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. Busch, 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