Beavers finally on top, as Oxy goes down

It came down to the last shot of the season, but the Caltech men’s basketball team snapped a 310-game conference losing streak that dated back to 1985. ESPN reports:

PASADENA, Calif. -- The Caltech men's basketball team ended a 26-year conference losing streak Tuesday night after posting a 46-45 victory over Occidental in the team's regular-season finale on senior night.

By my count, Caltech faculty won 9 Nobel prizes between the Beavers’ last two conference victories. I boldly predict that that’s an NCAA record that will never be broken.

Steelers vs. Jets, pizza, wine

Via Serious Eats, I made Cooks’ Illustrated’s thin-crust pizza for the playoff game. One pie was a plain cheese pie, while the other was pepperoni (poached, of course, lest I incur the Wrath of Kimball). The main departure from the recipe was to use fresh mozzarella cut into discs, since Giant Eagle only carried part skim mozzarella in the firmer formats.

The pizza was a success, with the fresh sauce a big hit. I’d say my biggest problem is shaping the dough. My pizza crusts always end up with a very thin center, gradually thickening to a thick cornicione. Obviously I’d rather have a uniform crust from the center to just inside the cornicione.

The wine was a 2003 Edmunds St. John 2003 “Wylie-Fenaughty” Syrah (El Dorado County), chosen because it was a birth-year wine for Carlee’s recent birthday. My note:

Clear dark plum. Restrained nose of red fruit, herbs, clove, menthol. Smells like there's some grenache. Bracingly mineral, herbal, iodine, coffee, with blackberry finish. (90 points)

Soundtrack: Wiz Khalifa: Black And Yellow

Now let’s get 7.

50 years ago…

Via the LA Times, half a century ago, Caltech triumphed in a nationally-televised athletic contest:

Rarely had a Rose Bowl seen such flawless execution.

The preparation was inspired, the key players unwavering and a national television audience enthralled.

Fifty years ago this Sunday, an intrepid interloper made an uninvited, unprecedented and unforgettable appearance in the so-called Granddaddy of Them All.

Caltech made the Rose Bowl.

A small band of ingenious Caltech students made it happen, surreptitiously altering a University of Washington halftime flip-card routine so that it would spell out "CALTECH" in what became known as the Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961.

We have to take our victories however we can get them.

A Tale of Two Almae Matres

Congratulations to the Penn State women's volleyball team, who defeated Texas in straight sets in the NCAA semifinals, and will try for their fourth consecutive national championship on Saturday.

And then there's Caltech men's basketball.

Conference play in the N.C.A.A. Division III Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference begins after the holiday break. Caltech’s losing streak sits at 297, according to the athletic department.

...

A basketball in [Coach] Eslinger’s office is covered in autographs—not from players, but from the five Nobel laureates currently on the faculty. Pointing to a photograph of the team he inherited, Eslinger counted 5 among the 17 players who had played high school basketball. There were more valedictorians than starters.

On the repeatability of NCAA football games

Nate Silver has a new column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. In the inaugural edition, he writes of the difficulty of ranking college football teams.

Lancaster

After writing yesterday’s post about Sparrow Songs’ film about Trona, I checked out their earlier films and realized they’re following me around, at least in some time-reversed Merlinesque sense.

After I finished grad school, the Spousal Unit and I moved from Ridgecrest to Lancaster, California, in the Antelope Valley. It’s an aerospace town, home of the Lockheed Skunk Works, and not far from Edwards AFB. The street names reflect the engineering sensibilities of the area: We lived on Avenue J-7, which was the seventh of fifteen streets between Avenue J and Avenue K. The town was an interesting mélange of engineers and recently-released prisoners and their (often quite extended) families.

This Sparrow Songs documentary concerns the local California League (A) baseball team, the Lancaster Jethawks. The Jethawks gave away the best free gift I’ve ever received for attending a sporting event: A Burt Rutan bobblehead.

Sparrow Songs - Episode 10 - The Farm from Sparrow Songs on Vimeo.

“We’re not dividing matrices out there”

Oregon right tackle Mark Asper, quoted by Matt Hinton, on the bizarre signal posters on their sideline:

"It's not, 'OK, I have to add the top square and the bottom square.' We're not dividing matrices out there."

C’mon, Mark, inverting a 2x2 matrix isn’t that hard. For example, the inverse of the above matrix is simply:

“Dividing” another matrix, such as the one to the right, by this matrix is simply a matter of performing matrix multiplication of the new matrix and the inverse shown above.

This multiplication is left to the reader (or quarterback).

These guys have 45 seconds to get the play together. Frankly, I don’t see what would be so hard.