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How did Mayweather win that fight?
How he won, by scoring points within the rules of boxing, period. You get points for landing hits on the face and body cleanly. And he landed more, he always does, and if you analyse the tapes you can see he landed about 75% more punches. In other words, he completely dominated this fight. And the judges saw that and awarded him between 8 and 10 of the 12 rounds.
Now punches landed, that goes into scoring. But it’s difficult to see when a punch takes a fraction of a second. So subjective things like pace, aggression, poise etc all play a non-official role in scoring. Here we see Mayweather dictate the pace of the fight and showing ring leadership. We perceive aggression from Pacquiao because he comes forward more, the key way in which aggression is measured. But aggression can also be measured in punches thrown, although it’s less striking as you can punch while backing up (like Mayweather does), and here we surprisingly see that it’s Mayweather who threw more punches by a very tiny margin. While Pacquiao was clearly more aggressive, he threw nowhere near the normal rate he usually does, which gets him the win.
So why not? What prevented Pac from throwing volume? Mayweather is a master of defense, and has the physical advantage of length and more reach. This allows him to hit at a distance where Pac can’t hit him, requiring Pac to lunge in and punch from a relatively less stable position. Mayweather can anticipate and counter, or move away. When he did get pinned down on the ropes, he carefully timed his exit and pivoted around Pac towards the center of the ring, where he can dictate the range of the fight. If Pac came in with too many angles preventing Mayweather from escaping, he’d go in for the clinch and pivot. After they break up, he’s center ring again. By doing this, Pac’s offence was neutralised.
That’s mostly it. There are details, but that’s the gist of it.
Most people don’t like watching Mayweather fight, they want to see a slapfest while Mayweather plays chess. Mayweather barely does combinations because combinations put you at risk of getting hit. Instead, he takes potshots, controls distance, his stamina, his position in the ring etc. That’s why May’s KO percentage is relatively low and why many consider him to be a boring fighter. The people that watch him do so because 1) he is unbeaten and they want to see if he’ll get defeated or worse, KTFO 2) some are starstruck by his earnings and think he must be interesting to watch 3) he’s a very complete and tactical boxer. Number (3) is pretty rare among mainstream people who watch one or two boxing matches a year, but it’s the reason he is considered the pound for pound best fighter active today.
At the end of the day this is boxing, a sport with certain rules, within which he thrives. He’s not the most exciting or powerful fighter, not the one who brutally beats people up. He is unbeatable by today’s fighters within the parameters of the sport of boxing, but loses out within the parameters of most spectators.
– IkmoIkmo
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Why do bugs fly around aimlessly like complete idiots in circles for absurd amounts of time? Are they actually complete idiots or is there some science behind this?
Bugs have limited vision, and a very simple brain. They basically operated on a preprogrammed set of instructions. Fly around, looking for hints of food, or a mate. Like a moth will fly around a light or candle, because it think it’s using the moonlight for navigation. Flies just circle around, not realizing their circling around, they’re just flying around, avoiding walls and other obstacles looking for food.
– Snewzie
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How is it that a burglar can sue a home owner if the burglar was injured while breaking into/attempting to break into a home?
You can sue nearly anyone for nearly any reason. That doesn’t mean you’ll win. Most of the time when you read about lawsuits like this, where a criminal wins money from a homeowner or business, if you look into the case a little more their is a lot of context being left out that makes the case or award make a lot more sense. For instance, you sometimes hear about a burglar that fell through a highschool’s skylight and sued and won a bunch of money. When you read up on the case it turns out that it was a 19 year old former student of the school that was playing with his friends at the school’s basketball court. There is some confusion why we went onto the roof, he might have been stealing a floodlight or he might have just been re-positioning it so they could play at night. He fell through a painted over skylight that he couldn’t have known was there, and that the school had ordered a board to cover up the skylight because it knew it was dangerous. He was paralyzed for life. The money he got was from the school’s insurance company, who settled with the family out of court. Look up Bodine v. Enterprise High School for a variety of opinions.
The larger point is that just because something is your property doesn’t mean that you have unlimited rights to do whatever you want to with it. You have a responsibility to keep your stuff from killing and maiming people.
