Some Good Points

The man writing this link raises some interesting questions. Saw the movie last night, it's better than the reviews, but definitely could have done with a better writing staff. Worth seeing, just not as supremely awesome as it could have been. More to come later today.

Oh, and Happy Birthday Sister-type!

Grab Bag

I'm going to see Terminator tonight. I already saw Star Trek and Wolverine. There are about 6 more movies on the list that I need to see this summer. Expect a full blown summer movie post tomorrow.

Until then, thoughts on basketball. If I had to guess before the game ones which favorite would lose I definitely would have gone with the Lakers. Instead they won by two and the Cavs lost by one. Odd. I'm revising my estimates and going with two 6 game series that should be pretty enjoyable to watch. Still banking on a Lakers-Cavs final. Between David Stern and the Nike-Muppets commercial the fix is in.

Finally, a teaser paragraph for a later post. After the TNT guys did their all time starting 5 my dad and I picked top 10 teams, alternating picks. Dad got Bird and 1st pick, I got MJ and 2nd. The teams broke out as follows:

Dad: Bird, Magic, Hakeem, Jabaar, Big O, Wes Unseld, Malone, Isiah, Wilt and.... I'm forgetting the 10th
Me: MJ, Duncan, Russel, David Thompson, Jerry West, Bill Walton, Scottie, LeBron, CP3, John Stockton

It's a fun game to play and you really can't go wrong doing it. Anyway, that's fodder for a more full post at some time in the future.

Oh, and I'm currently 3-3 in my 40k League. I feel like I'm getting the hang of my new army, but am very much looking forward to next month's version. So much more versatility, wayy better speed and much better ability to deal with the abundance of mech lists out there.

Any and all thoughts about any and all topics much appreciated in the comments field.

Slow Day

Sorry all, just not a lot going on today. Hopefully the basketball tonight will provide me with useful fodder for future posts.

That said, I did just find out that I have 35GB of emails on my work account. The top tier that they counted in the email telling us to start deleting our emails was 15GB. I am so proud of my email account. 6 years of undeleted emails are awesome.

$50 BILLION!!!!

Based on my previous assertion that if and when the Lakers defeated the Rockets China would owe the United States the outstanding trade balance it looks like our country is $50B richer today than it was on Saturday. Pretty awesome, huh?

Seriously though, as I stated in the initial post about Rick Adelman's snake-bit history against Phil Jackson I wasn't sure what the precipitating cause of the Rockets' defeat would be, just that I knew they would lose. Well as the post game 6 articles will show, it really wasn't that Phil out coached Adelman. Rather, as the case seems to be in virtually every situation a combination of superior talent and just plain bad luck conspired against Mr. Adelman.

As I'm want to tell anyone who will listen, you should never take betting advice from me. That said, I would qualify this particular situation by pointing out that it really wasn't a bet. It was a sure thing. And if we've learned anything over the past few years, it's that sure things should always be cashed in on.

Predictions for NBA conference finals - Lakers in 6, Cavs in 4; Cavs in 5 in finals.

Am I Turning into my Mother

Here is the article in question. Given my overall high opinion of my mother there are drastically worse fates that could happen. I'd like to stay about 5'1" though if I had the option...

Planning on a few more updates over the course of the day, so stay tuned, or don't. That's cool too.

National Pizza Party Day

No, I'm not making this up. Those of you who know me, and if you're reading my blog you know me, know that there is no more perfect holiday for me. I think I'll need to co opt it into the International Church of Billy (ICOB - membership 1 and always recruiting, leadership positions are available). The even more amazing thing - I'm actually going to a Pizza Party tonight.

Awesome meter officially set to 11.

Justification for Higher Education

As a reward to anyone who read my earlier opus, feast your eyes on THIS!!!! When I'm up until 4am regularly during my 1L year, things like this will help me stay awake.

