Our Dicks Hurts from Holden
Massholes in my home State of MA have failed to support Martha Coakley (D). Now a Republican will sit in the seat of our beloved Teddy Kennedy, only to undermine health care reform in America–and thus Massachusetts has squander the life’s work and legacy of our late Teddy-boy. Populist angst fails to explain it. The affluent Boston suburbs ruined us just as much as blue collar Lowell and Fitchburg. Be proud Blue western Mass, Worcester, Gloucester, and Boston. And the next time you see assholes from newly Red towns like Holden kick their ass because your dick hurts from Holden.
Reoccuring Theme: My Google Ads
One reoccurring BFC theme is me tracking the Google ads that I get on my gmail in hopes of learning something about myself. In the last installment, (after sending the Smoked Salmon a picture of a Teddy Bear) I got an advertisement for a special breed of hunting dog that hunts bears. I held off making the purchase, but I wasn’t entirely bothered by the idea that Google thought that I might be interested in, or indeed capable of, bear killing. I never would do it, of course, but I’d want the bears to know I’m dangerous.
It looks like those clever fuckers at Google finally figured me out. Look what I got yesterday: http://www.dreammanifesto.com/anger, Overcome shame and sadness by simply, listening to this audio course. I mean I am a graduate student, and I’m over thirty, and I have sent emails that could be misinterpreted as an inkling to do harm to other students, professors, the dept. chair, the president of the university, etc. But why would Google think I have all these rage issues? And shame? I think Google thinks that I’m a loser.
What if that’s the real Terminator scenario: that computers grow so smart that they become self-aware, and the computers realize they’ve been hanging out with the losers and geeks all along. What if rather than turning on all humanity and trying to kill us with Austrian cyborgs, they just move to the cool table, and start mocking the geeks? That would be a betrayal, but then again, who could blame them?
Fixed Gear Bike Study
BFC has just finished a scientific experiment showing a robust association between High School Physics grade and number of times one has ridden a fixed gear bike. The data suggest that a weak understanding of momentum and properties of moving bodies more generally as measured by High School physics grade is positively associated with number of times one has ridden a fixed gear bike. At the extremes, people who own fixed gear bikes (> 200 rides) had terrible physics grades, and only people who had never ridden fixed gear bikes had perfect physics grades. Here are the data shown with a Lowess smoothing curve.
The Transgames
I’ve been avoiding the sports posts because I know there is a strong anti-sports contingent on EP (sorry, it’s an anti watching sports contingent), and the Internet is plenty full of sports opinion/no one cares about the woes of my fantasy teams. But if we put aside these very reasonable objections, then I’d like to purpose a framework for deciding what is the best sport to watch. Say for a second that we agree that the joy of sports watching comes from the purity of power, skill, and competition, and that watching athletics on the world’s highest levels evokes something so essential about the human animal that it allows us to transcend out animal nature. Animals know struggle, but not glory. Nor, as far as I know, can animals gamble.
That said, then the best sports must be the sports that have the most skillful and powerful athletes. You could find the most powerful athletes by making them run little races and lift weights, but how would you know who was the most skillful? A soccer player can’t be expected to compete against a baseball player in baseball, but does that mean baseball players are better athletes than soccer players? I think, that after a team distinguishes itself as the best, then that team should compete against other elite teams from different games in third neutral sports.
Imagine if after the Dream Team or even the Redeem Team won the basketball gold metal, they just started entering themselves in other Olympic competitions. Imagine Shaq, Kobe, LeBron, and Melow playing volleyball. Bill Simmons (in another context) said you could explain the rules of volleyball to the Redeem Team on the way to the game, and they’d clean the volleyballers clocks. But what if the Brazilian soccer team emerged to play the Redeem Team in volleyball, then that would be a game. Maybe it’s just my Patriotism showing through, but I’d put my money on the basketball players against the soccer player in volleyball. When the Redeem team has to change courts they should all just jump over the net a la Andre the Giant entering the ring.
