Damn

Well, at least K-State is still in it.

You have no idea how painful that is to write.

One Down

Phew!.

All year, every game, KU has always played down to to the opposition. And it's going to come back to bite them before we're done, certain prognosticators notwithstanding.

It will be a morality play, just like Memphis can't hit free throws turned out to be in 2008.

My bracket, and my heart, say KU wins it all (it's sort of mandatory for KU alums), but if I had to bet, my wallet would say it ends next week.

And I'd never be happier to lose a bet.

Who Woulda Thunk?

Bobby Knight and I go way back — I was at Indiana University from 1973-79, including the great undefeated 1975-6 team featuring Scott May and Quinn Buckner. Over the years I've had the chance to notice that when he's coaching he's not particularly stable.

However, over the last year Knight and Brent Musburger telecast Big XII basketball games, mostly those involving KU and/or K-State. I've also heard him on the Mike & Mike radio show on my drive to work.

When he's not coaching, Bobby Knight is smart, witty, thoughtful, and doesn't just talk to fill the air. It's amazing.

Of course, I have no way of knowing what he's like off-camera, but it's a considerable improvement over the old Knight.

Maybe he should have started out as an announcer.

City of Big Shoulders Cries Over a Little Snow

Yes, folks, Chicago has just broken a 102 year old record for snow in a single day.
12.6 inches
OMG!
Here in DC, we call that Saturday.

What Google Knows About You

No, this isn't the revelation of any big conspiracy. It's just to point out (i.e., make myself a bookmark) that the page

http://www.google.com/dashboard/

lets you get information about most of your Google accounts, including your privacy settings.

Skip This Post

L&T's thanks go to the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro for this link to a site which addresses one of the Web's biggest problems:

The pointless opening page.

Parsing the Google Calendar XML Feed to Create New Calendars and RSS Feeds

We use Google's Calendar as part of our church web page. It's easy to keep up to date and we don't have to install any special calendar software on our server. It even has an extremely sophisticated XML feed. OK, the feed is considerably shorter, if you tweak the call a bit, using Google's published parameters. You can use this feed in an RSS aggregator, informing your readers about what's happening in the near future. But this might not be exactly what you want.

For instance: It's helpful to have a web-page listing of upcoming events, or a customized RSS feed.

This turns out to be relatively easy to do, if you know the trick,

Read more ⇒

You know, 1963-1972 was a decade, too

Today's rant is brought to you by the Washington Post's Weekly Free for All. Now FfA actually has many intelligent and thoughtful comments. I read it every week. But FfA has a dark side, as seen at the bottom of the page, where we have yet another writer bemoaning the Post's referring to the ten-year span just ended as the decade. (It's right above the letter suggesting that the Post is trying to destroy the English language by quoting Gilbert Arenas verbatim.)

OK, people, listen up: we're going to set up some rules here:

From now on, there will be two types of Millennia, Centuries, and Decades: the Pedantic and the common.

In the Pedantic system, all counting begins at midnight between 1 BC and 1 AD.^† Thus a Millennium takes in the years 1-1000, 1001-2000, 2001-3000, … ; Centuries are 1901-2000, 2001-2100, … ; Decades are 1951-1960, 1961-1970, … These names are capitalized.

In the common (or vernacular) system, millennia, century, and decade (all lower-case) are defined by the similarity of the digits forming the years. Thus all the years in a millennium have the same digits except for the last three, in a century all the numbers are the same except the last two, and in a decade only the last digit changes.

Let's show a few examples, OK?

Name of era	Years
First Millennium AD	1-1000 AD
First millennium AD	1-999 AD
Twentieth Century AD	1901-2000 AD
Twentieth century AD	1900-1999 AD
First Decade, Twenty-First Century AD	2001-2010 AD
First decade, Twenty-First century AD	2000-2009 AD
Eleventh Millennium BC	11,000-10,001 BC
Eleventh millennium BC	10,999-10,000 BC

(Yes, the First millennium, AD or BC, has only 999 years. Deal with it.)

If all this bothers you, remember your Sesame Street:

One of these things is not like the other, one of these things is not the same:

2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010

Try explaining that all these years are alike to Big Bird.

---

^†People giving me a hard time about using BC/AD here will be required to listen to the complete collection of Brit Hume's sermons. Contact Eldrick Woods for more information.

The Big Snow of 2009

You may have heard that the upper East Coast had a rather large storm yesterday. It wasn't a blizzard, because the winds never picked up as had been expected, but there were record amounts of snow for December. As best I can judge, given that the large number of trees in our yard disrupt the snowfall, we got 19“.

