And then there were eight

If you follow the sports, you might have heard that the Braves and Red Sox both completed historic collapses last night, or alternatively, that the Cardinals and Rays completed historic comebacks.  


The NYT has adequately documented the Sox collapse, but the same article could be written concerning the Braves, if only the Braves and Cardinals played in the AL East instead of the Red Sox and Rays**.  In fact, Cardinals, without Wainwright for the season, with Carpenter getting older, and with various nagging injuries to their 3-4-5 hitters, looked worse off to my eye than the Rays, and like they might miss the playoffs for Pujols' possibly last season in a Cardinals uniform. 

What shouldn't be lost in all this is that the Braves would still be alive if Kimbrel hadn't blown a save. The Red Sox would be alive if Papelbon hadn't blown a save, or if the Yankees hadn't sent Cory Wade out for the ninth.  All of which is to say that, if you weren't already convinced, Mariano Rivera is the greatest reliever of all time -- which is something, even if that means he's "only" been as valuable over his career as Tommy John, David Cone, or Bret Saberhagen.  After all, being the 50th most valuable pitcher of all time is damn good, and leagues better than the next reliever on the list (Gossage, if you're counting at home; I don't include Eck because he had a great career as a starter before becoming a reliever).


** though you could then plausibly argue that the Angels would be the AL WC, all disrespect to the strength of the NL intended

Hi, it's Irving. Irving Who? Irving Gas

Got a call from some people "doing a survey."


She: Have you bought gas at a local station within the past two weeks?
Me: I don't remember.
She: Hunh?
Me: I own a Prius and don't drive very much. [as it turned out when I checked my records later, it had been more than two weeks]
She: How about within the last month?
Me: Yes.
She: Where was it?
Me: I don't remember.
She: Hunh?
Me: I know where the place is; it's the place I go to all the time, but I don't remember the name of it off the top of my head.  I could go check my records to find out.
She: Well, was it an Irving?
Me: I've never heard of them before.
She: You haven't?
Me: Nope.
She: Well, we have enough people in your category.  Thank you!  [click]


I was fairly certain there wasn't an Irving Gas in Burlington; looking online, they appear to be a MA-based company... oh, they do in fact have a location in Burlington, and it's the closest gas station to my house, and right across from the park we walk to.  My only defense is that it's a relatively recent name change, and I haven't fueled at that gas station in about nine years because they have the highest prices around, so I don't even look at it anymore.  Even with the name change.

Moby-Dick (1851)

Cleaning out my Drafts folder, I found a 3 months-old reply to the following question.  The e-mail thread is long dead, but the reply seems postable.

Now, how does anyone feel about Moby-Dick?

I think "Call me Ishmael" is one of the more overrated opening lines of a novel.  It has a certain simplicity and oomph the first time you read it, but it gets tiresome with repetition.  The opening of Pride and Prejudice, OTOH, makes me happy every time.  I have a stupid grin on my face right now from thinking about it.

IIRC, roughly half the novel is basically a technical instruction manual on whaling, as best as Melville could research at the time, which is fascinating from historical perspective but is a questionable addition to a novel.  Still, I read it all, so mission accomplished, I guess?  

There's that fascinating bit at the beginning where Melville spends pages and pages writing about how Ishmael makes an incredible fuss when he finds out he'll be sharing a bed with a harpooneer.  

No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply.

Oh, Ishmael, you naive homophobe!

Personally, I think China Mieville's The Scar features a better story of a hunted leviathan, but Moby-Dick was worth a read, if only to provide some perspective on The Scar.

Netflix and me, the sucker

A lot has been said about Netflix/Qwikster, but one thing I haven't seen stressed enough is this: 


Actually, scratch that.  I was about to say that I, and presumably many other Netflix customers, still have the streaming service solely because we want 3 DVDs out at a time.  This was based on the fact that when the new pricing went into effect and I looked at the options online, it looked to me that if you wanted no streaming, you could only get 2 or 1 out at a time... but when I went to go get a screenshot of that for this blog entry, I finally noticed the "Show Additional all DVD Plans" text in the lower right.  Because I have "only" a 20-inch screen and usually have the bookmarks sidebar open, half the text was off the screen.

So... it turns out that you could simply cancel streaming from the get-go, and if you were just using the DVD service anyway, actually pay less than you were previously paying.  

So, aside from Netflix's skeezy tactics of not showing the 3 DVDs out at-a-time with no streaming option by default, what's the big deal here?


(I mean aside from the fact that now that the DVD rentals are a separate business, everyone like me will drop the streaming service until streaming matures to the point where it can almost completely replace the DVD rental service... at which point, the best option might not be Netflix.)

Jane Eyre (2011)

Very moody violins.

This is faithful to the letter and spirit of the novel and well acted and well cast.  The choice to start the movie with Jane running away from Thornfield, without any explanation of where we are in the story, is a curious choice... and it doesn't work.  The beginning drags awfully, and it's not until we get to Mia Wasikowska and Judi Dench that it begins to pick up.

The Book of the Dun Cow; Walter Wangerin, Jr.; 1978

God imprisoned Wyrm, evil incarnate, inside the Earth and set the creatures of the Earth as his unknowing keepers.  Wyrm tries to escape; his plan is to loose Cockatrice and a horde of basilisks upon the world to kill his keepers. Anthropomorphized animals assemble!  


This was shelved in the adult section, but it reads like YA (ah, and the NYT classed it so, calling it the best children's book of that year).  I could see people liking this, but I definitely prefer Chanticleer and the Fox.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

(originally viewed 8/17/11)


I wasn't going to write about it, but it recently came up that I didn't enjoy The Big Lebowski.  So, how did BL fail me?


On cursory examination, you might think the film stands noir on its head, but noir is essentially all about slackers who, through some otherwise minor event, get dragged way over their heads into grander schemes than they can imagine, but manage to muddle through and unravel the seeming mysteries that motivate the puppet masters, and finally come through in the end.  We just haven't seen a noir protagonist quite like The Dude before.


Since nothing really new in the way of plot is being offered, the script needs to excel in the characters and dialogue.  Unfortunately the dialogue, especially and at times excruciatingly in the scenes at the bowling alley, is not up to snuff**.  The Dude, Maude, and the "real" Lebowski all come off well, but Walter, Donny, and the nihilists just don't work, even now that I know that Walter is a direct poke at John Milius.  I realize that not everyone lives in a Noel Coward play, but I personally think Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as modern comedic noir has a lot more going for it than Lebowski***.  


There are flashes of a great movie that lies somewhere in the concept of The Big Lebowski, but that movie never manages to reveal itself, and I guess it's that failure to reach its potential that is ultimately disappointing.  The Dude, and apparently the Coen brothers, would have a clear conscience about that.



** I felt much the same way about Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ladykillers remake, only the problems are more pronounced in those films.  I wasn't crazy about No Country for Old Men.  Needless to say, I'm really worried that I won't like Fargo if I watch it again.


*** full disclosure: I'm a Val Kilmer homer, but also a Jeff Bridges homer, so neither movie is getting too big an advantage from my actor preferences, right?

Notes on a Scandal

As part of my ASA membership, I get a gratis copy of Signficance magazine, which was also the first I'd heard of the scandal surrounding Dr. Potti at Duke University.  Sadly, the Significance magazine article is not publicly available, but the writer's highlighted conclusion is that "Universities should support statistics as they support computing: specialist units should give advice on each."  The sad thing is that the Statistics department at Duke University has a 20+ year long history of working with the Medical Center; in fact, the Statistics department is housed in the Old Chemistry building right next to the West Campus entrance of the Medical Center (while I was there, the grad students used to go to the Med Center cafeteria for lunch all the time).  Don Berry, in particular, was a strong liaison with the Medical Center and did a ton of work on clinical trials at Duke in the 90's before moving to, ironically, to be the head of the Division of Quantitative Sciences at M.D. Anderson, where Baggerly and Coombes (no website?!), the professors who unearthed the problems in Potti's research, currently work.


But it's not like after Berry left there were no connections between the Duke Statistics department and the Medical Center.  Dalene Stangl (former chair of the department) has been doing clinical trials research with the Medical Center since before Berry left Duke, and Mike West (chair of the department during the 90's and the driver behind the department's rise from obscurity to prominence among Bayesian departments) and Ed Iversen have been doing work in genomics for ten years.  All this is to say that there is absolutely no reason why Potti should not have known about the statistical resources at his disposal.  So why didn't he use them?


Well, looking at the list of papers at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy (IGSP), West appears as coauthor on three papers with Potti, though thankfully not the Nature Medicine article, which is not (no longer?) listed on the IGSP list of papers.  The problem is that many of the remaining papers in the list that include Potti as coauthor have titles like "Oncogenic pathway signatures in human cancers as a guide to targeted therapies" and "An integrated genomic-based approach to personalized treatment of patients with advanced stage ovarian cancer", very similar in title to the problematic "Genomic signatures to guide the use of chemotherapeutics" Nature Medicine article.  Excising the one tumor won't really give confidence in the health of the  other papers, especially any that are based on the same data, until a thorough independent biopsy is conducted on each of them.

Your Highness (2011)**

I've slept on it and decided Your Highness is a horror movie.  Not because of the gratuitous amount of fake blood spilled.  Not because Natalie Portman's character must protest that she doesn't want a chopped-off minotaur's penis to touch her.  It is because we are pleading that Danny McBride won't touch her.  In the end, we are saved from this mental image by a chastity belt, and can happily imagine that he is killed on the quest to defeat the witch that put it there.


** I was considering "Natalie Portman goes slumming" as the title, but there's that whole Star Wars prequel thing.  You could argue that was unintentional slumming, because no one could have known in 1997 just how bad the results would be, but it's possible she thought this would be funny.

Mix tapes for the 21st century, part 2

Grooveshark wins for now; here's the "Confessions of a Sock Monkey" playlist and here is the accompanying story.  I might have liked to have the Sinead O'Connor version of "Why don't you do right?", the Peggy Lee version of "You'd be so nice to come home to" and especially the Rosey Grier version of "It's all right to cry", but close enough.  

So far I'm fairly impressed with Grooveshark's selection, but their interface feels a bit clownish with the noisy ads.  


