The Day in Web

Greg Wyshinski's line, "... like a Weeble dropped on a trampoline ..." wins the line-of-the-day award, and possibly for the week. I wasn't thinking about Weebles or trampolines until I read his Puck Daddy column this morning, and now dropping Weebles on a trampoline is all I wanna do. Now if only I had the Weebles. Or the trampoline ...

Last month I wrote about sports storylines I was following. Among them was the growing hockey rivalry between Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin. Well, they are meeting head-to-head in the Eastern Conference semifinals and Igloo Dreams has a writeup of tonight's winner-take-all Game 7.

As the (apparent) worst of our little financial correction recedes into the rear-view mirror, the Wall Street Journal reports($) that Congress is thinking of getting involved in how banks compensate their executives. The problems with this are too long to list in depth here, but the most important one is the same as with all government involvement: The government is rarely both objective and competent. People often think of government as an unbiased arbiter, but, at least in a democracy, government officials respond to their own incentives and pressures and "objectivity" gets left by the door in the rush to reward political friends and punish political enemies. And even when they are being unbiased and are sincerely looking for the best courses of action available, they too often lack the expertise to know what they're doing. Would you want Congress setting your pay?

Libertarian Alert!

OK, so it's not millions of people massing in the streets, but each time we get articles like this, America gets a little bit closer to ending the lunacy that is the War on Drugs and becoming a freer, more moral society in the process.

I'm lukewarm, for what it's worth, about the good-for-the-economy argument. It is valid and makes a lot of sense, but I would prefer if more people took heed of the immoral nature of denying reasonable, consenting adults their right to feel pleasure however they see fit as long as they aren't tangibly and directly hurting other people.

Random Brain Leakage

On the mental radio: Village People's "In the Navy".

Future for a Friday, Gird-Yourself-America, Edition

Louisiana state senator Danny Martiny (R) is sponsoring a bill that would ban human-animal hybrids. As a transhumanist, I say we might as well have this fight now, because the expanding/evolving definition of "human" and what that definition means to "human rights", citizenship, etc., will be THE defining domestic-policy dispute of the 21st century.

Those who wish to remain politically aware, active, and relevant in the coming decades would do well to start brushing up on this now.

200 Reasons I Love Sports (200-191)

I love sports because ...

200. The 2009 NBA Eastern Conference semi-finals. The East has three good teams: Cleveland, Boston, and Orlando are all legitimate contender for the world's title, but only two of the three can reach the East final. Most likely scenario has Boston and the Magic playing each other for the right to face LeBron and the Cavs.
199. Gump Worsley. The world needs more Gump Worsley
198. There's a new event very nearly every night.
197. Major-league baseball's All-Star Game. I kvetch about it every year. It's a waste of time. It disrupts the pennant races. No one takes it seriously. Then each year I watch it.
196. Ditto the NBA's All-Star Game, to a lesser degree
195. Kvetching about the NFL's Pro Bowl and then *not* watching it.
194. Super Bowl parties
193. Not attending Super Bowl parties and instead focusing on the game.
192. Bunting on the stadium stands during baseball's postseason games.
191. The tension before the puck drops at the beginning of a rivalry hockey game

And Kentucky's Election Thieves Win the Prize

... for being the first, presumably, to commit documented voting-machine fraud. Congratulations!

The fraud is actually kinda slick and exploits two key points of weakness: a difference between what the printed instructions say and what the system actually does, and people's unfamiliarity with a system they use maybe once or twice a year, a system of which they have no real under-the-hood understanding. The gist of the attack was this:

1) There are different types of voting machines used by the same vendor. Some of the machines, manufactured by Omaha-based Election Systems & Software, use the "cast vote" button as the last step in the process. Other machines of the same model family (the "iVotronic") use "cast vote" as the second to last step in the process. In these machines, which were used in the fraud, the cast-vote button prompts the user to confirm.

2) The documented instructions for the second group of machines was written for the first group. The written instructions voters saw told them that cast-vote was the final step, even though it wasn't.

3) It was an inside job. After the voter pressed the cast-vote button -- which they were explicitly told by both the machine's written instructions and by in-on-the-scam polling-place officials was the last thing they needed to do -- but left before pressing confirm, a polling-place worker slipped into the booth, "corrected", shall we say, the ballot, and then confirmed, making the worker's vote the official vote recorded by the system.

There is one way, and only one way to do electronic-voting right: The voter MUST leave with a hard-copy receipt of their vote. That, of course, doesn't matter if voters are told by corrupt officials that they don't need receipts or that the machine doesn't give them. But keeping people inside the system from subverting the system is the eternal challenge of security, and the receipt system requires that *all* workers of a given polling place be in on it. If only one non-rogue worker tells voters to not leave without their receipt, then this fraud cannot take place.

Fourth Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest

Security guru Bruce Schneier is hosting his annual contest for people to submit their best "movie plot" terrorism threats. It is Schneier's belief that security measures built to defend against very specific threats (say, a bomb in a shoe) are destined to fail and are often used only to scare people. I'll let him explain the contest. From his newsletter:

Let's face it, the War on Terror is a tired brand. There just isn't enough action out there to scare people. If this keeps up, people will forget to be scared. And then both the terrorists and the terror-industrial complex lose. We can't have that.

We're going to help revive the fear. There's plenty to be scared about, if only people would just think about it in the right way. In this Fourth Movie-Plot Threat Contest, the object is to find an existing event somewhere in the industrialized world -- Third World events are just too easy -- and provide a conspiracy theory to explain how the terrorists were really responsible.

The goal here is to be outlandish but plausible, ridiculous but possible, and -- if it were only true -- terrifying. Entries should be formatted as a news story, and are limited to 150 words (I'm going to check this time) because fear needs to be instilled in a population with short attention spans.

Well, we can't very well have people walking around in states of non-fear. That just won't do at all.

If you're of an imaginative and scary mind, submit your entry here. Tips on how to write a good terrorism story can be found here

Matthew Yglesias, Meet Idiocy. Idiocy, Matt

The normally-lucide Matthew (don't call him Matt) Yglesias posts this humdinger of a travashamockery at his ThinkPress blog. His core argument:

Now there’s a decent argument out there, familiar from Adam Smith and the whole tradition of economics, that a world full of greedy people isn’t necessarily quite the disaster that pre-modern ethical thinkers would have thought. This is all well and good. True even. But it’s a sign, I think, of a kind of sickness running through American society that we’ve lost the willingness to just say clearly that ceteris paribus greedy behavior is not virtuous behavior.

If that's not explicit enough, there's this:

... the best people are people who aren’t primarily driven by greed.

Fairly takes your breath away, this example of high-octane horseshit.

The view that greed and attempts to satisfy it are in and of themselves is common, but its commonness doesn't make it any more correct. To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke's classic line, the entrepreneur who makes $500,000 a year and pays, say, $100,000 in taxes does massively more social good than the hippy tree-hugger who prattles on about the spiritual emptiness of consumerism, and -- this is the important part -- this remains true even if his primary or even sole motivation for running his business is making more money only for the sake of making more money. The beauty of capitalism is that, in a properly-functioning market, it harnesses people's natural greed and drives them to contribute more to the community welfare by providing goods and services that people want to buy out of the belief (possibly erroneous, but that often is a judgment others are not in a position to make) that those goods and services will make their lives better. Consider your favorite locally-owned restaurant. Does the proprietor care more about running a successful business or providing to the community? If it's the latter, why is he or she selling food at even one thin dime above cost? And if it's the former -- even if the proprietor cares *only* about turning a profit and maximizing that profit -- does that make the food taste any less good?

Note that I am not endorsing greed at the expense of others. When people satisfy their greed by extracting instead of creating value -- and the overheated housing market had plenty of these folk, people who could not have looked themselves in the mirror -- then that is wrong. But the problem there is usually dysfunctional or deeply asymmetrical markets and the solution is finding ways to make those markets function better. Two of the more reliable if not infallible ways of that are education and increased transparency. Demonizing those who provide good things to the rest of us with no concern for the rest of us gets us nowhere.

Viva la Revolucion!

Glory be! ESPN is using OPS (the sum of a batter's on-base and slugging averages) on its baseball telecasts! Even better, they're rolling out the stat the way a "new" stat (forget that OPS has been around since forever -- I myself figured it out preparing for a table-game draft in 1989 -- and has since been supplanted by OPS+, VORP, and others, it's new to the mainstream) should be rolled out: By providing context. Underneath each hitter's stat line is the league average OPS, instantly giving the viewer a standard by which to judge good from bad.

The sabermetric revolution continues to roll.

Sports Storylines, cont.

I mentioned yesterday that some of my springtime will be spent watching the Montreal/Boston NHL playoff series. This is provided, of course, that watching Habs/Bruins doesn't keep me from following the individual derring-do of Pittsburgh's Sidney Crosby and Washington's Alexander Ovechkin. Sid the Kid and the Great Eight are nearly polar opposites, the former is a sweetly-skating center, the latter an explosive left wing. Crosby is as deft a passer as there is in the world, the powerful Ovechkin scores goals as relentlessly as the tide, leading the league in goals two years running. Crosby is quiet and unassuming, Ovechkin brash and demonstrative. Crosby, a twenty-one-year-old Nova Scotian, has experienced team-level success that has to date alluded his twenty-three-year-old Russian counterpart, having led, along with fellow superstar teammate Evgeni (pronounced "Ev-GHE-nee") Malkin, the Penguins to the Stanley Cup Finals a year ago, while Ovechkin has yet to carry the Capitals, similarly laden with talent, past the first round.

