Why politics is boring

It's a recurring theme for him, but Ezra Klein once again does a good job of summarizing what is wrong with the American political system: the Senate. It's broken. And you can have a million pundits write a million articles and posts and do a million interviews about this or that tactic or strategy or poll or gaffe, and it's all noise, because the simple, boring, underlying reason that we're in the position we're in is because it takes sixty--sixty--goddamn votes in the Senate to pass a law.

As the refrain goes: We're all Californians now.

The internet hits a walk-off homerun

This is it. It's over. INTERNET WINS:



From a cool blog that filters 4Chan for you.

When slogans go meta

The other day I saw a bus ad where the slogan was:

One of our unyielding principles: strong principles.

So odd. I guess it makes sense: in this company's set of principles, some are classed "unyielding"--they are never violated come what may--and some are merely classed "strong"--which to me suggests something weaker than unyielding. So the upshot, I guess, is that all principles are, at the very least, strongly held--and this will continue to be the case, come what may.

I have no idea what the ad was for.

Bad Beatles

I thought this was pretty funny. They're just awful:



I like John's "We'd like to play another song--I think."

Go Lakers!

Well, with pitching like that, and hitting like that, you're not going to get very far. Such a weird postseason--first we seem to dominate the Cardinals and catch every break, and then the Phillies just clean our clock in every facet of the game. Sigh.

A good post

From TNC. Just thought it was worth passing along.

A good thing to know

Jumping off from the previous post, it seems to me that a good a priori statistic to know would be the following:

Suppose that two teams meet in a 7 game series. If you suppose that they are evenly matched, then you'd expect Team A to win the series 50% of the time. Okay. Now, suppose Team A loses the first game. A is down 0-1. What would have to be the odds of A to win each game such that Team A would have a 50% chance of winning the series? Does Team A have to be 55-45 good? 60-40? 70-30? What would bring the odds for winning the series back to parity? This, I think, would be a good set of figures to know to have a good intuitive grasp of how improbable a series win is for a team that falls behind.

Of course, these figures are just fixed mathematical calculations that you could apply in any sport. Unfortunately I don't know how to do the math to calculate them out, but maybe some bored genius will help us out.

The value of ad hoc statistics

More questionable baseball statistics, this time about the Yankees:

The math certainly bodes well for them. Since Major League Baseball adopted a best-of-seven format for the ALCS in 1985, the team that won Game 2 has advanced to the World Series 17 of 23 times.

I'm always wary of this sort of statistic because it can be misleading. Of course, for any Game n in a series, you expect the eventual series winner to have won that game more often than the loser, if only because in every series the winner is guaranteed to have 4 wins spread over those 4-7 games and the loser only anywhere from zero to three wins spread over the same. And of course, by definition, you expect the series winner to win Game 7 100% of the time.

So what are the a priori probabilities here? Well, running a simulation of 10,000 7 game series in which each team has a 50-50 chance of winning, these were the results:

Team A wins 4922 out of 10000 series
Series winner wins
Game 1: 6541/10000 (65%)
Game 2: 6565/10000 (66%)
Game 3: 6579/10000 (66%)
Game 4: 6643/10000 (66%)
Game 5: 5896/8732 (68%)
Game 6: 4692/6220 (75%)
Game 7: 3084/3084 (100%)

So a priori, assuming evenly matched teams, we would expect the series winner to win Game 2 about 65% of the time. The statistic in the article said that the series winner in the ALCS has won Game 2 17 out of 23 times, or about 74% of the time. Considering that the sample size is very small--23 games--this difference of 10% doesn't seem to be terribly significant.

