Love, chance, and flipping the coin

Recently, I’ve been studying methods of statistical analysis.  I have gravitated toward baseball analysis since it provides a good laboratory for applying statistical methods to learn about what counts as ability and what counts as chance.  Much of which we care about learning should be related to discovering what counts as ability versus chance.

I’ve been thinking about how love and romance might be amenable to statistical analysis.  One must first define love and romance appropriately so that one can attach numbers to it.  I suspect even those who have had hundreds of sexual partners can narrow their number of romances and trues loves to less than a dozen.  Lets take a person who has fallen deeply in love  four times in their life.  Lets say all those loves failed.  What can we say about that person’s ability to achieve love and happiness?  Not much unless we possess some numbers to validate or invalidate our hypotheses.

Flip a fair coin four times and count the number of heads.  What is the chance that you will get four heads in a row?  It’s 1 out of 16 times giving a .0625 probability.  Let’s say each time a person falls in love they have a 50-50 chance of it being a success.  Fall in love four times and you have a 93.75% chance of one those being a success.  If the success rate of romance it 50% you’d expect a lot of satisfied souls roam the earth.  Such does not seem to be the case.

The romance coin might be biased in favor of failure.  The chances of all failures in four tries might be much higher than 6.25%.  Yet observing a person who has failed at love four out four times, one still wonders how much of that is due to innate inability to achieve a lasting love or chance alone.

In my own case, zero successes out of however many tries doesn’t seem as daunting when looked at from a statistical point of view.  I don’t know the population mean and standard deviation regarding the random variable love.  I have done no sampling to estimate those parameters.  Maybe, my failures are closer to the mean than I think.  Bad luck might plague me as it does many others.

If success at romances are independent events, then past failures mean nothing with the next flip of the coin.  I’m not ready to flip it.  Probably never will flip it again.  I have a feeling the mathematical expectation is negative.  It’s like betting on sports against your bookie.  Play the game long enough and you will eventually lose all your whip out cash.

Frumpy indolence charms me more than romance these days.

You’re next Maile Meloy

One winter day I was browsing the new arrivals in the fiction section of the Harold Washington Library when I chanced upon Maile Meloy’s collection of short stories Half in Love.  When I read the first story I was hooked and swallowed the book in a couple of gulps.  I see she has a new collection of stories titled Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. The NYT Sunday Book Review gave it the lead review this past weekend.

I admire Meloy’s prose style.  She writes crisply and cleanly.  She wastes no motion.  The NYT review indicates I’ll enjoy the new collection as much as the first.  Hence, her new book will be my next fiction reading selection.

Bud Wilkinson, the streak, potential, and performance

Bud Wilkinson coached the Oklahoma football team from the late Forties to the early Sixties.  At one point his teams won 47 games in a row–still the record for college football.  The record is even more impressive than you might think since college football teams played fewer games in his era.  The record spans five seasons.

Mr. Wilkinson tried his hand at politics, but failed to gain elective office.  He analyzed the ABC TV Saturday football games in the Sixties.  His delivered his commentary with intelligent and enthusiastic softness.

During the past two weeks I have been reclaiming my memory.  I’ll always associate the number 47 with the Oklahoma winning streak.  As sports winning streaks go, it stands as a splendid statistical outlier. It dazzles like the IQ of a genius.  Some say Bud Wilkinson was a genius.

One of my all time favorite quotations comes from Bud Wilkinson.

Potential is nothing; performance is everything.

The quotation has brought a lump to my throat more than once.

Baseball on the iPhone and love

I’m back home from Minneapolis.  The trip was nice and the White Sox even beat the Twinkies last night.

When I found out that the Cubs/Cards game was not being carried in the Minneapolis area yesterday, I looked for an iPhone app that would let me access the radio broadcast of the game.  I found AT BAT at MLB.com.  The app cost $10.  You get all the radio broadcasts of every MLB game and TV feeds if the game is not blacked out.