The NFL Draft. Will the Lions take yet another wide receiver with a premium draft pick? They have the chance with Texas Tech stud Michael Crabtree sitting there. Do they take Jawja's imposing but scatter-armed Matt Stafford? Does Baylor offensive tackle Jason Smith go in the top five and in doing so remind NFL fans that Baylor does in fact still have a football program? Where does Alabama's Andre Smith go after being kicked off the team prior to the Sugar Bowl for unnamed rules violations and then disappointing everyone with a who-cares approach to the Combine? Where does Missouri's mighty midget Jeremy Maclin fall? His dazzling speed and breathtaking open-field skills are in a package that would fit under a Christmas tree. Will a team use a premium pick to draft a guy who might be only a third-down back and kick returner? And once in the lineup, will he be the game-breaker Reggie Bush has failed to be?

Mathematical Elimination Fever! The Pittsburgh Pirates, who proudly wear the crown of Team Chrisopher Will Follow (in this they follow the 2003 Red Sox and 2006 Rays), are gunning to avoid their 17th successive losing season, a mark that would break the all-time record held by the 1933-1948 Philadelphia Phillies. The Pirates, who began play in 1882, are about 700 games up on the Phils in the All-Time Battle for Pennsylvania, so they shouldn't be too concerned about finishing four to ten games under .500, as is their destiny with this group. Good chance they get off the losing-season shnide in 2010.

Keeping with that theme: The Atlanta Braves, who opened for business back in Boston as a charter member of the National League in 1876, start the season with an all-time record of 9,772 wins and 9,808 losses, a mark 36 games under .500. A 99-63 record this year puts their 133-year mark exactly at break-even. Even for a good Braves club, 99 wins are a bit of a stretch this year, especially given the competition in the NL East, but it's fun to think about.

The Ascension of LeBron. The world's greatest basketball player continues his ascent into Global Icon status as Cleveland takes its best-in-the-NBA record into the playoffs. This is the first year that I can see that the Cavaliers have entered postseason as the league's #1 team, and the 6-foot-8, 255-pound James is clearly its best player. The NBA title has a long history of going to the team with the best individual player, and James by himself makes the Cavs the team to beat and end Cleveland's 44-year world's-championship drought; no Cleveland team in any sport has won its league's ultimate title since the 1964 Browns won the NFL championship. That dry spell ends here and now. The Cavaliers will win the NBA Finals.

So let it be done.

Spring is in the Air, and a Soon-to-be Middle-Aged Man's Fancy Turns to Thoughts of Sport.

It's April. Spring is officially in all its glory, America's most majestic sport, major-league baseball, is in full swing, the spring somnolence that is the overly hyped manufactured drama of the NCAA basketball tournament is behind us, the National Hockey League drops the puck on its 2009 playoffs on Tuesday, and the NBA starts its postseason this weekend. And don't get me started on how beautiful Augusta National looks in hi-def. This is the first time I have had the pleasure of watching the Masters on the big-penis Samsung I bought in August and Augusta's azaleas, against the backdrop of all that green, is hypnotic in its beauty.

Storylines I'll be following for the next few weeks:

The Hornets' playoff run. After dispatching the Dallas Mavericks 102-92 today to go one game up on the Mavs with two to play for the sixth position in the Western Conference, the Hornets look like they'll be playing either Houston or Portland in the quarterfinals when the playoffs start next weekend. I don't really know who's the better matchup. They are about equal as teams, each with a good big man. The Rockets have more experience, Portland has more depth. "Age and experience trump young talent" is one of those adages that float through every sport with very little to back it up; if anything, in most sports the evidence runs counter. But the NBA is the one league where experience seems to matter most, so the Hornets might be better off taking the puppy-young Trail Blazers. Whhoooooo!

Hockey's rivalries continue. One of the most heated rivalries in any sport pours gas on the fire when the Montreal Canadiens and the Boston Bruins meet in the NHL's first round. The Bruins, in their best season in thirty-five years, were the best team in the East during the regular season, earning 113 of 164 standings points (the NHL awards two points for a win, one for a game lost in overtime), compared to Montreal's 93. The Canadiens are celebrating their centennial season but finished the regular year a disappointing eighth in the East after being a pre-season favorite to challenge for the Stanley Cup. Games between these two are among the most physical in hockey and I plan on not missing a minute.

More tomorrow ...

Somewhere, Naomi Klein and Thomas Frank Die a Little Inside

Will Wilkinson has a column in which he basically states that societies that rely heavily on government are screwed. The argument, which intuitively sounds pitch-perfect, is that in a society where people trust each other and are willing to set aside (if only briefly) their own immediate-term wants to focus (if only briefly) on the common good, government, for those reasons, is likely to function efficiently. Of course, in such a society government is likely to be less needed, since people are solving common-good problems on their own (Wilkinson: "Voluntary civil society associations will thrive"). By contrast, in a place where people do not trust each other and societal needs are abandoned while each chases his or her own at the expense of others, strong government agencies and programs are needed to keep things from devolving into chaos. But those are exactly the type of societies in which government is most likely to be inefficient at best, corrupt and focused on advancing its own interests at worst.

The way around this is not focusing on better government programs, but on increasing the level of trust people have to the other people and institutions within the society. This both improves the quality of and lessens the need for activist government. The Burning Man culture is a good example of this in action.

I'm not really aware of empirical evidence backing this claim (though BM does make a good datum for the argument), but, again, it's one that I find intuitively senseful.

Climate Engineering

To the degree that climate change is harmful, this is the kind of thing that will allow us to escape or mitigate the damage, not useless attempts at conservation that are often thinly-disguised attacks on modern consumerist culture.

The Funniest Thing I'll Read Today

South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker get a signed photo of Saddam Hussein from the Marines. Turns out that the USMC made Hussein watch the SP movie during his captivity. The dictator was depicted in the movie as being Satan's boyfriend.

Bringing the Badness

Oh, sweet baby jane are the Houston Astros going to be bad.

I know that they won yesterday, beating Chicago 3-2 in a ten-inning affair. I know that they have two of the game's brighter stars in Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt. I know that they have a successful recent history, with only two losing seasons in the past seventeen years. I know that an NL championship trophy from 2005 shines in their trophy case.

But oh, are they going to be bad.

Forget that they are trotting out as their third baseman 35-year-old Geoff Blum, whose .700 career OPS is about fifty points below the norm for his position. Forget that the starting pitching rotation was patched together with Elmer's glue. Focus on one thing: Houston has played two games in 2009, and in each manager Cecil Cooper has chosen to bat Pudge Rodriguez second.

Rodriguez is finishing off a remarkable career. He once possessed a breathtakingly broad skill set, highlighted by his legendary throwing arm a catlike quickness behind the plate. Even at his best, however, Pudge was a poor choice for the second spot in the batting order. His awful ratio of double plays to walks drawn was always better suited for the fifth or sixth hole, and that ratio has only grown uglier with time. That Cooper cannot see this is by itself evidence that he is incapable of effectively running a major-league team. Couple that level of boss's-chair incompetence with a roster that swamps its only two bright lights with flotsam, and even a .500 record is a pipe dream.

Astros fans, you are headed towards a bright light. That light is an onrushing train.

Dynasties

Neil Paine, whose name would be a thousand times cooler if he would drop the training "e", has at the invaluable Basketball Reference site a good post on the NBA's dyansty teams. Good stuff, but one thing, Neil: This lives in Laker lore as the "Baby Sky Hook", not the "Junior Sky Hook."

Carry on.

The Hacker Culture

Every so often I stumble across something, even something originally written several years ago, that makes me re-question where I belong on a variety of intellectual/philosophical/political spectra.

It's quite long, but still worth reading.

Cars, Fars, Bars, and Tars!

Obama, yesterday: "We cannot, we must not, and we will not let our auto industry simply vanish."

Why not?

Seriously, why not? If other organizations can make cars better or more efficiently or with higher quality than we are willing to, why don't we just let them do it and focus our energies elsewhere? Repeat after me: America does not need a domestic auto industry. America does not need a domestic auto industry. America does not need a domestic auto --

The colors! Oh man, the colors!

Cryonics

Is there a better first-date conversation?

No, thinks I.

Below is a comment I posted to the above-linked Daily Mail article; it's my standard boilerplate, but it is, I think, quite effective in rebutting many of the objections listed by some of the less-informed people populating the thread:

Objections to cryonics normally follow one of four paths: 1) Revival is technologically unfeasible; 2) It is immoral; 3) One life should be plenty enough and only a fool would want a "second" one; 4) It's all a scam.

Rebuttals: 1) Undeniably true now and for the immediate future, but progressively less so the further into the future one imagines. Everything said about cryonics' unfeasibility were also said for tens of thousands of years about flight; 2) If morality demands we all expire at our appointed times, why bother with even CPR or other proven life-extension methods? 3) True enough for some, much less so for those who constantly marvel at and revel in the wonder of life, and cannot imagine having too much of it; 4) Some organizations are less scrupulous than others, but most of the biggies, like CI and Alcor, have sterling track records and reputations.

I have been interested in and debating cryonics for over a decade since first picking up James L. Halperin's The First Immortal in an airport bookstore, and I have yet to hear convincing counter-rebuttals.

Freedom and the Future for a Friday

... And you can have it in any color you like, so long as it isn't black.

Actually, it isn't *quite* as bad as it sounds. California's Air Resources Board -- because air must be parceled out according to bureaucratic diktat -- is not outlawing black cars but is rather mandating "solar reflectivity" levels that represent a tough row to hoe for less-reflective black. So, in an attempt to appease CARB, the paint people have been tinkering with the chemistry to find blacks that reflect more light and to date have produced nothing more striking than "mud-puddle brown".

RIP, John Brittain, 1965-2009

We lost yesterday one of the funniest men to ever write about baseball, John Brittain. As of now, there are close to 600 comments on the Baseball Primer thread regarding his passing, probably ninety-five per cent of which are from people who never met him, yet feel a sense of loss and will for a while. If nothing else, that speaks to the power of the Internet's ability to bring together people (which has been remarked upon many multiples of millions of times) and to the wit and wisdom of John's writing (which cannot be remarked upon enough).

His last article was published on The Hardball Times site only last week. Fittingly, it covered John's favorite team, the Toronto Blue Jays.

The writing world is a little less full today.

RIP, John, you socially-unacceptable thing, you.

Future for a Friday (4 days early or 3 days late)

Interesting. If nothing else, it would be an incredible safety boon to people living alone.

Less interesting, to the point of being tiresomely stupid, is the idea that such a technology is "silly", because people shouldn't be trying to reduce or eliminate risk from their lives and should instead focus on living it. My response to this idiocy is to point out that, firstly and most importantly, monitor != protect. Nothing inherent about such tools prevents people from living their lives to the fullest; if anything, the opposite might be true (this is beside the point, but to argue otherwise is to argue that more information is predominantly harmful, a stance I reject outright). Secondly, who the hell are these people to tell other people what "living" is? For some people, reducing risk and staying safe is a perfectly wonderful way to live their lives.

Meet the New Boss ...

... same as the old boss.

Yes, you have indeed been fooled again.

Related: FSF amicus brief; Obama, Biden, and the RIAA

Because When I Speak, Vegas Listens

Last week I noted that betting even money on the Yankees to win fewer than 95 games was a license to steal money. The bookmakers have agreed: SportsBook.com now has New York's over/under down from 95.5 wins to 94.5 and the price has gone from even to -115 ($115 wager pays $100).

I graciously accept the title of most influential person in Las Vegas, and will wield my power wisely.

Yanks under 94.5 at -115 is still a decent bet, if not the print-money deal it was a week ago. There's some real risk in that lineup; Derek Jeter will be 35 in June, can no longer play anything more than a passible shortstop (if that), has lost his power (after belting 150-200 points of isolated slugging at his peak, he was at 108 last year), and is little more than an average player. They're paying A.J. Burnett for five seasons' worth of Cy Young-caliber pitching when he's really had only three good years in his whole career. They need C.C. Sabathia to not develop his own gravitational pull. Throw in the age in the outfield, their not having a decent backup behind Jorge Posada ... there's a lot of risk here. Plus the competition from the Red Sox and defending champion Rays will be just brutal, Toronto still has one of the better run-prevention teams in baseball, and Baltimore will be ushering in the Era of Matt Wieters, who will one day rule all he surveys. I see New York as more of a high-80s team with 92- 93-win upside, maybe a 30-35% chance of getting to 95 ... at -115 you need about a 53% probability to break even, so under-94.5 is still playable.

If gambling were legal, of course.

EDIT: 3/23/2009 - I mentioned at the top that "Yankees to win fewer than 95 games" was the original bet. The original bet was actually Yankees to win fewer than 96 games, since the over/under was 95.5 -- LCL

Humans >> Chimpanzees

This Megan McArdle post is more about the hazards of predicting the future and the extent to which our liberties-protecting and -enhancing economy relies on those predictions, but what caught my eye was this part:

In some sense, all of history's progress from lives that were nasty, brutish and short to today's splendiferous buffet of iPhones, nine-month courses of physical therapy, and year-round fresh broccoli can be summed up in three words: gains from trade. We live better than a tribe of chimpanzees roaming through the primordial forest because we specialize and then exchange the fruits of our skills with each other. Trade, as the ecoomists say, increases the size of the economic pie to be divided between us.

I will leave it to the reader to decide whether year-round fresh broccoli really qualifies as a societal advance, but that's neither here nor there. What matters is the importance of trade and, more specifically, *trade based on specialized skills*. You do what you're good at and don't waste time doing what you're not good at. I do what I'm good at and let others do what I'm not good at. Then we all trade what we have produced with those skills. It's really quite communitarian when you think about it (the communitarian-boosting effects of capitalism clearly exceed those of explicitly-communitarian "isms" like socialism and communism, though, again, that's neither here nor there). Keep that in mind the next time someone espouses the spiritual goodness of self-reliance, etc., and other such claptrap.

Aaaaannnd ... It's Official

Florida is left out of the NCAA basketball tournament for the second year running. Actually, a more accurate statement would be that Florida PLAYED ITSELF OUT of the NCAA basketball tournament for the second year running. Ken Pomeroy's ratings have them as the 44th-best team in Division I when there are only 34 at-large spots. Defensively, Pomeroy has the UF rated 88th, giving up 63.2 points per 65 possessions when adjusting for quality of opponents (the top teams are normally well under 60), and they lost 10 of their 32 games despite playing a shamefully-putrid schedule: 292nd out of 344 by Pomeroy's numbers. Part of this was the decline of the Southeast Conference as a whole. Strength-of-schedule rankings are not unlike house prices; what your neighbors are doing matters, and Florida's in-conference neighbors were so weak that the league finished dead last among the six major conferences. And even surrounded by po' folks, the Gators couldn't crack the SEC's top five, finishing tied for fifth at 9-7 with a Mississippi State team that a) beat them head-to-head and b) won the SEC tournament when UF was bounced in the second round. So call them sixth in the weakest SEC in years.

So .. 44th overall, 88th in defense, 292nd in schedule, and sixth in the number-six major conference. Is this deserving of a bid to the national championship tournament? Lessee ... Pomeroy's #44 teams the past three years:

2008 -- Missouri. They missed the tournament (but were much better than Florida '09 at the defensive end, ranking 70th) and played a vastly tougher schedule: The Big 12 was the nation's toughest that year, and Mizzou's 180th-ranked non-conference schedule was *112 spots better than UF's this year*.

2007 -- Boston College. The Eagles were invited as a 7th seed, but played the #117 non-conference schedule and were fourth in the ACC, the nation's toughest league. BC fell in the second round to Georgetown

2006 -- Air Force. A 13th-seed invite that was 24-6 and lost its first-round NCAA game to Illinois.

The number-six teams in the number-six major conferences the last three years:

2008 -- Wait, that was Florida again, finishing sixth in the number-six SEC (two years straight the SEC has been the weakest of the power six). They missed the tournament.

2007 -- Missouri from the Big 12. They missed the tournament.

2006 -- Nebraska from the Big 12. They missed the tournament. Let's just run this back a bit farther.

2005 -- Arizona State from the Pac 10. They missed the tournament.

2004 -- Southern California from the Pac 10 (which was actually the number-eight league that year, ranking below the Mountain West and Conference USA). Guess what. They missed the tournament.

2003 -- Southern California from the Pac 10. And the beat goes on.

2002 -- Syracuse from the Big East. One of the very few seasons that Jim Boeheim's Orangemen were denied a chance to dance.

2001 -- Ah, never mind.

The lesson here is pretty simple: When you're conference is the weakest of the six majors, you had better crack that league's top five to have even a prayer of being in the conversations when ESPN's herd of talking baboons surrounds Jay Bilas and pontificates on the selection committee's choices and snubs. Two straight years now, the Gators have been unable to do that.

Damn.

Auburn 61 Florida 58

Quentez Robinson blocked Walter Hodge's three-point shot as the buzzer sounded to seal Auburn's win over Florida in the second round of the SEC basketball tournament. The loss cements UF's disappointing finish; after winning their first five conference games, the Gators dropped eight of their remaining thirteen in a six-week spasm of rotten play that was reminiscent of their 3-7 falloff to close last season.

This is Florida's second consecutive miss-out on the Big Dance that is the NCAA tournament after having their ticket punched nine years running from 1999 through 2007, closing that run with national championships in '06 and '07.

Does coach Billy Donovan find his seat a bit warmer? Probably not, or at least he should not. I am a big believer in Bill "the Sports Guy" Simmons's rule regarding five-year grace periods (see rule #12), and after back-to-back banners, Donovan could coast for another four or five years and still be deserving of having his name grace the O'Connell Center's hardwood floor. But there's no getting around the fact that too many of the Gators' losses over these two often heart-wrenching seasons are attributable to factors most people associate with poor coaching: Missing late-game free throws and not having someone get back for transition defense, which cost UF a shoulda-been-a-win game against South Carolina ... turnovers ... blown defensive assignments ... and, finally, putting the season-deciding shot in the hands of Hodge, a bit player for most of his first three years and not a light-it-up scorer as a senior (although, in fairness, he did hit a three on the prior possession to keep Florida within striking distance) when Nick Calathes, Dan Werner, and Erving Walker are all equally good or better from three-ball land. Florida was second to league-champion LSU in per-possession point margin, outscoring its opponents by 4.55 points per 65 possessions and was first in offense at 71.5 points per 65 possessions, yet will miss the tournament. Some of this hangs on the middle-aged man with the suit and clipboard -- and the $2.5 million salary.

The SEC tourney continues tomorrow with LSU playing Mississippi State and Tennessee squaring off with Auburn, with the winners playing in Sunday's final, but who the hell cares?

Florida is going to the NIT. Again. Oh, the ignomy.

Freedom for a Friday

Preach on, Brother Bill! I could not agree more with this, and think that it will eventually be ... well, "downfall" is too strong a word, but the closed nature of the iPhone is going to bleed Apple's market share, with Google's Gx phones, based on the company's open-source Android operating system, being the primary beneficiaries.

Think about it this way ... Apple's iPhone is more closed than any OS Microsoft has ever released. When was the last time an MS operating system would run only programs either developed by or expressly approved by Microsoft? Yet that is exactly what Apple has chosen to do. And the company will suffer for it, and rightfully so.

What I'm Watching Tonight

Main Event

SEC Basketball Tournament: Florida/Arkansas, 8:45

The Gators need to win three straight conference-tournament games to avoid missing the NCAA tournament for the second straight year. Given that a team cannot win three without first winning one, beating Arkansas is critical.

Appetizers

NBA on TNT

TNT's Thursday-night pro-hoop doubleheader consistently offers one of the most entertaining five-hour blocks on TV. Tonight it's Lakers at Spurs (important for the Hornets, who trail San Antonio by three games in the Southwest division) followed by Cavaliers at Suns. Anyone who misses a chance to see LeBron James should have their televisions taken away. James is having a season that wouldn't look out of place in Michael Jordan's career. And he's only 24.

Keeping an eye on ...

NHL - Pittsburgh Penguins at Columbus Blue Jackets

Pittsburgh is a game ahead of Columbus for sixth in the East, a spot it needs to maintain to avoid having to face juggernaut Boston in the first two rounds of the playoffs, plus the Pens have two of hockey's most exciting players in Sidney Crosby and Evgeny Melkin.

NHL - Calgary Flames at Detroit Red Wings

A likely preview of the Western Conference semifinals.

Make! Money!! Now!!!

The Dow has lost most of its gains from the past ten years. Jim Cramer is waving his arms on CNBC's Mad Money, saying that while there's always a bull market somewhere, he can't find it here. Many workers' 401(k) accounts have been wiped clean. And in the cruelest of fates, some people "were good friends" with Bernie Madoff. In such uncertain times, how does one grow wealth?

The award-winning^* staff at Diamonds & Emeralds is here to provide you with the answer. The surest way to make money in 2009 would be to bet on the New York Yankees' winning fewer than 96 games this year. Or it would be if gambling were not illegal.

Whatever.

Here are the MLB over/unders for regular season wins, as posted by SportsBook.com. The minus-sign number in parenthesis represents the amount needed to risk to win $100 (the rare plus-sign number denotes how much the better stands to win with a $100 bet)

Toronto Blue Jays
Over 79.5 (-105)
Under 79.5 (-125)

Texas Rangers
Over 73.5 (-130)
Under 73.5 (even)

Arizona Diamondbacks
Over 86.5 (-115)
Under 86.5 (-115)

Atlanta Braves
Over 84.5 (-115)
Under 84.5 (-115)

Baltimore Orioles
Over 72.5 (-105)
Under 72.5 (-125)

Boston Red Sox
Over 93.5 (-130)
Under 93.5 (even)

Chicago Cubs
Over 91.5 (-115)
Under 91.5 (-115)

Chicago White Sox
Over 78.5 (-115)
Under 78.5 (-115)

Cincinnati Reds
Over 80.5 (-115)
Under 80.5 (-115)

Cleveland Indians
Over 85.5 (-115)
Under 85.5 (-115)

Colorado Rockies
Over 77.5 (-115)
Under 77.5 (-115)

Detroit Tigers
Over 81.5 (-115)
Under 81.5 (-115)

Florida Marlins
Over 76.5 (-115)
Under 76.5 (-115)

Houston Astros
Over 73.5 (+105)
Under 73.5 (-135)

Kansas City Royals
Over 75.5 (-105)
Under 75.5 (-125)

Los Angeles Angels
Over 87.5 (-130)
Under 87.5 (even)

Los Angeles Dodgers
Over 82.5 (-150)
Under 82.5 (+120)

Milwaukee Brewers
Over 80.5 (-115)
Under 80.5 (-115)

Minnesota Twins
Over 83.5 (-115)
Under 83.5 (-115)

New York Mets
Over 89.5 (-115)
Under 89.5 (-115)

New York Yankees
Over 95.5 (-130)
Under 95.5 (even)

Oakland Athletics
Over 82.5 (-105)
Under 82.5 (-125)

Philadelphia Phillies
Over 88.5 (-115)
Under 88.5 (-115)

Pittsburgh Pirates
Over 69.5 (-115)
Under 69.5 (-115)

San Diego Padres
Over 71.5 (-115)
Under 71.5 (-115)

San Francisco Giants
Over 80.5 (-115)
Under 80.5 (-115)

Seattle Mariners
Over 72.5 (-115)
Under 72.5 (-115)

St Louis Cardinals
Over 82.5 (-115)
Under 82.5 (-115)

Tampa Bay Rays
Over 88.5 (-130)
Under 88.5 (even)

Washington Nationals
Over 73.5 (+105)
Under 73.5 (-135)

How on earth is Yankees over 95.5 (essentially betting that the Yankees will go 96-66 or better, a mark that would basically make them the the best team in baseball) such a heavily-favored bet? Minus-130? The idea that the Yanks will win 96 or more games is so popular with SportsBook's customers that the book forces you to accept only 79 cents on the dollar (a $130 bet pays $100) if you want a piece of it. At that price, Yankee-over betters need a 57% probability to have even a break-even chance of winning money, and, to my mind, a 70+% chance to make it a good value wager. Do the 2009 Yankees have a 70% shot at winning 96 games? Out of the 120 team-seasons over the last four years, only nine teams (7.5%, an average of 2.3 teams per year out of 30) have won 96+. So risking 130 to win 100 on Yankees over 95.5 means requires thinking that the Yankees have a 70% shot at being one of the top two teams in baseball. That's an awfully high standard. Much easier money stands to be made on the under (95 wins or fewer). They can be "only" one of the top five or six teams in the game and still not win 95, especially in a division as steel-cage-deathmatch tough as the AL East -- and that bet pays even money.

Detroit under 81.5 looks good, too. That's a club with some tasty implosion potential.

Pity we do not yet live in a free society. Maybe in 2362 (sigh).

^* Six-time winner of coveted "Darkest Office in the Building" award

The Universe Does Not Exist to Comfort Homeowners

My dad pointed this out from the Yahoos. Seeing more pieces like this floating around. Hough's article is better than most, and his #5 ("Neighborhoods are changing in unpredictable ways") is a very under-appreciated reason for praising renting over buying. Depending on the source, the typical homeowner might have anywhere from 30-80% of their net worth tied up in their home. This is madness. Talk about lack of investment diversification ... sixty, maybe eighty cents for each dollar of a person's life, tied up for decades in one home in one neighborhood. For a generation, and probably longer, personal-finance gurus have railed against individual people buying and selling individual stocks or behind too heavily weighted in any one investment, etc. And this whole time public policy and culture have encouraged people, most of whom have the financial sophistication of Pez dispensers, to not only make a massive thirty-year investment in one asset, but to borrow money to do it.

Madness.

Joy of Life #39 -- Schadenfreude

HA HA!

This makes me pine for the good ol' days where NCAA sanctions meant a program's being banished from TV, conference champioinships, and bowl games. America's college football fans could use less garnett 'n' gold-clad Bobby Bowden in their lives.

If seven of the Seminoles' 2007 wins are "vacated", what might that do to St. Bobby's chase of Joe Paterno for the all-time Division 1-A wins record? Nothing. For one thing, the Florida State program will be vacating wins, not Bowden personally. For another, a chunk of Bowden's wins were at what is now Samford University, a 1-AA school. If only wins at 1-A universities count, then Bowden is too far beyond Paterno for it to be even considered a race. If wins at 1-AA as well as 1-A schools count, then Grambling legend Eddie Robinson still sits at the top of the mountain.

Ugh.

This is monumentally depressing.



Slashdot commenter "Joe Snipe" has what I think is the most likely explanation:

[Colorado] made attempts to be "ahead" of the curve when it came to an online presence (see also denvergov.com and the atrocity that is netfile; we were one of the first states to have online tax filing). Unfortunately they hired people who knew ass all about javascript (or proper DB handling) and no one knew enough to stop it in it's infancy. Now it has snowballed into something too costly to replace and too borked to simply repair. I imagine someone told some user that ff was a security risk, rather than go into the technical details of why the site falls to crap on browser it was never tested for. Eventually, through what I like to call "the wiki effect" that same information got passed back as fact to the current web coders who promptly put up a notice to inform their end users.

Lions >> Fish

Saw Big Fish and Secondhand Lions with Michele Saturday night. Lions, I thought, was better than Fish, if only because anything having to do with lions will always be better than anything having to do with fish.

Heard good things about Saturday's Spanish Town parade. It certainly seemed to take its toll on the Saturday-night party crowd. I might go see it next year. Don't tell Michele.

Nastalgianomics

The Cato Institute's Brink Lindsay has a new paper (PDF) out in which he savages a Nobel-winning economist like only His Brinkness can. Fun for the whole family. Speaking of family, the family in the cover picture ... shouldn't there be Negroes or Communists menacing the young daughters' virtue? Or something?

By the way, another one for the liberal types who equate social justice mainly with income egalitarianism: Do you prefer another "Operation Wetback"? It would lower the competition among low-skill workers for low-skill jobs, thus boosting wages for those jobs (some equality-focused commenters, most notably Mickey Kaus, make this argument explicitly in supporting strict anti-immigration reform). If so, why are citizens of the USA more entitled to the rights to sell one's labor than non-citizens?

Cringely Breaks Up Microsoft

Bob Cringely, one of the tech world's more grizzled commenters, exposes his plan to cut 'n' gut Microsoft into a leaner, more focused, and, presumably, more efficient tech provider. I agree with most of what he says, especially regarding positioning the Xbox as a non-family, high-octane, high-kickass, all-testosterone gaming system-to-the-xtreeem (it even has an "X" at the front of its name!).

But what I found most interesting was his take on MS's opening its own stores, which I dutifully hammered a week ago. Cringely sees it less as an attempt at real retailing than as a marketing ploy designed to bypass press coverage of the Windows 7 rollout by getting the new OS and various other MS tools and toys out into the public where people can kick the tires on them themselves (all in an environment tweaked just so) without their opinions' being influenced by Walter Mossberg and other doomsayers. That's the plan anyway, at least as conjured up by Cringely.

I'm still, to say the least, underwhelmed. If this is mostly a marketing effort of Redmond's part, why is it spearheaded by former Wal-Mart exec Kevin Turner, a hard-core retailer's retailer? If MS was hoping to get real Wal-Mart expertise in hiring Turner, than it could not have been thinking in terms of propaganda over retailing success, since Wal-Mart, Turner's only professional home to date, is a thousand times better at actually selling stuff -- and the logistics of moving around stuff to be sold -- than winning hearts and minds.

Log Rollin'

Da gubmit wants you to keep your home wi-fi logs so police can go through them if they think they need to. This is why > /dev/null is your friend. And there is, as always, an economic consideration: As one Slashdot commentor posts, "Who is going to pay for the storage costs, backups, etc.? I'm not going to foot the bill for it or get fined because my cheap Linksys router dies after six months of use and I lose my logs."

My default thinking has always been to purge, purge, purge because you don't need to secure data that do not exist. The idea that home users' logs might be trolled only reinforces that view. How long before altering a device's log settings -- not trashing or altering logs, just changing how often something is logged, or where those logs are stored, etc. -- is itself a crime?

Apocalyptic Doom Rescheduled for Later

The effects of global warming have been postponed. The National Snow and Ice Data Center regretfully informs the public that its prediction of a "quite possible" ice-free North Pole for the 2008 melt season was wrong because of unreliable sensors. The NSIDC apologizes for any inconvenience.

Hornets 100, Thunder 98

Kevin Durant scores 47. For the year he is scoring 25.9 points per game (fourth in the league) on .481 shooting with an Offensive Rating (points per 100 possessions) of 111. This is at the age of 20. By comparison, Kobe Bryant scored 19.9 on .465 (106) in his age-20 season (1999) and LeBron James scored 27.2 on .472 (114) at 20. Durant will never be the passer James is and his rebounding is a bit disappointing, but we are witnessing the birth of a marvelous and graceful scoring machine. Watching Kevin Durant play basketball is a gift.

Sunday Morning News

This is good news.

The allure of protectionist/nationalist trade policies in difficult time is quite understandable and difficult to resist. But understandable or not, they still reduce people's standard of living by reducing their economic options and in many cases forcing them to buy goods and services from low-efficiency and/or low-quality producers. This, added with 1) the moral problems inherent with telling people who they can and cannot do business with, 2) the enforcement costs required to ensure that all the populace's buying and selling is happening with only state-approved entities, and 3) the creations of black markets that are an inevitable response to (2) and (3), all conspire to make them a bad idea.

The G7's pledge this weekend is a step in the right direction ... or, at least, a pledge to not step too far in the wrong one.

One Strike Away and One Swing of the Bat. The Tale of Donnie Moore

Every baseball fan remembers the 1986 World Series, when the New York Mets' Mookie Wilson rolled a ground ball through the legs of Boston first baseman Bill Buckner, giving the Mets, who were baseball's best team during the season but were down to their last gasp in the Series, extra life and denying the Red Sox their first world's championship since 1918. Most fans also remember New York's playoff win that year against the Houston Astros, when their sixteen-inning win in Game Six of that series pushed the Mets into the World Series without their having to face Houston pitcher Mike Scott, to whom they had already lost twice in that set, in a loser-goes-home Game Seven.

What most fans do not remember, though, is the other playoff series that year, Boston's win over the California Angles in the American League Championship Series.

The Angels opened the 1986 season having won just two division titles in their 25 seasons of existence and had never been to the World Series. After having finished in second place in the AL's Western Division the prior two years, the Halos were sluggish at the start of '86, and woke up the morning of June 16 just a .500 ball club through the season's first sixty-two games. But they started a five-game winning streak that day, propelling them to a 61-39 finish and they won the West by five games over Texas. On October 7 they opened the best-of-seven AL Championship Series against the East champ, the Boston Red Sox. The two teams split the first two games in Boston's Fenway Park, then headed to Anaheim Stadium for the next three. The first two of those three were tight ones: California got a couple of seventh-inning home runs to turn a 1-1 game into a 5-3 win in Game Three, then the next day scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth to force extra innings before winning in the eleventh. The win put them up three games to one in the series, a lead only a small handful of teams in the game's history had ever blown.

Then came Game Five, about which, more later.

Pitchers and Catchers Report to Spring Training

As beautiful and descriptive a seven-word phrase as there is in the English language. I'm sitting here watching ESPN Classic's showing of the Bucky Fucking Dent game.

51 days left in the Dark Time. Opening Day is April 6.

Great Moments in Bad Ideas

Microsoft is opening its own retail stores. PCWorld identifies the top ten ways that the MS stores will differ from Apple's. #2 is probably my favorite.

My first thought was to put this under "Great Moments in Bad Ideas" and poke fun, but a nagging voice in my head said to not be too hasty; this could work and really surprise some people. Then I thought it through further and, no, it won't work. Under "Great Moments in Bad Ideas" it will remain.

News From the Freezer

The Cryonics Institute has added 17 new members in the 2009's first 42 days.

Magic Buttons

The "polls" have closed on this, but I really like the "Magic Button" style of questions. I haven't seen those before, although I'm sure they've been around. And I'd be curious to hear the logic of people who chose differently on questions three and four.

Robert Higgs is Smarter and Crazier than I Am. I Like People Like Robert Higgs.

I thought this was really interesting. I hope to write more about that this week. Ditto the Will Wilkinson post that brought Higgs's to my attention.

Mental Radio

The mental radio has locked in firmly on KC & the Sunshine Band's "Play that Funky Music". Ordinarily I would complain, and loudly, but this is actually a respite from the mental radio's previous selection, the Guess Who's "American Woman", except with "weeble" replacing "woman". I'm rooting for some AC/DC or at least Pantera or Machine Head to kick in at some point, but experience has taught me that I don't fully control this thing.

More on the Kissing of 18-Year-Olds' Asses

Rivals has LSU being passed up by the Nick Saban Athlete-Collection Machine at Alabama. Florida is tenth, but only because Urban Meyer prefers quality to quantity; 12 of the Gators' 16 commits do their partying in the four- or five-star suites, and UF's 3.94 average is #1.

Future & Freedom for a Friday

Freedom: The feeling of loss that Ms. Sepich endures to this day is beyond words. What happened to her daughter is beyond imagination. But taking DNA samples of the merely accused instead of convicted? I have very mixed thoughts on this, probably mixed enough to have the Libertarian Party take away my membership card, but I'm still working through various pros and cons.

Future: It was forty-five years ago that Dr. Robert Ettinger published The Prospect of Immortality, the book that kicked off cryonics. Thank you for your foresight, Dr. Ettinger, and best wishes for your continued good health and contributions. We still need you, 'cause we ain't there yet

Random Whatnot

Bill Gates is still out to sting you.

Bullet, Ye Be Dodged

And the Western World is spared the ignominy of a seven-loss team's being hailed as pro football's world's champion. Whew! Now Civilization can move its attention to more pressing matters, such as weather the Kansas City Royals have a shot at centending in the AL Central (yes), whether LeBron James really could average a triple-double (no), and whether the global economy will be faced with the boa-constrictor that is protectionism (almost certainly, if mostly in the form of those imbecilic buy-local/buy-American campaigns).

