Pilsen wins 1st Czech Stanley Cup

Many people in Pilsen follow soccer as well as ice-hockey; our teams were great in recent years.



A flag of HC Škoda Pilsen...

Just minutes ago, HC Škoda Pilsen, the local ice-hockey club, defeated HC Zlín in the last, seventh match. At 96:15 (!!!), the captain and playing 40-year-old owner Martin Straka – the local ice-hockey emperor whom North American readers may know as a New York Ranger (and, previously, a member of 5 other NHL teams) – scored the decisive goal in this incredibly hotly contested series of final matches.




Despite the immense contributions of Pilsen to the Czech ice-hockey, this is the first victory of the Pilsner team.




A reason why North American TRF readers should be pleased is that Pilsen is the most American city in Europe; and HC Škoda Pilsen is also the most American/Canadian team in the extra league – as the flag above, one of the unofficial flags below, indicates. Nicolas St. Pierre of Canada and Ryan Hollweg and Nicholas Johnson of the U.S. are among current players who celebrate the title. Several other Canucks and Yankees have played here, too.



Several years ago, this Native American was added to the logo which now shares the place with the Škoda logo. The Native American on the logo is a modernized version of a symbol of the 2nd Infantry Division that liberated my hometown in 1945. Throughout communism, it wasn't quite possible to discuss the liberation by the U.S. army. The ice-hockey club has changed its name 11 times.

A few years ago, Pilsen won the presidential trophy – the best team before the play-off stage begins. This season, Pilsen was the 1st team during most of this early stage but at the end, they decided to save some power and the ultimately runner-up – HC Zlín – won the presidential trophy.

HC Zlín is a Moravian team from the town where Tomáš Baťa founded the shoe company. During communism, the town was renamed as Gottwaldov after the scaled-down Czech counterpart of Mr Stalin, namely Mr Gottwald.

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SSC Naples - Viktoria Pilsen

The soccer team in my hometown, FC Viktoria Pilsen (web), has already brought some quality moments to its fans in Pilsen, in Czechia, and beyond.

After decades in which it struggled on the boundary of the top Czech league and the next-to-top league, the team (now led by the new stellar coach, Mr Pavel Vrba) won the top Czech league two years ago (it was second on the following year) and showed the best Czech team results ever in the super prestigious UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Europa League.



A year ago, they once played 2-2 against AC Milan, defeated Atlético Madrid two months ago, played as peers against FC Barcelona, the world's best team according to most soccer fans, and beat many teams that don't sound as luxurious as FC Barcelona but that were still expected to smoothly prevail. But last night, the level of joy that the Pilsner players may bring to their fans has been upgraded to a brand new level.

They played the first match (the rematch will take place in Pilsen next week) against SSC Naples. The winner of the bi-match will advance among the top 16 teams of the UEFA Europa League, the second most prestigious league on the continent. Based on the information below and no other data, infer and discuss your estimate for the final score last night.




Here are the data:

• among the 48 teams in the group stage of the league, Viktoria Pilsen has the lowest annual budget, around 5 million dollars
• the most expensive Slovak player of SSC Naples, Marek Hamšík, is more expensive than all the Pilsner players combined
• Naples is currently 2nd in the top Italian league (Serie A) which is qualitatively more renowned than the Czech league (where Pilsen is the current leader)
• Naples hasn't lost in UEFA matches played at home for nearly 20 years
• Naples hasn't lost a match in 2013 yet
• bookmakers set the odds for a Pilsner victory to 8-to-1 or so
• four Pilsner fans were attacked (and sort of stabbed) with knives in the Naples railway station
• one goal Pilsen scored was declared invalid due to some kind of offside situation that almost no viewers understood
• Naples fans were so sure that their team is playing an inferior foe that they only filled 1/4 of the Stadio San Paolo
• the Italian fans were showing "3-0" with their fingers to the Pilsner players, to indicate what they believed the final gift to Pilsen would be
• the Pilsner captain and others had the goal (before the match) to achieve a result that would preserve some chances for the rematch. This formulation meant that they only wanted to lose by a moderate score like 0-to-5 so that some Pilsner fans may still believe that the rematch will be 6-to-0 and Pilsen would advance
• SSC in SSC Naples usually stands for Superconducting Supercollider whose center-of-mass energy was supposed to be 40 TeV, i.e. 5 times higher than the LHC in 2012
• Naples has 1 million inhabitants, 6 times more than 170,000 who live in Pilsen
• there is a saying "to see Naples and die"

