Some Blog Site

Transcript
Father: Are these your mobile devices?
Son: Look, dad, it’s not what you…
Father: And what is this? Minecraft??
Son: Dad, I …
Father: Answer me!
Father: Who taught you how to do this stuff?
Son: You, alright!
Son: I learned it by watching you.
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What are you teaching your kids?

The last time I added a method of predicting the winners of NFL games, it wasn’t all that impressive. That was YPP, and it was not an improvement over MPW.

MPW has been the leading indicator for the last few years, better than any other automated, statistics-based predictors.

But now MPW is pushed to second place, because MPWHFA has taken the lead.

I added MPWHFA (and its results) to the list of NFL game-predicting methods.

It wasn’t just slightly better than the old leader – it averaged a full percentage point better.

Of course, that’s not entirely fair to MPW. HFA stands for “Home-Field Advantage”, and MPWHFA is really just an improved version of MPW. Take MPW, add a few points to the home team, and see which team has the larger number. That team should be the winner.

Next step: predicting not just the winner, but also the point spread. MPWHFA does that too (and at around a 60% success rate, I might add). MPW and MPWHFA are based on net points. That should be all you need to know to figure out point-spread predictions.

Enjoy!

It’s March, the start of the spring quarter. Time for me to update the theme on this blog. This one was inspired by … well, if you don’t already know then it won’t matter if I do tell you.

As is usual, it’s not much of a new theme – all I did was replace the images.
Anyway, here’s a slightly new look.

A recent department meeting was held in a conference room with dozens of folding chairs. I ended up near the back, and I found myself staring at the back of the head of the person sitting in front of me. There was no comfortable way for me to sit so that I could see the speaker at the front of the room.

That got me to thinking about how the seats could be arranged to improve sight lines.

Problem:

If the audience were somewhat transparent, it would be okay because you could see through them in order to see the speaker. Like this:

But they’re not, so sitting directly behind people is a problem.

One that can be easily solved though.

All you need to do is offset each row by half a chair.
Solution A:

Maybe it would be better to offset each row by a third of a chair.
Solution B:

If you’re ever in charge of setting up a conference room for an audience, be sure to stagger the chairs a bit. Thanks.

Since there is some debate about the best way to measure who won the Olympics (correct answer: “We all did”), I thought I would prepare the results using several different methods so that various countries could claim to be the winners.

Usually, there is some sort of debate as to whether the winner should be the country with the most gold medals or the country with the most total medals. In keeping with Soviet tradition, these Olympics removed the options and give you only one choice: Russia. No debate necessary.

Since there are too much data to put into one post, I’ll summarize the results in this post and also point to another page that contains the unsummarized data.

Summary: The Netherlands won the 2014 Olympic games.

I prefer to normalize the Olympic rankings by athletes or, as they are sometimes called, delegates. How many contestants did a country send to win medals? And how many medals did they win? It’s more of an efficiency rating, but I think it is better than comparing medals to the general population.

When one adjusts the points total by number of athletes sent to the Winter Olympics, The Netherlands is the winner. They and Belarus were the only countries to earn more than one point per athlete or, as I ranked them, less than one athlete per point.

For the complete data, please view the charts on the 2014 Olympics Results page.

My Christmas present this year was a dash cam. I was inspired by last year’s Russian meteor footage, captured by hundreds of dash cams.

After reading a few reviews, I settled on the G1W. I didn’t want the fanciest of cameras, and at around $50, the G1W offered the best compromise between features and price.

Photos

I ordered it off eBay, and it came shipped from China.

I was a little concerned that they called it a toy, but I chalked that up to translation nuances. Upon further inspection, I chalked it up to export duties.

Opening up the shipping envelope, I found this box:
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