Terror Rats: Part VII

Wednesday, April 8th
Marshall, Texas
Near Caddo Lake, around 1pm
Caddo Lake was once the largest freshwater lake in Texas until creative irrigation sent the crown elsewhere. The lake traverses the border between Texas and Louisiana. It’s a diverse place with both swampy areas and open water. The lake is home to thousands of animal [...]

From the Notebook

-Read Catcher in the Rye by Salinger. I liked it, a little dull at times and at times annoying. It’s overhyped but few novels really capture adolescent maleness so well. As for the language and adult substance, well…After “Southpark: The Movie” I doubt I’ll ever get offended by anything ever again.
-I thought the series finale of [...]

Women in baseball

I’ve been saying this for years, if you learn to throw the knuckleball early in life, you can be a professional baseball player no matter who you are:
OSAKA, Japan (AP)—Japan’s first female professional baseball player made her debut Friday, striking out one batter in the ninth inning.
Eri Yoshida, a 17-year-old who throws a sidearm knuckleball, [...]

Terror Rats: Part VI

Monday, April 6th 2009,
USDA-APHIS Office
Littleton, CO
Time as a government bureaucrat flows away. It flows away faster than it does for the rest of us. The average man experiences a trickle of time. For the bureaucrat it’s a deluge. A waterfall. This is normally why government bureaucrats are several decades behind the [...]

Terror Rats: Part V

3am, March 24th
A remote corner of Grimes County, Texas
A beat up darkish-orangish-rustish Chevy Suburban from the mid nineteen-eighties drove down a little dirt road in the dead of the night. The only light came from the moon and the dirty headlights of the sluggish vehicle.
It came to a creeping stop and a short [...]

UZR correlated to Runs Allowed

Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) is a statistic which purports to accurately measure fielding ability. In fact, there’s little reason to doubt it. But how useful is UZR? While it’s not completely fair, running a correlation between UZR and the number of runs allowed (RA) should give us an idea as to the utility of the [...]

Spring Training Stats, Useless?

Maybe not:
A few years ago we discovered that there is a way to use spring training stats to predict future performance. We took all spring training hitters and found that, as expected, about half of them do better than their career norms in the upcoming season, and about half of them do worse than their [...]

From the Notebook

-Finished Douglas Adams “Restaurant at the End of the Universe” And “Life, the Universe and Everything.” I’ve got all five of Adams’ Hitchhiker’s trilogy in a single volume and I’ve been reading them while doing the elliptical machine. From what everything I’ve read so far, the series definitely starts to fall apart in [...]

Colbertness

Most of the time I don’t like Colbert, but I still watch his program regularly as it’s one of the few good programs playing when I’m at the gym. Occasionally I’m rewarded; This interview with Juan Cole was hilarious:

The Colbert Report
Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Juan Cole

comedycentral.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor
Mark Sanford

(Looks like the [...]

Terror Rats: Part IV

9 am Monday, March 23rd
Littleton, CO
Dr. Bill Smith, the Deputy Director of Wildlife Services in the Western Region of the Wildlife Damage Management Assessors Office, a division of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was sitting in his office taping receipts to computer paper. The chief accountant [...]