Matthew Yglesias

Evolutionary Psychologists Prefer Blondes

New research indicates that blond hair and blue eyes evolved because they make you hott. Don't tell Toni Morrison! I don't actually understand, based on the article, what new evidence is supposed to be involved in this argument. This is more interesting:

A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

To me, this indicates that by 2300, if not sooner, the fact that natural blonds once walked the earth is going to be, to most people, an implausible trivia fact, as if I went around maintaining that there used be to be natural blueheads until the 1920s and you never see them because there was no color photography.

UPDATE: Or perhaps there is no such WHO study.

Betting

Checking out Tradesports' NBA championships contracts, I see you can buy Detroit for 37, San Antonio for 26, Miami for 10.7, Dallas for 11.0, and Phoenix for 9.2 among the teams with realistic shots at winning. The Spurs seem overvalued to me at this price. I think they're the best team in the league. I say six times out of ten they beat the Mavs in round two. Six times out of ten they beat the Amare's back Suns in the Conference finals. And six times out of ten they beat Detroit in the finals. That gives them a 21.6 percent chance of winning all three series, and I think a strong case could be made that I'm being too generous to San Antonio.

The big five put together have a combined value of 93.9 which is too low. The odds that some other team is going to win have to be much less than six percent. Buying all five is a certain winner. Buying Detroit, Miami, Dallas, and Phenix for 67.9 isn't a sure winner, but I think it improves your expected value.

Death By Parking

We haven't had a good killing in the neighborhood in a while, but apparently the gunfire I heard the other night around the corner was tragically fatal:

A 33-year-old Arlington man died early yesterday in the District after he was struck by an errant bullet fired during a dispute over a parking space outside a jazz club on U Street NW, D.C. police said.

These bystander-y murders are always the scariest.

Take That, Richard Cohen

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Winning The Right Way

It seems to me that when I man's scored 46 points, his career high is 47 points, and there's a full quarter left to play you don't keep him on the bench throughout the fourth quarter, no matter how uncompetitive the game may be. Anyways, a true shooting percentage of 104% is pretty damn awesome.

Polygny and Divorce

Alex Tabarrok writes:

Polygny will be bad for poor men who lose out in the competition for first wives to rich men who are on their second. This already happens, by the way, because of serial polygamy - older men divorce their older wives and marry younger ones leaving older women unmarried and some younger men without young wives. Bad for the young men but not necessarily bad for the young wives. For this reason it's probably true that polygny cannot be countenanced in a democracy. At least not until the supply of young men is reduced enough so that every many can have at least one wife even if some can have two.

I think this serial polygyny business is oft-misunderstood. It carries the implication that before the era of easy divorce, monogamy was the norm and the main impact of easy divorce has been to implement a kind of pseudo-polygny. This obviously does happen now and again, but it doesn't capture the real trend. Back in the day, in elite circles at least, informal polygny was very much the norm. The dynamic was that a man's wife had no real choice -- legal, social, or economic -- but to put up with infidelity as long as her husband kept up appearances to a reasonable extent. This is your classic double-standard. Read Anna Karenina. Changing laws and norms about divorce and the increased economic empowerment of women means that non-monogamous marriages that formerly would have stayed together now tend to break up instead. But what's increasing isn't primarily male non-monogamy, but female intolerance of male non-monogamy and to some extent female non-monogamy. Most divorces are initiated by women.

"Makes Sense"

Walking to work, I was thinking that the Knicks definitely need to find a way to make a deal with Denver to acquire Kenyon Martin. That way, they can field the perfect Curry-Martin-Rose-Francis-Marbury All-NBA Overpaid squad. The current lineup has a terrible gap at the four where the Knicks have only hard-working veteran journeymen and promising youngsters -- fulfilling the Isiah dream urgently requires the addition of another past-his-prime not-really-star player, and Martin's just the man. Chad Ford, I see, actually thinks this would be a good idea. He thinks the Knicks could land Martin for Malik Rose, Maurice Taylor, and Jamal Crawford and I guess at that price it's not totally crazy for NY but I don't really see why Denver would want to do it.

