Warnie vs Murali - Round 2

Former Sri Lankan captain, Arjuna Ranatunga has weighed into the Warnie v Murali debate with this argument:

"If you take the record, Murali has played fewer matches and Warne never had to bowl at the top-order batsmen... He always had McGrath and Gillespie to take wickets at the start. Warne would come in sometimes and clear the tail. If you look at Murali, he has to come on and take top-order wickets from the start."

OK, Ranatunga is obviously stretching the point to say that Warne never bowled at the top order, but what about his more general point that a higher percentage of Murali's wickets are specialist batsmen? Courtesy of Howstat, we see that 25.7 per cent of Murali's wickets have been top-order batsmen (1-3) and 42.6 per cent have been middle-order batsmen (4-7), compared to 23.0 per cent and 39.8 per cent for Warne.

Shane Warne's wickets by batting order

Muttiah Muralidaran's wickets by batting order

So, Ranatunga is right, but is that necessarily a good thing for Murali? The point I made in my last post on this subject was that Warnie's figures may have actually been harmed by bowling with McGrath and Gillespie, because it reduced his chances of picking up quick and easy wickets when they were there to be had. Warnie actually took a higher percentage of his wickets in the top order than, say, Stuart MacGill, who has also had to deal with the Australian fast bowlers grabbing quick wickets. Meanwhile, someone like Anil Kumble, whose bowling partners have not been as great, has figures that are more similar to Murali's.

Stuart MacGill's wickets by batting order

Anil Kumble's wickets by batting order

In other words, Murali's haul of top-order wickets may not be worth as much as Warnie's top-order wickets, because Warnie mainly took top-order wickets when they were hard to get. As I've said before, I doubt that this accounts for the whole difference between Warne's and Murali's records, but it's an argument that I think should be considered more closely.

Searching For The Boom Recruit

I was asked the other night to write something on the AFL National Draft. Since others have already looked at the average number of games that each number draft pick can be expected to play, I thought I would look at the immediate impact that each of the top 10 draft picks can be expected to have. Here is a summary of what the top 10 draft picks over the past decade have done in the season after they were drafted:

Pick	Average Games	Median Games	Best
1	15.2	16.5	Brett Deledio/ Bryce Gibbs - 22
2	12.4	15.5	Paul Hasleby - 21
3	9.4	7.0	Chris Judd - 22
4	6.5	6.5	Matthew Pavlich - 18
5	10.0	9.0	Leigh Brown - 21
6	3.9	4.0	Steven Salopek - 9
7	7.0	4.5	Joel Selwood - 21
8	4.6	3.5	James Bartel/ Chris Tarrant - 11
9	3.5	2.0	Caydn Beetham/ Mark McVeigh - 9
10	4.1	4.0	Chris Egan - 13

Judging from these stats, Matthew Kreuzer (Carlton, No.1) and Trent Cotchin (Richmond, No.2) would be expected to be solid contributors next season. (Also, it's probably fair to say that the higher you are drafted, the lower the quality of competition there is at your club for senior places.) Picks 3 to 5 would be expected to be useful contributors, while picks 6 to 10 will probably only play a handful of games. As for the rest, while I imagine there will be your Alwyn Daveys and so forth, you can probably draw a line through most of them in 2008. But one can always hope that your team has the bolter.

The Finger Points Outwards - No.6

I've written another article for the Avengers Forever website, called: Whatever Happened to the '90s Generation? You know, back in the early 1990s, Marvel's characters were actally used to sell comic books rather than movies. Yep, it's hard to believe.

Here's a couple of interesting articles from The Economist about the U.S. of A:

First, the great experiment of New York's public schools.

Second, what you can learn about America from Dollywood.

And finally, a review from the Economist on Pierre Bayard's book about 'how to talk about books you haven't read'.

Warnie vs Murali

Over the coming Australian summer, Sri Lankan spinner Muttiah Muralidaran is expected to overtake Australian spinner Shane Warne as the highest wicket-taker in the history of test cricket. But who has been the better bowler? Let’s take a look at their respective records:

Warne – 145 tests, 708 wickets at 25.42 runs per wicket, 57.49 balls per wicket, 2.65 runs per over, 37 times taken five wickets in an innings, 10 times taken ten wickets in a match.
Muralidaran – 114 tests, 702 wickets at 21.36 runs per wicket, 53.45 balls per wicket, 2.40 runs per over, 60 times taken five wickets in an innings, 20 times taken ten wickets in a match.