– giantcrabattack
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The McDonald’s “Hot Coffee” Lawsuit
The newspapers don’t report enough detail, and people assume the party doing the suing is wrong, when in reality there is a good reason for it. The famous McDonald’s hot coffee suit. People see a woman suing McDonald’s for her coffee being too hot, and they laugh at her and say the country is going to hell. What they don’t do is read into it, where they’ll find out that she severely burned herself (NSFW) and required expensive medical treatment and had permanent damage to her vagina. Nor do they read about how that particular McDonald’s was serving their coffee too hot on purpose so people would take longer to drink it and increase their chances of ordering more food. Nor do they read about how the McDonald’s had been warned several times in the past to quit this practice by health and safety authorities.
These, taken together, greatly reinforce the perception of how common ridiculous lawsuits actually are successful.
– Nutella_Sandwich
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Why Tesla’s new power wall a big deal
For people with solar panels, it lets them store the excess energy and use it themselves rather than selling it back to the grid for pennies.
For everyone with variable usage costs, it lets you take power from the grid when it is cheapest (nightime) and then store it to use at any time you want basically meaning you always pay the minimum rate for your power.
For everyone long term, if these gets widely adopted, power companies can completely change the way they create power, and there will never be variable rates. And “theoretically/optimistically” power would get cheaper because power plants would be running constantly rather than stopping and starting.
Telsas power banks are better than what you can get today simply because they are for the most part a lot cheaper than current methods, and have programming built in so anybody can use them efficiently.
– Doom-Slayer
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What does it mean to play a ‘beautiful’ game of chess and why do people say Magnus Carlsen’s game are soulless?
Beautiful combinations tend to be things where someone is setting up a play for a while, then pays it off all at once. The sort of thing that makes you go “Ohhhh, THAT’S what he was doing!”
Carlsen’s style is very disciplined. He tends to play very safe, very methodical games, and simply wait for his opponents to make small missteps (which he can then punish them for). His games rarely allow such combinations, because he blocks that sort of setup as it happens and doesn’t seek to set up combinations of his own.
Here is a great example. At move 24 Joshua Waitzkin, then 10 years old at the time, sacrifices his Rook and Queen for a mate in 7.
Bobby Fischer and his windmill . At move 18, the movement of the knight checks and reveals check by the Bishop. The Knight is free to gobble anything in its path, and Byrne is hopelessly entangled in Fischer’s mating net by move 35. The beauty of this mating net is the combination of all of Fischer’s minor pieces working in tandem against White’s Queen to force mate. It is a “forced mate” because there is absolutely nothing White can do to escape losing. Try for yourself to see what White can do during the mating net. Nothing.
– Chel_of_the_sea
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Why Kenyans and Ethiopians are the absolute masters of marathons / long-distance running? What makes these two countries produce so many male and female world-class winners?
I listened to a podcast on this subject some months ago. It turns out that most of Kenyan marathon winners hail from a very small region of the country. In this region, the local tribe(s) have for many generations held a ceremonial rite of passage that the boys and girls would have to go through, which entailed a tremendous amount of pain. Basically, you have to show an insanely high pain tolerance to be validated as a member of the tribe and to have children. Do this over many generations, and the hypothesis is that this population of individuals has that x-factor of being able to persevere and endure pain like none other, thus giving them the advantage in high-endurance sports. Most of us who don’t train for such sports don’t really appreciate the tremendous amount of pain that athletes go through in training, recovery, and pushing forth the envelope in performance. While this is by no means conclusive, since there are physical/biological characteristics that help these runners in a purely logistical sense, one could definitely argue that those characteristics aren’t unique to this tribe. Like the other reasons stated by some users here, neither a high-altitude environment nor an ancestry of long-distance runners are unique to this tribe. There are many individuals/marathon runners with long skinny legs, light ankles, and high VO2 max. It seems that the cultural factor is what is absolutely unique to this population that time and time again produces winning marathon runners. It’s what sets them apart.
Here’s the link to the particular podcast episode. Now that I mention it, Radiolab is an awesome show to subscribe to, lots of very interesting episodes on random facts of history, science, psychology, etc., and presented in a very captivating manner.
– Rouhani_9
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How do modern infantry soldiers get “good” at war?
Yes a bullet from an amateur kills just the same as a Spec Ops would but war isn’t about killing. War is, and always has been, about morale. Morale is and always has been the key component of winning battles. It’s why our Ancient brethren bunched up in phalanxes to mutually support each other. It’s why early muskets, despite all their issues, were still used en masse and were wildly successful; they go boom really loudly and scare the piss out of the other group of people. It’s why line tactics were used and it’s why, to this day, some armies are inherently more professional and well performing than others.
