"Many of you are probably aware that the Chinese are going to great lengths to organize fan cheering for the upcoming Olympics. The Peoples Republic of China can do flip card stunts with the best of them, but this is something different: a massed, coordinated infusion of pre-programmed good vibes.
[...]
This got me wondering what sort of cheers we would hear at baseball games if this procedure somehow made it to these shores and into the stadiums of our national game. How would cheers sound if they were coordinated and attitudinally adjusted to fit the Chinese model?"
--Jim Baker
Chad pointed out to me that one of them is astonishingly good advice:
To the pitcher trying to work his way out of a bases-loaded situation: "Your enemies are everywhere, but focus on the only one who can hurt you."
My perception of Chad's uncanny ability to be right about things is almost like an umpire's perception of Barry Bonds's or Frank Thomas's batting eye: His track record of correct judgment makes me unusually likely to trust his judgment, in particular to change my mind about some logistical decision based on his insight, so we have a virtuous(?) cycle where the fact that he's "shown me the light" in the past leaves me unusually open to his suggestion.
(Guaranteed accurate until the next time I change my mind, or election day itself, whichever comes first.)
Start with the Real Clear Politics map found here. Flip Virginia, Indiana, and New Hampshire over to McCain (right now Obama's poll numbers will be inflated because the Democratic primary has gotten more attention, though that effect should gradually recede) - election still goes to Obama.
And yes, I read fivethirtyeight.com when I think of it.
According to The Onion, accessories for [the 2006] Streisand farewell tour included 25-foot-long acrypc fingernails and James Bropn.
Two quote-of-the-year nominees to follow, brutally sarcastic, and consistent with my most fervent political beliefs.
It's also critical that you avoid the fatal mistake of getting creative and comparing people you don’t like to other evil dictators, such as Joseph Stalin or Fidel Castro. With few exceptions, white people are actually fond of almost any dictator not named Hitler, and your remark that "this is just like something Mao Zedong would do" will be met with blank stares and possible social alienation. This is because, with the exception of Hitler, oppressive dictators share a passion for many of the things white people love- such as universal health care, conspiracy theories, caring about poor people while being filthy rich, and cool hats. Stick to the script and compare things you don’t like to Hitler, and Hitler alone.
--a Stuff White People Like contest winner puts Godwin's Law to good use
Seriously, did we kick communism to the curb only to suddenly discover, centuries after the French, that a free market will attract (and benefit from!) suspiciously smart people in pinstriped suits who are using their money to − wait for it − make more money? "Speculators" provide crucial liquidity (which is marketese for "money with which to buy the stuff you want to sell"), and perform a valuable function in helping locate assets that are under- or over-valued. Even those nassty speculatorsses at the end of the real estate boom (the evil "flippers" mom told you about) did some good stuff: They allowed people to sell their houses at a tidy profit, and fixed up old properties in preparation for resales that maybe never came. Many gambled and won (as did the people who sold to them), many others gambled and lost (freeing up "winners" who will buy those properties at firesale prices). That's all kind of the point.
--Matt Welch, over at Reason
It works on so many levels:
Asked to explain his Red-hot start, Bruce said simply "Sample size."
--Sports Illustrated
(And indeed Jay Bruce's hot start didn't last long, but by the end of the year his total numbers will be fine.)
If you're wondering what new stories The Onion will post tomorrow, compare this list to what they've already posted this week.
UPDATE: Through Friday, we're still waiting on Closeted Father... and ...thinks he's still in the closet. I suspect carload of... won't make the cut because of the bad word, which is a shame given the real thrust of the article is the ignorant slack-jawed kids working the drive-through.
"What obligations does a city have to a team that is so often considered vital to the community? What obligations does a team have to a city from which it expects undying loyalty and frequent taxpayer support?"
--Caple, referring mainly to the Supersonics' (NBA) attempt to get out of Seattle.
The answer to the first question is almost blindingly simple (unless the city already has contractual obligations); the answer to the second depends on where goodwill fits into one's business model.
