1) on soccer vs. hockey:
- I doubt soccer will ever really catch on in the US because it's lots of fun to play (esp. when you're a kid) but pretty dull to watch to the average person.
- A growing hispanic population base (which has over-taken afro-american as the largest visible minority in the US) may help soccer's chances.
- Hockey has a mcuh more exciting product to watch, but it's got a lot of work to do to ever break out of it's North Eastern (Boston), Minnesota and Michigan base. The recent rule changes should help, but there's a lot of work to do.
2) On global warming:
- This
interesting series of articles in one of Canada's national newspapers presents some interesting scientists on the other side of the debate.
- Personally, I come from a point of view that I believe polluting is bad (I'm more concerned with the negative health side effects of smog), but I'm not sold on the stastical relevance of the Earth heating up a bit as a coming sign of the apocalypse (it is 4 billion years old, and we've only been precisely measuring temperature for a few hundred years. That's a pretty tiny sample size to be so definitive about something most weathermen can't predict accurately only 2 days into the future).
- And anyone that thinks the month of December being warm in some places this year is an indicator of global warming obviously flunked basic stats in school whn it comes to understanding sample sizes...