Thursday: Ok, then.

They're trimming trees.

I also noticed today that there's a dead tree at work.  I wonder if they're going to get rid of it.

• One problem of being this far west is that I get a lot of "tomorrow" content in the evening.  Because of this, I'm going to put this link here, for convenience.  It'll probably be the image for tomorrow.
• In case you missed it, the president of Turkey isn't a good guy.
• How to deal with things when someone dies.  Not like the "hiding the body" kind of way.  The "cancelling accounts and things" way.
• Verizon should be nationalized.  This is a bullshit fee.  Last time I changed phones, I ordered it from the manufacturer, switched to it by myself, and used exactly zero of Verizon's resources to do it.  This isn't a legitimate expense, it is simply a member of an oligarchic sector using their power to extract added fees.
• Apparently today has a meme attached that I was unaware of.
• These are good pictures.
• Yes.  Who subscribes to newsletters for a webpage?  I'm here to read this one story I saw a link to.
• Adventure tree.
• This next one was going to be a link, but then I made a plot, so now it's not.

Here's the link.  It's how much various people are paid per page to do things to make a comic book.  There are generally 22 pages in a comic, and they sell for about $3.99.  Here's a link containing how many comics were sold in January.  

The plot.

Conclusions:

1. Comic book writers should be paid more.
2. That probably means that there can't be ~400 comics published a month, as using the Marvel low-end numbers means 1822.1 issues need to be sold to break even on the creative team.
3. I don't even know what the third point should be, this is just kind of depressing.
4. Something about trades?
5. That's a remarkably good fit to the "regular issues of known characters" section of the distribution.

Wednesday: This is kind of like reruns. Maybe it's a "remastered" post?

First up, killing the Supreme Court.  Again.  But still with numbers and statistics, because that's the best way to do things.  Assume the Senate decides to stop being fuckheads.  Then, Merrick Garland gets a hearing and since he's basically fine, he gets a seat on the Supreme Court.  Since that bag of shit is dead.

So here's the cumulative "how many justices are alive" plot.  Honestly, according to this, if the Senate doesn't stop acting like children, Obama might have two more people to appoint before the end of his term.  It's good that the Republicans are running an idiot and a serial killer as their top options this year, since that sets up a good shift when they don't become president.

And the by name individual plot.  I've seen a lot of stuff talking about how Garland is "already old" so it "doesn't matter" if he gets confirmed or not.  Side note: fuck Shane Ryan for being a fucking idiot.  "Who's Shane Ryan?"  Exactly.  Also acceptable:  a fucking idiot.  The cumulative plot clearly shows that the next president is very important for determining the Supreme Court's future.

In any case, he's younger than the median justice, and is likely to be on the court for another ~15 years.  Or, you know, the next four presidential terms.  Also, it's interesting to note the benefit of appointing women to the court.  Roberts was born in 1955, and Sotomayor in 1954.  That's the unit the script uses for sorting the key.  But, looking at the graph, Sotomayor is likely to be on the court ~3 years longer.  I should also enable the grid display next time I do this.

Next topic: Damn it, Dave Willis, it's right there on page four.  The only options that are on the kids meal that are not available on the adult menu are the mac and cheese and the pizza.  Looking at the picture they selected for the pizza suggests that no one orders that.  "Why?"  Because look at that picture.  That is the picture the chose for the menu, and the pizza in it looks awful.  Besides, we already know that Joyce wants chicken tenders, because she told us.

• The other point that I could make about the link up there to the story that fucking idiot wrote was conveniently covered by Paul Krugman today.  Tl;dr: the Republican party is "an engine designed to harness white resentment on behalf of higher incomes for the donor class."
• Krugman also points out a fact that Shane Ryan, fucking idiot, didn't bother to read in his history.  SR, FI, claims "When was the last time that the same party had back-to-back presidents win two terms? The answer is James Madison and James Monroe, both “Democratic-Republicans,” in the early 1800s.  Does that change your view on the likelihood of Clinton winning two terms?"  "Huh, that doesn't sound right," you say.  That's because it may be technically true, if you ignore the fact that FDR was elected president FOUR TIMES, died, Truman took over A MONTH AND A HALF into FDR's fourth term, and then was elected to his own "technically only first term" in 1948.  Truman could have run again in 1952, as the 22nd amendment didn't apply to him, but didn't (largely a popularity thing, but read Harry's quote in the third paragraph here.  HUH.  I WONDER IF THAT WILL BE A BIG THING IN THE FUTURE?).
• Steven Universe is renewed for two more seasons, in a move that shouldn't really surprise anyone.
• Spiders.  (No actual spiders in the link).
• Kitty.  (This is technically a kitty, but probably stretching the definition).
• Cereal.
• Hrm.  A lot of those are dubbed.  I should probably just buy the DVDs for the ones I haven't actually seen yet, since otherwise I'm going to have to drive to far parts of the island on like a Tuesday to see things.
• I would like more Supergirl gifs from this episode.

Tuesday: I wish people were less stupid.

I really need to find an image library so I can make this automatically.

