Moneypuck

Statistician Nate Silver made a name for himself by accurately predicting the 2012 U.S. election, and today he's taking on an even more difficult and controversial subject: why Canadian teams never win the Stanley Cup.  With the elimination of the Ottawa Senators - the last Canadian team standing in this year's playoffs - the winless streak is now at twenty years.  There are of course more American teams in the NHL; only seven of the thirty teams are Canadian, and it was just six for most of those two decades.  But still, that's a fifth of the teams, so you'd think they'd win at least once given all those years.  What are the chances of rolling a die twenty times without ever rolling a one?  That's more likely than twenty years without Canadians winning the cup.

He makes a good point about the financial reasons:  for the first half of the drought, the Canadian dollar was low, and there was no salary cap.  Since NHL salaries are negotiated and paid out exclusively in American dollars, but U.S. TV rights don't bring in much money, a Canadian NHL team gets most of its income in Canadian dollars, then pays out most of it in U.S. dollars.  So the Canadian teams were barely staying in business, never mind paying big bucks for star players.  Without a salary cap, there was nothing to stop more profitable American teams from outspending them.  But for the second half of the drought, the Canadian dollar has been strong, putting the Canadian teams on a stronger financial footing.  Now they could outspend most American teams, but aren't allowed to, thanks to the salary cap.

Beyond that, he doesn't really have much to say, beyond the idea that it's bad luck. (After all, it's not like Canadian teams don't get to the finals; that's happened five times during the drought.)  He does proffer the idea that the enthusiasm of Canadian fans takes away an incentive to improve the team, though I don't really buy that: thanks to the salary cap - and the less-famous salary floor - winning and losing teams cost about the same, so you don't save money by having a no-talent (i.e. cheap) team.

Still, the article is worth reading as it does have lots of interesting analysis of the strength of the local hockey markets, giving a better idea of just how the size of a city and the rabidness of a fan base affect a team's profitability.  It's an argument lots of people have in the absence of any facts, so it's nice to see an attempt to put numbers behind it, even if they mostly do confirm what everyone (except Gary Bettman) already suspects.

But seriously, a team called the Toronto Legacy?  Stick to numbers, Nate.

The Future In Beer

You may remember a few years ago, there was this curiosity story that news outlets used to fill extra minutes or column inches.  The story was that a brewery was marketing a beer for gay people.  But to me, this wasn't some light time-waster story; it was the most horrifying thing I'd ever seen.  That's because I'd already seen Saturday Night Live do a spoof ad for Gay Beer years earlier.

But then, life-imitating-art repeats itself.  (Did that sentence make any sense?)  You may have heard this joke:

The story goes that there was a meeting of all the big brewers.  Mr. Miller was there and Mr. Bush, Mr. Coors and Mr. Guinness.  They came to a break time and food and drink orders were taken.
Mr. Miller ordered a Miller Lite.
Mr. Busch ordered a Bud.
Mr. Coors ordered a Silver Bullet.
Mr. Guinness ordered an iced tea.
One of his colleagues asked, "Aren't you going to have one of your own products?"
Mr. Guinness replied, "If none of you are drinking beer, neither will I."

And now, what happens?  Coors actually has an Iced Tea!  Real life keeps doing things that people used to think was funny, but only when it relates to beer.

Pay Me a Buck and You May Read This Post in Helvetica

There's a new concept in software, and it's called "freemium".  The idea is that you get to use the software for free, but you can pay to get some sort of added features.  It's especially spreading in games.  It seems like a good fit for casual games.  See, if you're a hard-core gamer with a Master Chief tattoo, you'd probably be willing to pay to play a major game, but if you're a mobile phone owner just looking for something to waste time with, you're less likely to put up even a small amount of money to try out Sharks Vs. Giraffes.

The challenge for the game makers is: what are you going to charge the user for?  There's basically three approaches: 

• Charge for advancement.  Having trouble getting past the Dread Ogre of Vargal?  Pay a buck to go to the next level anyway.
• Charge for speed.  You see this in Facebook games a lot.  If you don't want to wait for your Farmville crops to grow, you can pay to harvest them now.
• Charge for customization.  Everyone else wonders through the forests of Orgoeron in drab burlap, but you can pay to have a nice custom outfit.

