October 27, 2012

Big "Frankenstorm" coming. Will watch tonight's forecasts, as they are good within two days and not so good beyond that range. Already have the batteries from last storm.

Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise has a nice chapter on Weather forecasting. Claims local broadcasts have a "Wet Bias." From his book:

"In what may be the worst-kept secret in the business, numerous commercial weather forecasts are also biased toward forecasting more precipitation than will actually occur. (In the business, this is known as the wet bias.) For years, when the Weather Channel said there was a 20 percent chance of rain, it actually rained only about 5 percent of the time.

People don’t mind when a forecaster predicts rain and it turns out to be a nice day. But if it rains when it isn’t supposed to, they curse the weatherman for ruining their picnic. “If the forecast was objective, if it has zero bias in precipitation,” Bruce Rose, a former vice president for the Weather Channel, said, “we’d probably be in trouble.” "



Tundra Brewery has a table at the Greenmarket. 2 for $5, will try Brown and Red before going for the Six-Pack.



Finally, someone gets it right.



Some good Pepper purveyors at the Greenmarket.



Scooby at Union Square.



From the archives, The Misery machine.

October 6, 2012

I have read a lot on the Kennedy Assassination and an old College roommate is an expert. Will try this one only because I thought the Killing Lincoln was better than expected. Heard he discusses George de Mohrenschildt, who is one of the more interesting people around Oswald in Dallas.



Nate Silver's new book The Signal and the Noise has been ordered. I encountered "Bayesian inference" in my readings on Randomness. More to come in this book. I also expect to see Random Walks , Chinese Restaurant and Monte Carlo processes.



Heirlooms in the sun.



Cornucopia from behind.



Great live version of Steely Dan's "My Old School."

October 1, 2012

Nate Silver's FiveThityEight Blog is the place to go in this election. The name comes from the number of electors in the United States electoral college. He is mentioned a lot in a New York Magazine article about Polling.

September 29, 2011

Epic night of baseball last night.



Nate Silver's blog on the New York Times Website brings forth a new curse emanating from a Bill Buckner themed episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." From the day that the episode aired on September 4, 2011, the Red Sox went 6-18.

From Nate Silver:
The Red Sox had just a 0.3 percent chance of failing to make the playoffs on Sept. 3.
The Rays had just a 0.3 percent chance of coming back after trailing 7-0 with two innings to play.
The Red Sox had only about a 2 percent chance of losing their game against Baltimore, when the Orioles were down to their last strike.
The Rays had about a 2 percent chance of winning in the bottom of the 9th, with Johnson also down to his last strike.

Multiply those four probabilities together, and you get a combined probability of about one chance in 278 million of all these events coming together in quite this way.



Boston Globe on John Lackey: "Not only is he coming off the worst season a Red Sox starting pitcher has ever submitted, but he's a miserable, dim, finger-pointing, unaccountable wretch of a teammate, and those may be his good qualities. "



Carl Crawford's salary in 2011 is $14,000,000.

Boston Globe on Carl Crawford :"Carl Crawford, the player Damon helped replace in Tampa at a fraction of the cost, plays with such timidity. What has happened to that dynamic player who tormented us all those years while he was in Tampa Bay? And is he gone for good? Because right now, he's Coco Crisp with a lousy glove."