Matthew Yglesias

Airport Blogging

Do you know what they call the Quarter Pounder in Madrid? Not, as I'd been led to believe, a "Royal con queso." Instead, it's a Cuarto di Libra and I think a libra was Spain's pre-metric unit of weight. Since a libra presumably isn't the same as a pound, I'd be intereste to know how big a Cuarto di Libra actually is. Meanwhile, there is a McRoyal Delux à la Pulp Fiction but it seems to correspond to the Big and Tasty or perhaps the defunct Arch Delux.

More Photos

I really like taking pictures of trains, but I tried to keep the number of shots actually loaded into my Spanish trains set to a reasonable quantity. Meanwhile, Flippantangel didn't like my last batches -- "But, again, cute children but no hot women--what gives?" So here's some pictures of women, several of them hot. Meanwhile, I would also maintain that the ladies in this photo from Reykjavik were pretty attractive.

Spanish Basketball

Since Real Madrid-Teka is so dominant in the Spanish basketball league, and since it's linked to the super-good Real Madrid "football" team, I'd always just assumed it would be the favorit of every hoops-loving Madrileño. My sources indicate, however, that the less accomplished CB Estudiantes is actually the more locally popular squad. The reason, it seems, is that Estudiantes gives a lot more playing time to Spaniards while the Real team is dominated by foreigners.

Photos From Madrid

Spain is swell, I just wish my guidebook had warned me that the city walls in Ávila are closed on Mondays. Various people told me there wasn't much worth seeing in the Reina Sophia besides Guernica but those people are mistaken (a couple of great Dalí's, among other things). At any rate, here's a couple of photosets now up on my Flickr page -- this is the Madrid Botanical Gardens, which was great. I took a whole bunch of pictures of the Plaza Colón as well, even though nothing there especially justifies the attention. I just thought the monument was really odd and couldn't stop clicking.

Mediocrity: Pro and Con

Okay, not done yet. I say "March Madness" is an obscene celebration of mediocrity. Jason Zengerle disagrees. I think his post couldn't have come out at a better time, right before last night's two excellent matchups -- Miami-Detroit and San Antonio-Denver. I have a soft spot in my heart for the Nuggets, so perhaps this is clouding my judgment, but I see them as the one real sleeper possibility in the playoffs.

The Getaway

Well, folks, I'm off to Madrid tomorrow for some vacation . . . you'll have to amuse yourselves.

So . . . Detroit beats Miami. Barring injuries, I don't expect anything different from the Conference Finals. These are good teams, it's a tough matchup, but at a minimum home court advantage will pull the Pistons through in the end.

Under/Over

There's really nothing to be said about John Hollinger's all-underrated team, but I thought this paragraph was interesting:

Before I introduce the rest of the squad, I should point out that underrated can be kind of a hazy definition, and it can vary throughout a player's career. Shawn Marion, for instance, was wildly underrated for most of the past few years, but that appears to have evened out this season. And sometimes a player can be world-famous and still be underrated. Yao Ming, for instance, is a household name ... and yet most people routinely underestimate how good he actually is.

The whole concept really is murky. Take, for example, Stephon Marbury. He's a player whose main reputation seems to be a reputation for being overrated. But if that's the case, then he actually can't be overrated. So is he underrated? Maybe not. But that seems like a weird thing to say. Conversely, all I ever hear about Andrei Kirlenko (until the wife thing) and Elton Brand is that they're underrated. But if everyone thinks they're underrated, how underrated can they be? What they seem to be, perhaps, is less famous than they ought to be. Yao is yet another case.

I think the most conclusively underrated stuff tends to actually be bad. Take Fantastic Four which is not a good movie. The critics made this out to be a movie that was bad on a world-historical scale. It just isn't. It was a run of the mill bad summer movie. Underrated. Yet who wants to spend their time championing a bad movie as underrated just because it wasn't as horrible as people say? Not me, at least not really.

Absurd Views

Tyler Cowen asks, "What is the most absurd claim you believe?" The rules of the game are that "It should refer to a view which you actually hold, but many other smart people consider untenable and bizarre." Tyler links to a picture of Quine so I think we may hold the same absurd views. Sensible people heap scorn on all sorts of postmodern nonsense about how there's no objective morality and how science doesn't provide us with access to objective knowledge about the external world. I think the postmodern nonsense is basically correct. I recommend Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind to one and all.

