Fantastic Four disappointment

I was shopping at the weekend for Fantastic Four figures. I found Mr Fantastic, the Human Torch, and the Thing, but I couldn't see the Invisible Woman anywhere.

I found a digit in my soup

I am, my wife tells me, an incurable geek. And all because I called my son's alphabet soup "alphanumeric soup" since it has numbers as well as letters in it.

I also saw something suspiciously like a "(". My wife insists it was just a bent "I", but I'm not so sure. If I find any more punctuation marks, I'm going to insist it's ASCII soup.

Hmmm, I wonder if I can sue the supermarket on the grounds that I found a digit in my soup?

http://www.legalzoom.com/articles/article_content/article13621.html

Floyd's Organism

Floyd Landis denies accusations of doping. Speaking at a news conference in Madrid, Landis said the testosterone was "absolutely natural and produced by my own organism".

His own organism, huh? I have this mental picture of a reptile tank in his rec room with a little creature roaming around in it. Maybe its small enough that he can slip it down his cycling shorts while he's racing. Every couple of miles or so it bites him on the thigh, injecting some testosterone to keep him going.

In any case, the point is the same: whether he owns the organism or he just borrowed it from his coach, it doesn't make it right.

IT Irony -- poor old Veterans Administration

Spotted this headline on ComputerWorld today:

"GAO Calls on VA, DOD to Better Share Medical Data".

I thought that the problem with the VA is that it is all too good at sharing medical data? Seems they can share it with any random burglar who walks off with one of their laptops, but not their most important collaborative agency.

Just to rub it in, the next headline on the website was:

VA Pushed to Pursue IT Overhaul

The FBI's recovery of the stolen laptop and disk containing personal data on 26.5 million veterans and active-duty military personnel didn't stop the calls for a sweeping restructuring of the IT organization at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Paranoia 'a widespread problem' (BBC News)

I knew there was something going on out there that nobody was telling me about.

Irregular Nouns

Everybody is familiar with irregular verbs in english -- in fact, if you learn english as a foreign language, probably the first verb you learn is the absurdly irregular To Be, none of whose past or present tense forms remotely resemble the infinitive.

What few people realize is that english also has a lot of irregular nouns. Many things are named differently when they happen to you vs. other people. For example, the noun for surgery varies by person:
- I have a procedure
- You have surgery
- He/she has an operation

Likewise, if you lose your job:
- I was part of a RIF
- You were laid off
- He/she was fired

And when you travel overseas:
- I am a traveler
- You are a visitor
- He/she is a tourist

More later, I think.

Stupid Sports Statistics

Most statistics that you hear on ESPN are stupid because they are so meaninglessly specialized ("Hernandez is only the 6th player in the last 12 years to hit 8 times in his first 5 games". Whatever.) But one that I heard on ESPN a couple of nights ago stuck with me not because it was stupidly complex, but stupidly simple.

The talking heads on Sportscenter were setting up the next game in the NBA finals and trying to make some point about the dramatic significance of game 5. Breathlessly, one of them announced that with the series level at 2-2, "the team that wins game 5 has gone on to win the series 18 times out of 24." Wow, pretty impressive sounding stat, right? That all-important momentum from winning game 5 carries you to victory.

Except that if you think about it for two seconds -- which is about how long it took me -- you realize that there is no game 5 momentum. None whatsoever. Nil. Zilch.

If you assume that both teams go into the last two games with a 50/50 chance of winning each game -- i.e. no "momentum" for the game 5 winner -- 18 series wins out of 24 for the team that wins game 5 is exactly what you'd expect by chance. Consider: the team that is down 2 to 3 needs to win both remaining games. With a 50% chance in each, it has a 25% chance of winning both games and the series, so it should win 6 out of 24. Which is just precisely what has happened historically. Winning game 5, in other words, has conferred no special "momentum", that makes the team that wins it no more likely to win game 6 or 7. Each of the following games is still a toss-up.

In short: the magical "momentum" of winning game 5 is that you lead 3 to 2 and only need one more game to clinch the series. Nothing more, nothing less.