Probability Question of the Day
Suppose you root for four teams, each of which plays one game per week, each of which has exactly a 1/2 chance of winning any given game. (Suppose each of these coin flips is completely independent of the others.)
What is the probability that within a specific span of three weeks, at least one of those four teams will lose all three of its games?
This is easy to express as a brute force computation, where the savant skill is to know (or guess well) the approximate value of that computation, within (say) two percentage points.
[Yes, all four of my fantasy football teams were 5-3 a few weeks ago, and now one of them (the one I briefly thought of as the best of the four!) has sunk to 5-6.]
Awesome Semantic Distinction of the Day
Despite what you may be hearing, we are not asking Congress for a bailout but rather a loan that will be repaid.
--e-mail from "GM Program HQ," subject line "An urgent message to GM owners" (bold in original, italics added)
I'd also love to know how the Center for Automotive Research derived the factoid that "One in 10 American jobs depends on U.S. automakers"
(My position on a Big Three bailout -- including calling it what it is -- should be pretty obvious, right?)
Aside from any economic doctrine or axe to grind, I'm also generally amused that Wells Fargo (web site a few days ago, special message after the log-in page) went out of its way to tell me it's doing fine, while General Motors went out of its way to tell me it's completely screwed.
Psst! College Football Has Playoffs Already!
In fact, Appalachian State has won Division 1 three years in a row. (Maybe this is pedantry, but it's pedantry with a purpose!)
As Wikipedia will tell you:
The NCAA Division I Football Championship[1] is an American college football tournament played each year to determine the champion of the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). Prior to year 2006, the game was known as the NCAA Division I-AA Football Championship. Informally, the name of the championship is often still qualified as being FCS or I-AA, to distinguish it from the Bowl Championship Series, in which selected teams of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS, formerly Division I-A) compete. The BCS is not an NCAA sanctioned tournament or championship.
Get that? If I'm not grievously mistaken, any NCAA Division 1 FBS team could switch from the Bowl Subdivision to the Championship Subdivision if it so desired. (Pending, I guess, the expiration of any contractual obligation to the conference it belongs to.) For that matter, any NCAA Division 1 FBS conference could switch over to FCS if it so desired.
In short, as best I understand it:
1. NCAA has sanctioned a Division 1 football championship.
2. Several teams have opted not to participate in this because they have better things to do (i.e. go to Bowl games).
3. Some fans of those teams, apparently wanting to have the same cake they've already eaten, want those teams to get the bowl exposure and content for a championship crowned via playoff.
4. Earlier this month Congress and the Bush administration joined forces to solve all the other problems this country faces, thus leaving this pseudo-dilemma as (by default) worthy of Barack Obama's presidential attention.
5. Some time in the near future (this is a thought experiment masquerading as a bullet point), an eccentric billionaire will announce a bracketed single-elimination tournament scheduled for late December or early January, with invitations extended based on the same algorithmic rankings used for the non-poll portion of the current BCS. One of three things will happen:
a) the NCAA will prohibit teams from participating in this (possibly because it exceeds some cap on games played, though in this case teams could choose to schedule fewer regular season games)
b) the NCAA will neither prohibit teams from participating nor bestow any official status on the champion
c) the NCAA will officially declare the winner of this tournament to be the National Champion
Of course c) is vanishingly unlikely. So to what extent would the general public latch onto the tournament winner as, in practice, the undisputed champion? If the playing field were ideal, I'd guess more than the BCS but less than 100%. (Wild guess.) But if the playing field weren't ideal... what would be the marginal effect (on the degree to which the champion were recognized by consensus as National Champion) of (let's say) Ohio State deciding it had better things to do but the rest of the top nine teams competing in an eight-team playoff? Where's the tipping point?
All of this is a very wordy way of saying that everyone -- yes, every single person -- who agitates for current BCS teams to have a playoff, is wasting their lives in the process.
(Then again, you already knew I felt this way about football teams associated with educational institutions in the first place.)
updated comics page link
I finally removed They'll Do It Every Time (how long ago did Scaduto die?) and them Piranha Club because it's not worth the effort.
Hope blogrolling is editable again soon.
The New Way to Brag That One Doesn't Have a TV
...is to post a comment to a weblog that boasts of one's detachment from the Internet and patronizes the blogger's imagined motivation.
Mostly unrelated: some large companies have been sued by employees whom the companies refused to pay while their computers were booting. Aside from the litigation (despite the typecast, I hope and expect that employees would generally win here), isn't the real problem here a faulty design that wastes a criminal amount of people's time? The step at which one must enter a password should come last.
Coming back into type, with a vengeance, I'm surprised that so many of these operations would still be in the U.S. at all. In the long they should be in India, or whatever developing country shows enough American dialect fluency to supersede India.
The Tyranny of the Identifiable Victim
(Or if you prefer, the specific hard case.)
Via Megan McArdle, a post about how conservatives and libertarians tend to lose arguments they should win, because people overweight direct effects and undervalue indirect effects -- or, more sharply, overreact to the fate of the person they can identify rather than the person they can't identify.
Specific examples of this immediately come to mind, though I'd like to think the first one actually transcends ideological lines:
1. Taxpayer-funded stadiums. Everyone can conceptualize the teams who play there, but too few people understand the marginal effect on taypayers or bother to picture the substitution effect.
2. Alleged voter suppression versus allegedly fraudulent voting. The latter (in theory) would taint an election every bit as much as the former.
Getting back to conservatives and arguments, Megan postulates "Surely on taxes, for example, it works the other way around."
Taxes, yes; deficits and gov't budget balancing, not so much.
(Ah, crazy California voters, could you possibly have been more wrong on a slate of ballot propositions? To be fair, "my" [me personally, not any particular ideology] side carried six of the 12, but the harm of the other six will far outweigh the gain of the six results I liked.)
[To be fair, someone with principled opposition to gay marriage would fervently claim that I overweight the direct effect when I point to the specific couples hosed by the overturn -- to which the only way I could respond would be to claim that they're 100% wrong about the direction the indirect effect would take.]
So What's the Second Most Notorious Moment in NFL Point Spread History?
It would have to be the Bills-at-Patriots game of the late 1990s, right? Specifically, New England was driving from behind late in the 4th quarter and benefited from at least three borderline calls (two on the same play): whether Troy Brown Shawn Jefferson made a catch, whether the spot of the ball should be good enough for a 1st down, and then on the next play a phantom pass interference call in the end zone.
After New England scored, Wade Phillips(?) petulantly refused to put any Bills on the field for the point after attempt. So Adam Vinatieri just took the snap and ran into the end zone. Getting 2 instead of 1 there made the difference in New England covering.