Where We Do Not Predict, We Foretell

To put it bluntly, the Arizona Cardinals are lucky to be here. First, they were lucky to play in a junk division; their three division mates, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle, were a combined 13-35. Including their postseason run, the Cardinals are 6-7 against non-NFC West teams, and have been outscored by 43 points. They were lucky to be the beneficiary of Jake Delhomme's historic meltdown in the semifinals, and they were lucky that Philadelphia upset the Giants in that round, giving them home-field advantage for the championship game.

It stops here. Lots of things have come together to put the Cards in the Super Bowl, and now Pittsburgh will tear them apart. Ben Roethisberger goes 19-31 for 285 yards and two scores, Kurt Warner is intercepted twice and sacked three more, and Larry Fitzgerald has big numbers, but most of his 130+ yards come in catch-up time. The Steelers become the first franchise to win six Super Bowls, winning 28-10.

Two Short Hits

1) Today is Jackie Robinson's 90th birthday. Anyone who thinks his Hall of Fame status hangs on only his breaking major-league baseball's color line needs to look at his career again. Robinson was a truly breathtaking ball player. Branch Rickey, the man for whom bringing Robinson to the big leagues was only one bullet point on a magnificent resume, would never have made such a move were it not true.

2) Sportsbook.com lowered the Super Bowl line to Steelers -6.5. 88%(!) is on Arizona to win straight up, lowering the price on that bet from +200 ($100 bet wins $200) to +190. I find this 'Zona love stunning. Are people falling for the "recency effect", and focusing on only the Cardinals' last three playoff games while ignoring the mostly-lackluster sixteen games that game before them. I'm ready to acknowledge that the Cardinals aren't as bad as their horrid late-season slide -- doesn't anyone remember this team losing consecutive games to Minnesota and the Patriots by a combined 82-21 count, with those two drubbings coming all of two weeks after a 48-20 Thanksgiving Night humiliation in Philadelphia -- but even when they were playing at their best they still found time to cough up a 56-35 hairball at the hands of a Jets team that missed the playoffs.

The Cardinals are the worst team to reach the Super Bowl since at least the '79 Rams (who were promptly dispatched in Super Bowl 14 by, coincidentally, Pittsburgh), and probably ever. I say lay the six and a half, sit back, and watch the Steelers roll.

Happy Birthday, Reason and Rational Thought!

Happy Birthday, Reason and Rational Thought!

2009 marks the 350th year of the Royal Society, which has as good a claim as any as the birthplace of the Enlightenment. And if you're thinking to yourself, "wow, I should really write a novel based on that," well, Neal Stephenson beat you too it, writing not just a novel, but an entire series, The Baroque Cycle. It's a story in the seventeenth century about the Society and the beginnings of natural philosophy, coupled with global political intrigue and no small degree of sex. It includes Issac Newton; Leipzig; a captured whore's daughter who sleeps/cons her way into great wealth and power yet remains always admirable and becomes the leader of an anti-slave revolution; two orphaned brothers, one of whom becomes a straight-laced and highly-regarded military man, the other is Jack, the swashbuckling "King of the Vagabonds", who falls in love with the aforementioned whore's daughter; King Louis XVI (or was it the XIV?) of France, Britain's shadowy, unspeakably evil Star Chamber, a man named Enoch Root, who might or might not be an immortal wizard, the chase for the Philosopher's Stone, the Tower of London, the heist of a mammoth fortune from Arabia, clashes over religion, class, wealth, and, for good measure, the first kidney-stone removal.

Those who can do better that that are welcome to try.

Three Great Things About Baltimore

1) The world's greatest 9-1-1 dispatcher is there in case you slice off your own toe.

2) They are celebrating Edgar Allen Poe's 200th birthday.

3) Matt Wieters. Matt Wieters. Matt Wieters. It has been twenty years since the Orioles had a player who could at least be in the room when the topic was best player in baseball. They have one now. Matt Wieters will gross over $300 million playing baseball, and will be worth every single penny.

Kwitcherbitchin

Think you have it rough? No, you don't. I am not a huge fan of Brad Delong's, but he nails it here.

The current recession may turn into a small depression, and may push global living standards down by five percent for one or two or (we hope not) five years, but that does not erase the gulf between those of us in the globe's middle and upper classes and all human existence prior to the Industrial Revolution. We have reached the frontier of mass material comfort—where we have enough food that we are not painfully hungry, enough clothing that we are not shiveringly cold, enough shelter that we are not distressingly wet, even enough entertainment that we are not bored.

There is no real reason to believe that the human condition will not continue to improve, if in fits and starts, as the centuries pass.

Because Too Much Recruiting Talk Is Never Enough

Dr. Saturday strikes another blow for the meaningfulness of college football recruiting rankings. Five-star recruits are five times more likely to wind up on mainstream-media All-America teams than the four-star types, and 70(!) times more likely than the two- and one-star schmucks they so dominated in high school.

Empiricism is a wonderful thing, is it not?

The Internet Leaks Into My Brain ... and My Brain Leaks Back Out Onto the Internet

Yahoo's Matt "Dr. Saturday" Hinton shows, again, that college football recruiting rankings do matter. When a team has the more highly-regarded collection of high-school recruits -- as measured by the people at Rivals^* -- it wins three games out of four, outscoring the lesser-talented team by fifteen points a game. This wouldn't be true if recruiting ratings were all a bunch of hooey.

^*Rivals has LSU first in the country this year, followed by Ohio State, Southern California, Alabama, and Texas. Florida is tenth.

--- Joe Sheehan's column today at Baseball Prospectus has a general-thoughts column which includes this line: "... [Would] be better off as a tester for experimental parachute designs." I would like to nominate "You would better serve mankind as a tester for experimental parachute designs" as the Best Insult of 2009 So Far. I would also like to announce that I will be using this regularly and freely.

--- After making the playoffs in each of their first eleven years in Denver -- with two Stanley Cups -- the Colorado Avalanche are in danger of missing the postseason for the seond season in three. Culprit: Offense. When the Av's won the Cup in 1996, they were second in the league in goals scored. When they won the other, in 2001, they were fourth. The '08-09 bunch are just 22nd in the league and were shut out last night.

--- Sportsbook.com has the Steelers as still a solid seven-point favorite, a number unchanged from the open. On the win-outright odds, though, Arizona pays at +200 (a $100 bet wins $200) and 88% of the money on that bet is going to the Cardinals, so the gambling public has the Cardinals with at least a one-third chance of winning. I'd lay the seven.

--- From the Wall Street Journal's article ($) on how lobbying increases as the size of the gubmint free-money handout bailout grows: "The shoe lobby sent a letter to congressional leaders Tuesday asking for a stimulus provision abolishing the import tax on synthetic, fabric and canvas shoes." Aah! Head to the hills! The shoe lobby is running amok! Grab the ammo and the canned goods! It's the shoe lobby! The SHOE LOBBY!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

This is, though, something the government-intrusionists (mostly harder-core lefties, but such GIs can be found on the right) too often do not acknowledge in the claims that only Government Program X can cure Awful Social Malady Y: The more of a role the government plays in a society, the greater the rewards from lobbying will be, and the more lobbying we will have. And, since lobbying means money, more lobbying means more dollars finding their way into and winding their way through the political system, when they could be spent in other places. If you want to reduce the influence of The Rich in American politics, you start by reducing the influence of the government in American life.

31 Laws of Fun

I liked this a lot. It's never too early to begin preparing for life in 2362.

I particularly like #12: "Life should not be broken up into a series of disconnected episodes with no long-term consequences. No matter how sensual or complex, playing one really great video game after another, does not make a life story." A life well-lived should be more than one experience piled on top of another. YMMV

Why Economic Stimulus is Torture

Will Wilkinson goes off (read the whole thing) on economics and those who claim to practice it. By his own admission, his rant is inspired more by frustration than by a calculating approach to the pros and cons of various schools of economic thought, but he has a point:

In the debate over economic stimulus, I hear many otherwise brilliant people making a lot of baseless conjectures about mass psychology — about consumer and creditor “fear” and “uncertainty,” and what to do about it. But, as far as I can tell, none of them has even a rudimentary theory about the causes of micro-fear or how it scales up to aggregate consumer demand or aggregrate credit supply, etc. So I feel like I’m hearing a lot of smart people talking out of their asses about a subject they’ve never actually studied –the psychology of coordinated expectations — and pretending it is “economics,” a subject with much greater rhetorical prestige and political power than amateur psychology.

...

If booms or recessions are really based in coordinated psychological changes, then why should we think that monetary or fiscal policy is the most relevant policy lever? If the thoughts and feelings of the population are the issue, then maybe the real problem is that the mass media are unduly scaring people. Wouldn’t it follow, then, that good economic policy would have at least as much to do with controlling the media as controlling the money supply? If the problem with handing Maria Bartiromo a script of state-mandated talking points is that it wouldn’t work, how do we know that?

That's all interesting, and whether vesting the brown eyes of CNBC's original Money Honey with the force of government is a good idea is debatable. But this is provocative:

If the problem with turning the entire media into a servant of state macroeconomic engineering is not that it wouldn’t work, but that it’s repulsively illiberal, then we ought to face up to it

. This is something that's been running through my head for quite some time. I oppose much government intervention largely on the grounds that it is less effective than most voluntary or market-based measures, but even the stuff that makes sense on many levels (ie: military draft) rubs me seriously wrongly on the grounds that morality requires liberty and government action by definition reduces the liberty of the person being acted upon. Libertarians *might* be better served (or would at least be more idealogically consistent) begging off the entire idea of the efficacy of Government Action X and focusing instead of its illiberalness. This, come to think of it, is very similar to the torture debate, except the sides differ (torture: left = "it's wrong"; right = "gotta do it if it works";; economic regulation: left = "gotta do it if it works"; right = "it's wrong").

Might write more about this later.

Diagnosis: Christianity

When one wants real insights into religion's effect on people, one can do worse than to plumb the wisdom of Scandinavia's death-metal scene.

From Varg Vikenes:

Christianity was created by some decadent and degenerated Romans as a tool of oppression, in the late Roman era, and it should be treated accordingly. It is like handcuffs to the mind and spirit and is nothing but destructive to mankind. In fact I don't really see Christianity as a religion. It is more like a spiritual plague, a mass psychosis, and it should first and foremost be treated as a problem to be solved by the medical science. Christianity is a diagnosis. It's like Islam and the other Asian religions, a HIV/AIDS of the spirit and mind.

Hat tip to Ken.

That is all.

Be Careful What You Wish For ...

The Chicago Cubs have been sold. Condolences to Mr. Ricketts and his family.

Freedom for a Friday

The negative.

The positive.

And, for our liberal friends whose political philosophies center mostly on social-justice and egalitarian concerns, there is this.

Update

Meant to add in the Chuck Noll post that, unless New England captures another title in Bill Belichik's tenure (and '09 marks the fourth ringless year in a row for the Patriots), Noll's four-Super Bowls mark is unlikely to be matched for some time. Now that Tony Dungy has moved onto the next phase of his life, and Tampa Bay has ridden itself of the march-to-mediocrity that was the last few years of Jon Gruden's tenure, the only active coach with even one Super Bowl championship on his resume is the man who a year ago denied Belichik his fourth, Tom Caughlin of the Giants.

Chuck Noll

ESPN has a nice piece on the only man to win four Super Bowls.

Walk, Don't Run

John Gasaway of Basketball Prospectus talks about the stunning decline in the pace of play of Pac-10 basketball. His point about whether this could lead to recruiting trouble is, I think, valid. Superstar athletes are superstar athletes largely because they can run and jump and they will go to schools where they can run and jump. And those schools are not in the Pac-10.

Obamarica, #1

Eep.

Diff'rent Strokes

This, I thought was fascinating. Yale Law sounds like it could be more properly called "Yale Philosophy School for People Who Want to be Hippies but Also Want to Make Money and/or Wield Influence", while Harvard could bill itself "Harvard Law: Where We Teach You to Dominate Others by Demanding You Kneel to Us". I wonder how much, if any, of the difference can be explained by each school's deliberately eschewing the other's styles, curricula, and philosophies, by way of trying to differentiate itself from the other.

Bawlmer 911

A dear friend of mine is proud to announce that she will be a member of Baltimore County's 9-1-1 dispatch. I encourage all members of the English-speaking world to head to Baltimore and start up emergencies, giving her more opportunities to say "Baltimore County 911. What is your emergency?"

A Night in the Life, Part 2

When we last left Michele and Christopher, the chef had arrived.

The chef in the tall white hat set the grill afire, and a flame several feet high shot into the air. Then came the eggs. Tossing them up into the air and catching them on a spatula before breaking them and letting them sizzle on the grill. I took out the BlackBerry to record the show ...

... and after a minute or two thought of a passage in Neal Stephenson's essay, "In the Beginning there was the Command Line". Stephenson recounts a trip to Disney World. While walking through the Magic Kingdom, he spies a man with a large camcorder recording everything in sight, yet looking at the exhibits only through the small screen in the camcorder. Stephenson thinks to himself, "Here is this guy, spending all this money to come down here for a vacation, to look at man-made replica's of other people's imaginations, and he's watching it through a television. And I am watching him." And I realized I was doing the same thing, watching a replica of a Japanese style of cooking, and doing it through a viewfinder. I put away the BlackBerry and remarked to Michele about the Zen-style nuttiness of what I was doing. She laughed, but didn't take her eyes off the show.

I lost track of time, so I have no idea how long various techniques of grilling, slinging, seasoning, cutting, whittling, shaping, frying food -- all while keeping up a level of audience-interaction patter that would make an Atlantic City Boardwalk pitchman proud -- went on, but at some unknowable point, I was sitting with a full plate of food.

And, I ask, just where the hell has THIS been all my life? Yeesh, that was good.

Michele on or way out told me that she had never seen me smile that much. I guess I have a new favorite restaurant.

The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend

Richard Pittman at LSU blog And the Valley Shook makes a point about the zero-sum nature of sports that is all too often forgotten by fans

Presidential Phones

Interesting post from Devin Coldewey at Crunch Gear regarding what a mobile phone designed specifically for heads of state and other security-conscious pooh-bahs might look like.

Menz, Trukerz, and Heated Steering

The exciting conclusion of Saturday's evening at Koto's will be posted shortly. For now, I wanted to talk about an interesting ad strategy being pursued by the people hawking the Chevy (don't dare call it Chevrolet, not with a truck) Silverado.

There are (at least) three different ads, each starring former football great and classic man's-man Howie Long, and each specifically targets one of Silverado's three primary rivals: Ford's F-150, the Dodge Ram, and Toyota's Tundra. In the F-150 ad, Long, in his Silverado, stumbles across a guy rather gingerly getting out of his truck bed with the use of a step hanging off the tailgate. Long mocks this as a "man-step", all but implying that an adult male who uses such a step would be better off driving his little hybrid to ballet class than risk injuring himself getting in and out of pickup trucks. In another, a gentleman for whom the Ram is clearly too much truck, gently bumps into Long's pickup while trying to parallel park. Long, weirdly in good humor (when was the last time you chuckled while getting bumped by another driver?) walks up to the driver and tells him not to worry, no problem. Then he notices neatly manicured hands clutching the steering wheel. "Enjoy that heated steering wheel," he says with a chuckle. The best of the trio, and most strident in showing off its in-your-face testosterone level (that it targets the only Japanese-made truck in the series might or might not be a coincidence), is one with Toyota's Tundra in the sights. Long pulls up to the filling station next to a baby-faced chap in a flat-brimmed ball cap. Long compliments him on the truck. Baby-face says, clearly pushing his voice an octave or two below its normal range, "Yeah. It's a real truckers' truck. For real truckers. Like me." Long inquires about the real-truckers'-truck's gas mileage. Baby-face answers in a much higher tone, suggesting that his balls aren't properly inflated with sufficient man-hormone. Long, again, chuckles and mentions the Silverado's superior mileage. "Enjoy being a real trucker." [read "being" = "pretend being] This is the only spot in which an advantage Silverado has over its competition is mentioned.

What's classic about these ads is how little they mention about Silverado's own features. The tactic is clearly that if your own product doesn't have selling points of its own, make fun of the competitors' features. And if you can do so by playing to your targets' fears and insecurities, so much the better. Whether these ads work in terms of increasing Silverado's market share and GM's profits (assuming there is a GM six months from now) remains to be seen. It's also an interesting look into the psychology of truck buyers ... at least the buyers Chevy is looking to chase.

A Night in the Life

On Saturday, Michele and I took my first-ever trip to a Japanese restaurant. Ten gazillion times I have driven past this place on College Drive, maybe twenty gazillion, but rarely if ever did I think about going in. Then when Michele and I were thinking about places to eat the other day it occurred to me that a) Michele had said a couple of times that she loved Japanese food and b) she and I had never gone for Japanese, largely because c) my aforementioned Japanese-food virginity.

To Koto's of Japan we go.

We go in. We didn't make reservations and there's a thirty-minute wait. I give my name and am handed one of the little signaller jobbies, the round black thing that looks like an ashtray with flashing red lights. We first go to the bar, but I notice on the TV the Ravens/Dolphins game. I'm DVR'ing this to watch it later, so catching snippets of it at the bar while waiting on a table just will not do. We go outside and enjoy some night air, refreshingly cool and breezy after a month of unseasonably, ridiculously warm summery weather. Jokes about the final end of "post-summer summer" are told. Michele has a cigarette but after her smoke begins to get uncomfortably chilly. We go inside for the rest of the wait. Our conversations are too mundane to list here ("You can download a Google-mail program specifically for your phone," etc.) but are the comfortable and comforting talks of people who share an effortless and enjoyable chemistry. The time passes smoothly and we're soon told our table by the hibachi grill is ready. Because we were sitting inside by the hostess's podium there was no need for them to send the ashtray its signal, depriving me of seeing the little flashing lights. This is disappointing.

We're led to our seats.

Well now, this is nice. My first look at a hibachi grill. There are four grills, two to each side. Michele and I are take the last two seats to the right of a divider. I'm to her right. Whoops. I have another view of the TV. We switch seats and the game is safely from my view.

On the other grill in our section, a young and seemingly large family is hosting a birthday party for their son, who later proves himself to be something of snotnose little brat. To our right are an older couple out on the town. The man remarks on the game on the TV (he, thankfully, says nothing more than who is playing) and the woman says something in return. They start talking, in rather halting tones, about football. The woman says that forty years ago she knew the names of all the teams in the league, offering this as though it's new information. I wonder if maybe they're in the early stages of dating; if they had been in a long-time relationship it's probable that her old fondness of football would have been ground long since covered. I can't stop smiling. I'm feeling good, soaking up various sight, sounds, smells, and sensations, and this is all pretty cool.

An Asian man with a tall white hat appears, armed to the gills with sharp knives and other tools that could be used either at a grill or in a pain chamber. It's the chef!

(to be continued)

Palm: The Return

This company has been given up for dead time and again lately in the face of competition from BlackBerrys and iPhones, but Palm goes all Lazarus on us with its newest phone. Been getting some wowser reviews.

Future & Freedom for a Friday

I wanted to expound on the "21st-century Americans ... " paragraph from yesterday's post, but Dennis Kowalski did it much more eloquently on the Cryonics Institute's mailing list. His post, published with his permission:

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I don't know if people who think about the future take into account the exponential nature of technological advancement and how it changes things for the better. When I talk to people about the future many are either negative or a little afraid. It is [fashionable] to talk about the problems of the world but ignore the progress.

The future is uncertain but if we can gather anything from the past ... here's a thought experiment: Lets go back in time, 500 years ago.

99.9% of humans were engaged in basic survival occupations. They either were farmers or in hunting gathering tribes ... starvation was the number-one killer. Even the top 0.1% (as in kings, pharaohs, emperors, or chiefs) were lucky to live to 30 yrs of age. They had head lice, horrible diseases treated by witch doctors and wizards who used blood letting and the alignment of the stars as primary health care treatments. No phone or internet communications, just foot runners. They had no planes ,trains, or autos just horses...no refrigeration, poor nutrition, little entertainment. Romans watched people getting mauled by lions ...for fun? I could go on and on ... overall, a brutal existence even for those on the top of the heap.

Fast forward to today. In the world we have cell phones with 911 access, television with cable, the internet and computers are everywhere ... many people own cars and even if they rent ... one way or another...even if they are poor...they have better living conditions, at least technologically, then most humans did in the past.

I think for lack of a better word, we are spoiled. We keep moving the bar on what it means to be wealthy financially, from millionaire to billionaire. Our life expectancies have tripled. We are angry when people get killed in wars or civilian targets get hit, but this was the norm for most of history. We have so much unbelievable wealth and good fortune around us that we fail to see it in front of our eyes.

So I think if you plucked someone from 500 years ago and brought them here they would be in utter awe of what we have now. Yet they would be puzzled at how much we worry, complain, and fret over the world. For instance, They'd probably welcome high cholesterol and heart disease caused by obesity because in their time most people were starving. No one even got cancer because they either didn't live long enough to get it and no one knew what cancer was. Even "Third World" nations are doing better today then in the past. In the past people just died and went unnoticed altogether.

What does this mean for the next 100 years? I think we will be at a distinct advantage to the people living in the future because their problems will be relative to their existence. We will think of those new-age kids as spoiled, and we can wax nostalgic about how hard we had it. I could see an argument between two people in the future about why they are only worth billions of dollars and only have 100 robot servants while some other rich guy has trillions of dollars and 10,000 robot servants. We could add that they don't know how easy they have it with their fancy teleporters since we had to actually drive from point to point. It's all relative. Advanced nanotech, robotics, and genetics are powerful technologies that will vastly empower humans of tomorrow to a degree that humans of today can only dream of.

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Thank you, Dennis.

That, than any other, is the biggest selling point for cryonics: Today is vastly, hugely, almost incomprehensibly better than yesterday. And it stands to reason that tomorrow has a good chance of being even better still.

Raisin' Keynes

The Wall Street Journal reports($) on the "don't just stand there do something" desperation among governments looking to avoid taking their economic-contraction medicine, a stance popularized by John M. Keynes but debunked by Milton Friedman and the montarists. Wishful-thinking quote from the article: "Economists say that if governments can get money into the economy quickly, targeting projects that will have the biggest effect, and make sure the spending is temporary, they can avoid inflation and wasteful spending."

And we can all have free ponies.

The WSJ has another article on national whining about declining 401(k) balances. Kristine Gardner, a 35-year-old whose sense of entitlement vastly exceeds her historical perspective, is quoted as saying, "There's just no guarantee that when you're ready to retire you're going to have the money." Babe, there's no guarantee that you'll even be alive when you're ready to retire. Welcome to life.

21st-century Americans live longer, more comfortable, more peaceful, more secure, and more prosperous lives than any group of people in human history. Even our least-affluent neighbors have access to education, entertainment, and luxury that monarchs of three centuries ago dared not dream of. This longevity, comfort, and education comes from an economy that produces such an abundance of our basic needs that huge numbers of people are able to live what by historical standards are unimaginably luxurious lives. But it starts with prosperity, and prosperity requires a dynamic economy.

And dynamic, abundance-producing, civilized-lives-creating economies are strangled by the risk-averse.

Just Say No (to the BCS)

I was going to write a post about all the fallacies behind the BCS system, foremost among them the prominence of the sham that is the coaches' poll (Does Urban Meyer have a solid opinion on whether TCU is a better or worse team than Virginia Tech? Goodness knows that if he does, that's hardly what Florida is paying him for) and the simply ridiculous restriction on the computer rankings disallowing any margin-of-victory component.

Fortunately, however, Bill James has done my work for me. Money quote: "The only role that the computer rankings play in this is that they're there to take the fall when the system doesn't work—and it doesn't work most of the time."

And here's why the system doesn't work most of the time: It can't. There is no way that in a normal season any system, algorithm, or panel can identify the two teams most worthy of playing for the national championship, because in most seasons at least three and sometimes five teams have equally-valid claims to a title-game berth. The only times a solid one-versus-two is possible is when a "working" system is not needed: Think Southern California and Texas in 2005, or Miami and Ohio State in 2002. When there is controversy (Auburn/USC/Oklahoma in 2004 as just one example), the system is bound to fail. Consistently identifying the Annointed Two is something the BCS, regardless of its setup, just cannot do. And no wrangling over the relative values of opinion polls and computer rankings can change that.

Thoughts for the Day

"Rationality Quotes 21" from Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowski's blog Overcoming Bias

Enjoy.

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"The most dangerous thing in the world is finding someone you agree with. If a TV station news is saying exactly what you think is right, BEWARE! You are very likely only reinforcing your beliefs, and not being supplied with new information."
-- SmallFurryCreature

"Companies deciding which kind of toothpaste to market have much more rigorous, established decision-making processes to refer to than the most senior officials of the U.S. government deciding whether or not to go to war."
-- Michael Mazarr

"Everything I ever thought about myself - who I was, what I am - was a lie. You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that feels."
-- Neil Gaiman, Stardust

"Saul speaks of the 'intense desire for survival on the part of virtually everyone on earth,' and our 'failure' in spite of this. I have often pointed out that the so-called 'survival instinct' is reliable only in clear and present danger - and even then only if the individual is still relatively healthy and vigorous. If the danger is indirect, or remote in time, or if the person is weak or depressed - or even if required action would violate established habits - forget the 'survival instinct.' It isn't that simple."
-- Robert Ettinger on cryonics

"We are running out of excuses. We just have to admit that real AI is one of the lowest research priorities, ever. Even space is considered more important. Nevermind baseball, tribology, or TV evangelism."
-- Eugen Leitl

"That's something that's always struck me as odd about humanity. Our first response to someone's bad news is "I'm sorry", as though we feel that someone should take responsibility for all the $&#ed up randomness that goes on in this universe."
-- Angels 2200

"We were supremely lucky to be born into this precise moment in history. It is with an ever-cresting crescendo of wonder and enthusiasm that I commend you to the great adventure and the great adventure to you."
-- Jeff Davis

Texas 24 Ohio State 21

Apparently some heavy losers on Sportsbook.com's ledgers tonight. As I mentioned in my earlier post, nearly four betters in five on that site layed the points, and tonight they came up empty. I'll have a follow-up post late tomorrow or Wednesday.

Beautiful post-game quote from Longhorns receiver Quan Cosby: "First and foremost I have to give glory to God." Got that, Ohio State fans? God hates you. God is cheerfully rooting against you. God is fervently working, day and night, to savage your dreams. And so is Quan Cosby. Deal with it.

Hook 'Em, Horns!

Texas and Ohio State are in the Fiesta Bowl tonight. I'm rooting for Texas, in part because I fell in love with the school on a brief visit in '87, partly because a cousin went there, partly because burnt orange is strangely cool, but mostly for national-championship-chaos reasons I will discuss more tomorrow.

Yahoo has Texas as an 8-point favorite, down from a 10.5 open. Sportsbook.com has the Longhorns minus 8.5 with 77% of the money going UT's way (numbers provided for entertainment purposes, of course).