Quotulatiousness

January 28, 2012

Revising the NFL’s rating system

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:32

The NFL keeps lots and lots of statistics, but the traditional way of ranking teams is based on total yardage gained and lost. Using that measurement, the two worst defensive teams in the league were the top seeds in their respective conferences, and one of them is appearing in the Super Bowl next week. That doesn’t seem to be an accurate way of comparing teams, as John Holler points out:

A more accurate reflection should be taking in three factors, not just yards gained or allowed. In realistic terms, there should be two other criteria measured. Seeing as games are decided by points scored, that should be factored in. Also, there are defenses that are known as “bend, don’t break.” They allow yards, but, once in the red zone, they stiffen up and turn potential touchdowns into field goals.

While not a perfect system, the numbers bear out that this is a much more accurate reflection of the true value of an offense or a defense. According to the “official” numbers, the Eagles were a top-eight team in both offense and defense. Reality said otherwise.

What follow are VU’s reality rankings of NFL offenses and defenses. Each team is ranked in three categories – yards, points and red zone touchdown percentage. The first figure is where offenses and defenses were ranked for comparison purposes.

[. . .]

Offense

Defence

1. New England – 2-3-2 (7)
2. Green Bay – 3-1-3 (7)
3. New Orleans – 1-2-6 (9)
4. Detroit – 5-4-4 (13)
5. Carolina – 7-5½-7 (19½)
6. San Diego – 6-5½-10 (21½)
7. N.Y. Giants – 8-9-8 (25)
8. Philadelphia – 4-8-14 (26)
9. Atlanta – 10-7-13 (30)
10. N.Y. Jets – 25-13-1 (39)
11. Buffalo – 14-14-11 (39)
12. Oakland – 9-16-16 (41)
13. Tennessee – 17-21½-5 (43½)
14. Baltimore – 15-12-17 (44)
15. Dallas – 11-15-20 (46)
16. Minnesota – 19-19-9 (46)
17. Houston – 13-10-25 (48)
18. Pittsburgh – 12-21½-18 (51½)
19. Chicago – 24-17-12 (53)
20. Arizona – 19-24-15 (58)
21. Cincinnati – 20-18-26 (64)
22. Miami – 22-20-24 (66)
23. Tampa Bay – 21-27-19 (67)
24. San Francisco – 26-11-30 (67)
25. Denver – 23-25-23 (71)
26. Washington – 16-26-29 (71)
27. Seattle – 28-23-22 (73)
28. Jacksonville – 32-28½-21 (81½)
29. Indianapolis – 30- 28½-27 (85½)
30. Cleveland – 29-30-28 (87)
31. Kansas City – 27-31-32 (90)
32. St. Louis – 31-32-31 (94)

1. Baltimore – 3-3-1 (7)
2. San Francisco – 4-2-4 (10)
3. Houston – 2-4-9 (15)
4. Pittsburgh – 1-1-17 (19)
5. Cleveland – 10-5-3 (18)
6. Miami – 15-6-6 (27)
7. Seattle – 9-7-11 (27)
8. Tennessee – 18½-8-10 (36½)
9. Arizona – 18½-17-2 (37½)
10. Chicago – 17-14-7 (38)
11. Atlanta – 12-18-8 (38)
12. Washington – 13-21-5 (39)
13. Jacksonville – 6-11-23 (40)
14. N.Y. Jets – 5-20-16 (41)
15. Cincinnati – 7-9-25 (41)
16. Kansas City – 11-12-18 (41)
17. Philadelphia – 8-10-30 (48)
18. Dallas – 14-16-19 (49)
19. Detroit – 23-23-12 (58)
20. Denver – 20-24-15 (59)
21. St. Louis – 22-26-13 (61)
22. New Orleans – 24-13-28 (65)
23. Minnesota – 21-31-14 (66)
24. San Diego – 16-22-29 (67)
25. New England – 31-15-21½ (67.5)
26. Green Bay – 32-19-20 (71)
27. N.Y. Giants – 27-25-21½ (73½)
28. Carolina – 28-27-27 (82)
29. Indianapolis – 25-28-31 (84)
30. Oakland – 29-29-26 (84)
31. Tampa Bay – 30-32-24 (86)
32. Buffalo – 26-30-32 (88)

Sonny Rollins honoured, but Kennedy Center misses an opportunity

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:14

One of the best jazzmen of the 20th century was recognized in an event at the Kennedy Center recently:

Was there a single jazz musician in the audience for the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony last month? Besides Sonny Rollins, that is, who was one of the five honorees. From what I saw on the CBS telecast of the ceremony, the only jazz musicians in the house were those hired hands who were on stage playing in Sonny’s honor. Is it possible that no other jazz players were there? It’s more likely that the show’s producers wouldn’t recognize a jazz musician even at close range, so all we got were long shots of the Obamas and movie and pop stars. At least the President and First Lady looked like they’d heard jazz before they got to the Center, and surely they appreciated Bill Cosby’s irony-laced introduction. But how many people in that bejeweled crowd had ever heard a note by the Saxophone Colossus?

Granted, it was great to see Sonny getting the honor, to watch the montage of images from his career and hear the narrative voiced by Cosby. Cos described his own surprise encounters with people in far flung places abroad who in the midst of their daily routines were listening to Rollins, then concluded his remarks by welcoming Sonny “home” to his native land. But notwithstanding the primacy of jazz in American performing arts, the music long ago lost its appeal for the masses, and even the curious may know little about its history and Newk’s place in it. Thus while Cosby’s comments spoke to his personal admiration for Rollins, the occasion called for something more, the kind of critically-grounded statement that a Stanley Crouch or Gary Giddins or Bob Blumenthal could have provided. But a teaching moment like this was squandered, while the most resonant image may have been the sign of Rikers Island displayed among Rollins’s personal landmarks.

Conrad Black on Pierre Trudeau and his political career

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Writing in the National Post, Conrad Black discusses Pierre Trudeau’s time in office:

Nor is there truth to the theory that Trudeau possessed any original political ideas. He was a run-of-the-mill 1960s social democrat who wanted big government, the nanny-, know-it-all-state, high taxes, and the confiscation of income from those who had earned it for redistribution to those who had not in exchange for their votes (far beyond what could be justified by the acquisition of votes for federalism in Quebec, where the money transfer was also largely from the non-French to the French).

It was hard to square Trudeau’s professed enthusiasm for civil rights with his friendship with Fidel Castro and other dictators who ruined their countries, such as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and his cold-shouldering of Soviet dissidents and other international civil rights advocates, and even the Canadian victims of the Korean airliner the Russians shot down. This was of a piece with his fawning deference to the Soviet leadership and his antagonism to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and even Richard Nixon, who all regarded him as little better than a communist fellow traveller (and told me so).

His campaign to reorient the Canadian economy away from exports to the United States was authoritarian rather than based on any fiscal incentivization of competition, and was a fiasco. His pursuit of arms control was chimerical; he disarmed Canada, did nothing to reduce the country’s military dependence on Washington, and produced a nonsensical plan for more conferences to agree on the unverifiable “suffocation” of defence spending.

[. . .]

His elevation to the headship of the party and government continued the grand Liberal tradition of choosing men lately drawn from outside politics (King, St. Laurent, Pearson). He took it whimsically, and much of his record was just idle dabbling, posturing, and the supreme confidence trick of saving Canada with a Charter of Rights that is revocable by each province (and has unleashed the bench on Canadian life like a swarm of hyper-active social tinkerers); and by imposing bilingual breakfast cereal boxes and television programming even in unilingual parts of the country.

It was clever enough that, as the English say, if you put a tail on it, you could call it a weasel: the rights of man and not governments, our (French-Canadian) house is all Canada, and deluges of Anglo-money in Quebec in the name of social justice, gracieusete du Canada. But it was a ruse, made more farcical by the revelation that Quebec’s supreme separatist strategist, Claude Morin, was a spy for the RCMP.

The Quebec nationalists took the bait, as well as the federal transfer payments, and today Quebec is a bovine clerisy of civil servants and consultants on life support from the rich English provinces, and separation is just a romantic delusion. I think that, at heart, Trudeau was a worldly Gallican Catholic cynic who sincerely despised separatism, was bemused to find himself a national saviour, and played the role with courage, brio and success.

How a long-dead activist’s ideas influenced Barack Obama

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:52

In an article from 2009, Jim Geraghty traces the influence of Saul Alinsky (who died before Obama went to high school) on the President’s early days in office:

Alinsky died in 1972, when Obama was 11 years old. But three of Obama’s mentors from his Chicago days studied at a school Alinsky founded, and they taught their students the philosophy and methods of one of the first “community organizers.” Ryan Lizza wrote a 6,500-word piece on Alinsky’s influence on Obama for The New Republic, noting, “On his campaign website, one can find a photo of Obama in a classroom teaching students Alinskian methods. He stands in front of a blackboard on which he has written ‘Relationships Built on Self Interest,’ an idea illustrated by a diagram of the flow of money from corporations to the mayor.”

In a letter to the Boston Globe, Alinsky’s son wrote that “the Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. . . . Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.”

As a tool for understanding the thinking of Obama, Alinsky’s most famous book, Rules for Radicals, is simultaneously edifying and worrisome. Some passages make Machiavelli’s Prince read like a Sesame Street picture book on manners.

He also took advantage of the innumeracy of many people:

When Obama announced a paltry $100 million in budget cuts, and insisted this was part of a budget-trimming process that would add up to “real money,” he clearly understood that the public processes these numbers very differently from the way budget wonks do. Alinsky wrote: “The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested, because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion.”

That’s the same sense that Mark Steyn captured recently.

Alinsky sneered at those who would accept defeat rather than break their principles: “It’s true I might have trouble getting to sleep because it takes time to tuck those big, angelic, moral wings under the covers.” He assured his students that no one would remember their flip-flops, scoffing, “The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father.” If you win, no one really cares how you did it.

[. . .]

Moderates thought they were electing a moderate; liberals thought they were electing a liberal. Both camps were wrong. Ideology does not have the final say in Obama’s decision-making; an Alinskyite’s core principle is to take any action that expands his power and to avoid any action that risks his power.

Photoshopping images is so passé: using game footage is the new trend

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

At the BBC website, Phil Coomes shows some side-by-side images of real events and modern FPS game images. The recent flap over clips from the game Arma 2 being cited as genuine film captured from the IRA is only the first of many incidents we should expect to encounter, as games get better (and advocates remain as dedicated to advancing their causes as ever):

Today we are used to seeing real time reports from across the globe, technology has advanced and anyone with an internet connection can travel to far-off places, even imaginary worlds, from their armchair.

The world of video games has progressed too. Some seem real, as highlighted by a recent Ofcom ruling that ITV misled viewers by airing footage claimed to have been shot by the IRA, which was actually material taken from a video game.

Labelled “IRA Film 1988”, it was described as film shot by the IRA of its members attempting to down a British Army helicopter in June 1988. However, the pictures were actually taken from a game called Arma 2.

[. . .]

So I went through my photos taken from various combat zones, and attempted to replicate them in a computer game.

The game Arma 2 was ideal — it’s more of a war simulation than an all-out blaster, with the correct uniforms, vehicles and weapons as well as varied terrains and bang-bang firefights.

Plenty of hours fiddling within the gaming environment, alongside Ivan who developed the game, produced some pretty remarkable results.

In some cases it is actually quite hard to tell the difference between my photographs and the computer version, which is deeply worrying. The level of detail is so precise that the virtual war zone is as convincing as the real thing.

Deirde McCloskey on the “Bourgeois Virtues” that sparked the modern world

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dalibor Rohac reviews some of the key arguments in McCloskey’s recent book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (which I’m currently reading — and very impressed with).

Unlike “Bourgeois Virtues,” “Bourgeois Dignity” makes a historical argument. Modern economic growth, she claims, is a result of an ideological and rhetorical transformation. In the Elizabethan period, business was sneered upon. In Shakespeare’s plays, the only major bourgeois character, Antonio, is a fool because of his affection for Bassanio. There is no need to dwell on how the other bourgeois character in “The Merchant of Venice,” Shylock, is characterized.

She contrasts this with attitudes 200 years later. When James Watt died in 1819, a statue of him was erected in Westminster Abbey and later moved to St. Paul’s cathedral. This would have been unthinkable two centuries earlier. In Ms. McCloskey’s view, this shift in perceptions was central to the economic take-off of the West. “A bourgeois deal was agreed upon,” she says. “You let me engage in innovation and creative destruction, and I will make you rich.” A commercial class that was not ostracized or sneered at was thus able to activate the engine of modern economic growth.

Ms. McCloskey insists that alternative explanations for the Industrial Revolution fail, for a variety of reasons. Property rights, she says, could not have been the principal cause because England and many other societies had stable and secure property rights for a long time. Similarly, Atlantic trade and plundering of the colonies were too insignificant in revenue to have made the real difference. There had long been much more trade in the Indian Ocean than in the Atlantic, moreover, and China or India had never experienced an industrial revolution.

By elimination, Ms. McCloskey concludes that culture and rhetoric are the only factors that can account for economic change of the magnitude we have seen in the developed world in past 250 years.

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