I've been playing around with the Linux version of Picasa, Google's photo organizing software, and with Picasa Web Albums. I don't claim to be a gifted photographer, but here's a few pictures of the storm and its aftermath, all taken from our front door.

We're in the middle of what promises to be the biggest snow storm Maryland has seen in years. It will most likely set the December record for snowfall. We're scheduled to get something between 16 and 24 inches of snow, depending on how long the nor'easter hangs off the coast. Since it's a nor-easter, that means when the blizzard hits, an hour or two from now, the snow will be blowing east to west, a foreign notion for a Kansas boy like me.

The picture above was taken about 10:45 am. I'd estimate 10-12 inches of snow on the ground.

Read More (Please)

The Read more ⇒ link at the bottom of many front page posts is a Blogger feature that Liz Castro alerted me to. I'll let you go to her page to read all the gory details, but if you use a third-party template be sure to read all the way through to my comment, which tells you how to activate the feature in your blog.

If you want it. I'm not entirely convinced it's useful, at least for a blog like this. True, it lets the casual reader see more articles in less space, but as my click logger quickly shows, most people don't look at this blog every day for the Pulitzer quality prose — they directly click to a a specific post (or maybe this one) because a search engine told them help was at hand. Those people never see the link, since they automatically see the whole post.

So tell me, mythical reader of my every word, does that little Read more ⇒ link do anything for you?

RSS Feed Template

When we designed the new version of our church home page, we constructed a page where we collect sermons. It turns out that this page, and the associated sermons, gets hit a lot. I've been told that the hits match the biblical texts specified by the liturgical calendar for upcoming Sundays, which suggests that most of the traffic is pastors looking for sermon ideas.

Nevertheless, it's useful for a congregation to put its sermons on the web, because, let's face it, the sermon is the biggest chunk of time in a service, and is most likely to give you an idea of the church's, or at least the pastor's, theology. So we want to publicize the sermons as widely as possible.

One way to do this is to construct an RSS Feed. Once you have one, people can link to it as, say, a Live Bookmark, or with a feed aggregator. You can also export the feed to other sites. For example, we've set up a church newsletter blog, and you'll see the titles of the last few sermons on the right-hand side.

Setting up an RSS feed isn't all that hard. I was able to do it using the prescription in Elizabeth Castro's HTML, XHTML & CSS, with a few modifications needed to get the thing to properly validate. I'm putting a template for the feed reader here, as much for my use as anyone else's:

Read more ⇒

Doubly Bad Seasons

At the end of this season, the Washington Nationals finished as the worst team in baseball, with a record of 59-103 (0.364). To add insult to injury, the Baltimore Orioles finished as the worst team in the American League, 64-98 (0.395). So if you had the misfortune to watch all the Orioles and Nationals games on MASN, you saw a combined record of 123-201 (0.380).

This set me to wondering how bad this really is. In most two-team markets, when one team is up, the other one is down, right? Well, not always. I went looking through the season standings in Retrosheet, searching for two teams in the same market that finished at the bottom of the division.

Read more ⇒

A Pretty Good Average

June 12, 2011: This post completely fraks up the calculation of David Smyth's Base Runs statistic. I've now fixed that, and added the data from 2009 and 2010. You can find all the updated tables here.

I'm a big fan of Sabermetrics, the use of statistical information to understand how baseball teams win games. Part of this is my love for the game, part my natural tilt toward numerical data, and part is that I've always enjoyed reading Bill James's work (full disclosure: he and I overlapped at KU, though we never met). Not to mention the fact that, from my desk, I can see several editions of both The Baseball Encyclopedia and Total Baseball.

But … in the old days, we judged batters by average (> 0.300 is good), home runs (> 30), and runs batted in (> 100). That was it. These stats have some problems: batting average doesn't tell you how many times a guy gets on base by walking, you can only bat in runs when your teammates are already on base, and as for home runs — well, OK, home runs are a pretty fair way to determine part of a players value.

The inadequacy of the traditional trio of AVG/HR/RBI led to the development of new measures for player performance: On-base percentage, slugging average, runs created, etc., etc. The problem is that off the top of my head I don't know what's a good number for any of these statistics. OK, a slugging percentage of 0.900 is better than 0.400, but is a player who slugs 0.500 a power hitter, or just Joe Shlabotnik?

Read more ⇒

How to be a Computer Expert

I really should just bookmark all of xkcd: