Author: Muttrox

Sons of Anarchy had some pretty good songs on it. Here are two cover versions I particularly like:

Lyle Workman & The Forest Rangers did this very soulful instrumental version of Fortunate Son.

Other good covers include Hey, Hey, My, My, Gimme Shelter, Someday Never Comes, and (below) White Buffalo’s version of House of the Rising Sun. Enjoy!

Sons of Anarchy.. not the greatest show by a long shot, but one out of every three episodes seemed tighter with better flow and structure. Wonder why?

That’s our wacky president!
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” And he added that the United States should admit more people from places like Norway.

Let’s unpack this:
1. He used vile profanity. Not a big deal. Plenty of presidents used salty language. This one is predictably much more coarse. It is not surprising and not important.
2. He thinks we should have more immigrants from prosperous first world countries, countries kinda like us. Not much wrong with that either, or at least it is easily defensible.
3. The people from these countries are not the same as these countries. There is something wrong here. Not everyone from a country represents that country, and Haiti’s poverty corruption and hopelessness shouldn’t condemn any of their people.
4. What is truly sad is the complete and utter lack of empathy. The idea of immigration as something we do for someone else is completely foreign (ha ha) to Trump. Refugees are losers. He genuinely feels that people born in the wrong circumstances brought it upon themselves. He seems utterly confused at the rationale for allowing folks in. It is the complete antithesis of the words on the Statue of Liberty.
The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made – a big setback for DACA!

President Trump said (tweeted) later:

The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made – a big setback for DACA!

I agree fully. Except the outlandish proposal was from Trump.

There is a thematic flow to this round. It helps to say the questions out loud, hearing the rhythm often makes the answer obvious.

1. How much is one plus one?
2. How much is one plus one plus one?
3. What feeling should you hide away?
4. Will you hide your feelings?
5. What year do I have feeling will be a good one?
6. What year have I been feeling it since?
7. What year did Justine hang down with the freaks and ghouls??
8. No one alive from this year will ever do.
9. What year will I kick it like?
10. What year will I party like tonight? (easy one)
11. What year do we assume control?

“I wonder how many steps I need for one calorie?,” I idly thought. I have a Fitbit data, I wonder how many ways there are to approach this. Let the math geekdom commence!

Assumption: Fitbit uses a linear algorithm. You get some credit for living, and then extra credit for steps. Exercise figures in, but I’m treating that as a second order problem not in scope.
1) Do a scatter plot to confirm linear relationship. Yes, it seems pretty linear. A quick correlation on the data gives .9666, very high.
2) Keep looking at the Fitbit until I have just hit any particular calorie. Count steps until it increments again.
3) Similarly, look at the data. Find two entries with similar steps, and calculate the difference.
a. Observations 12 and 13: A difference of 16 steps was 144 calories
b. Observations 13 and 14: A difference of 52 steps was -138 calories. Uh oh.
c. Observations 20 and 21: A difference of 81 steps was ~-300 calories. Uh oh.
d. Conclusions: Maybe not so linear? This approach didn’t work at all.
4) Pick two observations that seem kinda typical. The linear equations is y=mx+b, 2 equations in 2 variables. Check results against a few other observations, see if it holds up.
5) General Linear modeling. Which here degrades to the simple case, and Excel has that built into the graphing. The equations is 0.0726x+1933.4.

Conclusion: I get 1,981 calories for just existing, and each step gets me another .7 calories. Or it takes 1,377 steps to get a hundred calories.

Maybe it’s time for Muttrox to get back to work.

Oddly enough, this seems to be a real question. A number of people at work maintain that there is no such word as “scarcity.” Go figure.

I watch a lot of NBA basketball now that Celtics games are broadcast frequently. I’m loving it. Basketball is a great sport. It is not close to broken, but the professional game can be improved easily.

Make Games Shorter: Really, make more of the games actual play. Reduce stoppages of play, increase the flow and speed of the game. Reduce the boredom of watching one player make a free throw.

1. Greatly reduce timeouts: I knew that the number had been reduced, I didn’t realize all the fine points that have reduced the end of game drag. The effect has been noticeable.
2. Enforce “continuation” appropriately. There have been efforts along these lines, but it needs more.
3. Greatly reduce “In the bonus” free throws: Presumably this rule is here to dissuade a team from continually committing fouls. This is evidenced by the fact that offensive fouls are excluded. But the threshold is set far too low. It should not be normal to be ‘in the bonus’ so much. Normal play is dissuaded, and the game is slowed down for no good reason. The current limits are on the fifth foul in a quarter, or the second foul in the final two minutes of any quarter. Possible tweaks are:
   • Increase the threshold to seventh foul or 3rd of final two minutes. In fact, the thresholds should be backed into. Look at the distribution of actual fouling within a quarter, and decide what percentage should be in the bonus, determine the thresholds from there.
   • Measure the limits by the half instead of the quarter. Who really cares if there are a lot of fouls in the 1st or 3rd quarter?
   • Remove the actual free throw. Simply award one free point and possession with a new 24-seconds.
4. Enforce time limits on free throw shooting: The player has ten seconds from the time they get the ball at the line. This is frequently violated, not just by Dwight Howard. More importantly, players take their time to get set at the line. The other players take their time to get set up in their spots around the key. As a Tivo user, I can assure you that each free throw takes almost 30 seconds of real time. Set reasonable time limits for how long it should take, and enforce delay of game.
5. Tweak the rules to reduce free throw shooting. As mentioned above, a foul could result in an automatic point and a fresh clock with possession. Or perhaps the player fouled can decide whether to take the free point and possession or revert back to taking free throws.

Get More Fans Watching

Reduce the Number of Playoff Games

All playoff series are best of seven. Groan. It makes the playoffs take forever, reducing interest. It makes the favorite more favorite, reducing upsets and interest. It increases the wear and tear on the players themselves, shortening their careers and keeping some of them from participating in the Olympics. Go back to first round is best of 3, second round is best of 5, and the last two are best of 7.

Televise Playoff Games at the Right Time of Day

It seems like a simple thing: Schedule televised games when most people are awake to watch them. But sports has a hard time with this. Take baseball. Last years World Series had every game scheduled after 8:00 p.m. Eastern. What little kid can stay up past 9:30 to watch the end of the games? It is no mystery to me that baseball is dying off. Among other reasons, no youth can watch the championship games. The same goes for NCAA. Monday night football used to start past 9:00 p.m.

Of course the difficulty is the timezones. A game that starts at 7:00 EST starts at 4:00 on the West Coast, before work gets out. There is no good solution. However, this only applies to weekdays. There is no good reason that a weekend game should ever be at an hour that cuts off either audience. The World Series had two weekend games, both schedule at 8:20 p.m.

Last years NBA finals had two games scheduled on weekends. Both of them, including Game 7, were scheduled for 8:00 p.m. Stop shooting yourself in the foot.

What is the single most watched television event every year? The Super Bowl. What time does it air? 6:30 EST. Learn from the best.

Reduce Tanking
The Philadelphia 76ers were just doing what the system encouraged them to do – deliberately lose games to get a better shot at a number one pick. It’s disgraceful. How can the league have a sports competition where one team tries to lose? Unfortunately, I haven’t seen a good answer to this. You got a good one, let me know.

The most interesting revelations from Michael Wolf’s book (Fire and Fury) about Trump are about his mental fitness.

Besides the constant (and well-deserved) speculation and pushes for impeachment ever since the inauguration, there is another path to remove Trump from power. The idea that a president is not mentally competent to do the job has been around for a while (the latter years of the Wilson administration were run by surrogates after a stroke), and passed into constitutional law as the 25th Amendment after the Kennedy assassination.

Section 4
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Everyone can see that Trump is mentally unfit. Everyone has known this for a long time. And that is just the problem. Over 60,000,000 people voted for him with full knowledge of who he was. How can you remove the President for being unfit when the majority of the country saw the same thing and decided he was fit enough? It’s not enough. What you need is something that shows that (a) the problem has gotten worse, or (b) the problem is so bad that the will of the country needs to be set aside. Option (b) is the most thought about, unlikely as it is that the cabinet and Pence would turn against Trump.

Wolff’s revelations put option A back on the table.

Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something.

Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country’s future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe [my emphasis] he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

Is it true? We don’t know. But if so, it clearly shows Trumps mental state degrading further since he came into office. To whatever degree this book serves at evidence, it further demonstrates Trump is “manifestly unfit”.

Update: A very balanced editorial in the New York Times today, which references this interview with one of the original authors of this amendment. A good case for why I am completlely wrong!

Update: Fun with copy and paste, this has been slightly updated and given a new headline.

I annoy my wife with these quizzes. You’ll get the idea pretty quick.

1. She can wound with her eyes. How can she kill?
2. Where did she take the midnight train to?
3. Where did he take the midnight train to?
4. How do I feel about your ability to find a better mate?
5. Who rings like a bell through the night?
6. Where was a woman’s soul made?
7. When is she stealing my heart, my soul.
8. What could a hundred men do?
9. What percentage of people danced to the jailhouse rock?
10. Once I begin, how often will I cease?

Look for more of these…

The music is nice, and lyrics are even better. I rarely pay much attention to the words, but these are a cut above. This is a view of marriage that is much more mature than your typical love song. I have a feeling we’ll be playing this at our anniversaries for a while.

We’ve all been following the Comey/Mueller investigation. What will come of it? Here are my predictions.

• Trump did not collude. (I’m using the term collusion loosely, including conspiracy and such.)
• Some folks within the Trump camp, including family members and higherups aligned themselves with the Russians, knowingly. They are guilty, and are traitors.
• Other higherups within the Trump camp would have no part of it (Sessions).
• Trump himself never did an actual quid pro quo. He is a dupe, an idiot, a wannabe authoritarian getting played by Russia, but not an actual traitor.
• After the fact, Trump obstructed justice multiple times in multiple ways.

The aftermath:

• The traitors within the Trump will be thrown to the wind, and downplayed as bad actors, Trump will not accept any responsibility for their acts or what his campaign did.
• He will simultaneously claim that it was no big deal and pardon some of them.
• Congressional Republicans will say that he may have done some bad things, but the Trump coverup is not high crimes and misdemeanors, and will refuse to let impeachment proceedings proceed.

And then the 2018 midterms. Buckle up, it’s going to be a heck of a ride.

Back in 2015, I wrote a little piece ripping apart an editorial from William Cohan. Lo and Behold, Paul Krugman also lit into him, independently. Always good to have a Nobel Prize winner on your side.

Ever seen this? The toilet paper holder has two rolls. Its easier to keep toilet paper in the stall if one roll is completed all the way, so this sticker is placed on a random roll.

That’s the seemingly logical explanation. But the true explanation is that one roll has mutated, and by chance has generated this sticker. The sticker will extend its life at the expense of its compatriot, giving it more time to reproduce and pass on this beneficial mutation. Natural selection at work.