Monthly Archive for September, 2005

MLB Playoff Odds

Published
by
DP
on September 30, 2005
in Sports
. 0 Comments

The Yankees have an 80% chance of making the playoffs. The Indians have a 62.5% chance. And the Red Sox have a 58% chance.

There are sixteen possible outcomes after this weekend’s six games — three between the Yankees and the Red Sox and three between the White Sox and the Indians. You could say there are two possibilities in each of six games, which would be 2*2*2*2*2*2, or 64. But really, we only care about the outcome of each series. There are four possible outcomes of each series, meaning that we take 4*4, or 16. There are sixteen possible outcomes of this weekend. We could go further and talk about possible one game playoffs. Personally, I’m interested in which teams will make the playoffs. Further, I’m interested in what the odds are that each team will make the playoffs.

So what to do? Figure it out in Excel, then use Excel to create a table!

Below I show the sixteen possibilities for what the New York Yankees (NYY)’s, Boston Red Sox (BOS)’s, Chicago White Sox (CHI)’s, and Cleveland Indians (CLE)’s, respective records could be after this weekend. (Apologies for the ugliness.) To the right of those columns, I show what the playoff picture will be Monday morning. The final four columns show the odds, per each Monday morning playoff picture, that each team will make the playoffs. Note that in each scenario, the White Sox have 1 out of 1 odds of making the playoffs, because they have already secured the AL Central title.

About ⅔ of the way down, you’ll see the “nightmare scenario,” where MLB would have the first ever two-tiered one game playoff. Here, I have determined that the Yankees, for example, have a 50% chance of winning the first game. They also have a 50% chance of losing that game, meaning they would play the second game against the Indians, where they again have a 50% chance of winning. 50% * 50% = 25%. The 50% from the first game plus the 25% from the second game equals 75%. (Blah blah blah, etc etc etc.)

The last two rows show first, the odds out of 16 that each team will make the playoffs. The White Sox will make the playoffs 16 out of 16 times, because they have already locked up the AL Central. The final row shows each team’s odds out of 100. Enjoy.

NYY BOS CHI CLE NYY BOS CHI CLE
97-65 93-69 99-63 93-69 NYY wins ALE; 1GP CLE@BOS 1 0.5 1 0.5
97-65 93-69 98-64 94-68 NYY wins ALE; CLE wins WC 1 0 1 1
97-65 93-69 97-65 95-67 NYY wins ALE; CLE wins WC 1 0 1 1
97-65 93-69 96-66 96-66 NYY wins ALE; CLE wins WC 1 0 1 1
96-66 94-68 99-63 93-69 NYY wins ALE; BOS wins WC 1 1 1 0
96-66 94-68 98-64 94-68 NYY wins ALE; 1GP CLE@BOS 1 0.5 1 0.5
96-66 94-68 97-65 95-67 NYY wins ALE; CLE wins WC 1 0 1 1
96-66 94-68 96-66 96-66 NYY wins ALE; CLE wins WC 1 0 1 1
95-67 95-67 99-63 93-69 NYY wins ALE; BOS wins WC 1 1 1 0
95-67 95-67 98-64 94-68 NYY wins ALE; BOS wins WC 1 1 1 0
95-67 95-67 97-65 95-67 1GP BOS@NYY; 1GP NYY@CLE/CLE@BOS 0.75 0.75 1 0.5
95-67 95-67 96-66 96-66 1GP BOS@NYY; CLE wins WC 0.5 0.5 1 1
94-68 96-66 99-63 93-69 BOS wins ALE; NYY wins WC 1 1 1 0
94-68 96-66 98-64 94-68 BOS wins ALE; 1GP NYY@CLE 0.5 1 1 0.5
94-68 96-66 97-65 95-67 BOS wins ALE; CLE wins WC 0 1 1 1
94-68 96-66 96-66 96-66 BOS wins ALE; CLE wins WC 0 1 1 1
Out of 16: 12.75 9.25 16 10
Out of 100: 79.68 57.81 100.0 62.50

Pennant Race TV

Published
by
DP
on September 29, 2005
in Sports
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Here are the crucial games so you can plan your weekend. I almost didn’t include NL games. I don’t know when it happened, but I just don’t care about the NL anymore.

I’ve read on ESPN.com that more games than indicated here may get airtime. If I find anything definite I’ll update this post. I might add the spreads, too.

Oh, and this is courtesy ESPN.com.