I saw a link to this story today.  TL;DR: old people are stupid, and in their stupidity, are buying guns to protect themselves.  First thing I googled, "how much of a criminal hellhole is Austintown Ohio".  Surprise answer?  "Like basically not really any crime at all."  Then, using my think-mo-tron, I decided how much easier things would be if there were a single place that would have lots of crime statistics, so we could look it up.  Some sort of government bureau, tasked with keeping statistics about justice.  Oh wait, because we have a functioning government, that's exactly what we already have.

So let's look it up:  how much crime do old people suffer from?  Table 5.  "Less than everyone."  But what about this document explicitly on "Crimes Against the Elderly"?  Surely that's going to tell us how much crime old people have to worry about, right?  Ok, fine, old people.  Table 7 says you're more likely to be attacked by a stranger than any other age category.  Then again, I can probably counter with figures 3 and 4, which show that old people have always been the victims of less crime, and no matter what, crime has gone down in the last 20 years.  By a lot.

It would have been nice if James R. Hagerty had actually put some of that information into his story.  I guess working for the Wall Street Journal means you don't actually have do journalism anymore.  

• Blah blah, this is just for the gif of Supergirl realizing she has ice cream now.
• This has all the other good gifs from that episode.  I can't believe I forgot the Ikea table thing.
• This is another review of that stupid Batman/Superman movie.  That movie probably has neither Ikea tables nor ice cream.
• I made the mistake of reading the app names when I should have been paying attention to the icons.
• Ducks.
• I want BMO faces on my shoes. :(
• These are all wonderful pictures, but I can't make captions for all of them.
• Except number four.  "Come on, Steve.  God wants you to take a long hike."  "Whoa whoa whoa, Steve.  I have, like, six pizzas getting delivered.  We better skip out on all this 'hike' nonsense.  Besides, it's not like that's going to be easy with your sock/sandal combo there."

Monday: I don't have a coherent theme for today, so this is the title.

Part 1:  A bird.

I caught it in mid-hop.

Part 2: A gratuitous Dutch angle shot of my lunch.

This wasn't a fully intentional artistic choice, I just wanted a good shot of my delicious strawberry soda and was too lazy to reorganize things, mostly because I was really hungry for that sandwich.

Part 3:  My never-ending battle to find a decent patty melt.

This is a long-running issue.  My best success has been to make them myself, but that's a lot of effort.  There's this place that made a proper one three and a half years ago, and a check of their menu indicates they still sell them (so, maybe I'm going to Aiea this weekend).

Tonight, just before heading home, I checked Dumbing of Age, which now updates at "before leaving work" instead of "after getting home" due to the time change.  Since I know that he bases lots of things on real life, so I googled the restaurant they're at.  After a bunch of menu pages of "that looks good, probably a lot because I'm hungry," I became very unhappy that they have a patty melt.  It doesn't use Swiss cheese, but it's still very close.  Plus, you get fries, and soup.  Sure, a lot of kinds of soup aren't that great, but still.  It comes with soup!

Part 3a:  A quick discussion of web comics.

It is too difficult to keep track of web comics any more.  Most of them publish something on the order of 4 panels a day, which means that the story is decompressed about a factor of 1.5 compared to a regular comic book (taking 22 pages at ~8 panels a page, published monthly).  This makes the story somewhat slower, but since it's broken up into tiny chunks, keeping a full story line organized is even harder.  This explains why it's possible for me to realize today that one comic I've been reading since college has been published for eighteen and a half years.  What's happened in that comic?  No clue.  I remember bits of stories, but even though it's in my RSS feeds, I don't really read it.

One issue is that many web comics add characters, and then add more characters, and repeat until the cast becomes so large that it's no longer feasible to keep everyone straight.  I think this is one reason why Alice Grove is one of my current favorites.  The cast is basically three people, with a new person just recently added.  It's manageable.  Another good example is Scary Go Round, as that has a cast of Shelly Winters (who died once.  Maybe twice.  It's been a long time.), her sister Erin (now Mordawwa, Queen of Hell), and Lottie Grote (the best character in webcomics, ever).  Sure, there are other people, but I don't even bother trying to keep them straight.

"Was there a point to this?"  No, not really.

Part 4: WTF was with today's episode of Supergirl?

"Are you really going from web comics to actual comics, which have an even worse problem with way too many characters that are impossible to keep straight?"  Yes.  Duh.  The main difference is that in web comics, everything is done via one perspective.  In actual comics, you can decide to stop following the story of Superman and Batman, because that's just a pile of shit now, and instead follow the story through Supergirl, who is apparently being written by insane people now.

"So it's bad?"  There isn't a way to explain this without clearly stating the following facts:

1. They wanted to get Flash from the CW Flash show onto Supergirl to do a cross promotional thing.
2. So they looked it up in the comics, and saw that Flash has a Cosmic Treadmill that he can use to travel through time and between dimensions.
3. They then said, "Yeah, ok.  But we'll probably have to explain the concept of the multiverse."
4. So they did that.  As part of the episode.  On national television.  With all the characters just being, "Sure.  Makes sense to me!"
5. But they had to cover the fact that this was clearly cross promotion, so had a character point out that they look like "the multicultural gang from some CW television show."
6. And, despite it being a gimmick, used the episode to also tie up like four or five hanging plot threads from the rest of the season.