So, I hung out in a bar drinking beer and listening to my Cubs win yesterday afternoon before going to the White Sox/Twinkies game.  The audio was clear and the after checking out the TV picture this afternoon, it ain’t half bad either.  The bad thing is that it plays hell on the better charge.  I don’t know if you can watch or listen to a whole game without being on Wi-Fi.  But as a temporary baseball fix it guarantees you won’t go into withdrawal when you are stuck god knows where.

If you can’t have love, then baseball live on the iPhone has got to be the next best thing.

White Sox vs. Twinkies

I am in Minneapolis watching some baseball this weekend at the Metrodome.  We wanted to see it before the Twin Cities opens their new baseball park next year.  None of us have ever been here for baseball.

We have another game tonight.  I like baseball a lot.

A poem before traveling

Why I am awake at this late hour and writing this post I cannot tell you.  Let’s just say that one can do worse than quote an ancient Chinese poem before traveling.

Evening after Rain

Sudden rain this afternoon
saved my thirsty garden.

Now sunset steams the grass
and the river softly glistens.

Who’ll organize my scattered books?
Tonight I’ll fill and fill my glass.

I know they love to talk about me.
But no one faults me for my reclusive life.

Tu Fu (712-770) from Crossing the Yellow River translated by Sam Hamill

Translations are different works of art. Yet 1300 years from the writing to the translation, sometimes, does not seem to make a damn bit of difference.

Chrome plated and/or smart

Until the news hit this past week that Google was introducing a new operating system called Chrome targeted at running on netbooks, I did not know what a netbook was.  I hit Curtis Schweitzer (dot) net to see what all the hoopla was about with Chrome.  Then I scurried to the Wal*Mart and Dell web sites and discovered they are small laptops with 10 inch screens designed primarily for Internet usage for those on the go.  The prices range from $300 up to $600 not including discounts.  Damn, once again I am behind the curve.  In fact, I am not even on the curve.  To my defense, in my travels to Starbuck’s each day I have yet to see a person using a netbook there.  I know what you’re thinking: State Street, that is not a random sample.

I wonder about netbooks though.  How do they fit between laptops and smart phones?  I understand the return to lug-ability from the monster foot print laptops.  If your usage is primarily Internet usage on the go, the move to smaller from larger seems like a good thing.

My quandary is not about Chrome, but whether netbooks will compete long term with smartphones.  With my iPhone I have the ultimate in lug-ability for Internet usage.  It fits in the front pocket of my blue jeans.  Plus, it has all the other stuff like phone, camera, photos, music, gps, videos, etc.  I’ve got mobile apps for most of the Internet applications I use most heavily: Google, Facebook, ESPN, Bloglines, games, eReader for book reading, even Word Press (Which by the way, is so rudimentary it’s a joke.  You can’t even take a photo, attach a message, and send it to your blog).

I predict the smartphone will be the computing platform of the future for personal mobile and home Internet apps. (For a lot of folks that is all they need.)  Soon you will be able to take the phone and plug it into a docking station at home with a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and storage attached.  In effect, you won’t need a laptop or netbook on the go unless you are doing some heavy duty computing such as studying global warming or trying to win at your latest computer game.

I have used my iPhone during the past two years more than any toy I have ever bought.  I can hit Starbuck’s early in the morning and get my first Internet fix.  I have an app that allows me to set my fantasy baseball lineups, which during baseball season is always my first chore in the morning.  I like doing that in the peace and quiet of the corner Starbuck’s at six in the morning.  At night, sitting in the bar, I am the answer man.  I can Google the answer to any question that someone throws at me. (Well, I didn’t find much information about what Mark Prior is doing these days when someone asked me a couple of days ago.)  I can read blogs, news, and books on it no matter where I am.

I’m not saying netbooks, laptops, and workstations are going away, but the smartphone seems to have the edge these days in mobile Internet computing.  And let’s face it, people these days only seem to have the patience to tap out a few misspelled messages.

Oh well, who cares what I think?  When I was a small boy we didn’t have TV.  We had a party line wall phone.  Records were 78 type plastic discs and scratchy by today’s standards..  You had to go to the bank for transactions.  You had to go to the train station for your ticket when you were travelling.  When you received a personal letter, it was a big deal.

