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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures." -- Daniel Webster
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Thursday, January 28, 2010 :::
- The Big Lebowski, in the style of Shakespeare.
- 400 year old poetry that may look familiar to Beatles fans.
- The New York Times' 1990 obituary of Bronko Nagurski, who probably has the best football name of all time.
Perhaps the most familiar tale about the 6-foot-2-inch 230-pound Mr. Nagurski concerns a scoring run he made for the Bears at Wrigley Field. On a touchdown gallop against the Redskins, he is said to have knocked two linebackers in opposite directions, stomped over a defensive halfback and crushed an interferring safety man before caroming off the goalposts and finally crashing into the stadium's brick walls.
''That last guy hit me awfully hard,'' were the words attributed to him as he ran back to the huddle. - A typical incendiary blog post.
- A computer program that takes the box score from a game and some play-by-play data as inputs and produces a newspaper story about the game. I've had fantasies of doing this with financial journalism. (In practice, I bet having the computer produce a first draft and a human tweak it would produce better results; this is the usual diminishing returns result one gets from pushing the labor-to-capital ratio too far in one direction.) Speaking of which,
- Sportswriting is the #1 most full of sh*t profession. ("Stock market expert" is #6.)
One man, however, did take it upon himself to prove the point empirically in 1971 with an actual study on sportswriters' ability to predict college and NFL games. Their success rate was .476, which you may notice is slightly worse than a coin. The coin's writing ability is arguably superior. - The story of an ant colony.
- Iowa Hawk shows how to reproduce the hockey-stick climate change graph, and lets you play with exactly how robust it is.
Labels: Wide World of Web
::: posted by dWj at 3:18 PM
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