I simply don't understand how they could possibly have gotten the approval to cram all of this into one hour long television show.  I saw a review last week that I think best articulated my though from here:  this show simply wouldn't work without Melissa Benoist making Supergirl so wonderful.  The fact that they're fine letting people cram all the crazy shit in makes it even better.

"This doesn't make any sense."  No, this doesn't make any sense.  Mary Marvel gets her strength through the wizard Shazam invoking the power of Hippolyta as the "H"?  Hippolyta as in Wonder Woman's mother?  That just blows my mind.  That has to have come up at some point, right?  Unfortunately, because people are awful, I can't find anything about it, because all "Mary Marvel Wonder Woman" searches have to deal with the stupid shit that happened more recently, which to steal from that link "I dunno, it gets very dark and overwrought and honestly I have not kept up with DC Comics very much in recent years."

Part 5: All the remaining links.

• Bunnies aren't supposed to get wet, so I'm using this link to point out that bunnies aren't supposed to get wet.
• Dogs.
• Cat.
• Mark Hamill.
• Words.
• Estimates of the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage.
• This is kind of depressing, and kind of interesting at the same time.
• This is just an interesting history thing.

Sunday: Traditional Easter.

Well, maybe not, but I really wanted ramen.

 It turns out Easter is not the busiest day at the ramen place.  It is also another place where they can guess what I want to order as soon as I walk in.

I also win the "gyoza three days in a row" award.

 And because I always run out of all my kleenex at the same time, I stopped at Safeway.

Which still has one of the best views of Diamond Head.

Today's also the last day I update the sports = statistics stuff for this year.  Here's the table for the rest of the tournament:

#Bracket	N_R1	PP_R1	Nwrong_R1	P_R1	S_R1	N_R2	PP_R2	Nwrong_R1	P_R2	S_R2
Mine	32	1	6	26	.995	16	2	4	50	.998
Heart-of-the-cards	32	1	10	22	.656	16	2	8	38	.320
Julie	32	1	10	22	.656	16	2	6	42	.738
BHO	32	1	9	23	.823	16	2	6	43	.820
538	32	1	8	24	.928	16	2	7	42	.738
Rank	32	1	13	19	.129	16	2	6	39	.424

#Bracket	N_R3	PP_R3	Nwrong_R3	P_R3	S_R3	N_R4	PP_R4	Nwrong_R4	P_R4
Mine	8	4	3	70	.998903	4	8	3	78
Heart-of-the-cards	8	4	6	46	.044	4	8	4	46
Julie	8	4	4	58	.610	4	8	4	58
BHO	8	4	4	59	.674	4	8	3	67
538	8	4	2	66	.955	4	8	2	82
Rank	8	4	2	63	.875	4	8	3	71

#Bracket	N_R3	PP_R3	Nwrong_R3	P_R3	N_R4	PP_R4	Nwrong_R4	P_R4
Mine	2	16	2	78	1	32	1	78
Heart-of-the-cards	2	16	2	46	1	32	1	46
Julie	2	16	2	58	1	32	1	58
BHO	2	16	1+	67+	1	32	1	67+
538	2	16	2	82	1	32	1	82
Rank	2	16	2	71	1	32	1	71

If the President gets his pick correct in the next round, then he'll win with an 83.  Otherwise, 538 wins based on only getting two wrong in round 4.  Everything else is locked in now, so there's nothing really to update anymore.

Links.

• Dog.
• Bunny.
• A disturbing comic book bunny.
• A disturbing space bunny.
• The Lovecraft essay is pretty good.
• This story has a predictable end, but is still good.

Saturday: Ok, so today I pretty much just wasted.

But that's ok.  It's fun to do nothing productive.

I thought about getting a burger for late lunch, but that wasn't an option today.

 So I went with the default option:

I guess it's a bit bad when they know what I get so well that they basically just tell me what I'm going to get.

I spiced it up with the ebi fry, though.  They have a fish and chips that I thought about getting, but decided the shrimp were enough fried things for today.  Also gyoza.  I didn't mention it yesterday, but this makes today #2 in "days I've had gyoza."

• Bats.
• And I've seen that before.
• Bunnies.
• Dog joke.
• Sure.
• "Woo buddy this is not a quick one."  On elves.
• Princess Kaguya.
• Chrysler building.
• Ham.
• Pizza.
• All movie guns are this one nerf gun.

Friday: Good Friday

What makes it good?

French toast, I guess.

This wasn't the best french toast ever.  It seemed a bit overcooked, and was a bit gummy inside.  Not their best, but they were also crazy busy at 4pm, so I'm guessing the kitchen was just overwhelmed.

But seriously, the best part of today is having a day off.  Originally when I was looking at the calendar, I was unhappy because it looked like today was being used both as the Good Friday holiday and the Prince Kuhio Day (which is tomorrow) holiday.  However, when I looked into it, they've added a "floating holiday" that can be taken anytime to account for the double-vacation weekend.  That's nice, because I can use it to pad out a vacation at some point.

