Bracketology

Every year, mid March, the basketball stat-loving fans are knee-deep into "bracketology". This is the pseudo-science that tries to guess who will play in March Madness.

I should back up some. The NCAA is a governing body of college sports in the United States. Each college/university is placed in a "division" based on the size of their school and on their level of athletic prowess. In particular, there is Division 1, 2, and 3. Division 1 is where the best athletes tend to go.

March Madness is the NCAA Division 1 Men's Basketball Championships.

The tournament is in mid to late March and has 65 teams. Each college/university in Division 1 belongs to a conference. Each conference has a way of determining a winner. Sometimes they have a tournament at the end of the season. Most major conferences do this, e.g. the ACC, which stands for the Atlantic Coast Conference had a year-end championship that concluded yesterday, March 15 (Duke beat Florida State).

Duke, for example, got an automatic bid into the tournament by winning the ACC championships and represents the ACC.

The Ivy League looks at the team with the best regular season record (I believe, only against other Ivy League teams). This year, it's Cornell.

There are 31 conferences, each with an automatic bid based on how that conference decides to pick a representative. Why automatic? Many of these conferences are very weak and would not otherwise qualify for March Madness if it weren't for the automatic bid. Fans of basketball often enjoy these smaller (called "mid-major") conferences because the upset, while rare, is entertaining.

There are 34 at-large bids. A committee decides which 34 teams that didn't get an automatic bid qualify. The committee decides, based on a body of work, which teams get an at-large bid. It is the source of nervous anticipation when teams on the "bubble", that is on the verge of making it in or not, wait to find if the committee picked them or not. St. Mary's didn't get in. Arizona did. These two were on the bubble.

In the weeks leading up to Selection Sunday (which was March 15 this year), experts called "bracketologists" (a made up name to sound a bit scientific) try to guess which teams will make the 34 at-large bids.

Now if you add the two numbers: 31 automatic and 34 at-large, you get 65. This is not a power of two. A single elimination tournament should add to 64.

65 came about because a new conference was added to go from 30 to 31. No one wanted the number of at-large bids to go down by 1 especially since the new conference was likely to be very weak.

Usually, March Madness is played over three long weekends. By long weekend, I mean Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. If a given team is not eliminated, they play two games during this long weekend. 6 wins gives you a national title.

How to deal with 65 then? Two teams play in a play-in game and that is played on the Tuesday (2 days before the first "official" day). The winner usually has the honor of playing a number 1 seed.

Ah, so seeding. Once we get to 64, each team is placed in one of four groups of 16. They are called East, West, Midwest, and South. Within each group, the teams are ranked (or seeded) 1 to 16. They play each other so that 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, 3 plays 14, and so forth. In other words, the highest seed always plays the lowest seed at each possible round, making their chances better (though not guaranteed) that they will make it to the finals.

Once each of the groups has eliminated down to 1, there are 4 teams remaining, and this is called the "Final Four". In the final weekend, they go from 4 to 2, then 2 to 1 to determine a champion.

For many universities, a good sign of success is making it past the first long weekend. If they win 2 games, they are in the final 16, which is called the "Sweet 16". A measure of how good a basketball program is is how many times they have made the Sweet 16 ever and in the last few years.

Bracketology is interesting because people spend lots of time trying to guess who will make it, and for the most part, they are correct, plus or minus 5-6 picks. The exact seeding is a bit challenging as other factors are put into play.

In particular, high seeds are often placed at a tournament site (picked long before March Madness) near their university so their fans can come and support them. This may seem unfair (it's common wisdom that the more fans that come and cheer, the better a team does), but in the past, lower seeded teams have sometimes been placed closed to home, while the higher seeded opponent is far away and fewer fans attend, thus giving a "home court advantage" to the lower seeded team.

The committee created something called "pods" a few years ago, so they could mix and match teams from different regions (the East, West, Midwest, South from earlier) at the same tournament site so they could help teams stay close to home. This is a tough job, and it affects seeding too.

It's amazing but people spend the last weeks of February and the first weeks of March trying to predict which teams will make it. Time and fastidious attention are critical, and yet it is merely a game.

Oh yeah, betting. This is perhaps the hugest betting that occurs on any event in the US. Most of it is done in small office pools where each person puts in a small amount, between 5 and 20 dollars. It keeps interest up especially in upsets and tiny teams and people who play but know nothing of the sport and do well nonetheless because those that know better pick more upsets than they should.

So it begins.

What's a City?

Many years ago, probably at least 15, I stumbled on a conversation that was a bit of an epiphany. Epiphany is too strong a word, but nevertheless, I like the sound of that word over "eye opener".

The discussion centered around the notion of "what is a city". Of course, I had the rather naive view that it was anything above a certain population. Something big enough to make it bigger than a town, bigger than a suburb. A metropolis, such as it was, would be a big city.

However, the two people debating the issue, and it could hardly have been a debate, because they agreed to same principles, but were simply niggling on details of what were proper examples of cities.

A city, they had agreed, was not only a large metropolitan area, but some place that had a distinctive personality. So New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago fit the bill. New Orleans and Philadelphia would be considered cities, but places like Tampa or Rochester or Jacksonville might be suitably non-descript to count as a city.

Would Portland and Seattle be cities? Places like Nashville and Atlanta maybe yes. Places like Charlotte, not so much.

Why use this definition? It's been said many people who live in the city like the city. It has museums and plays and concerts and sports teams. Its very size generally means a diversity in things to do, and people that live there, as ethnic groups of all sorts will find more familiar faces in a big city than in a rural countryside.

If the city lacks personality, maybe Buffalo or Des Moines, then it becomes just a large place that isn't particularly distinctive, an overcrowded place without the kind of personality one wants.

The city seems antithetical to the car. Not to say certain cities don't practically require the use of a car (think Los Angeles), but that the convenience of cities should be nearby places to go that is walkable or certainly accessible via public transport. It's difficult for a city to be walkable and have cars. But to be walkable means you need to distribute restaurants, stores, museums, etc. all in the same area and not segregate homes on one end, and shopping on the other.

I happen to like the car, but there are plenty of times where the sheer amount of time, compounded by the incessant number of traffic lights, makes the journey so very arduous and therefore tedious. The city fights this because the parameters are so much bigger. The number of lanes, the tall building, the taxis jockeying for positions, the rules that seem to only appear in cities, one way streets, and so forth. What a pain.

If you like the car, then you want tiny towns and wide open spaces where the congestion of a city populace isn't there. It is an urban fantasy that a city be desolate of drivers except for the one person, free to roam down streets with towers that pierce the sky, and with the roof pulled down, the music blaring loudly, the wind rushing like waterless currents through one's hair, and equate this rush of exhilarating movement and equate this with freedom.

Watchmen

Watchmen, so I've learned from reading several articles, is based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore, the same guy who penned V is for Vendetta. Moore has generally been viscerally opposed to any film adaptation of his work. However, fans of his work--and they are numerous are curious, at the very least, how it would turn out.

Given the big budget affair that most superhero movies have turned out to be, an action that generally attracts many well-named actors to roles, think Tobey Maguire in Spiderman or Robert Downey Junior in Iron Man or many of the cast of Batman, it's quite amazing to have a film where you struggle to recognize the actors. If you're the casual filmwatcher (no pun intended), you might not recognize any of the actors.

I recognized two, and even then, only barely. Billy Crudup, who shares the same birthday as me, plays the CGI-ed up Dr. Manhattan who is mostly very blue, very naked, and very unemotional. I also knew, somewhat of Patrick Wilson, who plays Nite Owl, the awkwardly straight-laced superhero who generally admonishes the crowd to behave themselves.

Contrast this with Batman, where there are, at least, tons of famous character actors from Gary Oldman to Michael Caine to Morgan Freeman to Christian Bale. In the latest, Dark Knight, you get to see the incredible Heath Ledger playing a demented Joker. But Ledger is so famous, even before his untimely death, that you would know "that's Heath Ledger, wow he's good".

In Watchman, you're so engaged with these actors as the roles they play, you don't even think "that's so and so". So many films are scared to cast relative unknowns to play roles. I understand these aren't hacks. These are actors with reasonable resumes who've done well in much smaller parts. But it really helps to be engaged in the storyline when you don't think of the people playing these roles.

The mainstream comics, Marvel and DC, have defined the modern superhero. Usually, though not always (Batman being an exception), the superhero is imbued with superpowers, in someway. They can climb walls, or have adamantium claws, or can have flames emanating from their body. There's usually an origin story. There's usually some maniacal bad guy who is just as powerful, or, at the very least, a mad genius. Think Lex Luthor.

Oddly enough, in a world of superheroes, the government never seems to think it's too weird or feels too threatened that they cower to the might of the superheroes. They simply pass laws and such restricting behavior and the superheroes sometimes listen. Although the film isn't a traditional superhero movie, The Incredibles has this theme where the government has told superheroes to clamp down and stop being super. And oddly enough, they listen.

OK, to be fair, that film really explores Bird's thesis that there are hugely talented people out there (artists, in his world) and the PC attitude that everyone is good is doing a disservice to the geniuses. But beyond the subtext, the film is still a superhero film and takes its cues from comics.

People have claimed that Watchmen is a dark movie, and perhaps it is. But I thought The Dark Knight was darker. The Dark Knight is not so much about Joker vs. Batman, at least in any conventional sense of bad guy vs. good guy.

It's more like real-world ethics where Joker is presenting one real-world ethical dilemma after another. He poses questions that Batman needs to answer. Does Batman want to save the woman he loves, or the man that could save Gotham. That Batman picks the woman, and ends up realizing he's been tricked, well, that doesn't matter. Joker, ultimately, isn't about anything. He's not a character that has his own goals and motivations. He's a teacher, a tester, a challenger. He is the foil for Batman, making him deal with his personal demons.

It helps the second film is not an origin film. That was the first film.

If Watchmen draws analogies to Batman, at least, the Christopher Nolan version (though any would do), it makes sense. Batman is really the wealthy Bruce Wayne. In such a world, the wealthy have access to genius engineers who build special cars and special suits. They are superior fighters and movers, but otherwise, lack any other special powers. They're just superhuman enough to win any fight, but not so superhuman to fly or have any particular power.

Except for Dr. Manhattan. We'll get back to him later.

The origin story of Batman also serves as some inspiration to Watchmen. Batman wasn't a do-gooder. He had a traumatic childhood event, and spends his life as a vigilante. He's not the "dark knight" for no reason. He's not a paragon of virtue like, say, Superman is.

Watchmen tackles several themes that superhero movies don't usually deal with. First and foremost is politics. The films generally have the worldview of commies and pinkos and liberals on the one side, and the righteous conservative view on the other. And most of the Watchmen lean on this end. They feel they need to be just outside the law to do what they need to do.

Many of the superheroes, perhaps The Comedian, most notably, are deeply flawed heroes. They don't take responsibility. They revel in power like renegade cops. Even the heroes that are close to wholesome, namely Nite Owl, have to deal with other heroes that are less than wholesome. Nite Owl serves as our protagonist.

In real life, he's much like Clark Kent. Meek, shy. His superhero persona is merely a rigid reflection of his more timid self. Constantly cleaning his glasses, he's repressed. He's Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark without the confidence. The film never quite establishes how or why he gets along with Rorschach who is the resident psychopath/detective.

The film, set in the 1980s, also pays homage to heroes that preceded them. This is one idea that really never gets explored in superhero films. Nite Owl is really the second of two Nite Owl's, the original already too old to fight crime. The younger, lacking the bravery to ask Silk Spectre out on a proper date, at least goes to cheer up the older Nite Owl, drinking and talking about the good old days.

