It was 70 years ago today that the “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III took place:
March 24, 2014
The Great Escape (with bonus Canadian content)
Paul Wells’ Twitter summary of the last 48 hours in Quebec politics
Is anyone going to piece together the utter fiasco of the PQ's last 48 hours? It's genuinely breathtaking. (/n)
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 24, 2014
1. The PQ feeds false information about voting irregularities to the provincial election agency.
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 24, 2014
2. Perhaps this is a left-hand right-hand thing and the party leadership doesn't know party members were the source for the story, but…
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 24, 2014
3. …rather than verifying the accuracy of the information in private conversation with the DGE, the following personalities comment:
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 24, 2014
4. The minister of Justice. The minister for families. The minister for higher education. The minister for relations with anglos….
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 24, 2014
5. …the guy whose bill says emergency-room doctors with yarmulkes should be fired. The star casserole-banging youth MNA. And the premier.
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 24, 2014
6. And then, when *a Radio-Canada host* asks the DGE the questions *any of these people could have asked the DGE,* the story collapses.
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 24, 2014
7. And 24 hours after claiming students were "stealing the election" — and less than 24 hours after Lisée hints they're mobbed-up….
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 24, 2014
8. The entire bunch of them drop the story. Whoopsie, never mind us, we're just the entire leadership of the incumbent government!
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 24, 2014
Twenty years. Twenty years I've been covering politics. I've never seen anything this disgraceful, not once. What a pack of idiots.
— Paul Wells (@InklessPW) March 24, 2014
Is there a “magic formula” for drafting a winning NFL quarterback?
Short answer … no. But CCNorseman at the Daily Norseman has come up with an evaluation system that looks promising, especially as the Vikings are once again hoping to draft their QBOTF in this year’s crapshoot draft:
First, I created a list of quarterbacks to research to determine what traits they might have had in common coming out of college, both good and bad. I attempted to answer the following question: Were there certain traits that all successful quarterbacks possessed coming out of the draft, and were there any negative traits that can generally be dismissed as not being that important? As it turns out, the answer is yes to both questions.
In compiling a list of quarterbacks to study, I decided to take a look at all of the most successful quarterbacks that have entered the league within the last 15 years, regardless of the round in which they were drafted (or if they were drafted at all). I think most fans can agree that we need a quarterback that can lead the Vikings to the playoffs, and ultimately to the Super Bowl. And most quarterbacks that can achieve consistent playoff appearances or consistent efficiency metrics tend to have the best chance of winning a Super Bowl. So in order to be qualified as “successful” for this study, a quarterback must have either won a Super Bowl, have appeared in at least 10 playoff games, or be ranked in the top 32 of career “adjusted net yards per attempt” (ANY/A) statistic compared to the entire history of the NFL (ANY/A is the statistic that most closely correlates to winning and losing for quarterbacks).
[…]
In any case, from there I scoured the internet for pre-draft scouting reports of all 26 quarterbacks, and unfortunately I drew blanks on 6 of them that were drafted prior to the year 2000 (Kurt Warner, Jeff Garcia, Donovan McNabb, Daunte Culpepper, David Garrard and Matt Hasselbeck). So for the remaining 20 quarterbacks that I could actually find pre-draft scouting reports online, I tracked which attributes were listed as “positive traits” and which attributes were listed as “negative traits” in the various reports. After boiling down the data I began to see which traits occurred most frequently and there were seven attributes that stood out as being the most common as they applied to more than half of the 20 quarterbacks on the list. So, here is a list of the seven most common “positive traits” that successful NFL quarterbacks on the list above possessed coming out of college:
- Good Pocket Awareness and mobile around the pocket with an ability to “step up” in the pocket (15 of 20 QBs possessed this trait)
- Smart and made good decisions with the football showing patience (14 of 20 QBs possessed this trait)
- Good Arm Strength or “Prototypical NFL Arm Strength” (13 of 19 QBs possessed this trait)
- Good Attitude, leader and fierce competitor (13 of 19 QBs possessed this trait)
- Has good vision, can see the field and read defenses (11 of 20 QBs possessed this trait)
- Good accuracy (11 of 20 QBs possessed this trait)
- Can throw on the run (11 of 20 QBs possessed this trait)
Some other positive traits that appeared for several of the Quarterbacks on the list (but less than half) were: good size/stature, good ability to scramble and avoid the rush, quick release, good touch passes and good ball placement and timing. But again, those traits were not common for the majority of the quarterbacks on the list with each one being common for only 8 or 9 quarterbacks, total. So in short if we can find a quarterback in the draft that exhibits most (if not all) of the seven traits above, then they will have a lot in common with the 20 most successful quarterbacks drafted over the past 15 years when they were college prospects. And therefore, they should have much better odds of panning out as a draft selection just as these prospects did before them.
He then uses these identified traits to look at current draft prospects and the results are rather different than most mock drafts portray:
In any case where does all of this leave us in regards to the quarterback prospects in the 2014 draft? Which ones are most likely to succeed? Well, in looking at the top 10 QBs from the latest cumulative draft rankings, they all possessed some of the traits above, but none of them possessed all seven (and of the 20 most successful, none of them possessed all 7 coming out of college either). In order to determine with traits were more important, I assigned a point system to each one relative to their frequency in the scouting reports. Below is the point scale.
