http://gizmodo.com/5430268/i-spent-300-million-on-this-movie-and-all-i-got-were-these-lousy-papyrus-subtitles

We went to see Avatar yesterday.  The subtitles came on, I shot a knowning smirk to Matt, and in an instant, a blockbuster action/scifi turns into a high comedy.

I’m no film buff or critic.  But frankly, I’m not all that impressed with the idea that James Cameron was able to use a bottomless pit of money to create a movie with slight aesthetic advantages over its predecessors (in contrast, look what we’ve been able to create with pocket change), especially when it’s attached to such a wishy-washy script.

What a waste.  How unfortunate to see what could have been a landmark film mired and lost due to poor attention to detail.

Today’s adventure:  Hunting for websites I used to visit in the late 1990’s, that pretty much haven’t been updated since the last time I went there.

www.pinkmonkey.com

www.stickdeath.com

maddox.xmission.com

and a couple still in use:

www.imdb.com

www.craigslist.org

What else?

http://www.altavista.com/

No, fortunately, I didn’t lose my phone.  Or drop it in a puddle of beer, or worse, in the urinal while trying to send a text message.  Or drunkle it away (Brian’s invention, my definition).  No, it’s in fine standing on the kitchen table.

But I did get a Facebook invite today for a phone dropped in the toilet.  And a friend lost her phone to the otherwise exhilarating David Guetta concert earlier this week.  And one of Zach’s friends destroyed his phone’s screen in a bout of debauchery last night.

The whole Facebook event thing worries me.  Not that Facebook doesn’t already have access to an obscene amount of personal and private information, but that folks regularly create events asking their friends for their phone numbers.  I’ve never fully understood the true harm in letting a stranger know my phone number, but I inherently feel like it’s not necessarily something I’d like to give away for free – or at least, allowing access to people who aren’t looking for me specifically.

Case in point: I just typed “phone” into the Facebook search, and filtered to Events.  To no surprise there’s over 500 pages of “I lost my phone and need your number” or whatever cutesy spin on that that folks like to use.  And just like that, I’ve got ten to a hundred phone numbers per page, with a first and last name attached, a decent guess on location based on area code, a decent guess on demographics based on profile picture, and best of all, a few of their friends’ names and corresponding information.  Cakewalk for telemarketers:  “Hi Chris, your friend Robert Johnson recommended I give you a call and that you’d be interested in….”

And I can only imagine how much of a huge, huge underestimate 500 pages is.

My phone number is available on my Facebook profile page, which is public.  And on the Press Releases and Media Kits that Eleven Magazine distributes widely.  I hope that if someone is looking to speak to me personally, they’ll be able to do so.  But I’m quite skeptical about leaving my number out for vague general consumption in the cloud, like so many other users are doing.

Obvious solution for you:  If you’re invited by a friend to one of these “events,” just take out your phone and call them!  That’s the point anyway, isn’t it?

Through Bill Simmons’ latest column, I found this awesome math & probability article on ESPN detailing Bill Belichick’s controversial 4th-and-2 play call last week.  I thought I’d touch on it with some thoughts from a business/decision making/organizational-supply-chain-management perspective.

Context:  Patriots’ ball on their own 29-yard line, winning by 6 points, just over two minutes to go.

Objective: Maximize Patriots’ probability of winning the football agme.

Decision Tree:

Thought I'd dust off Microsoft Paint for a change

How to read this:  Belichick has to decide whether he wants to go for it on 4th-and-2.  Each circle represents a point of action that’s out of his control (it’s in Tom Brady’s), and each square represents a point where the ball changes hands (it’s in Peyton Manning’s).  If Belichick decides to Punt, he gives Manning control – and if the Colts score, the Patriots lose.  If Belichick decides to Play, he gives Brady control.  If Brady converts (and further, if they hold the ball), the Patriots win.  If Brady doesn’t convert, Manning takes control, and if the Colts score, the Patriots lose.

How to interpret this:  As per the article, if the Patriots punt and give the Colts the ball deep in their own territory, the Patriots’ probability of winning is 79%. Or in other words, there’s only a 21% likelihood that Manning can take the ball all the way downfield in around two minutes and score a touchdown.  (Though, given how Manning has been playing this season, you could argue this is a lowball estimate.)

But if they play, we know the probability of converting based on empirical data is 55.7%.  And assuming the Pats are able to convert the 4th down (putting us at the top-most circle in the diagram), there’s a 92% chance that they’ll be able to hold the ball for the win.  If not, the Colts have a 34% likelihood that they’ll drive for the touchdown – giving the Patriots 66% odds of winning in that situation.

Working backwards: Putting the ball in Brady’s hands gives the Patriots a 55.7% chance of winning 92% of the time, and a 44.3% chance of winning 66% of the time.  Their overall odds of winning the game by giving Brady the ball, therefore, are 80.5% (92*.557+66*.443).  Which is better (sliiigghtly) than letting the punter do his thing.

But the science of management and organizational behavior deals with way more than just numbers.  There are an infinite number of intangibles.  On the one hand, this basic calculation doesn’t consider dozens of other minute possibilities (consider that the Pats convert the 4th down but then can’t hold the ball – we’d still need to figure out the odds of the Colts driving to score).  Or maybe Belichick had a feeling that his punter wouldn’t be able to kick effectively (I’m envisioning the second-to-last play from the movie The Replacements – skip to around 7:30), and that therefore, the win probability from punting the ball was strikingly lower than it seemed at the surface.  Who knows.

