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.
Sunday Morning: a progress report
My good friends the Sieberts chronicled the progress of Jessica’s pregnancy with a photo session every Sunday morning. Coincidentally, Sophia Noelle Siebert, my beautiful goddaughter, was born on a Sunday morning (the 13th of September, 2009). Around that time, Erik handed off the Sunday morning photo series and a fitting Velvet Underground song on a Flash drive. I put together the following slideshow together using Camtasia for Mac.
Hans Reichel’s daxophone
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“The daxophone, invented by Hans Reichel, is a experimental musical instrument of the friction idiophones category. It consists of a thin wooden blade fixed in a wooden block (often attached to a tripod), which holds one or more contact microphones. Normally, it is played by bowing the free end…
Sunday Morning: a progress report
My good friends the Sieberts chronicled the progress of Jessica’s pregnancy with a photo session every Sunday morning. Coincidentally, Sophia Noelle Siebert, my beautiful goddaughter, was born on a Sunday morning (the 13th of September, 2009). Around that time, Erik handed off the Sunday morning photo series and a fitting Velvet Underground song on a Flash drive. I put together the following slideshow together using Camtasia for Mac.
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.
NRBQ: Captain Lou (Captain Lou Albano, 1933-2009)
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Captain Lou Albano, professional wrestler, actor, rock singer, and all-around legend, has died. He was 76. Here’s a song NRBQ wrote for Lou, on which he’s featured.
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?
House Arrest Plan B
I want to get a fox trap, so I can capture a live fox. Then if I ever get arrested and I’m put under house arrest, I can put the GPS ankle bracelet on the fox and release it. Imagine the cops tracking the fox while thinking it was me. I’ll go down in history as the most agile and fleet-footed criminal ever!
Steve Martin & Bernadette Peters: Tonight You Belong to Me
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Tonight You Belong To Me, a hit from the 50s, is performed here by Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters (and someone else on cornet, presumeably). The audio is taken from the romantic walk-on-the-beach scene of the Jerk (1979).
A Space!
I went by an old warehouse on the corner of Imlay and Commerce St. in Red Hook Brooklyn. It has a broken out, wide open window on the first floor, and the building is no doubt hemorrhaging toxic waste from every orifice — in other words a classic Space! Anyone (else) living in Brooklyn wanna sneak in and run around it? There is a so tempting sign about a guard dog. Personally, I will never be too old for this sort of fun; I’d do it in a wheelchair.
Get Behind This:
