I like these

> Soccer already has four officials, three of which are always watching the play. They use radio to keep in contact.

Ah OK I thought those were the replay guys. They miss enough stuff that it seemed like it must be because there's only 1 guy making the calls, from a single angle and 20 yards away. You can step on a guy on purpose during a stoppage and get nothing. No wonder guys roll around.

> Nope. Knowing that you can replace just three people during a match makes it a better game. It's not just "throw a fresh set of legs into the game" every ten minutes.

It's slower, in a game with so few chances to begin with. It's less exciting. More tactical perhaps, but less exciting.

> Nope. Get rid of penalties and play until someone wins, IF it is important that someone actually wins. Normal season games -- no need.

I don't disagree - really I just want them to take it down to 9 players for the whole game ;). But if there are going to be penalties, reduce the number of players so they're less likely.

> The ref has the watch.

I mean I know they "have" one, but the system is a joke. Players on a trailing team rush the ball back into play (grabbing the ball out of the net and running back to centre) because they know that not doing so costs them actual play time. They wrestle over the ball as time winds down, the leading team stealing the ball and the trailing team trying to get it back and throw it in as fast as possible. The ref gets to decide the game by shortchanging the extra time (which is frequently up to 10 minutes too short).

> Grabbing a jersey is a yellow-card offense.

Yeah and hooking was theoretically a penalty in the 90s. I saw an awful lot of jersey grabbing and very few cards. Apparently you can grab a guy around the shoulder on a breakaway and haul him down for effectively no real punishment... Hockey kept having brief "crackdowns" on clutch-and-grab over the past 20 years, but the refs would go back to "well it wasn't that bad" after a while. They finally went full zero-tolerance, and it's way better.

> No, he gets a free kick. It's called a "set play". In many cases, a free kick results in a goal that wouldn't have happened if play continued.

If you haul a guy down at half, it's worthless. (I didn't say get rid of the free kick)

> Really? Under your "five minute sit" rule, you wind up with enforcers -- just like in hockey. You want to retaliate against the other team for perceived injustices, you put an enforcer into your line and he takes a penalty. Then gets out of the box and can do it again. Or you put in an enforcer to physically attack the opponent's star players.

Enforcers are pretty much out of the game of hockey. Trying to hurt someone should still be punished with an ejection. The card system isn't too harsh, it's too soft and inconsistent. "Don't do that again. Here, take a kick from a mile away." "Lucky you did that at 80 minutes, not 10 minutes, or this game could have been totally different!" "Bad! You're ejected from... *next* game"

According to 538... about 31 seconds

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

Ice hockey has 4 officials on the ice at once, despite the playing surface being only 30% the size of a soccer field. They used to only have 3 (1 referee and 2 linesmen), but a 4th was added in the late 90s.

I don't see why soccer can't just add an extra referee, so that there are 2 sets of eyes on each play, and the ref isn't always so far behind the play.

Not that I mind VAR. Might as well get important calls right if you can.

Other things I wish they would take from hockey:

* More substitutions, more exciting.
* Reduce the number of players in overtime, so games are less likely to go to penalties.
* This thing called the stopwatch was invented. Maybe use it. You can even hook them up to these newfangled electronic scoreboard and clock things using the properties of electromagnetism.
* Zero-tolerance on holding. This was a problem in the "clutch and grab" 90s and 00s era of NHL hockey, so they cracked down on it.
* Short-term hockey-style penalties. You can trip a guy and all that happens is he gets the ball back?? Break a rule, go sit for 5 minutes by yourself and feel shame.
* Not even sure what to do about the card system, but there's got to be something better.

They should just play ice hockey instead, really :P

Here is analysis by the 538 statistics site, which explains roughly how the timing is supposed to work... and how they are always shortchanging the added time, regularly in excess of 10 minutes.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

What.. It absolutely does!

Not as much for say a TV show or movie, but anything with fine text (say a video game steam or lecture of some sort) can be unwatchable at 480p. Faces and expressions in panel discussions can be difficult to see.

And yet oddly those most educated in science tend to have the least belief in gods.

Which god are you talking about? The Catholic one? Which scientific discoveries point to a god other than the god of deism, god of the gaps?

So's evolution (I think? Perhaps not in whole), but the point is that before those ideas existed, you pretty much had to think of species and the universe as static, and that only made sense with a god, and a god that had a particular reason to create humans and suffering etc.

Whereas with those well-supported scientific theories, things make a lot more sense without a god, or at least without the god of the Abrahamic religions ("a personal God" "who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind" as Einstein put it, rejecting the idea in a letter to a Rabbi).

Whoops, I can think of 2 actually. That's really it though.

> Bacon, Bayes, Euler, Galileo, Leibniz, Maxwell, Newton, Pascal, Riemann

Uhh...Well known modern day scientists, yeah... You basically had to believe in a god back then because without the discovery of evolution or the big bang (non-static Universe), nothing made sense without a god.

The GP comment was overboard, but modern STEM groups skew sharply non-religious compared to the surrounding population. I barely know any religious people. I can think of 1 (the other one announced he was no longer Christian last year). A few "spiritual". People who grew up religious or in religious families and are now atheist, I know a LOT of them.

Um yeah, Trump is worse.

Not that know why anyone would be hoping for Hillary 2020 at this point.

But Trump is deeefinitely worse.

Maybe "literally stole" is a bit strong, but "illegally acquired"

Also the Hillary strategy was to get people to send messages to specific friends. Like they had to actually approve sending a message.

Cambridge Analytica literally stole their data, against Facebook's rules.

Pretty stable over the past few thousand years, suddenly accelerating in a hotter direction.

What's your point, though? No one expects CO2-induced climate change to outright kill all life. But it will massively disrupt the current stable ecosystem, and human civilization. What were the global temperatures during those periods of much higher CO2? And what were the sea levels? What effects will changes to those have on current ecosystems, and human civilization? Also those periods of higher CO2 levels are at least 800,000 years ago.