The International Olympic Committee — long a swirling cesspool of corruption, censorship, and reputation-laundering for repressive regimes — has attained a new low, issuing guidance to athletes competing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics that no political protests will be tolerated, specifically banning kneeling or raising fists.
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Tag: sports
Crowdfunding for Los Anarchists, a junior roller derby team in Sun Valley, CA
Anthony Gulino writes, “Los Anarchists Junior Derby is a nonprofit that takes a DIY approach to teaching roller derby to kids. It runs programs for all levels from the youngest, newest skaters to the highest level of competitive junior derby at its dedicated facility, Anarchy Hall, in Sun Valley, CA. Los Anarchists’ travel team is the current Junior Roller Derby Association World Champions in the Female division and have been invited to The Big O in Oregon, as well as tournaments in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Tampa this season.”
California to force NCAA to pay athletes
The NCAA is notionally an “amateur” league, but the only thing amateur about it is that the athletes (who risk their health and even their lives) are unpaid, while the universities effectively own and operate wildly profitable pro sports teams.
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Inaugural Heavy Metal Knitting World Championship title goes to Japan’s Giga Body Metal
The inaugural Heavy Metal Knitting World Championship were an unqualified success, with competitors from the US, Russia, Japan and beyond converging on Joensuu, Finland to thrash and knit: competitors such as Woolfumes, Bunny Bandit and 9″ Needles thrashed to heavy metal music while knitting, for an audience of about 200. The winners were the five-person Japanese team Giga Body Metal. Scottish competitor Heather McLaren (a Ph.D candidate in engineering) told the AP, “When I saw there was a combination of heavy metal and knitting, I thought ‘that’s my niche.'”
I finally found an anti-fog product for my swim goggles that actually works
Update: The manufacturer writes, “Sea Gold is NOT for use with swimming goggles. It can irritate the eyes and we would appreciate it if you update it with our Anti-Fog Spray.
For the record, I haven’t experienced the irritation, even after more than a month of use.
I am an extremely dedicated swimmer, thanks to a chronic pain condition that is just barely held in check by an hour in the pool every day. I go through a couple pairs of goggles every year: generally the thing that goes first is the elastic or the ratchet for the headband, but sometimes a pair of goggles will get so fog-prone that I just can’t swim with them anymore.
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As sports company abandons support for “smart” basketball, Nike pushes a software update that bricks its self-tying shoes
Wilson X was the sports manufacturer’s entry into the market for smart basketballs, but maintaining the app that made sense of the telemetry from your sensor-equipped roundball was expensive and stupid and so the Wilson X app is no more, and the “B” in “B-ball” stands for “bricked.”
Seattle can’t afford to fund arts, housing or tourism, but it can find $135 million to repair the Mariners stadium
King County Council was ambushed by a series of surprise amendments to its meeting on Monday that resulted in $135,000,000 being diverted from hotel lodging tax funds earmarked for affordable housing, arts, and tourism boosting, to effect repairs to the Mariners stadium, despite the team being valued at nearly $1.5 billion.
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DRM, the World Cup, and what happens when a red team plays a green team
Before the W3C green-lit its DRM for web-video, we at EFF made a plea to allow bypassing the DRM to add accessibility features like shifting colors to accommodate color-blind people; the leadership dismissed the idea as a mere nice-to-have that companies could be relied on to fix themselves.
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Welsh police deployed facial recognition tech with a 92% false positive rate, but they’re sure it’s fine
The South Wales Police deployed a facial recognition technology at the June 2017 Champions League soccer final in Cardiff, and 92% of the people identified by the system as matches for suspiciousness were false positives.
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A progressive Democrat is challenging the racist, authoritarian Steve King for his Iowa Congressional seat
Rep Steve King (R-IA, @SteveKingIA, 202.225.4426) is a notorious Islamaphobe, surveillance advocate, conspiracy theorist, xenophobe, and all-round asshole; he’s held his seat since 2003 but now he is being primaried by his own party and challenged by a celebrity ballplayer turned Sanders Democrat, J.D. Scholten — a native Iowan who decided to move home and run against King during the first Woman’s March, in January 2017.