Relating to Understand

I realized relatively early on in my life that I most readily understand a concept only when I am able to relate it to something else with which I am familiar. If you've been reading this blog at all you'll notice that I'm constantly comparing one thing to another, comparing sports and modes of expression, strategy games and financial markets, love and a time of cholera (ok, not that, but I needed a third thing and that title has always stuck in my mind - not that I've read the book, although I hear good things). I'm currently reading through Michael Lewis' new book "Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity". As I was reading I came to yet another semi-baked theory that I'd like to share with my massive readership.

First, a little about the book. I received it as a birthday present, and both the Official Giver of Gifts and I thought that the book was authored by Lewis. He is definitely one of the X amount of people I'd want to sit around a dinner table with, so anything he puts out will immediately draw my attention. I was a little disappointed when I saw "Edited By" above his name (and in very small print, trixy publishers!) on the cover, but I figured I'd give it a short read to see if I could learn anything. I was pleasantly surprised by how he structured the book - intros written to each section/financial panic, and those sections comprised of news stories written about said panic. It's an interesting way to get a sense of the mind set that goes into each of these "catastrophes".

In the section on the Asian crash of '97 he writes about the hedge fund Long-Term Capitol Management (LTCM). Starting the story back in the context of his initial book Liar's Poker (a mandatory read for just about anyone) he writes about the crash of '87 and how it marked a change in power on Wall Street. At the start of that book he describes the average trader as someone who traded more from his gut than his head, and at heart was a salesman - emotional intuition was more highly valued than rigorous analytics. In the anecdote from Panic he writes how in the '87 crash, in the midst of Black Monday (Oct 19, 1987, the biggest single day drop %-wise in the financial markets ever) John Merriweather and his group of "young professors" were able to realize a fundamental truth about the crash and everyone else's reaction to it.

Lewis describes how the emotionally effective traders had essentially (very much simplified for the sake of narrative) been using cheat sheets to determine what the prices of their bonds should be. The specific set of circumstances that arose on Oct 19th, 1987 was not covered on those cheat sheets. Lewis is a much better writer than I'll ever be, so I'll just quote his section here:

This brute with razor instincts, it turned out, relied on a cheat sheet that laid out the prices of old long bonds as the market moved. The move in the bond market during the panic had blown all these bonds right off his sheet. "he's moved beyond his intuition," one of the young professors thought. "He doesn't have the tools to cope. And if he doesn't have the tools, who does?" His confusion was an opportunity for the young professors to exploit.

In order to exploit that opportunity, the young professors developed a series of mathematical models that would allow them to accurately price those bonds in more extreme and increasingly exotic ways. They took an area of knowledge that could previously be condensed down to a cheat sheet and evolved it out to the point where people needed multiple Ph.D.s in order to follow the math. Along the way they made hundreds of millions of dollars and kinda-sorta inadvertently triggered a follow-on financial panic in '97 and can be round-aboutly blamed for the current financial fiasco in which we currently find ourselves.

Ok, now that you know wayyy more about esoteric financial details of the 80s and 90s I'll explain the revelation that made all of this make more sense to me.

The analogy that makes the most sense to me is to compare the evolution of the financial markets to post-Newtonian physics. The "brute with the razor instincts" from the above passage was working in the equivalent of a Newtonian version of physics. He was dealing with actions and reactions that he could experience in his daily life. Sure some of them were complicated - the equivalent of a dropping weight spinning a rod that pulls a string that's attached to another weight that's on an incline, and figuring out how fast the weight goes up the incline. There's a lot to that problem, but you can relatively easily build the system, and none of the math should be beyond a pretty smart high school student.

What the young professors did was invent the equivalent of Relativity Theory and Quantum Dynamics. These two theories work just the same as Newton’s theories in every day environments. It’s only when things start moving really Really REALLY fast or gets really Really REALLY small that Newton’s laws break down, and you need either Relativity or Quantum Dynamics to explain what is happening. Analogously (did I just make up a word there, not sure) the old bond pricing cheat sheets worked really well in most cases that would ever come up. However, when that 1 in 50 million situation occurred the cheat sheets were invalidated. You needed much more complicated equations, using wayyyy more Greek letters than most people would recognize to begin to make sense of what was going on.

