EarlWoodman.com

1. Tegan & Sara - Like O, Like H
2. Northern State - Things I’ll Do
3. Ben Folds - Bitches Ain’t Shit
4. Sleater Kinney - Modern Girl
5. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps
6. John Frusciante - Look On
7. Rihanna - Lemme Get That
8. The Lonely Island - Santana DVX
9. Brandi Carlile - Josephine
10. Lily Allen - Knock ‘Em Out
11. The Ting Tings - That’s Not My Name
12. Nicole Scherzinger - Whatever You Like
13. Rilo Kiley - The Moneymaker
14. The Posies - Start a Life
15. Brand New - Okay I Believe You But My Tommy Gun Don’t

(I’ve been using that pun for ages and no one ever even chuckles, but you can bet your damnedest I’m going to try again.)

Last week I attempted to make falafel for the first time. It was sort of edible and tasted much like that at Extreme Pita, so I can’t say it was an unmitigated disaster, although I do tend to put those two words together rather often.

There it is - the uncooked falafel. I have no deep fryer, so I attempted to fry it in a saucepan with an inch or so of oil in the bottom.

The falafel absorbed ALL of it:

Ok, so you can see the oil on the paper towel. That is a better place for it than my stomach, for sure. Here is another shot:

This time the oil is being absorbed by the paper towel on top. Tasty.

I’ve merged my four blogs into this one. The following URLs will soon be gone:

www.ignatiofairfax.com
earlw.wordpress.com
thevocmreview.wordpress.com

I have no screenshot, but trust me this was taken verbatim from vocm.com a few days ago:

It was a normal flight home for a group of passengers returning to St. John’s from Mexico last evening, but there was much talk of swine flu as the plane unloaded. It got in just after 11:30 Thursday night. Jessica Pelley says it was suppose to be a relaxing vacation, but even lounging around the pool, and hearing others talk of the virus, made her nervous. The group of passengers were greeted at the airport by Canada Border Services employees wearing face masks and plastic gloves,  and some family members, covered their mouths, although happy to see their loved ones. Passenger Laura Dalton says she learned of the outbreak on the news, and kept herself up to date on the happenings. She says they were asked to wear hand sanitizer before eating at the restaurant. Robert Cobb however says he didn’t see much evidence of the flu…And Sean Whelan said it didn’t have much of an impact on his trip… But for the most part, they all agreed, they enjoyed their time in the warmer temperatures.

Problems:

1. “suppose” should be “supposed”
2. Too many commas in the “suppose” sentence
3. “The group of passengers were” should read “The group of passengers was”
4. “and some family members, covered their mouths, although happy to see their loved ones” -> that’s a mess
5. Asked to “wear” hand sanitizer?
6. There should be no ellipses in a news article. 
7. A sentence started with ‘And’. 
8. A sentence started with ‘But’.
9. After one ellipsis there’s a space, but not afte the other. 
10. “But for the most part, they all agreed” -> did the reporter ask every single person if he/she enjoyed the time in the warmer temperatures or is he/she just referring to the people mentioned?

I think I’m going to be sick…

As I expected, I got more than 50% of the round 1 NHL playoff games right. I got 5 of 8 which ain’t too bad. That’s the same as two of the so-called experts on TSN, and way better than Maggie the monkey.

Now I’m gonna calculate the odds of each of the remaining teams of winning the Stanley Cup using the method I showed in the last post.

Boston - 31.5%
Washington - 19.5%
Pittsburgh - 8.5%
Carolina - 5%

Detroit - 24.5%
Vancouver - 13%
Chicago - 12%
Anaheim - 3%

These numbers don’t add to 100%, which can be expected since I didn’t look at all possible scenarios, just the best and worst case for each team. So now I’ll normalize them, which is hand-wavy, but should be a reasonable estimate.

Boston - 26.9%
Washington - 16.7%
Pittsburgh - 7.3%
Carolina - 4.3%

Detroit - 20.9%
Vancouver - 11.1%
Chicago - 10.3%
Anaheim - 2.6%

(These numbers don’t add to 100 because of rounding.)

I highlighted the whole damn sequence. It’s just awful.

I have circled VOCM’s grammar mistakes. And what’s with the inconsistent usage of spaces between sentences and after commas? 

Original article: http://vocm.com/news-info.asp?id=35786

I did something stupid. I collected playoff data from almost 20 years of NHL playoffs and then aggregated said data without keeping the original. That severely hampered what I wanted to do with this article, but I still have something worthy of sharing.

As mentioned last time, I wanted to determine how good of a predictor regular season points are in determining playoff winners. So I plotted the aggregated data in the form of categories of points versus winning percentage historically since 1991, excluding the shortened season. The result is a graph with a clear trend line and a fairly high correlation coefficient (0.91).

As an example, when a playoff matchup involves a team that had between 21 and 25 points in the regular season more than its opponent, history indicates a 71% chance that the higher ranked team will win the series. Interestingly, if I did not aggregate the data into groups, the correlation coefficient would have been lower. I’m not entirely sure what this means.

So, let’s take a real world example from this season: Calgary/Chicago. The gap in points was 6, so we look for the value of the linear regression line for the 6-10 category. Eyeballing the graph, it’s about 62%. That’s the chance of Chicago winning according to this model.

Even more interesting is trying to determine the chance of a team winning the Stanley Cup. Let’s take Chicago again and at first, we’ll assume they always meet the toughest opponent in each round and that no teams have yet been eliminated.

62% chance of beating Calgary times 35% chance of beating San Jose times 38% chance of beating Detroit times 35% chance of beating Boston = 4.7%, as a worst case, and as a best case: 62% times 65% chance of beating Anaheim times 65% chance of beating Columbus times 65% chance of beating Montreal = 17%. Taking the average of these two, there’s a 10.9% chance of Chicago winning the cup.

San Jose is the top performer in the regular season, and their chance of winning the cup according to this model is: (worst case) 73% chance vs Anaheim times 65% chance vs Chicago times 58% chance vs Detroit times 58% chance vs Boston = 16% and best case is 73% (Anaheim) times 73% (Columbus) times 73% (St. Louis) times 73% (Montreal) = 28.4%, for an average case of 22.2% of winning the Stanley Cup.

For the lowest team, Anaheim, the chances of them winning the cup (from the beginning of the playoffs, not today!) would have been (worst): 27% times (SJ) times 27% (Det) times 38% (Van) times 27% (Bos) is less than 1 percent. Best case: 27% times 38% (Cal) times 42% (St. Louis) times 42% (Montreal) = 1.8%. On average, Anaheim’s chance of winning the cup is about 1.4%.

A couple of series are finished and my current record is 1-1. I got Vancouver win right and the Boston win wrong. I’m not at all surprised about that second one.

I based my predictions entirely on point totals during the regular season. In fact, I cubed them. Then I took the ratio of the greater team to the total of both teams’ cubic points and that’s the chance that the given team will win each game in a series. 

So in this example: 
Wash: 1259712
Mtl: 804357
Chance of Wash winning each game: 61%

In the iteration I ran, Montreal beat the odds and won 4 of 7 games. But of course that happens in real hockey. 

Now, why did I use cubic points? Because I wanted there to be a good chance of an upset. Using squares gives too much, and using “quads” doesn’t give enough.

Here is an example of the outcomes if I had used squares:

Philadelphia upsets Pittsburgh in 5
New Jersey beats Carolina in 5
Washington beats New York in 5
Boston sweeps Montreal
Calgary upsets Chicago in 7
Vancouver beats St. Louis in 6
Detroit sweeps Columbus
San Jose beats San Jose in 6

This run actually turned out pretty sensible but in repeated testing it was not this good. Now here it is with quads:

Pittsburgh beats Philadelphia in 5
New Jersey beats Carolina in 7
Washington beats New York in 6
Boston sweeps Montreal
Chicago beats Calgary in 6
St. Louis upsets Vancouver in 7
Detroit beats Columbus in 5
San Jose beats Anaheim in 5

This is a bit more along the lines of what I expected for quads. Only one upset and it took a whole 7 games. For shits and giggles, let’s try with 8s instead of quads:

Pittsburgh beats Philadelphia in 5
New Jersey sweeps Carolina
Washington sweeps New York
Boston beats Montreal in 5
Chicago beats Calgary in 6
St. Louis upsets Vancouver in 6
Detroit sweeps Columbus
San Jose sweeps Anaheim

This time we have four sweeps and only one upset. This looks to be less typical. But we need something better than just eyeballing it to determine if cubes are a good choice, or whether we should even use points. We need a better predictor. That’s the subject of a future posting.

My computer figured these out, based on the regular season points for each team. The San Jose Sharks should win their first cup.

Round 1
Pittsburgh 99 Philadelphia 99 4-3 for Phi
New Jersey 106 Carolina 97 4-2 for Car
Washington 108 NYR 95 4-0 for Wash
Boston 116 Montreal 93 4-1 for Mtl

Chicago 104 Calgary 98 4-2 for Chi
Vancouver 100 St. Louis 92 4-1 for Van
Detroit 112 Columbus 92 4-3 for Det
San Jose 117 Anaheim 91 4-0 for SJ

Round 2, reseeding
Washington 108 Montreal 93 4-3 for Mtl
Philadelphia 99 Carolina 97 4-2 for Car
San Jose 117 Chicago 104 4-0 for SJ
Detroit 112 Vancouver 100 4-1 for Det

Round 3
Carolina 97 Montreal 93 4-1 for Car
San Jose 117 Detroit 112 4-1 for SJ

Final Round
San Jose 117 Carolina 97 4-1 for SJ