It’s Friday, and here’s my video of the week… wait, let’s enhance it:
December 18th, 2009
December 11th, 2009
I have an idea. Every Friday I’ll post a video from my YouTube “Favorites.” It won’t necessarily be new, or timely, or funny, or profound. But I’ll do my best not to totally waste your time.
So, without further ado, did you know that George Lucas approached David Lynch about directing Return of the Jedi? This video is making the rounds today, unsurprisingly…
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March 13th, 2009
[Disclaimer: The following post is partly a reprise of one I wrote last year]
March Madness is almost here, and my workplace productivity is bound to suffer a little (don’t worry Kyte crew — I promise I’ll get all my stuff done). Selection Sunday is this weekend, and then it’s all about bracketology. I always look around the Internetz for a little help, and there’s no shortage of resources out there. There are roughly three ways to approach it…
Tap the hive mind
Yahoo Sports has an application called the “Team Ranker” that’s sort of like a Hot-or-Not for evaluating possible matchups. The theory is that the masses will collectively gravitate toward the most likely outcome. The obvious risk is that the Team Ranker application might be dominated by people who know nothing about college basketball and make their picks more or less at random. Imagine the Yahoo Answers kids attacking this one. Yikes.
Fanboys might be a problem too. Duke and UCLA, for example, have a lot of them – and haters too for that matter, so no matter how viable they might be as contenders, I would worry about people expressing their desires instead of their predictions. Finally, the official tournament seeds and rankings are themselves driven – in a way and in part – by a collection of opinions, so even if Yahoo’s Team Ranker is dominated by true college basketball aficionados, I would expect the results to follow the seeds.
Turn to the Experts
I’ve done well with this strategy in past tournaments, but it’s not a sure bet. Taken as a whole, the experts tend to follow the seeds, and they inevitably split on all the toss-up games, so you still have to use your gut to a certain extent. The other challenge is that the expert commentary you can find is pretty disjointed. There are a lot of bits and pieces out there – separate breakdowns by region and conference, lots of hypothetical head-to-head matchups and riffs on narrow subjects like “injuries to watch” – so it’s difficult to synthesize it into any kind of cohesive set of picks. That said, the free resources I tend to look at are the obvious ones:
Each of these sites has its stable of pundits who crank out a furious stream of blog posts and articles between the time the field of 64 is announced and the first tip-off. The trick is to sift through the noise and spot the nuggets that can help you. Most of all, I look for predictions – especially whole brackets.
DIY science geekery
This is especially fertile ground for data junkies. Impress your friends by rattling off the latest betting odds or spouting opinions about how the Pomeroy Pythag Model stacks up against the Key Game Play stats model – if you can find any of this info for free. If you’re willing to pay, however, there are all kinds of nifty online tools to play with. One called Bracket Brains lets you dive deep into individual matchups. It costs anywhere from $26.95 to $79.95, although they do offer a free version that gives you a taste. Matchup by matchup, it provides a whole range of parameters you can tinker with to help you make your picks.
You can adjust how you think various slices of things like recent performance, strength of schedule and Vegas spread will factor in to each matchup. You can look at similar matchups from past tournaments (based on the parameters you set). You can even view a map showing the distance each team will travel to the game venue. As you tinker with the weightings of all these parameters, the projected outcome of the matchup in question changes in real time.
Another tool called Bracket Caster runs simulations based on each team’s past performance and calculated chances of winning against any other team. According to the description, every possible tournament game has been simulated one play at a time and repeated 10,000 times. Using this data, you can run your own simulations of the regional brackets, or look at a high-level analysis of any individual matchup.
Finally, one category of basketball statistics – efficiency – has become especially popular as a way to measure any team’s true merit and predict its performance in future games.
A team’s offensive efficiency is defined simply as points scored per 100 possessions. Defensive efficiency is points allowed per 100 possessions. Defining a “possession” is somewhat more complicated, and I’ll spare you the details (go here if you’re interested). Last year, a Sports Illustrated blogger named Luke Winn wrote a compelling examination of just how good a predictor efficiency is (the actual post seems to have moved), which he nicely summed up as follows: “From 2004-07, only two teams outside the top 49 in defensive efficiency made the Elite Eight, and zero teams outside the top 25 made the Final Four.”