And since it's the weekend, it's sports = statistics time.  First up, my picks for this round of things:

One that I was doomed to get wrong.

And the other doomed one.  But a new mistake!

Texas A&M:

29.687500       14.062500       3.125000                3       6       3       Texas A&M

28.125000       18.750000       21.875000               3       8       2       Oklahoma

First up, I think my analysis notes have been wrong on the previous posts.  The file I'm pulling these numbers from is in 2016/2015/2014/group/game/rank/name format, not 2014/2015/2016 format.  This changes the analysis for some of my previous mistakes, but I'm too lazy to go correct those.  In any case, using this new, correct information, it looks like I thought (from the 2016 ratings) that Texas A&M should be slightly better than Oklahoma.  Folding in previous years could have potentially altered that choice.

I was thinking a bit about adding some score-based information in as well.  The idea being that each team scores a given median number of points across all their games, and have a given median number of points scored against them.  By comparing how well a given score ranks in all their games, and against their opponent's, it should be possible to construct offense and defense ratings.  This might be useful to say, "Team X is generally better, but they only are a +1 in offense, and they're playing a +4 defense, so they might not win."  The other benefit would be to add two new metrics, which could then be used across the full multi-year dual-gender score set to determine which relative weights each should be assigned to a more complete prediction model.

I think the first step that I should do, though, is to dump all of that data into a database, instead of using horrible fixed-width formatted files to manage things.  That's largely a consequence of not really caring a lot about the project.

In any case, here's the comparison table for round three:

#Bracket	N_R1	PP_R1	Nwrong_R1	P_R1	S_R1	N_R2	PP_R2	Nwrong_R1	P_R2	S_R2
Mine	32	1	6	26	.995	16	2	4	50	.998
Heart-of-the-cards	32	1	10	22	.656	16	2	8	38	.320
Julie	32	1	10	22	.656	16	2	6	42	.738
BHO	32	1	9	23	.823	16	2	6	43	.820
538	32	1	8	24	.928	16	2	7	42	.738
Rank	32	1	13	19	.129	16	2	6	39	.424
#Bracket	N_R3	PP_R3	Nwrong_R3	P_R3	S_R3	N_R4	PP_R4	Nwrong_R4	P_R4	S_R4
Mine	8	4	3	70	.998903	4	8
Heart-of-the-cards	8	4	6	46	.044	4	8
Julie	8	4	4	58	.610	4	8
BHO	8	4	4	59	.674	4	8
538	8	4	2	66	.955	4	8
Rank	8	4	2	63	.875	4	8

This now has the added columns of S_RX.   These are my simulated CDF values based on the Yahoo selection pick fractions given for each team.  This is another piece of kind-of garbage code that I threw together earlier in the week.  I think it's doing everything correctly, but I don't see any simulated results that get a total score above 83, and yahoo does list some in their leader list.  Maybe 1e6 simulations isn't sufficient to fully probe things?  Maybe I'm truncating or rounding something odd?  The main idea behind this calculation is to see how well a given set of picks should rank.

Plots for individual rounds and the total after three.  In general, the mean drops (because past mistakes have continuing consequences) and the variance increases (because there's the 2^N point scaling thing and because the number of individual games is falling as well).

Links.

• Even though I've thrown out like five of your flyers, and get annoyed at your TV commercials, I still think you're ok, Bernie Sanders.  I guess birbs agree.
• Star Wars.
• This is why I love everything bagels.
• And even though everyone has already seen it, Bi Lions.
• Dog.
• I wish there were more Mordawwa.

Thursday: I spent all day thinking it was Friday.

Because it's effective Friday.

I had chocolate/peanut butter/banana bread.

• Garry Shandling died.
• I don't know.  This seems like it might end up being grindier than I want.
• I'm also not sure on this one.  I always thought that FLCL worked well because it was so short.  Haruhara Haruko crashes, messes up Naota's life in an unexpected way, and then jets off at the end, having helped him somewhat.  Then again, maybe they can give Mamimi a better ending.
• Cheeseburger backpack.
• Brak dress.
• Squirrel.
• Video game boss.

Wednesday: I can't think of a good title for today.

Maybe something about, "huh, that's a lot of tabs I have planned for the links today."  Because I do.  Eighteen.  Let's see how many I cull out when we get there.

I also got office candy today:

"Aren't grape and muscat technically the same?"  Yes, but I think Japan has a thing about muscat grapes.

And then I turned it over and saw that they're "best before" like nine days ago.  Come on, Longs.  Oh well.  I mean, they're gummy gobs of sugar, so I'm not that worried.  Also: yummy, so I'm probably going to eat them pretty quickly.

While I was trying to decide on dinner, Julie posted a photo of her super delicious looking dinner.  So that made me look up something tasty as well, and that's when I discovered that you can now order Honolulu Burger Company online.  I probably should have done that, because going there meant waiting for the couple who both suddenly realized that they would need to pay for their burgers.  It was seriously a massive surprise to both of them.

My pictures aren't particularly fancy, because I was more interested in eating:

Mushroom mushroom burger on wheat, no chipotle mayo, add gochujang.  I took off the tomato, because it didn't look super red all the way through.

And my out-of-focus sweet potato fries.

• See, this is why you don't just say, "machine learning will solve all our problems."
• I saw a tumblr post about book restoration, and when I looked closer, I saw that it's based at MSU.  So I read some more.
• And saw this.  Apparently this is the standard way to store books in the off-site storage library.
• Which is basically this idea I had two years ago, but done all professionally.
• Like, super professionally.  I wonder if there's a good way to get the boxes without having to have an actual university sized library.
• And how cool is this book?  Books are awesome.
• Rice cooker.
• Something about sports stuff.  I didn't fully read it, because it didn't really use numbers.
• North Carolina is knocked off the list of "states that don't suck ass."
• Dog vs. citrus.
• Bird, stop that.  You can't just take sugar packets.  You didn't even buy a coffee.
• Hokusai, but with bunnies.
• I can't wait for the trade to be published and shipped to me.
• Garnet.
• Sterb.
• "Why not silmarils?"
• Superman.

One.  I removed one link because it was a duplicate North Carolina story, but nytimes and so had the stupid subscription thing.

Tuesday: O frabjous day! Calloo, Callay!

Why am I all "Through the Looking Glass"?  They repaved Beretania Street.  It is no longer a hell of potholes and uneven sections.  That leaves only the entire rest of the road network to be fixed (but seriously, Beretania was particularly awful).

And I'm not totally sure I got this simulation correct, mostly because I flooped it together in far less time than I really intended.  I'm also not sure that hash-of-hash-of-array-of-array-references is really the most efficient data structure for the problem.  I'll look at it again later in the week.

• I guess it's good that it's not due to the animals being in a bad shape, just due to funding, but this is still kind of crappy.
• Erte.
• I totally use "genre" like that, Sailor Moon.  And now I want waffles.
• Or ramen.
• So it turns out the Superman/Batman movie is bad.
• Maybe they should have just remade this one.  Since, you know, it wasn't bad.
• The second image is really the reason for this link.
• My comment last night while watching it:  "There's something you need to know."  Opens shirt, takes off glasses.  "You're a fucking moron, Lucy Lane.  A stupid, stupid moron."
• Peter Serafinowicz.  Huh.  That is a good choice.

Monday: Blah.

So I got another burrito for lunch.

And discovered that it's kind of hard to consistently reheat lasagna.

• Ghost beats ghost.
• Animation.
• Updog.
• This is why I don't watch cooking shows anymore.  It's full of assholes like this guy.
• This looks delicious.  Seriously, click this link, and tell me this isn't something we need in the US right now.
• Republicans suck, and are breaking their own party.  This is a good thing, because fuck them.

Sunday: It's annoying to make lunch plans for yourself, and then discover that the place isn't open for lunch.

Which suggests strongly I should have gotten lasagna yesterday, and done steak today, but that wasn't the order I wanted to do them in.  I also kind of want french toast again.  :-/

It's good lasagna, though, so it probably isn't that big of a problem to have to wait.  I also perfectly centered the cheesy garlic bread there.  Perfectly.

The problem is that since I ate lunch so late (4:30ish), I'm kind of think I'm either still hungry, or hungry again.  I still have half of that lasagna, since it was kind of a huge chunk. Eat it later?  Eat a snack instead?  Save it for tomorrow?  So many options.

In other news, today was the end of round two of the sports thing.  I also need to go back and update posts with the new label I've decided is probably useful, "sports = statistics".  So I updated everything before the final game was over, and then had to double check nothing went wrong:

Copying from 538.  Two of those I didn't care about anymore due to prior choices, one of them I kind of knew was going to be the case, one of them I wasn't expecting to take two overtimes to come to my result, one apparently fell apart in the last two seconds, and the final one had me frowning at it until it decided not to make me re-edit all my stuff.

 Results for this time:

Again, three of my four mistakes this time around were caused by my winning choice being eliminated in the previous round.  For the last one:

Xavier:
12.500000       42.187500       29.687500               2       7       7       Wisconsin

34.375000       12.500000       14.062500               2       8       2       Xavier

Why did I choose Xavier?  Did I get confused and use the 2014 rankings instead of the 2016 ones?  This looks like me being dumb.  Maybe I took the #2 ranking too seriously?  I should probably write down logic notes next time, so I can point to the error directly.

What does the scoring comparison look like?

#Bracket	N_R1	PP_R1	Nwrong_R1	P_R1	N_R2	PP_R2	Nwrong_R1	P_R2
Mine	32	1	6	26	16	2	4	50
Heart-of-the-cards	32	1	10	22	16	2	8	38
Julie	32	1	10	22	16	2	6	42
BHO	32	1	9	23	16	2	6	43
538	32	1	8	24	16	2	7	42
Rank	32	1	13	19	16	2	6	39

Again the "rank" method is garbage, and shouldn't be used.  Nate Silver had a tweet earlier about how this is apparently because it's based on RPI too much.  Looking at wikipedia, it looks like RPI is an incomplete version of my LAM method.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  This also shows the point where HotC totally falls apart, becoming the worst method.  Everyone else is pretty well clumped together.  I'm a bit surprised that 538 isn't doing better, given the "we included scores, and at-home values, and distances to the games, and the number of cats each player owns, and the SAT scores of each player."

This also makes me think I should have actually entered my selections into some pool.  Maybe I should hone the method a bit more, and see how it works over a few more years.  Or, alternatively, I could do the reasonably easy thing and apply the method to the historical data, and see if this consistently matches reality.  Maybe next weekend, since I think it's a long one.  This will also make me fix my master Makefile to put things into logical directories, and not just dump the outputs into a common directory.

Links:

• This is a good pendant.
• This is technically NSFW, but it's also classical paintings, so not that much.  Also: cool.
• Mark Hamill.
• The President of the United States.
• Well.  So I guess I'm buying this from Amazon now.
• Ok, so it must not have been fully announced, because A doesn't have it yet.  This did give a chance to notice that I'd double pre-ordered the Patsy Walker trade.  Whoops.  I guess I need a bigger "HEY, YOU ALREADY ORDERED THIS!  YOU HAVEN'T READ IT YET BECAUSE IT'S NOT PRINTED YET!  BE PATIENT!"

Saturday: Steak or chicken.

The end decision was "steak."

So I drove out towards the east.

Imagine drinking pure sugar.  Now imagine that there was something sweeter than that.  That's this "berry lemonade."

Soup.

Significantly overcooked steak.  :(

I'm going to eat the rest of it once I finish this post.

• Art jail.
• Dog + dog.
• Cat + bunny.
• Fox + drunk guy.

Friday: Well. Ok then.

It turns out that they play two rounds each weekend of this thing.  First up, "What's making that noise while I'm in my office?"

"Are they murdering a car?"

Nope.  They murdered a house.

 "Is something flapping due to my fan?"

Nope.  The two asshole birds you can't see in this image were tapping on my window.

So, statistics results.

Ok, that West Virginia loss is going to hit the later rounds.

As is Purdue.  Not as bad as Michigan State, obviously.

Let's look at the comparison table:

#Bracket	N_R1	PP_R1	Nwrong_R1	P_R1
Mine	32	1	6	26
Heart-of-the-cards	32	1	10	22
Julie	32	1	10	22
BHO	32	1	9	23
538	32	1	8	24
Rank	32	1	13	19

The columns are the bracket identifier, the number of games in the round, the points per correct selection in the round, the number wrong, and the total points.  The brackets are mine above, the "Heart of the Cards" bracket taken by simply selecting teams based on the 2016 ranking I calculated, Julie's bracket, President Obama's, the 538 bracket taken by assuming constant composite rankings from their pre-tournament predictions, and a dummy bracket constructed by selecting teams based solely on their "sport rank" thing.  That's actually working out a lot better than I expected.  I was correct in shaking up the straight HotC numbers with a bit of historical data.  Looking at the mistakes:

Arizona:

26.562500       43.750000       40.625000               1       5       6       Arizona

25.000000       37.500000       53.125000               5       1       11      Wichita St

I didn't believe the numbers, given the #11 ranking.  From above, I should ignore the ranking in the future, because it's pretty shitty.  The problem is that my numbers suggest that Wichita State is the best team in the entire thing, which doesn't seem like it's right.

West Virginia:

28.125000       21.875000       1.562500                2       6       3       West Virginia

34.375000       39.062500       45.312500               2       6       14      SF Austin

Ditto.  My numbers predict that SF Austin is the second best team.  I guess if either of them come out winning, I can say that I predicted it, and then tossed it in the trash.

Baylor:

17.187500       23.437500       20.312500               3       3       5       Baylor

25.000000       18.750000       7.812500                3       3       12      Yale

No clue, but it sounds like everyone was surprised by this one.

Purdue:

29.687500       14.062500       -3.125000               4       3       5       Purdue

37.500000       -7.812500       -3.125000               4       3       12      Ark Little Rock

My numbers say they both suck, so I went with last year's numbers to break the tie.  I could have added in the 2014 values, but this was a #12 ranking, and I didn't believe those.

Dayton:

28.125000       26.562500       20.312500               4       7       7       Dayton

9.375000        7.812500        34.375000               4       7       10      Syracuse

This one I should have gotten right.  I folded the two previous years in, and that said that I should trust consistency over a sudden jump.  Maybe Syracuse has some new great player.

Michigan State:

35.937500       18.750000       28.125000               4       8       2       Michigan St

23.437500       3.125000        23.437500               4       8       15      MTSU

Again, this one seemed like it was a surprise to everyone.  There are only three values of my ranking between these two values, so that kind of suggests they're within ~5% of each other in terms of skill.  Oh well.

Link time.

• Not directly one of my topics of interest, but I saw this on arXiv/stat today.
• Animal fight.
• Dogs have their own button to open the door.  You can tell that this dog is allowed in, because he has a badge.
• Ghibli movies.
• This would probably be me if there was one close enough.
• I figured this would be the best link for this story.  I'm glad that a lot of my favorite writers there have moved elsewhere.
• Tennessee and North Carolina should lose this, because this is a dumb fight that shouldn't even be happening.
• On a similar topic, Kansas and Louisiana should be nationalized, because they clearly can't govern themselves.

Thursday: I think I'm going to do an weekly update on this sports thing.

But I probably should have believed in the heart of the cards numbers on those #12 ranked teams.

Also: this corned beef is not as good as pastrami.

• Mobile ads are stupid.  I have never found a useful mobile ad, and I will actively not buy things from companies that use mobile ads.
• I like unagi.
• I wish people weren't so stupid.
• But see, I'd rather go to a museum to see art.  Airports are places I try to get through as quickly as possible.  I wonder if this means my next trip, I'll need to schedule extra "art time" at SFO.
• This is dumb.
• I really like Lion.  Lion is the best.
• I'm curious as to how they're going to try and investigate this without damaging things.
• On a related topic, that story led to reading about Nefertiti, which led to this interesting article on Neferneferuaten, who might have been Nefertiti ruling as a king.  Or, you can read down into section 4.3 and discover that no matter how fucked up you thought ancient Egypt might have been, I guarantee it's worse.

Wednesday: Well...

First up, I guess I was wrong in my ranking of Holy Cross.

To be fair though, hydrostorm is objectively a better Item Crash.

Maybe I was wrong.  I looked a lot like my grilled cheese at lunch was cut horizontally rather than symmetrically.  It's less clear in this picture, but the bottom half was super rounded an all sides.

The financier was a bit odd tasting too.  Chocolate with something else.

First links:

• Baboon.
• Rick Santelli is a fucking moron, and you only need to read his own words to see that.
• Yesterday was the Ides of March.
• Red Panda.
• Bernie vs. Hillary.
• Mac & Cheese.
• What?  I am so confused by this comic.
• Mitch McConnell.
• It looks like the President selected a lot of the same teams as I did.
• I generally played the PSP version with the Fairy familiar, just so I could sit in chairs and have her sing to me.
• This song.
• Video.

Secondly, why did I suddenly publish a half edited blog draft from September 2014?  Because I caught the Murder Team 5 2012 special on TV this evening.  Unedited notes below the cut.

Mission to Kill: 2010 Special

This took way longer than I expected.  I also wasn't expecting to take nearly five hundred screenshots.  And then using 250 of them, plus more to make gifs.  That makes something like 15MB of images.  Oops.

I also discovered that there was an official webpage for the series (due to this page), which makes sense.  It was made five years ago.  

Anyway, 2010 special of Mission to Kill Murder Team Five!

I didn't really do any of the improvements I discussed two years ago.

Basketball.

Basically my solution this time was:

1. Check with Julie that no team went undefeated this year.  That was my big problem last time.
2. Run the 2016, 2015, and 2014 game solutions to determine the relative rankings for all of the teams in each of those years.
3. Rank things based on the 2016 solution, letting 2015 solutions break ties.  Also use this information (and the 2014) for solutions to:
4. Anytime a #12 sport-ranked team is ranked substantially above a 1-4 sport-ranked team, assume something is off with the model, because I have a lot of #12 ranked teams ranked really high for some reason.

So the result table is:

#2014.score     2015.score      2016.score    group   game  sport-rank  2016.score      Team.name

23.437500       28.125000       40.625000       1       1       1       40.625000       Kansas

-9.375000       -21.875000      1.562500        1       1       16      1.562500        Austin Peay

18.750000       -3.125000       17.187500       1       2       8       17.187500       Colorado

29.687500       7.812500        20.312500       1       2       9       20.312500       Connecticut

3.125000        32.812500       26.562500       1       3       5       26.562500       Maryland

9.375000        20.312500       29.687500       1       3       12      29.687500       S Dakota St

10.937500       4.687500        20.312500       1       4       4       20.312500       California

14.062500       14.062500       34.375000       1       4       13      34.375000       Hawaii

40.625000       43.750000       26.562500       1       5       6       26.562500       Arizona

NAN     NAN     NAN     1       5       11      NAN     VAN/WICH

1.562500        18.750000       28.125000       1       6       3       28.125000       Miami FL

14.062500       21.875000       9.375000        1       6       14      9.375000        Buffalo

12.500000       15.625000       17.187500       1       7       7       17.187500       Iowa

-20.312500      23.437500       15.625000       1       7       10      15.625000       Temple

37.500000       46.875000       37.500000       1       8       2       37.500000       Villanova

3.125000        -1.562500       17.187500       1       8       15      17.187500       UNC Asheville

21.875000       20.312500       34.375000       2       1       1       34.375000       North Carolina

NAN     NAN     NAN     2       1       16      NAN     FGCU/FDU

-15.625000      -12.500000      14.062500       2       2       8       14.062500       USC

18.750000       17.187500       20.312500       2       2       9       20.312500       Providence

3.125000        10.937500       28.125000       2       3       5       28.125000       Indiana