Fine. So what was the result? The Pilsner guys gave quite a lesson to the Italians, 3-to-0, just like the Italian fans expected – but with a wrong sign. ;-) Mount Vesuvius above the Italian city hasn't erupted for quite some time: they simply had to import an eruption from the Czech lands. The Czech team's players saw Naples and let it die. As you can see, expectations are one thing; reality is another thing. Dozens of arguments in favor of an expectation don't imply that the result has to be one of a particular kind; the consensus among arguments is irrelevant as long as each of these arguments is soft.



Pilsen started the match more actively. After 10 minutes or so, the forces were balanced but everything changed again around the 20th minute. Pilsen was better once again. After 28 minutes of the match, the 22-year-old emerging star of Pilsen Vladimír Darida (who may sometimes inherit the shoes of captain Pavel Horváth, the witty 37-year-old soccer player with the greatest buttocks in the world) scored a beauty.

At the beginning of the second period, the Naples coach finally realized the seriousness of the situation and sent the Slovak player Marek Hamšík, an ace of theirs, to the stadium because Cavani, another star, had clearly been neutralized throughout the first period. Suddenly, the pressure by the Italians seemed overwhelming. But the Czechs – well, we have four Slovaks in our team, not just one – were apparently super lucky in defense, destruction of the Italian tricks, and the goalie Matúš Kozáčik (one of the Slovaks in our team) remained flawless.

So despite the pressure, Pilsen could develop its own impressive projects. At some moment, František Rajtoral scored a goal. It would be the second goal by Pilsen – an impressive feat, we would think at that moment: imagine, 2-to-0 against Naples – and most viewers believed that the goal was legit. However, the referees evaluated it as some kind of off-side that depended on the Pilsner player's (David Kolář's) ability to reduce the efficiency of defense by a defense player of Naples. It sounds awkward, nevertheless the goal wasn't counted.

Rajtoral got kind of upset so some minutes later, he scored another goal, anyway. ;-) Captain Horváth realized that if this is how Rajtoral acts when he is angry, the referees should try to p*ss him off much more often. This second goal broke the resistance by Naples. Stanislav Tecl, a new hopefully elite forward hired by Pilsen a month ago, finally scored the third goal that humiliated Naples, too. Next week, Naples has to beat Pilsen by a 4-goal difference to advance. Unfortunately, it's not impossible but it may turn out to be hard. The Italian press has already abandoned the team and their chances to win the double match.

If Rajtoral's first shot were approved, Pilsen would have 100% efficiency (4 of 4) in its shots on the Italian goal. ;-) Sometimes things simply work.

In the same UEFA Europa League, Sparta Prague played Chelsea (with goalie Petr Čech who is also Czech) at home. The traditional, decade-long "best Czech team" lost 0-to-1. People were praising Prague for not being humiliated. However, one may easily see that much of this praise is lacking emotions. Everyone knows that Sparta is a mediocre, uninspired, defensive, alibistic, politically correct team in the international context, a team that is unlikely to truly excite you. It's Viktoria Pilsen that is able to stun the viewers by its courageous, combative game style and earn new fans well beyond the city borders of Pilsen.



Due to the recent successes in the international context, the Pilsner stadium – now called the Doosan Arena (across the Radbuza river from the Pilsner Urquell brewery; owned by the city; named after an industrial company that forked off Škoda Pilsen) – had to be extended and upgraded. It looks kind of pretty over there and the Pilsner fans are luxurious, indeed.

Oscar Pistorius' murder

Oscar Pistorius, the most worshiped South African athlete and amputee, probably murdered his girlfriend, a glamour supermodel, in the morning of the Valentine's Day. The early media reports stated that he thought the victim was a robber. It turned out that it was just a story backed by himself, not by police or any other official places. Reports of shouting in that home make it much more likely that he knew damn well whom he was shooting.

I don't know the motives and I am not making any official accusations but I do think it was a regular murder of the kind that not-so-famous people sometimes commit, too. Many people find it unthinkable because the image of Pistorius has been shaped into one of a moral authority. I think it's a silly media construction. The amputations make certain things hard but he was lucky – to a large extent, overcompensated – on many other fronts and difficult events in one's life just can't make him a universal saint in all respects. He was presented as a universal saint because many companies were making profit out of such an image but it has always been a man-made mirage of a sort, I think.

