Quotulatiousness

November 9, 2017

Fan reactions to the Vikings’ swap at quarterback

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Yesterday’s news that the Vikings were activating Teddy Bridgewater and placing Sam Bradford on injured reserve got lots of reaction from the fan bloggers as well as the pro sports writers in the Twin Cities. 1500ESPN‘s Matthew Coller provided some background on Bridgewater’s early development with the Vikings:

Last year, Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer said he never saw himself having another quarterback other than Bridgewater.

The question comes up often: Why are Zimmer and the Vikings’ players so impressed with a quarterback who only threw 14 touchdowns in 2015?

The first reason is that they don’t grade players on touchdowns. It’s really a bad measure of QB play. In 2015, Bridgewater only threw 42 passes in the red zone, while Blake Bortles tossed 95 passes and was one of the league leaders in touchdowns. Nobody would say Bortles is better than Bridgewater. The Vikings were third in the league in rushing touchdowns in ’15 and seventh in Drive Scoring Percentage. Bridgewater was leading his team down the field, but Adrian Peterson was getting the touches when they were in scoring position.

The second reason: Coaches and teammates focus on the game tape (and winning) rather than the box score.

Before we look at some of the things that made Bridgewater so popular – outside of his personality – it should be noted that we can’t know until he plays whether the former first-round pick will be back to his old self or how long it will take him to trust his repaired knee. For some players, they never make a full recovery.

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Frankenstein: The New Romantics – Extra Sci Fi – #2

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 7 Nov 2017

Industrialization and the Age of Reason benefitted society in many ways, but also created an atmosphere of dehumanizing mass production. The Romantic literary movement rose up to assert the value of emotion in a modern world, and praised science as a marvel whose discoveries bounded on magic made real.

Lois McMaster Bujold interview

Filed under: Books — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s apparently a reprint, but since I missed it the first time, it’s a new one to me:

Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer: You published a Star Trek fanzine in the 1960s, while the series was still on the air. It’s the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek, so I can’t resist asking you about it. What was it like to be a fan writer in the 1960s?

Lois McMaster Bujold: It was a lonelier enterprise back then than it is now. I go into it a little in this recent interview.

Other than that, I expect it was like being a newbie writer at any time, all those pictures and feelings churning around in one’s head and latching on to whatever models one could find to try to figure out how to get them down on a page. Besides the professional fiction I was reading, my models included Devra Langsam’s very early ST fanzine Spockanalia, and Columbus, Ohio fan John Ayotte’s general zine Kallikanzaros. It was John who guided Lillian and me through the mechanics of producing a zine, everything from how to type stencils (ah, the smell of Corflu in the morning! and afternoon, and late into the night), where to go to get electrostencils produced, how to run off and collate the pages — John lent us the use of his mimeograph machine in his parents’ basement. (And I just now had to look up the name of that technology on the internet — I had forgotten and all I could think of was “ditto”, a predecessor which had a different smell entirely.)

Fan writing, at the time, was assumed to be writing more about SF and fandom, what people would use blogs to do today, than writing fanfiction. So an all-fiction zine seemed a novelty to some of our fellow fans in Columbus.

[…]

ECM: Miles Vorkosigan is an amazingly resilient kid (and then an amazingly resilient adult), but it sometimes seems like moving to Escobar or Beta Colony, or staying with the Dendarii, would make his life much easier. His attachment to his home planet is a little mysterious. What are Miles’s favorite things about Barrayar?

LMB: I actually put off this question for last, as it was strangely hard to answer. (I may be overthinking it.) Partly it’s that it requires me to reboot a character I haven’t written in some years, and hold his whole 43-years-book-time character development in my head at once. Why does anyone love their childhood home, or their family, if they do? (Not a universal given among F&SF readers, I observe; it’s a very anti-domestic genre. Don Sakers’s Analog review of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen touched on this.)