The result of this evolution is that instead of anyone who was particularly smart in High School understanding exactly how the world around them works, only those who majored in physics in college would be able to accurately explain what’s really going on. Of course, just like with physics, the financial markets didn’t stop there. The young professors busted out in the late 90s, but instead of going back to the easier days of everything on a cheat sheet matters just got more complicated. Wall Street began courting people with degrees in advanced physics and mathematics even more strongly than they previously had, and these people did what they normally do – torture the numbers to try and understand reality.

If you’re as big of a lay physics geek as I am you’ll know that the current Holy Grail of physics is to unify Relativity with Quantum Dynamics – explain what happens to the really big and the really small with the same set of equations. This quest has lead to terms you might have heard: String Theory, M Theory, Brane Theory, the Multiverse, etc. While it is possible to have an extremely basic understanding of what all these theories suggest (Brian Greene is the author you’re looking for), there are probably 50 people in the whole world who could really keep up with the math that goes into it. Similarly, as financial matters have gotten more and more complex – credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and a host of other oddly named financial products – the amount of people who can intelligently comment on them have similarly shrunk. It got to the point where the people in charge of the big banks playing with the money didn’t totally understand the models that their decisions were made on.

Now, there are tons of different implications for this realization, and I’m sure I’ll happily digress onto many of them in the future, but I’m onto my third page of single spaced text and I’m sure no one is still interested in reading this. The take-away should be that there is an interesting and informative parallel between the growing complexity in our understanding of the physical universe and the growing complexity of our manipulation of the financial universe.

Hopefully this comparison can help others with their understanding of the world, and as always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments (I think I’m up to 4 total comments at this point! WOOT!)

Why precise language matters

I was reading about a new bill that's going through congress right now that is aimed at curtailing cyber-bullying. Stepping away from whether bullying in general and cyber bullying specifically should be criminalized, what really struck me about this particular bill was the critique that it was "broadly worded" and could be interpreted in ways other than the so called intent of the authors. The specific language of the bill can be found here, and to my as-yet-untrained legal reasoning it does seem to provide a bit more leeway than Rep. Linda Sanchez seems to suggest is the intent. The original cnn.com article rightly points out that elected officials are not generally the most tech-savvy bunch, Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens, and I realize that lawyers make their hay on interpretation of "loosely" written laws, but it would be nice if the people making our laws understood what they were talking about.

This article brought to my mind a larger (in the Billy universe anyway) issue of poorly written rules, and the great Rules as Written (RAW) vs. Rules as Intended (RAI) debate. As previously mentioned throughout this blog, I regularly play tabletop strategy games known as Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. These games have many strengths, but clarity in the rules is not one of them. The designers of the games excuse this by saying that the players should follow RAI instead of RAW. Their logic for this is that it should be clear in all situations what the "intended" outcome is, and where the players are unable to readily reach an agreement they should effectively flip a coin to figure out what happens in that particular case. The problem with this approach to the rules is that it assumes you play the game with the same 3-5 people every time and that house rules can be developed over the course of your friendship to cover the odd corner cases that sometimes come up.

The problem with this strategy is that it breaks down when people do not have regular opponents. I might always play using certain conventions (forests are infinitely tall in Warhammer being one of those), but players in Chicago might play differently (use true model's eye view to determine how tall the trees are). Both of these interpretations are equally supported in the rules, and it rarely is an issue because we are geographically separated enough that the conflict doesn't ever come up. However, on my cross country road trip to Law School this summer I plan on stopping at various locations and playing these games. I know that there will be multiple instances where my opponent and I are going to have differing interpretations of the rules, and both of us will, strictly speaking, be correct. A properly written rule set would provide us with the means to settle these disputes. Sadly, Games Workshop, the company that makes Warhammer and Warhammer 40k, does not seem to care about my particular plight, and I will undoubtedly go to my grave harping on these same issues.

Taking this example out of the nerd-o-sphere and into the "Real World", there is an unfortunate similarity between Games Workshop and Rep. Sanchez's view. Both assume that the intent of the rule/law are apparent, and that their interpretation of that law is the only one that could ever come about. Sadly, this is not the case. Yes, actions with "the intent is to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person" covers the actions of a cyber bully, but it could also be argued that they cover your average Internet forum poster. Anyone who has read the comments section of Deadspin will know that they pretty much only post with the intent to intimidate or harass the subject of the post. I don't think Rep. Sanchez believes that all Deadspin commenters should be imprisoned, but as written, that is what her bill will allow for.

There is no great solution to this problem as constituted. Not because I can't outline a solution (write clear, well defined rules/laws) but rather because the people in charge of writing those laws need to have their points of view radically altered before such a solution becomes feasible. Ultimately this is my argument for having smart people hold elected office, and why I'll always vote for the smart person I disagree with over the moron who shares my views. A smart person will be able to write laws whose consequences, while I might disagree with, are intended. I'm much more afraid of the unintended consequences of a poorly written law whose intent I agree with.

As always, please feel free to sound off in the comments section, but be careful, you could be committing a felony!

Surprise cake for ones birthday is cool

Because I promised quantity I will merely say that surprise and (at least feigned) heartfelt cake for ones birthday is always a cool thing.

On the topic of further posts - I'll be more than happy to opine on the issues of the day if anything actually happens today. It seems most people are responding to the events of previous days today rather than actually doing anything new that's worth commenting on.

That said, the Lakers-Rockets game should be awesome tonight. For the sake of the National Debt (a term whose capitalization is much in question, at least amongst my colleagues), all patriotic Americans should be cheering for the Lakers.

If something interesting happens later I'll be sure to chime in, if not, have a great rest of the best day of the year!

Quantity over quality

I have a few more detailed ideas for longer, rambling style posts. However, today being my birthday I don't particularly feel like dedicating the time required to give each post its due. And if Plato taught us anything it's that true justice is found in rendering to each what it is due. Therefore, today will be more grab-bag-y.

First off: I don't care how much it costs, but the first commercially available version of this will be mine.

They should also start working on personal flying devices, cause those would be equally awesome, and give new meaning to the ultimate super power question: invisibility vs. flight.
(I'm a flight guy myself, but invisibility is much closer, so I'll take what I can get).

On Last Night's Games

Last night's NBA playoff games deserve comment, and in the wake of the Manny on 'roids revelation I doubt they will get the attention they deserve. Given my relatively limited interest in baseball I can ignore the Manny situation (I was with Simmons thinking he was just too dumb to figure out how to use them) and instead focus on the superior sport of basketball. And when I say basketball I really mean the Lakers-Rockets series. I spent most of the Celtics-Magic game watching LOST (AWESOME episode btw. The finale is shaping up to be as mind blowing as the rest have been), so I didn't get to see the Celtics blow the lead wide open. Just from perusing (which should mean a casual glance, but instead means detailed examination. I'm using my preferred definition in the hope that I can change the meaning of a word by sheer force of will) the box score it seems that Rondo had a fairly dominant game, and if I'd watched the whole thing I'd probably have more to say on the topic. However, I didn't so I wont.

I did stay up way too late last night watching the Lakers-Rockets game. If you read down a few posts you'll notice that I made a fairly (ok, ludicrously)bold prediction about the outcome of the series. Given the way the first game resolved itself I had a vested interest in the Lakers pulling out a victory. The scoreboard says the Lakers won by 13, but anyone who watched the game will know that it really was a lot closer than that. This Rockets team presents a ton of match up problems for the Lakers, and if Kobe isn't hitting ridiculously high degree of difficulty shots it could be a much tougher series than my pride is willing to accept.

Any one's that surprised at the chippiness of the game shouldn't be. You could tell that the League wanted the Lakers to win the game, and I predicted as much in my pre-game chat with my Dad, when I saw that Joey Crawford was one of the refs. Simmons called it earlier in the day on his twitter for Salvatore in Boston, but once I saw that assignment I was hoping Crawford would be in LA. Sure enough, there was his bald head at tip off. Now, if you don't follow the NBA you might not know that Crawford once challenged Tim Duncan to a fight, while Duncan was on the bench. This man is not a paragon of refereeing excellence. So is it any wonder that Derek Fisher did free safeties the world over proud when he leveled Louis Scola? Or that Ron Artest's throat attacked Kobe's elbow? There was no hope for this game from the start.