Franchise Steve

Well, you can say this. Penny Hardaway is pure dead weight and Steve Francis is definitely a better player than Trevor Ariza. In that sense, I guess, this is a good deal. But unlike with the trade for Jalen Rose, Francis' contract is not only expensive but runs all the way through the 2008-2009 season, so this deal really will impair the Knicks' ability to ever get under the cap and really makes a mockery out of talk of rebuilding in any sense other than that the team sucks right now. A Marbury-Francis backcourt seems designed to prove that sometimes the whole can be less than the sum of its parts.

The interesting thing, really, is that on paper a lineup of Curry, Frye, Rose, Francis, and Marbury actually looks like a pretty solid starting five. In practice, I think you'd have to be pretty dumb to expect that to work out.

Divisions

Everyone's all upset about the NBA playoff-seeding rules in light of the impending Dallas-San Antonio clash in the second round. I agree that the status quo is problematic. Most people seem to think they should alter the seeding formula, but I think the league's impulse to try and make winning the division meaningful is correct. It's good to establish goals short of winning a championship for teams to try and achieve and maintain fan interest. What I would do is follow the NFL model and change the regular season schedule around to make the divisions more distinct.

Tristram Shandy

I forgot to mention right after I saw it, but you absolutely must see this movie. It's hilarious, and a brilliantly clever adaptation of a hard-to-adapt book to boot. For a little while near the end it falls off its peak before recovering, but when it's on it's absolutely brilliant and even when it's off it's pretty damn great.

Summers Resigns

The temptation will be to view this primarily through the lens of Summers' occassionally controversial political statements, but I would emphasize that there's probably a lot of institutional politics in play. When I was a campus reporter, there was constant discontent with Summers' efforts to centralize the administration of the university and a perception that he was trying to downplay the Faculty of Arts of Sciences in general and the College in particular as the centerpieces of the university. Tying these airy concerns together was very practical upset about some changes he wanted to make to university financing that would have benefitted some faculties at the expense of others. Naturally, those on the short end of the stick were not pleased. Some kind of big falling out with the FAS Dean related to that and other purely internal matters would be a perfectly sufficient reason for someone to wind up being asked to step down.

UPDATE: From Summers' resignation letter:

We cannot maintain pre-eminence in intellectual fields if we remain constrained by artificial boundaries of departments and Schools. "Each Tub On Its Own Bottom" is a vivid, but limiting, metaphor for decision making at Harvard. We will not escape its limits unless our Schools and Faculties increase their willingness to transcend parochial interests in support of broader university goals.

This issue will be especially important with respect to the unique opportunity the University has before it in Allston. In recent years we have made further land acquisitions, and begun to prepare sites for development. Just last week we announced plans for a first major science building and additional space for our art collections. A master physical plan is taking shape and the University has begun acquiring the necessary development capacity for its implementation. The greatest challenge will be to mobilize the tremendous creativity and energy in our community to assure that what we build in Allston enables the University as a whole to undertake pioneering work in important new ways that make a real difference in the world.

The Allston project is the one Summers wanted to finance in a controversial manner. "Every tub on its own bottom" is an old-time Harvard saying that became the rallying cry for opponents of financial collectivization. This stuff, I think, is the real issue here. Parochial interests versus Summers' vision of broader university goals.

Clash of the Whatevers

Brian Leiter's right about Leon Wieseltier's review of Dan Dennett's new book. On the other hand, when an advance copy of the book showed up at the office I grabbed it and immedately read it because I'm a huge admirer of Dennett's work and the new book is . . . well . . . pretty bad. It's thin. Dennett doesn't have the requisite knowledge to write a convincing empirical history of religion (not that I do, either), but to fill out the philosophical skeleton he's put together that's really what you would need.

People would do well, I think, to go read Consciousness Explained or Darwin's Dangerous Idea or Freedom Evolves and leave this new one alone.