(Bonus section: in the above example, I'm actually being conservative, because I'm assuming that the teams are evenly matched. But of course, in real life the teams are sometimes not evenly matched, in which case we should say that one team has a (e.g.) 60-40 or 70-30 chance of winning. If we run the 10,000 series simulation with 60-40 odds, we get this:

Team A wins 7140 out of 10000 series
Series winner wins
Game 1: 6766/10000 (68%)
Game 2: 6690/10000 (67%)
Game 3: 6784/10000 (68%)
Game 4: 6724/10000 (67%)
Game 5: 5853/8436 (69%)
Game 6: 4456/5748 (78%)
Game 7: 2727/2727 (100%)

If we run it with 70-30 odds, we get this:

Team A wins 8729 out of 10000 series
Series winner wins
Game 1: 7318/10000 (73%)
Game 2: 7286/10000 (73%)
Game 3: 7274/10000 (73%)
Game 4: 7305/10000 (73%)
Game 5: 5558/7532 (74%)
Game 6: 3474/4363 (80%)
Game 7: 1785/1785 (100%)

So what we see here is that, when we account for the fact that teams are not always evenly matched--that sometimes a team will have a odds-on advantage in winning each game--it only nudges the probability that the series winner will win Game 2 upwards. Which makes my case a little bit stronger....

...although, we should note that the probability probably never swings too far away from 50-50. Remember that, in the regular season, the best team in the league rarely has better than about a 65-35 advantage when it plays 165 games against all the other teams in the league (which includes a lot of crappy and mediocre teams). When you consider that in the ALCS the best teams are playing against each other, I imagine that the odds of the team favorited to win doesn't go much beyond 60, if that.)

Anyway, to conclude: the statistic cited in the article is not particularly meaningful. Moreover, it's odd to focus in on Game 2 in isolation of the fact that the Yankees also won Game 1. It seems like, if anything, the statistic we should be getting is: what are the a priori odds that the Angels will come back from 0-2 to win the series, assuming they're evenly matched with the Yankees (a good assumption, I think)? Well, assigning the Angels to "Team A":

Team A wins 1893 out of 10000 series

Doesn't look too good for the Angels.

(Photo used sans permission from here.)

On Rush and the Rams

Harinder wrote to me asking what I thought of the controversy surrounding the NFL freezing out Rush Limbaugh from buying a minority stake in the Rams, and I have to say, I think there's not much to it. Not only is Rush Limbaugh a polarizing and supremely distracting national figure, but he also has a history of making racist comments about football players. Making him part-owner would have been a terrible business decision for the Rams and for the NFL. The only thing that surprises me is that he was seriously considered in the first place.

Mystery solved: it's record producer Lou Adler!

For years now I've been asking the question: "Who's that guy sitting next to Jack Nicholson??" You know the guy I'm talking about: he's old, tall, white, has a big beard and always sits next to Nicholson at the Laker games.

Well, randomly on YouTube one of the videos had him on the thumbnail, and it turned out to be a clip from a documentary about The Mamas and the Papas. Anyway, long story short, the guy's name is Lou Adler:



And now you know.

It is Padilla time

This is awesome.

I like the Dodgers, but...

...this is easily one of the worst parties I've ever seen. It's just, like, 20 dudes in a room awkwardly pouring alcohol on each other while everyone else stands around and watches.

Revolutionary advances in 115 bullshitting

Well. It seems that some physicists have come up with the theory that the reason why no one seems able to build a particle accelerator large enough to create a large number of Higgs Bosons is because the universe is prearranged for this not to happen--the Higgs Bosons, through backwards (through time!) causation, have the effect of undoing the preconditions of their own creation. From our end, what this looks like is that anyone who tries to build the particle accelerator just ends up having a lot of bad luck and it never gets built/runs.

The paper says:

We argue that a restriction determined by a drawn card or quantum ran-
dom numbers, on the running of LHC (Large Hadron Collider), which was
proposed in earlier articles by us, can only result in an, at first, apparent suc-
cess whatever the outcome. This previous work was concerned with looking
for backward causation and / or influence from the future, which, in our pre-
vious model, was assumed to have the effect of arranging bad luck for large
Higgs producing machines, such as LHC and the never finished SSC (Super-
conducting Super Collider) stopped by Congress because of such bad luck, so
as not to allow them to work.

