February 2015 Posts

FiveThirtyEight.com: How The Academy Chooses The Best Picture

FiveThirtyEight.com: How The Academy Chooses The Best Picture

Eye opening. Not necessarily an indicator of what actually happened this past weekend1 but eye opening, nonetheless.

If you’re too lazy to read, here’s the infographic for you TL;DR’ers:2

hickey-datalab-oscarvoting

  1. Although I did see “Birdman” and most people I talk to agree: it was “out there”… I suppose we’re not like most people on the Academy. []
  2. It’s worth noting that the process described only applies to the award for “Best Picture” – not for the rest of the awards. []

R.I.P., Tark the Shark

In what is arguably the most grueling week of the school year, we lost two college basketball coaching legends.

Earlier this week we said goodbye to Dean Smith.

This morning, we lost Jerry Tarkanian. Those early 90’s Runnin’ Rebels are still the greatest college basketball team that I have ever seen.1

Rest in peace, Tark.

  1. A lot of people say Larry Johnson should’ve shot that 3. I say Greg Anthony shouldn’t have fouled out. Looking back, that was actually a crazy time for a young teen to be a sports fan — Mike Tyson got knocked out (which by the way, was 25 years ago today), Duke upended the 34-0 Runnin’ Rebels, Michael beat Magic for his first ring, then Magic got HIV and retired. A real “bye, bye, Miss America Pie” stretch of sports history. []

That colorblind screen in the “Kingsman” trailer…

If you’ve seen the trailer for the upcoming movie “Kingsman”, you may have noticed this (if not, cue to the 32 second mark of the official trailer).

Screen Shot 2015-02-07 at 4.31.12 AM

The above image flashes ever-so-briefly at the 0:32 mark, right after the “20th Century Fox” logo. Folks with red-green colorblindness — such as the author of this blog — may share an approximate version of the following thought:

“Fine, joke’s on us, what the &@#% did that say?”1

So, I was going to go on a huge rant about how it’s no less inexcusable to clown on the eight percent2 than it would be for any other disabled persons’ group.3

But it turns out it’s just the logo/name of the UK film production house.

Though I am still curious as to why the British folks at this company feel the need to throw up their name in an image that roughly one-in-every-dozen males are unable to see. Perhaps I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it has something to do with the movie.4 Or perhaps they’re trying to raise awareness for the colorblind?5

  1. Thanks to the wonders of modern-day image-editing software, I know what it says now. []
  2. If you scroll down on that link a bit, there’s a side-by-side image comparison of what normal vision versus two common types of red/green colorblind vision looks like. I have no idea if it’s truly accurate, but the point is: It’s subtle. Very subtle. []
  3. Which by the way, when — or how, rather — did that become a thing of trend? Whatever. We’ll have our day. I’m waiting for the day where someone figures out how to encode things such that ONLY colorblind folks will be able to see them. I don’t think that’s scientifically possible but whatever. []
  4. Though with emphasis on the word “doubt”. []
  5. I do rather hope they’re not meaning to poke fun at the eight percent. We’re colorblind, after all – not billy goats in a petting zoo. []