Categories
Found

Hey-yy, Batter Batter Batter, Swing, Batter!

It seems to be the week for over the top analysis of movies. Do check out Larry Granillo’s deduction of which baseball game Ferris Bueller was at.

It appears obvious now that this is a real ballgame that Ferris is at, not just something recreated for a film crew. The Harry Caray play-by-play and the Braves players on the field are pretty solid evidence of that. So what game, then, are they watching? Did the Cubs win, or did Ferris sing “Danke Schön” as a way to wash away the stink of a Cubs loss?

“What’s the score?”

“Nothin’ nothin’.”

“Who’s winning?”

“The Bears.”

Categories
Found

Will You Be Checking Out Today, Mr. Connors?

“For anyone who wants to check all of this, I really don’t suggest watching Groundhog Day in this manner. It’s not the best way to enjoy what is essentially a light-hearted comedy whose metaphysical concerns are supposed to be enjoyed in fun, and not worked out mathematically. Normal people should be happy to just watch, and accept that Phil Connors is stuck repeating his one day endlessly over and over until he finds himself- but then, I don’t think I’m normal.”

Simon Gallagher has made a compelling argument to estimate how many days Bill Murray was trapped in the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day.

Categories
Debated

The WWDC Question

Each year, I seem to only go to one training event: Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (also known as WWDC). You’ll notice that Apple hasn’t updated the site since the end of the conference last year, which means we’re now into March and we don’t know when the conference will be. (For comparison, last year WWDC’s date was announced on February 16th, or so my archives would indicate.)

So I’ve decided to do some detective work. Based on the last two years, we can assume the following:

– WWDC occurs with at least one day falling in June.
– WWDC occurs at Moscone West in San Francisco.
– WWDC runs five days, from a Monday to a Friday.

Apple has no information about WWDC 2006 yet, but luckily the [Moscone Center](http://www.moscone.com/) is not quite as secretive. While WWDC is not listed, there are three events [listed in June](http://www.moscone.com/site/do/event/list?nav.type=0&nav.filter=0604&nav.base=0602) that are scheduled to use Moscone West. If we mark these off on a calendar as conflicts (WWDC takes up the entire building), we get a calendar that looks like this:

Based on this calendar, I think we can safely rule out the last two weeks of June, and possibly the first full week (as the Saturday is often used for registration and setup). If I were to guess based on this calendar, I’d bank on it being June 12th-June 16th.

This would be (of course!) horrible for me, as it’s the last week of our semester at work and there will undoubtedly be an exam that needs monitoring. This would make WWDC three for three in terms of causing conflicts and difficulties. I just can’t win.