Many a mickle maks a muckle

Old school

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:29:30 GMT

1. Wow, it's hot, especially when we can't ventilate this house nearly as much as we'd like, bearing the safety of our indoor-only cats who are far more adventurous than they are streetwise. We're having difficulty sleeping due to the temperature and that's having all manner of knock-on effects.

2. Few sporting tournaments take place anywhere as euphonious as Wimbledon, whose annual lawn tennis championships are in progress at the All England club. I'm not a particular tennis fan, but I've been enjoying this year's championship. It's certainly exciting that Andy Murray has reached the semi-final and has at least as promising a set of prospects as Tim Henman ever did. The only thing to grumble about is the rather fussy and slightly pretentious typeface used on all the electronic scoreboards, which I suspect is a new development compared to last year.

I'm particularly enjoying the developments in the infrastructure, though, and this year's event has two excellent developments. The new roof over the Centre Court is an instant smash hit, so to speak, and already has demonstrated its worth in preventing a Bad Light Stopped Play incident, even if not yet a Rain Stopped Play incident. It's also a pretty solution, as well as a practical one, and I think a counterpart roof over at least No. 1 Court is more likely than not within the next ten years. The new No. 2 Court has also got off to a fine start; while it is physically just a roofless bowl, it is an aesthetically pleasing one, and the camera angles with the outside of Centre Court in the background make us feel at home straight away.

I look forward to the redevelopment of the old No. 2 Court into a new No. 3 Court, though the suggested three-year timescale strikes me as rather leisurely. It seems strange that the old No. 2 Court had a reported 2,990 capacity and the new No. 3 Court will be cut down to just 2,000. If this is the result of turning a set of stands into a bowl, it's got to be considered a step up. Commercially, the impact of the new No. 2 Court is immediately very beneficial in terms of ticket revenue; I stand to be corrected, but previously I remember Wimbledon selling (in previous years) specific Centre Court tickets, specific No. 1 Court tickets and general grounds admission tickets. This year, a new tranche has been added in terms of selling specific Court No. 2 tickets - and a good number of them, too, for those who want to see nearly-the-best-of-the-best tennis. It's plausible that specific Court No. 3 tickets might follow in future years. The value of the general grounds admission drops slightly each time, but it's still an attractive proposition.

In some regards, the new No. 2 Court is overdue. Compare Wimbledon's facilities to those of the other Grand Slams, all of which have at least three show courts. Melbourne Park, which hosts the Australian Open, has the 15,000 capacity Rod Laver Arena, the 10,500 capacity Hisense Arena and the 6,000 capacity Margaret Court Arena. The French Open's Roland Garros stadium has the 15,000 capacity Philippe Chatrier Court, the 10,000 capacity Suzanne Lenglen Court and a rather good (3,500 capacity?) No. 1 Court as well. (One source suggests there may be a new 15,000 capacity centre court coming, though it's unclear whether it would be an addition or an expansion.) The US Open's National Tennis Center, to excerpt the name, has the 24,000 capacity Arthur Ashe stadium, the 10,000 capacity Louis Armstrong stadium, the 6,000 capacity Grandstand Stadium, as well as three side courts with capacity into four figures. Wimbledon really lagged behind in terms of having two big courts and not much else; No. 2 Court is a step forward, and No. 3 Court will hopefully be another in time.

The best thing about the Wimbledon facilities is that they all look pretty on TV. Centre Court will never compare to the Ashe stadium, but Centre Court looks nicely designed on TV, whereas Ashe stadium just sprawls and sprawls. I claim I'm not being jingoistic here; the new Wembley stadium - while it looks great from the outside - has an inside that suffers in exactly the same way. It's not a size issue, it's a design one; Barcelona's Camp Nou is bigger than Wembley but looks really put-together in a way that Wembley does not, and the San Siro is formidable and brilliant while being not much smaller. Now it may well be that Wembley's much-vaunted "no bad seats" policy is a natural consequence of the degree to which it sprawls, and stadiums which might look better from the inside, to my eyes, turn out to have problems. It's a balancing act, but more people will see the inside of the stadium on TV than ever will see it in person.

It's also tempting to wonder what might follow for Wimbledon after a new No. 3 Court. After all, the All England Club claims to have six show courts: Centre, No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 (the old No. 2), No. 4 (the old No. 3) and, er, No. 18. Could some day these all be bowls with their own ticketing arrangements? (Is there enough interesting tennis to justify it? That's why junior tournaments, invitational senior tournaments and the like have been added to the programme, after all.) Only the first four of those feature Hawkeye, for instance, so it's worth wondering if there could be the scope to promote another court or two into a bowl. Such a move would start to impinge on the number of side courts, which might have an impact on the quantity of tennis that could be played, but this might not be insurmountable.

A slightly old aerial view suggests that options might include adapting the non-grass courts at the south end (extremely unlikely, as these are converted into marquees for retail with considerable commercial value), the grass courts to the north of Court No. 1 (isn't this where players warm up?) or Aorangi Terrace (also known as Henman Hill or Murray Mount; about as iconic as No. 1 Court these days). There do seem to be other green spaces around, but I suspect these may be used as car parks during the Championships. It's all a very tight fit. I suppose the most plausible solution could be to dislocate more of the support buildings and infrastructure outside the regular confines of the territory to create room for another new facility. Potentially a move to further encourage public transport use might free up car parking space, but with car park tickets sold at £25 per car per day, parking is a strong revenue stream already.

3. Recently, I enjoyed reading that the school I attended between the ages of 11 and 18 has been granted planning permission for a major new redevelopment. The school admitted its first pupils in 1978; I attended from 1986 to 1992. This timeline mentions new buildings going up in 1988 and 1992, both of which were exciting and new during my time there, but whose predecessor woodland I can still remember. I've only ever visited the premises once since university (earlier this year, taking Meg to a craft fair there) and haven't had the chance to look around the major new science and technology centre opened in 1996, and I have no clue whereabouts the Music School opened in 1997 even is situated on the grounds.

The plans involve the demolition of the old maths wing and the old dining hall - which, itself, proved insufficiently large and required a semi-permanent marquee as an annex. This space will be used to host a 750-capacity auditorium, with other land being used for a new block including a small hall, a dance studio and ten classrooms. The building in 1992 included what seemed at the time to be a vast new theatre, where the school would assemble en masse for whole-school announcements; while it still seems so new to me, it is going to be repurposed for three more new classrooms and a new dining hall to replace the demolished old one. This is hard to believe, considering how exciting and new the theatre was. On the other hand, it will have served its job for close to twenty years, almost half the life of the school; there will have been two cohorts (and more!) going through a first-year to upper-sixth existence knowing nothing other than the existence of the theatre. Job done, but it's a surprise to someone used to thinking in scholastic terms that the theatre's life cycle is not just finite but relatively short.

All told, fifteen new classrooms will be built, "for mathematics, languages, and business and religious studies". The need to replace the mathematics wing is clear; it is not clear whether computing remains a subsection or not. Business studies and economics only ever had half a home previously; Latin, Greek and Classical Studies were originally taught in the same corridor as modern languages, but when some new modern language classrooms were built at the same time as the sports hall (the 1992 building!) art kicked out the old modern language facility and it's completely unclear where the classics ended up. (I saw hints that the attic may even have come into use - though whether this is for music, classics or something else is unclear. I had a covert poke around the Friarage when the craft fair was in progress, which brought a few memories back, but left a few questions open.) The Independent Schools' Inspectorate report hints at migration that has taken place relatively recently.