The chance of a Stray Dog

Take a bar.  Now, how would you calculate the probability you will pick up a Stray Dog if you are hanging out there?  Let’s take a look at the variables that might be relevant.  Your age, their age, your charm index, their state of innebriation, the time of day, special events ocurring in town, competition (cock blockers), etc.

It seems as though one could study the problem via linear regression.  There must be other methods and models too.

Let’s suppose you have worked out optimal times to be in the bar.  Suppose your main goal for being in the bar is to pick up a Stray Dog.  Think of the money you’d save drinking in the bar if you only went there during the optimal times for picking up that wonderful someone, and doing something else when the chances were not good.

Baseball, the juice, and the elusive facts

Everybody remotely interested in baseball has gotten their fill of news about performance enhancing drug use by many baseball players.  We hear much moralizing about the issue that pushes the question of whether PED’s actually enhance performance to the side.

While looking for data and statistical analyisis regarding the issue, I found this interesting site: Steroids, Other “Drugs”, and baseball.  The author claims that PEDs do not enhance baseball performance–most notably the power ability of a player.  The article states a case that changes in baseball construction and manufacture account for home run increases during baseball’s modern era (1980-present) better than use of PEDs.  In fact, if you adjust for changes in baseball manufacture, power numbers have actually been decreasing during baseball’s modern era.

I have not studied the article’s statistical study in enough depth to comment on its methodology or accuracy, but it is a step in the right direction.  One must study the matter statistically to glean the facts.  Assuming a PED enhances performance is no better than assuming eating Wheaties enhances performance.  You have to do a well designed study and make good inferences from the results to know about what might be going on.

Alas, that seems too droll and boring a concept for sports radio and TV talking heads to get their minds around.  However, inquiring minds like mine want to know.  I feel a lot of other folks want to know too despite the media’s attempts to dumb the issue down.

Chicago baseball and intentional walks

Let’s face it, some mornings we are destined to write about what’s on the top of our minds.  Chicago baseball is on the top of mine.  The Cubs despite all the chaos on the field, in the dugout, and in the front office trail the Cards by a mere 2.5 games at mid season.  The White Sox have won seven straight and have closed to within 2.5 games of Detroit.

It appears that no team will run away with the National League Central Division.  The winner will probably be a handful of games over .500.  That is a good thing for my Cubs, for I don’t see them playing the kind of baseball people expected from them before the season started.  I could list their ills, but you’ve heard it all before.

Yesterday’s Cubs win over the Brewers was interesting.  The Brewers intentionally loaded the bases in the bottom of the 10th inning in hopes of achieving a force out to end the inning.  They walked another batter though, and the Cubs scored the winning run without needing a firecracker or sparkler to do the job.

Loading the bases to get the force out seems like a plausible play right up until when it doesn’t work.  I wonder what a statistical analysis would say about the maneuver.  A study sounds interesting, but I expect one would have to go through a randomly selected set of score cards to get the data after carefully defining the problem.  It could take a long time to gather comparison data.

On the other hand, might there not be a clever Monte Carlo simulation one could run against the problem?  I’ll report back if I come up with an answer.

Silent dawn

Friday, 3 July 2009.  A holiday.  Almost 9 AM, the holiday assures the city sits silent outside my doors.  Let’s take time out for a Chinese poem.

Drinking at Crooked River

Beyond the park, at River’s Head,
the water’s calm, the palace disappears.

Peach and willow blossoms scatter
as orioles fly up together.

Drinking, I don’t care what they say–
I never cared for the court.

From my office I now see the immortals
have long since sunk into the sea.

Old and grieved, I see it’s futile
to lament the duties I evaded.

Tu Fu (712-770)

from Crossing the Yellow River, translated by Sam Hamill

This morning’s dawn laps about my feet like warm ocean waves.  The silence sedates, soothes, and calms me–even makes me feel assured.  I will devote this weekend to silently meditating on the poetry of the great Tu Fu.

New dawns break against the shore.  We weather them as best we can no matter their gentleness or violence.

Welcome to your bailout: “it’s your money–don’t you know

The conservatives just won’t let it go.  They insist President Obama is a socialist.  They forget that leftists, like me, think he is a centrist neo-liberal.  Whether he will return the US economy to a place where there is a broad middle class that shares in the real growth of the economy remains an open question.  Many leftists remain very skeptical.  Include me in that group.