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Longest match in Davis Cup

Being a sports fan may be an amazing waste of time, especially if you get stuck in a pond with black swan matches.

Today I decided to watch the Davis Cup doubles, Czechia vs Switzerland, played in Geneva, a few miles from the LHC. A reason was that some friends and relatives did the same. That was quite a silly decision, I am afraid!



Previously, the longest match in the Davis Cup was the 1982 match between John McEnroe (USA) and Mats Wilander (SWE), 6 hours and 22 minutes. Now, the today's match Berdych-Rosol (CZE) – Wawrinka-Chiudinelli (SUI) has been played for 7 hours and 1 minute. The match ended a minute ago.

You see that the record length finds itself in a whole new category which was unknown in the 1980s. This new kind of an extreme event is clearly a new proof of global warming. ;-)




The Czech duo has wasted 12 matchballs, among other things. You could think that the odds of that are \(p=1/2^{12}=1/2,048\) but it's an overestimate of the "extremeness" because all the matchballs appeared when the Swiss players were serving and the probability that they win the fifteen is higher than \(1/2\) when they serve.

Fortunately, the 13th matchball hasn't been wasted (note that each match is won by a fifteen that follows after a "matchball" is announced). Most Czechs probably don't believe that 13 is an unlucky number so that this is not the worst paradox here. What's more paradoxical is that the 13th matchball was the first one that was played during the service of the stronger Swiss player, Chiudinelli. But he failed to do what his colleague Wawrinka successfully did 12 times before him. ;-) Such things happen and they're not insanely unlikely, especially because the difference between both players isn't astronomical, it's just "marginal".

The sets were CZE:SUI: 6:4, 5:7, 6:4, 6:7, 24:22. The last two figures may be confusing so let me stress it's twenty-four vs twenty-two and these rather large numbers play the same role that is usually played by numbers such as 6:3 or 6:4 or 7:5. :-) The score of the today's fifth set has also beaten the highest score of team tennis, 23-21, sometimes from the 1950s. However, it was nothing in comparison with the highest score of a fifth set in Wimbledon. Three years ago, they managed to play 70-68 in the fifth set somewhere. :-)

As I was watching the match for many hours, I was increasingly thinking it was a waste of time. However, it would be painful not to see the end of the match if I have already invested so much time. On the other hand, this argument wasn't "absolute priority" for me and I was actually ready to turn the TV off. Moreover, as the match was getting longer, my interest was gradually refocusing from the question who would finally win to the question which records for the longest matches would be breached.

When we discuss similar anomalies today (and yesterday), I had to deal with a flat tire on my bike yesterday. In recent years, it would be an event that happens twice a year in average. Within minutes, I take the wheel off, replace the tire with a healthy one waiting in a buffer (with 2 reserve inner tubes), and fix the flat tire (glue a special piece of rubber over the whole etc.). For many years, it would be exactly like that. One hole, one reserve tire, job finished. Occasionally, I would buy a new inner tube or new tire or new plasters and glue to fix the holes.

But yesterday, things were different. When I placed the new tire, it happened to be punctured as well. Maybe I had forgotten to fix a tire in the past. So another hole had to be filled. However, this anomaly (2 instead of 1) wouldn't be worth a few paragraphs. What happened was that I created another hole by using a screwdriver perhaps too dangerously while returning the tire and tube onto the wheel – something that hasn't occurred to me for years, either. To make things dramatic, I found out today (one day later) that my other wheel, the back wheel, was flat as well – a regular sharp piece of glass in the tire was the reason why the tube was empty. So after I walked the bike for a few miles, I fixed the fourth hole in my tires in two days – quite a number! ;-)

Also, I won't even tell you how many hours I have wasted over the last year by trying to upgrade my AMD/Intel GPU Windows 7 drivers. Today, after I decided that all the new drivers above 8.901.4.0 (the same number for the AMD driver and the Intel driver) have some problems, e.g. they prevent hibernation from being completed, I returned to 8.901.4.0 and decided that it's actually equally fast and there's been no progress in the drivers for a year! These switchable graphics cards' drivers are a mess – partly because they depend on a collaboration between Intel, AMD, and the computer manufacturer (PackardBell, owned by Acer) and such a required collaboration (and sharing of responsibilities) rarely works in capitalism because it resembles communism way too closely.