Indeed, each hero, especially the male heroes, are different reactions to power. The Comedian is like bad cop, who does whatever he wants, because he's got power. Rorschach believes in vigilante justice. He's got a code, but once he decides you're the bad guy, he's not above any method to deal his brand of justice. (Maybe like The Punisher). Nite Owl is the closest to a straight-laced superhero, but who puts up with the shenanigans of other heroes. He's a bit helpless to stop their bad behavior.

Ozymandias is the smart one, who uses his brain to become, well, Tony Stark? He's successful in business. He's revealed his identity so he can use his talent and wealth to help the world in some way.

Dr. Manhattan is also a genius, in his way, but an otherworldly one. One who gets increasingly detached as the film goes on. Despite practically godlike powers, the early parts of the film shows that he isn't above manipulation, nor above being in relationships. Superheroes often are considered super-moral. Because Crudup plays him so detached, and because he's, well, distracting as a hero (they once claimed Hulk would be naked in the film), it's easy to overlook that he's not particularly moral himself, partly because he is so detached. There's a key scene where The Comedian does something particularly awful and he points out to Dr. Manhattan, much like he points out to Nite Owl (really Nite Owl 2), that he has the power to stop him, but doesn't.

Indeed, the characters that are considered "good" often lack the strength to do good, even as those that prefer "by any means necessary" choose less than savory means to achieve their objectives.

This is far from a traditional superhero film. The Dark Knight for all its ethical quandaries is still about a good (well, kinda good) guy against a bad guy, and their confrontation with each other, although it's really about a split identity. A key scene in The Dark Knight has Joker asking what Batman believes in and what is he prepared to do when push comes to shove. But despite pushing the traditional boundaries of how good and bad guys behave, it is, more or less, structured in this framework.

Watchmen doesn't have a traditional bad guy. The bad guys resemble some of the faceless henchman in some of the Timothy Burton Batmans who have superior fighting skills but zero personalities (at least, in the Watchmen, there is minimal personalities for the bad guys that appear in the middle of the film).

The Watchmen explores what happens if ordinary people became superheroes. The special effects have a strongly retro feel to it. There's a certain realness to the Nite Owl flyer that, like Batman's vehicles, mimics his character. Despite it's obvious large windows that look like eyes, it pays homage to heroes like Batman, but because Nite Owl is not burned into the collective psyche like Batman (another thing in the film's favor, I'd say), the craft is somewhat charming.

Finally, this is a world that is about the real people behind the masks and spends as much of its time there as it does in the superhero mode. Even in real identities, these characters spend little time dealing with real people. They hang out with one another. It's not like Clark Kent hanging out at the Daily Planet where he interacts with Perry White, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen.

The Watchmen lacks the intensity of the recent Batman films, but it poses a lot of heady ideas. The world depicted in the film isn't fully realized, but it is full enough to keep the audience thinking about what it means to be a hero and what it means to have a life outside of being a hero.

Google Weather

Most weather sites kinda suck. What I want, and it's simply really. Combine Google Maps with a weather overlay. I want zoom-in and zoom-out. I want to know if rain is on the way, etc. I don't even need weather predictions if the cloud cover is right.

Do it Google!

Cleaning Party

When folks move, they are taking advantage of something people are willing to do as a favor. Expend a few hours to do a large amount of work. The tradeoff is this. The person who is packing expends a lot of hours packing so the movers don't have to. It's hard to get help if the things drags on and on.

There's something that could be done similarly, I think, but for some reason is social taboo. A cleaning party.

How many people do you know are a perpetual mess? Their homes look like a tornado went through it. I have to admit, I'm one of those folks. I'd love to have people over to help clean, but the problem is deciding what to keep and what to get rid of. I wouldn't be able to make that decision.

Ideally, what I need is someone to come for about an hour at a time and give me an assignment. Do this by the next time I see you. For some reason, external motivation works better on me than my own motivation which is simply to do nothing.

Instead, people feel awkward about helping others clean, even if the effort is a lot less than actually helping people move. They feel that the person should take care of their place themselves since it's possible to do it.

Obviously, I disagree, but that's me.

Cosmos

Cosmos was a series that showed up on PBS in, hmm, 1980, I think. It was a 12 part series hosted by astronomer, Carl Sagan. At the time, science shows like this seemed cool. I caught an episode again in college a few years later, and it seemed laughably optimistic.

In the series, Sagan would travel around in an imaginary spaceship that resembled a dandelion.

What was rather notable about the show was the music. Vangelis composed many of the memorable music. This is something that is unusual. Rarely is a science program noted for its music.

Here's a sample:

Tennis Aha

I was looking at some slow motion video of Andy Murray, world number 4 ranked player.

Slow motion video has to be the biggest aid to analyzing the way the pros hit. It's really changed how I look at strokes. Without slowmo, you can't see what's going on. It's too fast.

In tennis, there are two main theories of hitting a forehand. One is called the straight arm forehand. Federer and Nadal use this as does Fernando Verdasco. The idea is you hit the ball with a straight arm. To get the correct angle, however, your arm sticks out significantly to the right and in front of you.

The alternative is the double-bend forehand. Basically, your elbow is closer to your body, and there is a 120 degree bend between the upper arm and the forearm. This allows the forearm to be mostly parallel to the ground. To get a similar effect with the straight arm, you need to have your arm way, way out.

Here's the insight. It's much easier to get the racquet face to point right if the arm is parallel to the ground as opposed to being nearly perpendicular. The double bend facilitates this. The forearm is nearly parallel to the ground, and keeping the racquet face pointed correct is not so bad.

Now all I have to do is try this out on the court.

On Faith

I was thinking about this a day ago at 5 AM eating at an IHOP waiting for food.

Although people will tell you that faith, and I mean Christian faith in general, is about, well, faith. It is about community too. Many "good" people like the church because it provides community. Without community, I wonder how faithful many people would be.

Consider how Christians perceive various fringe groups that claim to be Christians, e.g. Mormons. The more fringe it is, and the more it doesn't involve Christ, the more likely the average Christian says it's all fake, without seeing the irony of that statement.

If anything, Christians point to a long long history of the faith, that it didn't just come about last week. But they can also point to the large numbers of active believers. After all, Greek worship of their own gods predates Christianity by a fair bit.

Without community, you are isolated. You have no other people that confirm the beliefs you have. Despite the statement that one should place their faith in a higher being, the fact is, people place their faith in other people. It is because of the community sharing this belief that they feel good about faith. If they were the only ones who believed something and no one else did, they would be far less sure of their faith.

But beyond that, the community provides a sense of belonging. The faith creates a common kind of culture. Some people wonder why African Americans choose to live near other African Americans. One reason is community. There is a shared background and then there is a community that understands where you came from and helps shape that view.

I'm not saying that you couldn't live without the community but Christians place a strong emphasis on going to church. They want you to be part of the community and some take reassurance from that. The community is one reason many ethnic groups have banded together.

Now one reason some people aren't atheists is the loss of community. It can be made up through secular means, such as Habitat for Humanity or various non-denominational charities. Is the sermon important to community? Charities don't have the equivalent of services, but should they?

That would be very intriguing.

Tennis Update

This is one of those blog entries that you should skip if you don't play tennis. I'll try to make it readable if you don't, but I won't try that hard. Expect to be bored. Even if you do play, you may or may not want to read.

Today, I thought I made a breakthrough. Let me explain what's going on. I've been trying to redo my forehand for about 9 months. It's taken a very long time because it requires me to adjust my wrist and arm at an angle so that it resembles the way the pros hit. I have a camcorder with a tiny playback. It's so tiny that I can't quite tell if I'm hitting the ball the way I want.

