Football Curiosities

In celebration of the Super Bowl this weekend, I thought I'd bring up a blast from the past...yup remember the Denver Gold of the USFL? Over a great 3 years the Gold finished 27 - 27 but did lead the league in attendance...gee imagine that! Also anyone remember that on July 17, 1983 the first championship game with the Michigan Panthers beating the Philadelphia Stars at the old Mile High Stadium, anyone? Wow those were the days...ha. Gotta love the good old football days!

Haiku Wednesday

Super Tuesday

Cast your vote today
Choose Elephants or Donkeys
Eight months rhetoric

Magazine Update

New Yorker

With the incessant talk about the downing economy is it any wonder it doesn't become a self fulling prophecy. Anyway in the intro to the magazine it discusses an economist Hyman Minsky who held that Wall Street encouraged businesses and individuals to take too much risk which generated ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. His "financial-instability hypothesis" states that there are 5 stages of the credit cycle: displacement, boom, euphoria, profit taking,and panic. Displacement is simply a new invention that causes excitement (internet, low interest rates), which leads to a boom (money flows), then euphoria which causes conservative businesses to lend credit to anything hoping to make a killing, then these same businesses start to sell-off knowing the good times won't last, and finally panic hits when (tipping point anyone?) it hits the little people (and usually too late).

Wired

What's Inside: Featuring PowerBar Protein Plus - High Fructose Corn Syrup (American's consumed 58 pounds of this sweetener) eeks!

Boring article on stuff that seems to suck...but I prefer the little sidebar on 34 things that don't suck (things I agree to): farmer's markets, tap water, pocketknives, DVRs, thumb drives, kites, netflix, guitar hero, bicycles, velcro, and flip-flops. And I include M&Ms, iPods, lava lamps, books, comic books, and running shoes.

Interesting aside in the iPhone article. Buried in the middle of the article was a reference of Apple's interest in putting forth a tablet computer. Lots of references that this would be the new thing...I wonder.

50th Anniversary of Lego

To mark Lego's 50th Anniversary here is my first lego...

It says this came out in 1973 but I was 2 so perhaps Legos stayed on the shelf a bit longer. I remember building this, it was fantastic. My favorite model basically because it was simplistic yet very cool. Just loved how the rubber bands were used to cushion the ride. Great set
LEGO brick curiosities

• There are about 62 LEGO bricks for every one of the world's 6 billion inhabitants.

• LEGO bricks are available in 53 different colors.

• 19 billion LEGO elements are produced every year.

• 2.16 million LEGO elements are molded every hour, or 36,000 per minute.

• More than 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1949.

• Two eight-stud LEGO bricks of the same color can be combined in 24 different ways.

• Three eight-stud bricks can be combined in 1,060 ways.

• There are more than 915 million combinations possible for six 2 x 4 LEGO bricks of the same color.

• The LEGO bricks sold in one year would circle the world 5 times.

• 40 billion LEGO bricks stacked on top of one another would connect the earth with the moon.

• World-renowned author Douglas Coupland believes the LEGO brick represents a "language in itself."

This Week in Comics

X-men #207
Lucky 13 for the Messiah Complex or shall I say unlucky for one of the originals. So it is done, a cross-spanning story which is one of the best X-crossovers in years. The ending was satisfactory and certainly a new feel for what it means to be an X-men. Cyke is taking on a much bigger role, which I fear will begin to cast him into some shadows and dark parts. I see him turning darker and I am sure it will become a plot point sometime in the future. The X-books are certainly going down a different path. Couple of good lines...my favorite

"Well, I hope you remembered your lunch money, kiddo. And your warm, woolly mittens, and your best -- / -- Soul dagger? Yeah I bought that."

I still think the baby has got some connection to Jean Grey...the hints of the baby girl touching Scott's locket with a picture of Jean and Scott, the red hair, and having Cable and her going into the future...there has got to be something there(?)

Astonishing X-men #24
I was reading on wikipedia the other day about Whedon's publishing record on this book and frankly it is horrible. This thing has been going on for quite sometime. This book marks the next to last of his contribution to the x-history. It has been a good run. Not for sure this whole Beakworld has made alot of sense but he continues to nail the characters...