It's unclear how the school sees its future. Each year had around sixty students in my day; by the time I left, year sizes had grown to around eighty and may now be closer to ninety. The school was all-male from 11 to 16 when I attended, but since then has become co-educational throughout. (Possibly still more than 2:1 male, though.) Building an auditorium to seat 750 may suggest that they don't expect to expand above a hundred or so per year in the near future. The open question: will the fifteen new classrooms be enough? I suspect the science and technology facilities may start to struggle to meet demand, but there may be more to the situation that I do not currently know.

School fees were high, but barely manageable with the assistance of a scholarship, for our one-public-sector-professional-parent family when I attended. They rose by just a little over inflation (technically, the RPI measure) while I was there. Since then, I reckon they've increased by inflation and another 50% over the last sixteen years or so. As the school's reputation has grown, and as they have taken girls alongside boys, they have been able to set the bar in terms of parental funding higher still, and I believe their catchment area has increased over time. Sadly, there is not even a hint of the magic phrase "needs-blind", which is surely the ideal way forward. Even with the scholarships and bursaries that are advertised, should we ever want to send offspring there - and the whole fee-paying school issue is not one we have discussed - I think we would have to look for some unadvertised, anti-meritocratic, artificially socially immobile legacy assistance to send a second generation of Dickson there. A shame.

4. In Beavis and Butthead-style news, I was charmed to hear that MLB's Philadelphia Phillies have recently given a number of starts to 23-year-old pitcher Antonio Bastardo.

5. Please might I borrow a Windows XP Home Edition DVD from someone? I have a valid licence but no disc and need to reinstall. I am not ruling out installing some other OS at some point in the future, but need to extract years' worth of specifically formatted data from my Windows-only (?) mail application first. Mac OS X is not on the cards. I've used it on Meg's Mac; while I like it, I think we all know that, in the style of the British version of the "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC" campaign, I'm a Mark rather than a Jeremy.

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Puzzles, poker and pain

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:19:46 GMT

1. Tomorrow sees the US Puzzle Championship, used as the qualifying test to select the national teams for the World Puzzle Championships in the countries of most, though certainly not all, of the people reading this. Theoretically I think you were meant to have registered by yesterday - whoops - but I registered yesterday and was still directed to the puzzles. (But perhaps I'll be disqualified for late registration! Who knows?) This year's puzzles look really good; I haven't tried the qualifier for several years, but this year's look fun. They also look accessible; I don't know how many I'll be able to finish, but I feel like I have a shot at most of them. (The last few, which will go completely over my head, look really inspired.) Threepeating US champ motris comments, as does test compiler Nick Baxter.

I'll be going in to the puzzles tomorrow "cold", but this test looks like it has a lot more to offer to more modest solvers - like me! - than previous years' tests do. If you've ever been attracted to the thought of taking part, this year looks like a really good one to try, even if it's your first one. Let Really Smart Guys, a lovely near-live blog written at the 2008 World Puzzle Championship, inspire you! Conversely, if you're frustrated by the annual puzzle championship schedule for national-class solvers apparently being one event long, the monthly-ish Oguz Atay Puzzle Contest is similarly very fine; I enjoyed stinking the place up in its fourth edition.

2. The World Series of Poker is in progress at the moment; in fact, it's about half-way through. Numbers are similar to those from last year; some tournaments are attracting more players than last year, some slightly fewer. My gut feeling is that it bodes well for the main event; while I haven't seen anyone quote an over/under for entrance figures and I'm not sure how the online qualifier numbers compare to last year's, I'd guess at about 7,000 - a little more than last year's 6,844 but below 2006's 8,773. The big story so far is that Phil Ivey has won two tournaments in the first half of the event; Brock Parker won two short-handed ("6-max") tournaments in quick succession and Ville Wahlbeck has impressed by so far taking first, second and third places in three of the five $10,000-buyin events he has so far entered.

3. Many people have observed the phonetic similarity of the name Johnny Marr, who plays guitar (for the Smiths, as it happens), to the French phrase "j'en ai marre", often translated "I'm fed up". However, "j'en ai marre" is just a sentence fragment; you would use it in the context "j'en ai marre de ((quelque chose))", or "I'm fed up with ((something))". There is a lovely bit of British English slang, "mardy", which could be translated as "fed up" in a similar way. (A BBC h2g2 author has more.) Accordingly, it's got me wondering whether the phonetically similar "marre de" and "mardy" might have some sort of linguistic link. Etymology or coincidence? (Or, alternately, perhaps someone doesn't like Tuesdays...)

4. Here is an Excel question. Suppose I have a table like so:

Day	Rain	Temp
Mon	14	8
Tue	19	10
Wed	12	10
Thu	22	13
Fri	11	12

and I'm looking to try to find the average Temp on days when there was more than 13 units of Rain. How would you do this? My approach, which doesn't seem to work (in Excel 2000 on a PC), is to create another column at the right-hand end where the cell is empty if there was no more than 13 units of Rain or contains the Temp value if there were more than 13 units of rain, like so:

Day	Rain	Temp	AltTemp
Mon	14	8	8
Tue	19	10	10
Wed	12	10	(empty cell)
Thu	22	13	13
Fri	11	12	(empty cell)

...whereby taking an average of the new right-hand column will give me the answer I need. Furthermore, should the rain value on Tuesday turn out to have been 9 instead of 19, changing the 19 to 9 should change the AltTemp from 10 to (empty cell), and so the average AltTemp should change from being calculated based on three figures to being based on only two.

Trouble is, I can't come up with a function I want to get this. I have tried something like =IF(B2>13,C2,#N/A) or =IF(B2>13,C2,#NULL!) - and so on for the remaining rows - but the average of a series which includes some numbers and some #N/As (or some #NULL!s) is #N/A, where I just want to skip over the cells with the #N/As in when performing the average. Can't help feeling this is going to be a really easy question for someone who knows better than me, but I've been working on this on the night shifts so haven't had anyone to ask and I haven't been able to work it out from the help. Accordingly, is it clear what I want - and, if so, how do I do it, please?

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A little light transport blogging

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:08:01 GMT

1. I have inadvertently dared huskyteer to ride a thousand miles in 24 hours on her scooter. (Perhaps it counts as a motorbike; I'm not sure if there's a continuum and where her vehicle is on it.) She is doing this as part of an organised attempt by the Riders Branch of the Royal British Legion. The ride takes place next weekend; she writes more about her attempt here, should you want to sponsor her. It represents the sort of craziness of which I approve, and sets me wondering how far you could ride in 24 hours if you were prepared to take advantage of the German autobahns. Someone with the mental stamina to keep going for twenty-four hours could probably cover in excess of 3,200 km (two thousand miles) if they got consistently lucky with traffic jams and roadworks, but about half the autobahn network is no faster than highways anywhere else in the world and the congestion apparently can be terrible.

