Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2016 January 29

= January 29 =

Mr. Irrelevant
(As he's completely hatstand.--Shirt58 (talk) 03:48, 29 January 2016 (UTC)) I just discovered this concept, which is quite fun. Mr._Irrelevant has some interesting information about people who went on to do well, like play in a Super Bowl, but that might be an average or below average player benefiting from being part of a great team. Has any Mr Irrelevant ever played in a Pro Bowl, which I presume is based on a perception of their individual performances? --Dweller (talk) 17:01, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Jacque MacKinnon (1961 NFL Mr. Irrelevant) played in two AFL All-Star Games, the AFL equivalent of the Pro Bowl. As the NFL considers the AFL to be a full major league, and incorporates all AFL records into the NFL record books, that should qualify.  -- Jayron 32 18:07, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
 * There would be a star beside that, since the title wasn't bestowed until 1976. So, Jacque would be a "Mr Retroactively Irrelevant" Matt Deres (talk) 02:54, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Cool, thanks --Dweller (talk) 11:20, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Then there was Jimmy Walker, drafted 445th and last in the 1967 draft. That same year, he was the #1 pick in the NBA draft and became a two-time All-Star while playing for the Pistons.  → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 15:36, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Interesting, but not really that remarkable. That just means he was a lot better at basketball than at football.  Maybe the unusual part of it is that such a talented basketball player was good enough at football to get drafted at all. --Trovatore (talk) 20:25, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Mike Piazza has probably the highest draft pick:talent ratio, with only 43 more players taken after him (in a draft of 1433) but was inducted in to the 2016 Hall of Fame class. uhhlive (talk) 19:52, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Actually, the correct answer for "Highest draft pick:talent ratio" in any sport is "infinity", as there are many players who have never been part of a draft, but have made the Halls of Fame in their respected sports. Baseball, in particular, would have many of these, as the draft only covers players from North America (U.S. and Canada).  Players from other countries may be signed as free agents without going through the draft.  See Major League Baseball draft.  Since the introduction of the modern MLB Amateur Draft in 1965, there have been several HOFers who were never drafted.  From the HOF class the year before Piazza, Pedro Martínez was originally signed to the Dodgers as a 17-year old undrafted Free Agent.  In American football, the most recent undrafted player in the HOF I believe is John Randle, elected to the Hall in the second year of his eligability.  The NBA, like Baseball, may sign foreign players without drafting them (though it may draft foreign amateurs, I believe).  The most recent undrafted NBA player in the Basketball HOF I can find is Dražen Petrović.  In the NHL,its a bit trickier, since it seems that nearly all players enter through the draft, even experienced foreign professionals (i.e. Igor Larionov or Viacheslav Fetisov both of whom had been drafted years before being allowed by Soviet authorities to join the NHL)  However, I did find that Börje Salming is in the Hockey HOF, had played in the NHL, and was never drafted by an NHL team; he also holds many Toronto Maple Leafs team records.  So it seems that in all four major North American sports, you can find hall of fame members who were never drafted.  -- Jayron 32 04:46, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Call me a literal-minded mathematician if you want, but I have to point out that "draft pick:talent ratio" gets smaller (at least, in absolute value) as talent increases, if "draft pick" stays the same. Jayron's "infinity" answer makes sense, I guess, if you adopt the convention that someone who is not drafted at all has an infinite draft-pick number, but if the "draft pick" numerator means the number at which the athlete was selected, then "draft pick" and "talent" would ordinarily be expected to be inversely correlated, so the "ratio" doesn't make much sense in the first place. --Trovatore (talk) 08:14, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the better ratio would be $$\tfrac{1}{\text{draft pick}} : \text{talent}$$ ratio.  → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 16:50, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Books in newspaper format
I could not find an average size of a newspaper page, anyway bearing in mind 35 word per column inch we can estimate around 5000 words per page. Hence an average novel of 60,000 words could be properly printed in a 12-page newspaper format. But have there been books printed in such a way? Not serials, but an entire book in one go.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 23:08, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
 * There are Coffee table books which are the size of the average newspaper. -- Jayron 32 07:10, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * In the 18th and 19th century, there were Story papers in newspaper format, which tended to contain serials of several stories at once. These gave rise to the Penny dreadfuls (UK) and Dime novels (US) which were single-story but in a cheap magazine format with a flimsy cover. I think the problem with publishing a serious book as a broadsheet or tabloid is that people usually want to keep books but newspapers need to be carefully looked-after. Alansplodge (talk) 17:40, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Michael Moorcock wrote a novelization of the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle which was published in newspaper format. --Viennese Waltz 18:04, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

It is not exactly the case, though their goal is close. Those are the books which page sizes are similar to newspapers sizes. I meant the entire newspaper layout, that is rather cheap lightweight paper, large pages divided into four and more column. The difference from newspapers, that instead of printing 100-200 thousand copies of gossips, propaganda, advertisement, etc., they might have printed more or less decent literature, which would be cheap and much more affordable than in the form of standard books. Especially, this might be a good way of propagating good literature. People have been spending thousand hours a year reading information noise, instead they might read something decent and useful. Of course this idea might work only before the Internet.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:11, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, very similar, I knew about such phenomena. But they still looked more like cheap books. I wondered if somebody has made a step further and got into my idea in the past. Newspapers are more durable than it is thought. I am sure many have been finding at their home old newspapers that accidentally have been forgotten but remained intact for years if not dozens of years. It is not the problem anyway. You read a novel, then you either give it to somebody or just dispose, how serious or not it might be, most fiction books are never read twice. I think in the past when books were much costly, rare, if not scarce (in some countries especially), it might be an alternative especially for those who did not want to have a home collection of read books.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:11, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

An interesting example, but looks more like a kitsch bearing in mind the topic of the book. I think the main problem with my unusual idea that there will be hardly found an author who will agree to print his book in newspaper format. The author gets his money from the impression size multiplied by the price: 100 thousand of ¤0.1 copies or 10 thousand of ¤1 copies will give him the same sum. And in fact he most probably would not find those 100 thousand readers, but if they were, it would be more profitable to print standard ¤1 books.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 10:11, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't know about novels, or even predominantly-text books in general (though I'd be surprised if there've been no examples). As for books loosely called photobooks, yes, they've existed. Indeed, there's recently been quite a lot of fuss over a particular example, Will Steacy's Deadline (about the Philadelphia Inquirer): description and praise by Pete Brook, comment by Blake Andrews, and there's lots more about it that's googlable. -- Hoary (talk) 04:43, 2 February 2016 (UTC)