I also hate their search engine; it throws up a lot of chaff when searching for a track, and does things like rank "Where the Hood At" and "Ride Wit Me" as more relevant to a search for "You'd be so nice to come home to" than several versions of the actual search term.  This means I almost always need to click the "See all" button.  All in all, not nearly as satisfying a user experience as putting together the mflow "Confessions of a Sock Money" playlist, even if mflow came up a few tracks short.  Mflow's search field to "Quickly add tracks to this playlist" especially kicks the ass of anything Grooveshark had to offer.  

So, I want mflow's interface and Grooveshark's database.

Mix tapes for the 21st century

Been playing with some Chrome apps.  A friend recommend We Are Hunted, but while I like the idea of having a "radio" that plays through new music, I had to keep stopping what I was doing to skip to the next song, and at the end of the day, I had about 4 songs marked that I kinda sorta liked.  So I went hunting through the music section of the Chrome apps store, and Mflow was highly recommended. 

The search isn't bad; it starts showing results as you type and separates the results into artists, albums, users, and tags (sadly, not tracks here, though if you do search by a particular song name, the search results do show a tracks section).  The track listings also helpfully show which album the track is pulled from, which is important when you want the version of "Pressure" from the Nylon Curtain and not the one on the Greatest Hits album.


I'm having fun with this, because I can check out holes in our music collection, and confirm things like:

• we're good to go with Prolonging the Magic and don't need any other Cake albums
• we're good with just the first two Cranberries albums
• same with Ben Folds Five's second and third albums and can skip his solo career, though I might be convinced that we need "Rockin' the Suburbs"

Sure, previewing music online isn't new, but my prior experience with places like last.fm gave me the impression that most places just gave you clips, and while you can hear full tracks youtube, it's less convenient to listen to whole albums (and I'm still a bit of a sucker for albums).


What I'm not entirely satisfied with on mflow is the selection.  It occurred to me that creating and sharing mflow playlists would be a good replacement for mix tapes; however, until they have more Shelleyan Orphan, that won't work for us. 

So what other services are out there?  Here's another situation where Wikipedia is really helpful, with a list of online music databases, and in particular the streaming services.  Of these, I need to check out Grooveshark, and maybe I'll check last.fm again, but the rest seem like they won't suit my needs.  The one that allows me to share "Confessions of a Sock Monkey" as a cloud mixtape soonest wins.


...of course, there's also Mixcloud, which would allow me to put in my own audio -- very helpful when the mix includes a sample from Mahler's 5th, or if I want to read the script as part of the mix.  I'll have to look into that, too.

High School Rankings

Google and Chrome have killed my once compulsive bookmarking.  Our Firefox bookmarks have been accumulating since before we moved to Vermont; since Sarah no longer uses the desktop for her primary web browsing, she's given me license to clean house.  Some of the things I bookmarked were interesting, like my high school district website... as if I would have difficult finding it if I needed it.  


At any rate, they had linked to this Newsweek ranked list of the top 500 public high schools in the U.S. (though you can't tell that from the title), because OTHS made the list.  I don't know if I have the time or energy to properly criticize this kind of endeavor, but while they seem to mostly be interested in the "best" *college prep* high schools (as determined by a narrow band of statistics), at the same time they don't account for where kids are going to college (presumably Newsweek's definition of "best" would rank a HS that sent more kids to 4-year colleges than one that sent more kids to 2-year colleges; look at the NJ Monthly ranking to see how the 2-vs.4-year college matriculation rates vary wildly across schools).  This is like the bad old days of baseball statistics where the Cy Young award was generally simply given to the pitcher with the most wins, with strikeouts and ERA as a tiebreaker, with little regard for factors like run support or BABIP.



So, the top 25 of Newsweek's rankings is littered with magnet schools, and all I can think is: Really?  No kidding?  When you get to pick which kids go to your school, your students all perform well?  Wow.  That's about as insightful as putting Harvard and Princeton at the top of U.S. News and World Report's list. Get me some pre- and post-testing and we'll see how each school is really performing.



There's also no idea here of what the difference is between ranks.  There's this "Newsweek Score", and presumably there's very little difference between 2.874 and 2.807, but how much better is 2.8 vs 1.8?  And are we supposed to be whipped into some sort of competitive frenzy by this?  Where did OTHS place, anyway?  Somewhere in the 400's?  Yup, just ahead of... rival school Red Bank. 

Woooowooooo!  SUCK IT, Red Bank!  In your face!  ;-)


I've put the Newsweek rankings data in a spreadsheet on Google Docs, so if you're interested, you can analyze it however you like, but I'm afraid it's mostly GIGO.

Anniversaries, part 2

Twelve years together; that's the bathroom anniversary, right?  No, technically it's silk/linen?  Well, close enough.

Anniversaries

We just hit 10 years living at our current address -- it was the day Irene hit VT, and while there wasn't much at all in Burlington beyond some wind and rain (no flooding, no power loss) we were still distracted enough to have forgotten about having a minor celebration of the date.  Also, technically, I didn't start living here for another four weeks, because I was finishing development work on SPSS 11 before moving.