Let’s leave all the political labels out of the discussion though.  Let’s concentrate on what has happened to the US auto companies.  When the economy turned down sharply.  The auto executives did not waste much time getting into their private jets, flying to Washington, and asking Congress for bailout money.  Some of capitalism’s finest hours occur when mighty corporations start to go broke.  They claimed they needed the money to stay competitive in the global economy.  What wasn’t mentioned is that we are in a global recession and all car companies profits are down.  If you can’t afford a Chevy, you can’t afford a Toyota either.

The car companies have gotten their bailout.  However, the Obama Administration has had the gall and temerity to take a stakeholder position in how that money is used even up to globally restructuring the industry.  Geez, that the taxpayer footing the bill for the auto company bailouts should have a stakeholder position via their elected officials consists of nonsense to conservatives, yet a supremely equitable arrangement to the rest of us.  Some us like to have some control over where our tax dollars go and want someone who is accountable for seeing that it cures the ills of those who get the money.

If I buy shares of common stock of General Motors I get voting rights with that stock.  I can also vote with my fingers and dump the stock with a few clicks of the computer keyboard.  Of course, for the small shareholder those voting rights are a sham since those votes don’t carry much weight, but at least it is something.  Let’s take the large institutional investors instead.  When billions of their dollars are at risk, you can damned well bet they’ll step in and take control of the Board to assure whatever restructuring needs to be done will be done.

Conservatives always have convenient memories when it comes to the rules of capitalism.  The rules they glory in when the cash is flooding into the coffers during the boom times change when spigot shuts off.  The simple matter regarding the auto companies is that the US government, hence, the US taxpayer is now the major stakeholder in those companies.  Asserting stakeholder rights and demanding accountability is prudent financial management.

In the words of President Bush, “it’s your money–don’t you know.”

The future and the exquisite grandness of Internet social networking

I see her in pictures with anther man.  She radiates happiness.  And I am happy for her.

Softly, the summer of 2002 comes to mind and thoughts of one of those other ghosts emerges from the mist we call memory.

The future is easy.  Sometimes, all you have to do is start over.  And this time get it right.

As persons, we are a collection of personae each with its own narrative.  Adding a new one to the mix should be no chore at all.

Final catharsis

I read that a new edition of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast comes out this week (NYT).  Sean Hemingway, grandson of Hemingway and his second wife Pauline, has edited it and added additional sketches from Hemingway’s manuscript.

For good or ill, A Moveable Feast remains one of my favorite books and sparked my imagination when I was young.  I will read the new edition in hopes it will not dull my enthusiasm for the first edition.

Hemingway never finished the book before he committed suicide. Yet are competed manuscripts ever finished?  If reading is a transaction between writer and reader, then all books may not be finished as we apply new interpretations to it.  My favorite books seem to be those books I can read again with a fresh view.

Some events never find a final interpretation or catharsis.

Positivism, arguments, and answers

Let’s divide questions into two classes.  Those that can be studied using statistics and those that cannot.

When I say can be studied by statistics I mean three things as taken from Langley’s Practical Statistics.

1) Defining a problem or what is to be sought,
2) Choosing a method in which the answer may be found,
3) Interpreting the meaning of the results.

Let’s distinguish between two kinds of positivism: strong positivism where one believes that all that can be studied is through statistics and scientific method, and mild positivism where one cares more about studying questions that can be answered through statistics and scientific method, and does not care much about those questions that can’t be studied thus even though one feels they are still important questions worthy of reflection on their answers.  What I’m talking about is two kinds of positivist temperament.

I would categorize myself these days as a mild positivist if I am a positivist.  Distinguishing inductively between the probable and the improbable satisfies me more than contemplating questions that, although rigorously argued philosophically, cannot be put to statistical scrutiny.

