Health, or rather lack of it, is a popular excuse for the current disappointment that is the 2008 New York Yankees. Fans use it, writers use it, even Hank Steinbrenner has blamed the season on the team’s health. Certain times an injury really is random, a pitcher gets hit by a comebacker, outfielder’s collide, a base runner lands the wrong way sliding into a bag. However, often times health can be predicted, not a specific injury, but some players are just healthier than others, and that health is a skill far too many of the 2008 Yankees lack.
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The first thing you learn when following baseball sabermetrics is that not all statistics are created equal. Popular statistics can easily be misleading, a prime example in baseball is batting average. The rate at which a player makes contact maybe interesting in itself, but doesn’t exactly tell us much about what a player contributes to a team’s ability to win or score runs. Likewise, I am led to wonder if popular economic statistics like the Gross Domestic Product really tell us all that much about the economic reality of a nation.
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I’ve had this theory for a couple of months now. Obviously the strike wasn’t the sole cause of the recession, nor was it even probably a major cause, but did the writer’s strike have any statistically significant role in our current economic downturn?
Each year over $150 billion is spent on advertising in the United States alone. I can only assume that businesses expect to at least match that investment with increased revenue. Thus advertising is related to some increase in economic activity.
However, during the WGA strike of 2007 and 2008, networks were forced to air reruns in place of fresh scripted shows. Those reruns led to lower ratings, fewer people watching television, fewer people watching television commercials, fewer people buying products and services as a result of watching commercials. Thus some depression of economic activity was a result of the WGA strike. I guess the harder question is just how much the strike affected the economy, and was that effect statistically significant or relatively trivial?
I think the director of HBO’s Hard Knocks is a bit too fresh out of film school. You can be a bit more subtle than having the voice over compare training camp to a carnival and then show a carnival in the B-roll footage, or show a slug when comparing the pace of training camp to well … a slug. The last straw was the narrator mentioning just how hard it is for some rookies to take the step from the college game to the pros, and then showing footage of a rookie tripping on the final step of a flight of stairs. Yea, real subtle and artistic there.
After previous attempts at developing my own content management system for Realmofhob.com, I’ve finally returned to WordPress.
Creating a custom CMS is actually pretty easy for the front end, especially when I had taken advantage of disqus to handle the commenting. Read-only content is pretty easy to code up, and a little .htaccess tweaking will even provide friendly URLs. The problem with a custom CMS, is the management end. I never got around to creating anything close to a functional backend, and for the most part I was left with phpMyAdmin to perform blog updates. Hence, no updates at all.
I considered dabbling with Python/Django, but decided to table that experiment until the 1.0 release of Django in September. Not to mention my need to become a bit more familiar with Python itself.
So in the end I decided to come back to my old friend WordPress. The following is why.
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I just want to point out a new blog, Socially Given, the purpose of which is to use the power of social media for charity.
I’m not sure whether they are accepting straight donations of money or not, but the plan is to publish a high quality blog with guest writers volunteering their services. Traffic will be driven to the site naturally through submission to the various social bookmarking sites. All ad revenue will be donated to charity and in the spirit of full transparency receipts and statistics will be published.
I encourage anyone who would like to help out do so. And everyone else should at least head over there and give it a visit. Your traffic equals more money for charity.
Offer high quality material, give all the proceeds to charity and the traffic will come.
The blog Techcrunch is reporting that,
The New York Times has decided to let users post stories directly from their site to Digg, Facebook, and Newsvine. As of Monday, the paper will embed links to all three sites to most of their online stories.
Techcrunch is also reporting that the New York Times contacted both Digg and Newsvine initially. This is a good sign for the respectableness of newsvine, that The New York Times would choose them along with Digg over other social bookmarking sites like Netscape or Reddit.
It will definitely help publicize newsvine, having their icon displayed along with every free New York Times article.
This also is a small validation of all my work over at newsvine. If the New York Times is taking notice of a site where I am a top user, then that can’t be a bad thing.
Contrary to the opinion of a certain British pop group, one is not the loneliest number, for included in one is zero, and thus one is not alone. Zero is the loneliest number, for zero only includes the empty set, and thus zero is alone.
I recently heard someone describe the current Santa from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as a “very realistic santa” which got me to thinking that if Santa is not real, what would make any given santa more realistic than any other. Of course the image of Santa that we have is very real, and thus if a given santa conforms to that image, then he is realistic, but does that make santa real? If we can think of something does that make it real, and thus in corollary does our not thinking of something make it unreal? Does anything exist outside the mind?
I want to find a small town, one of those towns where everyone knows everyone else, where I can settle down, and there will be that girl next door and we will fall in love and live happily ever after in that small town…