2011 Golden Gate Bonspiel

I was not at the Golden Gate Bonspiel this past weekend, but my brother was, and I'll post some random thoughts on it.

• My brother did not get to play in the bonspiel, but has learned the lesson that it's a good idea to sign up for a bonspiel on the first day.  Incidentally, one of my brother's teammates got to play one game as a spare, but of course it was for the Saturday 7AM game.
• The bonspiel was held at the Sharks Ice at Fremont which is the official practice ice for the San Jose Sharks.  My brother hadn't been there before and noted that it was nice that they have a bar and restaurant there.  Apparently, the Oakland Ice Center is a public facility and therefore can't have the extras like that. 
• I was rooting for The Bond Girls: Bonus Edition, but it wasn't meant to be I guess.  It was good to see the Bourbon Cowboys make it to the B finals.  I wonder if I'll ever make it to the finals of any bonspiel.
• Probably due to the recent Norway/Loudmouth visit, my brother reported seeing lots of crazy pants.  Also, goldengatespiel posted this picture.  I don't know about you, but I can't imagine spending $325 for one of those jackets.

• My brother told me that he could say to people that he's the brother of StPaulCurler and there was instant recognition.  I thought that was kind of cool.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised as roughly a third of the hits to this blog have come from California, the most of any state/country.  I'll have to play at a bonspiel in California some day.  I would love to meet all of you in person.

Curling Patent - Tabletop Curling on Ice

This just seems kind of silly.  You can't really tell from the picture, but what's being patented is tabletop hockey, but on a table containing a refrigeration unit that can create actual ice for your game.

In the patent, they discuss the possibility of changing the design "to mimic the sport of curling."  They go on to say, "In such a case, miniature brooms and a miniature curling stone could be used on the sheet of ice". 

How would this even work?  I'm trying to imagine something like table shuffleboard, but on ice.  And while I think it might be funny to sweep a miniature stone with a miniature broom, I just don't think that would ever be practical.  Also, because you can't really replicate the physics of curling (heavy rock on bumpy ice) at the tabletop level, I feel like I would just go with something like the Cool Curling table.  This way, you don't have to deal with the added headache of trying to regulate the ice on your little tabletop.

So in general, I think this is kind of a ridiculous invention (for curling or hockey or anything else), but if you actually have one of these things, I would love to see it. 

Curling Patent Application - Instruments for Tracking Stones

Here's another interesting patent application I found.  (This is something I do at work when things get slow.)  Curling is only mentioned once in this patent, which is obviously targeted at golf, but let's talk about it anyway.  Here's a picture for the golf scenario.

This is a fairly long patent (27 pages with 14 pages of text), but I believe the gist of the idea is on a golf course, you set up lots of radio transmitters.  As a golf ball is in the air, radio signals will bounce off the golf ball.  This happens many times a second and by analyzing how all these radio signals from all of the radio transmitters are affected by the golf ball, one can discern the true path of the golf ball and its rotation while it was in the air.  Additionally, you can add other sensors for measuring wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity, and any other environmental factors that may also contribute to the golf ball path.

This seems really complicated and expensive.  I can imagine that there are easily thousands of dollars of hardware needed to set this up for just one hole in golf.  I can also see that an elite golfer could really learn something if all of this data were available for analysis. 

Back to curling.  As I said earlier, curling is mentioned once (page 16) in a list of of sports where this technology could be used.  This list also included a number of popular sports (including, inexplicably, boxing) so adding curling to this was a clear attempt to make the patent as broad as possible.  I'm not a patent attorney, but my guess is that if someone designed something like this specific to curling and patented it, I doubt there would really be an infringement.

But would this be valuable in curling?  I think you would need an empty curling club to make this work.  Otherwise, you'd have lots of people and dozens of rocks that would cause interference to radio signals.  But if it were possible, how valuable is it to know the speed and rotation of a rock as it goes down the ice?  I can see some value in that, but maybe not with a system like this.

The Norway Curling Team Visits the Bay Area

The Norway Curling Team was in the Bay Area last week.  My brother was there and recorded some videos.
First, here's a video of Christoffer Svae, the mastermind behind the pants.


There's no video of this, but my brother told me that later, there was another interview where Svae was asked what he thought about San Francisco and part of the response was "San Francisco women love the pants."

Here's a video of Markus Hoiberg, who is now the team's alternate:


Apparently, due to the popularity of the pants, Loudmouth sponsors the entire contingent of Norway curlers so juniors and all of the other teams wear something from Loudmouth.  And it seems that lots of people bought pants that weekend.  I'd be curious to see pictures from the upcoming Golden Gate Bonspiel to see if it's a huge collection of the loudest curling attire possible.

So there was a game where the Norwegian team played a house team that's local and it wasn't even close.  We don't have a final score because they stopped scoring pretty early on so it must've been really bad.  Also, one of the Norwegians said that there were more people watching this demo game than had watched the Norwegian nationals.

Anyway, it looks like it was a good time.