Wolverine, "When does Pete get to throw me at something?"

Virgin Galactic

Space is Virgin territory - with these words in 2009 the quest to make space a bit more closer will become a reality. Branson's Virgin Galactic will take 6 paying customers to an altitude of 72 miles at a speed of Mach 3 allowing for 6 minutes of weightlessness. Certainly an adventure for those able to afford the $200,000 price tag.

So basically at this stage this is simply a stunt but someone has to be brash enough to get it going and I am totally behind it. By turning space into something that can be reach can only mean that in 50 years it will become common place. Imagine those first airline travelers! Anyway I am sure it will have its growing pains but lets up that it works and someday maybe even I can see the curvature of the earth

Haiku Wednesday

Winter Sky

Long shadows, low sun
Big piercing blue sky, drab earth
Clouds caress white peaks

Lego Set 7672

Weighing in at 482 pieces, this product marks Lego's first foray into what I call the non linear star wars universe. To me it marks a great uncharted territory for the product lines of the future. It is obvious to me that for the most part they have run out of viable options with the movie universe tie ins. Especially considering the majority of the items are simply retreads. Great for a new generation of builders but for those of us who have been around since the sets first started to arrive I can only bring myself to buy so many "new" models of things I already have (i.e. Falcon ver 2.0, Slave I ver 2.0 or 3.0, Y-wing ver 2.0, etc).
Obviously the developers both at Lego and who control product at Skywalker Ranch realize to move the universe along and control its money making (and with no more movies)scheme needs to move into this non-linear product line. For years the video games have run rampant in developing back stories and creating new villains and spacecraft. So here is the first attempt at dipping into this untapped market. The Rogue Shadow which is the name of this Imperial Ship has three included figures. The first is an obvious tie-in to the linear Star Wars and is Darth Vader. The second two are mysterious characters called Juno Eclipse and the Secret Apprentice. Okay well that's interesting but so? No package indications and no writeup with the instructions, just 3 characters and a mystery ship. But on the cover is a tie into something called "Force Unleashed". Again nothing to me? Well obviously being more than a casual fan I decided to do a little research and what I found was an amazing new mega event being "unleashed". From what I can tell the gist of the new scheme is tied to a whole new video game coming out in the Fall of 2008. A platform wide game launch (probably like "Halo") allowing you to play this new secret apprentice which presently has no name (it's supposed to be secret and thus Lego's silly naming on the package). Obviously for the uninitiated Sith can't have multiple apprentice so it appears that Anakin is being sneaky. Well the game is only the beginning...a new book, a comic graphic novel, and toys mark a mass marketing ploy to try and get it to feel like a movie premier. Interesting to see if this works...if it does expect every 2-3 years to have a new "something". Personally from the Lego standpoint I hope this works as it would be nice to get new models every so often. Anyway great new model. Joy to build and not something hastly thrown together...interesting to actually see it in action...PSP is to have the game too.

Rox Talk

Back to the Hot Stove. With my Game Score+ meanderings I sort of dropped the Roxs. Anyway I think Garett Atkins said it best (when asked about the D-backs signing of Haren),

"Yeah, we needed more good pitchers in the NL West"

Anyway the NL West seemed the most active of any of the divisions in the Senior Circuit. Major signings included Haren to D-backs; Iguchi, Hairston, Edmonds, Wolf, and Prior to San Diego; Jones and Kuroda (not to mention Schmidt's return) to LA; and Rowand to San Fran. Obviously something seems to be missing from this list....hmmmm, yup the Roxs signed no one of significance. Is this good or bad? Well basically what I did was I took last year's Win Shares and see what the addition of these players meant.