QB Traits Point Scale
Trait #1, Good Pocket Awareness: 7 points
Trait #2, Good decision making: 6 Points
Trait #3, Good arm strength: 5 Points
Trait #4, Leader and good attitude: 5 Points
Trait #5, Can read defenses: 4 Points
Trait #6, Good accuracy: 4 Points
Trait #7, Can throw on the run: 4 Points
Total: 35 Points PossibleIf a quarterback had one of the traits listed above as a positive, they earned that many points. However, if it was listed as a negative part of their game, then I subtracted that many points from their total. If one of these traits simply wasn’t listed as a positive or a negative, then it didn’t count for or against them. Listed below are the seven quarterbacks that scored double digit points based on this rating metric.
It won’t surprise anyone that Christian Ponder’s score using this scale comes out as a magnificent -2 (yes, that’s a negative number). If this scoring system was in use at Winter Park in the coming draft, the Vikings would end up drafting Derek Carr, Fresno State (score 28 out of 35) or Jimmy Garoppolo, Eastern Illinois (who scores 27 out of 35).
Interpersonal communication in Shakespeare, or “Juliet and Her Nurse”
Emma Pierson does a bit of statistical analysis of some of Shakespeare’s plays and discovers that some of the play names are rather misleading, at least in terms of romantic dialogue:
More than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it, we can now say that Romeo and Juliet has the wrong name. Perhaps the play should be called Juliet and Her Nurse, which isn’t nearly as sexy, or Romeo and Benvolio, which has a whole different connotation.
I discovered this by writing a computer program to count how many lines each pair of characters in Romeo and Juliet spoke to each other,1 with the expectation that the lovers in the greatest love story of all time would speak more than any other pair. I wanted Romeo and Juliet to end up together — if they couldn’t in the play, at least they could in my analysis — but the math paid no heed to my desires. Juliet speaks more to her nurse than she does to Romeo; Romeo speaks more to Benvolio than he does to Juliet. Romeo gets a larger share of attention from his friends (Benvolio and Mercutio) and even his enemies (Tybalt) than he does from Juliet; Juliet gets a larger share of attention from her nurse and her mother than she does from Romeo. The two appear together in only five scenes out of 25. We all knew that this wasn’t a play predicated on deep interactions between the two protagonists, but still.
I’m blaming Romeo for this lack of communication. Juliet speaks 155 lines to him, and he speaks only 101 to her. His reticence toward Juliet is particularly inexcusable when you consider that Romeo spends more time talking than anyone else in the play. (He spends only one-sixth of his time in conversation with the supposed love of his life.) One might be tempted to blame this on the nature of the plot; of course the lovers have no chance to converse, kept apart as they are by the loathing of their families! But when I analyzed the script of a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet — West Side Story — I found that Tony and Maria interacted more in the script than did any other pair.
All this got me thinking: Do any of Shakespeare’s lovers actually, you know, talk to each other? If Romeo and Juliet don’t, what hope do the rest of them have?
Update, 28 March: Chateau Heartiste says that this study shows that pick-up artists and “game” practitioners are right and also proves that “Everything important you need to know about men and women you can find in the works of Shakespeare”.
QotD: On Women’s Power
If you have never been sexually attracted to women, you will never quite understand the monumental power of female sexuality, except by proxy or in theory, nor will you quite know the immense advantage it gives us over men. Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no.
Sex is most powerful in the mind, and to men, in the mind, women have a lot of power, not only to arouse, but to give worth, self-worth, meaning, initiation, sustenance, everything. Seeing this more clearly through my experience, I began to wonder whether the most extreme men resort to violence with women because they think that’s all they have, their one pathetic advantage over all she seems to hold above them. I make no excuses for this. There are none. But as a man I felt vaguely attuned to this mind-set or its possibility. I did not inhabit it, but I thought I saw how rejection might get twisted beyond recognition in the mind of a discarded male where misogyny and ultimately rape may be a vicious attempt to take what cannot be taken because it has not been bestowed.
There were other surprising discoveries. With all the anger I felt flowing in my direction — anger directed at the abstraction called men — I was not expecting to find, nestled within the confines of female heterosexuality, a deep love and genuine attraction for real men. Not for women in men’s bodies, as the prejudicial me had thought. Not even just for the metrosexual, though he has his audience, but for brawny, hairy, smelly, stalwart, manly men; bald men, men with bellies, men who can fix things and, yes, men who like sports and pound away in the bedroom. Men whom women loved for being men with all the qualities that testosterone and the patriarchy had given them, and whom I have come to appreciate for those very same qualities, however infuriating I still find them at times.
Dating women was the hardest thing I had to do as Ned, even when the women liked me and I liked them. I have never felt more vulnerable to total strangers, never more socially defenceless than in my clanking suit of borrowed armour. But then, I guess maybe that’s one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man’s armour is borrowed and 10 sizes too big, and beneath it he’s naked and insecure and hoping you won’t see.
That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man’s world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Eventually I realised that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room. It was hard being a guy.
Rather than choosing to become a woman again, it is probably truer to say that I reverted to form. I stopped faking it. I came back to myself, proud, free and glad in every way to be a woman.
Norah Vincent, “Double agent” (an edited extract from Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised As A Man), Guardian, 2006-03-18.