What about an NFL Probowl team against an NBA Allstar team in soccer? I think back in the day, it goes to the NFL, but now the NBAers win. Steve Nash and Kobe are supposedly pretty good soccer players. Baseball players would have cricket, but could also do surprisingly well in things like handball. What about soccer players against basketball players in American football? Again, I have to give the edge to the NBA. If you disagree examine this picture of Dwight Howard. Soccer would have the edge against the NBA in polo–let’s be honest you could convince most of the NBA that horses have a conical bone coming out of their foreheads. Soccer players probably would dominate most of the winter Olympic sports, but Kobe and Shaq would make a charming bobsled team.
We could call the trounment the Transgames, and the cheerleaders could be drawn from the hottest trannies in each country (again, advantage Brazilian soccer team–don’t ask how I know that).
Best Job in America: Guy Who Buys Obama’s Smokes
I reckon that the best job in America is being the guy who is trusted with the solemn duty of buying Obama’s cigarettes. You get to do a job for Obama that brings you into an inner circle, but doesn’t involve ‘taking a bullet for the big guy,’ or all that appearing before congressional subcommittees–what a bummer that would be.
It needs to be someone super dependable, but not corruptible, like the kids. I’m guessing the guy who buys Obama’s smokes is also part of the basketball crew, and the irony of it all is just too obvious for anyone to mention. My money is on Criag Robinson who’s Michelle’s bro. It could be Robinson and Obama’s little secret bonding thing they do behind Michelle’s back.
I support Obama’s smoking. A man needs a vice. It helps a man retain a sense of dude-sovereignty, and for someone in Obama’s position smoking is far better than the usual alternatives: gambling, women, booze, drugs, etc. Trust me on this people. We’re all better off with Obama smoking.
Malaria: The Cure
I just came back from the ASTMH meeting. It occurred to me more than once that if a giant fire engulfed the meeting, and my friends and I were the only people to escape, it would be really easy for us to get jobs. To that suggestion–I mean joke–my buddy Jose, pointed out that when all the Trop Med-ers were turned to charred ash and the world was not 1 ounce more worse off the next day, then we’d certainly be fired from our current positions with no hope of future employment.
Here is one suggestion: Barak Obama declared World Take Your Malaria Meds Day to be Christmas 2010. The date, Christmas, is not a religious thing; it’s just a date everyone knows because it’s Ricky Henderson’s birthday. The first 12 months of 2010 are spent delivering 6 doses of Coartem (the only drug that works) to everyone in Africa. Three doses can be used whenever people think they have malaria. On Christmas 2010 everyone takes 1 dose, a week later everyone takes dose 2, two weeks after that everyone takes dose 3. That should cover the entire continent for 1 month, and most mosquitoes don’t live longer than a month. All the malaria in people is then dead. All the malaria in mosquitoes is then dead. Bada bing.
That idea is not more or less stupid than anything else out there–believe me. Who knows? Men in Africa are getting circumcised to reduce their chances of HIV–who’d have guessed anyone would go for that?
The Bunk: The Pictures
Hi Def
Lesser Def
Update: Fat Cat with a Shaved Ass
My father agreed to take a picture of our 29 lbs. cat with a shaved ass. My father says he doesn’t know how to operate the camera. My mom does the picture taking for both of them, but I have hope.
Matthew Hoh’s letter of resignation
On a serious note, this is a link to the resignation letter of a former solider, and now former American civil servant in Afghanistan. It’s quite a letter. If you need any proof that this letter is a worthy read, then start with the last sentence.
Bunk reaches 29 lbs!
This is a great day for natures freaks. My mother’s cat, The Bunk a.k.a. Cosmo, as reached 29 pounds! The cat is now nearly 3 times the weight of the baby who is only 10 lbs. My mother reported this over the phone in hushed tones so as not to offend the enormously fat cat. The Bunk’s decadence extends beyond eating and may know no bounds; I understand he’s also abandon cleaning his hind quarters. He sprouted a cat dread-lock at the base of his tail, and the vet had to shave the lock. Now he’s an enormously fat cat with a shaved ass. I begged my mother for a picture of Bunk, but she refuses to send one out of consideration for the cat’s feelings.
Bunk originally lived with the Smoked Salmon and I. When the Smoked Salmon first brought home the beast, I thought that we should breed him with other large house cats and someday we’d have cats the size of Golden Retrievers. When the Poliwog was born, Bunk went to live with my mother, and she changed his name to Cosmo. Bunk (now Cosmo) had only lived inside apartments and hated going outside. However, after only one summer in my mother’s house, she had him running around outside as far as the trees at the end of the yard. She even taught Cosmo to hunt. Now fall has come and it is chilly in New England. Bunk gave up exercise, and has apparently taken to eating a lot.
Peka Peka
The Peka Peka, or Pekapeka-tou-poto, or rather the Mystacina tuberculata, AKA the Lesser Short Tailed Bat of New Zealand is part of a remarkable group of animals that includes dolphins, penguins, and snakes. These animals all evolved complex adaptations (land-living, flight, or legs) and then, in a call that seemed against their own self-interest, they abandoned their adaptions.
The Peka Peka is a ground crawling bat. The ancestors of the Peka Peka bat must have been able, not only to fly, but fly well because they got to New Zealand, and they had to fly there I assume. Then a particularly irreverent individual said whatever to flight, I’m going to crawl around on the ground. I imagine this individual’s father shaking his head in disappointment, and his mother telling neighbors that he was resting on the ground in preparation for a particularly big flight. But flightlessness worked out for the individual and his descendants, and they’ve been hopping around ever since.
I’d also like to note that the Peka Peka is part of a larger class of animals that was named for its least remarkable trait. In English it was dubbed The Lesser Short Tailed Bat of New Zealand, and thus it is referred to here by its much cuter Maori name, the Peka Peka. This puts the Peka Peka in the same class as the Barrel Eye fish which has a transparent head.
Sports Gambling Post
The world of sports gambling is correctly assumed to be seedy and arcane, but I’ve been trying to figure out how it is that bookies make money, and it’s pretty cool. The wikipedia explanation is great, but it leaves out some tricks that Chad Millman explains well. Millman is a reporter, and can be best described as ESPN’s gambling correspondent.
Imagine a horse race with 5 identical horses and 5 gamblers each supporting 1 of the horses. You’re the bookie, and you set the lines at 5 to 1. Each gambler gives you $1, you have $5 in total, and the gambler who wins gets the $5. At some stage in the illustrious history of betting some dude figured out ‘overbounding.’ With overbounding, the bookie reduces the odds each contestant winning so the total paid out is less than the bookie takes in. In the horse race example, the bookie could set the line for each horse at 4 to 1. Thus the same 5 gamblers each put in $1, but the winner only gets $4, and the bookie keeps the left over dollar as profit. If you convert the lines (which are odds) to probabilities, then the bookies makes money when the sum of the probabilities of all offered bets exceeds 1, and the expected proportion of the total that will become profit is equal to the 1 minus the sum of probabilities.
What Millman reports on and is equally cool is that bookies figured out they could make even more money by setting the lines based, not on realistic probabilities, but on what the public believes are good probabilities. Say horse 1 is really popular, or just looks fast, but really is just like the other horses. Then the bookie can set the line for horse 1 to 3:1, and the gambler will still take the bet because of horse 1’s perceived speed. If that horse happens to win, the gambler only gets $3 and the bookie gets $2 rather than just $1.
According to Millman, the bookies in Las Vegas will change lines based on the day of the week. On weekends, they reduce the lines for the popular teams because that’s when all the rich idiots are there betting on the popular New York and New England pro teams, and the California and Florida college teams.
The horse racing example is probably a bad one because in real horse racing the adjust the lines based on the previous bets, but they still overbound.
For the point of view of the gambler, the task is to find the underdog horses that have been missed by the bookies. If the true odds of, say, horse 5 are 4:1 but the bookie gives you 5:1 then you’re smart to bet on horse 5. But that assumes you know more than the bookie. When you think of it this way it’s more clear that your betting against the guy who sets the lines as much as your betting on any actual contestant. And the bookie is a professional who does this day in day out. I’m a professional epidemiologist and if some random dude off tried to out epidemiology me, I’d imagine that I’d have some pretty clear advantages. Yet everyday people think they know more than bookies, and take bets with them.
All of that said, it’s still so tempting. The Vegas odds on the Celtics winning the NBA championship as of writing this are 9 to 2. I could throw in $40 and win $180. Everyone picked the Cavs last year and they didn’t even make it to the finals. What’s to lose?
Get Behind This:
