"New York Sugar Party" Doesn't Have As Nice A Ring To It
Swede Rock: Dead Man vs. Dungen
Given the increased access to world wide communications systems, listeners in the states can have bands revealed to them, that otherwise would have remained only names on the lips of those in the know – or just plain unknown.
I figure that the Örebro, Sweden band Dead Man is a case in point. I’d not ever heard their name, nor been aware that in 2003 they released a self titled disc on Crusher Records. Moreover, I had not a clue as to the fact that they released another disc, entitled Euphoria, earlier this year in May
The music on this latest disc reflects the group’s fascination with a few eras of bygone musics. There’s a bit of the old folk tinged psych added to the Swede’s swagger that works to their benefit. Americana is also a touchstone for these folks, but not in an olde tyme kinda way – kinda like the Band. Which is funny since the band was primarily comprised of Canadians.
Regardless of that cultural caveat, Dead Man is not going to wind up on any year end lists this year or next for that matter. Their music, while steeped in groups that all can appreciate, seems to lack a certain urgency that separates great acts from everyone else.
It’s not due to a lack of talent – but sometimes things just don’t work out.
But if you’re in the market for a Swedish rock act with a buncha American-psych influence, look no further than Dungen.
I remember them coming through my town a good four years ago, touring on Ta Det Lungt. Initially, I thought, why would I bother going to watch dudes play rock music with lyrics I had no hope of understanding?
I should have gone.
Even before Ta Det Lungt, Dungen’s two earlier albums pointed towards rock based music of plentiful varieties – all of which I immensely enjoy. Their self titled disc as well as 2 (which has been re-released as Stadsvandringar) are both capable of being compared to either Dead Man releases, with Dungen coming out on top.
Not to disparage Dead Man – it seems as if they almost have the right combination of styles – but for rock music from the Swedes, check out a Dungen release before you take a listen to Euphoria.
New Study Finds that Some Breast Cancers Disappear
Macallan and the 12-Year Argument
Ibanez comments on D-sabr's
Ibanez is aware of some of the conversations that have taken place in the blogosphere about whether the Phillies were foolish to have given him so much money ...These conversations have taken place only in the last week or so. Obviously a lot of Mariners read all you guys avidly.
"Number one, with sabermetrics in general, it's a statistical probability thing,'' he said.I don't think Ibby meant to say it this way; if he did, the above statement would admittedly have no value. Let's stipulate that this is not the most articulate start to the case-for. Batting average is a statistical probability thing. All stats are, including Rauuuul's HR and RBI as relating to his contract. But also, what say we lay off the ad hominems. It's very poor form to attack the arguer, rather than the argument. "Of course Raul hates the metrics, they say he's terrible" ? ... is both weak, and obnoxious. Whether it's Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton or Raul Ibanez, you don't get to throw out the argument just because you got somebody to laugh at the arguer. It's still going to be your responsibility to answer the arguments themselves. .
"And the way they come up with the defensive measurements, or ratings, is flawed. It's as flawed as the Gold Gloves. One of the reasons is, they don't consider things like ballpark factors, defensive positioning or alignment for certain hitters.''Raul is on the right track here, IMHO. The world is a super-complex place. You move an outfielder from one ballpark and team to another ballpark and team, and his defensive ratings not only might, but usually DO, change. Outfielders' numbers DO fluctuate based on the variables around them. Adam Dunn, last season, had average-solid defensive numbers in LF -- after several years of lousy numbers in LF. Skeptics will shrug and dismiss Dunn's solid statistical performance last year. But this misses the point: HOW could defensive stats have measured Dunn to be a quality LF last year? I mean, WHAT went wrong with those metrics in 2008? D-metrics are far more volatile than we admit. It's not enough to just quip, "well, 3 out of 4 years, they were bad, so there's NO evidence to say he isn't putrid." This utterly fails to deal with the problem of, why did those last 160 games measure out the way they did?! Was Raul given a section of the outfield that made him look statistically weak, so that Ichiro could run down more balls? Who knows. That's the kind of thing Raul is hinting at here. You tell me that you counted it up, and Raul cost us -18 runs with the glove in 2008? I might, or might not, buy that. But even if I do, that is a long way from saying that in some other park, with some other set of teammates, behind some other pitching staff, you guarantee me he'll cost another 18 next year. This is not a quibble. A good portion of those defensive numbers are due to circumstances -- some visible, and many invisible. .
Ibanez added that most of the people taking down the statistics that measure defense are doing so "off a television'' and are "not equipped to assess talent on the baseball field.''This makes more sense than people give it credit for. Imagine a 3-on-3 basketball game. By the end of the afternoon, your two teammates are going to understand extremely well, how good your defense is or isn't. People measuring your defense from the stands, with cameras and spline charts, aren't going to see everything that your teammates see. ...Now, I'm not saying that those spline charts are useless, either. But as always, Dr. D urges respect for the complexity of the problem. Raul's teammates -- and bosses -- DO respect his defense a lot more than the stats do. That is precisely what gives me pause for thought as to how confident we saberdogs can afford to be. Raul's case-against is, if a little rough-hewn, still on the right track, IMHO. Cheers, jemanji .................. image: http://newscoma.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/smitphu008001ozzie-smith-198...
Freezing Cookie Dough
It's the time of year when everyone is baking cookies for holiday entertaining. One of the best ways to make sure to have enough cookies (since it's impossible too many), is to use your freezer.
Right now, I'm going to talk about freezing cookie dough for baking at a later time; I'll talk about freezing baked cookies later. You can easily freeze cookie dough for many kinds of cookies, and, properly stored, cookie dough will keep in your freezer for as long as six weeks.
Some cookie dough freezes better than others. Delicate cookies that are made with a liquid batter don't fare well; avoid madelines and merringues, for instance (both are fine for freezing after baking. These cookie doughs freeze well: shortbreads, sugar cookies, snickerdoodles, chocolate chip/toll house types of cookies, peanut butter, refrigerator cookies/roll cookies.
- Double-wrap dough before freezing. Either wrap the dough in plastic wrap and then place in a zip lock bag, or line a small plastic freezer-safe container with plastic wrap, fill it almost to the top with dough, drape the excess plastic wrap over the top, and seal the lid tightly.
- Make sure to date and label the container or bag, noting the kind of cookie dough, and the oven temperature for cooking the thawed dough.
- A day before you plan to cook the cookies, defrost the dough in your freezer; then follow the instructions in the recipe for baking them.
Freezing the entire batch of dough does mean you need to plan ahead, allowing time to defrost the dough, and you need to cook all the cookies at once, but there's a "short cut" method you can use with some cookie dough.
- If the cookie is one that you make by placing "drops" of dough from a spoon onto a cookie sheet, cover a cookie sheet with foil or cooking parchment, then "drop" the dough by spoonfuls, but go ahead and fit as many as you can on the sheet.
- Instead of putting the cookie sheet in the oven, pop it in the freezer for a few hours, or overnight, so the individual balls of dough freeze.
- Remove the frozen lumps of dough from the cookie sheet, and place in air tight containers, or freezer bags. When you get ready for fresh cookies, remove as many as you need from the freezer, and bake them.
- You'll want to adapt the specifics to your cookies and recipe (keep an eye on them the first time) but in generally frozen cookies take 10-15 minutes to bake on a cookie sheet lined with cooking parchment, at 350 degree F.
Next up? How to freeze baked cookies.