On the face of it, Murali’s figures are more impressive. However, a common charge against Murali’s record is that, unlike Warne, he has taken a lot of his wickets against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, both of whom are relatively easy pickings for a half-decent trundler. Muralidaran has taken 163 wickets in 23 matches against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, while Warnie has taken 17 wickets in a paltry 3 matches against the minnows. Hence, the argument goes, Warne’s career figures are more impressive than they first appear.

But are they? To answer this, let’s adjust Murali’s figures so that he has played the same amount of Tests against each nation as Warnie has. For example, Murali’s career wickets would be the sum over all opponents of the number of wickets Murali has taken against that opponent times the ratio of the number of tests Warne has played against that opponent to the number of tests Murali has played against that opponent. Murali’s adjusted figures are as follows:

Muralidaran adjusted – 144 tests*, 903 wickets at 21.86 runs per wicket, 55.50 balls per wicket, 2.36 runs per over, 75 times taken five wickets in an innings, 29 times taken ten wickets in a match.

*Warne played 1 test against the ICC World XI.

So Murali still appears to come out ahead; the only difference now being that Warne has bowled to the Sri Lankan batting line-up, while Murali has faced the mighty Australian batting line-up (which makes Murali’s figures more impressive). While Murali’s figures have been helped by playing more often against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, he has also performed well against the nations that Warne played a lot of cricket against, including England, South Africa, New Zealand and the West Indies.

So what hope is left for Warnie-boosters? Well, leaving aside any arguments about the legality of Murali’s bowling action, the main argument would seem to be that Warne’s figures were adversely affected by being surrounded by better bowlers than Murali. It could be that when there were easy wickets to be had, Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie gobbled up most of them before Warne could get a go, but when the going got tough, it was left to Warne to be belted around the park before getting the breakthrough. My guess is that will not make the difference, but I’m ready to be proven otherwise. At least Warne can always say that he won more matches.

The Finger Points Outwards - No.5

Think you know Superman? Think again.

Think you've got it made when you win the lottery? Think again.

Think video games make people more violent? Well, maybe.

Keep Those Novels Simple, Stupid

Today I became aware of the fact that Amazon compiles statistics on the readability, complexity and length of some of its titles. This got me to thinking: how do the books that I like compare to the rest of Western literature? As my profile shows, my top 20 favourite fiction books are as follows:

1 Ulysses - James Joyce
2 King Lear - William Shakespeare
3 Paradise Lost - John Milton
4 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
5 Neuromancer - William Gibson
6 The Trial - Franz Kafka
7 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
8 Money - Martin Amis
9 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
10 Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
11 The Man Who Was Thursday - D.K. Chesterton
12 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
13 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
14 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
15 Atomised - Michel Houellebecq
16 The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
17 Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
18 The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis
19 Waiting For Godot - Samuel Beckett
20 Cloudstreet - Tim Winton

The table below gives the median values for all of the top 20 books that I could find statistics on, and the percentage of fiction books which are below that value:

<<

Metric	Median Value of Top 20 Books	% of Fiction Books Below Median Value
Readability
Fog Index	8.7	37% are easier
Flesch Index	69.7	37% are easier
Flesch-Kincaid Index	6.1	25% are easier
Complexity
Complex Words	9%	48% have less
Words Per Sentence	12.5	26% have less
Length
Characters	462130	54% have less
Words	81208	55% have less
Sentences	5184	58% have less

So what have we learnt? Apparently I like books that are on the readable side, and not too complex. It may be that I’m a simple guy, but I’m going to take a stab that my preferences are fairly representative of the human population. I also seem to like books that are slightly on the longer side. In fact, if you consider my three favourite books as outliers – ‘Paradise Lost’ being an epic poem, ‘King Lear’ being a play, and ‘Ulysses’ being whatever it is – then the next four highest books – ‘1984’, ‘Neuromancer’, ‘The Trial’, and ‘Brave New World’ – are all pretty typical of my preferences. (Three of those are also science-fiction books set in the Earth’s future, but that’s a subject for another post.)