I mean just look at your assertion and compare it to the real world. If you were correct then two groups of roughly equal (materially) groups of men would perform equally as well no matter the situation. This flat out isn’t true; look at the ISIS conflict for the perfect example. The Peshmerga and other professionalized forces, using almost precisely the same equipment as their counterparts, absolutely dump on the rabble that is ISIS. It’s why the Iraqi army, with all their tanks and jets and modern weaponry got manhandled; they had no morale and just did not stand up to a fight. This has to do, mostly, with training. It’s why countries recruit mercenaries with years, if not decades, of fighting experience instead of just picking up Joe Schmoe on the side of the road.
Training is nothing more than rote memorization and mindless repitition over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Doing something so many times and getting so familiar with it you do not have to think to do it. You shouldn’t have to consciously think about pulling a magazine out of your pouch and reloading your gun. You shouldn’t have to consciously think to keep your hand steady when being racked with gunfire and think about dropping that grenade on accident. It’s so that when you’re thrown into real deep shit and you’re freaking out, whether visibly or not, your combat efficacy is not affected. You can still follow orders, you can still provide covering fire and clear a jam, you can still stay aware of what your unit is doing even if your entire being is shaking from fear. This extends, even further, with combat experience. It’s why veterans are preferred over “green” conscripts; the veterans have “trained” in combat so to say and are used to it. They know how to act in it. Being able to function under threat of death, more than anything else, is the admirable quality in every single war in every single period of history.
That is what truly separates soldiers which are “good” at war and those who are not. It’s why irregulars near-universally get routed by professional soldiers; the former are not a cohesive unit while the latter are. The latter are groups of men who have, in general, spent months and usually years training together. They have been in stress together and know how eachother function. They are a unit who has spent months/years running through scenarios hundreds of times so that when it actually happens they just…do it. They don’t freeze like a deer in the headlights because they always got themselves under control. They don’t panic. They do their job and hold the line.
It’s a common (and true) historical fact that, in the age before armored warfare (technically 1916 onward but, truly, the 1930’s onward) the most men died when one side routed. That is when the two phalanxes met or the two lines of musketeers met the poking of spears, swords, and musket fire did not kill all that many actually. The actual battle itself was surprisingly non-lethal. Why? Because as a unit you are strong and have mutual protection. However when that unit is shattered and turn and run that is when the cavalry and everyone else swarms in and cuts everyone down as individuals. That is what training prevents; it prevents units from breaking down into a bunch of self-serving individuals.
War today is in the same vein and wants the same goals. Except instead of lines of men in a grouped spear formation or lines of muskets meeting with cavalry support we got a lot more firepower packing and a lot more distance between us; fights happen at 600m not at 3 feet. In this day in age this truism only gets truer; modern war on the infantry level, at its core, is not about killing the other people. It is about suppressing them to allow your side to maneuver around them and continue to suppress with. As you gain superior firing position you put even more fire on them as they can put less fire on all of your men (either from just lack of firing position and just being overwhelmed) and are forced to withdraw. Being able to do that better than the other guys is not luck but a unit being able to act as a cohesive unit under pressure and to not freak the fuck out more than anything else.
– elos_
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How exactly are ‘burner’ phones used by drug dealers
Pre-paid phones offer many benefits to a drug dealer. The most obvious is that you have nothing tying the phone to your name so even if there are records of your communications it is really difficult to prove who the person is using the phone. Another benefit is being able to switch your number constantly making it much harder for the cops to keep a tap because of the short time that you use the number. In addition laws in the US make it hard to use SMS as evidence in court because anyone could have used the phone to send them.
I used to switch phones once a month to reduce risk and evade the cops. I did everything through SMS so there couldnt be any voice recordings to identify me. One time I was getting interrogated for 3 hours and the cops knew I was selling and had 100s of SMS messages that a narc had given them. Because of the prepaid phone they didn’t have enough evidence to charge me with a single thing.
– ferociousfuntube
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How can rockstars like Keith Richards and Ozzy Osbourne do so many hard drugs and consume so much alcohol over their lifetimes, yet still live into old age?
Scientists have sequenced Ozzy’s genes, and it turns out that he’s liver produces radically more of an enzyme called cytochrome P450 than regular people. Cytochrome P450 are a class of enzymes that break down drugs like cocaine, so his body is able to rapidly detoxify the drugs he takes, before they can kill him. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ozzy-osbourne-genome/
– Gemmabeta
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