King,

I think that the palm call in the UConn/GMU game was a palm. It shouldn't have been called, since they rarely make that call at any time in any game, but it was palming. I couldn't believe that they called it, but I wish that they would call palming more. There are way too many guards in college that use palming to their advantage.

As for fouling at the end of the game, I don't see the problem. Few of the exciting finishes that we have had in this tournament would have been possible under some of the rule proposals that have been made above. In fact, I think that the double bonus switches on too early. I think that the balance of games would be better if double bonus didn't start till at least 12 fouls.

I agree that GMU misused the no "rebounders on free throws" gambit. With the time under 10 seconds, it would make sense to do that if they were up by 4 or more points, in which case the problem of following on the rebound and stopping the clock becomes a bigger worry. With that said, I think that it is quite possible that GMU could have lost at the end of regulation if they had manned the lane. That extra second used getting the rebound might have forced UConn to shoot a 3 pointer, and they might have made that one.

Finally, a comment on sitting players in foul trouble that relates back to earlier columns. I agree that automatically sitting players in foul trouble for long stretches makes no sense. There are situations and players, though, that it does make sense for. I think most players should be pulled for a minute after getting a third foul, to give them a chance to collect themselves. Since many teams are adept at attacking players in foul trouble, teams are often stronger defensively with a sixth or seventh man in then, with a timid starter who is in foul trouble. With that said though, there still are many coaches who are too rigid and keep their stars on the bench for way too long. Rules of thumb don't work here - each situation has to be analyzed on its merits.

Ilanin,

While I agree with most of your post, here is one point that you got wrong:

A classic example would be a radioactive half-life - that is an average decay time, but nobody would ever call it that.

Half life is not the mean life-time anymore than the mean is the same thing as the median. The mean lifetime of a radioactive particle is the half-life divided by the natural log of two (0.693).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactivity for the details.

I wish conferences tournaments would be dropped. I follow Big Ten basketball and I would much rather watch regular season games than Big Ten tournament games. The atmosphere is never is good on a neutral court and the games just aren't usually as much fun.

Teams that sneak into the NCAA tournament by getting hot and winning the conference tournament rarely do much in the NCAA tournament, anyway, so I really don't see much point to the conference tournaments. If the ACC wants to keep theirs, fine. But I would love to see the Big Ten drop its tournament.

With that said, I will probably watch a few of the Big Ten tournament games this weekend, but probably not the championship.

The "Counter-factual Computing" article seems legitimate, if not very well written. See http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/02/28/paul-kwiat-on-quantum-computation/ for commentary from one of the researchers involved.

Also, I think Xenu is the character from scientology. Zeno was the Greek with his very own paradoxes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes .

The hockey game at Lambeau Field was last Saturday.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=2332675

http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/sports/index.php?ntid=72388&ntpid=1

I like luge, probably largely because it was something I could pretend to as a kid. Then it was snapped away from me by a move south to a place with where the snow never stuck for long. (Sorry Chicago, I love a lot about you, but the winters were always a disappointment.) Anyway, I agree that luge doesn't always make for great TV, but it is fun during the Olympics.

As for inline skating and 50 championships, that line bugged me as well. I am sure that they must have at least 10 different events, and that Texan whose name I am too lazy to look up must have won several a year. Of course I am guessing that the competition might be a little sparse from the rest of the world, since inline skating is a less publicized sport than even luge or biathlon.

As for the point that "the latest high-profile athletes seem to get younger and younger every year," I don't think that is really the case. Some of the higher profile women's individual team sports have put in lower limits on the age of women that have helped keep some of the truly young girls out of the limelight too early. I believe that both tennis and gymnastics have age limits now and others probbaly do as well.

Besides which, women's team sports, which tend to have mostly women of college age an above, have gained much more prominence over the past decade or to. Women's basketball, soccer, and hockey, in particular, have raised their profile in the US quite a bit. These sports seem to have athletes that avoid the extremes of gymnastics or track.