But most importantly, it’s awfully tough to justify at what was probably the most critical point in the Pats’ game – if not, their entire season.  Belichick wagered big – and lost big.  There’s already been a ton of fallout from fans, press, and I can only imagine, from the players too.  A good manager should know that sometimes the highest-percentage play isn’t always the smartest – sort of like how you probably wouldn’t bet $100 for a 1-in-1000 chance to win 100,001.  You win overall (by a dollar!) if you make the bet every time, but maybe you’re better off taking the safe route and pocketing the $100.  Or, in Belichick’s case, saving face and letting Manning win the game instead of losing it for himself (@2:00 in).

What’s the highest possible score in a game of Scrabble?

Kevin and I had a little discussion over the Safety Words show at the Firebird last night about the wordsmith elitist board game.

Basic internet research draws forth the following results:

1) Here’s the World Record for the highest-scoring Scrabble game to occur, with 1,320 points on the board (yes, apparently, they have world records for silly junk like this).  But that’s nothing…

2) One site points out that you can feasibly, yet in the most unlikely of scenarios, score 1,962 points – not in a game, but in a single turn.  Poor Guy-Who-Played-Jinneyricksaw.  I bet he thought he had the game wrapped up.

A much more difficult question, however, is the maximum number of points possible over the course of an entire game.  Given the structure put forth by the rules of the game (limited set of letters, limited set of board space, limited permutations of letters as per the Scrabble dictionary), I propose that a maximum is possible.  Calculations become tricky when considering that adding a single letter to the end of a word constitutes an entirely new word score (such as turning Jinneyricksaw into Jinneyricksaws, in our last example).  I’d envision, therefore, that the final board would ultimately look like a giant square of uniform Scrabble letters, whereby each word played would not only result in a bingo, but create seven new words in the perpendicular direction.

The simple approach:

1. A scrabble board has 100 pieces, with an average piece score of 1.87
2. The center row (turn 1) has a double and triple word score. Working along the right edge, each row besides the two above and two below (turns 2,3,4,5) has a double word score.  The top and bottom rows (turns 14 and 15*) each have two triple word scores. [[I'd die if I tried to include letter multipliers too.]]
3. Players will take turns playing bingos horizontally, while collecting parallel words.  The game lasts 15 turns (14 plays of 7 tiles plus one play of 2 tiles).
4. Final score: 1949.81.  Which isn’t even as good as the single-word score earlier.  Although it doesn’t consider that turn 15 (which should be on the 9x multiplier) is only two letters long, or that there are letter multipliers, or that words with higher letter scores should be saved for those 9x’s.

The difficult approach: Players start by playing two-tile words, building an even square, and rather than collecting the greatest number of bingos possible, collecting the greatest number of parallels possible.  The center letter alone (hopefully a Q or Z!) becomes part of 29 distinct words vertically and horizontally, and will ultimately count for 480 points alone (counting for the initial double-word score and the two 9x board-length words created along both axis.  Knowing this to be the most valuable letter, and assuming this to be the most valuable piece of Scrabble real estate, we can come up with a theoretical maximum of possible points at 48,000 points (480*100).

But we know that not every letter sits across the double-triple word scores, and not every letter counts for 10 points.  So a more realistic estimate might be that each letter will become a part of 29 distinct words (which is inaccurate, but might roughly cancel out the effect of not considering word- and letter- bonuses), and that given the board with sixty-eight 1-point tiles, seven 2-point tiles, eight 3-point tiles, ten 4-point tiles, one 5-point tile, two 8-point tiles, and two 10-point tiles, the maximum possible score in any game of Scrabble is approximately 5,423.

Thoughts? Evidence to prove me wrong? Amazed at how silly this is? Let me know.

I was interviewed and quoted in a St. Louis Beacon article yesterday!

Not often that you get to see your name in print.

…Well…errr…it’s still always nice to see.

I feel like 60 Minutes’ Twitter page should be called “16seconds,” and every tweet should just be “ticktickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktick.”

Except at 10:00 it goes “It’s 10pm.  Do you know where your children are?”

Instead, they just report actual news.  Wasted opportunity for humor.

I know I’ve been bad at writing updates.

Instead, for the time being, you should read Kevin’s blog.  He’s about as funny as I am, but has a little more free time on his hands to daydream and write.  I stand behind everything he says.

…I stand behind nothing he says.

Enjoy, though.

Almost forgot, my last post was the 100th post published on this blog.  Apparently I have lots of things to talk about.  I always thought I was more vapid than that.

To celebrate, I’ve turned public a new page on the site: my bucket list.   It looks like I’ll be very busy for a long time.

By the way, thanks for reading and following my nonsense, for whoever’s actually out there reading.  It’s nice to know that you’re there.

Here’s to a hundred more.

-J

Spotted this in the supermarket a week or two ago:

Your friends seem to think you're thirsty.

We could do a psychological dig here and get into some whole “be wary of who your friends are, and what their motives might be.”  But screw that.  Let’s just appreciate this on the surface level that all the students’ friends are alcohol companies.  Hah.