The Top Ten Most Viewed Wooden Finger Posts (and The Best Of Everything) of 2012

And to finish the year off, these were the ten most viewed posts on this blog that were written this year:

1.       Album Cover Review – Lana Del Rey: Born To Die

2.       Album Review – Coldplay: Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends

3.       Quick … Name The Five Sports In Modern Pentathlon

4.       Mid-Year AFL All-Australian Team 2012

5.       Is Andrew Bogut A Bust?

6.       Rejigging the Olympics Medal Tally

7.       How To Rate Every One Day Batsman Ever, or Why Viv Richards is Probably The Best

8.       ‘Uncanny Avengers’ #1 and ‘Saga’

9.       The Finger Points Outwards No. 42 – Does Distracting Free Throw Shooters Work?

10.   Jimmy McNulty And The Economics Of The Baltimore Serial Killer

The first two posts were thousands of views ahead of the rest, and each racked up more views than the rest of the top ten combined. They probably did so for the same reason: they are high on the list when one does an image search in Google for the covers of those albums. Google searches tend to be the highest determinant of traffic for this blog, irrespective of content.

Now, some personal favourites for 2012:

Best Book: On Warne – Gideon Haigh
Best Album: Lonerism – Tame Impala
Best Song: Pyramids – Frank Ocean

Best TV Show: Mad Men
Best Film: The Dark Knight Rises
Best Comic: Saga – Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Best Sporting Event: Hawthorn v Sydney AFL Grand Final (though I got more satisfaction from the Melbourne Storm’s NRL Grand Final win)
Best Sportsperson: Usain Bolt
Best Website: The Basketball Jones
Best Post: The Flight Of The Pixie Point Guards – Andrew Rafner on The Basketball Jones
Best Beer:  Mountain Goat Rare Breed Before The Dawn Black IPA
Best Twitter Feed: Tim Siedell (@badbanana)

Prospero Ano Nuevo!

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The ‘Fightback’ In Cricket And Regression Toward The Mean

The word ‘fightback’ in cricket – often used to denote an improvement in the performance of a team – always annoyed me. Possibly this may have been because growing up I was a nervous Aussie cricket supporter, and given that the Australians had the upper hand in the majority of matches they played in, the word was seemingly most often employed by commentators cheering on the efforts of the other team. But possibly there was also a sense that a ‘fightback’ was not really that big a deal, that is a sense that it would be unusual for all 11 members of a cricket team to perform poorly.

This latter point is essentially the idea behind the concept of regression toward the mean. I like this term, because it puts a cricket team’s supposed ‘fightback’ into proper perspective. Say that a team is 4/40 – a pretty bad start to any team’s innings, and you have two batsmen who have to get off the mark out in the middle. What would you expect each of them to score? If they each scored about 40 runs, and added about 80 runs to the team total, you might be inclined to say that they had done very well, and that they had led a ‘fightback’. But really, scoring about 40 runs each is what you would expect, on average, the No.5 and No.6 batsmen to score. Now it could be that the team being 4/40 indicates that batting conditions are worse than average, and that would mean a batsman who performed at their average had actually done pretty well. Nevertheless, the point is that the anchor for one’s expectations should be what a batsman has done over his career rather than how the other batsmen have performed on any particular day.

Similarly, if a team is expected to make on average about 350 runs per innings, and they make only about 100 runs in the first innings, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that they would make substantially more than 100 runs in the second innings. Again, it’s nothing more extraordinary than a team regressing towards its mean performance. And the same applies if a batting team gets off to a considerably better-than-average start: you would expect that it is more likely than not that their performance from there on in will deteriorate, and the bowling team’s performance will improve in comparison.

Of course none of the above will seem that revelatory to cricket-watchers who have completed a course in statistics. But it’s a reminder that, during the course of a single match, when one is wondering what has been the driving force behind a supposed ‘fightback’, the answer often isn’t anything more dramatic than performance simply regressing to the mean.

The Finger Points Outwards - No. 51

ECONOMICS:  A conversation with the economics professor who created the board game Anti-Monopoly, including his legal troubles with Parker Bros.

 

BASKETBALL: Researchers find the surprising truth about whether basketball coaches overreact by benching star players when they get early fouls.