All-Stars

Allow me to engage in a bout of hometown ressentiment. Remember when the coaches were picking Eastern Conference All-Star Game reserves? Why, yes you do. Back then, as I recall, the reason Gilbert Arenas couldn't be on the squad is that his team wasn't a winner. Conversely, room had to be made for four Pistons players because, apparently, Detroit had assembled not just the best team int he league but a team destined for world-historical greatness. Today, the Wizards have moved into the fifth seed in the East, a perfectly respectable place to be. Detroit, meanwhile, has wracked up a massive half game lead over the Spurs in the overall league standings and a one game lead over Dallas and may well not finish with the best regular-season record.

Thank Your For Smoking

I didn't seem to like this one as much as most of my friends who've seen it have. To me, it was very uneven, with a few genuinely great moments but also some scenes that were more groan-inducing than funny. What's more, I object to the portrayal of the "mod squad" (i.e., merchants of death) lobbyists for the tobacco, alcohol, and firearms industries as hyper-cynical. The world contains plenty of perfectly sincere libertarians who would regard defending the right of citizens to use potential dangerous products more-or-less unimpeded as a perfectly respectable way to earn a living and a good dose of sincere conviction would be useful in that line of work.

Larry Brown

I'm not sure Larry Brown's reputation has yet taken the hit that this season's performance warrants. Bill Simmons says:

(By the way, you can't do a worse job coaching an NBA team than Larry Brown did with the Knicks this year. It's impossible. Condescending, inexplicable, unfriendly, haphazard, rambling, incoherent, unprepared, overcritical, self-defeating, depressing, unrealistic ... really, pick any negative word or phrase for a coach and it probably fits. This current Knicks team was poorly conceived, but it also wasn't a 20-win team. Brown botched the 2004 Olympics beyond belief, he screwed up the 2005 Pistons with all the Cleveland rumors, and he's destroyed the 2006 Knicks to the point it's turning into a "24" episode. These are the facts.

I basically agree. If you look at the Knicks' roster, it's clear that no coach was going to make this into a good team. But lots of teams in the league don't have the players you need to be a contender. There's nothing about the players the Knicks have that destines them to be competing with Charlotte for the absolute cellar. One would expect a hall of fame coach to be able to either do more with this team, or else be losing games because he's developing the skills of younger prospects.

Rawls on Capitalism

Chris Bertram and Tyler Cowen both comment on some new John Rawls correspondence that's surfaced and includes this rather strident anti-capitalist statement:

The large open market including all of Europe is aim of the large banks and the capitalist business class whose main goal is simply larger profit. The idea of economic growth, with no specific end in sight, fits this class perfectly. If they speak about distribution, it is most always in terms of trickle down. The long-term result of this — which we already have in the United States — is a civil society awash in a meaningless consumerism of some kind. I can’t believe that is what you want.

So you see that I am not happy about globalization as the banks and business class are pushing it. I accept Mill’s idea of the stationary state as described by him in Bk. IV, Ch. 6 of his Principles of Political Economy (1848). (I am adding a footnote in §15 to say this, in case the reader hadn’t noticed it). I am under no illusion that its time will ever come – certainly not soon – but it is possible, and hence it has a place in what I call the idea of realistic utopia.

I disagree with Tyler that this should impact one way or another our understanding of Rawls' famous ideas about distributive justice. The correspondence in question took place decades after he outlined his principles of justice and considerations about "meaningless consumerism" don't play any role in that argument. It's also clear if you compare A Theory of Justice to Justice as Fairness that Rawls' thinking on the propriety of capitalism changed somewhat over time, which is hardly unusual.

The "stationary state" issue is even clearer, I think. Rawls says he believes this in Theory but I think he would agree that the discussion of that point is more of a gesture in the direction of an argument than a fully-formed argument as such. Later in life, he did work on various question and never really presented full-fledged arguments on the stationary state issue or the broader issue of justice between generations in which the stationary state topic is embedded. I think the best thing to say is that what the implications of Theory's core argument are for this is left as a somewhat open question by the book and that there's no reason to think the book's author has privileged access to the correct answer.

To me, the most immediate worry about a "stationary state" is that the cessation of economic growth in the rich economies of North America, Western Europe, and the Pacific Rim would seem to have dire implications for economic growth in poor countries. Growth in the rich world is not a sufficient condition for growth in the poor world, but given the current structure of the international economy it is a necessary one. Philosophically speaking, I think that if you could dramatically enrich the poor world by ceasing economic growth in the rich world there may be a strong case to be made for doing so. Empirically, I don't think that option is actually available, though I'd be open to arguments that I'm mistaken.

Now suppose the whole world like like Denmark write large -- prosperous, but not quite as prosperous as the United States, but much more equal in terms of the distribution of wealth. Would it be a good idea for the global economy to stop growing? I'm not sure. I'm not sure that under those circumstances further growth would be obligatory, but it's certainly not obvious to me what the upside of ceasing growth would be. I don't think trying to combat a culture of consumerism is a good reason; indeed, that sounds suspiciously like trying to foist an eccentric conception of the good life on a population where many people like consumerism just fine and those who don't are welcome to disengage from it.

MVP Wade?

John Hollinger says Dwyane Wade is the league's most valuable player. My instinct -- and, I think, most people's -- is to say this is ridiculous, Wade plays alongside Shaq, the Most Dominant Player Ever whereas the Mavs or the Suns would turn to shit without Nowitzky or Nash. But Hollinger says this is wrong, citing 82Games.com's on court/off court numbers for the Heat. Wade is a net +17.5 guy, whereas Shaq is a net +4.4 guy:

And in this analysis, Wade is far, far more valuable to the Heat than Nash, Nowitzki, Parker, Billups and Bryant are to their clubs. With Wade off the floor, the Heat have been outscored by an eye-popping 8.8 points per 48 minutes. To put this in perspective, a team getting outscored by that amount would normally go about 15-67.

Additionally, no other Miami player -- not even Shaq -- has an impact anywhere close to this. Even when O'Neal is off the court, the Heat outscore their opponents by 2.9 points per game -- in fact, with any other player off the court, Miami still outscores its opponents. But without Wade, they suddenly morph into the 2004-05 Bobcats. Only one other player -- LeBron James -- is even close to Wade in this category, and in LeBron's case it's as much a condemnation of the Ira Newble/Luke Jackson contingent as it is a stamp of his own quality.

This is arguably a situation where on/off numbers are misleading. Wade plays 39 minutes per game, and presumably a hefty proportion of his offcourt minutes are garbage time. The Heat's 17 most-used five-man units all include Wade, as does their 19th most-used unit. Shaq's backup, meanwhile, is Alonzo Mourning who's still an extremely effective player in limited minutes. The one lineup on the top 20 list that involves neither Shaq nor Mourning -- Payton/Wade/Posey/Haslem/Walker -- performs terribly, it's the least-effective of the Heat's lineups.

Conversely, Hollinger's kind of glossing over the fact that the Heat's record is better when Wade misses whole games than when Shaq does. I'm not sure the on/off stats should outweigh those basic facts. Obviously, though, Wade's a fantastic player and he does deserve some consideration along with the other guys you hear about. This whole question probably could stand more scrutiny.

Opposite Day!

This sounds fun -- take a day to write a blog post or two defending positions I disagree with. I'd be interested in nominations from commenters.

If You Can't Take The Heat

Amy Sullivan argues that contrary to what I said before, the Wizards, at a minimum, would probably be better off getting the five seed and facing Cleveland followed by Detroit in the playoffs than dealing with the superifically easier NJ-Miami duo. I guess I agree that the 'Zards have a better shot against the Pistons, but I regard the odds of getting past the second round as so tiny either way that this is not worth worrying about. New Jersey, I think, is easier to beat than Cleveland and the real question facing the team this year is whether or not they lose in the first round.

Who Needs Adam Morrison?

Chad Ford description of the great white hope:

The Good: Some scouts believe he is the best basketball player in the country. He has an unbelievable feel for the game and combines that with a passion for winning that's nearly unrivaled in college basketball. Morrison also has good size for his position, has improved his long-range shooting and is a leader on the court.

The Bad: Athleticism is the biggest issue. Morrison is not a bad athlete, but he's far from an elite one. That means he has to work very hard to get his own shot. He's developed a number of tricks to make it happen on the college level, but will they work in the NBA? On the defensive end, it's just ugly. He can barely guard anyone in college. The fact that he has diabetes also creates a question mark.

So basically if Morrison works out, what you'd be hoping for is a high-scoring small forward who's a defensive liability. Now, oddly, the two teams said to be most interested in him are Portland and Seattle, both of whom are better on offense than defense already. Drafting someone with that profile seems like a bad idea under the circumstances. I think Atlanta's entire roster already plays the three, so that's probably not the best idea either. Chicago, by contrast, is significantly better on defense than on offense so there's maybe a case to be made for them. The team also seems so young that they should maybe try and trade their draft pick -- dunno if that's being speculated about. To me, that makes Orlando look like the team that could best use him.

Is Our Children Learning?

There are a ton of schools in the immediate vicinity of my house, and according to this map none of them -- not the elemtary school, not the high school, neither of the middle schools, and neither of the charters -- are making the Adequate Yearly Progress. Given the quantity of new condo construction in the area, I think the local building contractors may want to to consider stepping in and trying to do something about this. I don't think there are enough childless yuppies on the entire eastern seaboard to fill all those units, and I don't see tons of yuppie family types wanting to move in under the circumstances. Of course, the families actually living in the neighborhood are screwed either way -- right now the schools are bad, but if the schools improved richer families would start moving in and working class parents wouldn't be able to swing the rent anymore.

Revenge

Flip Saunders really should have known better than to give Arenas such meager playing time during the All-Star Game. This is a guy whose skills are fueled entirely by perceived slights -- the team went into a slump right after they decided the US Olympic team needed a little Gilbertology.

Brokeback Again

Just read Ross Douthat's old review:

But of course it is a gay movie, too, in the sense that it's a movie that doesn't just tell the story of two men in love, but advances certain ideas about the nature of that love. There isn't a political agenda in Brokeback Mountain, exactly - it isn't a brief for hate crimes laws or domestic partnerships, except by implication - but there's unquestionably a moral and philosophical agenda, and one that's more radical, I think, than most critics are likely to acknowledge. The film is a study in the contrast between homosexuality and heterosexuality, and the former is - almost without exception - presented as preferable to the latter, as purer and more beautiful, and ultimately as more authentically masculine. Critics have noted, rightly, how Ang Lee portrays his heroes' wives sympathetically - particularly Michelle Williams's Alma - and this is true, so far as it goes. But while the film invites the audience to like them and pity their plight, it also trades in the darkest stereotypes of domestic life - the squalling babies, the tiny apartments and the mounting bills, the domineering in-laws and the general claustrophobia that almost any man feels, at one point or another, in his married life, but that Brokeback Mountain portrays as being the whole of it.

But that follows, doesn't it? There are some typical discontents that a man would have with married life. And if the man in question were a gay man and he was married to a woman then those discontents really would be more-or-less the whole of married life. That's sort of what makes gay men so . . . gay, no? If being married to a woman had tons of appeal and offered a lot of emotional satisfaction to a man, that man wouldn't be very gay. Well, so it seems to me. It's not that much of a slam on heterosexual marriage to say that a gay man wouldn't enjoy it very much. Conversely, I imagine I wouldn't really dig being married to a gay dude, but that's a fact about me not a fact about gay marriage.

Bobcats

A New York Times article contends that the Charlotte Bobcats have a much brighter future than their fellow cellar-dwellers in NYC:

The Bobcats have the reigning rookie of the year (Emeka Okafor), a promising rookie point guard (Raymond Felton) and a dynamic swingman (Gerald Wallace), none of them older than 23. The Knicks have two former All-Stars (Steve Francis and Stephon Marbury), both 29, who play the same position and have been traded a total of seven times.

The Bobcats, in their second year of existence, are following a methodical plan to build a contender. The Knicks impatiently bounce from one splashy trade to the next while trying to avoid the worst record in the franchise's 60-year history.

That seems right, but I worry about this:

The Bobcats figured to be in the 30-victory range this season before injuries struck. Okafor, who averaged 15.1 points and 10.9 rebounds as a rookie, has been out since mid-December because of an ankle injury. The rookie forward Sean May has also been out for the same span. Wallace, the Bobcats' most versatile scorer, has missed 23 games. Kareem Rush, the starting off guard, has missed 18 games.

In all, Bobcat players have missed 199 games to injury, the second most in the league.

The thing about injuries is that they're part of the game and some players seem distinctly more injury-prone than others. Consider Denver, about which you could definitely say the team would be a lot better if their guys were healthy. The problem is that they've got a couple of guys -- Martin and Camby -- who can't stay healthy consistently. Utah seems to be in a similar situation with Boozer and Kirilenko. When you see a lot of injuries to your promising young core, you need to worry that you might have assembled a promising young core of injury-prone players. The cap space, of course, is very nice but is there a top-tier player who's going to want to go play for Charlotte? In the 2007 offseason, the bitchin' 2003 draft class will all be restricted free agents, so there's definitely some hope. . . .

Fat Bald Guy Rule

Seems plausible:

The careers of these two coaches illustrate what I call the Fat Bald Guy Rule. The FBGR posits that, when considering otherwise roughly equivalent candidates for any job whose formal requirements don't include being good-looking, hire the fat bald guy. The reason is simple: Society gives all sorts of unearned preferences to good-looking people, so when a fat bald guy manages to assemble a résumé that at first glance resembles that possessed by his good-looking competition, the FBGR assumes that the former record is actually far more impressive than the latter, all things considered.

One assumes the effect would be even stronger for women.

The Bracket

The goofy Western Conference playoff bracket wherein the second-best team will get the fourth seed has gotten all the attention, but there's some Eastern Conference wackiness as well. After all, can anyone doubt that you'd rather get the sixth seed and face New Jersey followed by Miami than the fifth seed and face Cleveland followed by Detroit? The league is lucky that Indiana, Washington, Philadelphia and Milwaukee are so tightly packed that it doesn't make sense for anyone to try and tank games in order to finish sixth rather than fifth because doing so runs a strong risk of getting yourself dropped to seven or eight.

Osama's Got No Chance

Today I was inside the actual Capitol building for like the third or fourth time since I moved to town. The way this always seems to work is that when you're going in, you need to enter through some weird hard-to-find sidedoor, but on the way out you get to walk down the main steps which are quite grand and offer this awesome view of the National Mall and all just seems very "inside the Beltway." Anyways, I stepped out this morning, taking in both the grandeur and this morning's splendid weather when, just to bring it all together, I spied in front of me a really cute, petite blonde chick carrying . . . a giant black machine gun. Hott. The Capitol Police is really stepping things up.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Apropos the laptop theft discussed below, my new MacBook Pro is four times faster than my old PowerBook G4 in roughly the sense that Stephon Marbury is the "best point guard in the NBA." Back in the real world, it seems that some programs are faster, but others are actually slower, depending (I guess) on whether or not they've been re-written for the new chip architecture or whatever. The built in iSight camera is neat, I guess, though also sort of pointless.

Crime Might Pay If You Did It Better

Read this shocking tail of true crime. The most surprising thing about it is all the stuff that went unstolen. There'd long been loose talk of the HDTV as a burglary risk, but I'd never really believed that. The thing is a little awkward to carry and, besides, has so many tangled cables connected to it that actually getting it out of the place expeditiously would be very difficult. So, television is safe and sound. Either the XBox or our Bose CD/DVD thingy, however, would have been easy to cart off. Even more surprising, not one but two easily portable digital cameras were sitting on a shelf right next to a wallet that did get stolen but left unmolested. There was also a 60 gig portable hard drive lying around, a valuable ticket to tomorrow's Metric show (okay, maybe not so valuable) and a whole bunch of delicious Turkish deserts.

Belle, Sebastian, and the New Pornographers

I really went to this show to see the opening act, but things got pretty disappointing. Neko Case isn't with the pornographers on this tour. Bad. But even worse, her backup was sick and couldn't sing. The result was . . . not so hot, despite the band's best efforts. But Belle & Sebastian, who I generally think are overrated, really saved the day with a fantastic set. Perhaps I need to reconsider my general evaluation.

Bust?

I haven't watched any Magic games recently, but by the numbers Darko Milicic looks an awful lot like a promising young big man nowadays. 7 points, 2 blocks, and 5.3 rebounds in 20 minutes is non-slouchy stuff considering the limited playing time and given distinctly non-sucky play arguments like "he's only twenty years old" are once again seeming persuasive. Now it turns out that there were several excellent players available in that draft, so even if Darko improves it'll still be hard to justify that number two draft spot. But there's a world of space between "not as good as Dwayne Wade" and "ha, ha, you suck."

Most Improved Frenchman

Tony Parker or Boris Diaw? Diaw's raw numbers are way up -- 4.8 ppg to 12.8, 2.6 rpg to 6.8, 2.3 apg to 6.9 -- in a way tha leaves Parker (16.6 to 19.3 / 3.7 to 3.4 / 6.1 to 5.8) in the dust notwithstanding Marc Stein's contention over the weekend that Parker is the most improved player so far. Then again, it's fairly common for commentators to confuse "improved" with "played more minutes" and certainly Diaw's playing time is way up from 18 minutes per game to 34. But even a per-minute analysis clearly supports Diaw. His points-per-40 is up about 40 percent from last year's number, while Parker's only improved modestly from 19.5 to 22.2 and in terms of assists and rebounds, Parker's become slightly less productive while Diaw's up and while Diaw commits fewer turnovers this year than last, Parker commits more. Both have shown comparable improvement in true shooting percentage.

It seems to me, in other words, that while Parker's the better player, that reflects the fact that he was a way better player than Diaw was last year; Diaw's shown far more improvement.

Facts: Who Needs 'Em?

Rick Spielman reporting for ESPN on CBA talks:

In reality, though, that would not be the case. Currently, the players draw a percentage -- 65.5 percent in 2005 -- of a revenue pool called designated gross revenue (DGR), which is primarily television money and ticket sales. The owners already have agreed to use a wider pool from which to draw player salaries, one called "total football revenue," which includes things like local radio and television income, stadium revenue, etc. Using TFR instead of DGR, and with the new television money in place and all other types of new revenue coming in, you're talking about an astronomical amount of money being shifted to the players.

While I don't have the exact numbers, it's hard to believe that 56.2 percent of TFR actually would be a step backward from 65.5 percent of the smaller DGR pool. Yet Upshaw seems to feel accepting anything less than 60 percent would be a loss.

I don't have the exact numbers either, but then again I'm not a professional sportwriter. Isn't this question kind of important? Are the owners asking the players to take a smaller share of revenue, or are they offering them a slightly bigger one?

MVP Formula

If you want to see statistical analysis gone badly awry, look no further than this effort to predict NBA MVP winners. Can you say "specification searching?"

A good tip-off is when you need to start weighting variables in a transparently ad hoc way. It makes perfect sense, of course, that how a team performs relative to its conference rivals would be a factor in MVP voting. But the formula says you get -5 MVP points for being 4th-or-worse in your conference, 0 MVP points for being third or second in your conference, 2 MVP points for being first, and 5 MVP points for being first with a 4 game margin or more. There's clearly no theory behind these specific quantities -- they're just the numbers that happen to make the formula's retrospective projections come out "right" and also lead to the conclusion that consensus favorite Chauncey Billups will win this year.

Back in the real world, meanwhile, everyone knows that if Nash hadn't missed any games in the 04-05 season, the Suns would have had a better record (thus boosting his score according to this formula) but his MVP case would have been weakened, since Phoenix's poor performance Nash-less convinced a lot of people (rightly or wrongly) of his uniquely valuable contribution.

The Pajama Game

I rarely agree with John Podhoretz, but we seem to share an affection for The Pajama Game, possibly the only musical comedy about union organizing. Apparently, there's a revival on broadway now. Good times.

Of course, with this following the Brokeback post below, the blog is arguably getting too gay for comfort. Back to sports soon.... Also, chicks sure are attractive, eh? Certainly I think so.

An Oscar Opinion

Everyone keeps thinking I'm joking when I say this, but I think Brokeback Mountain needed more hot gay sex. Yes, yes, yes the story's about love and longing and universal themes. But it's also, at some level, about really hot sex. If it isn't, important elements of the plot don't really make sense. The dudes never break out their fishing rods on all these "fishing trips" so presumably they're up to . . . something, right? What gets portrayed is a lot of staring into the middle distance. That's fine, but obviously they were getting it on a lot. It's not "confusing" or whatever that they aren't portrayed fucking constantly, since it's all implied, but it seemed like a bit of a gutless move. Yes, it's politically defensible to try to water down the gay sex as much as possible to give the movie broad appeal, but it's aesthetically cowardly. So says I.

The other thing is that they managed to take the Brokeback short story, which is short (ergo, "short story") and turn it into a long movie. The result is to radically change the pace from rapid to languid, which is rarely a good idea. It also contributes to the aforementioned problem. The need isn't necessarily for more hot man-on-man action, but for said action to be a higher proportion of what you see. After all, you "get" the basic plot point -- these dudes aren't going to be very happy with their lots in life -- pretty quickly, it doesn't require intensive exposition. Also, like everyone, I think there was too much crap about the sheep at the beginning. Who cares? Sheep are the boringest thing imaginable.

Risk and Basketball

Fascinating dialogue (part one; part two) between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell. The most interesting contention is Gladwell's view, near the end of part two, that "bad GMs" in the NBA are usually insufficiently risk-averse. Both participants say various smart things about that, but I thought I'd add the obvious -- people want to try and win championships. That's obviously much harder to do than is fielding a winning team or a playoff team and I can see believing (and, indeed, it may even be true) that you need to take bad risks to elevate a team to this status.

I think this is a bad thing altogether. Of course it would be weird for a GM to aim for better-than-average status rather than championship status over the long haul. But as a fan, I'm reasonably satisfied with making the playoffs and having some hope of advancement as long as it's not obvious that the team's entered a perennial cycle of decline. In some ways, the most impressive achievement is to do what the Pacers have done and make the playoffs 14 years out of 15 while needing (naturally) to rebuild the team on the fly as former stars age or leave.

Experimental Philosophy

Interesting stuff. I feel like the article fails to raise the most salient point. Philosophers spend a lot of time talking about people's intuitions. The group of "people" in question, however, is somewhat eccentric, with professional philosophers and philosophy graduate students heavily overrepresented. At its broadest, you add undergraduates who take philosophy courses and the social peers of philosophy professors into the mix. It's possible, however, that at least some intuitions are differently distributed among sociocultural groups and the informal "ask people I know" method isn't going to pick this up, whereas formal survey methods might.

To take a research-free example, the Christian vision of the afterlife involves making bright-line distinctions between people who go to heaven and people who do not. My understanding of Hinduism is that it involves a much more continuous approach to the question of rebirth -- lives are better or worse, not good or bad. People, including non-Christians, who grow up in a culture heavily influenced by Christianity (or Islam for that matter) may, for this reason, be much more inclined to find schemes involving an obligatory/permissable dichotomy intuitive than are people who grow up in India. It would be at least worth checking.

Longshots

Outside the five contenders (San Antonio, Detroit, Dallas, Miami, Phoenix) which team has the best chance of winning the championship? The odds of the entire "field" put together are quite poor, so the odds of any particular field team winning are pretty miniscule. That said, my longshot bet would be Denver. Like the Suns, they benefit from the odd bracket that will have Spurs-Mavs in the second round. We know from the end of last season that this group is capable of going on a tear and playing well-above their apparent long-run ability level. Their not-so-impressive regular season record reflects the costs of having two injury prone guys (K-Mart and Camby) in important roles, but if they're fortunate that might not be a problem come playoff time. They almost certainly won't win, but if anyone breaks out, I think it's more likely to be them than anyone else.

The other respectable case, I think, can be made for Indiana whose +3.1 margin of victory is the field's highest and suggests they've been underperforming and who we haven't really see play at full strength almost all season.

In Re: D'Antoni

I feel Chris Sheridan is not feeling the force of the question:

Jay (NY): Why did Team USA pass over Mike D'Antoni as coach to give the reins to Coach K? With all due respect to Coach K, he's never had to handle pro athletes before, nor does he have the international game pedigree that D'Antoni does.

Chris Sheridan: Uh, Jay, Mike D'Antoni is Coach K's lead assistant.

This seems to me to miss the force of the point. If, as Team USA seems to agree, D'Antoni is the NBA coach best-qualified to lead a team in international competition, then he ought to be the coach of the team unless you can produce a strong rationale for preferring a college coach. After all, we're coaching NBA players here. Maybe the idea is that a college coach will have a non-partisan standing that an NBA coach would lack, rendering him better-positioned to make tough calls or whatever.

Team USA

This looks like a pretty solid roster to me, given the number of players who (for understandable reasons) didn't want to participate. I feel the team is a little thin in terms of real point guards and could use some Mike Bibby. And what's Luke Ridnour doing? I thought he was around to provide token whiteness but Brad Miller and Adam "The Great White Hope" Morrison have that covered.

The real scandal here is that Mike D'Antoni isn't the coach. This is a team of NBA players who are going to be playing by international basketball rules. D'Antoni has had success coaching NBA players and has had success coaching teams playing under international rules. Coach K is, well, neither of those things. Is the idea that if they players don't get paid it must be like college? That doesn't make much sense.

Also no Iverson. Arguably, a penetration-heavy scoring point guard is way less useful to Team USA than he is to his NBA squad. But Gilbertology's on the team and if he's not exactly the poor man's Iverson then he's certainly the somewhat less prosperous man's Answer. Of course by 2008 that may well not be the case. But Antawn Jamison? Team was composed by hardcore Wizards fans, I guess.