This puts me in mind of other epic journeys; the closest Britain has to one involves wondering how long it might take to get from John O'Groats to Land's End, or vice versa, by scheduled public transport. (The significance of this particular journey is that it's conventionally regarded as the most north-easterly point of mainland Great Britain to the most south-westerly point. That said, there are locations further in each of the four major compass directions; see Dave Gorman's Sit Down, Pedal, Pedal, Stop And Stand Up tour, passim.) Without flying, Transport Direct makes finding the route almost disappointingly simple; the southbound journey can be completed in just over 21½ hours, by virtue of taking the overnight sleeper from Inverness that calls at Crewe, and the northbound journey takes a little over 24 hours because the connections don't fall nearly as neatly and you get stuck in Wick for two hours.

Transport Direct is so capable that it almost takes the fun out of trying to create the shortest routes, though if I were actually going to perform the journey then I think I would check its conclusions rather more thoroughly, not least to try to create some back-up plans in case of late running. (Or just buy an All Line Rail Rover and wing it for the rest of the way.) It's sufficiently authoritative-seeming to accept its conclusions at face value for the purposes of this purely academic exercise, though. You might be able to finesse the time a little further by checking different days of the week, or conceivably different times of the year. However, I don't believe it's smart enough to take advantage of scheduled flights, so I suppose the next task would be to try to create the quickest possible journey in either direction taking available scheduled flights into account.

2. National Rail have released a May 2009 map of the Great British rail network. It's deliberately geographically inaccurate, which is part of its charm, but still useful. (Sadly it only has two dots for little Pontefract's three stations, but there are so many other stations it misses out - for entirely obvious reasons - that quibbling about one dot for a small town is splitting a hair.)

3. London is probably the most interesting city to blog about for transport developments in my view, at the moment, but it's far from the only one with news. Manchester made a bid to fund a number of extensions to its tram network from the Transport Innovation Fund, but the bid (which also covered a number of other transport improvements) was conditional on the acceptance in a public ballot of a peak-time weekday road pricing scheme. The ballot rejected the proposal, but since then government funding (mostly local and regional) has been found to start work on some of the extensions. In Singapore, the first part of the Circle line of the MRT system has opened, a little like the East London line compared to the future London Overground loop. Extensions will follow in the near future; eventually Singapore's Circle line may become teacup-shaped, much like London's own Circle Line from December onwards.

4. Onto London as such; some time ago, I mentioned the wonderful London Connections blog, which was for a while the most interesting blog on the subject of developments in London transport infrastructure. While it was sadly brought to a conclusion last August, some of the most frequent contributors have banded together to produce London Reconnections, which is at least as good. London Connections' own former editor comments to London Reconnections from time to time, which is high praise indeed. Can't say I'm wildly thrilled about the opaque use of pseudonyms, but that's a small criticism of an excellent read. Similarly, the news page of the unofficial Croydon Tramlink site has been updated once since the very sad early passing of Stephen Parascandolo.

In other London news, there is suggestion that countdown clock-style timers may be introduced at some pedestrian crossings. I've been really impressed by these when I've seen them in other cities: Singapore, Indianapolis, Boston. Suggestions that the British timers might feature analogue clock-hands sweeping out a gradually illuminating right-hand semi-circle, replacing the standard "beep-beep-beep-beep" with a "donk-a-dink-a-dink diddle-diddle-diddly-bom (poom!)" are sadly fanciful.

5. With a delightful URL, a Finnish writer reports upon his recent trip to a conference discussing Personal Rapid Transport: driverless automated podcars that can follow a number of routes along a track. (I've blogged about the subject before.) The conference discussed the state of the art; the first modern system(s?) - and the word "modern" here tips its hat to West Virginia - are scheduled to become fact, in infant but yet fully functional stages, within the next six months. The theory is lovely and it's always wonderful to see potentially disruptive technologies come to fruition. The logic is convincing and the omens are promising; we'll just see how the unknown unknowns pan out in practice.

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What are you playing at?

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:47:20 GMT

As usual, this is essentially another post about games of various sorts. While Meg and I don't play all that many games with each other, we are pretty playful a lot of the time, and if we are sufficiently playful then perhaps we will ascend to coming back as kittens in our next lives. :-) Most of my blog entries refer to play in some way or another; I guess my last post was just an attempt to play at the European Election, or at least to play at being a predictor. Similarly, Iain played at being a minute-by-minute journalist with his European election UK-and-more results liveblog (and part 2) and, honestly, did a better job than the professionals. Sign him up! While I take my job seriously, I guess the differences between being an electricity trader and being a poker trader (a poker player who plays with other people's money; they keep most of the profits) aren't so big; we don't refer to participants in the market as players without reason.

1. This weekend sees the fourth annual Come Out And Play festival in New York City. All manner of city-sized fun, from the high-tech to the no-tech. I'm particularly delighted to see lots of "new sport" games, where the barrier to entry from a design perspective is very low. Many of them look a lot of fun to play, even though they would probably benefit from rather greater athleticism than I am able to provide. Blown-up video games are also wonderful, and this version of live-action Pitfall looks particularly great. All manner of puzzle events, as well, plus games played on subway trains. (Snakes on a plane? Werewolf on a train!) It looks insanely great and I look forward to reading more about it soon.

1'. Perhaps we can hope for some of the best designs to make an appearance at the Hide and Seek Weekender in London over 31st July to 2nd August. Will anyone reading this be going - hawkida, jvvw, perhaps? (bateleur has said he'll be running an interesting-looking game on the Friday evening...) I said I would go to this last year and I didn't, so I'm not going to make any promises this year. Honestly, it would probably take the confluence of a few happy coincidences for it to happen, not least a good mood. However, it all sounds wonderful, and I hope it is as good in practice as it sounds. I have a few potential reservations, largely out of a fear that you probably get the most out of it if you've been there from the start, and I fear my views on the interaction of stories and games may be unfashionable. However, I want it to be amazing fun, I want the people to be really nice and I want it just to be a case of "let your fears go, come with an open mind and let your hair down".

2. However, even if I don't go this time, it's heartening to see that it exists for people to attend; it's also heartening that the pervasive games movement is growing in the UK, only (at worst) a little behind that in the US. We know about the activities in London and Bristol (who have the Iglympics upcoming); it turns out - dog-whistle message here - that Birmingham is the next city in the UK to form a focus for the mystery-adjective games movement, with BARG being a monthly-ish meeting to play interesting games. Excellent! All it seems to take is someone with the spoons, confidence, chutzpah and resources to make the movement move; the source material (the games) are already in place. Some day the movement will make it to these parts; if Middlesbrough has a games club broad-minded enough for RPGs, CCGs, miniatures war games and board games, it would seem to be a likely place to start. (At some point, I'll start going back there again.)

2'. However, Birmingham has more than that; last weekend saw it host the third UK Games Expo, which is possibly even more impressively comprehensive still across many of the media we call game: not just RPGs, CCGs, miniatures and board games but also computer games as well. Again I haven't been, but this is partly because much of the action seems to take place in rather an expensive hotel. As with attendance in London: some year, perhaps. I'm not clear if the BARG people and the UK Games Expo people know each other, but they probably should. Ooh, and UK Games Expo features the Living Dungeon, which seems to be LARP without the scary role-playing bits that might form barriers to entry for the mundanes. (Big on puzzles, no rubber swords.) When it says "Inspired by the likes of Raven, Crystal Maze, Knightmare, and for those more experienced adventurers, The Adventure Game", my heart goes pitter-pat. Again: anyone potentially interested for next year?