SOCIAL POLICY: Rave, By Dave: a blog about Australia’s tax-transfer system.

 

The Shit Gamer’s Review: 'Batman – Arkham City'

‘Batman: Arkham City’ has to be one of the greatest video games of all time (well, one of the quotes on the front of the ‘Game of the Year Edition’ I have says as much). One can get lost in its bleak cityscape for hours on end, gliding and grappling between the rooftops, or mixing it up with the Arkham City inmates at ground level. The gameplay is a combination of role-playing game and beat-em-up, effectively combining the two main elements of Batman’s crime-fighting methodology: detective work and hand-to-hand combat. (I’m sure it’s not the first Batman game to do this, but anyway it does it very well.) Similarly, the Catwoman sequences manage to throw in most of the things you would want to be Catwoman for: burgling, whipping, bounding up walls, and wrapping your legs around enemies’ necks.

One might argue that RPG’s lose a bit of their lustre nowadays in that you can easily look up the solutions online if you want to. I admit I looked up the solutions from time to time (this one from Game Pressure proving to be the most helpful). Allow me to make the following justifications. First, the game itself provides a lot of hints, and so looking up guides online doesn’t add as much as you might first think. Second, I only used them when I had been wandering around aimlessly for some time. Third, you could argue that it is within the character of Batman to use all the resources available to him, and that Batman feels more like Batman when he knows exactly what he’s going to do next.  Finally, video games are a lonely experience, and seeing others raise the same questions you are raising helps you feel decidedly less solipsistic.

It took me essentially one obsessive week to finish the main storyline, but that is just a small part of what ‘Batman: Arkham City’ has to offer.  There are many side missions, and hidden prizes to collect, and once you finish the game you can go back through it all over again, with harder enemies. But here’s the paradox: as much as I loved ‘Batman: Arkham City’ I just wanted to get through the main story as quickly as I could. As I already said, I used cheats whenever I was wandering aimlessly for a few minutes. Indeed (SPOILERS!) when, two-thirds of the way through, Catwoman is given the chance to leave Gotham City rather than go back and save Batman, I thought ‘beauty!’ and took the exit. When (SPOILERS AGAIN!) I had slogged my way through all the bad guys and had to endure throwing that freaking Remote Batarang 450 times and had actually finished the game, and then found out there was some sort of extra mission at the end, my heart sank a little. I admit it: I have no patience. I don’t explore. I’m just driven by the need to finish. I’m sure there are areas of life where that’s an asset.   

(A final aside: yeah, yeah, she’s just a computer-generated character and it's Wolowitzesque to say it, but Talia al Ghul in ‘Arkham City’ is hot. Like, really hot. And if you do feel silly ogling a bunch of pixels, do an image search for the actress who did her voice instead.)

Album Review: Melody’s Echo Chamber – Melody’s Echo Chamber

French singer Melody Prochet uses her supposed ‘echo chamber’ to full effect on her debut album. Typically, her tracks begin with about 0:05 or 0:10 of relative quietude and bottom-of-the-scale frequencies, before the synthesisers appear and the plus-10kHz frequencies light up with red. ‘Endless Shore’, at track number six, is the definitive MEC track in this regard, with a fairly consistent block of red-level intensity at the 10-15kHz mark, while the highest frequencies primarily remain only in blue. The pattern is more or less repeated on another stand-out track ‘Some Time Alone, Alone’, which proceeds along with a similarly shoegaze-like spectrography.

'Endless Shore':

 

'Some Time Alone, Alone':

Other tracks dial down the energy a touch: single ‘I Follow You’ has a milder, bluer, and more stable profile than the two tracks mentioned above. Seventh track ‘Quand Vas Tu Rentrer’ though stands out in contrast to a lot of the album (its lyrics are in French, for one thing). It stays mostly in the sub-5 kHz range, particularly at the start of the track which has only a few, repeated notes and the faint strands of Melody’s distorted voice. The track then builds up gradually, and only starts to move well up the scale when the drums enter in around halfway through.

'I Follow You':

‘Quand Vas Tu Rentrer’:

 

However, the greatest activity at the upper frequencies comes on two of the later tracks – ‘IsThatWhatYouSaid’ and unexpectedly, the closer ‘Be Proud Of Your Kids’. Both are essentially instrumentals: ‘IsThatWhatYouSaid’ is purely one, and its barrage of loud, spinning noises keep it nested in the double-digit kHz range.  Meanwhile, the sound of ‘Be Proud Of Your Kids’ is more intense than it may first seem given that its most memorable component is a young girl speaking shrilly in French. In reality though, that actually forms a minor part of the overall file, which combines a cluster of instruments with Melody’s largely indecipherable but sufficiently vociferous lyrics.    

‘IsThatWhatYouSaid’:

 
‘Be Proud Of Your Kids’:
 

All in all, ‘Melody’s Echo Chamber’ is a debut that doesn’t flitter around in the lower ranges, but continuously reaches for the 22kHz border. Some audiophiles might prefer that there was a bit more variance in how the tracks progress, but those who like their spectrograms splashed in red with a splatter of white will surely not be disappointed.

Graphic Novels You Would Like If You Weren’t Too Chicken To Read Them: Building Stories

Over the next few weeks, various websites will start naming their lists of best comics and graphic novels for 2012, and it’s a foregone conclusion that Chris Ware’s ‘Building Stories’ will be near or at the top of most of them. ‘Building Stories’ is probably the most acclaimed comic since ‘Watchmen’; it’s so acclaimed that even book reviewers such as Publishers Weekly have ranked it amongst the best books overall for 2012. (Indeed, you could almost say that it’s so acclaimed that those who fancy themselves to be in the ‘literary know’ might be too chicken not to read it.)

Book reviewers and hardcore book readers are to some extent book fetishists, and even those (like myself) who have acquiesced to owning an e-book reader still have a fondness for the look, feel and smell of a thick-as-a-brick hardback. They know that, in most cases, their preference is irrational; the words are no different whichever form you read them in, and the electronic versions are usually far cheaper and do not clutter up your living space. But ‘Building Stories’ gives them all something to point to as evidence that the ‘physical’ form is superior. Ware’s new novel comes in the form of 14 separate sections of different shapes and sizes, which (theoretically, at least) can be read in any order. It’s therefore a book whose reading experience is essentially impossible to replicate in electronic form, which I think explains at least part of its appeal amongst the world’s remaining readers. 

The 14 different sections of ‘Building Stories’ come packed in a grand-looking box, shown below:

On the back of the box, I’ve heard, is supposed to be a guide for the order that the various sections should be read in. (But if you can figure it out, you’re a better reader than I am.)

If you look more closely on the back of the box, you’ll see that my copy was ruined by my having to peel an over-adhesive sticker off. I’m not going to publicly denounce the store I bought it from for their sticker policy and the disregard it shows to collectors (apart from to say it’s a store that should definitely know better than that), but needless to say I was NOT HAPPY AT ALL!!!

And this is how all the sections sit when you open the box. Really, this is exactly how they sit, because I’m obsessive enough to make sure that I’ve kept the original ordering within the box (even if that’s different from the order in which I’ve read them).

 

This is my favourite part of the collection: it follows a single day in the lives of the main characters (Sep 23, 2000), and it’s made to look like a Little Golden Book. You could even write your name on the inside front cover – of course, I wouldn’t dream of doing that in a million years …

 

 

I got excited by this one for a moment – I thought it was a board game! Now that would’ve broken down some literary barriers! Alas, it’s not, it’s just a well-reinforced comic strip.

 

At the bottom of the box is this monster newspaper-sized section. I haven’t read this one yet, because like any broadsheet it’s a bit hard to read while you’re in bed unless you’re plotting to take your partner’s eye out. I’m become even more hesitant to read it now I’ve spotted the huge, creepy picture of a grimacing little girl lurking somewhere in the middle (not shown). It’s the most disturbing Ware drawing since Jordan Lint’s wife seemingly tried to swallow his head whole.

 

BEER!! [1] – BeerHere DEAD CAT

Name: DEAD CAT

Brewery: BeerHere

Place Of Origin: De Proef, Lochristi, BELGIUM

Type: (easy-going) Red Ale

Alcohol Content: 4.7%

Why I Bought It: My lovely wife told the guy at the counter it was because it has a dead cat on the label, as if this were a revelation. Of course it’s because it has a DEAD CAT on it!

The guy then asked if I knew why the beer had got that name. Apparently it’s because BeerHere can’t make their usual Fat Cat ale, due to European hop shortages. (You can also discover this by reading the story on the label.) He then gave me a free lambric beer, so all in all it was a top visit.

Taste: Fairly light for a red ale actually. Those imagining a strong, dark, dead animal taste will be disappointed.

What I did while drinking it: Watched the Aussie cricket team’s middle-order batsmen Michael Hussey and Matthew Wade flay the Sri Lankans at what used to be the Bellerive Oval in Hobart. (Also, I started my ‘Building Stories’ post for later this week.)

What I did after drinking it: Confronted the dead, dark matter in our kitchen sink.

The Shit Shot Theory*

In a 2010 article lambasting NBA easybeats the Washington Wizards for a particularly horrendous night’s shooting, the Courtside Analyst coined the rather splendid phrase ‘the Shit Shot Percentage’. ‘The Shit Shot Percentage’ was used to denote those shots taken from just inside the three-point line at a range of 16 to 23 feet from the rim; too far away to have a high expected percentage of going in, but too close in to gain an extra point if they do. As the Courtside Analyst puts it:

“These are the absolute lowest value shots and should be avoided. Besides being stupid, they are also a sign of (a) weakness — you lack the strength to go to the hoop, or (b) laziness – you are settling for an available “bad” shot instead of working to get a good shot. Shit shots are available all night long. That’s because they don’t return very well on the investment.”     

The article then goes on to claim that NBA teams take a ‘shit shot’ 20 per cent of the time, or on one in every five possessions.  The ‘Shit Shot Theory’ has been used to explain the difference in the field goal shooting percentages of the New York Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony and the Miami Heat’s LeBron James. Using shooting statistics from the 2009-2010 season, Andres Alvarez at The Wages of Wins Journal showed that while Carmelo is a better mid-range shooter than LeBron, the latter is a much more effective scorer because a higher proportion of his shots are close to the rim.

Now I think I have a nice-looking jump shot, perfected through spending years of my childhood daydreamily shooting away at the (now-long departed) hoop in my parent’s backyard. It’s not a jump shot to make you swoon or anything, but it has the one hand to the side and the flick of the wrist and everything. And my teammates would say there are definitely spots on the court which are my spots to shoot from. I’ve marked these spots on the diagram below:

I don’t really shoot three-pointers nowadays because I have to heave the ball to even make the distance, and that makes my shot all wonky. I remember one night at basketball training when I was about 13 or 14 I was training apart from the other kids for some reason and I took shot after shot from halfcourt, and - no joke, I swear it’s true! - I was getting something like 7 out of every 10 in. There was a parent of another kid on the sidelines who I think was watching me, and after every swish I would turn around and look at him to see if he had seen it, and then trying to seem all nonchalant I would dribble back to halfcourt and drain another Hail Mary. Anyway, apparently I had more muscles in my arms at 13 than 33. I can’t make those anymore. And I don’t tend to drive to the hoop, because I have no muscles and I’m slow and uncoordinated and someone would flatten me.

With that in mind, let’s overlay the above diagram with the ‘Shit Shot Range’, shall we?

Yes, that’s right - all of my favourite spots are in the Shit Shot Range. This is why, despite my nice-looking textbook jump shot, my actual field goal percentage is quite low. If Melo and Bron can only make 40 per cent of their shots from that range, then you can imagine that I don’t make a particularly high percentage of shots from that range either. 

I don’t naturally tend to look to shoot anyway – to the point where my teammates have shouted ‘SHOOT! SHOOT!’ when I get the ball – but after working out the implications of the Shit Shot Theory for my offensive usefulness I’ve been even more reluctant to hoist up attempts. Which is a good thing, in terms of winning basketball games, as deflating as this realisation is to my self-worth. And my years spent tarting up my jump shot haven’t been a total waste – after all, there’s always H-O-R-S-E.   

*Actually, it’s not technically a theory, but calling it one makes the title of this post reminiscent of that Sheldon Cooper show.