I haven't read this yet, but I just wanted to comment on something that has kind of annoyed me throughout the whole process.
back when the report was that the patriots balls were pretty uniformly 2 lbs short there was maybe something to look at or investigate, regardless of how relevant any of it was to playing football, but since the actual numbers have come out we're apparently actually having all these discussions to maybe track down a third of a pound here or there.
I really hope the general public understands that these are fairly generic ball gauges and not ****ing electron microscopes.
you cannot use these tools to accurately measure air pressure to the tenths or hundredths of a pound anymore than you would try to preheat your oven to 350.36 degrees.
to be generous, these gauges are manufactured with an error range of around +/- .2 pounds, and maybe even more.
just read the article and wanted to give myself a little shout out on this point ^^
I had pulled that error range out of my ass after talking to a mechanical engineer buddy of mine who has used and calibrated gauges.
turns out there was actually a portion of the exponent appendix that tested this, and found about 75% of these gauges were within +/- 0.1 psi with the other 25% just a tenth or 2 outside that range.
I think +/- 0.2 is pretty close for a made up number.
as for the guy's article, it's pretty long, and he put a lot of effort into it, so I don't want to detract from it in any way, but I think it's just a rehash of the argument over gauges, which I find fairly irrelevant.
there's another point made further down that's just a rehash of something already covered in the exponent appendix starting around page 42, which he apparently says he hadn't seen --- the bit explaining why the colt balls lost less pressure (they had warmed up).
to answer the guy's question, about 10 min indoors accounts for the discrepancy, according to exponent.
the guy argues for the logo gauge to be the original gauge based on the premise that the pat's gauge showed certain readings on the intercepted ball, but the problem with this theory is I don't think it mentions the conditions that ball was measured under -- ie was it brought indoors?
anyway, as I mentioned in my quoted post above ^^ this all becomes entirely irrelevant and bordering on crazy homeless ranting when you really look at it, as the 'worst' case gauge (non-logo) apparently asks us to explain a discrepancy of about a third of a pound on something like half the balls, which would be a pretty insane rant for you to accuse me of sneaking off to the bathroom to let a third of a pound of air out of these balls, and this is with gauges that might read 0.15 psi light on one read and 0.15 psi over the next, for a net difference of 0.3 psi of uncertainty in just normal gauge to gauge usage out of the factory, before we even get into a gauge that's established to be 0.4 psi 'off', and before we get into measuring under conditions that are rough estimates and approximations of actual conditions.
I understand people see numbers in a report on the internet, but these are made up approximations that have a greater degree of error than what we are actually measuring.
if anybody ever gives you any crap about this nonsense report just challenge them to tell you exactly how much air 'the deflator' was letting out --- all the measurements are right there in the report.
ps
there was one interesting takeaway I got from the couple pages of the exponent index I just browsed --- apparently, colts balls were kept in garbage bags, while pat's balls were out and exposed to the rain.
they then go on to say that the wet balls not only show around a 0.2 psi (yes, I'm an ******* for making a 0.2 psi distinction) drop from the dry balls, but they also take longer to re-acclimate to the warmer indoors.
so, the point remaining that all these little 0.2's here and there add up, and the entire range of numbers is insignificant.
