Nexus Prime Unveiling Soon

Here.

Amazon Silk: Connecting People and Clouds with Webbing

Amazon wants to rule the world. Is Silk a precursor to Skynet? In a word, yes. Watch out Amazon, you are making Cloud God angry.

Update: Bob Brenly is not Nostradamus

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/ct-spt-0926-cubs-cardinals-chicago--20110926,0,5348419.story

Bob Brenly is a visionary, but he doesn't give himself his due credit.

So Rick Santorum just lost the election...

He says sex shouldn't be an issue in the military. That is exactly why we repealed DADT. It is crazy how some Republicans only care about social issues. This guy is an idiot.

Opening Night

Community, Parks and Rec, and The Office all open tonight with new seasons. Now that Michael is gone, how about Jim and Pam leave and let Dwight take over the office? Also, Fringe debuts tomorrow and Sawsheezle can't wait to witness the new season. Also, in case you missed it, these shows have already aired new episodes:

Archer
Workaholics
Blue Mountain State
How I Met Your Mother
Modern Family
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

A Fur

This is a semi-immediate emotional reaction fur in response to Sawsheezle getting his little heart broken this evening by a prospective female. Shart happens. Alphas to the front! Anywho, this in addition to being stressed out by the semester and feeling like the University of Arizona football team could use a 25 year old DE/WR/CB prospect with years of eligibility left, I have decided to try a little bit of a "clense" diet in order to calm the nerves and restore my currently unbalanced chi. Also, I may have high blood pressure so this may help that too. I believe I will start things off by saying no way to fast food, alcohol, and soda. I will then increase my intake of flaxseed and wheatgerm oils while trying to pump extra hard at the gym. For the mental side of things, I think I will make some time for reflection/meditation and do some of that tantric yoga shit the celebs do. Anyway, the goal of course is to dunk a basketball and right now I am not getting rim (although I am very close) so the end result is clear. The journey itself is, admittedly, a little tough to bear sometimes, but shart happens and you have got to get back on the horse. Can I get another Alphas to the front!?

A Negative Droid Bionic Review

As expected, the pentile screen is a love-it or hate-it thing. Overall summary of a bunch of reviews seems to be: performance excellent, bloatware terrible, screen bad (or good depending on who you ask), 4g great, dual core awesome, camera ok, price not worth it.

http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/review-motorola-droid-bionic-2011099/

More Conference Realignment

Texas A&M is perhaps ruining things again. Can't we stop this realignment mularky? How about Sawsheezle settles things the alpha way? Bam. Here we go. How about the Lonestar conference which is only Texas schools? The rest of the Big 12 can stay together and add Boise State, and perhaps some other scraps.

The Lonestar Conference (10 schools)

Texas (BIG 12)
Texas Tech (BIG 12)
Texas A&M (BIG 12)
Baylor (Big 12)
TCU (Mountain West)
UTEP (Conference USA)
SMU (Conference USA)
Rice (Conference USA)
Houston (Conference USA)
North Texas (Sun Belt Conference)

Your One-Stop Fur for Droid Bionic Diesel Goodness

CNET

http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/07/motorola-droid-bionic-review/




http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/09/droid-bionic-review/




http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/07/droid-bionic-hits-verizon-tomorrow-we-go-hands-on-today-video/



http://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/09/07/motorola-droid-bionic-review/




Highlights/thoughts so far

1. It is fast.
2. It has a pentile screen which some people abhor. Here is some info.
3. It is going to cost $300 for sure.
4. I haven't heard anyone say that it is revolutionary by any means.
5. To me it seems this is too little too late even though 4g is still in its infancy.
6. If Nexus Prime is coming out before x-mas and iPhone next month is this phone worth the $300 price tag?


Keep coming for more...

Win-Tease

For those of you who like wins still please take a look at this little gem. You will waste part of your life if you read this article. I think he may be a win-tease (you're welcome world).

http://joeposnanski.si.com/2011/09/05/in-praise-of-wins-sort-of/?sct=mlb_t13_a2

Wilbur

Pretty funny in my opinion.