OK, back to work everyone.
December 4th, 2008
For the last couple of months, I’ve been working for Kyte (more on that in a future post), and yesterday we got a nice shout out from backstage at the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, highlighting Kyte’s mobile streaming capabilities. Ever the evangelist, Arianna was pressing Jon Stewart on the question of blogging – specifically, why doesn’t Stewart blog?
His knee-jerk answer was that he has a television show – one that airs daily – that provides an ample outlet for his thoughts. “I don’t have any extra thoughts,” he says.
Of course Stewart’s answer doesn’t satisfy Arianna, and I’m sure she’s right in the sense that Stewart’s fans would eagerly devour all his extra thoughts, spontaneous backstage antics and the rest of the “dreck” (as he refers to it later on the show, with Arianna as his guest).
On the other hand, I understand how someone who writes all day every day for his show would have no energy left over for blogging.
At one point Stewart notices the member of Huffington’s crew using the Nokia N95 8GB to capture the exchange on video, and the conversation turns briefly to online video and “embedding.” Then web analytics, and when Arianna mentions Nielsen ratings, Jon Stewart recognizes commmon ground and asks, “are you sure you’re not TV?”
Here’s Arianna on the actual show:
December 4th, 2008
I wish I could maintain this perspective all the time:
Thanks Louis CK
April 13th, 2008
I can’t believe I’m writing about Britney Spears, but bear with me.
One would hope that Britney bottomed out somewhere around the head-shaving or the crotch-flashing. Now it seems the gossip mill’s coverage of Britney has finally bottomed out as well.
Yesterday I was in the checkout line at the Safeway – where I get most of my celebrity gossip – and I noticed the usual array of Britney shots on the covers of the usual magazines. But something was amiss.
The normally snarky Us Weekly had Britney’s face dominating the cover, but instead of the obligatory jab about her latest booze binge or child-endangerment episode, the headline simply read, “Living With Mental Illness.”
Adjacent to this on the shelf was Star magazine, whose cover story was something about how Britney and K-Fed are working to come up with a parenting agreement that will be good for their kids.
All of this on the heels of the recent South Park episode (“Britney’s New Look“) lampooning our insatiable appetite for tabloid news. Key quote, “I know watching celebrities go down can be fun. Me and my friends were just as guilty as all of you, but maybe, just maybe it’s time to let this one go.”
Amazingly, the tabloid press is listening, and it seems they’ve agreed to a ceasefire.
Of course, Craig Fergusson called for it a long time ago.
February 4th, 2008
The other day, I was watching – for maybe the fiftieth time – this video by sigur rós for the song “Glósóli”
It’s a stunning piece of filmmaking, for a gorgeous song, but if not for YouTube, how would one find such a thing as this? MTV doesn’t show videos anymore, and a band like sigur rós probably wouldn’t get much play even if they did, so why does sigur rós bother? Who is it for?
Well, thanks to the wonderful internetz, MTV is completely obsolete. sigur rós offers up a huge collection of videos on their website for anyone to download. And there are many more on their ftp site.
I’ll be busy with these for a while.
January 24th, 2008
When I was a kid, my parents controlled my TV diet, and while I was hardly deprived, I was never at risk of becoming a glutton. After school each day, I was allowed to 30 minutes of TV time – enough for one show. Our TV set was a 17″ black and white with the obligatory rabbit ears. It was old and sad, even for its day. It sat in the corner of my parents’ bedroom, probably because that was the only place where it could get decent reception, and I remember sitting on the corner of my parents’ bed, joyfully, for my daily dose.
There were, if I remember correctly, six channels: NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS and two UHF channels. I would rush home from school to watch Ultraman, Spider-Man, The Little Rascals or The Three Stooges (although my mom ultimately banned this last one, after I started reenacting the stooges’ antics on my younger sister).
Sometime in college I stopped watching TV. I think I just didn’t have time. I also didn’t have a TV. This abstinence phase continued after I moved to New York, then Arizona and well into my life here in the Bay Area. I won’t say I missed it, but this was probably due to not really knowing what I was missing. I will say that through those years, whenever I encountered “ambient” television – in many bars, for example – I was powerless to look away.
All this ended a few years ago when I signed up for DirecTV, with TiVo (before they switched to their own DVR). It was like going from a tricycle to a Ferrari. I had never been one to proselytize about the evils of the idiot box but still, for the first few months, I kept my conversion secret. I considered TV to be junk food for the mind, and while I never begrudged anyone their right to a tasty – if unhealthy – snack, it was also not something to be proud of.
Gradually though, I began to make exceptions for certain shows. Then more and more. Until finally I had to acknowledge that there are a whole lot of good things on TV. It’s not 57 channels and nothing on. It’s 500 channels, and trying to optimize my TV viewing to see as much of the good stuff as possible.
January 14th, 2008
Some kind of silly excuse for a Golden Globe Awards ceremony took place last night, with no speeches, performances or jokes – just winners announced by unknown non-celebrities who had the look of Star Search contestants in the “spokesmodel” category.
The impact of the writers’ strike on the event and activities surrounding it reportedly cost the Los Angeles economy anywhere from 75 to 100 million dollars. If the Oscars suffer the same fate – which looks likely – the blow will be much bigger.
The producers who are the target of the strike represent only a slice of that pie, but even if you consider the whole thing, $100 million is small potatoes compared to the amount the producers would give up by submitting to the writers’ demands, so a couple of missed awards shows probably won’t cause them to blink an eye.
The other problem for the writers is that the strike hasn’t had the expected crippling effect on the quality or quantity of television available to viewers like me. Sure I miss a couple of shows, but I was watching too many anyway. Now, with the writers’ strike going on, I can still watch my favorite reality shows (lately, Kitchen Nightmares, The Dog Whisperer, Survivorman, No Reservations and Top Chef), and I can watch other shows in reruns that I didn’t make room for before. With my favorite scripted shows on hold for a while, I’m enjoying my chance to give my second choices – shows like Friday Night Lights, The Office and Lost – their due.
The only show I was really painfully missing was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but that’s back on now. Woohoo!
The bottom line is, I’m not sure how much pain the strike is delivering to the wallets of the producers, which is why no one expects it to end anytime soon. There’s simply too much good TV left on the air for the strike to make much of a financial impact.
Even if this was not true, or even if the writers hold out long enough to dent the supply of good television, they still might not hit the producers where it hurts, because, as a product, television follows a demand curve much like that of a controlled substance. With television, as with cocaine or cigarettes, a reduction in supply has little effect on demand. Watching television is the default leisure activity for Americans. We do it out of habit. We’ll keep doing it whether or not there’s anything worth watching.
The thing is, the writers are in the right. They deserve a piece of the web revenues, and the producers are greedy bastards for not allowing that. Maybe the force of public opinion will ultimately be enough to sway the producers. Maybe the strike will hurt their moral sensibilities, and that will be enough.
Or maybe there are enough good people in Hollywood to eventually force a bottom-up victory. Maybe the string of isolated side deals already happening between shows and their respective writers will reach a critical mass and lead to an industry-wide agreement.
It has happened before.
January 9th, 2008
Am I the only one who wants to punch my TV whenever I see Chad on those Alltel commercials? He reminds me of the pretty rich boy from every teen movie – the one who dates the popular girl, drives a fancy car and treats everyone around him like shit. It doesn’t help that the other characters in the commercials are the kinds of lovable geeks we remember fondly from those same movies.
Wouldn’t the Alltel commercials be much better if the archetypes were reversed – one scrappy geek vs. the big popular kids – and we could root for the underdog? Wouldn’t that make much more sense, since Alltel is an underdog company in its industry?
Even Alltel seems to sort of think so, based on the fact that the geeks (who represent other mobile phone companies) are the main focus of each commercial – because they’re funny – while Chad gets barely a frame and has almost no lines.