As a basketball game it definitely showed the contrasting styles of the two clubs. When the Lakers were able to break the game open and get the ball moving well they were superior. When the Rockets could slow everything down and play chest-in-your-face defense they were the better team. Fortunately the Lakers were able to dictate tempo more than the Rockets (and Kobe's holywtf?!?!!?_ shooting helped) and the Lakers were able to win a much closer game than the 13 point final difference would suggest.

As of this posting the NBA has yet to hand out any suspensions for game 3. The only player whose play is under review but wasn't ejected was Kobe, and I don't think the NBA is stupid enough to suspend him for a game (and seriously, what else are you supposed to do when a neck attacks your elbow like that?). I don't think anyone will be suspended from game 3, but I do think that there will be a silly amount of fouls called early, just so the refs can establish that they're in control of the game. Oh, and if you ever wanted to know a part of why Artest is the crazy man he is, well, check this out.

Anyway, it should be an enjoyable series. If the Lakers make it to the finals it will definitely not be the sweep-fest the Cavs are going to have. And if you're not seeing the parallels between these playoffs and the '91 playoffs where the Bulls romped through the East en-route to annihilating an aging Lakers team, well, I don't know what to do for you. All I know is that I'll definitely be watching game 3.... my birthday at 9:30 EST though, ouch, well, it'll be a experience!

As always, please sound off in the comments section! (really, 3 comments total is weak folks, you can do better!)

On Mediated Existence

Here's another post in the "How Billy Sees the World" series. Warning, this will probably be dense and will occasionally use big words. However, if you manage to make it through to the end you'll have a better understanding of how I see the world and that's a gift without measure. (riiiiggghtt...) Anyway, this post's topic is mediated existence/experience.

I was first introduced to the concept of mediated experience in a class I took on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. One of the main themes of the class was that society had evolved away from the strictly hierarchical structure of the middle ages towards a more egalitarian, flatter social structure. Without a rigid social order it was harder for each individual to "know his place in society". For example, a peasant always knew he was subservient to a knight, and the knight was subservient to the king. Similarly, in religious terms the order went God - Priesthood - Everyone else. So, in the middle ages, if you were an "everyone else" there were middle men between you and both ultimate temporal and spiritual power. Your relationship with these ultimate powers was mediated by an intermediary (hence the term). Your understanding of existence was predicated on the beliefs and interests of powers higher than you were. Obviously there were lots of layers of complexity, but for the sake of not knocking out all my readers one paragraph in I'm going to ignore those.

With the coming of the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, (semi-) Universal Suffrage and other "modernizing" influences, these mediating bodies have gone away. However, all of these moves away from mediating influences are relatively recent, and there are still inherent tendencies towards mediation. There's an unspoken clash between the modernizing influences pushing us away from mediation, and the conservative, comfort with the status-quo tendency of humanity bringing us right back to mediated existence. I could keep going on for a long time, but I can sense eyeballs leaving, so I'll move on from the background to the relevance in today's world.

More and more I've been thinking about how rapidly the few mediating influences in our lives are disappearing, and how noticeable it makes those few mediators that still exist. For example, if you're reading this blog you're getting my unmediated (let alone edited) thoughts. There's no layers of separation between me, the thinker, and you, the reader. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, as much as is made of how these tools are going to change our world, I think at their most basic level what they'll do is remove some of the last vestiges of non-personal mediation from human interactions. In the hyper-connected future, the only way interactions will be mediated is the extent to which each individual chooses to self censor.

There have been several different instances recently where the idea of self censorship has come up recently. Bill Simmons recently wrote about how celebrities and athletes are using these new forms of communication as the mediating forces surrounding their lives. My Mom's blog is written via a pseudonym, largely because she feels more comfortable writing as Ashleigh Burroughs than as Susan Hileman. And the first thing that everyone over the age of 30 said to me when they found out I was blogging was, "be careful, companies are looking at that stuff when deciding who to hire."

