in whether a well documented perceptual-motor bias associated with reading direction influenced foul judgments. Prior studies have shown that readers of left-to-right languages tend to think of prototypical events as unfolding concordantly, from left-to-right in space. It follows that events moving from right-to-left should be perceived as atypical and relatively debased. In an experiment using a go/no-go task and photographs taken from real games, participants made more foul calls for pictures depicting left-moving events compared to pictures depicting right-moving events. These data suggest that two referees watching the same play from distinct vantage points may be differentially predisposed to call a foul.

[Uncwilly]

Paul died

[ewmayer]

Sad news indeed - here is the Beeb link:

Paul the World Cup octopus dies in his tank in Germany: Paul the octopus, an unlikely star of the 2010 World Cup who 'predicted' the outcome of eight matches, has died at an aquarium in Germany. Staff at the Sea Life centre in Oberhausen said they were "devastated" to learn that he had passed away during the night.

He had eight legs but apparently no cat-like nine lives. Still, he accomplished amazing things in his brief cephalopodian life. I was always impressed by his ability to not let fame affect him ... he remained the same humble, mussle-munching "octopus of the people" right up to the end.

(Hey, what can I say - I'm a sucker for a good Octopus story).

[99.94]

An unwelcome light shines in a dark corner?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/9201248.stm

[Flatlander]

Originally Posted by Flatlander

...
Slightly off topic:
Has anyone heard the cry of "Redhill!" at a football match?
I'll tell you why later.

edit: If I say 'football' I always mean 'soccer'.

Okay, you've had enough time. Apparently it's shouted when a ball goes 'miles' over the bar. Well it was in the 80's anyway.
(I used to live in Redhill, Surrey.)

[davieddy]

Originally Posted by Flatlander

Okay, you've had enough time. Apparently it's shouted when a ball goes 'miles' over the bar. Well it was in the 80's anyway.
(I used to live in Redhill, Surrey.)

Assuming the match was being played in Redhill, I would
have thought a more appropriate response to such an extravagant miss
would be "Reigate".

David