TEAMS TIME (ET) NAT TV PITCHERS
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Chicago Sox at Detroit 1:05 PM ESPN Garcia vs Grilli
NY Yankees at Baltimore 7:05 PM Small vs Bedard
Toronto at Boston 7:05 PM Downs vs Clement
Tampa Bay at Cleveland 7:05 PM Fossum vs Sabathia
Chicago Cubs at Houston 8:05 PM Rusch vs Rodriguez
Friday, September 30, 2005
NY Yankees at Boston 7:05 PM ESPN Wang vs Wells
Chicago Sox at Cleveland 7:05 PM Buehrle vs Millwood
Philadelphia at Washington 7:05 PM Brito vs Hernandez
Chicago Cubs at Houston 8:05 PM Zambrano vs Pettitte
Saturday, October 1, 2005
NY Yankees at Boston 1:15 PM FOX Johnson vs Wakefield
Chicago Sox at Cleveland 1:15 PM FOX Garland vs Westbrook
Chicago Cubs at Houston 4:05 PM FOX Williams vs Clemens
Philadelphia at Washington 4:05 PM FOX Myers vs Patterson
Sunday, October 2, 2005
Chicago Sox at Cleveland 1:05 PM McCarthy vs Elarton
Philadelphia at Washington 1:05 PM Lieber vs Carrasco
NY Yankees at Boston 2:05 PM Mussina vs Schilling
Chicago Cubs at Houston 2:05 PM Maddux vs Oswalt

Republicans

Published
by
DP
on September 28, 2005
in Politics
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Since George W. Bush was sworn into office as the President of the United States, Republicans have had nearly five years with control of the Executive Branch, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. So what are they doing with that mandate, that political capital, that overwhelming support from voters?

They’re appointing unqualified friends to critical, life-or-death-matter positions.

They’re dabbling in insider trading and pulling the curtain back on blind trusts.

They’re making their own interpretion of political fundraising laws.

Someone must have come up with this one by now: Got vote?

Comment: Spam?

Published
by
DP
on September 28, 2005
in Internet
. 0 Comments

The other day a questionable comment was posted on my site. WordPress gives you a ton of options for how to handle comments. If I checked the right boxes and unchecked the wrong ones, then I have it set up so that when a user makes his or her first-ever comment, I must approve that comment and, in effect, approve that user. From that point on, the user may post comments freely without my approval. However, I still have the power — via the WordPress Dashboard — to delete any comment (or post).

The comment in question included a username, but the username was a the URL to a website’s homepage. The URL the user entered as his URL was a specific page on that website. And the entire content of the comment was text copied and pasted from that specific page.

If I assume that the mysterious poster had no malevolent intentions, then I have to call him out for not understanding 1) the forms he had to fill out to use my site, and 2) how to give the source website its due credit. Personally, when I reference a website’s article, I paste the article name into the body of my post, then use the URL of the article as the link of the text. That way it seems to me that I am making it very clear where I got something.

The fact is that I don’t think the user was clueless. I suspect that this a case of comment spam. But I don’t know for sure.

Ultimately, the fact that the user did not include a real nickname/username, did not include a URL, and did not include an email address, he did not provide me with any way to contact him or verify the sincerity of his post. In light of this, I have determined that it is my policy to delete comments left by seemingly anonymous posters.

Gmail, Sidebar, Notifier

Published
by
DP
on September 27, 2005
in Internet
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The Gmail Notifier has two functions: the obvious function, which is to tell you when you have a new message in your Gmail Inbox; and to set Gmail as your default email application.

Google Desktop’s Sidebar also tells you when you have a new message in your Gmail Inbox. It does not, however, allow you to set Gmail as your default email application. Since Sidebar provides one half of Notifier’s functionality … why not the other half, too?

Google Toolbar for Firefox Updated

Published
by
DP
on September 26, 2005
in Internet
. Closed

I came across this headline in Google Desktop’s RSS aggregator, Web Clips:

Official Google Blog: New, improved, and out of beta

I didn’t know what the article was about from the headline, but it sounded interesting and I double clicked on it. Turns out it’s about the latest version of the Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Here’s the deal: When I started installing toolbars like Yahoo’s and Google’s in Firefox, I wanted to (or at least wondered if I could) squish two toolbars into one row (like you can do in Internet Explorer). Well, you can’t. But with the latest (and first out of beta) release of Google Toolbar, you can’t actually move the Google Toolbar up to share a line with the navigation toolbar, but you can drag every single element — including the Google logo — to any other toolbar. It’s almost ridiculous the degree of customization this grants the user.

The ability to add, subtract, and rearrange screen elements in the Toolbar conjures thoughts of the Google Sidebar. Sidebar is so great that Google should really make it available separate from Google Desktop Search.

The other new feature in Google Toolbar for Firefox is Google Suggest. It’s neat but not earth shattering. However, I think it’s telling that both of these new features are Firefox only. Between Sidebar and an apparent focus on Firefox, this begs the question: Will Google release its own (Firefox-based) browser? Personally I can’t see Google relying on another company’s technology. If Google sees something it likes, it buys it.

Would Google acquire Mozilla and close Firefox’s source code?

RSS

Published
by
DP
on September 26, 2005
in Internet
. 0 Comments

I’ve known about RSS for several years now, but I’ve never really been excited about it. Before now. I knew that you need some kind of aggregator to really take advantage of RSS. Firefox will aggregate RSS feeds into the sidebar. My Yahoo allows users to add RSS feeds as sections to the personal homepage. I tried these technologies, but they never seemed useful to me because, of the ten or twenty web sites I check regularly, I like browsing their pages. So I never took advantage of RSS.

But now I’ve got Google Desktop 2. It includes an RSS aggregator, which it calls Web Clips. It automatically adds RSS feeds from websites you browse. This is good and bad, but it’s so easy to add or subtract feeds, I leave the option turned on.

I knew this was good when I noticed Sports Illustrated articles in the RSS feed. See, ESPN.com is for all intents an purposes my exclusive sports source on the web. But CNN.com is my primary news source. Because Sports Illustrated and CNN are affiliated, big sports stories from SI are often linked to on the CNN.com homepage. So at some point in there I clicked on an SI link. Google Desktop added SI’s RSS feed. An SI article showed up in the Web Clips plugin.

The epiphany wasn’t that I had easier access to another outlet. The epiphany was that I could still visit my favorite sites just like I always did, but easily get updates from sites that I might not visit on a regular basis. I can still enjoy the sites I’ve always enjoyed, and now I get effortless access to the best of sites that I might not otherwise enjoy as much.

Google Competing with Self

Published
by
DP
on September 24, 2005
in Internet
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I just formatted my hard drive, and the first applications I installed were, in order:

1. Norton Antivirus
2. Firefox
3. AOL Instant Messenger
4. Google Desktop

And that’s it so far. I declined this time to install the Yahoo toolbar in Firefox, but after about a minute of thought I went ahead and installed the Google toolbar again. I am a little torn because now with Toolbar and Desktop, I have two Google search boxes on my screen basically all the time, which is repetitive. But I would keep the Toolbar just for the spellchecker.

When it came to a homepage, I did away with Google Customized … Desktop makes it unnecessary.

Currently, my home “page” is CNN.com, ESPN.com, PvPonline.com, and Gamespot.com. I kind of feel like Wikipedia should be in there, though …

ESPN.com: Blue?

Published
by
DP
on September 23, 2005
in Internet and Sports
. 1 Comment

Today ESPN.com’s red bar at the top is … blue? Anyone know why? Is this permanent or temporary?

They should really do a front page redesign to reduce the clutter.

Halo 3

Published
by
DP
on September 23, 2005
in Video Games
. 0 Comments

When Bungie releases Halo 3 sometime next year, I’m hoping that the user colors/emblem system gets some upgrades. I have tried again and again to find the perfect emblem and the perfect color scheme, but I’m just not sure it’s possible with the options available. My wish list:

1. More colors to choose from. In Halo 2 we are given 18 colors to choose from. And they are all washed out. The white is more of an off white, and the black (”steel”) is gray. Steel and brown are almost the same color. Red and crimson are almost the same color. Modern consoles render millions of colors. Given the broadband connection required for Live, it’s not asking too much that users get a color picker for 24-bit color depth. Or at the very least 256 colors.

2. The ability to choose more than four colors. Yep, we only get four colors in Halo 2. Primary Player Color (main armor color, icon background 1), Secondary Player Color (armor trim, icon background 2), Primary Emblem Color, and Secondary Emblem Color.

3. More emblems. We get 64 in Halo 2. Ten of these are single digits, 0-9. Some of them are too similar to each other. Some of them are too obscure for anyone to recognize or understand. Some are just too hard to make out on the screen. And Bungie could release more as time goes on. It could hold contests — users could submit new emblem designs.

4. More emblem backgrounds. How about a sunburst background? Or a background consisting of more than two colors?

5. Armor patterns. Tiger stripes. Leopard spots. Racing stripes. You can customize your team’s uniform in Madden — why not in Halo? Halo 2 gives the user the trim (Secondary Player) color, but it’s not enough. Besides — in team games, your personal color choices get wiped out — your only unique identifier is your icon. Why not white arms or white shoes or a white helmet? This should be kept in check so that a user’s team affiliation is obscured, but it could be done.

6. Numbers in addition to emblems. The NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL do it. And let’s make them double-digit numbers. I was number 25 in high school.

7. Adjustable armor appearance. The Arbiter has different armor than a standard Elite. A Helljumper has different armor than a Spartan. Or maybe just gives a few tweaks.

I could go on. Heck, maybe I’ll add more later.