A Win Share is statistic developed by James that assigns a single number to each player for his contributions for the year. All pitching, hitting and defensive contributions by the player are taken into account. Statistics are adjusted for park, league and era. A Win Share represents one-third of a team win, by definition. If a team wins 80 games in a season, then its players will share 240 win shares. So for last year based on the team's final standings

	W	L	RS	RA	Ex - W	WS Factor
Arizona	90	72	712	732	79	0.88
Colorado	90	73	860	758	90	1.00
San Diego	89	74	741	666	89	1.00
LA	82	80	735	727	82	1.00
SF	71	91	683	720	77	1.09

So assuming that all the teams current players earn similar Win Shares in 2008 (probably not, but I will assume that some players will go up and some down...this is just a back of the envelope analysis!). So basically looking at the 2008 roster versus the 2007 roster and looking at only starters and players with at least 100 at bats, I determined the Win Shares (divided this number by 3 for wins) returning and then I also adjusted these Win Shares with the WS Factor above. I did this because Arizona's win total last year was way out of whack with the pythagorous win total based on their runs scored and runs against. I doubt very much that they will be as "lucky" as last year especially with them trading Valverde this off-season.

	WS Return	WS Correction
Arizona	82	72
Colorado	81	81
San Diego	60	60
LA	72	72
SF	55	60

So Colorado, which kept its team pretty much intact and only losing Matsui's 14 Win Shares, Carroll's 4 Win Shares, Fogg's 6 Win Shares. What about the other divisional rivals and their additions?

	+ WS Wins	Total Wins
Arizona	6	78
Colorado	0	81
San Diego	8	68
LA	11	83
SF	11	71

Well based on this little exercise it looks like LA has the early club house lead. They had a bunch of good acquistions in Andrew Jones and possibly a full season of Schmidt. The unknown factor is the Japanese pitcher Kuroda. San Diego has a lot of offensive holes to fill with losing Cameron, Giles, and Bradley and trying to make this up iwht Iguchi, Hairston, and Edmonds (who is old!). Haren doesn't solve Arizona's offensive woes (although their young players should start to hit being a year older). What about our Roxs? Well with full seasons from Jimenez and possibly Morales along with a year older Hirsh the pitching should stay fine. The only real hole is 2B. Can Nix get 8 - 12 Win Shares this year (to make up for Matsui's 14)? I think the Roxs will be fine even with the rivals additions.

This Week in Comics

New X-men #46
Chapter 12 in the Messiah Complex saga...almost there. From the future comic lists it would appear that the New X-men are done. The writers are on to X-Force and the another new book is slated as Young X-men What this means for the current team is anyones guest. Perhaps they will move into the mainstream books, perhaps they will just fade to the background Too bad since I am finally getting around to knowing them. Another excellent cover. Story itself really didn't go anywhere. Basically the story was a plot point to get all the X-folks to Muir Island along with Predator X. Now onto the conclusion...

The Umbrella Academy #5
Well another next to last review. The first arc is coming to close. It has been a good first step. The storytelling has been such that it has been very difficult trying to figure out characters but this is always the hardest part as these are new and have no real back story. Good art decent story...let's see if it can get wrapped up nice...

David Lynch - Catching the Big Fish

With every new year, I try to read some sort of self help, motivational, or this is how I got where I am type book. Saw this book in the store and with Lynch's wackiness in the movies, I figured what the heck. As a person he seems to be pretty straight forward. I mean he looks kind of like an ax murderer but reading his story he seems to be a pretty normal individual and as he says, he is just a boy from Missoula, Montana. Anyway when you look at his work he is a tremendous movie maker. I mean for sheer off the wallness it is amazing. Twin Peaks, great, Elephant Man, touching, Wild at Heart, wacky, Blue Velvet, demented...I mean he has done it all. Some quotes:

"It's best on the big screen (i.e. movies), That's the way to go into the world"

"A film should stand on its own "

"True happiness lies within"

Overall a good lite read...big into mediation...don't know if I could settle into a deep enough quietness to get there...

Haiku Wednesday

Best Movies

Must See, Riveting
Dynamic scenes, great acting
Over already?

Apple Air

I think sometimes Apple gets caught up in their own little universe and gets too chummy with themselves. I also think they have been caught in that "make a splash" each year or else. Last year it was the iPhone, this year the MBA. To me the MBA is nothing more than iCandy. It is a total niche product with absolutely no real upside. The Apple faithful think it is silly and underpowered and the newbie looking to break in isn't really going to buy a paper thin computer. Why doesn't Apple go for the kill...they have amazing buy in of their iPods and iPhones...why don't they introduce a relatively cheap cool computer that will cement their place as a new media hub? Instead they dilute their offerings with "art". It just seems to me that the MBA is a product of hubris and not something people were really grappling for. Sure I hate lugging around a 5 pound computer but what about something like this? Heck as a busy traveler I wouldn't want to carry around such a paper thin device...can't wait to see the warranty fillers on this product. But like a friend says, Apple enjoys being an upper crust type company, they like to make a splash and they probably don't want to cater to the masses. Plenty of BMW type companies that just stick to a certain group of the world. Guess with computers the desire for a clean interface that tends to work more often then not just makes competitors look lame in comparison.

Birthday Crossword

A Monday puzzle this year! Good little puzzle...plunks and abrade were killers. It seems the Monday puzzles. Favorites include free kittens and prize inside.

Philip Pullman - The Golden Compass

Saw and loved the movie...so my thought was that the book would even be better, more fantastical...ughhhh what a slog through it became. Very disappointing. What I don't understand is that this was supposed to be a kid's book (?) and I just never got that. I mean the Harry Potter books have a kid element to it that adults can easily relate to but this one just seems too harsh, too dark to be a kid's book. Really not a lighthearted book but kind of sinister. I will finish the trilogy but it won't be a top priority.

I really thought all the religious stuff was way overblown, as usual...it only provides an outlet for a healthy dialogue about what it all means. If only people were open-minded about these things and instead of feeling attacked and backed into a corner with claws out, simply consider other viewpoints and move on. Does it really matter so much to you about what others think about something? Is it wrong to have different thoughts? Why take it personal, in the end what you think only really matters to you.

Peter Parker, SWM

Big shake up for our friendly neighborhood spider-man. Twenty odd years of his comic life flushed down the drain. Was this a good move? Personally I don't read the mainstream spider-man...I keep to the ultimate version. And why do I do this...well part of it is because it is a stripped down simple version of spidey not shackled by the weight of 500+ issues. No clone saga debacle and no marriage. Spidey should always be that awkward teenager or twenty something. The marriage thing was probably good at the time because frankly how many twentysomething plots can one reuse but then we are now at that time of gee how many different marriage plots can we twist. Good or bad is kind of irrelevant because comic book characters have to have that soap opera mentality about themselves otherwise no one would bother to see what happens month to month and year to year. It really doesn't mean that the marriage thing was a wasted plot point but it helped develop the character in one way and in hindsight it really didn't move the core character in the direction that makes him interesting. Let's hope they don't ruin the renewal. My thoughts for Peter's Singles Ad:

SWM seeks SWF who isn't afraid of spiders. Enjoys costume parties. Can we save the Universe together?

This Week in Comics

X-Factor 27
Chapter 11 in the ongoing series. Kind of a filler issue...some issues get resolved like the multiple man getting sent back through time (cool concept though!) Bet we see Layla down the line...two issues to go. Predator X is at the Mansion...big throw down in the next issue. Pretty decent this was the first filler art issue. Up to this point the issues have been well written and drawn but his one had the look of a last minute filler artist...got to hate that. Best thing about this series has been the cover art...fantastic.

Captain America Omnibus

Wow what a well written series. I admit I missed out on the Death of Captain America...I came in at Issue 26 having missed out on a beautifully scripted arc up to that point. When Marvel put these issue into their Omnibus edition I initially balked at paying $100 to read the issues. Fortunately Mile High Comics had their 40% after Thanksgiving sale so I snapped this up like a big dog. Finally got to read it over the Holiday Break and what a great series. I mean every issue led somewhere or provided some clue to the bigger picture. There wasn't any fluff or unnecessary crap that sometimes we have to put up with long term series (i.e. the author decided to mail in a story that month because he didn't feel like it). What amazed me was the tight group of actors. Reading the X-men through the years there is such a huge cast of characters that you that you can afford to go down on some tangent with B-list characters and get away with it. This one though as a tight knit group, a long standing history, and a take that certainly does not suck. My only real question is when Ed took this over and brought Bucky back into the mix, did he know about Civil War. His plots do get a bit of track due to the Civil War storyline...did he intend to really kill of Steve Rodgers from the beginning? Obviously it was a certain progression of his story up to Civil War and once the fall out occurred it made sense. Anyway it was a good read.