UPDATE: Thinking this over, it occurs to me that when Wieseltier has his editor's hat on, he almost always gets Thomas Nagel (see, e.g., Nagel in the current issue) or Simon Blackburn to do reviews of philosophical books for The New Republic and I think they do an excellent job. Either would have been very strong choices to review Dennett's book and I think both would have had a roughly similar take to Wieseltier's but probably navigated the relevant issues in a way Leiter or I would be happier with. It's contrary to the blogger's natural ethos, but specialization is a good thing.

All-Stars

Marc Stein:

I wish to see the four Pistons go on a big run when they make their en masse appearance to justify all the slobbering they've been generating, lots of it coming from this corner of cyberspace.

Any justification that might provide would be purely bogus. Can there be any doubt that the Mavericks (or the Spurs or the Suns) could beat the East All-Stars, were they so inclined? Being an actual team with complementary skills that practices together regularly and has in-game experience alongside each other is a big advantage. But the idea of an All-Star Game is just to showcase superstar talents, it's not a genuine effort to put a winning squad together. The other thing people are looking for -- a West supertall lineup of Garnett, Nowitzky, Gasol, Duncan, and Yao is much more in the spirit of the enterprise.

Love Lost?

"There's no love lost between those two." Fair enough. But say you want to disagree -- "no, no, there's plenty of love lost between them" -- that's problematic. This is making me doubt that I understand the initial phrase. Why would the love be lost? If it wasn't lost, does that mean it's found, or just that it was never there?

Trade Iverson?

Last on Jack McCallum's list of teams that need a deal are the 76ers:

My guess is, the 76ers will slide into the Eastern Conference playoffs as the eighth seed. That isn't good enough for a team with one of the most exciting players in the game. So, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls ... I think it's time. Time for the 76ers to part with Allen Iverson.

I'm not suggesting for a minute that Andre Iguodala and Kyle Korver can replace Iverson's scoring. But in any trade scenario, A.I. would bring valuable pieces, probably a legit player, maybe a prospect and a draft pick and also clear cap space to go after a free agent. No deals involving Iverson seem to be in the wind, but this is about which teams need to make a trade, right? It's time to shop A.I. to the West.

I don't see how this is supposed to work. Iverson doesn't even have Philly's biggest contract, that's Chris Webber. If AI's salary magically vanished during the offseason, their payroll for next year would still be $69 million or so. Assuming they also got "a legit player, maybe a prospect and a draft pick" in return for him their salary would either be several million higher than that, or else they'd have to give up someone along with Iverson. That'd save some money for the Sixers ownership, but it's not enough to make a run at any top-tier free agents. Besides which, trading Iverson would clearly be a move toward a "rebuilding" phase but you'd be rebuilding with . . . Webber as your centerpiece which would be bizarre. When Philly traded to acquire him, they essentially committed themselves to doing the best the can with the Iverson-Webber combo until Webber's deal expires.

Generally speaking, trades that involve a team trading away its superstar franchise pillar are fun to speculate about, but rarely advisable. There's a reason these deals almost always get made when the team is under duress, either because the star is dogging his way out of town (Vince Carter goes to New Jersey) or because of something complicated like the Kobe-Shaq situation. These things are the NBA equivalent of dreaming of a centrist presidential candidate.

Darko Deal

And he's gone. Looking back, what I don't quite understand is why Detroit didn't just trade this draft pick away in the first place. The Pistons were gearing up for a serious run at the championship, Larry Brown was in no mood to spend time trying to develop rookie prospects, and the number two pick in that draft was in high demand.

The Man In The High Castle

Interesting ruminations on the book from Eve Tushnet. I don't remember the book in perfect detail, but as I remember it this is subtly wrong:

The characters don't necessarily recognize that the "real world" (= the world you and I know, where the Axis lost) is preferable to their own world, where Africa is a heap of bones and North America is a collection of occupied territories.

As I recall it, the book has a more complicated structure [spoilers].

