Today in math-hating news OUTSIDE politics

Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher has had just about enough outta you quants:

Fisher said voters — and computers — put too much emphasis on style of wins and strength of schedule, however, and said the eye test is a fairer way to evaluate Florida State’s actual ability.

LOL. Never mind on-field performance! It’s gut feelings that matter!

Sigh. Go find a seat next to Turd Blossom, Jimbo.

In which Don Pettit remains awesome

This tab has been open for a while, so I’m not sure where it came from, but the astronaut gave a 30-ish minute talk at Luminance 2012 about the challenges and awesomeness of shooting in space.

It’s worth your time. For serious. Fun fact: hard drives fail quickly in zero-gravity, and nobody (to Pettit’s knowledge) has figured out why, so they transmit the raw files back to the ground as quickly as they can.

For more Pettit, check out his blog or his Flickr account.

Posted in Pix

More on the conservative echo chamber

This article is a great rundown of how, exactly, conservative media’s bubble managed to misinform their audience so completely:

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday’s result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout — Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs.

Those audiences were misinformed.

Outside the conservative media, the narrative was completely different. Its driving force was Nate Silver, whose performance forecasting Election ’08 gave him credibility as he daily explained why his model showed that President Obama enjoyed a very good chance of being reelected. Other experts echoed his findings. Readers of The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other “mainstream media” sites besides knew the expert predictions, which have been largely born out. The conclusions of experts are not sacrosanct. But Silver’s expertise was always a better bet than relying on ideological hacks like Morris or the anecdotal impressions of Noonan.

Sure, Silver could’ve wound up wrong. But people who rejected the possibility of his being right? They were operating at a self-imposed information disadvantage.

Again, for emphasis: the degree to which Fox & company feel free to simply LIE hurts them, and it’s hurting us as a nation. It needs to stop.

Rachel Maddow Breaks It Down For You — And For The GOP

Make time for this, but if you can’t, here’s a transcript:

MADDOW: Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately president of the United States, again.

And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to oversample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math.

And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing.

And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone`s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually.

And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And U.N. election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.

Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for Democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole, because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides, both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country.

They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions.

And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff.

And the if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is snuck a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems.

Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them.

And unless they are going to is secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again. And that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we`re counting on you. Wake up.

There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let’s accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let’s move on from there.

If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everybody. Big night.

This is a distillation of something I’ve said for a long time — since Clinton, really. The GOP has abandoned reason and the enlightenment. They prefer doctrine to fact, since for them at the highest levels, the only thing that matters is what had worked at the polls. Facts have no special weight for them over lies if the lie works better in November, and several times now that’s worked, or at least seemed to. It’s this notion that gave us birthers, but also insane hostility to gays as a wedge issue, and Swift Boating, and a whole host of other mendacious angles promulgated by the right wing.

This has to change. Every bit of ingenuity wasted on lies to gain power is ingenuity we’re not using for the very real problems we as a nation face. We’ll all be a whole lot better off if we have two functional parties instead of a center-left party dealing in facts, and a right-wing party made up of insane fundies convinced the earth is 6,000 years old and that we’re being led to ruin by a Muslim Kenyan usurper.

GOP to Demographics: Drop Dead

After every big election, someone pronounced the losing party dead and buried. It would be a mistake to make that claim now about the Republicans, but they do have a very real problem:

The demographic changes in the American electorate have come with striking speed and have left many Republicans, who have not won as many electoral votes as Mr. Obama did on Tuesday in 24 years, concerned about their future. The Republicans’ Southern strategy, of appealing mostly to white voters, appears to have run into a demographic wall.

More here. It turns out that running on wedge issues designed to inflame older or rural white voters (gay marriage, immigration) tends to drive off younger voters, immigrants, and urban professionals. Who knew?

This isn’t something they can fix with better messaging. The GOP will need to seriously retool if they want to make a play for these groups and break up the coalition that’s elected Obama twice now. You can’t run on anti-immigrant xenophobia and expect the latino vote to break your way, you know.

LULZ

Josh Marshall reminds us that the GOP has won the popular vote just ONCE in the last six presidential elections (Bush v. Kerry in 2004). Before that, you have to go back to Bush the elder vs. Dukakis.

Once less giant

Longtime University of Texas Darrell Royal passed away yesterday. He was 88.

Royal took over as head coach at Texas at age 32 in 1956 after starring as a halfback for Oklahoma and then taking head coaching jobs at Mississippi State and Washington.

In 23 years as a head coach, he never had a losing season, with his teams boasting a 167-47-5 record in his 20 years at Texas, the best record in the nation over that period (1957-76).

Royal won 11 Southwest Conference titles, 10 Cotton Bowl championships and national championships in 1963 and 1969, going 11-0 each time. Texas also won a share of the national title in 1970 when it was awarded the UPI (coaches) national championship before losing to Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl. The UPI awarded its title before bowl games were played. Nebraska won the AP national title that year.

The national title season in 1969 included what was dubbed the “Game of the Century,” a come-from-behind 15-14 victory by the top-ranked Longhorns over No. 2 Arkansas in the final game of the regular season.

It’s not an exaggeration to say he was Texas’ Bear — they even named the stadium after him.

Via Edgar, some great Royals quotes you probably don’t know came from him; here’s a couple I like:

  • “Give me an O.J. Simpson, and I’ll show you a coaching genius.”
  • “I don’t know. I never had one.” Answer to Mack Brown, then coach at North Carolina, when Brown asked Royal how he handled a losing season
  • “He’s so rich he could burn a wet elephant.”
  • “Three things can happen when you pass, and two of ’em are bad.”

In case you forgot who Ole Miss is

White students held an angry protest there last night over Obama’s re-election:

Students were heard shouting racial epithets about Obama and African Americans in general. One Ole Miss student, a freshman, said some 200 male students were gathered in the parking lot at Stockard and Martin freshman dorms at about midnight yelling racial slurs related to Obama and African Americans. The student said the 200 or so gathered fled when the police arrived around midnight.

There was also a reported gathering of students shouting racial slurs about Obama and African Americans in general near Kincannon Dormitory.

About as clear as it gets: Scalzi on the GOP

From John Scalzi’s endorsement of Barack Obama:

Look: The modern national Republican party is a hot mess, a simmering pot of angry reactionaries driven by selfishness and willful ignorance, whose guiding star is not governance but power, and whose policies and practices are tuned to build an oligarchy, not nurture a democracy. Its economic policies are charitably described as nonsense and its social policies are vicious; for a party which parades its association with Jesus around like a fetish, it is notably lacking in the simple compassion of the Christ. There is so little I find good or useful in the current national GOP, intellectually, philosophically or politically, that I genuinely look on it with despair and wonder when or if the grown-ups are ever going to come back to it. Before anyone leaps up to say that the modern Democratic Party has problems of its own, know that I do not disagree. But if your practical choices for governance of the country are between the marginally competent and the actively malicious, you go with the marginally competent.

In his campaign for president, Romney has embraced many of the worst elements of the modern national GOP policy thinking, up to and including choosing Paul Ryan, architect of a ruinously idiotic budget plan, as his vice-president. Romney’s run on this nonsense, and despite a late burst of tacking to the center, I think he’s beholden to it, and will be as president. I think it’s obvious that I believe it’s the wrong course for the country, economically, socially and politically.

More to the point, I think the real problem is that the actively malicious, awful and small-minded politics of the modern GOP have to be stopped. The modern GOP, simply put, has no moral center; it pays superficial obeisance to “traditional values” while yearning to implement policies whose highest moral achievement is consolidating wealth for the very few, and is perfectly happy to be as cynical as it needs to be to achieve that goal. If the GOP wins this election, it will simply become further untethered from the common good of the nation, because why shouldn’t it? There is no political reason for it to be otherwise. If mendacity continues to be rewarded, then mendacity is a legitimate strategy of power.

Sorry to be late with this. I’ve only just recovered.

RAMMER JAMMER BABY.

Of note: It’s only since they hired a guy named Saban in 2000 that LSU has had any sustained success against Alabama. Saban and Miles have made LSU a power in a way they really never, ever were before — before then, the best they’d ever done was win two in a row vs. us (and that only 4 times since 1895).

The record on that link doesn’t really even tell the whole story of Alabama’s dominance in the sixties and seventies — during the streak of 11 wins over LSU, the Tide was also beating Tennessee every year, and lost to Auburn only once. The only other losses were singletons to Ole Miss, Georgia, and Mississippi State — one each, in 11 years.

As a friend of mine said, there’s a very good reason Bear is legendary.

That’s what made the early 21st century so huge for the Tigers. I imagine they’re as happy about their record vs. Alabama since 2000 as they are about their championships — they bagged 9 of the last 14, including 5 in a row (2003-2007) and 7 of the first 8.

BTW, there’s something you don’t often see in that video, especially outside the end of national title games: Saban smiled.

I should also point out that there are times when I think Rammer Jammer is cruel and unsportsmanlike. This is not one of those times. In DEATH VALLEY, even. Deal with it.

Dear Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan

Seriously? I mean, really? Taking Nate Silver to task for offering a “put up or shut up” bet to Joe Scarborough?

If there was any doubt as to how off-base you were, you removed it with your final graf:

When he came to work at The Times, Mr. Silver gained a lot more visibility and the credibility associated with a prominent institution. But he lost something, too: the right to act like a free agent with responsibilities to nobody’s standards but his own.

You’re correct that the relationship is unbalanced, but not in the way you think: Silver had plenty of exposure during the last election cycle as an independent voice. The Times gains more credibility for partnering with him than he gains exposure — you’d be covering him anyway. I’m sure the Times is paying him handsomely, but I’m similarly sure he’d be right to completely dismiss your tut-tutting here.

Fortunately, it looks like most people are taking Sullivan about as seriously as she deserves, even if Silver himself was gentlemanly about her bizarre wrongheadedness.

(Final link: h/t Frazer!)

Today’s In-No-Way Creepy News

A downed 100-year-old oak tree in New Haven turned out to have a human skeleton tied up in its roots.

One hypothesis:

The skeleton could belong to a victim of smallpox, interred in what amounted to a “mass burial site.”

As evidence, he cited a passage in the New Haven Green chapter of the book, “Historical Sketches of New Haven.” The book describes how some notables, beginning with Martha Townsend, were buried in the walled-off cemetery behind the Center Church on the Green. Others were buried in the rest of the Upper Green, apparently with great density.

“Sometimes, at the dead of night, apart from the others, the victims of smallpox were fearfully hid here,” the book reads. “The ground was filled with graves between the Church and College Street; sixteen bodies having been found within sixteen square feet.”

The last bodies were buried there in the 1700s, Greenberg said. In 1821, the stones were moved to the Grove Street Cemetery, and the ground was raised to level off the Green. The bodies remained behind.

Happy Halloween.

Hey, Will?

I don’t want to overstep my bounds or anything, but I just want you to know that…

Muschamp rage

…there are plenty of decaffeinated brands that taste as good as the real thing.

I’m late on this, but…

…if you’re not checking in on Grantland’s Rembert Explains the 80s feature, you’re missing out.

The idea is this:

Every so often, we’ll e-mail 25-year-old Rembert Browne a video from the 1980s that he hasn’t seen. Rembert will write down his thoughts as he’s watching the video, then we’ll post those thoughts here.

Madcap hilarity ensues. Seriously. Some topics Rembert has tackled:

Enjoy.

Nothing like new toys to reinvigorate your picture-taking

Observe my 2012 photo folder:

2012pix

The top box encloses the 12 events between June and early July wherein I took pictures.

The bottom box starts when I bought a new camera (to replace the one stolen in early September), and encloses the 20 events between early July and late October.

As should be obvious, I’m still pretty darn happy with the Olympus.

Posted in Pix

If I had any human decency, I wouldn’t show you things like this

But, as it turns out, I am a terrible, terrible person.

Yes, that was Rip Taylor. And just when you think they were done being awful, well, . . . just stay through 4:00 and see.

(Via Mefi. There is, of course, lots more where this came from.)

(PS: Best comment at YouTube: “What if, due to some horrible accident, this video were the only surviving record of our time for future historians to study.” Indeed.)

Who Death Was, and Is

On the left, an actual photo, from 1989, of a woman named Cinamon Hadley. On the right, Mike Dringenberg‘s drawing of Death, whom he co-created with Neil Gaiman.

372887856963

That the former was the inspiration and model for the latter is not a matter of conjecture. Dringenberg apparently drew her often. Even Neil says so.

Now in her earlier forties — just like the rest of us — she’s returned to Salt Lake City, but I was surprised to learn that, for a while, she lived here in Houston. Weird.

Things we noticed about football today

LOLREBS

In reviewing the upcoming conference slate, we realized that Ole Miss could win its second conference game in a row for the first time since 2009.

Six is a magic number

Auburn has lost six games in the last seven weeks; Alabama has lost six games since December of 2007 (UF on 12/6/08; Utah on 1/2/09; USCa on 10/9/10; LSU on 11/6/10; Auburn on 11/26/10; LSU on 11/5/12).

Notwithstanding our success so far, traps are traps

Mississippi State is undefeated so far this year, but their schedule was frontloaded with softies both in (Auburn, Kentucky, Tennessee) and out (Jackson State, Troy, South Alabama, Middle Tennessee) of the SEC. Tellingly, even with that early slate, they’ve given up 2 or more touchdowns three times already.

I’ll be in my bunk.

Porsche is letting journalists see its new hybrid supercar, the 918 Spyder.

First, the bad news: it’ll cost a million bucks when it’s introduced next year. But, oh my God, this car…

372806840882

The 4.6-liter dry-sump V8, mid-mounted in the chassis, generates 580 horsepower at 8,500 rpm and 370 pound-feet of torque at 6,500 rpm. Redline is 9,000 rpm. Mounted to the V8, actually bolted together to form a single drive unit, is a 95 kW (127 horsepower) electric motor. The centrally located engine and motor send their power through a seven-speed PDK dual clutch gearbox, rotated 180 degrees on its longitudinal axis (lowering its mass closer to the pavement), driving only the rear wheels. . . . But there is more to the powertrain, as the 918 Spyder is actually all-wheel drive. Mounted on the front axle is an 85-kW (114 horsepower) electric motor, sending power to both front wheels completely independent of the rear powertrain.

And:

Add up the output from the one combustion engine and the two electric motors and the 918 Spyder’s total system power is 795 horsepower and 575 pound-feet of torque. According to Porsche, the 918 will rocket to 60 mph in fewer than three seconds and reach a top speed in excess of 200 mph in its most aggressive setting. On the famed north loop (Nordschleife) at the Nürburgring, one of Porsche’s 918 Spyder concepts ran a 7:14 less than two weeks ago (for comparison, Porsche’s limited production Carrera GT, introduced in 2004, circled the same loop with a best time of 7:32). When it hits showrooms, the 918 Spyder will be one of the fastest street-legal vehicles in the world.

The performance numbers are impressive, but keep in mind the 918 Spyder is a hybrid – Porsche says it is capable of a scarcely believable 78 mpg on the highway.