Too bad questions are not as easily categorized as I’ve laid it out.  Take condoms for instance.  I take it as scientifically shown that using condoms reduces the number of cases of sexually transmitted diseases.  Those that enjoin people not to use condoms are relegated to justifiying their position by saying using a condom is a sin or some other moral or religious injunction.  However, one might consider that reducing sexually transmitted diseases carries more moral weight than a religious injunction that increases the chances of getting sexually transmitted diseases.  The moral question remains despite the scientific evidence.

One should be honest when arguing metaphysical or moral points of view.  One should declare how one is answering questions.  One should not try to subvert scientific evidence with pseudo-scientific arguments to the contrary intended to obfuscate an issue.  Those last statements are again moral injuctions of a sort, but I would think that we would have all reached a point where we agree with them.

holy hush

Morning.  The sky growing brighter.  I’ve slept eight hours.  I don’t know what to make of the world after eight hours of sleep.  I feel as if I have awoken in a different world.  Yet nothing extraordinary admits itself into my thoughts.  A haze shrouds my future, a future different than the past.

It’s Sunday morning though.  I often feel a little of Wallace Stevens’s holy hush on summer Sunday mornings.

No priorities

I was rummaging through my book closet this morning when I ran across Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, a book I bought and never read.  I’m going to take it for a spin now.

However, the Cubs/Sox game is coming up, so it will be a book for tonight and the weekend.

I know, I have no priorities.

Thunder

We can construct an arbitrarily large sequence of composite numbers.  When putting that beside the notion that a function as simple as x/log x estimates the number of primes less than x arbitrarily close to square root accuracy, things seem strange.

I guess I don’t really understand questions about primes yet. Immensity always overwhelms my imagination.

It’s grown dark at midday.  I can her thunder in the distance.

Tangled

We read the great poets.  They find the extroadinary and profound in the almost missed ordinary things–things tangled so much in our boring days we can’t see them except when the poets show us.

Looking for somebody

Some people are always looking for somebody.  Even when they have found them, they get bored and start looking anew.  Other people are never exactly looking.  They accept chance as it happens.

Let’s say those are two well defined categories of people.  How do you quantify what happens?  How do you make sense of it all?

Damn it, Ray

Raymond Carver’s Collected Poems remains one of my favorite reads.  I like his conversational voice that has music woven through it.  Geez, I wish I could do that.

Check my last, (or hers)

She calls me.  She says he wasn’t as serious as she thought.  She says she was ambivalent in the first place.  I tell her hanging out together is still on my agenda.  (That’s so cold saying it that way.)  Fuck it; she’s no longer in my heart.  It ain’t going to happen.

Some people you desire for your whole life.  Others fade into blue as swiftly as you can make it happen.

Color her blue.  But don’t get me wrong.  I’ll always remember her that Sunday afternoon at the coffee shop when she first opened Middlemarch.  I’m going to miss discussing it with her, but I barely understand it myself.  By the time she is my age and read it several times, she will know much more about it than me.

I hope the children she will eventually have understand just how smart her Mom is.

Simple sentence

Sometimes, a simple sentence well crafted will do.  Come on, write!  People will love you for it.

Talisman

I’m still playing chess, although not as many games as I did.  I’d like to think that my games are of a higher quality, but I am getting my ass kicked by folks who are way better than me.

I do my analysis with the chess set V gave me for my birthday last year.  It’s a sort of talisman.  A spark of life flows through me each time I touch a piece.

Goodbye to you President Bush

Politics remains on my mind even though I have not written about it.  It seems as though I have missed the Obama phenomena.  The thing I like about the whole deal is the way conservatives have acted towards his policies.  First, they claim he is a communist.  When that doesn’t work, they claim he is the new Roosevelt.  They are either being disingenuous or showing some deep ignorance.  Who likes either?

Meanwhile, I’m still gloating over the demise of President Bush.  His economic and foreign policies have been damned by events. Thus he is damned too–he with his head in the sand.

But that is not what I really want to talk about. I merely ask some questions.

Why is it that the people like Obama who save the Capitalist system from its own excesses gather the most ire from conservatives?  And let’s add this subsidiary question: how stupid can Plutocrats possibly be?

Anyway, Daddy doesn’t care so much about adding an abortion amendment to the Constitution when Daddy is out of a job.