To start our fourth round, we have an alleged tax cheat vs. . . . I have no idea if Roald Dahl cheated on his taxes, but it wouldn’t shock me if he had!
To get to this point, Shakira defeated Michael “Douglas” Keaton, A. A. “could be Person Known by Initials or Children’s Book Author” Milne, and Gary “D & D” Gygax. Meanwhile, Dahl prevailed over Jane “Traitor” Fonda, Ethel “Traitor” Rosenberg, and Henry “as far as I know, not a traitor” Winkler.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that neither of today’s contestants has been strongly tested yet. It’s been a pretty easy ride for both of them, as they managed to dodge pre-tournament favorites such as J. R. R. Tolkien, James Naismith, and Miles Davis. (Michael Keaton was my personal dark-horse favorite, but I recognized he was a dark horse.)
Looking at the 8 remaining candidates in the bracket, we have 4 children’s book authors, 2 alleged tax cheats, 1 creator of laws or rules, and 1 duplicate name. All the traitors, duplicate names, and namesakes have disappeared. All the cool people have gone too! Who’d’ve thought? Maybe that’s what happens when the decisions are made by nerds.
Past matchup
Isaac vs. Wenwen turned out to motivate an awesome old-school blog-comment thread on body mass, scaling, and weightlifting. Physics and sports: always a great combination!
Raghu kicked off the discussion:
I vaguely remember that McMahon and Bonner’s excellent “On Size and Life” had a graph of the weightlifting world record for various weight divisions, which scaled as body weight ^ 2/3 or 3/4 or something like that. (I’m at a conference and so can’t look at my copy today.) Anyway, it leads to the interesting idea that what we care about shouldn’t be absolute performance, or the best in crude weight bins, but performance relative to the background physiological scaling law. How good are you *compared to * Mass^2/3 (or whatever). So, at Li Wenwen’s seminar we can all try this out.
And it went on from there. All about gravity and weightlifting.
But who should it be—Isaac or Wenwen? Robin writes:
But which speaker has the highest BMI?
To which David replies:
That’s easy to determine. Since dissatisfaction with and/or ranting about BMI is strongly correlated with BMI, just ask them whether or not they think BMI is a useful measurement.
Newton was a ranter, but I think it’s safe to assume that Li, as a lifter, will be more aware of weight. So she advances.
At this point, it starts coming down to the most esoteric of minutia. In that sense, one anagram of Roald Dahl is “Roll, Dad! Ha!”, which suggests he was pretty good at entertaining children in person as well as through books. Whether that sort of physical comedy would play well on the speaker circuit is anybody’s guess. Meanwhile, Shakira can be transformed into “Ask hair”, which implies a potentially interesting source of information about personal grooming. I’m in the mood for intellectual stimulation, even if superficial, so I’d go with Shakira.
My hips lie all the time. Dahl.
I can tell this is going to turn into another BMI thread.
Actually, one hip lies all the time and the other hip always tells the truth. Yet both of them tell me they never lie. And both of them tell me the other hip is lying. Oddly, though, they agree that BMI is potentially misleading.
Well, we are dealing with a site devoted to regressions.
There’s been some controversy recently over some of Dahl’s more antisemitic comments, and I don’t feel that it would be proper to champion an antisemitic person in the competition like this. However, Shakira committed tax fraud, and that is much more evil.
I can tell you that over the last few months Peru has been a cauldron of unrest: a flimsy coup attempt by a populist leftish president with a 20% approval rating, then impeached, the promoted vp pres betrayed her supporters, more than 60 protesters killed by police (and apparently 0 police interviewed by investigators about this), airports invaded and closed, practically all roads throughout the south closed in multiple places for weeks due to political protests, except on weekends and a couple weeks around Christmas and New Years because one has got to sell the crops. And party.
Nevertheless, Shakira (and Pique) still seemed to be at least the #3 story on TV news. Beat that.