Friday, April 09, 2010

The First Baseball Team Photo

I stumbled across this photo of the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club in 1858.


Thursday, April 08, 2010

Tim Berners-Lee on an "OPEN DATA" Web

The creator of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee has been pushing the Semantic Web for almost a decade. A web that is based on the data WITHIN documents rather than the documents themselves is how he sees the Internet of the future.

A new element found...more like created in the lab



Element number 117 discovered.  According to this article, it fits inbetween 116 and 118 which have already been discovered.


READ HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE

Look.  I'm not a physicist or chemist (although I took my fair share of high level science courses in college) but how do you discover element 117 AFTER 118?

The new name (unofficial) is:  ununseptium

If I create a new element in a lab, I want to be used as an artifical sweetner.  I can see it now:  Radioactive sweetner for your cup of "Joe" in the morning.  Its so heavy, you can taste the bevy of protons swimming around.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Economic Biases; Poor Reasoning



A great post on The Big Picture Blog describing how our biases have guided how we perceive the economic changes over the last several years. 

While this type of behavior isn't anything new--we are all human after all--biases and irrational conclusions seem to be getting a stronger lift through media outlets on both sides.   It is still amazing to me that even among individuals who are educated fall victim to biases and do nothing to change their habits.  They rarely weed through their ideology to get to the real truth.  As a psychologist once told me, "People are afraid of what they don't know or what makes them uncomfortable."

How do individuals perceive FINANCIAL REGULATORY REFORM, INFLATION, CREDIT CRISIS, MARKETS? Read ON HERE



Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Bank Failure Counter

This doesn't even make the last "block" of a newscast anymore. Yes, bank failures continue. This year, its the regional banks versus the larger banks.

NUMBER OF BANK FAILURES:

2000: 2
2001: 4
2002: 11
2003: 3
2004: 4
2005: 0
2006: 0
2007: 3
2008: 25
2009: 140

2010 (April 5th): 66

Sunday, April 04, 2010

2010 Pecota Projections Are FINAL

The 2010 Baseball season is here. PECOTA, the Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm is a statistical method for evaluating players. Using this method, accurate predictions have been made on overall team performance.

Snapshot of the American League Central.


Full link: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/fantasy/dc/

Thanks to Roy Neyer of ESPN.com for this baseball note:

Box score of the last game in which a player went 7 for 7.

Box Score Snapshot:

Full link: http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN197509160.shtml