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Jan 28

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Crazy Lawsuit Wednesdays!

DROP THAT CHALUPA!

Greetings from Hoth! The heat in my office has now been out for two days, and as a trademark Toronto SNOPOCALYPSE ™ kicks up around us things are looking decidedly grim for the rebellion.

Since my poor frozen brain is too sluggish for deep insight here’s some decidedly hot and spicy odd lawsuits from this week:

… you know what? This is just getting depressing… so we stop here. You don’t like it? SUE ME.

Jan 26

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Awww… you like me, you really li**Bandwidth Exceeded**

509-bandwidth-limit

Awww… I just popped over to fix a broken link in my Mad article from this morning and got the dreaded “509 – Bandwidth Exceeded” message – marking this as (clearly) my most successful month of blogging ever.

Of course around now most Bloggers would be decrying their scumbag webhosts for cutting off the juice in the first place… but since the scumbag webhost in question resolved the issue immediately, and also is me, all is forgiven.

Just wanted to say “thank you” to all you scary web-folk who keep coming here. I promise to keep doing whatever the heck it is that this thing is.

Jan 26

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Still no link between videogame violence and actual violence… shocking.

video-game_violence

Professor Christopher Ferguson, writing for the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling confirms what many of us have suspected all along: despite decades of data there no significant link between playing violent videogames and school shootings. There is also no significant link between being an altar boy and school shootings, bowling and school shootings , or Bob Geldof and school shootings. Is anyone else surprised that this discussion is still going on, even given that horrific acts of school gun-violence far pre-date the invention of the videogame?

“It has been observed that a small group of researchers have been most vocal in promoting the anti-game message, oftentimes ignoring research from other researchers, or failing to disclose problems with their own research. As some researchers have staked their professional reputation on anti-game activism, it may be difficult for these researchers to maintain scientific objectivity regarding the subject of their study.”

The article is most interesting for some of the fairly pointed criticism that Ferguson directs to those who have conducted studies over the previous decade noting, among other things, that it may be easier to get grants to search for negative results.

Like news coverage, even in academia it looks like the “shock headline” is what, ultimately, pays the bills.

(via GamePolitics)

Jan 26

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From the (Fone)boned-by-the-economy department

Man, I love this illustration

Mad Magazine cutting back to a quarterly publishing schedule? If Don Martin were alive he’d be Ka-PTHLONG-A-DONG-A-DONG-A-DONG’ing in his grave. William Gaines would be incensed, and hungry. Dave Berg would need THREE pipes just to calm down. Sergio Aragonés… well Mr. Aragonés would probably be exactly the same as he is. Because: A. He’s still alive. B. He’s all suave as hell. and C. Because death fears to face the magnificence of his moustache. Hmmm, I kind of lost my track there for a second.

This is, of course, sad news for anyone who grew up indebted to Mad (and more importantly boxes and boxes of back-issues of Mad from parents, relatives, neighbours, and garage sales)… as their first introduction to the world of comedy. Real comedy. Gut-busting comedy, the likes of which Riverdale’s denziens certainly didn’t deliver.

While there’s still some debate about the effectiveness of satire as an educational tool – there really is no question in my mind about the mass of material I only know about thanks to Bill Gaines singular vision. Read more

Jan 22

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Stupid Educational Hockey Math Brain-Blowout

Image not related, I just love Peter Puck.

I get flack from friends and family from coming home from the office and regaling them with absolutely non-sequiter information. This has created the impression that I spend all day at work reading “weird trivia fact books” or something. In reality, I often pick up bits and pieces of information which continue to grate at me in the back of my head as I do the more tedious tasks of my day.

Case in point: In cleaning out my Google Reader cache last night I saw an article at Puck Daddy about how a Chicago Blackhawks Fan won $1,000,000 at a game on Tuesday. The promotion, with the Illinois Lottery, was that a randomly chosen fan at each home game could win $1,000,000 if the ‘hawks scored a goal at exactly the 10-minute mark of the second period. Only five days after the promotion started, Martin Havlat made some lucky fan a millionaire.

The article also had a quote from a Darren Rovell article at CNBC about the odds of such an occurrence where Greg Esterhai, a representative of an insurance company, said the odds of such a promotion would be about 1 in 25, per season.

So today, while I sat on hold on the phone, I wondered if I could recreate this calculation before my call got answered:

  • A NHL game is 60 minutes, or 3600 seconds
  • A quick Google search turned up the 2007 goals-per-game average: 5.94
  • That would make the odds of a goal at any particular second 1:606
  • and given 40 home games in a season (40:606), approx 1:15 that someone would score a goal at any given second in a season… which is significantly different than the odds that Mr. Esterhai quoted.

Not only could I not figure out what mistake I had made before I had to turn my attention back to my actual call, this discrepancy drove me completely bonkers grating in the back of my head all day. One obvious flaw is that I’m sure the distribution of goals isn’t entirely equal over the course of the game (I suspect more goals are scored at the beginning and end of periods… also more goals during the first and third period seems to make sense)… but the quote was pretty clear that the calculation was for a goal during any second in a game… not particularly at a specific time – so a simple even distribution seemed most appropriate for a napkin calculation (in this, it turns out I was right).

I make no claims to being a math guru (first year economics in University just about handed me my ass with the calculus required) so I finally decided to write my dilemma down in a post to see if anyone out there could show me what mistake I was making… however in the process of writing my problem out long-form, my (completely stupid) mistake becomes glaringly obvious.

…

No, I’m not going to tell you what mistake I made. You can either gloat in smug superiority, or share my pain. Either one works for me.

Jan 21

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A Historic Tuesday

I would be the one who is neither incredibly ripped, nor dressed in vague 17th century garb

During the contentious 2008 US election we were often bombarded with variants of a very basic Republican speaking point: You don’t actually buy the hype do you? For all the talk of change you don’t expect you will magically open your eyes into a mystical new wonderland should, against all odds, a black man named “Barack” get elected to the highest office in the land?

Oddly, I had assumed this was just the usual pundit pedantry – intentionally making shallow word-play out of the broader social and international importance of metaphorical “change”. Heck, I think I probably argued that the act of such an unlikely election, in and of itself, would encompass of more national “change” than, perhaps, the entirety of the previous several presidential terms.

Ironically, the promise wasn’t nearly as metaphorical as I’d thought:

1130h EST, January 20th 2009 – Barack Hussein Obama II was inaugurated at the 44th President of the United States of America.

1200h EST, January 20th 2009 – I find myself in Puebla, Mexico officiating a press conference between Captain Henry Morgan and the famous Mexican wrestler, El 1000 Por Ciento Guapo, Shocker.

Now that’s change you can believe in!
(en espanol, but here’s a mildly comprehensible auto- translation)

Jan 19

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Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)

longlimb
Andrew Wyeth passed away this weekend. Modernist? Expressionist? Kitchmeister? I can provide no insight into these epic art-world squabbles other than the fact that I enjoyed his work immensely and “Christina’s World” gives me a serious case of the creeps.

Heck even muppet parodies of “Christina’s World” give me the creeps.

Regardless of the debate about his merits (and I even think his later work, is absolutely fascinating) there are very few contemporary artists the general public know at the drop of a last-name reference, and he was certainly one… even if I can’t bring myself to post “Christina’s World” as the thumbnail to this post.

Jan 19

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Barack Obama and the case of the missing Nintendo DS(es).

ds-lite-obama

A completely captivating story about the president-elect and his first family on the eve of his historic inauguration.

Intrigue! Mistyque! Secret service agents “as big as boulders”! Missing Nintendo DS(es)! Leapfrog! Iraqi policy debate!

Not only is the story entirely charming, but anyone with kids (or who has spent any time with kids) tasked with hunting down missing items can relate… well played, sir.

“I saw that the office was really shaped like an oval!” via Kotaku
(Very cool custom DS-Lite by Shepard Fairey)