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We have reached the end of the track season here, and one of the later meets reminded me of something that I feel like posting today. On certain events – I think this one was the 4×800 relay – the first 1.25 laps will have the runners stay in their lanes, but then on the back straightaway they are allowed to move over to lane 1. And there is usually an official standing at that point to both make sure people don’t cut over too early and also to remind them to cut over.

My experience as someone who understood math was that I did not cut over very quickly. And that frustrated the official, who thought I didn’t hear him yelling “Cut over!”, so he yelled more and louder at me.

Even all these years later, not many high school kids realize how much extra they are running. They just know that lane 1 is the shortest lane and thus they want to get to it as soon as they can.

It looks like this (not to scale, wrong number of lanes, other disclaimers):

The yellow star is where most runners aim to get, and the blue star is where I was aiming to get, and the green line is the start of the back stretch when runners could leave their lanes.

And now I’m going to add some geometry.

As you see, the distance I ran was line segment A, and other runners were choosing B+C.

Now let’s put some numbers in.

It doesn’t look like it, but the yellow dashed line is supposed to be a 45 degree angle. A standard high school track has 8 lanes of 42 inches each, so segment D is 28 feet

D² + D² = 1568, the square root of which is 39.6, so C = 39.6 feet.

Segment B is going to be 100 meters – 28 feet, so we end up with 300 feet.

Now for segment A. The Pythagorean theorem only works with right triangles, so this one is a little trickier. It’s also not enough just to know two length, we need an angle also.

Since I made angle CD to be 45, I know that BC is 135. So now we’re stuck using the Law of Cosines. I was hoping it would be easier, but that’s what I got.

A² = B² + C² – 2BC cos(A)
A = sqrt(90000 + 784 – 2*8400*cos(135))
A = 320 feet

So I would run 320 feet, and the opposition would run 339.6 feet, so I would get an advantage of 19.6 feet.

Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re not always in lane 8. And yes, it should be 7 lanes of width because no one runs on the outside of the lane so the 42 inches of lane 8 should be discounted. I’ll let you run the math on what the more appropriate number is. Just consider the 19.6 as the highest value it could be. Also, the opposition was not also in lane 8 with me, so no their distance would not be from the same point I was, as shown on the diagram (for illustrative purposes only).

In the last week or so, we had the announcement of the 2022 NFL schedule. Now that we know who will play whom and when, we can start predicting wins and losses.

I keep my predictions over at Some Fun Site. View results of previous football seasons.

2021 Summary

Last year, I predicted that

• Cleveland Browns = 9-8
• Washington Team = 11-6

How they actually did was

• Cleveland Browns = 8-9
• Washington Team = 7-10

Browns was close, Washington was not. Record prediction is not very reliable

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It is time once again to update Some Blog Site readers on the results of my Some Fun Site project to create a more accurate football prediction method.
The 2021 NFL season is over, and here are the most accurate methods for predicting regular-season game results (wins-losses):

• MPWLS: 63%
• ITPLS: 63%
• MYW: 60%

I thought the Home Field Advantage factor would come back into play this year, after being diminished last year due to lack of crowds, but oddly enough it did not, and the biggest factor was how the teams did last year.

If you think you have a formula that can predict the winner of an NFL game better than 62.8% of the time, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.
(For the ideas behind the methods, please visit the Some Fun Site page.)

Okay, okay, it is 2022 at this point, but the results are headlines as 2021 because they match with the 2021 predictions made in 2021 for the 2021 season. Also, the results are not all-haiku, just the predictions were. A more accurate title would be “Results for the All-Haiku Predictions made in 2021”.

Before the bowl games commenced for this past college football season, I made some predictions and some more predictions. Here, for your reading enjoyment, is the tally of those predictions. Note that the results are not in haiku form, in contrast to the predictions.
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Based on the popularity existence of last year’s article predicting bowl games in haiku form, I present to you this year’s all-haiku bowl game predictions. Still America’s only all-haiku college football bowl game predictions.

These are listed in order of date (earliest first). Some picks are whom I think will win, and some picks are whom I want to win. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide which is which.
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Since football season has started, I’ve been catching some of the games, and thus I’ve seen the NFL logo a few times.

It’s been the same logo for a couple years now, but the problem with it is just now bothering me.

If you look at the logo, pay attention to the bottom point, in the middle. See how the “shield” surrounding the NFL acronym is nice and symmetric, with a sharp point right in the middle?

Now see how the NFL letters are fitted in a similar shape as the shield, except the bottom middle point (the lowest part of the ‘F’) is not in the middle.

Why couldn’t they notice that when they were making the logo and do the alignment then?

But since they didn’t, I went ahead and did that for them.

I think it’s better.

In the last month or three, we had the announcement of the 2021 NFL schedule. Now that we know who will play whom and when, we can start predicting wins and losses.

I keep my predictions over at Some Fun Site. View results of previous football seasons.

2020 Summary

Last year, I predicted that

• Buffalo Bills = 11-5
• Los Angeles Rams = 10-6
• Minnesota Vikings = 11-5
• San Francisco 49ers = 13-3
• Seattle Seahawks = 7-9

How they actually did was

• Buffalo Bills = 13-3
• Los Angeles Rams = 10-6
• Minnesota Vikings = 7-9
• San Francisco 49ers = 6-10
• Seattle Seahawks = 12-4

Bills were close, Rams was perfect, and the other 3 weren’t even close. So much for that.

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