I have to take that video, upload it to my computer, where I can then slow it down and see if I've hit it right. That feedback loop is awful. That means, rather than fix my shot then and there, I have to wait until I get home and then, usually, realize I've hit it wrong. That can be depressing.

OK, so let me tell you what I'm trying to do. To explain this, I'll use a touch of physics. Imagine you had a frying pan. The surface you cook on has a "normal". To understand the normal, imagine you have a pencil. You put it on edge so the eraser is on the pan bottom and the point of the pencil points straight to the ceiling.

The pencil is perpendicular to the entire surface of the pan.

Now replace the pan with a tennis racquet, and the idea is the same. When you say a racquet face is "pointed" to a certain direction, it is the normal of the racquet face that points in that direction. That is, if you had that pencil, it's the direction the pencil points.

When you hit a forehand, you are hitting on the right side of your body. This is the power shot for most players.

If you watch pros hit, the forehand can be broken down into three parts. There is the takeback, where the player moves the racquet so it points to the back fence (the player faces the net). Then, there is the swing to contact, where the racquet moves forward until the racquet hits the ball. Finally, there is the follow-through. That's the part after hitting the ball until you finish.

While there's quite a bit of variation among the pros in the takeback, the swing forward has a lot of common attributes.

In particular, most pros have their racquet face pointing right. Now, when I looked at myself hitting a ball, I found that my racquet face pointed down. That is, to the ground. And occasionally, to the left.

I thought it would be easy to fix. Just rotate the wrist. But it isn't that easy. Small changes in the wrist cause huge orientations of the racquet face.

After many months, I realized a few things. First, the closer you swing the racquet to your body, the more likely it is to be closed, especially if you bend your wrist. I found that I generally bend my wrist a lot to hit the ball. The combination of bending the wrist a lot and swinging close to the body means the racquet face is closed.

It points down.

And I've spent months trying to figure out why I do that.

Part of it is muscle memory. When I swing, I stop thinking about how my wrist is oriented. My body just wants to do what it wants to do. I've thought about using various devices, but I'm just not that clever to do that. I know I need to bend my wrist less and I also need to move my arm further to my right.

I thought I had figured out a way to swing so that I don't get too closed. But, alas, it's not what I do.

This is why video is important. It shows me what I think I'm doing and what I'm doing is different.

Right now, the most successful thing I do is to think about one spot when I hit. That is, the racquet when it is right by my side. I make sure that is correct, and that seems to help the most. If I don't think of this reference point, then I end up closing the racquet.

The sad thing is, I can shadow swing, and do it the way I want to time and again. And then when I do it for real? I mess up. It's infuriating. The body just refuses to listen.

But I still try it and at least, there are things closer to where I want to be, but it's easy to make mistakes and slip to old habits.

Too easy.

I have an idea that I may give a whirl. I have a wrist brace. I can use that an a butter knife to make my wrist a bit more rigid. I should see if that helps or not.

Links

I prefer having many open tabs in a browser to remember sites rather than bookmarks or del.icio.us. Second choice is to stuff it into a blog entry just in case the number of open tabs gets too unwieldy or I get concerned I'll lose my tabs.

• Pancakes-NY Times
  
• Financial Crisis by MIT Blackjack team
  
• Our world may be a giant hologram
  
• Beginning Game Programming
  
• Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery
  
• French Garlic Soup
  
• I Teabagged Frank
  
• Recreating the button
  
• Getting the climax you deserve
  
• Links to food blogs
  
• Chili Chicken recipe
  
• Photoshop Tutorial
  
• Sichuan peppercorns
  
• David Foster Wallace
  
• Good editors aren't better or worse
  
• Rubinius for the Layman
  
• Ian's Shoelace Site
  
• Learning Rails with Heroku (broken)
  
• 10 Most Stunning Photoblogs
  
• Chicken with Yogurt recipe
  
• Writing a compiler in Ruby
  
• Installing Shoes (Ruby)
  
• 720p Youtube video upload
  
• Luke Wroblewski
  
• Hosting Rails