We are closing in on the end of the season for Bridger Bowl, but the snow gods are still delivering. We’ve got close to 3 feet of snow over the past week. Today was the day after the last 15″ dump and it seems that all my friends spent their fun tickets yesterday, while I was stuck in Bozeman. So although today was a solo mission, I got to ski some new lines in the hero pow. There was no way I was going to truck my SLR around solo today, so just a couple shots from the cell phone.
This is the first contest I’ve seen in North America where the terrain is on par with the Europe’s freeride events. And they are going HUGE on day 3. Unreal.
So here’s my baseline bracket for 2011. Pretty standard bracket based on Sargarin rankings.
I did tweak it to have BYU lose to Florida in the Sweet 16, rather than have them advance and lose to Pitt in the Elite 8. I think it is a pretty safe assumption that BYU shot themselves in the foot by suspending Davies. Interestingly, this assumption isn’t showing up in the Vegas lines (yet). I would think that BYU would be so heavily underbet that that you might be able to get nice odds on them, but that’s not so.
Lastly, I’ll mention that in most pools, I’d probably actually pick Duke or Kansas to win the tournament. Although I think Ohio will take the whole thing, I think that they are a poor bet. Since Ohio State are the heavy favorite, you’d likely have to either spilt the pot or you’d lose on previous picks. Whereas, if you pick either Duke or KU, you have a much better shot of taking the whole thing based on you being the only one in your pool to pick the winner. Think about this for a second. If Ohio has a 60% chance of winning but you have to split a hundred dollar pot, your expected winnings are only $30. But, if Duke has a 40% chance you can expect a $40 payout because you didn’t have to split the pot. This is basically the theory that Niemi, Carlin, and Alexander came up with in this awesome paper a couple years ago.
Personally, I think it’s a pretty cool story because it worked out well for this guy.
I, of course, think that you must give credit to the photographer, but basically posting to flickr is a form of marketing. You get way more random views on flickr then you are going to get on your site. One of the risks you take is that you are going to get ripped off. But, if you are at all serious about being “a pro” (like you are depending on your images for your livelihood) you aren’t posting you stuff to the net before it gets sent around for editorial review. And I don’t buy the argument that this form of image stealing is going to put the big photographers out of business. They have to be pushing the boundaries all the time and furthermore it’s less complicated for big publications to just shell out the money for licensing up front than to risk being sued.
I’m not saying that it is right to steal these images, I’m just really tired of this over-protectionism attitude for photos. I think few people realize that by wrapping their site in flash they are shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to SEO, not to mention the fact that you are excluding visitors. People need to have some savvy about what they are posting. Beyond that you just need to trust people to do the right thing. If it ultimately goes truly viral, then you just got your break like this guy.
