Opinion : Olympics

I read in the Globe last week that the Olympics are dropping baseball and softball as sports after the 2008 games. WTF? Now I love sports, and I love watching the Olympics (live hockey games during the time I eat breakfast on CNBC this week is awesome), but as I watch this week, I have got to wonder about some of these sports. Why is curling a sport, but bowling isn't? Ice dancing is more of a sport than baseball, lacrosse, or cricket? And why can't there be coed sports? Does gender make a difference in skeleton/luge or curling?
To be honest, I think that the Olympics have lost their way. The Olympics should be a stage to all sports, popular worldwide or not. If the sport is only popular in a few countries, than let those countries each field a bunch of teams. I was watching a women's hockey match yesterday thinking that the US and Canada could field 10 teams better than these two. They should be allowed to. There would be better competition and the best athletes will be crowned, and that is what the Olympics should be about. If another country (or several) doesn't follow that sport or doesn't even think it should be a sport, then their media can just ignore the whole thing. In fact, many countries already do this for the entire winter games.
Given that the Olympics should really try to include everyone, why not add several sports from around the world. In the age of corporate sponsorship, I can't believe that money is an issue. Politics shouldn't be that big a deal either, as every country must have some sport that they would like to be included. It is merely the conservativeness of the International governing bodies, and political correctness that seems to keep sports out. Until the Olympics include everyone, it is not going to truly fulfill its mission of being the world's sports showcase.

Sports to add:
-Baseball /softball (reinstate)
-Rugby
-Cricket
-North American/Australian Football
-Jai ali
-Lacrosse
-Broomball (winter)
-Racquetball/Squash
-Rock Climbing
-Bowling
-Pool
-Ultimate Frisbee
-Sumo Wrestling

investing

This Friday I made almost $150 on the stock market. And that was locked in by selling the stocks (at almost a 10% premium). While we can never predict long term performance, the short term has been pretty good. My strategy is simple enough: I take a volatile stock that is trading near a low point and has dropped recently for reasons other than bad earnings (executive left, regulatory rejection, oil prices, etc) and I buy it if I believe it can gain at least 5% in the short term. I always buy companies that are profitable or at least have a viable product that I have heard of. Also, I always trade with limit orders so I can have slightly less risk when buying. Once I have bought the stock, I put an automatic sell order to trigger between 5-10%. Not to difficult, and it has been working pretty well. It clearly involves a lot of risk, but my goals are all short term so this is fine.
The first company I bought this year was oil transporter Frontline, which turned over the 7% in a week, apparently pushed by higher earnings of other oil companies. Next, I bought Biosite, which was low because 3 of its top executives left or something. Either way, it dominates the growing market for heart protein tests that detect chronic problems, and it soundly beat earnings last week, giving me another 10% gain. I had also bought Highland Hudson group, which is somewhat undervalued and seems to me to be in great shape with no debt although not much profit on its large revenue. It also beat its earnings this week and I sold it today at a 6% profit as well. So far the only loser in my portfolio is the one large cap Dow Jones company I bought to reduce my risk: Microsoft. I bought it at a low point (down because they screwed up xbox 2 deliveries) and I figured it would jump when they release Vista. Maybe it still will, but it has sucked in the mean time, despite huge earnings and continued dominance of all its products. Anyway, This whole venture is looking like a pretty good idea. Add investing to my list of hobbies.