(If you're ready to install Microsoft-unverified drivers and you have an Intel+AMD hybrid graphics laptop, go to leshcatlabs.net for the newest Intel, AMD drivers modified to work on switchable graphics cards.)

The idea "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is something I have been trying to internalize for years but it may be true that these efforts have only been partly successful. In many situations, I have learned to be a real conservative "in practice" but it's surely true that the temptation to get the newest drivers/firmware even if the benefits of the upgrade aren't clear to me at all is a major counterexample suggesting that your humble conservative is sometimes excessively tempted to behave painfully unconservatively.

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Lance Armstrong and ephemerality of sports

Enhancing humans to find a TOE

Cyclist Lance Armstrong confessed to Oprah Winfrey. He gave short answers such as "Yes" to questions whether he's been using illegal compounds during every single triumph of his. It's hard to imagine why he would be saying "Yes" in the case that the true answer is "No". That's why the newer answers probably supersede his proclamations over many years.

He's been lying to us for years. Bad Lance. To lie is obviously wrong.



Of course, I never knew whether he would be doping. The hypothesis that his victories were due to unusual gifts from Mother Nature and hard work, aside from several comparable legal things, was always compatible with the basic laws of physics. Someone has to win even if no one is doping. And the individual races aren't independent from each other which makes it more likely that the same winner will be seen many times.

On the contrary, when the concentration of illegal substances in a community is nonzero – and they're probably rather common in cycling (and other sports: to some extent, Armstrong is just a scapegoat) – the person who wins is more likely to be one of those who took them than an average contestant simply because the substances are potential explanations of the success or its part.

East Germany used to be a superpower in sports – many of them. For such a small nation, it was incredible. Years later, we would learn that much of their excess above average was due to doping as well – it was pretty much omnipresent. But how much worse doping really is relatively to legitimate sources as a source of success?




Well, if you allow me to ask this blasphemous question and give an answer, I will be unable to hide that I don't really care about sports. It's surely cool to be fair in sports. And it's impressive to be really good. But it's not too impressive. When it comes to strength, speed, endurance, and stamina, aside from similar words that are helpful for sport professionals, it boils down mostly to some physical prerequisites of the athletes. Nature probably had to be generous to their body if they became so good although very hard work is usually needed to get the extra small advantage over others who are physically gifted by Mother Nature.

Now, as a physicist, I don't really separate Nature from "the rest". Chemical compounds we can produce are parts of Nature, too. They interact with everything else. They obey the laws of Nature. They are Nature. When a company produces vitamin C, it's the same L-ascorbic acid that you may see in wild Nature. (Well, you should be careful about molecules and their images, about chirality, because much of biochemistry is highly sensitive to it.)

It's not just some abstract knowledge about the unity of Nature. My emotions and moral judgment are affected by this knowledge, too. If humans are able to chemically improve themselves, well, then it is just another way how Nature may operate. It may be impressive if someone is very strong for purely natural reasons. But once again, if someone is strong for other reasons, it may be the same strength, physically speaking. From a truly meritocratic vantage point, I find it bizarre to be impressed by the former only. It's hard for wild Nature to produce or evolve physically extraordinary individuals but it's Her problem. Nature in the broader sense may achieve it by producing humans who are clever enough to understand some biochemistry, too. ;-)

Of course, athletes who are doping are also running the risk that they damage their health – usually other things than those they may improve by the illegal substances. But this is only the case when the imitation of wild Nature is imperfect. In some cases, people imitate Nature perfectly. They may produce lots of compounds that are in principle indistinguishable from the natural ones.

Imagine that we would find some (safe) compounds – or some similar technology to enhance the humans – that can make people much more productive or ingenious physicists, much more Einstein-like or Fermi-like. Would we ban them? After all, science is a sports-like competition as well so it should be fair, shouldn't it?

My answer is that I care about the outcomes of the process – scientific insights – much more than I care about some literal kosher rules how they should be obtained. So if some tremendous progress in theoretical physics were possible by applying the miraculous technology to someone who would agree to be enhanced, I would want him or her to be enhanced! ;-) The results – pretty scientific theories that fit together and agree with observations – are the truly amazing entities in this whole game.

