J Larsen

I'm holding out hope that Built to Spill will put out a good record this year. I think they are a really good rock group, but the last one was a misfire.

I saw them on Goo and thought they were great, but I was pretty young at the time. I remember very clearly that they played Burning Spear and only a few songs off the (then new) record.

I never really liked them all that much - I made myself tolerate them because my ex threw their first cd on a lot, but now that she's out of the equation... However, the new song where the singer repeats "My body is your body feel free to use my body" in sing-song like 50 times in a row is really one of the worst things I've ever heard on the radio. Give me Nelly over that shit any day. (And I thought "It's like stabbing yourself in the neck" would be a hard line to beat!)

That was my plan for the cat and the Mosaics - not so sure if my other stuff would fit, though.

The new Interpol single is one of the most atrocious things I've ever heard in my entire life. I still like the Panda Bear album, though it has lost a little of its initial luster for me.

That was me. Took the better part of a nice weekend. Any other questions?

I finally got fed up enough with my long-time rent stabilized (but otherwise problematic) apartment in soho, and am about to sign a lease for a new place about twice the size and a billion times the rent two blocks up the street. I live on a narrow, single-lane street, so loading up a truck is a huge pain in the butt and often just not possible. I have a lot of stuff, but only one really heavy piece of furniture. Any better ideas than buying a couple handtrucks and calling up a few friends?

Hey Guy - do you know that paper that came out sometime in the last couple years that found that the results of academic studies are biased towards finding significance levels of just under 5%? They had histograms of the p values that showed a huge spike right at 4.9. It was pretty funny, and somewhat appropriate to the issue at hand.

Last I checked.

But it seems unlikely that the more white refs you have, the more likely you are to have hot-headed obnoxious black players in the game or that the more black refs you have, the more likely you are to have calm, respectful white players in the game, which is the only way I can see your idea reversing the result. Again, I'm not sold on either study - but it doesn't seem likely to me that this is what is driving the result.

The NBA clearly wants to find no bias, and it is therefore not surprising that it finds none. The academics are probably motivated to find a bias (investing a lot of time in a research project only to get a null result is sort of a bummer), and I'm therefore not surprised that they found one. The question is how sensitive each result is to the assumptions of the underlying models and how reasonable their treatment of the data was. That the NBA refuses to release the data their study was run on raises an eyebrow (the proprietary personnel data argument is bullshit becuase they can code the data up in such a way that it retains its informational content but does not reveal exactly who was calling a foul on who at any given time).

Presumably they used the racial breakdown of the ref team. I agree that this is not as perfect as using the racial identity of the ref, but I don't find it to be as problematic as others suggest. Why do you not find it problematic? As you well know, correlation is not causation, and without a racial categorization of the specific referee making a specific call, you don't even have correlation. What conclusion can be drawn? When there are two or more white referees, more fouls are called on black players? Its a completely bogus study. It would be quite an odd result if the more white refs you had on a team, the more likely the refs were to call fouls on blacks vs. whites, but it wasn't the whites making the extra calls. Not impossible, but less plausible than the result we'd all prefer to think was untrue. That being said, I wouldn't take the results of the study at face value without getting some technical detail.

Why? What difference? Guy I think he is referring to this: No matter how small the effect is, if it is statistically significant, then it is a real effect given the assumptions of the model.

Hmmmm.... this sounds like it is "interesting" in the same way as a bad internet date. I'll see if I can find some samples online. Thanks!

I haven't, but someone else recently told me that I would probably like it. I'll check it out some time.

Aside from Extrapolation, the stuff with Miles and very small doses of Mahavishnu, I've nerver been able to get that into McLaughlin. I can appreciate the technical command of the instrument, but I just don't feel him.

I really didn't want to know that they were feeding cat food to chickens. Time to start a farm.

I don't think that had anything to do with him being brought up too early. Look at Cain. Foppert was just overhyped (as were Ainsworth and Williams). I'd like to think so, but after the Liriano trade, I wouldn't rule anything out.

While attempting to show someone at work Can-Am's products, I accidently went to www.can-am.com. Whoops.

That has happened the last couple times something went on last chance.

Last chance on Berigan...

I love to see them trade Morris or Ortiz (neither of whom I think can finish the season strong) and bring up Linceum, who has something like a 0.4 era through 4 starts in AAA.

A lot of research has shown that derivatives have improved the efficiency of the markets.

So true!! Somehow I had never really visualized this happening there, even though of course I always knew that it had. It really sounds like it's happening in some seedy club in a dodgy neighborhood back in a day when there were truly dodgy neighborhoods in lower Manhattan.

I actually prefer this one to Agharta and Pangaea. To my ears, this is his darkest and most evil sounding record - it is almost sort of punk. Not one I throw on a lot, but it definitely fills a certain need very well.