Posts from ‘February, 2009’

The Internet was down for about an hour today. The resulting scene on campus looked something like this: What a blessing! People got more things done. Students in my dorm interacted, face-to-face. The girl sitting next to me in class couldn’t open Perez Hilton – she had to focus. People stopped sitting on their email [...]

Start here (but only if you are not busy for the next hour or so). I’m still thinking about the answer.

T.S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” as an undergraduate at Harvard. It’s one of my favorite poems. The current literature, and my professor, suggest that the poem is a criticism of love in a modern age. I believe it’s more of a warning against the dangers of hesitating and of being [...]

First off, if you’re a teacher, realize that a good completion rate for reading assignments is 75%, especially if you assign a lot of work. If you’re a student, getting through the reading can be a struggle, especially if you fall behind. Here are some tips for getting through difficult reading. Low Difficulty – Trace [...]

Robin Hanson writes, Let us first notice some patterns about cynical moods. The young tend to be more idealistic, while the old are more cynical. People can remain idealistic their entire lives about social institutions that they know little about, but those who know an institution well tend to be more cynical. Leaders and the [...]

Marc Ambinder has posted a list of things people are "outraged" about this week in Washington. Reading the list reinforces the obvious point that a politician’s world is extremely disconnected from the reality on the ground. Not making the list, and hardly drawing a peep from anyone in Washington, is the language tucked into the [...]

I watched CMS play Pomona-Pitzer in the 5C rivalry game last night. CMS had 20 defensive rebounds (28 overall) and Pomona-Pitzer had 26 defensive rebounds (31 overall), so at first glance you would say that Pomona had a better rebounding game. But a look at the data reveals CMS was the far better rebounding team [...]

Note the potential for a diabolical student to flip around the labels, and the mental map you have to make between the labels and the jars. Compared with this: BOOM! Any attempt to switch these labels will leave a messy trail.

Quantitative baseball analysis took a big step forward with the introduction of VORP (“value over replacement player”), which measures each player’s worth compared with a below-average replacement, measuring contribution at the margin. For basketball, Bill Simmons recently proposed VOTT, or value over Tim Thomas, saying, “Is there an NBA forward alive who couldn’t play 31 [...]