Each approach has its problems.  Paying for custom items that don't affect gameplay won't bring in much money, since you're only selling to the rich, vain, or obsessed.  Paying for advancement takes away the challenge of the game, and allows people to buy their way to victory in head-to-head competitions.

I've now run into problems with the charge-for-speed set up.  I've just started playing Real Racing 3 for Android.  For the most part it's a good game.  I'm still getting used to trying to "steering" a car with the phone, so I can't comment too much so far.  Like a lot of driving games, you have to win money racing (pretend money, that is) and then put that money into upgrading and repairing your car.  What they've done is introduce a delay of 2-3 minutes for those upgrades, with the option to pay real money to skip the wait.

It all seems very arbitrary and phoney, added purely to make money.  Sort of like protection money to the mob.  Who do you need protection from?  The people you're paying for the protection.  It doesn't help that the first two Real Racing games (only on the iPhone) were conventional pay-for-the-game affairs.  Personally, I've never had an urge to pay even with the free credits they give you at the start of the game: After all, you don't sit down to play a game on your phone, you just want some intermittent amusement.  If it tells you you'll need five minutes to change the oil, that's just a push to go back to doing something productive.

It'll take a while for game makers to find the limits to what they can charge for, but it seems RR3 has gone a little too far.

This Post Is All About You

Journalists are always trying to make new sound relevant to viewers/readers, often by finding a local angle.  My favourite example being a New York newspaper that reported the Bolshevik revolution with the headline, "Bronx Man Leads Russian Revolution." (referring to Leon Trotsky, who briefly lived in the Bronx)

But the way the local emphasis often emerges is through reporting local victims of a disaster.  It's not, "100 people were killed in a plane crash," it's, "100 people - including 3 Canadians - were killed in a plane crash," as though that will make us care so much more.

The CBC went overboard this week in trying to report on the recent bridge collapse in Washington (state).

(Just as an aside: I love how the BBC article I linked to above has the headline, "US road bridge collapse 'caused by lorry'".  Who could the headline possibly be quoting?  Anyone involved with the story wouldn't use the word, "lorry.")

Anyway, the CBC reported the bridge collapse as severing vital link between Canada and the U.S.  So I thought, I hadn't realized this bridge was near the border.  Turns out it was about 80km away from the border.  Is that really close enough that we want to look at it as hurting us?  Most of us live within 80km of the U.S. border, so by that standard Americans could report pretty much anything that happens here as being about them.  Okay, I guess they already do that.  Except for the reporting on us part.

The extra irony is that the "lorry" that caused the collapse was Canadian.  So if we wanted to make the story all about us, that's the easiest way to do it, cast us as the perpetrator, not the victims.

Get The Cyber-Grout

Just wondering, who decided that the best way to arrange things on a computer screen is through a bunch of barely organized tiles.  It used to be that everything was organized in a simple list.  But that's passé, apparently.  Google+ used to be a list, but now it has the tiles too.  Facebook is probably like that by now, I should log in again and check.

What worries me about this is that as far as I can tell, the trend started with Microsoft.  They introduced the tiles for Windows Phone, and the new interface for Windows 8 that everyone hates.  Flickr just adopted it for it's relaunch, and it's slowly spreading.  

That's just not how this is supposed to work.  Apple is the one you copy user interfaces from.  Maybe everyone assumed that with Microsoft so boldly adopting the new paradigm, they must have copied it from Apple.  But is Apple using tiles?  No, their products still use nice elegant grids and lists of things.

Worse, when I just looked it up at Wikipedia, I find out that the whole thing comes from the Zune!  Why not copy Windows Vista while you're at it?

Bladraw

Bladraw, Definition:
The stalemate that occurs between a couple of men at closely spaced urinals, when neither can urinate because of the presence of the other.

Crack Wise

Tonight The Daily Show did a bit about Rob Ford (congratulations Toronto, you've finally got the world's attention) and in it, they claimed that actually, all Canadians are on crack.  Rather than take offence, I thought this actually makes some sense.  So to borrow from a different late night show, I present to you...