3. You can barely see the seam in the segue from the last sentence but one to observing that the other day I discovered a Cyberdrome Crystal Maze in a mall in Dubai! This must be the first new one in, ooh, about fifteen years. Apparently the show was popular enough on the English-language expat channel for the attraction to be viable. Some slightly blurry photos towards the bottom show it's the real thing, and not on too tight a budget. This is simultaneously delightful, retro and potentially inspiring for the future - and to manage all three simultaneously is some going.

3'. But - but - combining a fantasy theme with an attraction where you run around an unduly fancy indoor playground with playing old-fashioned computer games, I may have blogged about this before, but Wizard Quest of Wisconsin Dells, WI looks like an interesting one-off. It's unclear whether it's intended to be the first in a series, but 5-wits' Tomb in Boston sadly seems to have been one and done, with even the plan to rotate games falling by the wayside, and even the awesome-sounding Négone hasn't made it out of Madrid. (Shed a tear, too, for all Peter Sarrett told us about Entros back in the day.) Interesting games at family entertainment centres don't seem to have cracked the business model yet, so perhaps the overtly non-commercial approach (frequently funded as any other art event) as espoused by the pervasive games movement might have to be what it takes - and that brings us back to 1 above.

4. Because sports are just games written large, I remain fascinated by the forthcoming United Football League, playing gridiron football from October 8th and quickly looking to expand outwith its initial US base. Taking on, or even attempting to establish counterpart status to, the venerable National Football League is probably the biggest challenge in sports league organisation going, unless the FOTA (Formula One Teams Association - but not all of the teams) teams do decide to split and start their own series. UFL Access is documenting the UFL's progress and now is a really exciting time in terms of lots of little announcements. It's all factual, and it's going to happen; the league is doing really well at making lots of wise little decisions and dodging the bullets that took down all the other major would-be NFL counterparts - and UFL Access is doing really well at documenting progress. The UFL is taking on a task so vast that there are still hundreds of reasons why they might not make it, but they're doing really well at making good decisions so far.

5. One of the UFL's emphases is on condensing their product into a three-hour slot for TV. Similarly, Twenty20 cricket is an overtly TV-driven product. (Apparently the Indian Premier League features a 7½-minute "tactical break" for commercials half-way through each innings, the equivalent - I suppose - of breaks at the end of the first and third quarters...) TV audiences' expectations provide a bigger incentive than ever for sports to reformat themselves in a TV-friendly fashion. Athletics - track and field, if you will - is particularly interesting in this regard. There are, arguably, 24 classical events in athletics; with one exception, the men's athletics program has consisted of those 24 events at each Summer Olympics of the past fifty years. Three sprints, two middle-distance, one steeplechase, three long-distance, two hurdles, two relays, two walks, four jumps, four throws and a combined event. The women's program is almost an exact counterpart, with the baffling (and unwarranted) omission of the longer walk.

However, a full athletics program is more than most viewers seem to want. The European Cup events provided, and the European Team Championships (even more so) will provide, two four-hour chunks of athletics. Forty scored contests will be held: both men and women will do the classical twenty-four, minus the two walks, the decathlon, the marathon and with the 10,000m race slashed to just 3,000m. It takes a real long-distance fan to watch the whole of the 5,000m, so the final attempts in the long-jump contests are programmed against it, as well as intermediate "devil take the hindmost" eliminations providing interest during the race. I'm looking forward to that in a couple of weekends' time, but two four-hour sessions are still a lot to watch. My wife may agree with me on this one. :-)

Accordingly, there are some other attempts to condense athletics into TV-friendly formats. The IAAF are championing the "Diamond League" series of one-evening athletic events, each of which has to provide "a 2 hours live TV feed". The way they're doing this is to cut the programme down to just sixteen events, with half competed in by men and the other half by women. (Alternate meetings in the league switch the two around.) Take the European Cup's twenty events, lose the relays (shame!), lose the 3,000m and - most controversially - lose the hammer throw. The IAAF's sample timetable still looks three hours long, so presumably the two-hour live show they're talking about will feature as-live recorded highlights from the jumps and throws edited in among the races.

Shorter still is UK Athletics' "Super 8" format. Eight teams, two hours, twenty-two events: men and women each do two sprints, two middle-distance, the short hurdles, three jumps, two throws and a medley relay. (Standard medley relay fallacy: how good your short-distance runners are isn't nearly as important as how good your long-distance one is.) The first event using the formula took place in mid-week and the format seemed fundamentally sound, even if counter-programming it against England v. Andorra at football may have got it off to a bad start, and the competition uniform may have caused sponsorship woes ruling some of the top competitors out very late. Domestic athletics team competitions are sadly low-profile in this country; this professional made-for-TV format may not thrill the purists who prefer fuller-featured contests run as amateur competitions, but I know I like the sound of it!

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Today's thoughts

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:37:23 GMT

1. Several of you are going through rough times at the moment, particularly in terms of health developments. A blanket comment like this doesn't come close to cutting it, and I'll try hard to make the time to send you my warm thoughts while they're still topical, but do know I'm thinking of you.

2. Word of the day, or at least the word I've had going through my head since I woke up, is "escutcheon". It turns out that I didn't know what it means; I thought it meant something like "soupçon", or another way of saying "a small amount". Apparently it has a number of different meanings, none of which are even close to that, and some of which are not to be used lightly.

3. I work five minutes' walk (including a large and ever-so-slightly wobbly bridge) away from Stockton's main shopping centre. To give you a flavour, it features a Home Bargains, a Poundworld, a Wilkinson's and at least one or two more similar overstock stores. At work, we're quite keen on Dunkables, which are boxes of offcut, misshaped, broken and otherwise rejected chocolate biscuits. (Cookies!) I liken the fun of opening a box and discovering what's inside to that enjoyed by those of you who collect baseball cards, plus the biscuits are generally off-cuts of something at the classier end of the spectrum; you know, fancy selection box biscuits. The best pull I've had were biscuits that looked like Rocky (the biscuit, not the fictional boxer) but were made from "chocolate orange" chocolate. I didn't know anyone made those.

Similarly, on Friday, I bought a see-through bag of "Luxury Chocolate Misshapes" just because I liked the look of them, and they did indeed turn out to be genuine examples of rejects from some very famous chocolate box or another. (Without the wrappings, obviously.) Trouble is, I can't quite remember the original boxes well enough to tell if they were Quality Street, Roses, All Gold, Milk Tray or something else. (I'm pretty sure it wasn't Black Magic, but...) There needs to be a web site which catalogues these offcut biscuits and chocolates for ease of recognition. Is there, or do I need to start it?

4. On another similar "does this web site exist - and, if not, why not" front, I'd like to use a web site which automatically ran the "What song are you listening to?" application continuously upon several radio channels and keeping a list of the last few songs played by each radio station. Ideally it would also feature links to the songs' lyrics at one of the million and one lyrics web sites out there. This is a web site which possibly even has a business model, unlike most web site ideas, in that at least it could fairly obviously feature affiliate links to buy the songs that you might just have missed.

5. I understand there is great science behind the concept of picking wines which will go well with different courses of a meal. By extension, it surely ought to be possible to use the same logic to combine non-alcoholic drinks and meals. Suppose you have decided that your four drink options for the day are milk, orange juice, Coke and generic off-brand sugar-free lemon-and-lime, but you don't want to have any of them more than once. (There's always water as a possibility too, I guess.) If you knew you were going to have (over the course of a long day) (a) cheese on toast, (b) my wife's particularly brilliant spaghetti bolognaise and (c) vegetable curry with rice, are there some general principles that can be applied to decide which drink should go with which meal?