4.687500        18.750000       37.500000       2       3       12      37.500000       Chattanooga

20.312500       53.125000       26.562500       2       4       4       26.562500       Kentucky

18.750000       17.187500       31.250000       2       4       13      31.250000       Stony Brook

-3.125000       37.500000       15.625000       2       5       6       15.625000       Notre Dame

NAN     NAN     NAN     2       5       11      NAN     MICH/TULSA

1.562500        21.875000       28.125000       2       6       3       28.125000       West Virginia

45.312500       39.062500       34.375000       2       6       14      34.375000       SF Austin

29.687500       42.187500       12.500000       2       7       7       12.500000       Wisconsin

25.000000       6.250000        15.625000       2       7       10      15.625000       Pittsburgh

14.062500       12.500000       34.375000       2       8       2       34.375000       Xavier

12.500000       -6.250000       26.562500       2       8       15      26.562500       Weber St

21.875000       25.000000       34.375000       3       1       1       34.375000       Oregon

NAN     NAN     NAN     3       1       16      NAN     HC/SOUTH

23.437500       -7.812500       29.687500       3       2       8       29.687500       St Joseph's PA

32.812500       18.750000       18.750000       3       2       9       18.750000       Cincinnati

20.312500       23.437500       17.187500       3       3       5       17.187500       Baylor

7.812500        18.750000       25.000000       3       3       12      25.000000       Yale

28.125000       40.625000       20.312500       3       4       4       20.312500       Duke

-21.875000      6.250000        28.125000       3       4       13      28.125000       UNC Wilmington

20.312500       10.937500       12.500000       3       5       6       12.500000       Texas

1.562500        42.187500       15.625000       3       5       11      15.625000       Northern Iowa

3.125000        14.062500       29.687500       3       6       3       29.687500       Texas A&M

26.562500       23.437500       17.187500       3       6       14      17.187500       WI Green Bay

0.000000        4.687500        10.937500       3       7       7       10.937500       Oregon St

28.125000       26.562500       23.437500       3       7       10      23.437500       VA Commonwealth

21.875000       18.750000       28.125000       3       8       2       28.125000       Oklahoma

-9.375000       -7.812500       25.000000       3       8       15      25.000000       CS Bakersfield

34.375000       40.625000       29.687500       4       1       1       29.687500       Virginia

7.812500        -1.562500       17.187500       4       1       16      17.187500       Hampton

-6.250000       -9.375000       10.937500       4       2       8       10.937500       Texas Tech

-4.687500       18.750000       17.187500       4       2       9       17.187500       Butler

-3.125000       14.062500       29.687500       4       3       5       29.687500       Purdue

-3.125000       -7.812500       37.500000       4       3       12      37.500000       Ark Little Rock

29.687500       26.562500       15.625000       4       4       4       15.625000       Iowa St

17.187500       26.562500       18.750000       4       4       13      18.750000       Iona

0.000000        1.562500        26.562500       4       5       6       26.562500       Seton Hall

34.375000       46.875000       29.687500       4       5       11      29.687500       Gonzaga

14.062500       25.000000       28.125000       4       6       3       28.125000       Utah

4.687500        -3.125000       25.000000       4       6       14      25.000000       Fresno St

20.312500       26.562500       28.125000       4       7       7       28.125000       Dayton

34.375000       7.812500        9.375000        4       7       10      9.375000        Syracuse

28.125000       18.750000       35.937500       4       8       2       35.937500       Michigan St

23.437500       3.125000        23.437500       4       8       15      23.437500       MTSU

-1.562500       10.937500       9.375000        5       1       11      9.375000        Vanderbilt

53.125000       37.500000       25.000000       5       1       11      25.000000       Wichita St

14.062500       17.187500       10.937500       5       2       16      10.937500       FL Gulf Coast

-17.187500      -20.312500      6.250000        5       2       16      6.250000        F Dickinson

26.562500       0.000000        15.625000       5       3       11      15.625000       Michigan

14.062500       18.750000       14.062500       5       3       11      14.062500       Tulsa

9.375000        -3.125000       -7.812500       5       4       16      -7.812500       Holy Cross

9.375000        1.562500        15.625000       5       4       16      15.625000       Southern Univ

So, using this, I can answer the following questions I saw while doing the research of "figuring out what the fuck name FLGU is mapped to".

1. I saw a thing asking if Holy Cross was underrated.  My analysis says "no," and concludes with a "holy shit, are you fucking kidding me?"
2. Kansas is probably going to win it all.
3. Julie was right, Michigan State should have been ranked higher than Virginia.
4. I've already scored the two group 5 games that have played correctly.

Using the espn clicky thing to use these rules (I bent rule #4 to also apply to 13-ranked teams as well):

Group 1 and 2.

Group 3 and 4.

Final stuff.  I don't know how to call the score thing.  They're separated by ~4 points in the scores, or about 10%.  So maybe 10 points, since basketball is a "log10(score) ~ 2" kind of game?

For the remaining pre-game things, I have Michigan and Southern University winning those (in addition to the correctly called Wichita State and Florida Gulf Coast).