Here's the meat:

In the previous articles [1] we proposed that one should use the LHC-machine to
look for backward causation effects. Indeed, we proposed a model [1, 2, 3, 4] in which
the realized history of the universe was selected so as to minimize a certain functional
of the history, a functional being the imaginary part of the action SI [history], which
only exists in our model. In general, it is assumed in science that there is no pre-
arrangement [5] of initial conditions so as to make special events occur or not occur
later. However J. Bell proposed BBC as a solution to the problems of Einstein
- Podlosky - Rosen’s “super-determinism” [6]. Also, one of the present authors
(H.B.N.) and his group earlier proposed models nonlocal in time (and space) [7, 8, 9].
Similar backward causation effects have also been proposed in connection with the
story that e. g. humanity would cause a new vacuum to appear, “vacuum bomb,” by
one of the present authors (H.B.N.) and collaborators [10]. Our proposal is to test if
there should perhaps be such pre-arrangements in nature, that is, pre-arrangements
that prevent Higgs particle producing machines, such as LHC and SSC, from being
functional. Our model with an imaginary part of the action [1, 11] begins with a
series of not completely convincing, but still suggestive, assumptions that lead to
the prediction that large Higgs producing machines should turn out not to work in
that history of the universe, which is actually being realized.

Emphasis mine.

The experiment they propose is to basically do a random card game, where the result of the card game determines the upper limit of some design parameter in the machine, for instance the amount of energy it can use to move the particles around (or even, a card that says you do not build the machine at all). If you made it extremely improbable (like one in a billion billion trillion) that you would draw a number that is too low to allow for the creation of Higgs Boson particles, then you can be pretty sure that backwards causation is at work. They maintain that, if their theory is true, it is better to let the universe veto the construction of the machine by affecting the outcome of a harmless random card game rather than, say, having a worldwide recession cause the government to withdraw funding for it. (And if their theory is not true, then we will simply draw a card that allows us to build the machine such that it is capable of producing Higgs Bosons particles.)

Of course, I see a gigantic flaw with this whole approach, which is that it doesn't make any goddam sense: suppose their theory is true. It can still be the case that we draw a probable card--i.e., one that allows us to build the machine, but that the "bad luck" will end up coming from some other source, like for example the government will withdraw funding for some reason. If forcing an extremely improbable card to come up in the card game were the only causal path that could prevent the machine from being built, then the experiment would make sense, but it seems that there are a million causal paths--funding could be withdrawn, some other new discovery could draw away funding, an asteroid can hit the planet, a war could start, the principle scientists could drop dead of a heart attack, this line of scientific investigation could get discredited in the scientific community, etc etc--that the universe could utilize instead. In fact, since the "realized history of the universe" is no doubt "selected" so as to minimize the number of astronomically improbable events, I would imagine that the "path of least resistance" would precisely be for a chain of completely mundane and not-improbable events to derail the building of the machine, regardless of the results of some random card game (binding as it might be).

So, my conclusion: It doesn't matter if you got an act of Congress to make the results of the card game binding; it wouldn't do a damn thing even if their theory was true. The universe would block the construction in some other way.

UPDATE: As you probably guessed, it's not like I'm in any position to judge these things. Reading the rest of the paper (I was too excited about it to wait until I was done), it turns out that they want to try to make the probability of drawing a "restricting card" about equal to whatever the probability is of a "normal failure", since they assume that the highest probability failure option will be the one that will be utilized. Then they go into a lot of stuff that I don't understand that supposedly shows why this is a useful thing to do. In any event, someone with more mathy brains is going to have to explain it all to me at some point, and I withdraw my objection above.

But man: so neat!

Odds are this guy doesn't know what he's talking about

This annoys:

Repeating as World Series champions is, as the last nine winners can attest, exceedingly difficult. The last defending champion even to reach the World Series was the 2001 Yankees. The last National League team to win consecutive World Series was the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds, known as the Big Red Machine. So the odds are stacked against the Phillies, not that they mind.

He makes it seem like the fact that the Phillies won the Series last year actually makes it more unlikely that they will win it this year. But that's just the ol' gambler's fallacy at work.

I think the real insight lurking here is that baseball is, relatively, a very stochastic game, and so even a very dominant team is going to require a significant amount of luck to make it all the way twice in a row. Compare this to, say, basketball, which is not as stochastic and where you see higher winning percentages and where championship streaks are relatively common.