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Who goes? Europe decides!

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:30:12 GMT

Today and over the coming three days, the 27 member states of the European Union will re-elect the members who represent them at the European Parliament, the body responsible for debating and voting on (generally EU-wide) legislation proposed by the European Commission. The elections in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands take place today. (Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory, is lumped in with the UK, but the Crown Dependencies that are the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands ignore the election completely.) In England, elections will additionally be held for about 40% of the seats in county councils, district councils and unitary authorities. Additionally, a small number of elected mayors are defending their seats, and for the benefit of the rest of the world who don't get to vote, I may let you decide whether I have muesli for breakfast or steal some of Meggie's crumpets.

I'm not in an area where the local elections are taking place, so I'm most interested in the European elections. As well as the usual news sources of TV news organisations and newspapers, I've been following analysis from three particularly strong sources: Political Betting, which is one of the most-read UK political weblogs all around. It's excellent for data and analysis, though remember that bookmakers tend to set their odds to guarantee themselves a profit regardless of the outcome rather than to reflect their actual expectations of the outcome of the events who they monitor. Sometimes the comments get pretty murky, too.

Secondly, UK Polling Report, who seem to position themselves as the closest thing we have to a UK FiveThirtyEight, which would be a glorious thing. Site editor Anthony Wells wrote a glorious counterfactual, but the FiveThirtyEight team's baseball stats background leads them to a lot of original thought and methodology making Anthony a follower rather than an innovator.

Thirdly, a much underrated commentator and my old mate Iain's blog which I've plugged lots of times before, but it is really good and you should consider reading it. Iain is a thorough researcher, an insightful thinker and an all-round good egg. His politics tag includes an admirable proposed reform policy for UK politics at large, a lovely analysis of today's local elections (quack!) and a seven-part history of the European Parliament. Stretching for a criticism, Iain subscribes to the tradition of naming things the way he thinks they should be named, a practice that stretches from Private Eye to Tuesday Morning Quarterback. Iain's work is even more worth taking seriously than either of those; the in-jokes are fun, but I still miss many of the references.

Without blinding you with unfamiliar names, the European election in the UK is conducted under a relatively proportional system. Generally:if one party gets twice as many votes as the other in a region, it gets twice as many seats. That's it. It gets slightly blurry when we're scrabbling around the edges of "one seat or no seats" and it's hard to work out the precise nuances of tactical voting, but it's really not designed to reward tactical voting - if sufficiently many people don't accurately represent their first preference, the result rapidly becomes unpredictable. To me, this spells "just vote your true first preference" and leave it at that. I don't claim it's the best voting system possible, but I still like it far more than the one we used in 1994. Getting into polling system geekery, I do like Condorcet counted systems, though I wouldn't recommend using one here; I am aware of their disadvantages, but reckon that every system has its disadvantages and the advantages of Condorcet are easily sufficient to outweigh its associated disadvantages (e.g. the enabling of "burying") in a lot of cases. Not this one, though.

Incidentally, as much as I admire STV and would have preferred it to be used in Great Britain - much as it will be in Northern Ireland - on this occasion, I don't completely buy arguments concerning the effectiveness or otherwise of polling systems based on "wasted vote" criticisms. Specifically, I can see how reassignment of preferences "stops votes being wasted", I just don't think that "stopping votes being wasted" is all that important when determining the desirability or otherwise of a voting system. Yes, open lists are clearly preferable to closed ones. beingjdc has - as well as this very interesting and relatively plausible potential future history - identified a possible pathological case with the system used this time, but (again) I don't consider that a killer blow against the d'Hondt system's credibility as it's possible to construct pathological cases to criticise each system. I prefer to look at them as all good in different ways, rather than all flawed.

UK Polling Report feature the most recent polls from each of the newspapers (which are, sadly, up to five days old) and also this last YouGov poll (from a beefy sample, plus YouGov methodology has relatively recently tended to be more representative in practice than the newspapers' interviewer-led polls). The Conservative party are clearly leading in voting intention with about 25%-30% of the vote and it's very close for second place on about 15%-20% between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the UK Independence Party. While the Westminster government has been (more or less) either Labour or Conservative for about a century, when it comes to Europe, we don't have a 2½-party system so much as a 4.7511111-party system in England, with additional very strong players in Scotland and Wales. (That's made up of a half, a quarter and some crumbs.) With apologies, I will demur from blogging from ignorance about the situation in Northern Ireland.

The overarching political concern for the last month or so has been a sequence of revelations regarding MP's expenses. These have embarrassed politicians from across the political spectrum, though the biggest effect has been to continue to augment the antipathy towards "the system" at large. Betraying my leanings, I personally was a little more offended by some of the Conservative MPs' claims, but the court of public opinion broadly seems to have concluded that Conservative leader David Cameron has been a bit more effective than Labour leader Gordon Brown in dealing with the issue. Over the last day or two, a number of ministers have resigned, or at least said they would stand down at the next election. Of particular significance, the minister for Local Government stepped down the day before Local Government elections, which is clearly an embarrassment, not reflected in even the most recent YouGov poll; even the Chancellor is under pressure. Labour are in genuine danger of finishing fourth in "a two-party system".

While theoretically the point of the European elections is to try to ensure the European Parliament reflects the voters' preferences, many people seem to want to use it either to protest against the current Labour administration or to protest against "the system" by voting against the three major parties. (I wonder if there is a similar protest vote against the SNP Holyrood administration in Scotland or the Labour-PC administration in Cardiff?)

There is a degree of antipathy towards Europe at large, though in my view often poorly thought-out and sometimes borne of xenophobia. The Liberal Democrats are, broadly, relatively strongly in favour of European integration; the UK Independence Party, the British National Party and a number of smaller xenophobes are strongly against European integration and want to step back from protocol in place. The Labour and Conservative parties both have pro- and anti- factions and consequently have weaker views; I perceive Labour are pro-integration but not as pro- as they would like to be were it more popular, and the Conservative party are fairly explicitly against European federalism without going as far as proposing withdrawal altogether.

However, each of those parties ties up its position there with many other facets of policy. The BBC summarise the platforms here, but I could only recommend taking those as starting-points and then browsing the manifestos in depth of the parties that you might have been considering. You'll find that no party is completely unobjectionable, and no party is completely without merit. (Though several have very small lights hidden under very large bushels.)

Both the UKIP and the BNP include "stop mass immigration" in their platform, which is an automatic contention-killer for those of us for whom migrants' rights is a major point. (Yes, I did marry someone from another country because I was - and, still more than ever, remain - more attracted to her than to every single member of this country, thank you for asking.) While the BNP's manifestos have been deleted from Scribd - and if a "socially-minded" grey-hat has been responsible, that is not the public benefit that at first it might appear - the policies of "voluntary repatriation" and preference for Britons in allocation of housing and jobs are among the most distressing offered by any party. A leaflet of theirs said "It's not racist to oppose mass immigration and political correctness - it's common sense!" which follows a particular logical fallacy. While "opposing political correctness" need not be racist, when it isn't, it's very often homophobic or even anti-Semitic. Avoid.