-18 runs? Well, maybe, Anton
He also feels that some of the people looking at the numbers have already figured him a below average defender in their minds and discount anything good that he does. "Some of those biases that are pre-determined biases come into that mindset,'' he said. "Those are things that I'm going to have to continue to battle throughout my career. But if you go around the game, and you ask the players, you ask quality major league scouts, you ask managers, they'll tell you I'm the type of player they want on their team.''FWIW, I personally have NEVER agreed with the idea that Raul has terrible footspeed. Raul doesn't run badly. He comes around 3B pretty hard on a single. Raul has a legitimate complaint that the Seattle blog-o-sphere gets carried away with itself, once it decides it has found an ankle to gnaw. As Anton Ego put it in Ratatouille, " In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read." The Seattle blog-o-sphere has had a lot of fun with Raul, and in having its fun, might it have gotten biased? Of course it could have. Raul calls them on the baloney. Can you blame him? Again and again, I read M's fans saying weird things like, Raul couldn't run out of his own shoes if Adam Dunn were chasing him. I don't get it. Raul is in awesome shape and he picks 'em up and lays 'em down pretty good. Granted, the jumps look questionable. I see the crack of the bat, look over at Raul and he's only halfway up to running speed. I am not saying the guy's a good fielder. . === Expert Witnesses for the Defense === No idea why this point does not gain more traction than it does in Seattle:
Obviously, the Phillies thought enough of Ibanez's outfield defense to make him an everyday fielder and pay big bucks for it. "And if you look at the list of teams bidding for me, the ones that were the most serious tended to be in the National League,'' he said. "They didn't seem to have a problem with me playing the field.''You have to assume that you are a lot smarter than the clubs paying out the 8-figure contracts, if you are going to insist that Manny's, and Ibanez', and Dunn's, defense is canceling out half their production. And the fact is, ML teams in the 21st century have way, way better data than we do. I have NEVER seen an Anton -- we're using the parody in fun, and including ourselves in it -- calm down and contemplatively ask the question, "WHY did the great Pat Gillick not consider this -18 number important?" . === Where's the Team of Nine Paul Blairs? === I saw a cool quote to the effect of, "it's nice to see a team that realizes that running down balls in the gap is as important as hitting them there," or somesuch. This sounds great, and it is pithy and I like it. :- ) ... but if the idea is that defense is half of a player's value, the idea is wrong. There has never been a great manager who wanted 9 Paul Blairs as opposed to 9 Ted Williamses. 9 Ted Williamses would, demonstrably, score 12 runs per ballgame. But having 9 Ted Williamses out there on defense would not combine with average pitching to give up 12 runs a game. ...Six? maybe? Seven, conceivably, but not 12. 9 Teddys would score 12 per game and give up 6 or 7, and win what, 120, 130 games. His lousy defense is NOTHING compared to his great offense. Apply the same to an Adam Dunn, who is the poster boy for nice offense and 'putrid' defense. Nine Dunns would score you 7.5 runs per ballgame. Yet, he could be the very worst defender in all of organized baseball, and there would be no way for him to combine with average pitching to give up 7.5 runs per game. Nine Dunns -- no matter how badly you calculate their defense -- would give you a contender. And it's not like Dunn is a great hitter. ................ That is because IN GENERAL, the variance between one defender's effectiveness, and another's, is much less than the variance between one hitter's effectiveness and another's. (Part of the reason is that pitchers are part of the equation in the top half of the inning.) Excellence in defense is important, but it is not as important as excellence in hitting. The tendency in Seattle, to view defense as ultra-, ultra-important ... the tendency to view an 80-OPS glove man as being just as valuable as Manny Ramirez or J.J. Putz ... is off track. And 30 major-league GM's, with their saber staffs behind them, will agree with me on that. Defense is important, but let's not fall too madly in love with it. Earl Weaver didn't. Bobby Cox didn't. John McGraw didn't. Great managers use defense as the third or fourth string to their bows. . === Critical Mass, Dept. === Obvious caveat: if defense -- or OBP, or the bullpen, or HR, or speed, or anything -- is bad ENOUGH, you can reach the point to where it needs to be fixed. We're not saying there might not be a team whose DER desperately needs to be fixed. There might, and maybe Seattle's one of them. But you could say the same about (say) a team's bullpen. It doesn't mean that two relief pitchers are as important as all the position players together. You can hit a point of critical mass, where a given component of a system is SO weak that the whole system breaks down. It doesn't mean that you've proven that component is the most important. ............... I don't mind seeing "-18 runs defense" next to Raul Ibanez' name, if we're not dogmatic about it, and if we realize that under other circumstances, it might be different. But I'd also like to see it acknowledged that most ML teams don't put as much stock in our numbers as we do. Cheers, Dr D ................ image: http://www.fantasykat.com/ch/Images/e/ego02.jpg
The Fine-Tuning of G and Other Natural Constants
G = 6.674 * 10 (-11th power) * N * (m/kg)(2nd power).In layman's terms -- helpful, since I'm a layman :- ) -- there is a certain "amount of pull" between two objects with mass. We refer to this "amount of pull," or "attractional force," as gravity. How hard do objects pull together? It is in proportion to the products of their masses and is inversely proportional to the squares of the distance between them. In other words, the Sun would pull on Jupiter much harder than the Earth pulls on the moon, but you also have to factor in distance: Jupiter is much farther away in this comparison. This is a fairly simple relationship (not measurement) and is referred to as Newton's constant. Newton understood the relationship that he diagrammed, but of course did not measure its strength or weakness. Another way to speak of the strength of this constant was given in the January 5, 2007 issue of Science (page 74), where J. B. Fixler et al described the gravitational constant as
G = 6.693 × 10?11 cubic meters per kilogram second squared, with a standard error of the mean of ±0.027 × 10?11 and a systematic error of ±0.021 × 10?11 cubic meters per kilogram second squaredSo, as the amount of force a weightlifter is exerting can be measured by the pounds on the barbell, the amount of force that gravity is exerting can be described as above. ................... What you might not have spent much time reflecting on is this: is that the amount of this pull could have been "set" to a stronger or weaker force. A man who weighs 200 lbs. might have weighed 205 if the attractional force were stronger, or 195 if the pull had been weaker. Silly to spend your time thinking about things like this? Interest in such questions -- "What if the speed of light were 10 times slower or faster?" -- has set the Einsteins and Newtons apart from other scientists. A man who weighs 200 lbs. might very easily have weighed 1,000,000 lbs, in fact, if the strength of the gravitational constant had been "set" to a strength comparable to that of other natural constants. Meditate on that for a few minutes ... :- ) ................ At first glance, science students tend to assume (intuitively) that if the natural constants were different, then everything else would have simply evolved differently to accommodate. For example, if gravity were 1,000 times stronger, then men "weighing" 200 lbs. would simply be strong enough to move around despite weighing as much as a building. That, or perhaps life would evolve only on much smaller planets. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are many ways in which even the smallest changes to the natural forces would make any life impossible. The "tuning" of the gravitational constants -- the "tweaking" of these constants so as to "enable" the existence of living organisms that feed, breathe, grow, and reproduce -- is one of the oddest phenomenon of the universe we observe. Astrophysicist Hugh R. Ross, Ph.D (reasons.org) lists dozens of such tunings of natural constants and physical balances, including:
magnetic field... and 151 other fundamental "tunings" with respect to life on Earth particularly. But perhaps the freakiest, and most cognitive-dissonant, of all of these "tunings" occurs in the gravitational constant, with respect to the Big Bang. See G and the Big Bangatmospheric pressure
- if stronger: electromagnetic storms would be too severe; too few cosmic ray protons would reach planet’s troposphere which would inhibit adequate cloud formation
- if weaker: ozone shield would be inadequately protected from hard stellar and solar radiation
level of supersonic turbulence in the infant universe
- if too small: liquid water will evaporate too easily and condense too infrequently; weather and climate variation would be too extreme; lungs will not function
- if too large: liquid water will not evaporate easily enough for land life; insufficient sunlight reaches planetary surface; insufficient uv radiation reaches planetary surface; insufficient climate and weather variation; lungs will not function
if too high: first stars will be of the wrong type and quantity to produce the necessary mix of elements, gas, and dust so that a future star and planetary system capable of supporting life will appear at the right time in cosmic history
- if too low: first stars will be of the wrong type and quantity to produce the necessary mix of elements, gas, and dust so that a future star and planetary system capable of supporting life will appear at the right time in cosmic history