In the book, the Axis has won the war. Also inside the book, there is another book, in which the Allies won the war. Meanwhile, in our world, the Allies won the war. Ergo, the world of the book-within-the-book is our world, the world outside the book. Except it isn't. Important historical elements of the book-within-the-book are "wrong" by the standards of our world even though the right side wins the war. This site seems to agree:

Using a meta-narrative device of the sort that would become a menace to sanity during the reign of postmodernism, the alternative history novel, “The Man in the High Castle,” gives a synopsis of the historical scenario in the fictional alternative-history novel, “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.” Aside from the fact the Axis loses, the world of “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy” does not greatly resemble our own. Franklin Roosevelt, though happily unassassinated, serves just two terms. The British win the Battle of Stalingrad and extend the British Empire to the Volga. There is apparently even an Anglo-American war.A

As I recall, an important part of the Allied victory in "Grasshopper" is that FDR wisely set the Pacific fleet to sail, thereby avoiding its destruction at Pearl Harbor, whereas in the real world of course America prevails over Japan despite the sneak attack achieving a good measure of success. To say what this was supposed to signify, I suppose I'd need to re-read the book.

Listen to the Kids

Walter Mosley: "What are the young people telling us when they talk about bitches and ho's, motherfuckers and niggahs and bling? These are questions we shouldn't gloss over." Sadly, he doesn't actually answer the question. What are the young people telling us?

A Word to the Wise

If your passport is due to expire shortly, renew it, even if you have no immediate travel plans. If you don't, there's a chance you'll lose your wallet, containing your driver's license, and then you'll be fucked. Fortunately, a friend was the victim rather than, say, me so things aren't as bad as they might be.

Cricket Riots

Weird:

Indian riot police were called to restore order after about 3,000 cricket fans caused chaos at the Wagah border crossing between India and Pakistan.

The article doesn't offer any real explanation of why this happened. I recall that both times I was in England I would sometimes read a cricket recap in the newspaper or hear one on television and they were the most utterly baffling things I'd ever encountered, so I suppose it's no surprise I can't understand this story either.

No Reason

The number two thing Daniel Jones has learned editing "this modern love":

2. THE NUMBER OF WOMEN BEING DUMPED BY MEN "FOR NO REASON" APPEARS TO REMAIN HIGH.

Many of the essays and letters I've received about breakups indicate that despite whatever progress men and women have made in actually being able to talk about what's going on in their relationships, many men are still choosing to end relationships with women "for no reason." Time and again I hear about a man withdrawing from a relationship and ceasing all contact "for no reason" that the woman can decipher.

When the tables are turned, however, women seem to have little trouble explaining to men why it's over. Whether the man accepts the explanation, believes it or even hears it is another matter.

Does anyone really want a detailed explanation of why someone's "just not that into you?" I have my doubts. In a long-term thing, sure, one would expect some kind of reason but most breakups have to be of things that haven't been going on for years and years, so what's one really supposed to say? If you don't get a reason, you can always chalk things up to the generally handy all-purpose explanation that the other person is crazy.

Murder: Cool Again

After years of steady decline, murder seems to be back in style in at least many of America's small- and medium-sized cities. Killings are still dropping slightly here in the District, but from a ridiculously high level. I hear shootings every so often in my neighborhood, but they always seem to be non-fatal. An outbreak of bad aim is, perhaps, keeping a lid on things in these parts, though it would be interesting to know nationwide how prevalent those kind of non-slayings are.

Electric

Went to the Wizards-Cavs game last night -- good times. Gilbert (32 points, 8 rebounds, 10 assists, 2 steals, 3 blocks) kicked golden boy LeBron's ass (18 points, 9 rebounds, 8 assists, 1 steal, 0 blocks) and his "not good enough to have an all-star" team won handily, moving into the 7th seed slot just half a game out of the 5th seed. The game did, however, make me somewhat regret that Commission Stern gave Arenas the replacement All-Star slot. In some ways, a slot with an asterix is the worst of both worlds. If he'd gotten the recognition he deserved, that'd be a good thing. If he just didn't make the team, then we fans could nurse a grudge about getting no respect. Kinda sorta getting respect is a little lame.

The actual key the game, however, turned out to be Brendan Haywood's awesome gamesmanship that got Ilgauskas ejected for yelling and gesticulated wildly at the refs just minutes after a Z-Haywood double technical had been called. Caron Butler and Antonio Daniels also both had well-executed flops that were positively FIFA-worthy. Daniels seems to be working on a neat move where he manages to flop without losing the ball or his dribble.

One of the weirder features of live Wizards games is that home team three pointers are sponsored by Pepco, our local energy company. I don't quite understand what's going on here. Are people supposed to leave the stadium thinking, "man, I hear good things about this electricity stuff, we should get some for our house?" They would seem to be in the position of having a product so good that they hardly need to advertise it. I use electricity every day, and if you haven't tried it out you really should.

Justice!

Commission Stern <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/allstar2006/news/story?id=2325922">to the rescue</a>, Arenas is in the game replacing Jermaine O'Neal.

All-Star

Word on the street is that Gilbert Arenas won't be going to the All-Star game. The East squad will, however, feature Richard Hamilton who's averaging fewer points per game. And fewer assists per game. And fewer rebounds per game. And fewer steals per game. And it will also feature Michael Redd who at least has a narrow rebounding edge. We're told the cause of the snubb is he Wizards' "disappointng" season. The Wiz are currently 24-23, whereas Redd's imposing Bucks have demonstrated clear superiority by racking up a . . . 25-23 record.

Now, to be sure, Arenas scores more than those guys in part because he's asked to do more. If you swapped Arenas for Hamilton, Hamilton's ppg would probably go up because he'd take more shots. But is Hamilton a more efficient scorer than Arenas on his fewer shots per game? Nope -- they've got identical 56.6 true shooting percentages (erstwhile sharpshooter Redd has a TS% of 56.1). On points-per-40 Hamilton's 23.6 compares unfavorably to Arenas' 27.

And, yes, I'm being a surly home town fan here, but I think I'm right. On some level, team success is important. If a guy puts up monster numbers on a team that's in the bottom of the standings, you have to ask yourself if maybe he isn't as good as he seems. But if a guy's basically carrying a team of mediocrities into the playoffs then the fact that they aren't an elite team shouldn't weigh heavily against him. Does anyone seriously think that if Arenas and Hamilton got traded that would suddenly make the Wizards a better team thanks to Hamilton's winning ways? Of course not. Neither team would want to make that trade. The Pistons because there's no sense in messing with such a successful lineup and Washington because Hamilton's superior defense just doesn't make up for his inferior everything else.

Strange Days

It's a different kind of night when you score a career high 34 points and don't wind up as your team's leading scorer. Or when your team racks up 129 points in regulation and the game is . . . very close. Defense may win championships, but potent offense fuels delightful mediocrity.  

Get a Grip

I think advocates of the "five all-stars for Detroit" theory need to get a grip. The Pistons are 39 and 8. The Mavericks are 38 and 10. The Spurs are 37 and 10. The Heat are 30 and 19. Without taking anything away from the Detroit starting five, they simply haven't achieved a position of unprecedented dominance that would justify bestowing totally unprecedented honors on them. There's no contradiction between saying that Tayshaun Prince is a lot better than the fifth-best player on any other team and saying that he's not an all-star player. There are lots of non-all-stars who are good enough such that if your four other starters were all better than him, your overall team would be pretty beastly.

Some have raised the issue of whether the Pistons could beat the West All-Star team. I'm pretty sure they could, but this is a bit of a red-herring. It reflects the fact that an actual team, assembled to play together and benefitting from such things as practicing together and having game experience alongside each other would have a major advantage over a random collection of talent. What I wonder is how far down the rankings you'd have to go to find an NBA team that would lose to a hastily assembled All-Star squad?

Relatedly, a wacky Pistons-related scheme I would endorse would be just relabeling the Pistons "Team USA" for the 2006 World Championships. I'm fairly certain that, in practice, any good NBA team would perform better than a better-in-paper Team USA that, realistically, isn't going to put in the kind of practice time that an actual team has. As it happens, San Antonio, Dallas, and Phoenix all rely on foreigners for key roles, so none of them could do it.

Caché

I dug this stylish French thriller, though some will think it's a bit slow for a thriller. The screenwriter did, in my opinion, a really good job of constructing a deliberately indeterminate narrative. Indeterminacy is often deployed as a kind of cop out for stories that, in reality, just don't make sense. Alternatively, it's often accomplished through some kind of narrative trick which can be handled well, but often winds up being unsatisfying because it involves "cheating." Caché doesn't do either of those things. The narrative is "straight" -- you see what you see, and the indeterminancy stems from the fact that the characters in the film, like people in real life, simply aren't able to acquire enough information to fully understand the events that are unfolding in their life. It would be annoying for too many movies to reflect those kinds of limited perspective and epistemic problems but since this is the way that life does, in fact, work it's good to see it pulled off well now and again.

In addition, the era of globalization and mass homogeneity only makes Franco-American cultural differences more hilarious. The main character is the famous host of a television show where intellectuals sit in chairs and talk about books. All in all, however, the depiction of yuppie Paris in the early 21st century was strongly reminiscent of the late 80s New York City when I was a kid, which is also interesting and even perhaps accurate in light of rising crime rates and so forth over there.

>C

Davis-Rose Trade

Chris Broussard makes the obvious case against:

So why add another max contract -- Jalen will make $16.9 million next season -- for little, if any, gain on the court? Why not let Davis' $13.9 million fall off the payroll after this season?

Why keep spending mega-millions when you're still lottery bound with no lottery pick?

That was my first thought, too, but my second thought was that this is wrong. The Knicks' payroll is so high that even if they just let the Davis and Hardaway contracts expire at the end of the season, they still wouldn't be in a position to sign anyone for more than the mid-level exemption. What's more, Rose's contract is sufficiently short that the Rose-Davis swap doesn't postpone the hypothetical date at which the Knicks might eventually get below the cap. So dropping Davis would have saved money for the team's owners, but not freed up any cash for the team, so if the ownership is willing to carry the burden, who are the fans to complain? That said, the team's still fucked, obviously, but it's far from clear that anyone has the ability to unfuck them at this point.

avis-Rose

No Respect

Marc Stein's latest power rankings not only have the Wizards in 17th place behind the Rockets, but remark: "Even after a 10-5 uptick, Wiz haven't seen .500 since Dec. 6. The good news? Only two teams (Bulls, Magic) are realistically chasing them for the No. 8 spot." This is like the time ESPN said the Wiz were "way below" .500 when they were two games below .500; at 22-24 the Wiz are only 1.5 games behind fifth seed Milwaukee. Beyond the Pistons and the Heat, there's a lot of parity in the East's broad middle section before you get to the Boston-Toronto-Atlanta-NYC-Charlotte axis of suck. It's not like the 24-21 Nets have established some position of dominance that puts the Wizards to shame.

Best QB Ever

In other sports news, check out Antwaan Randle El's formidable passing statistics -- 100 percent completions! 22.33 yards per attempt! A passer rating of 158.3! How come he doesn't throw the ball more?

Fast Kenyans Revisited

Most readers seem to have felt that my "Gladwell versus Gladwell" post on shifting accounts of Kenyans' prodigious abilities in distance running was unfair. Indeed, Gladwell himself wrote in to urge me to note that my excerpt from his earlier article lacks the context of the piece's entire argument. This is, on reflection, true. The article has a dialectical structure, starting out with themes like the ones I excerpted, but eventually walks that account back substantially. This gives a better flavor of the actual conclusion:

There is a second consideration to keep in mind when we compare blacks and whites. Take the men's hundred-metre final at the Atlanta Olympics. Every runner in that race was of either Western African or Southern African descent, as you would expect if Africans had some genetic affinity for sprinting. But suppose we forget about skin color and look just at country of origin. The eight-man final was made up of two African-Americans, two Africans (one from Namibia and one from Nigeria), a Trinidadian, a Canadian of Jamaican descent, an Englishman of Jamaican descent, and a Jamaican. The race was won by the Jamaican-Canadian, in world-record time, with the Namibian coming in second and the Trinidadian third. The sprint relay-the 4 x 100-was won by a team from Canada, consisting of the Jamaican-Canadian from the final, a Haitian-Canadian, a Trinidadian-Canadian, and another Jamaican-Canadian. Now it appears that African heritage is important as an initial determinant of sprinting ability, but also that the most important advantage of all is some kind of cultural or environmental factor associated with the Caribbean. . . .

The same is true for the distinctive muscle characteristic observed when Kenyans were compared with Swedes. Saltin, the Swedish physiologist, subsequently found many of the same characteristics in Nordic skiers who train at high altitudes and Nordic runners who train in very hilly regions-conditions, in other words, that resemble the mountainous regions of Kenya's Rift Valley, where so many of the country's distance runners come from. The key factor seems to be Kenya, not genes.

That's much closer to what the profiling article says on the subject. At any rate, there's a real dilemma here. One of the main things the earlier article says is that there's a taboo around trying to talk about race and sports in an honest way. This is too bad for various reasons, but it's also clearly a taboo that exists for some very good reasons that I don't think need spelling out. If one wants to address that issue in a responsible manner, it's important to tread very carefully lest one merely wind up lending support to all sorts of racist theories. As a result, you're not going to want to casually toss off some mention of the role of genetics in Kenyan distance running ability when this isn't the main subject of your article. Indeed, I'm already regretting having brought this up in the first place, since there isn't actually anything in particular I have to say on the subject and I'm certainly on record as thinking that the alleged benefits of racial profiling as a law enforcement technique are vastly overstated.

Stars

This worked once before, so . . . if anyone out there in blog-land has a ticket or two to the Stars show at the Black Cat, I'd be happy to overpay to take it/them off your hands. I loves me some Stars.

Space Without Lasers

I watched the first DVD of Battlestar: Galactica a while ago, but it wasn't until I was watching some of Disk 2 this evening between work and party o' clock that I noticed something curious about the show: There are no lasers. Or phasers. Or blasters. Or any kind of super high-tech weapon at all. They fight with bullets and missiles. The Cylons devastate the 12 colonies with nuclear bombs not unlike the ones we have today.

I guess I don't have any real take on the significance of this. The show seems committed to a kind of overall low-tech aesthetic that doesn't always have a clear justification. Why would a ban on networked computers prevent people from having cordless phones? Things like that. On the other hand, I think the refusal to render the methods of violence unduly exotic does serve to help prevent the audiece from distancing itself from the horror of the events being described.

But here's the other thing. It's a near-universal principle of science fiction that artificial intelligence will, if created, eventually turn on its creators. You've got your Matrix and your Terminator, it's part of the backstory to the Dune books, it's everywhere. Do people really that's a likely outcome? It seems wildly implausible to me.

Weird!

Via Charles comes your Super Bowl fun fact of the day:

The Detroit where Bettis grew up is not exactly the Detroit the visitors and convention people want the media to see. There are empty, garbage-strewn lots, homes in disrepair. But this place is home. And always will be. . . .

Earlier this week, Bettis was awarded the key to the city. It should also be mentioned the last person to receive that honor was -- get this -- Saddam Hussein, who got it in 1980.

Makes you think.

What Happened In Cleveland

John Hollinger writes about the NBA's most-unimproved players. A shocking three are new acquisitions by the Cavaliers:

After a breakout 2004-05, Hughes struggled to mesh with LeBron James in Cleveland's backcourt. He somehow found a way to take nearly five fewer shots a game but still make more turnovers, and his league-leading steal total of a year ago has been cut nearly in half. Making matters worse, Hughes suffered his annual 20-game injury and is back on the injured -- 'scuse me, inactive -- list. . . .

[Damon] Jones, the self-proclaimed best shooter in the world, has disguised that fact exceptionally well this year. He's hitting only 36.9 percent overall and 35.7 percent on his trademark 3-point shots, both of which are huge declines from his breakout year in Miami in 2004-05. He's also annoying fans with his bragging and strutting, stuff that plays much better with the locals when the shots are falling. Since he's a sieve on defense and doesn't create shots for others, he needs to start finding the range.

At least [Donyell] Marshall has still been an effective player, but he's not nearly the weapon he was a year earlier in Toronto. Marshall shot over 40 percent on 3-pointers for three straight seasons, but the trip across the border has devalued him to a mere 31.9 percent in Cleveland. With LeBron James providing him plenty of open looks from his favored spot in the corner, that figure needs to improve.

Why would everyone who comes to play alongside James and Ilgauskas suddenly get much worse?

Why I Don't Live in New York

I don't need to even contemplate stuff like this. Plus, I have a back yard.

All Stars

See your teams here. I think it's pretty clear that if you were just doing your best to win games with the personnel available to the West you would want to drop the concept of "center" since the conference's best centers aren't that great and have mostly been injured while it features a million awesome forwards, several of whom are very large. T-Mac plays the three, backed by Shawn Marion and Carmelo Anthony. Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Pau Gasol, Dirk Nowitzky, and Elton Brand share duties at a vaguely defined 4-5 combo position.

Meanwhile, I'm hardly surprised the fans didn't notice, but Gilbert Arenas is clearly having a better season than Vince Carter.

Strange Criticism

Tom Friend's pissed King James won't join the dunk competition. I'd like to see him too. But then this: "He's getting by right now on reputation and marketing and stats and a seven-game Cavaliers winning streak in a bad Eastern Conference." He's getting by on his reputation as a good player, statistics that indicate he's a good player, and having his team win games? What kind of slam is that. Is it LeBron's fault that Cleveland's not in the Western Conference?

UPDATE: Admittedly, I wasn't expecting the Cavs to be so incredibly suckerific as they've been in tonight's second quarter.

Screenplays

Inspired by Greg's comment, I was looking at the best screenplay winners. It does seem to me to be the case that, in particular, "best original screenplay" winners are a better guide to finding good movies than are "best picture" winners.

Son-of-a-screenwriter that I am, I naturally have been nursing a longstanding grievance about the absurdly neglected role of the screenplay in making good movies good. Critics and audiences alike have a tendency to talk about movies as if actors are conjuring up good characters (and directors good scenes) out of some kind of mysterious ether. But, as everyone knows, good actors regularly turn in forgettable performances in crappy movies. This is what happens when somebody forgets to write compelling characters and place them in an interesting story.

UPDATE: See also.

Friends In Nerdy Places

Tia says, "I don't know that I've ever succeeded in making a platonic friend that stuck through the internet." I'm sometimes shocked and saddened to realize what a huge proportion of my friends are, at the end of the day, internet-based. There are really only two people in town who I'm friends with "through the internet" but I probably know most of my non-internet friends through those two guys.

Oscars

Nothing to say about the nomination, really. I do find it noteworthy how many of the recent-ish Best Picture winners have been movies I think are straight-up bad. The 94-97 Gump/Braveheart/English Patient/Titanic period is especially bleak. Having been vastly overrated in its day, I think there's now a tendency to overstate American Beauty's flaws, but it's still more "annoying" than "good." I recall liking Shakespeare in Love but it was sufficiently forgettable that I've pretty literally forgotten it.

By contrast, every single winner from the 70s and 80s is a good movie, though not always the best of the year.

State of the Kobe

Averaging 43 points in January? Ridiculous. Scoring 40 on 7 of 17 shooting? Double ridiculous. And you can't even say it doesn't work! As long as you get to play against the Knicks, your team can score 130 points and win in a blowout. How could New York possibly suck that much? What happened? I was watching the State of the Union, it's a serious question. Did Andrew Bynum really score 16 points in 12 minutes? When did Kwame Brown become better than Eddie Curry?