The UKIP's policy on immigration is available, though outdated given that a points system, similar to the one they propose, has in fact been introduced. The policy of requiring adoptive citizens to be on probation for ten years, during which time they must not attract so much as a trumped-up parking ticket or face deportation, is abhorrent. The blanket statement that "The UK would withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights" is horrifying in a way that it wouldn't be if they were to say even as much as "The UK would withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, but don't worry, we'd put the ones we liked back in place".

Can't find the link after a quick search, but one of those political surveys once pointed out that as far-right as the BNP may be socially, economically they're extremely protective of their core constituents, and apparently that is not uncommon among the traditional Far Right. (Oh no, here we are.) Conversely, the UKIP do seem to be economically "every man for himself" in a way that even the Conservatives consider to be the unacceptable face of capitalism. (Scrap inheritance tax, cut corporation taxes, "introduce 'workfare' to get people back to work"...) All that and they're linked with climate change deniers as well. (I suppose every party of appreciable size has its loony wing, to use the term in its political sense, but most of the parties have the decency to try to distance themselves from the loonies.) For what it's worth, I judge those who I know to have voted UKIP or BNP harshly. (Can't say I have much time for UK First or the English Democrats either, and NO2EU - of the opposite economic persuasion - are oddly silent on immigration matters...)

Ugh. Among other minor parties, Libertas are a pan-EU party who want EU reform, which sounds good, though they aren't very specific about what they want to introduce, just what they want to remove. I suppose this makes them the least objectionable of the small-governmenters, but not knowing what you're voting for is dangerous. There is a Christian-branded party, espousing "the good old-fashioned hate-y sort of love", which will probably pick up 1%-2% across the board (cf the 2008 London Assembly elections). Similarly, the far left are as split as usual (Socialist Labour, Socialist UK and I think NO2EU are pretty left-y as well) and can expect to pick up 1%-2%... between them.

More interestingly, "Jury Team" is an umbrella label for anti-party-politics independents. This is the sort of thing I would have been all over as an energetic young man and they've acquitted themselves rather well in my Friends' dealings with them. The concept of a slate of independents doesn't really work, though, no matter how good the independents are; this is an Independent Party, not an independence from parties. There are additionally one-issue parties for pensioners, peace, animal rights, Cornish independence and, er, pretending to be Roman. Salve! Now Valete!

I don't mean to be quite so dismissive of these small parties, no matter where they stand. As much as I am gloomy about the prospect of some fringe views getting state funding, if sufficiently many people hold those views, it seems a failing of the system if they are not represented. I tend to believe that the way to deal with odious beliefs is to tackle the beliefs and the thinking behind them, not to reform the voting system to stamp them out, even at the less-than-a-few-percent of support level. As a digression, emphasising in advance that here I'm specifically not referring to today's European election, here is an unpopular opinion.

I have a lot of sympathy for a nationally proportionally representative government rather than a regionally proportionally representative one. If some fringe views have a small proportion of the support nationally, might they be worth representation in the same small proportion of a fully elected revising chamber, in the style of the House of Lords? This would result in a lot of fringe views being represented, even fringe views I oppose extremely strongly, but I would argue this is ideal for a revising chamber even if not for a representing one. It's not as if some of the existing Lords don't have some pretty fringe views already, even if they sit under a conventional party (or cross-bench) affiliation.

The counter-argument against this that it would defeat the "you elect a local MP" level is a strong argument against this being used to elect local MPs, but there is no established link - and, I would argue, no need to establish a link - between a local constituency and their elected Lord, who would never be answerable to some hypothetical local constituency in practice. A nationally proportionally representative system would eliminate constituencies of locality and form effective constituencies of opinion. If the Archbishop of Canterbury wants a seat in the Lords, let him stand for a Christian party and see if he gets elected. (A putative STV election paper would be a bit of a big old bugger, mind you...)

The issue of turnout is really up in the air. European elections always get relatively weak turnouts, with UK turnout being among the worst. It is unclear whether the current anti-establishment feeling will result in mass protest in the form of mass anti-establishment vote, or mass apathy. Conventional logic suggests the latter, but Political Betting reports that many of those willing to use BNP and UKIP for their protest vote are certain to do so, while the big three parties' (and Green, though surely based on a very small sample) supports may be less likely to come out. I don't think there's clear consensus on how turnout is looking based on the data so far today. I had a pet theory that people are more likely to vote when there's both a local and a European election for them to vote in, causing higher votes in some regions (where there happen to be more local elections) than others, but the data doesn't support this.

Even though voting in the UK takes place today, it takes place across Europe until Sunday; while the counting will start at some point soon after the UK elections close, no results will be declared until the last paper closes on Sunday night, so the big Euro-results show (and Iain's Euro-results liveblog) will presumably happen after 9pm UK on Sunday night. (I do hope there aren't issues with votes going astray between voting and counting, or between counting and reporting.) The local results will start coming out during the day tomorrow; accordingly, there's no results show tonight. I would have missed it anyway, by virtue of needing an early night before the day shift tomorrow.

As a parlour game, below I submit my predictions of how each region will turn out. "Just a bit of fun, just a bit of fun", as is associated with political polling presenter extraordinaire Peter Snow. (Albeit under completely different circumstances.)

In England, I have broadly assumed a 7% share of the vote outside the big six, maybe a little more in London. (In 2004, there was a 5.9% share outside the big six, but Martin Bell took 6% in East of England, Respect got about 5% in London and the Liberals did well for a minor in NW England. I'm not sure any of the Independents will be big hitters this year, even Katie Off The Apprentice in the south-west.) Working roughly downwards through England, then further afield, as is my English wont:

North East England: 24% Labour, 20% Conservative, 17% Lib Dem, 15% UKIP, 10% Green, 7% BNP. With three seats, this probably goes Labour, Conservative, LD, but I think there's a reasonable chance that UKIP could beat LD to third spot. Lab 1 Con 1 LD 1
North West England: 25% Conservative, 19% Labour, 14% Lib Dem, 13% UKIP, 12% BNP, 10% Green. Gulp - this is the big one. If the BNP do relatively well and the UKIP do badly relatively anywhere, I think it'll be here. With eight seats I think it gets pretty sketchy pretty quickly. The first five seats will probably go, roughly, Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con; the last three are up for grabs. UKIP or LD getting a second seem unlikely, but all six getting at least one could be on the cards. Lab 2 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 1 Green 1 BNP 1
Yorkshire and the Humber: 23% Conservative, 19% Labour, 17% UKIP, 16% Lib Dem, 9% Green, 9% BNP. With six seats and all four big parties at least semi-competitive, I think the first five are going to follow the national trend and go Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con with the sixth up for grabs. Lab 2 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 1
East Midlands: 26% Conservative, 20% UKIP, 16% Labour, 14% Lib Dem, 9% BNP, 8% Green. Again, the first five are going to follow the national trend and go Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con - just not in that order. Lab 1 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 1
West Midlands: 26% Conservative, 17% Labour, 15% Lib Dem, 15% UKIP, 11% Green, 9% BNP. With six seats elected now and a seventh to be elected if the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified, I think we start off with the usual Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con shuffle for the first five and the sixth is very close. Lab 1 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 1 Green 1 and, you know, it's a knife-edge between the BNP, Conservative 3 and Labour 2 for the putative seventh seat.
East of England: 29% Conservative, 21% UKIP, 14% Lib Dem, 13% Labour, 10% Green, 6% BNP. Seven seats. Sing along with the first five - Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con, though Labour may come fourth, and UKIP look good to get seat number six. The Greens could sneak number seven; at least, they shouldn't be far behind Conservative 3. Lab 1 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 2 Green 1 though maybe a Green here is a stretch...
London: 24% Conservative, 18% Labour, 15% Lib Dem, 14% UKIP, 10% Green, 8% BNP. Another eight-seater. The first five follow national lines in some order. Green Jean Lambert should defend her seat - I have her sixth - and the last two seats are anybody's. Lab 2 Con 3 LD 1 UKIP 1 Green 1
South East England: 31% Conservative, 20% UKIP, 15% Lib Dem, 11% Green, 11% Labour, 5% BNP. The Greens might even beat Labour into fifth hear with Caroline Lucas, the Green leader, standing strongly. I have the seats going in a funny dance: Con, UKIP, Con, LD, then a Labour-Green intermezzo in some order, then another stanza of Con, UKIP, Con, LD. With ten seats, this prediction is flaky. Lab 1 Con 4 LD 2 UKIP 2 Green 1
South West England: ...and Gibraltar. 27% Conservative, 22% UKIP, 18% Lib Dem, 12% Labour, 9% Green, 5% BNP. Likely Labour fourth here. With six seats Labour will have to book it to make it to the Con, Lab, LD, UKIP, Con standard five, probably in fifth place, with the sixth and last seat hard to call. I reckon it's UKIP 2, but Con 3, Lib Dem 2 and Green all have hopes. Lab 1 Con 2 LD 1 UKIP 2 but I would be delighted to be wrong and for the Greens to win a seat here.
Scotland: 30% SNP, 20% Labour, 16% Conservative, 14% Lib Dem, 8% Green, 5% UKIP, 4% BNP. The SNP scoop up the non-Big Three non-Green vote here. With six to go, this is interesting. I think it goes SNP, Labour, Con, SNP, LD, Labour, but SNP 3 have a hoping of beating Labour 2, maybe even LD one. Lab 2 Con 1 LD 1 SNP 2
Wales: 24% Labour, 23% PC, 14% Conservative, 13% UKIP, 10% Lib Dem, 5% Green, 4% BNP. This one's tricky, even with as few as four seats. Labour and PC for the first two, then it gets harder. The Conservatives have a good shot at number 3, number 4 is close between UKIP, the Lib Dems and second seats for either Labour or PC. I call this one UKIP, but it could go anywhere. Lab 1 Con 1 UKIP 1 PC 1
Northern Ireland: no clue, so I shall follow the consensus-ish of (in some order) Sinn Fein, Ulster Unionists and Conservatives, Democratic Unionists.

Adding this all up, I get 22 Conservative, 15 Labour, 12 UKIP, 11 LD, 5 Green, 2 SNP, 1 PC, 1 BNP, 1 DUP, 1 UUP, 1 SF. Now let me tell you that I've not seen anybody seriously suggest that the Greens are likely to get four seats, let alone five, so you should interpret these as having been influenced by a heavy dose of wishful thinking and just-breaking-right anti-big-three protest voting. Should that happen, it would seem very strange for UKIP not to get more than 12 seats. In truth, the markets favour Labour to finish behind both UKIP and the Lib Dems in terms of seats; I have Labour outseating UKIP by three on a lower share of the national vote, by virtue of Labour consistently picking up in Scotland, Wales and the North-East of England where UKIP may be squeezed out. A Green jump from two seats to five would be a big old swing, but it's predicated on a national vote share jump from 6% last time to only 10%-ish this time.

Honestly, I'm not convinced by my conclusions, but I've shown my working, so it's all at least plausible. I can't help feeling that given that the two parties for which I have the most affinity, the Liberal Democrats and Greens, seem to do rather well, I may have put my own prejudices and biases in to a greater extent than predicted. We shall see. These are my conclusions. What are yours?

Now get out there and vote!

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Take the National Express when your life's in a mess

Tue, 26 May 2009 21:31:29 GMT

Meg's sister latemodelchild came to stay for two weeks early in May, which was a lot of fun. It also meant that I've not been at this PC, being (as it is) in the room that was Sarah's bedroom. Consequently I'm way behind on everything, as usual. (And over a week later still than when I started writing this, as you can guess.)

One amusing incident came in the packing stage, when latemodelchild (hereafter Sarah, for that is her name) had her white Apple power cord fall out of her suitcase and be tangled up on her white bedsheets. We did not discover this until we had waved her off on her train down to London, the first stage of her journey home. (Incidentally, this was not as easy as it could have been; upon reaching the station, train operator Grand Central still had a poster up suggesting that the morning's service would have partially been replaced by a coach, which we had missed. Their web site did not confirm this, and presumably the web site was more up-to-date, but it would have been nice to see some sort of retraction of the incorrect poster rather than just leaving the matter dangling.)

Accordingly, we discovered Sarah was on her way to London - and, from there, the US - with only the power that was left in her computer to tide her through until she could next plug in. To make matters worse, she had some seriously long airport layovers planned, with movies to watch to pass the time. The times of her train down and of her 'plane the next day meant that buying a new adapter would be extremely unlikely, and also would require the international connection kit as well. Furthermore, surely no courier would pick up on a Sunday for delivery early on Monday morning. Given that Sarah is still new to travelling in the UK, it seemed unreasonable to make her come back for it; we would have to get the cord to her.

We briefly considered a twice-250-mile road trip, which would have been fun, in a £60-plus-of-petrol environmentally-unfriendly sort of way, but Meg had to work the next day. Taking a train without booking in advance would be catastrophic, though we might have got away with a £65 return on Grand Central. The only affordable vaguely-reliable timely option available was the National Express coach service: down in the afternoon, then the overnight coach back. I've taken the coach to London or back plenty of times - enough to know it's a far from first choice option. This may seem unimaginable to US readers, but National Express is not a patch on the long Greyhound journeys I've taken; Greyhound buses have loads of width to them, comfortable suspension and a combination of engine noise plus road tone that proves far more calm and soothing than ever can be the case on the National Express. "It's the National Express, not the Orient Express", as a driver once said.

At first I was looking at taking the direct service down (leaving 3:20pm, arriving 9:45pm) and taking the overnight coach back (leaving 11:30pm, arriving 5:35am) for £32 but sadly the last ticket on the journey down had gone. An even crazier Sunday-only route presented itself: Middlesbrough to Leeds (leaving 4:10pm, arriving 6:20pm), Leeds to London (leaving 7:10pm, arriving 11:20pm), then the overnight coach back (leaving 11:30pm, arriving 5:35am). This was still possible - and, actually, £3 cheaper - but it meant that I would be travelling to London for ten minutes. As layovers go, that doesn't leave much room for safety - but National Express are generally pretty conservative with their timings and traffic can be expected to be benign on a Sunday night.

You may have heard of people who participate in mileage runs; under some circumstances, flying 50,000 miles in a year on a particular airline is rewarded so much more than flying 49,999 miles that if you're even vaguely close to the 50k mark it can make sense to engage in needless flying, typically on the last few days of the relevant (non-calendar) year, to cross the barrier and gain the extra rewards. This would be my first National Express mileage run - though, sadly, without a Frequent Coach Traveller Mile in sight. (To be fair, Meg did something similar once when she left her MacBook in a London hotel, but at least she had a routing which gave her a night in London. You may also recall the saga of leaving an iPod in a safe in Spain... damn Apple equipment.)

