Billiards is a good game (1975)

https://mag.uchicago.edu/billiards

by chucksmash • 2 years ago

84 59 2 years ago

mag.uchicago.edu

My father, who died in 2010, would play Yahoo Games Pool and was good at it. It is all angles and physics and good for the brain.

landedfolk• 2 years ago

Yahoo pool was ace. Fond memories of 2006 I think...bunch of devs taking 5 minutes off to play.

tsimionescu3• 2 years ago

This is a complete tangent, but I would note that we don't have physical models nearly good enough to actually compute the way billiards balls (or even worse, snooker balls) interact with each other and the fabric on the table. It's all guesswork and experience, mostly. The interactions between the balls and the fabric are critical for the vast majority of the movements, and they are far too complex for any physical first-principles based model to capture.

nemo44x• 2 years ago

Is this because of imperfections in the fabric? Golf has a similar situation where if you use a machine to roll a ball on a perfect line and speed, sometimes it won’t go in. This is because of imperfections in the gradient and that grass changes constantly as it slowly grows and bends towards light, etc.

Wow now that’s a tangent to a tangent!

lupire4• 2 years ago

Why are snooker balls harder to model?

imglorp2• 2 years ago

If anyone is seeking serious answers about the variables, the first bible is "Byrne's New Standard Book Of Pool And Billiards."

And it's not just the cloth and balls (rolling and static friction, dirt, ball elasticity...), it's also the rails, which rarely exhibit "angle of reflection == angle of incidence" due to more complexities.

emmelaich2• 2 years ago

Huh it's still around. https://www.yahoo.com/games/play/pool-lucky-break-9-ball/

Looks like fun.

jb19915• 2 years ago

The waitress told us he drew sketches of the faculty he did not care to eat with. She said they all had long noses.

I’m trying to understand this comment. I can’t tell if this is somehow a vague hint of an anti-Semitic attitude? It’s a weird thing to say or write in modern times if not.

Someone• 2 years ago

I can’t tell if this is somehow a vague hint of an anti-Semitic attitude?

Doesn’t seem likely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_A._Michelson#Life: “Michelson was born in Strelno, Posen, Kingdom of Prussia (modern-day Strzelno, Poland), to Jewish parents […] His family was non-religious, and Michelson himself was a lifelong agnostic”

saagarjha• 2 years ago

Considering he was Jewish it seems unlikely?

jb19915• 2 years ago

You have to admit, it’s a strange comment though.

Etheryte• 2 years ago

In many cultures this signifies being a fool, e.g. think Pinocchio. Similar connotations exist for a wide variety of exaggerated proportions you might see in caricatures. So in this context it seems he didn't think highly of the faculty members at an intellectual level.

calmbonsai2• 2 years ago

I forget the name of the specific art style, but "exagerated noses" is a known caricature motif. You can see this vividly depicted in the opening sequence of the BBC's "Yes Minister" TV series from the '80s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDEMthILzpA

xandrius• 2 years ago

Jumping to that conclusion does require a very honed skill of looking for outrage.

I'd be curious to know what they mean but until then I'd just take it as a pun and move on.

GJim• 2 years ago

Jumping to that conclusion does require a very honed skill of looking for outrage.

Welcome to the modern internet.

namdnay• 2 years ago

It’s a good thing they didn’t jump to any conclusion, and asked a question

lupire4• 2 years ago

It's a reporting of a report of an observation of portrait drawings.

Theres no way to know what it means from the text; you'd have to ask the artist.

jb19915• 2 years ago

The question is why did the author feel compelled to bring up this bizarre remark about noses twice in the article, it’s rather out of the blue and several of us in this thread found it odd. It’s just a little strange. Curious, is all.

rpmisms• 2 years ago

"I saw a monkey in this guy's house, which made me think of black people. Therefore, he was racist".

Assigning your own biases to other people is a great way to lose friends and influence nobody.

jb19915• 2 years ago

Ridiculous accusation. And note several others in thread had a similar curiosity about the remark.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

I wondered too. It may simply indicate that the portraits were (intentionally) unflattering.

boomboomsubban• 2 years ago

I like that this was published to promote "A River Runs Through It," but they either hadn't quite decided on the name or misprinted it as "The River Runs Through It."

It's also interesting that lunch was organized in a way where graduate students watched the professors eat, and professors had recess after lunch.

mauvehaus• 2 years ago

I hadn't read the byline until I read your comment. Young Men and Fire is also a highly worthwhile read about the Mann Gulch fire. I'm delighted to have this article to read in a Saturday morning, because Norman Maclean's prose delights me.

lupire4• 2 years ago

Amazon's page (and URL) covers all angles. All hail SEO!

https://www.amazon.com/River-Runs-Through-Norman-Maclean/dp/...

osrec5• 2 years ago

A more difficult variant is snooker, played on a 12ft x 6ft table with tighter pockets and smaller balls.

It can be frustrating to play well, but when you "get it", it really is a beautiful game to play, and a real mental workout.

For anyone interested, Ronnie O'Sullivan is the best ever player, and his YouTube highlights are worth a watch: https://youtu.be/PE8XPHnCNpg - makes the game look incredibly easy, but I assure you, it's not!

jimkleiber• 2 years ago

Wow this felt magical to watch, thank you for sharing it.

hnlmorg• 2 years ago

Ronnie might be the best but I’ve always enjoyed Mark Williams style of play more. The whole of the “Class of 92” are beyond special though.

osrec5• 2 years ago

Class of 92 are indeed very special. Williams is still doing amazingly well - just got to the final of the Saudi masters, and nearly clinched the deciding frame. Not bad for someone nearly 50 years old!

lupire4• 2 years ago

Billiards doesn't have pockets. Pool ("pocket billiards") has pockets.

You can see a billiard table in the background of the photo, behind the pool table.

osrec5• 2 years ago

English billiards does in fact have pockets, carom billiards does not.

pbronez• 2 years ago

Wow! Never saw Snooker before. It was awesome to slowly realize what he was trying to do, then watch him sink shot after shot after shot… the really impressive thing to me was the placement of the cue ball. He wasn’t just shooting balls into pockets. He was doing in a way that perfectly set up the next thing he wanted to do.

osrec5• 2 years ago

Cue ball control is the key. Anyone can pot balls when the cue ball is in the right place, but keeping that cue ball under control is what most people struggle with.

jakubmazanec• 2 years ago

I agree that Ronnie O'Sullivan is great; I especially love watching his record fastest Maximum break [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/9D2rFMPN9js

FearNotDaniel• 2 years ago

TLDR: the article posted is not really about billiards at all. But I guess HN culture has degenerated to such an extent that the top comment is a response to the title, not the content. Not that your comment is incorrect, I've played snooker a few times on a full size table but also wasted countless hours of a UK childhood watching it on TV. It's just... not really in any way relevant to what the article is actually about.

osrec5• 2 years ago

Have you read the full article? It is using billiards as a metaphor for an intrinsic understanding of physics.

fredzel2• 2 years ago

It's also one of the hardest games (sports) mentally, you can sit for a few minutes or few breakes and all you can do is wait for opponent to make a mistake - or play a safe. All you can do is try to stay focused and positive, not sulking over mistake you just made that might've lost you the whole match, to not mess up a chance when it comes.

jgalt212• 2 years ago

Sort of like batting against peak Pedro. Just wait for him to err, if not you're toast.

Towaway69• 2 years ago

Basically I've been playing billards all my life. Never really got better, playing at the same level for years. Meaning that getting more than two or three balls at one go was a rarity.

Until one day when I stopped looking at the white when playing a shot and instead I started looking at the target ball. It's weird that it took me so long to make that little change but it completely changed my skill level.

Something else I realised was that the less time I think about a shot the better the shot comes. As you said, it's a very mental game.

And I realised that it's all about placement: where do I want the white to be after playing a ball into the pocket.

aetherson• 2 years ago

Do you mean pool?

sfilmeyer• 2 years ago

In 1928, three years before his death, everyone said of Michelson, "He measured light," and today he is one of the few Nobel Prize winners whom nearly all educated people can name and give the reason for the award, although Michelson’s award actually was based on a wide spectrum of experiments.

I found this line (particularly "nearly all educated people can name and give the reason for the award") pretty amusing. Prior to this article, I'd heard of Michaelson, knew he was part of the Michelson and Morley experiment, and remembered a couple of details of the experiment design. But I also have a bachelors degree in physics, and I still couldn't have confidently told you whether he won a Nobel prize. I'm sure the intervening 50 years have dulled his fame a bit, but I've got to wonder how true it was when written.

fracus• 2 years ago

I had no idea Billiards had no pockets and no objective to sink balls into pockets. I had no idea a game like that existed, although, I certainly heard of Billiards but always thought it was, I now know is the game known as Snooker.

Ylpertnodi• 2 years ago

Billiards can be played on a snooker table (depending on company a potted ball is a penalty, £5 in the 'pot')

A great skill improver is often financially aligned.

quantified• 2 years ago

Their laboratory high school taught billiards as a phys ed class on the university's tables, too.

cafard• 2 years ago

Clicked to see whether this was Mclean on Michelson. Yep.

Billiards is a good game (1975)

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