That's what they do in Atlanta these days.
Cows are funny.
(Animals in general are funny, if you didn't already know this from the deserved appeal of Get Fuzzy or Pearls Before Swine or Sherman's Lagoon (or the undeserved appeal of Garfield.)
(The part above the fold is just banter; the part below the fold is more serious.)
Waiting for my lasagna to heat up, I noticed that the snack basket had a small package of oyster crackers nestled amongst the chips. I poured the crackers into a paper cup, added some Cheez-Its, shook well, instant snack mix. But that's not the point.
Oyster crackers and Cheez-Its in the same cup reminded me of the old parable: Earlier this month I went to a time management session (I have yet to attempt to compute how many days (weeks?) of better time management it will take for me to enjoy a net "time profit" on the time investment of attending the session) where the instructor began with an anecdote, attributed to an English professor, of a container of large pebbles. "Is it full?" Yes. "Really?" [pour smaller pebbles into the container; they'll slip into crevices] - repeat these steps through grains of sand and finally water.
(This parable really originated with an ancient Greek thinker, no? I couldn't immediately confirm this with a web search.)
That's not to be confused with the story of a professor who mocks his student for believing that God was real, only for the student to turn around and mock the professor for believing that the concept of "cold" (versus hot) was real. A decent response paper assignment in a philosophy class would be for the students to improve on the hypothetical professor's weak sauce.
(Irrelevant aside: The author of the above link is a Mets fan whose call for Willie Randolph to be fired was published just a few hours before it actually happened.)
This led me to think about philosophy classes I'd actually taken, papers I'd actually written, and the disturbing premise behind my most memorable paper:
Most of the justifications for punishing a convicted criminal, even if they're logically sound to begin with, don't actually require that punishment be given to (or only to) people who are actually guilty.
Retribution arguments (or deterrence arguments for that matter) don't actually depend directly on punishing the guilty; rather, they depend on a universal good-faith belief that the guilty (and only the guilty) are punished. Obviously the best way to instill this belief is for it actually to be true -- but in theory it doesn't have to be true.
(A real-life example of this -- from years after I wrote the paper -- would be the Duke lacrosse rape suspects, if the general public had never learned how weak the case against them actually was. If the case hadn't so conspicuously unraveled then, regardless of whether they actually did it, I think many observers were so convinced that they did it that anything short of a harsh punishment (with or without formal conviction) would have been deeply unacceptable to those observers.)
Meanwhile, incarceration and rehabilitation are just methods to prevent future crimes. The fact that you have[n't] already committed a particular crime may be a strong signal that you [don't] need to be incarcerated, or rehabilitated, but other factors may predict just as strongly.
Here's the part that I fervently hope my paper conveyed (lest the TA mistake me for a monster): I don't like that the above statements seem to be true, and I certainly wouldn't advocate either show trials or preemptive punishment. But if we want to foreclose the possibility of show trials or preemptive punishment, then we need to present the reasons why the state punishes people a lot more rigorously than we typically present them.
We might also need to be more rigorous when we explain why certain practices would be obviously manifestly unjust as applied to the innocent (yet tolerable as applied to people found guilty of specific crimes).
(Or we could rely on a pragmatic, commonsense observation that the U.S. would never engage in particular practices that we intuitively think of as unjust... would it?!)
...is that garbage-time blowouts distort them.
Dayn Perry touches on a caveat to the Oakland A's 2008 season, distinguishing between the Oakland and Anaheim records in 1-run and 2-run games, but the real reason A's have an inflated run differential:
13-2
11-2
14-2
15-1
(admittedly there's also a 0-12 floating in there)
I wonder whether projections would be more accurate if blowouts were capped to something like a seven-run margin.
See also Matt Welch's rebuttal to a similar piece predicting doom for the Angels.