Miles’s favorite place on Barrayar is easy to tag: the lakeside retreat at Vorkosigan Surleau, and the wild Dendarii mountain range backing up behind it. Actually including its obstreperous people. As ever, Miles is a conflicted hybrid, half city boy and half country, half Betan and half Barrayaran, half future and half past, stretched between in a moving present. Family, friends, landscapes; all made him and all hold him. And from his very beginning, with all those painful medical treatments as a barely comprehending child, he’s been taught that he can’t run away when things get hard. But which also taught him that painful things can get better. It’s a lesson he’s taken to heart, and not only because it validates his own questioned and criticized existence.

(Miles being Miles, he may also take this a step too far, and confuse pain with hope, which would make him not at all the first human to stray down such a path.)

How Expert Are Expert Stock Pickers?

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Marginal Revolution University
Published on 16 Aug 2016

In this first video in our Personal Finance section of Macroeconomics — and also our new course on Money Skills — we’ll begin to lay out some smart rules for investing.

Today, we’ll tackle Rule 1 — ignore the expert stock pickers.

What’s the basis of that rule? Well, in his 1973 book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, economist Burton Malkiel made a controversial claim. He claimed that a blindfolded monkey, throwing darts at the financial pages, could select a basket of stocks that would do just as well as a set chosen by the pros.

One of Malkiel’s later students, the journalist John Stossel, set out to test that claim. Stossel did throw darts at the financial pages. The darts landed on 30 companies. Turns out, Malkiel did have it right — the randomly-selected stocks did better than professionally-picked ones.

The point here is, random picking roughly gives you as good results, as trusting the pros. Consider — in most years from 1963-2008, the S&P 500 Index outperformed most of the managed mutual funds. And in a different study, researchers took the top 25% best-performing funds. Two years later, less than 4% of the original set remained in the top quarter. Five years later? Only 1% stuck around.

Basically — past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Chance often tends to win out.

To show you what we mean, take a hypothetical set of 1000 experts making market predictions. Let those predictions be based on a coin toss. Experts who land heads will say the market will surge this year. Those who land tails say the opposite. At the end of the experiment’s first year, 500 of the 1000 experts will have been right, solely by chance. Now, say the remaining 500 toss again. At the end of the second year, 250 experts will have been right, again by chance. Continue with this logic, and by the end of the fifth year, roughly 32 of the 1000 will have been right, five years running.

Perhaps these 32 will be hailed as geniuses, but remember, they only came about through a coin toss.

So, what’s to conclude from this? Two things.

First, luck and chance matter. In some cases, it can be hard to differentiate luck from skill, as proven by the “genius” 32. Second, no need to spend big bucks on a money manager. After all, the studies prove that random picking often works just as well as professional management.

That said, what if you did have market information? What if you knew something about certain stocks, that made you think they’d do well? Could you beat the market then? That’s what we’ll answer in our next video, when we tackle the efficient market hypothesis. Stay tuned!

QotD: The reputation of Che Guevara proves “the triumph of marketing over truth and reality”

Filed under: Americas, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Irish Post Office has issued a stamp to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Ernesto Guevara. This is, presumably, because he was both very famous and had some distant Irish ancestry. It is, however, a rather sinister philosophy that the worth of a man’s work or ideas, or his influence on the world, is much affected, either for the better or the worse, by his distant ancestry.

Guevara’s reputation is, of course, the triumph of marketing over truth and reality. There is probably no resort of mass tourism in the world where Guevara kitsch is not on sale and, one must presume, bought; and in an odd way this is only appropriate, for mass tourism makes lemmings seem like unreconstructed individualists, and Guevara was nothing if not an ardent promoter of mass conformity and unthinking obedience. Like many an adolescent psychopath, as he remained all his life, he dreamed of making mankind anew — not in his own image, exactly, for he thought of himself as a leader rather than a follower, but according to his own far-from-profound ideas of what mankind should be. The triumph of marketing is to have made this apostle of the most complete servitude into an apostle of the most complete freedom.

The triumph of marketing over truth and reality is nothing new, however. To expect people who are trying to sell you something also to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is to expect what never did happen and what never will happen. The buyer will always have to beware, no matter what legal protections are put in place for the unwary; the necessity is inscribed, as it were, in human nature itself.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Way of Che”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-10-28.

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