Mochrie is God
Was sad. Then Whose Line helped a little.
First World Problems:
I want SCRAMBLED EGGS but I’m too sad to clean the pan, so I’mma just sit here and listen to music until I crash.
Things are hard when you’re sad.
F
It’s three days into NaNo and I’m already thinking of changing my story.
Why do I do this.
Just fucking stick with something for five minutes, you complete bag of worthless trash.
BASEBALL PARTY FUN TIME 2K18
Things I should be working on:
- NaNoWriMo
- Class notes
- Class review questions
- Answering emails
Things I worked on instead:
- This freaking blog
So remember that baseball thing I’ve done a couple times now, once for 2016 and once for 2017? I did it again for 2018 because why the hell not.
Let’s do the CopyPaste Dance from a previous blog:
At the end of the regular baseball season, you can see how many wins each team got out of the total number of games they played, and then rank the teams by their performance (who had the most wins, the second most wins, etc.).
What I want to do is see how this “real” data correlates with how many wins each team would get if they scored their average number of runs per game in every single game they played. For example, if the Athletics score an average of 5.02 runs per game, how many of their games would they have won by scoring 5.02 runs in each of those games?
(Yes, I know you can’t score 0.02 runs in a single game, but just work with me here.)
The process:
- Record each team’s average runs per game (I’ll call this “RPG”) (from here).
- Sort teams from highest to lowest RPG.
- Now, if a team A has a higher RPG than team B, that would mean that A would win every game they play against B. So the next step was to figure this out for each pairing of Team A versus Team B.
- I used this logic for all pairings (numbers of games per pair was obtained from here), then summed across the rows to get the “predicted” number of wins based on RPG alone. Then I compared looked at how each team’s “predicted” number of wins compared with their “actual” number of wins, and ranked each team by both their “predicted” and “actual” values.
How do they compare for the 2018 season?
Boston (highest RPG) would win every game they played; Miami (lowest RPG) would lose every game they played. Bummer.
Correlation of RPG-predicted games won and actual games won: 0.797
Correlation of team rankings based on RPG-predicted games won and actual games won: 0.832
Pretty cool.
The biggest discrepancies, of course, are at the extremes. Based on RPG alone, Boston was predicted to win 66 more games than they did; Miami predicted to lose 66 more than they did. The smallest discrepancy is for the Angels, who were predicted to win two more games than they did.
FUN!
NaNooooooooo
So it’s day one and I’m already behind.
Because that’s the type of loser I am this year, I guess.
F
Hallow
Oh, my. What a catchy song.
Have a few more (mostly for the music videos). Happy Halloween!
I fought the blog and the blog won
Oh my god, I haven’t laughed this hard at a YouTube video in a long time.
I’m fucking crying.
Dudes, Primer is on YouTube
Ever since I met Nate, I’ve been raving to him about Primer, a movie made back in 2004 that focuses on some ordinary people accidentally discovering time travel. It was a super low budget movie ($7,000) and wasn’t very widely released, which means it’s super hard to find.
But hey, there’s a legit version of it on YouTube, which is awesome! I haven’t seen this movie since we watched it in high school physics.
So for anyone who wants some super dense time travel fun, here ya go.
AAAAAAA I FINALLY DID IT
So after like five years of talking about it, I finally did it: I finally made and ordered a paper copy of my blogs.
Well, for now, just Year 1. I’m going to see how it looks and how I like the binding/print/look of it all, and if it’s neato Frito, I’mma do all the rest of the years. I’ll show it to y’all once it comes in the mail.
And yes, I just said “neato Frito.” Fight me.
Edit: damn you, Canada Post, I want my bloggggggggggggs. Now I know how my readers feel.
LOOK AT THIS GORGEOUS KITTY IN THE SUN
That is all.
Every sponge cake is a waterfall
Holy hell.
- That guy sounds so much like Freddie.
- This is the only version of this song that rivals the original.
- The tone change caused by the Queen style is chilling.
- AAAAAAAAA I LOVE IT
Postmodern Jukebox is a gift we do not deserve.
Sleepyhead Remix: A Forgotten Happy
So as I’m sure many of you know, I’m all about the Sleepyhead remixes. I have approximately 25 or so of them.
Well, I just re-discovered this one and forgot how good it was. Check it out:
Love that violin chorus.
I almost forgot:
Nate and I met a super nice kitty on one of our walks a while back and we met him again today. Took a picture of him. His name’s Kevin.
(Am I a creep for posting a picture of some other person’s cat on my blog?)
We also murdered a caterpillar by proxy by drawing Kevin’s attention to it (he had no interest in it until we tried to move it off the sidewalk and it started doing it’s “get away from me predator” thrash, which immediately made Kevin claw the hell out of it), so there’s that.
ZoomaZoomaMathsGear
Heyo.
Y’all want some cool math-related stuff? Check out this website.
Favorites:
- Skew dice.
- Shapes of constant width.
- Symmetry groups wrapping paper (I don’t know why, but I love the symmetry groups. I’ve blogged about them a few times.)
- Torus balloons.
- Math stack playing cards.
- RGB/CMYK earrings.
- Galton board (Matt, I think you showed this to me once?)
WOO!
SCREW IT, LET’S DO IT
UI schedule for next semester. Because that’s just what I do.
M/W/F
- HIST 379: History of Science II: 1700 – Present
- MATH 480: Partial Differential Equations
- STAT 535: Introduction to Bayesian Statistics
T/H
- CS 460: Database Management Systems Design
- CS 479: Data Science
I miss undergrad.
More NaNo Thoughts
In addition to 1) wanting to continue working on last year’s NaNo, despite its lameness, and 2) wanting to retry my 2016 NaNo idea, despite its lameness, I have another (lame) idea that I’ve had in the back of my head for a while. It’s an idea that I’m sure has been done thousands of times…but hasn’t everything? It’s all about how you do it, right?
Anyway. It involves a cruise ship on which it is discovered that one of the passengers has some contagious illness (possibly one that the CDC hasn’t fully identified yet, but is dangerously contagious and deadly) and no port will allow the cruise ship to dock due to the risk of spreading the illness, so they’re forced to remain at sea as more and more passengers get sick and provisions run low.
Yeah, I know, dumb.
TIL: The Planck Constant can be hilarious
Alternate title: GOD I’M OBNOXIOUS
Hokay. So Nate and I were playing Jeopardy this evening and some question* came up that made me think of the kilogram. This got me ranting and raving about said kilogram, as I am wont to do, so I looked it up on my phone because I knew that there have been recent attempts to redefine the kilogram based on a physical constant and I wanted to see exactly what that redefinition would be.
This eventually led to looking up the Planck constant, which led to viewing this equation:
Of course it’s the mobile version of Wiki so it scrolls right in order for you to view the rest of the equation, but I initially didn’t think of that and I thought it was beyond hilarious that the Planck constant equaled 4.1. 4.1 what? Who the hell knows, that’s why it was funny.
Anyway.
*I can’t recall the specifics of the question, because like any well-adjusted happy person, I gloss over large amounts of my existence so that it’ll feel like I reach death faster.
Skidoo
Cooking dinner makes me anxious.
That’s…really dumb, but unfortunately true.
That’s all I have to say today, sorry.
A Thing I’d Never Thought I’d Say:
I prefer Twitter to Facebook now.
Reasons:
- Of the 40-ish friends I have on Facebook, most of them are either using Facebook to be passive-aggressive to another person or are pooping out kids and posting exclusively about pooping out kids (or, in one bizarre case, passively-aggressively pooping out kids). I have no interest in any of those things.
- On Twitter, I follow The Royal Society, Calgary Transit, a few pedestrian-promoting groups, some of the AH guys, Stats Canada, other stats groups/dudes, and a fair number of baseball pages/people. So y’know, things that are interesting and drama-free.
(Except for baseball. Sometimes baseball has all the drama.)
So yeah.
Let’s get down to business…to defeat…the nuns!
You know what sucks? Migraines.
You know what also sucks? Ocular migraines. An “ocular migraine” occurs when blood flow is reduced to the eye or the blood vessels in the retina spasm and results in partial or complete vision loss in the effected eye. How long the vision loss lasts varies from person to person, but it usually lasts about half an hour to an hour.
Ocular migraines can also precede good ol’ regular migraines or can occur with a good ol’ regular migraine.
I’ve talked about my ocular migraines on here quite a few times. For me, the partial or complete vision loss in one eye is my signal to take some Excedrin, ‘cause Big Boy Migraine Headache is angry and will be taking a sledgehammer to the inside of my skull very soon after my vision returns.
But now? The signs that I’ve come to recognize as the start of the ocular migraine (tingly fingertips, that small blind spot that grows and spreads) have happened a few times without the ocular migraine (or actual migraine) following. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but that’s caused me to take Excedrin when I didn’t need to, which is something I really don’t like. Hell, I don’t like to take medicine in general, but if I take it and it turns out I didn’t need to, that really bothers me.
Such a small dose of Excedrin when I don’t need it is probably not going to hurt me, but it’s the principle of the thing, yo. Now I feel like I have to wait until the ocular migraine fully kicks in to justify taking Excedrin, which at that point is really pushing it; if I don’t take the Excedrin early enough before the migraine headache part starts, it doesn’t do anything to help the pain, and then everything sucks for about half a day.
So yeah. Just venting, sorry!
AAAAAAAA
Remember that post about the Theremin that I made a few weeks ago? Hear it in Debussy form!
This is really beautiful.
Eigenblogger 