Whether it's me trying to not come across as a crack-pot lunatic (hopefully succeeding), my Mom using a pseudonym, or celebrities controlling their own persona, what all of these have in common is that each individual actor is the primary controller and conveyor of their own message. There is no equivalent of the 10th century Christian priest telling me how I should relate to God. There world is evolving into one with much more direct linkages between and among individuals. I don't think our society as a whole has figured out how we're going to handle this unmediated existence, but it certainly is interesting to look at human interaction in light of these ideas.

Another interesting aspect of this unmediated existence is the extent to which it is generational. In the April 7th BS Report (scroll down a bit), Bill Simmons and Rick Reilly discussed their different writing styles. As reference, Simmons just turned 40, but embodies the "Internet generation" much more than does Reilly who's going to turn 51 this June. The podcast itself is worth listening to, but the salient point is that Reilly grew up in an era where reporters had 800 words to make their point. In effect, the editors who mandated the 800 word limit were mediating the content for their readers. Simmons on the other hand is known for his 5000+ word diatribes, largely after Celtic and/or Red Sox losses (which makes for great schadenfreude). Simmons' career was largely self launched and has existed almost totally on the Internet. As his style was developing he never had to work within an 800 word structure, and it shows. He enjoys rambling asides, parentheticals and has never met a tangent he didn't like.

Similarly, if you go to my Mom's blog you can see that she writes under a pseudonym, uses acronyms for people's names, and generally has much shorter, more tightly written posts than I do. Like Reilly, my Mom grew up in a more structured age. The concept of people sharing relatively intimate facts about their life with the world is still something she's having issues adjusting to. I, being an unrepentant child of the digital age, am much more comfortable sharing my unfiltered thoughts with whoever feels like reading them. Obviously there is a certain amount of self mediation that goes on here at Dragon Army, (no one wants a direct view into the unconscious mind of another person) but largely in reading this blog you're getting unmediated with Billy Hileman (scary, I know).

So, those are my thoughts on mediated existence. The young seem more comfortable with it than the comparatively older, and our society seems to have committed itself to a future of only self imposed mediation. Take the idea, play with it, look and see how it applies to your own life. Any and all intelligent (or otherwise) thoughts are appreciated in the comments section.

And I really was ready with my Zombie Apocalypse Plan!

Sadly, it seems that this was actually a hoax. That said, I am curious what everyone else's Zombie Apocalypse survival plan is. Obviously you have to know the specifics of the Zombie Apocalypse you're dealing with, but what are some of the plans people already have. Maybe this could be the first post where my readers (there are one or two of you out there, right?) actually sound off in the comments. If they do, I promise to have a follow-on post analyzing the various plans put forward, and detailing my own plan as well.

On basketball and trade deficits

The second round of the NBA playoffs are starting up and you can already see series themes developing.

Starting in the East, my respect for Rajon Rondo is growing by leaps and bounds. The fact that he plays for a Boston team prevents me from actually liking him (too many years surrounded by too many Boston fans), but when he's playing right its tough to be cheering for the other team. TNT's Kenny Anderson has hit on a very interesting point regarding how other teams play Rondo. Due to the fact that I can shoot a mid-to-long range jumper about as well as Rondo can, most teams sluff off his defender, daring him to drive. This tactic worked last year while Rondo was still learning the pro game and developing chemistry with his teammates. This year Rondo is using that extra space to see the court, deliver the ball and when necessary setup and blow by his defender. In the NFL you always try to get to the quarterback. The only time where you don't is if you know he's going to pass and dropping 8 or 9 guys into coverage can, occasionally, work. That said, if the QB knows he'll have time he's always going to win. The analogy seems to be holding with Rondo. While occasionally dropping off him could lead to him forcing the ball when he shouldn't, consistently dropping back is just giving him more time and less pressure. In any and every game I've ever seen a good defense attacks its opponent, in this case the Magic should try it more.

In the West I'm prepared to make a very bold prediction. First though, I need to say that 10:30 or later start times are just cruel. One of the things about probably living on the west coast in 3 months that I'm most looking forward to is the fact that I'll be able to see these late games without having to stay up until 1 or 2 in the morning. That said, in watching the Lakers play the Rockets you can really see that the Rockets have a pretty decent match up with the Lakers. Michael Lewis wrote a stellar article a few months ago, that everyone should read, that detailed how the Rockets' Shane Battier plays defense against Kobe Bryant. It described how they don't care if Kobe goes off for 30+, as long as he's taking a lot of shots to get those points. Specifically, they called out the long range contested 2 from the wing as the lowest percentage shot he takes. Either Kobe hasn't read that article, or he's trying to prove it wrong, because boy did he take a lot of long range contested twos from the wing. Yao's size gives Gasol problems, although if I were Gasol I'd be pulling Yao as far from the basket as I could to clean things up, and Fisher is on his way to making yet another point guard a whole lot of money this off season. Artest is a tough enforcer who gives the team mental and physical toughness that T-Mac just can't supply (Ewing Theory here anyone?).

All that would seem to suggest that I think the Rockets would win this series. If it were just based on the players on the court playing in the specific match ups outlined above I'd be forced to say, "yes, the Rockets have a good chance in this series". I was just about to call my Dad up last night and explain all those points when one thing changed my mind. Rick Adelman's face showed up in all it's HD-unglory on my TV. Cackling to myself I gleefully dialed my parents and explained my idea. "I just figured out how I'm going to pay for law school, if gambling were legal. I'd take out the biggest loan I could find and put it all on the Lakers. It's Rick Adelman vs. Phil Jackson. It's guaranteed money!"

I've been watching this particular match up since the 1992 finals, and like gravity, death and taxes I'm now convinced that one of the immutable laws of existence is that Phil Jackson will always, Always, ALWAYS beat Rick Adelman. Whether it's the players, the refs, or some grand cosmic force, a Rick Adelman lead team will never defeat a Phil Jackson lead team. After having a good laugh about this idea we decided that just paying for law school wasn't enough. No, we were going to save the American economy and prevent a potential decline of American Hegemony, all based on this one immutable fact.

The biggest pile of money that America is currently playing with is the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Here's $700 billion that congress has mostly, kinda, sorta, ok-not-really, authorized the executive branch to use to "fix" the economy. Yes that's a gross simplification, but run with it for a second. What if, instead of investing just $700 billion we put that money on the Lakers to win this series. I'm terrible with understanding what the odds makers notations mean (Lakers -64/17, Rockets -52/28) but what I think that means is that the Lakers are roughly 6 to 5 favorites to win this series. If someone actually knows what the line is please inform me, but either way the Lakers are the favorite. Fine, we're not making all our money back, but $1.3 trillion is definitely better than $700 billion any way you slice it. Unfortunately, as my Dad pointed out, there aren't too many casinos that'll take that kind of action. I thought for a second and realized that not only could we save our domestic economy, but we could also fix the trade imbalance! China! They'd take the other side of the bet! Yao Ming is a perennial NBA All-Star not necessarily due to his play but rather due to the fact that he generally gets about 1.2 billion more votes than any other player. Chinese honor would demand that they back the Rockets in this bet. A quick search suggests that the current trade balance with China is roughly $34 billion favoring the East. Well, lets double down a lot and bet the TARP money on the Lakers to win and force the Chinese to back the Rockets!

There's not many places where you can see a discussion start with pressure defense on a point guard and end with a discussion on geopolitical economics, but I hope that the digressions made sense. More to come as the series unfolds.

Swine Flu

As Swine Flu, or H1N1 as the WHO and CDC now insist we call it (or if you're Israel "Mexican Flu"), slowly works its way from the sweltery (which apparently isn't a word, but totally should be) depths of the Southwest up to civilized parts of the country such as D.C. and Virginia panic will quickly start to spread. If you've paid any attention you should know that regular flu kills roughly 100k people a year, and we're at something around 200 confirmed deaths from Swine Flu. So, unless people start dying left and right and then turning into zombies thus necessitating me to put into place my Zombie Apocalypse Survival Plan, I'm not going to worry too much.

That said, while I'll still eat all the delicious bacon, pepperoni and other pork products I can find, I might not go as far as this kid: