TNSFF

Tech, music, sports, and other stuff.

28 Feb 2011

Twitter Updates for 2011-02-28

  • Let's go Hokies! Beat Duke! Cassell Guard Represent #
  • You're welcome, America. We beat the Dukies. #
  • As nice as Tumblr is, I'm sure glad I don't use it for anything. I'm pretty sure it is down more than it is up. #
26 Feb 2011

Twitter Updates for 2011-02-26

  • Fawcett Oil fire in Cambridge means most of Teele Sq is closed off. Had to ask to drive down to our place. Can smell the smoke from here. #
  • Oh rain, how I've missed you. #
25 Feb 2011

Twitter Updates for 2011-02-25

  • Wow, I don't like Jeff Green or Nenad Kristic. So, I'm obviously less than enthused. Who's our backup PG in the playoffs? Bradley? #
  • @nate_robinson The Garden won't be the same without the wings flapping. in reply to nate_robinson #
  • What the hell is going on with the Cs? Something big must be coming in a buyout or maybe we're merging with Minnesota. CONTRACTION! #
24 Feb 2011

Twitter Updates for 2011-02-24

  • Replacement Roomba getting shipped to me cheapish. Victory #1 I found out how to make Apple Mail send from multiple addresses. Victory #2 #
22 Feb 2011

Twitter Updates for 2011-02-22

  • Wow. Snow. What a shocker. I knew I hated Presidents' Day. #
  • @fraggle22 And you're upset about that? I'm pretty sure that was one of the top 10 moments of my life (though it's not the real one). in reply to fraggle22 #
  • At some point, I will have a job where I work from home. I will be roughly 9000x more productive. Give or take 1000. #
  • need to go grab a screwdriver to try to fix this Roomba

    http://twitpic.com/42bllo #

  • Roomba is charging. May have found the reason it just ran in circles and then gave up. If I did fix it, I will feel super manly. #
  • Gah, my work on the Roomba did not help. Contacting support and seeing if they'll repair it. Now I'm less manly. #
21 Feb 2011

Baseball Prospectus | Baseball ProGUESTus: Scorecasting Review

I finished up reading Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won a couple of weeks ago. I recommend it whole-heartedly, but this is a pretty good summary of how I feel about it:

When Moneyball came out, it didn’t take long for the importance of on-base percentage to become part of mainstream conventional wisdom. It would be great if some of the findings in the book did the same—the debunking of the ‘hot hand,’ for instance, or ‘icing the kicker.’ However, I’d hate for ‘home field advantage is caused by biased referees’ to do the same—because that’s a huge claim, and I don’t think it’s true. Ideally, the authors would have consulted some of the practicing sabermetricians in the various sports—the Prospectus writers, Tom Tango, Brian Burke, Gabriel Desjardins, and so forth—who would undoubtedly have pointed out some issues and advised the authors to temper some of their conclusions.

It's possible that having to qualify some of the results would make for a less popular book. In any case, Moskowitz and Wertheim are outstanding at getting their ideas across effortlessly. With a little more collaboration from others who study this stuff, this could have easily been the best popular sabermetrics book since Bill James. As it stands, it’s still recommended reading, but I wish it came with a warning to take some of its conclusions with a grain of salt."

(Via Baseball Prospectus.)

Scorecasting is a great read. And, if you're reading it with a somewhat open mind, you'll learn a lot, but also pause a lot and say "wow, I feel like I'm missing a whole side of this argument." Which is pretty much exactly how I felt reading Freakonomics.

(Note: If you buy the book from the Amazon link above, I get like 12 cents.)