Jump for Jurvis

Scruffy, sensitive male seeks gentle electric razor for tender caresses in the early morning. Must be low-maintenance and sweet-tempered.  Any recommendations peanut gallery?

After over 6 months at the top of my favorite Smart Playlist, Mainstream by Outkast has fallen off the chart. This Smart Playlist, called “_last week” so that it’s listed first among my playlists, is very simple. All songs that I’ve listened to in the last week are automatically added to it. If I’ve gone more than a week without listening to it, the song is automatically excised from the list. This means that there was no period of time from last October until last week when I went more than a week without listening to this single song. That may not seem like much in the era of ClearChannel overplaying a handful of schlock for whole seasons, but this one song out of a 60GB iPod (over 7000 mp3s!) remained atop the stack.

_last week means so much to me because it does an interesting thing that you can only get through an iPod interface (the one case where the iTunes interface doesn’t logically surpass the iPod interface). It allows the cream to rise to the top. By that I mean, the song at the top of _last week will always be the song that has spent the most continuous weeks having been played. It’s the kind of feedback cycle that lets you quickly listen to a broad selection of music that has been on repeat in your subconscious. And there’s no field in iTunes you can sort on that will present this cream to you in the same way. So take the plunge and make your own _last week (or _last month etc). Even if you never listen to it, you’ll be surprised to see how quickly it self selects the jams that get you groovin’.

Here’s a recipe for making $230:

1. Hold a blogging contest.
2. Start a pool to offer a grand prize for said contest.
3. Hold the cash.
4. Never mention it again.

When my mother first started watching Pride and Prejudice, I was 16 and not interested. But as she watched it again and again (and again!), I slowly came to see enough scenes to be intrigued. Now it’s one of my favorite stories of all time. My copy of the book is well-worn and I regularly bust out the DVD when I can tempt someone to join me for a 5 hour movie.

I tore through Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game over the holidays. My fascination with baseball and stats was well satiated until one footnote nearly derailed Michael Lewis’s hundreds of pages of well-constructed prose:

* These “percentages” are designed to drive anyone who thinks twice about them mad. It’s one thing to give 110 percent for the team, but it is another to get on base 1,000 percent of the time. On-base “percentage” is actually on-base “per thousand.” A batter who gets on base four out of ten times has an on-base “percentage” of four hundred (.400). Slugging “percentage” is even more mind-bending, as it is actually “per four thousand.” A perfect slugging percentage– achieved by hitting a home run every time– is four thousand: four bases for every plate appearance. But for practical purposes, on-base and slugging are assumed to be measured on identical scales. At any rate, the majority of big league players have on-base percentages between three hundred (.300) and four hundred (.400) and slugging percentages between three hundred and fifty (.350) and five hundred and fifty (.550).

-Lewis, 127

Yikes! Where to begin? I’ll skip his ridiculous usage of quotation marks and get straight to the point. 4/10 = .4 = .40 = .400 = 400/1000. Just because baseball stats are rounded after three decimal places and read as if the decimal point wasn’t even there by an announcer, does NOT equate per cent (literally per 100 from the Latin) with per thousand.

I don’t know how the editing process works in a publishing house like Norton, but for no one to catch the idiocy of this footnote makes me squirm a little inside. Basic math literacy (numeracy) is important for every one to learn no matter what they intend to do in life!

Reason number 4 for Todd to procrastinate away an hour or two installing Word Press and migrating his blog. Of course, he could just create an account at wordpress.com and use this MT plugin, but that would be superultramegalame.

This is what I’d said all along (since high school at least). The pre-chicken ancestor laid an egg with enough genetic variation in it to be called a chicken. End of story.