"According to the PECOTA-Adjusted Playoff Odds Report, Oakland has a robust 63.4 percent chance of making the postseason. By comparison the Angels have just a 36.5 percent chance of making it. That's a function of Oakland's significantly better run differential. As for the divide between run margin and record, the usual explanations seem not to apply. Usually such discrepancies are traceable back to each team's record in one-run games, but the A's are 10-10 in one-run affairs, and the Angels are 13-9. That's a difference, but not a big one. Two-run games? In those, the A's are 6-10, but the Angels are a whopping 17-4. Is such a disparity in two-run records mostly a function of luck, as we've come to believe about one-run records? Or is it indicative of a skill? The logic of scale suggests that it's more of a skill than one-run outcomes, but measurably less than records in five-run games. Color me flummoxed."
Another WNBA player dunked a basketball during a game.
Meanwhile, the Olympic soccer team includes the goalie who was ostracized for complaining about being benched in the World Cup semifinal, and does not include the beloved veteran who allowed four goals in that game. No word on whether the teammates are [still] friends with either or both goalies.
I moderately enjoy some womens' sports leagues, but the kind of press coverage they often get really doesn't help any particular cause.
(By contrast, I think men complain about being benched about as often as they dunk basketballs, and with about as much news value attached.)
1. When Reining In an Imperial President Was the Conservatives' Cause
--headline on a sidebar article accompanying "The Executive Power Awaiting the Next President."
They could have just as easily titled that article When the Imperial Presidency Was the Liberals' Cause. (Along those lines, it's always amusing to count, in NYT headlines, how frequently Republicans "attack" while Democrats merely "criticize.")
2. "Since both [a story about Syria's nuclear program and a human interest story about a wedding] are given equal weight, it can be hard to separate out the pain of one family from the strategic needs of the state. This makes it challenging for Israelis to step back far enough to gain a view of what is happening."
Do I misunderstand that passage or did the author just insult (by patronizing) an entire nation, (most of whom I suspect are at least as good at geopolitical analysis as the author himself), based entirely on overgeneralizing from 20 minutes of radio listening?
BONUS IRE: An editorial cartoon on page 2 makes fun of George Bush's hypothetical reaction to learning that off-shore drilling would take over a decade. Guess what, folks? If we had our act together a decade ago, guess what we'd have now?
I think we should all bow to the superior intellect of the cartoonist and then sit on our butts and wait for some other solution. Then, gosh, do you think we'll still have an energy crisis ten years from now? Do you think, maybe just maybe, we'll wish then that we'd made it legal to started drilling now?
DOUBLE-BONUS IRE: Thomas Friedman insults me personally (and humanity in general) when he compares energy consumption to drug addiction. Would it not be just as apt to call ourselves "addicted to" economic progress and affluence?
Meanwhile, the "Battleground" (back page) columns aren't insufferable so much as inane.
No Limit hold 'em poker to benefit the Oakland A's community fund. 64(?) players initially (in any case eight tables generally eight players) at 1500 chips, now down to four tables of 6-7 per table. The final eight would each get an autographed baseball*; the final four would each get something in envelopes(seemed to be tickets, not cash).
*- Two particular autographed baseballs had been auctioned separately and went for $200-250, but I think those were Dennis Eckersley level of fame and I didn't catch who the poker award winner autographs were from.
Blinds at 200-400, Hero started the hand with 4500 in the SB. A shortish stack limped, the table's big stack (just over 7K) limped, two people folded, Hero picked up A6o and pushed, BB and first limper folded, second limper asked for a chip count.
Getting 57 to 41 he called with JTo. By pure chip EV it's (narrowly) the right call for the range he should expect from a SB push. (It didn't occur to me to try to give off a tell of having a monster hand; I probably couldn't reliably pull that off anyway.) Tournament EV, on the other hand... see post title.
Oh anyway the point of the story, a jack rivered. For analysis purposes it doesn't matter which of the five cards was a jack, but in real life chronology after the four that weren't... oh well, handshake, nice hand, good luck, etc.