The Top Ten Things That Prove Canadians Are, Indeed, All On Crack

10. Manage to stay entertained through long winter
9. Think Blackberry will make a comeback

8. Economy stayed strong when everyone else's was collapsing - we had to be selling something
7. Understand Tragically Hip lyrics

6. Think nothing of getting up at 5:00 am to take kids to hockey practice

5. Baseball stars suddenly can't play after joining Blue Jays
4. Life of Pi

3. Believe we can get oil out of the tar sands without destroying the environment

2. Our senators can't remember where they live or where they get their money from

And - from the home office in Medicine Hat - the number one Thing That Proves Canadians Are, Indeed, All On Crack:

1. We elected Rob Ford

Majr Mergr

Rumours are that Yahoo has bought Tumblr.  Is this a good thing?  A couple of troubling things right away:

• Yahoo likes to spell their name as, "Yahoo!" and Tumblr likes to use, "tumblr."  So the combined entity has a deep corporate culture of trying to make punctuation part of their name
• Yahoo already owns Flickr, so their corporate identity - the equivalent of McDonald's McSomething and Apple's iSomething - will be to leave out the last 'e'.  Get ready for Readr, Networkr, Weathr.

I've already slagged Yahoo once, so I'll try to be brief.  I doubt this is really going to turn around Yahoo's fortunes.  Tumblr is valuable, but does it make sense to spend that kind of money on an Internet service that's only sort of different from a bunch of other services (Blogger, Twitter, Facebook.)  It looks like it will join Yahoo's stable of products that are sort of like social networks but don't really fit together.

At Least It's Stable Chaos

It's political Christmas and everyone is getting what they want.  The Obama White House is fighting several scandals, and Toronto mayor Rob Ford has been allegedly caught smoking alleged crack.  The question is: will it make a difference?  The usual thinking is, yes of course, but we're in a new world where silly little things like "reality" don't really matter.

As I've pointed out in the past with my post about Literally Unbelievable, partisan people talk about fictitious events just the same way they talk about real events.  I haven't been following Fox News's coverage of the scandals, but those that have report that their attitude hasn't really changed from the norm.  In fact, liberal journalists are surprised that conservative journalists are putting so much effort into the Byzantine dead horse that is Bengazi, not the simpler and more-damning IRS scandal.  Even though that seems to be the perfect issue for them: conservatives being opressed by government bureaucracy using taxes.  The only thing they could ask for on top of that would be a taking-our-guns-away angle.

Democrats have an attitude of running to stand still: They control the White House and Senate, but it's all they can do to keep the government open for business.  With that kind of political calculus, Democratic politicians openly condemning the President would probably get him impeached. 

As for Toronto:  Just when many people were asking, "Is Mayor Ford on crack?"  It turns out there might just be something to it.  But once again, the battle lines are drawn so deeply, that it's hard to imagine anyone changing sides even now. 

A few months ago, during a lull between Ford controversies, I read an article that pointed out that the weird thing about Ford is not what he's done, but the fact that it's unsurprising.  That is, it's not like he pretended to be straight-laced and polite, then changed when he got into office.  Voters new what they were getting and got what they apparently wanted.

Hey Lorne, Need A New Writer?

Derek Stepan was the New York Rangers' highest-scoring player this year.  Whenever I see the Rangers on TV, I hear the commentators say his name, and I keep hearing it as Stefon, the uber-hipster character from Saturday Night Live.  He's played by Bill Hader, who leaves the show after this weekend's season finale.  So in his honour, here is what I imagine a post-game interview with Derek Stepan would sound like:

Reporter: What did the team do to up the intensity for the playoffs?

Stepan: If you want intensity, then look no further.  New York's hottest club is [makes noise of goal siren].  Club owner Glam Boni is back with this new club that answers the question, “Luongo?” Located in Steve Avery's old hockey bag, this club has everything: goons, pucks, estranged Sutters, butch gorings, guys in Jaromir Jagr wigs, goalies who poke check without a stick.  And look, is that Don Cherry?  No, it's a homeless guy living in a 1970’s couch.  It's got all that and human skate sharpeners.

Reporter: Human skate sharpeners?

Stepan: That's that thing where a rapper who's had all his teeth replaced with silver gives you a pedicure.

Facing a Stacked Deck

Here in the Region Of Waterloo, there's been controversy over a proposal to build a casino.  I don't care that much about the issue personally, but I've found the process rather odd.  Kitchener just decided for a second time to reject the casino, but it may still be built just outside the city.  All this is in spite of public opinion running strongly against the casino.

