{"id":2731,"date":"2009-09-28T08:44:28","date_gmt":"2009-09-28T15:44:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=2731"},"modified":"2009-09-28T08:44:28","modified_gmt":"2009-09-28T15:44:28","slug":"explaining-the-arrow-of-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/28\/explaining-the-arrow-of-football\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining the Arrow of Football"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not sure which blogs the editors of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theonion.com\/content\/news_briefs\/nfl_scientists_postulate?utm_source=onion_rss_daily\">the Onion<\/a> have been reading, but I have to approve of their proposed model for explaining the low entropy at the beginning of a football game by recourse to an infinite series of downs before &#8220;first down.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>NEW YORK \u2014 Citing the extremely low level of entropy present before a normal set of football downs, scientists from the NFL&#8217;s quantum mechanics and cosmology laboratories spoke Monday of a theoretical proto-down before the first. &#8220;Ultimately, we believe there are an infinite number of proto-downs played before the first visible snap,&#8221; lead NFL scientist Dr. Oliver Claussen said during a press conference, adding that the very last yocto-down is a by-product of leftover fourth downs from this universe, as well as those from a theoretical universe running along an arrow of time concurrent to our own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Probably some enthusiastic football coach is going to try to cash in by writing a book about the idea, while others fulminate on the sidelines about how such irresponsible speculation is destroying the game.  (Thanks to Ahmet Toker and Tom Fishman.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not sure which blogs the editors of the Onion have been reading, but I have to approve of their proposed model for explaining the low entropy at the beginning of a football game by recourse to an infinite series of downs before &#8220;first down.&#8221; NEW YORK \u2014 Citing the extremely low level of entropy present [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-time"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}