SOX CLINCH

Boo-yeah! (Not boo-yao) Time to revisist my midseason predictions. At the time, Cleveland was not considered to be in the wild card hunt. Although the Mets let me down, I think the rest speaks for itself.

I also found this cloumn by a Cubs fan.I think he hits the nail on the head.

Turns Out I was Right

I posted a couple days ago about a wild wild card scenario. I then retracted what I said, but it turns out I was right in the first place. I should know better than to trust anonamous sources. The rule is

If three clubs finish the season with the same winning percentage and one team will be a division winner and another will be the wild card, the games will be played as follows: The two teams tied for the division lead will play the one-game tiebreaker, with the winner being declared the division champion. The losing team will then play the club from the other division for the wild card.

Now you know

where do you stand?

You are a Social Moderate (55% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (70% permissive) You are best described as a: Capitalist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

15-20%

As with most people, I've done my stint of working in the food service industry. It completely sucks. We all have friends that bus tables or are servers, and we hear endless stories about minor celebrities, or the customers from hell. These people put them all together to create this brilliant site. Luckily, I didn't show up in their Shitty Tipper Database (a great place to see the dining habits of some celebs).

Litmus Test

Barack Obama has decided to vote "no" on Judge Roberts. More interstingly, he appears to be in favor of a political litmus test for confirming judges

The problem I face ... is that while adherence to legal precedent and rules of statutory or constitutional construction will dispose of 95 percent of the cases that come before a court, so that both a Scalia and a Ginsburg will arrive at the same place most of the time on those 95 percent of the cases -- what matters on the Supreme Court is those 5 percent of cases that are truly difficult...In those circumstances, your decisions about

whether affirmative action is an appropriate response to the history of discrimination in this country

or

whether a general right of privacy encompasses a more specific right of women to control their reproductive decisions

or

whether the commerce clause empowers Congress to speak on those issues of broad national concern that may be only tangentially related to what is easily defined as interstate commerce

...

in those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart.

When I heard that the Democratic party is the party of emotive theatrics, I understood that to be sarcasm, hmmm. I would presume to remind Sen. Obama that ultimate mastery is not of the body, but of the mind.

This little paragraph sums up the corner Democrats have painted themselves into

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) made a remarkable statement: "The president is not entitled to very much deference in staffing the third branch of government, the judiciary."

This country has only one president at a time ... if the presidential election means anything in this arena, it must mean that the president's choice has a heavy presumption of confirmation ... Why else would Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have received only a handful of no-votes among them? During the Clinton administration, we deplored the way that the Senate treated the president's judicial nominees during six years of Republican control over the Senate ... If Republicans had been applying Mr. Reid's standard, they would have been within their rights to reject [all Clinton's nominees].

UPDATE: Looks like the Chicago Tribune is thinking some of the same things.

No one expected such independence from Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, a reflexive partisan. It was disheartening, though, to see Barack Obama (D-Ill.) fall in line with the Democratic leadership--and do a poor job of justifying that position. Admitting that the nominee has a host of sterling qualities, Obama essentially said he couldn't vote for him because Roberts doesn't seem to share Obama's views on racial issues--in short, he just isn't as enlightened as Obama. Who knew of that constitutional requirement?

The Internet was Invented for this Kind of Stuff

The Top 50 Science Fiction Shows of All-Time

The Wild World of Wild Card

If you've been in Chicago, you've felt first hand the angst in the air concerning the White Sox. Take heart fans; we are going to the playoffs. It may be sacrilege for a team in first place to speak of "clinching" the wild card, but I did a little figurin'...if the White Sox win only 3 of there remaining 10 games, then all of following would have to happen for them not to make the playoffs

New York Yankees go 6-5 AND

Boston Red Sox go 8-3 AND

Cleveland Indians go 5-4

Not impossible, but when you also consider that the Yankees and Red Sox have three games remaining against each other, then it becomes very unlikely. In the event that the Sox somehow win 5 of the remaining ten games, then it is a cinch because Boston has to go 9-1 and the Yankees have to go 8-3 and they play each other three times anyways.