Obviously, some people will object to a casino on moral grounds.  But even if you do not have a problem with the idea of gambling, you still have to weigh the benefits to the community (taxes and tourism dollars) against the costs (a certain portion of your populace suffering gambling addiction.). For the most part, communities seem to agree that a casino isn't worth it, and have been rejecting the proposal.  But then Woolwich township (right outside the city) surprised everyone by voting in favour of a casino, and shortly after, Kitchener council - who had initially rejected casinos - revisited the idea.  

A lot of people would write this off as typical politicians ignoring their constituents, but you can see where they're coming from:  As I said, people seem to be in agreement that the costs outweigh the benefits, but that's assuming we're talking about one community in isolation.  If you're a rural community on the edge of a larger city (like Woolwich Township) then the balance changes.  You'll get the benefits in taxes, but the costs in addiction will be borne by someone else.  Since destitute gambling addicts aren't likely to wonder the cornfields, pestering farmers for change.  Instead, it will be neighbouring cities like Kitchener that pay the cost.

That in turn, causes Kitchener council to reconsider.  In the same way that a casino in Woolwich is a positive with no negative for them, it's a worst-case scenario for Kitchener.  They'll be bearing the costs of the casino, but not sharing any of the positives.  At this point, they're thinking that if there's going to be a casino in the area whether they like it or not, it might as well be in Kitchener, where they can at least share in the benefits.

A lot of people think of local government as being inherently better than government at any higher level: the closer the decision makers are to the problems, the more they'll know about them, and the more they'll care.  That's often true, but it does have the detriment that sometimes a local government may be making a decision with ramifications beyond their borders.  If the politicians (and their constituents) won't be feeling all the costs and benefits, that may skew their decision making.

Dusting For Prints

I should probably dust in front of my computer.  But because I haven't, I noticed a curious pattern in the dust:

So I wondered, what could have left those marks?  Then a few days later, I realized that I often put my Thumbdrive in front of the computer when it isn't plugged in.  Here it is:

This reminded me of one of my all time favourite Public Service Announcements:

One Perspective On Advertising

At some sports events - particularly in Europe - they have ads painted on the grass in perspective so that from the camera's point of view they’ll look like a sign standing up.  However, when seen from another angle - like that of most of the fans - the sign is elongated to the point of illegibility.  Watching today's FA Cup, I noticed they took this a bit further and had a Budweiser ad that appeared like a curved beer can label.  Just think, somebody actually used a computer program to lay out what that would look like.  Pity it's all for the futile effort of trying to get British soccer fans to drink American beer.

Right after that game, I switched to the Blue Jays game.  And they have their own annoying turf ads. This season the broadcasters have taken to superimposing ads on the grass near the base coaches boxes.  You can often see an ad for Honda or Orange Julius with the proper perspective to look like it's painted on the ground.

It only just hit me that these two trends are contradictory:  one group are making ads painted on the grass to look like they're superimposed over the grass, but another group are trying to make ads superimposed over the grass look like they're actually painted on the grass.  That's how screwed-up humanity is: even our ads are trying to be something they're not.

Apology for Non-Symmetry

I'm going to have to admit it: my face isn't quite symmetrical.  Yes, the bridge of my nose is a little off-centre.  It's not something that bothers me too much: look closely and you'll see that lots of people have face bits that don't line up.

What does bother me is the question of how this happened.  If you find that, say, a carrot has a bend in it, you assume that it was growing straight, but something intervened.  It hit a rock, or some bug took a bite out of it and that curved it's growth in that direction.  So how do you explain my nose? 

It hasn't been broken or anything; have I just slept on one side more often than the other and gravity has done this?  Then how come my whole body isn't slanted?  Maybe it started much earlier:  as an embryo, one stem cell blew out at the wrong time, and I've been growing off-centre ever since.

Generation One-After-That

I've learned that there are some things in life that never change. One of them is Pepsi.  Every generation they try to position themselves as the edgy soft drink, and they always do it by aligning themselves with pop stars that are already household names.

Take this new Beyonce ad.  Yes, I know it's been on for a few weeks; but given how long they'll be playing an ad that expensive, it's still near the beginning of its lifetime.