Dateline 2/13/06

Wow, what a week that was. It started out like crap as I had a bad cold, but I still got everything done. I managed to finish off the last week helping Peer Health exchange launch by making two announcements and going to 2 meetings as well as the ending party on Friday. It turns out that BU had the most successful launch ever, getting over 200 info session attendees and over 90 applicants for the leadership positions (3 times as many as Harvard BTW). Anyway, that's over, but broomball has just begun. I organized a team of Pre-med students and we had the kick-off captains meeting on thurs. I am not sure what our skill level is going to be, but we have a lot of people and it will be a good time. As for other premed business, we had a planning meeting last Sunday to lay out the semester events, I went to the consortia meeting to coordinate with other student groups (waste of time), I spent hours wed. at the activities fair trying to get new members (1), and we had a meeting with former BU president Dr. Chobanian to finalize a guest lecture as one of our events. We also had our first meeting tues. and watched that NOVA special about becoming an MD, which really makes me want to try again at getting into medical school. That is not an option for next year, however, which lead me to negotiations with two programs about a possible one-year research stint. The first is the BU med. school lab that I am working in now. The prof. wants to have me as one of his students and believes he could get funding to pay for the MS degree if I work there another year. I really wish I could, but financing this option looks like an impossible task at the moment. The other program that I started talking to last week is the NIH NIAAA in-vivo studies lab. I had put a resume into the NIH's research student clearinghouse system but I had not expected to here from them for a while, if ever. To my surprise however, I got an email on Mon. (3 days after the application cleared!) asking me to direct my interest to a particular project involving mouse brains. Turns out the team is looking for a biomedical engineer and my name came up as a candidate. This seems like a good opportunity, will have to see if this goes anywhere...
Also last week, on Friday I went to the Dean's list reception, for the first time since freshman year. It is nice to finally take a few classes that aren't curved to a C+, which I inevitably get B's in for some reason. Actually, I carried a 3.7 last semester and hope to match that this semester as well. It would go a long way into making that second pass at med school admission more successful than the first. I had a linear algebra test on Monday that may not help this cause however, as I felt ill during it and probably did not do that well.
On the entertainment front, I went to see the Blue Man group on Friday night. It was not quite what I expected, but it was enjoyable. It was more prop comedy and less performance art than I thought it would be, but it was very funny. Also it was free, because they have this program that if you usher for the show and clean up a little afterwards, you get free seats (and they were good seats too). Much better than just hanging around the apartment drinking, watching TV and playing Risk, which is what I did yesterday. We were also supposed to go play paintball today, but the snow storm has postponed that until next week. Anyway, I crammed a month worth of activities into this week, so for the next 2 I am going to try to take it easy.

For the record : SuperBowl predictions

Wow, the two biggest football fans in my family root for the Steelers and Seahawks respectively. At thanksgiving, and again at Christmas,(like every year) there was talk that the two could reach the superbowl...wish I had bet on that this time around. Well anyway, here we are. Now I must admit that I don't really like either team but I will be cheering for the Steelers. That said, I want to know why they are favored. Seattle clearly had the better season, has the MVP, and the defense with the most big plays. Vegas is favoring a wild card team to beat them in the big game and I have no idea why. I will be cheering for the Steelers, but in the interest of being right, my prediction is:
Seahawks 33, Steelers 20

Dateline 1/31/06

This is another very busy week, and my life still seems to be in neutral. I was surprised early this week when Drexel Universitiy's medical masters progam called up to schedule an interview for Thusday. It is a phone interview but I am optimistic, as it was offered as soon as they got my application, which means that I was not wait-listed (as at every other program). Drexel also has the best of these such programs in my opinion, as it allows you to take 1st year classes with medical students and also allows you to travsfer to its research engineering program which is in line with what I am doing now. If they tender an acceptance offer, in the next few weeks, it is going to be hard to rationalize a serious job search, however. Speaking of the job search, I did take two steps this week. First, I met with a job finding consultant, which was arranged by the college. This resulted in a better resume and some new strategies. One of those strategies was to send/post my resume to dozens of online job boards and career placement services. That was the second step in my job serach so far. I also had an almni networking session at the end of last week and a career fair on friday that might yield some opportunities. At this point though, I can't say that I have seen any job openings that I really wanted, that I knew would be a dream job. Anyway, the serach continues.
Classes are great this semester, practically no work in any of them, yet they are interesting and I am actually learning something. Today BE 565 had Prof Sir Kornsberg give a guest lecture on metabolism processes, several of which he helped discover. good stuff. anyway, I need some sleep.