The Curious Case of Mark Reynolds

So I was having a friendly debate last night about the validity of scoring metrics in general and their ability to truly measure a player's value and possible impact on their team. Of course, it has been well documented that fantasy baseball is limited in its ability to measure the true value of a player, but I continue to argue that it is good at measuring raw offensive output. Again, we cannot measure defensive worth in fantasy baseball at least in its current incarnation. Some of the arguments that were brought up included situational hitting, lineup dependent thought processes by both the pitcher and the hitter, and various other psychological things. My argument is that there is no way that we can measure a player's psychological impact on a game so why worry about it? I think we should include an overall "fudge" factor that can include our "gut" instincts about a player's actual value. Take, for instance, Mark Reynolds. Reynolds, the perennial strikeout king, is like Adam Dunn's retarded little brother. Retarded because he strikes out more and walks less. They both just tear the cover off the ball though, but how good is Reynolds? I think all of our instincts will tell us that he sucks, but by how much? His replacement on the Diamondbacks this year, Ryan Roberts is, according to my gut, a decent third baseman but not an elite player. While I don't think he is better offensively than Reynolds, I "know" he is a better player overall. But is he? Let's take a look at the top third basemen according to Sawsheezle's scoring metric along with some advanced metrics from fangraphs. Recall that Sawsheezle's metric is fundamentally limited by the inherent parameters of fantasy baseball to only deal with offensive output.

The top third basemen according to Sawsheeszle (excluding Jose Bautista who is primarily in RF and Johnny Peralta who is at SS/3B):

1. Aramis Ramirez (300.7)
2. Michael Young (285)
3. Kevin Youkilis (248.5)
4. Mark Reynolds (241.8)
5. Adrian Beltre (232.8)
6. Evan Longoria (229.5)
7. Edwin Encarnacion (212)
8. Ryan Roberts (208.6)

Did you know that Aramis Ramirez is the best 3B in baseball (offensively)?

Now let's look at OPS from fangraphs which is still a raw metric, but doesn't include/consider number of games played/total at-bats:

1. Aramis Ramirez (.865)
2. Michael Young (.862)
3. Kevin Youkilis (.861)
4. Daniel Murphy (.809)
5. Mark Reynolds (.803)
6. Evan Longoria (.802)
7. Edwin Encarnacion (.801)
8. Ryan Roberts (.791)

No real shockers here, but Youkilis and Murphy are higher than expected, but this doesn't include total at-bats. Aramis has 107 more ABs than Murphy and 103 more than Youkilis and that is why Aramis has so many more points.

Now let's look at wRC which is a "runs created" metric:

1. Michael Young (91.5)
2. Aramis Ramirez (84.8)
3. Kevin Youkilis (75.9)
4. Mark Reynolds (71.8)
5. Ryan Roberts (65.3)
6. Edwin Encarnacion (62.4)
7. Evan Longoria (62.0)
8. Daniel Murphy (58.9)

Nothing so far has looked into fielding. Again, I wish we could do fielding in the fantasy league, but we really can't as was discussed in the scoring treatise. If we include fielding stats we can look at a player's WAR which is the number of wins above a replacement level player that the player is worth. The difference in two players' WARs should tell you how many more/less wins a team would have with one player or the other. Again, WAR is perhaps the most complicated statistic used in baseball today and I am not necessarily a believer in it, but it paints a different picture at least so let's dive in.

1. Kevin Youkilis (4.2)
2. Evan Longoria (4.0)
3. Ryan Roberts (3.6)
4. Michael Young (3.5)
5. Daniel Murphy (3.2)
6. Aramis Ramirez (3.2)
7. Alberto Callaspo (2.6)
8. Placido Palanco (2.3)
9. Macier Izturis (1.8)
10. Martin Prado (1.6)
11. Edwin Encarnacion (1.5)
12. Casey McGehee (0.7)
13. Mark Reynolds (0.6)

Now, at least according to WAR, Mark Reynolds drops from about 4th in the other metrics to 13th. We can see that the Diamondbacks gained three more "wins" by getting rid of Reynolds in favor of Roberts. But why is Reynolds' WAR so low? It is because he is a terrible fielder. We knew that. In our guts we knew that he sucked. We can at least see it here even if we can't measure some of the intangibles like whether or not he is a strong "clubhouse presence" or what he thinks about when he strolls to the plate with runners in scoring position.

This was interesting to do. I will be doing a lot of analysis like this over the offseason to reevaluate the scoring metric so as to improve it for next year. I would also thank my friend for putting up with a physicist who loves to argue about baseball.

Finally, a baseball writer who realizes Selig is ruining baseball

"MLB has spent decades trying to be more like the NBA and NFL. It hasn't worked. The solution is to embrace what is great about baseball, which is a long and meaningful regular season and the concept of a pennant race. MLB, under Bud Selig, sold September for October. Undoing that, by eliminating the wild card, is the key to making baseball's pennant races matter again."


Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/joe_sheehan/09/01/wild.card/index.html#ixzz1WkHG4KT9

No divisions please! Pennant races for the win! Please fire Bud Selig, elect Sawsheezle!

Fur Stats

I thought some of viewing stats were interesting.

Community is coming back

My work desktop

Here