Haiku Wednesday

Stock Show

The Old West is here
Cowboys are in the city
Where did Trigger go?

Magazine Wrap Up

Wired

Michel Gondry, frankly I had never heard of him...but then Jack Black's new movie about video store clerks remaking famous movies came about and...guess who the director is? Up to this point his best known movie was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I thought was good but kind of in that David Lynch style of moviemaking (i.e. more impressed the movie actually got made because frankly it would have taken a leap of faith for anyone to actually green light...wouldn't you'd think someone would have to understand it before letting it go forward...all in the name art!)

42 Entertainment? Again anyone? Well if you remember the internet search for interesting clues for the movie AI then you've got the organization. The latest has been Nine Inch Nails internet advertising. Mysterious flashdrives lying in bathrooms reviewing a new song which ends with crickets which when analyzed by a spectrograph reveals a phone number in Cleveland which leads to a phone message which led to a website and etc etc... Also the whole perplex city cards indicated the potential for world wide games. Exciting but unfortunately most of us have lives...

Where does $15.99 go when purchasing a CD?

0.16 Musician's Unions

0.80 Packaging/Manufacturing

0.80 Publishing Royalties

0.80 Retail Profit

0.96 Distribution

1.60 Artist's Royalties

1.76 Label Profit

2.40 Marketing/Promotion

2.88 Label Overhead

3.84 Retail Overhead

And iTunes - $9.99

1.40 Artist

3.00 iTunes

5.59 Label

Interesting infoporn article on nutritional values

Sky and Telescope

The prime meridian was established in 1850 by George Airy and then in October 1884 at conference in Washington DC declared that this would "the " meridian.  Didn't realize it took so long to make it official.  At one time, Paris tried to become this meridian and years before India had established a 0 degrees longitude.

New Yorker

In depth article on the head of the US intelligence service.  Seems a decent type of guy but can you really honestly feel safe about someone running this organization who grew up in the Cold War era and probably still can't figure out how to turn off the ringer on his cell phone?  Problem with government jobs and seniority...by the time these guys get into the position to run an organization they don't know beans about what is going on in the world around them.  I mean this article discusses a Disney Imagineer coming in and designing the Natonal Counter Terrorism Center.  They talk about Intellipedia (a la wikipedia) , A-Space (social network), and looking into virtual worlds???  Good golly have they forgotten the underlying basis of intelligence...i.e. local gossip, learning foreign languages, integreting into societies.  Ughhhh

The one thing interesting that I didn't know about was a Women's school in DC during WWII that operated the machinery that deciphered German naval code...for the story here

/div>

Rox Talk

Part III in my Game Score + research (Part I and Part II). The last post showed that using the extra outs adjustment factor and graphing the results using a pitch per out scenario could provide a necessary adjustment to the Game Score framework that added in the pitch count to make a realistic comparison between Red Bartlett's 58 pitch efficient pitching performance to Kerry Wood's 20 strikeout dominant performance. In conclusion to Part II, I wanted to see how this adjustment factor effected a team's performance over a season and what if I used correcting factor for actual pitches per out rather than using 3?

So the extra out adjustment factor showed to be a good adjustment when you consider the best pitched games but what about a team's performance over a one year period? Looking at the Colorado Rockies in 2007, the following graph indicates how the adjustment factor looks for a team during the season.

Pretty linear (note Aaron Cook's 74 pitch game below the x-axis). The correlation of this is equal to 0.77 while Game Score is equal to 0.46 (data not shown). So this shows for an average pitching staff, a pretty good correlation between pitch count and Game Score+, although there is a greater amount of negative game scores with this adjustment. During the regular season the low Game Score was 4 which translated to -23 GS+ (which wasn't the worst adjustment, this goes to a -65 GS+ pitched in Game 53 by Hirsh who throw 103 pitches in a 4 2/3 effort). So to conclude this adjustment factor shows good correlation to an average team between pitch count and the new metric Game Score+.

The final data crunch is to look at the good pitching performances and the 2007 Rockies using actual pitch per out instead of a constant 3. To review, I took all pitching performances and adjusted all the pitching performances to 9 innings. For those pitchers who didn't go 9 innings, these extra pitches were divided by 3 (assume 3 pitch strikeouts which if you recall is based on the 81 pitch perfect strikeout game) and provided the "extra outs" metric which is subtracted from Game Score. Instead of assuming a 3 for every pitcher then I just used pitcher's actual pitches per out ratio that was established for the innings they did pitch.

The final question is then instead of using 3 pitches to account for each out for pitcher's adjusted 9 inning game then what happens when we use their actual pitches per out ratio they were actually having during their appearance?

Well this method certainly drops the large negative games scores and still holds a pretty good correlation factor of 0.57 versus 0.77 using the 3 pitch per out factor. For the good pitching (data not shown) it drops the the correlation factor to 0.02 versus 0.25. Because of this I think using the 3 pitch factor seems to be the best bet.

Finally if you recall the whole purpose of this exercise was to try and determine if Aaron Cook's 74 pitch complete game was worthy to be considered a great game. If you recall Bill James' Game Score for this game was 67. Using my Game Score + adjustment factor you increase his score to 69. How does this relate to the best performances from 2002 - 2007? Well he barely eeks in to around 120th and doesn't even come close to matching the 2006 performance by Jeff Francis who pitched a complete game Game Score 91 versus Game Score+ of 75 (due his taking 129 pitches or requiring 48 extra pitches or 16 extra outs).

This Week in Comics

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 #10
Whedon is back for a pseudo filler issue. Guess this one was a bit out of the ordinary as the issue had a "reader" as a character which was chosen from readers who sent in an email stating why Buffy means so much too them. As far as the issue goes again it delves into the much bigger buffyverse which I just don't have a good feel for. It seems Buffy will be betrayed by someone close and the thought is Willow who then goes on to say if she hasn't already (?) Huh?? Anyway back to a continuity with he next issue. Do find the stories good but boy if you don't know Buffy it can be a challenge...even reading the wikipedia entry doesn't really clear anything up...whew!

Uncanny X-men #494

Now of course talking about a history... with almost 500 issue in the bag (assume 12 issues a year...) and we almost have 40 years of continuity to mess with...and I thought Buffy was tough to follow. Is it any wonder kids have a tough go of it trying to hook up with these long standing comic stories. I mean this Messiah Complex is really reaching into the old bag of tricks bringing out some long standing enemies and story lines. With Cable and Bishop being central characters in all this it would seem that the writer's have happened upon some long standing plot points and are finally trying to bring some closure. This is Chapter 10 so about 3 issues to go...still waiting for the shoe to drop...

Running

Just a quick chart showing my running averages over the last 4 years. The square is the mean and the lines on either end is the 95% upper and lower confidence limits.

Haiku Wednesday

Snowflakes

Quiet and lazy
Gently falls to my jacket
Melts, gone forever

And a bonus one for the new year

Nature's mathematics
Very simple, yet complex
Why else is car stuck?

Out with 2007 and in with 2008

Well another year in the books, another orbit around the sun. Good year, kept up with blog and I am pleased with how it has gone...it is nice to have the year laid out for you. 2008 will be better. I hope to improve some of the baseball posts. So the final tally:

- 31 books read (favorite, "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" - Michael Chabon)
- 94 comics reviewed (favorite, "Captain America" and "Messiah Complex")
- Best Movie seen was "Juno"
- Best Album was "Linkin Park"
- 29 Haiku's Written

My Favorites

Flickering shadows
Flame Dancing to its rhythm
Mesmerizing light

The night sky beckons
They shimmer and wink at me
Old friends say hello )

By the way this is what the readers of the NY Times thought was the most interesting for 2007:
1. Magazine: Sweeping the Clouds Away
2. U.S.: Virginia Tech Shooting Leaves 33 Dead
3. U.S.: Virginia Gunman Identified as a Student
4. Health: Study Shows Why the Flu Likes Winter
5. Magazine: Unhappy Meals
6. Maureen Dowd: A Mock Columnist, Amok
7. Books: An Epic Harry Potter Showdown
8. Multimedia: The Victims
9. Circuits: The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype
10. Dining & Wine: 101 Simple Summer Meals

Good year, things to look for next year....new Indiana Jones movie, Be Kind Rewind, the end of the Messiah Complex...)