Since I’ve been struggling with Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ recently, I thought it would be interesting to see how that compares. Unsurprisingly, it’s more ‘unreadable’ and more complex than most of my favourite titles, although not overly so (‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ have it well beat in those departments). Where the trouble seems to be is length; it’s about 4 times as long as the median value of my top 20. Maybe that’s why I’ve only managed to get a quarter of the way through it.

The Finger Points Outwards - No.4

Some interesting articles from the past couple of weeks, all of them economics-based:

Why gold-digging is a tough line of work.

Hurwicz, Maskin and Myerson shared the Nobel prize in Economics for their research into 'mechanism design'. While I'm still not sure I know exactly what that means, this article from the Economist helped me to understand it better than most.

Hillary Clinton has suggested that every newborn should be given $5000 that would accumulate interest and be available once the person turned 18. Marginal Revolution considers the economics of this proposal.

And finally, why it's better to be Santa than Scrooge.

In Rainbows: The Event and the Album

To put it frankly: technology scares me. I haven’t got the call from Guinness yet, but I reckon that I probably have the highest CD-to-MP3 file ratio in the Western world (if I’d been born ten years earlier, it would be the highest vinyl-to-CD ratio). So when those sneaky lads in Radiohead announced they were going to release their latest offering, ‘In Rainbows’, as a download off their website, my reaction was something like a nervous tingle, followed by a shortness of breath, and capped off with the horrible sensation of a paradigm shifting out from under my feet, dropping me into the digital abyss. Where others saw opportunity, I saw minefields. And unless I wanted to wait two months for the ‘physical’ release (a feasible option, but not a palatable one), I had to join the ranks of the internet shoppers behind the monks, the yokels, and the seven year old girls.

For those who were a bit more technologically-savvy than myself, the big news surrounding the release of the new Radiohead album was not that it was available for download, but that the band were going to let buyers choose how much they would pay for it. While putting purchasers through a rigorous series of questions to work out their reservation price would have been a more interesting (and economically sensible) way of doing this, for me this added another quandary to my decision to go down the download route. After a little bit of research on record pricing, which basically consisted of me skimming over some guy’s estimated breakdown (cheers to the Google age!) of the various components of a record’s price, I decided that, after subtracting marketing, retailing and manufacturing costs, around 11 or 12 Australian dollars was about right. In the end though I paid bang on 4 pounds, or 10 Australian dollars. Considering that I was hammered when I entered this amount, Thom Yorke can possibly count himself a little unlucky that I didn’t end up paying for his kids’ educations. I had another prolonged shortness of breath as 50 megabytes of MP3 files were transferred to my desktop, but I think it worked out OK – my computer hasn’t crashed yet and my bank account still has funds. I should stop walking around like ‘a cat tied to a stick’ in another week or so.

Anyway, I should actually say something about the album itself, which is excellent. The people still waiting ten years onwards for a repeat of ‘The Bends’ or ‘OK Computer’ are, once again, going to have to keep on waiting, but everybody else should be well pleased with what they find here. The main point that strikes me about ‘In Rainbows’ is that, after spending the last few albums approximating electronica and other genres of music, Radiohead have now emerged with a style that is definitely their own. Just as they have bypassed the music industry in the release of this record, so too have they staked out a musical realm for themselves that is far removed from what anybody else is currently doing. (In fact, has anyone spotted them in the past couple of years? Have they just been living in a big basement?) Somehow, without us really noticing it, they have woven together their two musical eras. Most of the songs, as has been typical from ‘Kid A’ onwards, are built around haunting, quasi-mechanical grooves, but then somewhere vaguely halfway through they begin to build up and eventually flower into the soaring finales that sent the hairs on the back of our necks standing bolt upright throughout the pre-‘Kid A’ era. The amazing ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ is the best example – it starts out with a insistent drum and guitar pattern (note that ‘real’ instruments are being used here, if that still has any meaning nowadays), and then slides into Thom doing his three-way vocal acrobatics, with more ‘angst’ in his voice than we’ve heard in years. Suddenly, Radiohead are all about the future again, and in an industry bloated by remixes and glorified karaoke singers, that has to be a good thing. Perhaps they’ll even inspire me to use on-line bookstores, you know, on the day when Zadie Smith releases her latest novel in pdf files…