Defector has a fantastic article this week from writer Keith Paradise titled The Rise And Fall Of Starter, The Coolest Company On Earth. Starter, of course, was an early maker of licensed sports apparel. Those awesome “satin” warmup jackets were their most famous product. (If you don’t subscribe just pay the $10 to read this… Continue reading David Stern part 6: An extra large satin piece of the puzzle
How long were they selling recordings?
Read this this morning and I’ve been bouncing off the walls ever since. This is the New Yorker! So wrong and so checkable. At bottom, the boom in private gigs reflects two contrasting trends. One has to do with the music industry. For more than a century after sound was first captured on wax cylinders,… Continue reading How long were they selling recordings?
Simulating 2023
The schedules are up in College Football Data so let’s run it: $ python3 ./mcc_schedule.py -v San José State at USC on Aug 25, 2023 UCLA at San Diego State on Sep 08, 2023 Stanford at USC on Sep 08, 2023 UCLA at Stanford on Oct 20, 2023 USC at California on Oct 27, 2023… Continue reading Simulating 2023
Three music pieces
I’m going to keep these in one place to keep from gumming up the archives.
revisiting github actions
We added github actions in May and then caught an actual regression a few months later. Now the life cycle has come around to fixing a weird deprecation. I identified how charmingly insane their set/get key/value system was so it looks like they overhauled it. Clicking through onto the Actions tab showed me that the… Continue reading revisiting github actions
Learning from a Message Board Genius
Or, why College Football is the purest sport. The twitter account Message Board Geniuses trawls the deep dark waters of single-team message boards and screenshots the most unhinged posts, often in galleries on Saturday when a particular team is melting down. I like to check in from time to time but I can’t bear to… Continue reading Learning from a Message Board Genius
Goodbye David Shaw
David Shaw is done at Stanford. And while the Rose Bowl victories and Pac-12 Championships are nice, we all know that his foremost achievement was the seven Mythical California Cups in his twelve years as head coach. Before things went pear-shaped in the last two years he owned Cal (eight game winning streak before 2019)… Continue reading Goodbye David Shaw
2022 champs
That’s a wrap. USC has done it in convincing fashion. They played the most games and won them all. Congrats Trojans: USC 41 at Stanford 28 on Sep 10, 2022 Fresno State 17 at USC 45 on Sep 17, 2022 San José State 10 at Fresno State 17 on Oct 15, 2022 San Diego State… Continue reading 2022 champs
Results
First the real Pac-12 simulation. Unfortunately the games have gone against our dream for an extra California game that decides both the MCC and the Pac-12. Odds of appearing in the Pac-12 championship game: Utah 59% Oregon 54% USC 52% UCLA 28% Fun race. As before, the odds don’t add up to 200% exactly because… Continue reading Results
On the possibility of an extra game
At some point with little explanation I added the list of current Pac-12 teams as a pre-canned “virtual” conference defined in mcc_schedule.py. Of course, the Pac-12 is an actual conference (for another year or two) so it’s a misnomer to run it in virtualconf.py but this allows some fun with the Monte Carlo simulators. Here’s… Continue reading On the possibility of an extra game