Life is pain

A very good post at Memories Of Kevin Malone that channels the damaged psyche of the generation of Dodger fans who were traumatized by the continuous failures of the 1990s. There are lots of good comments, too, including one from Megalomaniac that I'll quote at length:

Sure enough, in 1991, the Dodgers had a very good team and played very good baseball. It was a great summer. They had the best record at the break, 49-31. For 18 years, that record at the break has been a benchmark for me. I measured this team against it. Weird. And then heartbreak. The Braves, 7 games down at the break, caught them, and then passed them. I was devastated. I still hate the Braves because of it.

In 1992, I watched or listened to nearly every game. And that was before all games were on TV, so it was a lot of listening. 99 losses. And with each one of them, the elation from '88 and that awesome summer of '91 felt another hundred miles away.

And then it just got weird. Five rookies of the year, the rise of Piazza, knocking the Giants out in '93. Rather than winning anything, that stuff became the measure of a good season. And when the playoffs did happen, the goddamn Braves just swept the Dodgers right back to reality.

That really, really nails it. As I think I've written before, 1991 was the year I first achieved baseball consciousness (I was only 7 during the 1988 Series), and it was heartbreaking. And then, the next year, which was really my first year of being a bonafide, stats-mongering baseball fan, I had to endure 99 friggin' losses (on TV sometimes but mostly radio). It's the sort of thing that builds a lot of character. And ingrains in you a life-long hatred of the Braves. (Actually, it was a bit of a trip going up against John Smoltz of all people in the last series...gave me flashbacks to the bad old days.)

Anyway, the point is, it's really nice discovering that there's this whole Lost Generation of Dodger fans--folks who were too young to really experience the 1988 World Series, and who have grown up with the bizarre and disappointing experience of rooting for a franchise that was on the one hand one of the most storied in baseball, and on the other, completely unsuccessful. In other words: we're completely unaccustomed to success, and yet we're steeped in a tradition of success. It's a weird place to be. And it will continue to be that way until we get a Dodger championship that we can call our own.

(Photo from this site of Jose Offerman, who hit a homerun in his first career at bat--which was exciting, until we all realized that he lacked the ability to throw a ball to first base.)

UPDATE: It is worth noting that in that 1991 season, it was still the old playoff format where only two teams from each league went to the playoffs (and for some reason, the Atlanta Braves were shoehorned into the NL West). These days, the Dodgers simply would have made it in as the wildcard.

3 and 0 do it again go cha cha dodgers

A very satisfying Dodger victory. One or two things:

• The last few weeks I've been walking around town with my Dodgers cap on, and, man--Bay Area people really hate the Dodgers. And, you know, that's fine. But then it turns out that every Bay Area person's favorite basketball team is--you guessed it--the Lakers. Everybody here loves the Lakers! I'm never sure whether to hit them over the head with this consistency or graciously accept their love for at least one LA team.
• A guest blogger for Ackerman has a really good Moneyball-style pwn of LaRussa, explaining why reliever Ryan Franklin's ERA made him look a lot better than he actually was. This is satisfying, because I got really sick of everyone saying how LaRussa was going to out-manage us in this series.

On to the NLCS.

UPDATE: Harinder sez,

I think the Lakers love is because so many Bay Area residents are SoCal transplants. I just wanted to state my "Fuck the Lakers!" here for the record.

Nope! All the Bay Area Laker fans I'm talking about are born-and-raised Bay Area-ers. The reason why they love the Lakers is because they are weak-ass bandwagon fans who just couldn't commit to an abusive, no-championship relationship with the Warriors.

Your "fuck the Lakers" is hereby noted. Also: I've sent Kobe to rape you.

Quick thought

You know how the excuse for not repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is always something like: "we've got a lot on our plate, maybe when things settle down a bit"? Well I was just thinking that, as a matter of tactics, this probably has it completely backwards.

I would think the best time to roll out a change like this would be while the military is stretched thin and engaged in multiple theaters of combat, because in these circumstances the pragmatic case for equality--we need everyone we can get for the task at hand--would be at its most salient. When things are quiet, on the other hand, is when the armed forces has the luxury of kicking out perfectly good men and women.

Your Dodgers come-from-behind-craziness

If you're any kind of Dodger fan at all, you'll want to just sit back and watch every single one of these video clips.

Forehead slapping time

So, Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize. But why? Not only has he only been in office for less than a year, but:

• he's still got the two wars going, and they are far from resolved.
• he will not be able to close Guantanamo when he said he would.
  
• he's completely reneged on his campaign promises of transparency and accountability for Bush-era abuses, including civil liberties and torture. See here (via Harinder) for an account of how Obama--with the help of a Democratic Congress--is actually continuing the war on transparency that began with the Bush administration.

Worst of all, this sort of thing will give Obama the cover to continue Bush's policies, making it harder to hold his feet to the fire on the campaign pledges he's broken. The whole thing is really heart-rending, really, because it likely means that we're just stuck with this awful, brutal, secretive government for a long time to come--a government that infantilizes its citizenry, assuming the role of arbiter of what we need to know.

Ultimately, though, the blame resides with the citizenry itself. The idea that our government tortures people and acts upon information gathered from torture is no longer seen as something dispicable, morally reprehensible, and a practice that characterizes only the most brutal and oppressive regimes. Instead, it's seen as a mere partisan talking point--a point on which reasonable people can disagree. But it's just awful. It proves that we are a savage people.

PS: This reminds me of when Micheal Moore won the Cannes Film Festival for Fahrenheit 9/11, which was not a particularly great film in any respect. It was pretty obvious that the Cannes people just wanted to make a melodramatic "statement". This seems like the same sort of thing--hey, let's stick it to Bush, they probably thought. Let's reward America for doing an about face and rejecting the Bush worldview. In the end, though, they just ended up stupidly endorsing a slew of positions held by Obama that are indistinguishable from those held by Bush. Ack.

And it don't stop

Okay, I had this idea of setting up a side-blog whose gimmick is that every day, a new video is posted. You can find it here: http://runforitmarty.tumblr.com/

I figured it would make sense to open it up to multiple admins, so if anyone wants to help me run it (i.e., make sure that there are enough videos queued up so that it's churning one out every day), let me know. And of course, if you have any suggestions, let me know (I'll give suggested videos priority in the queue).

Let's all continue to fuck around on the internet--together.

Oh, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Jewish btw

It's true. Ackerman lays out the ramifications:

YHWH, moonlighting as a subpar Borscht Belt comedian, has given Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Jewish origins, according to the Daily Telegraph's inauguration of a geopolitical psychodrama. We have now determined that identity politics has a dank and silted basement. From here on out, Ahmadinejad can say whatever he likes about the Holocaust or Israel and it'll just be performative and tasteless, not an international outrage. Israel, in the most mindfucky course of events in its history, might be obliged to grand him citizenship. (Knowing Benjamin Netanyahu, he might bulldoze some Palestinian farmer's olive garden to build Ahmadinejad an apartment complex or something.)

Ahmadinejad's detractors are now objectively antisemitic. His comment-thread defenders are caught in quite a thorny Hebraic trap of their own -- so diabolical that one wonders if the Jews planned this all along...

If I were Andrew Sullivan, I'd say "Oy" here.

An injustice

The Dodgers will--barely--finish the season with the best record in the National League. Usually this means we would get to play the worst team that makes the playoffs, which is usually the wildcard, in this case the Rockies. But there is a rule that says that two teams from the same division cannot meet in the first round of the playoffs. And so instead of the Rockies, we will be facing the St. Louis Cardinals.

And this is bad, because the Cardinals have our number. They have excellent starting pitching and Albert Pujols. They're going to be very, very tough to beat in the post season.

Another bad thing--and this is just a general complaint--about the MLB playoffs is that the first round is over so quickly. It's a five game series. And baseball is a very stochastic game, much more so than, say, basketball or football. So a quick first round exit can really make you feel like you were the victim of bad luck more than anything to do with actual baseball skill.

Go Bears?

It seems Chancellor Birgeneau has some dirt on NYT columnist Bob Herbert.

If Alex Jaffe ran the FCC

This is from a while ago, but worth another look:


FCC Okays Nudity On TV If It’s Alyson Hannigan