Recently in sports Category

How the Major Lerague Baseball Schedule is Created. Or rather, how hard it is to do, without actually talking about how it's done. I can envison feeding all the parameters and rules into some sort of expert system, and then letting it crank away for a while generating possible schedules. Each possibility would get a score, allowing you to rank the schedules. If you find something that needs to be tweaked, that's a new rule to feed the system.

Sounds like a job for Prolog. Or LOGLISP, if that still is used anywhere.

Speaking of the Orange, back when I was at Syracuse in the early eighties, the Carrier Dome had just opened, and Big East basketball was just becoming huge.* It became routine to have crowds of 30,000+ for a basketball game. As students we camped out overnight for season tickets, usually starting about 24 hours before they went on sale. Some combination of pizza, frisbee, and Jack Daniels kept us going through the night. At some point in the wee hours of the morning they would typically let us into the Dome to wait in a little more comfort. Fall weather in Syracuse can get pretty cold.

* Remember the epic triple-overtime win against Villanova, in the finals of the first-ever Big East tournament? That was in the Dome, before they started having the tournament in Madison Square Garden every year.

Taking a brief break from web services talk, my college basketball team, the Syracuse Orange[men] just completed a fantastic (and unexpected) run through the Big East tournament. On to the NCAA tournament -- first up is Texas A&M. IF the Orange can get past the Aggies, and then maybe LSU, it could be a big game against Duke. Hey, if they can beak the Huskies, why not the Blue Devils? Let's see if Gerry McNamara has a couple more big games in him.

Update: Nope.