Really, I don't think the ad works.  And not just because of the blank stare she gives that's supposed to convey surprise at seeing past versions of herself in the mirror.  It's supposed to be some great act of personal courage to embrace these spectres of her past career.  But they don't really seem that far in the past.  Yes, I know, I'm not their target market, and to the people that ad is aimed at - young people who still find Beyonce edgy - something from a couple of years ago seems ancient. 

But in today's post-Madonna pop world, a constantly morphing look is pretty much the minimum for a female pop star.  I mean, they are expected to change their look several times in a concert, never mind a career.  So embracing your look of three wardrobe changes ago doesn't mean much.  Now if Alanis Morrisette had done an ad like this circa 1995, that would have been impressive.

The Mind Boggles

Things I've learned during my addiction to the Boggle app:

• Someone decided it should not accept dirty words, but should still put them in the list of words you missed.  This ends up causing profanity than it prevents.
• I look up definitions of the obscure short words the game accepts, just so that I’ll feel less guilty using them to run up my score.  Yet I can never remember what they mean no matter how many times I look them up.
• When they were creating Boggle back in the sixties or whenever, at some point they asked, "should we let them count plurals as separate words."  I'm thinking they have regretted their decision ever since.
• Frustration sets in when you realize you'd be more successful if you just frantically entered random combinations of letters.
• When you try to start all your apps by shaking your tablet, you've been playing too much.
• Frustration gets worse when you can think up words that you know are real but the game won't accept (pho? trew? eid?)

You Looking At Me Looking At You

The other day I was stopped at a red light, when a cyclist whipped around the corner on the other side of the street.  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that he was bald (not unusual) not balding, but with no hair at all (also not unusual) and seemed to even be lacking eyebrows (more unusual.)  So I turned to look, to see if my peripheral perception had been correct.  Of course, that's the point he looked my way and saw me looking at him.

So that made me feel bad.  Whether he's fighting cancer, or has some other medical condition, he's surely used to - and sick of - people staring at him.  I swear I wasn't staring, but still, from his perspective I was yet another person making him feel like he's on display.

I'm sure I'm not alone in having experienced this before: generally I'm not going to stare at someone, that's impolite.  But if a person has some easily-seen physical anomaly, you end up unthinkingly looking their way as soon as you encounter them.  And then you force yourself not to look, and I'm sure it's equally obvious to them that you are pointedly not looking at them.  I hope that people in that position would understand that seeing people looking their way is not necessarily the result of a person consciously treating them as a spectacle, but I'm sure it's easy to lump us in with people who just don't care.

Steel Wheels

What's the deal with all the cars I keep seeing without hubcaps?  I hope people aren't removing them thinking that they're saving gas by removing weight or something.  Or maybe it's a statement in favour of a practical aesthetic over unnecessary decoration.  When you think about it, thin plastic hubcaps are as useless as vinyl roofs.  More likely, they're intimidated by the giant alloy wheels you see on cars with half-inch-think tires.

The other possibility is that people are stealing hubcaps, and we're just seeing the victims driving around with bare-steel wheels.  Though that wouldn't make much sense: they've stolen so many hubcaps, that there are lots of cars driving around without hubcaps, so people like me think its a trend, so we don't want to buy hubcaps, so the hubcap thieves are stuck with thousands of hubcaps they can't sell.

Whichever explanation is correct, it's embarrassing that my car still has its hubcaps: Either I'm out of style for keeping them on the car, or the hubcap thieves think mine aren't worth stealing.

Neighbourhood #3

This weekend I had to survive a number of lengthy power outages in Woodstock.  It was quite a strange experience: I was watching Doctor Who, and just as the Doctor was about to reboot the Tardis and fix the rift in the space-time continuum, the power went out.  It took me a second to realize that the complete darkness wasn't part of the show.  It was like a moment of extra realism that would put to shame that special smell-o-vision version of Iron Man 3 that they're doing in Japan.

I looked on the Woodstock Hydro web page for an explanation.  They didn't any information on what was currently happening, which is another example of local organizations not using the web to send useful information, as I mentioned previously.  Or they couldn't update it because their power was out.  But they did have an explanation the next day.  I present it to you now without comment: