Go to MLB.com, Scoreboard, Wednesday's (May 14) games, Boston at Baltimore.
Click on the "MLBTV" logo: It's free but login/password required (if you don't have one already, go through whatever rigmarole it takes).
You'll want "Ramirez's amazing catch." Once you've seen it, the question I have: Did he end up getting help from the fan to reverse his momentum?
Obligatory link to the best Manny Ramirez article The Onion has ever published.
This column makes a bizarrely ambiguous use of first-person plural.
It also has a frightening lack of understanding of basic economics, much less human freedom. I don't think there's anyone who has both the standing to do what Wojciechowski wants done and the incentive to do it.
(We'd live in a much worse world if there actually were.)
"Gasoline is also a fairly minor expense when you consider the overall cost of car ownership. In 1975, gasoline made up 33.4 percent of the total cost of owning and operating a car. By 2006, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, gasoline costs had declined to just 17.1 percent of the total cost of car ownership. Of course, fuel costs have risen by about $1 per gallon since 2006, but even with those increases, fuel continues to be a relatively small part of the cost of car ownership. By contrast, the fixed costs of ownership—insurance, licensing, taxes, and financing—have increased nearly fivefold since 1975."
--Robert Bryce, Slate
I don't necessarily disagree with his overall point. I remember making fun of people who complained about $2.00 gas, because adjusted for inflation we were still doing well. But can you count the sleights of hand in the quote above? They include:
1. Selective endpoints. (1975 sounds vaguely like a round number, but gosh, weren't we just getting over a price shock at the time?)
2. Obfuscation by constant changing of units. Here's a percent stat... and then here's a "change since 2006" that he compares to a "change since 1975." What, you're not smart enough to convert in your head on the fly?
This is what passes for scholarship*?
Given some of the books on the guy's list (The Prince, mainly) I can only wonder whether there's an alternate universe in which The Screwtape Letters makes the list.
("That book gave all those evil people IDEAS!")
This is the EXACT SAME mentality behind all the people who fulminated against the Freakonomics Blog for supposedly giving terrorists ideas (in that thread about brainstorming possible security holes, the sooner to patch them).
*- The word "scholarship" chosen in part because the author pointedly puts "Ph.D." at the end of his name. How many books are written by people with doctorates -- and how many of those books list the degree after the author's name on the front cover?
Here's Robert Kaplan in the NY Times and here's Jacob Sullum discussing that piece.
Some of Kaplan's reasoning in the case against really ought to have been applied to Iraq planning, especially the part about accepting responsibility for the ensuing civil war. On the other hand, the gall of the current regime to stand in the way and just let hundreds of thousands die rather than dare let people in... my knee-jerk impulse had been to strongly support regime change there (even before the cyclone).
Thought experiment: If, instead of a natural disaster, we had simply learned after the fact that the junta itself was killing people on that scale, how strong would the case for invasion be?
(I also think we should apply the Sudan rule as necessary (though it's unclear to me to what extent the junta has rejected UN, rather than U.S., help) : Any regime that publicly conflates UN peacekeeping troops with an invasion force, deserves to be invaded and toppled.)
If nothing else, I thoroughly agree with this Kaplan passage (change the "might" to "would" to get my exact opinion):
"It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.)"
How is it even remotely possible to create (intentionally) a reference that's (inadvertently) circular? How could you possibly fail to realize this would happen, unless you were stabbing formulas in the dark?
Quite often I create inadvertent circular references always by inadvertently typing the wrong thing, say C2 when I honestly meant B2. The Excel UI for "yes, I know I meant B2 not C2" is subpar.
There's a catch-22 that I'm inordinately proud of "my" "generation" even as part of that level of pride involves a highly misunderstood ethos, one of whose manifestations (by all rights) ought to be refusal to pigeonhole yourself by arbitrary age range.
(Another of those, and perhaps the most misunderstood, is the meme of not caring about anything or anyone - rather the point is not to care about stupid people, and in general the sort of people who waste words on generational stereotypes are decidedly among the stupid.)
Anyway, this piece is sort of interesting and sort of vindicating if you can get over the fact that by definition it had no reason to exist.
One thing about "us" is that we'll do a significantly better job raising our kids than those silly helicopter parents did with the Y people.
(As a country.)
I never really reflected on what it means that there were so many of these in the past few years (just count the distinct facilities accounted for in the Related Videos).
Who needs bread and circuses? Can you imagine how badass it would have been for a Roman emperor to say "We need a new Colosseum, let's just demolish the old one"?
(Lest there be any confusion, I hope you already know full well my position on governments handing new stadiums to rich owners who by all rights could have paid for the things themselves. It's not like there are schools to fund or anything.)
(My favorite of the black/white meta-jokes is when 30 Rock's Tracy Jordan did a "Black people dial the phone like this" bit.)
Once every few months Sylvia (the comic strip) is so funny that it's worth the drought. But oh, the drought.
Today we learn that, if stranded at an airport, many men would probably love to pay $200 for time on an indoor putting green, while many women would love a French manicure. Guffaw!
Speaking of comic strips, we learned yesterday that Zits is quite a magical family: They make 12-letter words in Scrabble, without even needing the board/grid! Just lay 'em out on the table!
Over-under on number of weblogs wherein I post or comment about California's recent court decision: 2.5. (This and Volokh Conspiracy already make two.)
Over-under on number of times I take an implicitly "anti" gay marriage position: 0. (Don't take the over, unless you think there's a good chance someone on a blog I regularly read makes a fatuous comparison to Jim Crow laws.)
I'd been all set to fulminate against this misuse of poverty statistics, but Kerry Howley already said what I would have said.
Any suggestions for how to combat this? (Even excluding my bulk mail folder, this month I've seen a 20-fold increase in unsolicited messages per day and only about a five-fold increase in "real" e-mail. Most of the unsolicited are backscatter.)
Should I finally get around to filtering out any subject line like "Undeliverable Mail" or "Mail delivery failed" or such?
Apparently Indiana's voter ID law prevented 12 nuns from voting. Is this really the best that opponents of the law could muster?!
Oh, those poor nuns!
I realize (and often point out in various contexts!) that absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. But still, a thought experiment:
Which of these are you more likely to hear about, if true?
A. Someone was prevented from casting a legitimate vote.
B. Someone was prevented from casting a fraudulent vote.
Of the 28,000 commercial airline flights that take to the skies on an average day in the United States, fewer than 1 percent are protected by on-board, armed federal air marshals. [...] That means a terrorist or other criminal bent on taking over an aircraft would be confronted by a trained air marshal on as few as 280 daily flights[.] The Transportation Security Administration [...] said the 280 number "grossly understates coverage by an order of magnitude" and that the number is "four digits," but he would not elaborate.
--CNN (snipped to be more concise)
If "some four-digit number" of the 28,000 commercial airline flights has an air marshal then at most 35.7% of them do.
The discrepancy?
These sources say the marshal service considers a flight "covered" even if a marshal is not on board -- as long as a law enforcement officer or pilot in possession of a firearm is on board, even if that person is flying for personal reasons. The "covered" designation includes pilots armed in the cockpit.
The firearms training program for pilots is budgeted at $25 million. And while it is popular among airline pilots, many complain that they have to spend as much as $3,000 of their own money for lodging and meals when they take the course.
By comparison, the federal air marshal budget this year is $720 million.
Holy #&@*, where is all that money going?
1. Has anyone ever used PitchFix data (or the data Bill James charges you money for on his web site) to compare what "closers" throw in save situations versus non-save situations?
We hear all the time the meme that such players struggle when the game isn't in the line, and I wonder if it's just that they're taking the opportunity to tinker and test. I certainly would in their shoes.
2. We know that basketball teams tend to lose on the road. What statistical elements show the greatest disparity between road and home? If the biggest gaps included (for example) free throw attempts then a major explanation might be (for example) skewed officiating. So how do road teams compare to home teams for, among other things:
Shooting %?
Turnovers?
Offensive rebounds?
Defensive rebounds?
Free throw attempts?
Free throw %?
3-point attempts?
3-point %?
Shot clock violations?
(What would be the quickest, easiest way to test for home-cooked timekeeping?)
Can the home-road disparity be broken down further into how players perform by quarter?
Can you judge a man by the size of his cross?
Unlike a lot of baseball fans, especially in Ohio, I've always thought highly of you. So many times I'd just missed getting you in a fantasy baseball league.
Of course this is the year I finally landed you (on two teams!) and this is how you repay me? Feh.
(Yes, the 5th through 7th Google hits for that phrase are blogs; the other three of the top 10 are of course black-market lyric sites.)
Bay Area radio stations played these songs at the same time 15 minutes ago:
Cake - "Going the Distance"
Love & Rockets - "So Alive"
AC/DC - "It's A Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock N' Roll)"
Half-empty: Wish they'd spaced them out a little more, only caught the tail end of the latter two. Half-full: Great choices!
This weekend we walked around the Park Street Fair in Alameda. One of the booths was a wooden sign marker: "Signs Made in 10 Minutes or Less" was their tag line, as carved into one of their own signs. I was sorely tempted to order a "Signs Made in 9 Minutes or Less" sign just to see if it freaked them out.