OK, back to reality. I'd like to remind everyone that we do still have the best record in the American League. In any event the Sox will win the division, but as I was mulling over the possibilities I thought of a very strange scenario. If Cleveland ties with both Boston and New York there will be headaches all around. First, Boston will play New York for the AL East Championship. Then the loser has to hop on a plane and play Cle. ASAP. They will have the disadvantage of throwing their number two starter against Cleveland's ace. The ramifications of that game are enourmous. If the AL East loser wins, they travel to Chicago to play the Sox first round. But if Cleveland wins, the Sox wont play the wild card from their own division and would be forced to host the AL West winner. In every scenario, there are 2 teams that made the playoffs, but wont have their number one started available (incidently, making the AL west winners the LA Angels lucky bystanders in the whole situation). Furthermore, if the AL East loser beats the Indians, then they will be starting the playoffs with both their number one and number two starters pitching on short rest.

Can you say Crackpot?

I got an interesting email the other day announcing an event:

From: somedude (xxxx@nyu.edu)
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 11:06:01 -0400
Subject: David Lynch Event

Dear Students, Staff and Faculty:

As part of NYU's Next Reel Student Film Festival and the Directors Series, this is an interesting event that will be talked about for a long time to come and David Lynch will be on hand for both presentations. Admission is on a first-come basis. If you cannot get into the 7 PM show, the 9 PM show is a repeat of the first. If you have any questions, please email me. Best, Some Dude

The attached poster has a picture of David Lynch with the following headline "Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain". Below that is a picture of three smiling guys: "John Hagelin, PH.D, Quantum Physicist" and "Fred Travis, PH.D". As a former physicist, I know that a physicist doesn't go around calling him/herself a "Quantum Physicist".

As Meg and Jack White would say, I think I smell a rat.

I did a quick search on Hagelin, and found his webpage. His credentials seem legit: Ph.D from Harvard, post-docs at SLAC and CERN. Then it seems he lost his mind (and soul) and got involved with the crackpots, and his current title is (are you ready, it's pretty long): Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management, and Minister of Science and Technology of the Global Country of World Peace.

It gets better, his bio says he's a "world-renowned quantum physicist, educator, author, and public policy expert...and is responsible for the development of a highly successful grand unified field theory based on the Superstring." Funny, I've never heard of him. A quick search on SPIRES and arXiv for Hagelin, comes up with nothing. He's also one of the 'experts' in What the Bleep Do We Know. Wikipedia has a great entry on this film and the controversy surrounding it.

What bothers me most about this whole thing is when people (like David Lynch) use their pull to get into NYU's film school, just to push an agenda. More depressing, is when people use their credentials to give their wacky ideas respectability to a bunch of non-science people that are impressed with words like 'quantum'.

UPDATE: I did an APS search, and actually came up with a handful of hits. A few of them are from his legit days at Harvard. The others are in collaboration with other Maharishi U people. No one has cited their work.

Hello

I've learned one thing while on my extended absense from the blogosphere: the number of hits this site gets has absolutely nothing to do with whether I post or not. Last Saturday was one of the biggest days ever - a full week after I hadn't posted anything and a weekend where I usually get next to nothing. I invented an expression for this phenomena...A wathced pot never boils.

I toyed around in my head with completely changing this to a satire site (since I believe I have some exceptional talent there). My first piece was going to be titled "Liberal Chickenhawks Demand More Relief Effort". You can pretty much see where that's going. Anyways, the time to make the joke has passed.

Blogosphere Rears its Ugly Head

I am fairly disgusted with blogs right now. In less than a week after hurricane Katrina, we have seen:

Hysterical liberals trying to blame Bush for a natural disaster. This is followed with a shameless plug for their political agenda.
Smug conservatives who gleefully point out other nations and/or celebrities who haven't offered help. Mostly they were just too busy patting themselves on the back to notice.
Charges that the delays in rescue efforts are somehow racially and/or politically motivated.

In particular I have seen a lot of righteous "Oh this is what happens to poor people in America" posts. Actually, this extreme rhetoric is what happens when you give Joe Public a pseudonym and a website. I doubt I will post for awhile; this is just madness.