In comparison, sports are stupid childish pissing contests in which people compare their abilities and physical attributes – most of which they cannot change. It's fun as a recreational activity or a way to earn money (often lots of money), it's useful as an exercise to keep oneself in good shape, and it's a great source of activity for the fans (I am a sort of sports fan as well these days) but I admit that I consider the intrinsic value of these things to be low. The low value primarily stems from the fact that, as I wrote above, I primarily care about "results" or "products" themselves rather than "who did it" and in sports the "results" or "products" are qualitatively still the same.

As Richard Feynman would say, we don't live in a scientific era. People are obsessed with athletes or even models but they don't give a damn about scientists in particular. If you think about it impartially, you must agree how insanely this situation is. Lance Armstrong has earned something like $100 million for being a fraction of a percent faster than the next guys behind him. And this fraction of a percent was artificially engineered, too. It may always be engineered. But even if it were not, why do we ascribe value $100 million to someone's having speed while riding a bike – an irrelevant quantity by itself – that is a fraction of percent larger than that of other folks? It's just stupid, isn't it?

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Davis Cup + Fed Cup + Hopman Cup = Czechia

Czechoslovakia has always been a country of tennis. This is how the Czechoslovak team looked like when it won the 1980 Davis Cup:



You see Tomáš Šmíd of Pilsen, Ivan Lendl, Pavel Složil, and Jan Kodeš (only the former two players played the 5 final matches against Italy; none of the four players was Slovak – there have been no quota). This picture shows some funny fashion 32 years ago – in this case, it also combines some ultrashort shorts with a communist military-style suit decorated by our double-tailed lion "improved" by a communist star above his head.

Tennis has been a path for people to travel across the world and live in a Western lifestyle. Lots of families made immense investments for their children to become top tennis players – and sources of money and freedom – and most of these investments were lost, of course. The sport was tolerated by the communist regime but maybe they made a mistake, given the negative publicity they won by all those tennis players who emigrated to the U.S., especially Ivan Lendl and Martina Navrátilová. Incidentally, Lendl left our homeland after some politically correct communist assholes criticized him and fined him in 1983 for his participation in a tournament held in a South African bantustan.




When it comes to the female counterpart of the Davis Cup, the Fed Cup, our score seems much stronger. Czechoslovak or Czech (since 1993) women won it in 1975, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1988, 2011, and... 2012. Yes, weeks ago, Ms Petra Kvitová, Ms Lucie Šafářová together with the duo Ms Andrea Hlaváčková (daughter of the Pilsner Urquell brewmaster-in-chief) and Lucie Hrádecká defended the 2011 Czech Fed Cup in the final game against Serbia.

It was up to men to show – in the 100th Davis Cup – that men aren't discriminated against in our homeland. So Mr Tomáš Berdych and Mr Radek Štěpánek played the five games against the 2011 Fed Cup defenders, Spain, and Radek Štěpánek just decided about the fate of the salad bowl in a dramatic fifth match against Nicolás Almagro. And our guy just played wonderfully, despite his being well below Mr Almagro at the ladder. I made an informal bet that Mr Štěpánek would win the cup for us.



Berdych, the world's #6, is on the left, Štěpánek is on the right. Lukáš Rosol and Ivan Minář were members of the team, too.

After 22 years, a country finally managed to grab both the Fed Cup and the Davis Cup (previously the U.S. in 1990). And as the updated title reminds us, Czechia's Berdych+Kvitová also won the mixed 2012 Hopman Cup (previous victories 1989, 1994, plus Slovakia's 1998, 2005, and 2009). Of course, Czechia is the only nation that has won the three cups on the same year because the Hopman Cup only began in 1989. The consumption of alcoholic beverages in the Czech Republic may jump again tonight – above the level that already makes us the leaders of the world in this additional sport, anyway. ;-)

Because I am already boasting about athletes I root for, I can't forget to mention that both "key" sports in Czechia, soccer and ice-hockey, have sensible leaders of the extraleague right now (at least before the today's ice-hockey matches). HC Škoda Pilsen is the current leader in ice-hockey and Viktoria Pilsen 1929 is the current leader of the Gambrinus [another beer from Pilsen] soccer league. In both of these teams, remarkable veterans close to 40 years of age play a rather essential role (I mean Martin Straka and Pavel Horváth in particular).

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