The Middlesbrough-to-Leeds coach was operated on a National Express bus (as you'll see, many aren't) with number GN19. Upon arrival at Middlesbrough it was possibly 15% full, and upon departure it was maybe 35% full - lots of double seats left vacant. I sat on the right in the second back row, opposite the back-left toilet and next to an emergency exit window; it's a surprise to write this, but the leg room was excellent - by far the best I can remember having on a National Express coach, and I'd estimate the seat pitch at around 38"-40". On the downside, I couldn't make the seat recline, and wasn't sure if that was just due to being in an exit row seat. Sitting opposite the toilet presented no problems at all; I'm not sure it was used at all on the leg. The journey was fine but slow, passing through Thirsk and York on the way - both places we had, frustratingly, recently been! I ate one of the three sandwiches I had prepared for the journey and couldn't help but nap.

There was a 50 minute layover at Leeds coach station. It's probably the least worst coach station I've used in this country - but beats scant opposition, with London Victoria habitually overcrowded and Birmingham Digbeth a pit of despair. (Currently closed for refurbishment; let's hope the new version, debuting late this year, is much happier.) Leeds coach station adjoins the bus depot; both are light, bright and airy, and a sit-in branch of Greggs the baker (*angelic noise*) was in late stages of construction. Boarding for the 19:10 to London started about 15-20 minutes early. I was using the m-ticket option with ticket details sent (precariously, I thought) through SMS to a mobile phone with no paper trail; this worked well, though I didn't trust it completely as I'm forever jiggling the phone, resetting it and losing saved texts.

The Leeds-to-London non-stop service was operated by a Haywards Travel coach. This had adequate legroom (seat pitch 32"-ish?) and the seats did recline; the toilet was situated middle right and again I sat opposite it. The coach had a TV front and centrally, betraying its holiday origins, but (unsurprisingly) this wasn't used on the journey. Occupancy was about 60%; only a few people who wanted double seats to themselves had to share. The non-stop journey was easy, though the toilet had an extremely weak flush and started to smell by the end. I may have napped very slightly, but listened to three old Fighting Talk podcasts. We arrived (as predicted!) ahead of schedule, shortly after 11 o'clock, and by 11:10pm I had caught up with Sarah (who was, indeed, effusively grateful!) and her host Ellen on a traffic island in the middle of Buckingham Palace Road, opposite Victoria Coach Station. The handover was successful and they safely saw me onto the overnight coach.

The London-to-Middlesbrough service was much less fun. It was operated by a National Express coach, number VE20, but legroom was barely adequate (seat pitch 29"-ish?), occupancy was about 60% and so - as one of the last to board - I ended up with an aisle seat next to an occupied window seat, in front of someone with no chance to recline. It wasn't at all pleasant. The journey back called at Golders Green and Milton Keynes, with the usual Milton Keynes coachway also closed for reconstruction - demolition with extreme prejudiced use of dynamite, hopefully - and the temporary replacement apparently on the other side of the maze. I eventually dropped off after a couple of hours, having discovered that I had to sit up pretty straight to fall asleep, and maybe caught two or two and a half hours of naps in fits and starts before dawn. As usual, the service stopped at Woodall services for 40 minutes, during which time every light in the coach was illuminated hatefully brightly.

We arrived in Middlesbrough a few minutes early; I was able to catch the first bus of the day back to Thornaby and had only a very short walk home before snuggling up to Meg and enjoying my extended break between shifts. All told: a successful trip, if not particularly pleasant.

Changing at Leeds and having a non-stop service from Leeds was the slow way to do it, but is possibly even preferable to the direct route with a pause at Woodall. It was only really the last leg which is making me say, if not quite "never again", "not by choice, please, for a while". And everybody sings ba ba ba da...

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Poetry

Thu, 07 May 2009 22:26:24 GMT

"Coo er gosh, look at him posting about poetry."
"Ever since he got his fancy new Dreamwidth, he's changed, you know."
"Yeah. He wouldn't have posted about poetry on his old LiveJournal."

Crikey. You tell me if I'm being pretentious, and I'll summarise a discussion we had on the last night shift about farting, or something.

So last week a new Poet Laureate was, I suppose, laurelled. The incumbent, Carol Ann Duffy, is (according to the BBC) the first Scot and the first woman to hold the position in its 341-year history. It is unclear to what extent there has been prejudice in the past regarding selection. The BBC suggest that she was considered and rejected the last time the position was available in 1999 not due to her nationality or her gender but due to her previous partner. I haven't seen any suggestions that the selection this time was anything other than meritocratic, which is long overdue as well as the way it should be. Good luck to her; while writing royal poetry is a tradition rather than a requirement of the Poet Laureate position, I think I'd rather have had the events in the lives of the Windsor family of 1999-2009 to write about than the events of 2009-2019.

She is not the poet about whom I write today, though. The BBC also responded to the announcement by getting seven other poets to commit a little poetry upon the occasion; sometimes a very little. Now I have to admit, probably with less guilt than I should, that my taste in poetry - such as it is - is rudimentary at best, the like of Edmund Lear's nonsense poetry and such. I can't say that I had encountered the work of Carol Ann Duffy (and I wonder whether the middle name is a given name like that of Jamie Lee Curtis or a surname like that of Ian Duncan Smith?) beforehand, to my knowledge; I only recognised one of the seven other poets, Lemn Sissay, and that was from seeing the side of the Hardy's Well pub on the Curry Mile in Manchester.

However, out of the seven poets' work on the page, the two poems that spoke to me most were the two from Anneliese Emmans Dean, who is a poet, composer, wildlife photographer and performer from York. Now two poems do not a "favourite poet" make, but they're a fine start. The standard philistine line at this point would be to disclaim my knowledge of art followed by "but I know what I like", but that's being lazy at best. I don't claim that this will be any more than the most superficial or rudimentary sort of analysis, but writing about things I like is fun, and writing about things I like outside my usual genres... makes a change.

The short piece is a goof on one of the translations of the Prayer of St. Francis, which will resonate with many of my generation not only as a famous prayer but also as a hymn from school. The notion that a Poet Laureate might celebrate a royal wedding with a limerick is delightfully silly, and concluding a relatively reverent tribute with a throw-away killer line as a parenthetical remark tickles my funny bone.

It's the longer piece, On The Role Of The Next Century's Poet Laureate, that really did it for me. I'm not sure if there are reproduction restrictions that I'm breaching here, but (just for the purposes of quoting the BBC web site) I think this can be considered personal, non-commercial use.

On The Role Of The Next Century's Poet Laureate

Poetry!
Opium of the masses
Feed their habit
Feed their habit
Poetry
For the working classes
Let 'em have it
Let 'em have it
Poetry
Raise your champagne glasses
Chitter chat it
Chitter chat it
Poetry
For the lads and lasses
Twitter chav it
Twitter chav it
Poetry
With OAP bus passes
Zimmer jab it
Zimmer jab it
Poetry!
Opium of the masses
Live it, gab it
Give it, fab it
Pitter-pat it
Tit-for-tat it
Skit it, scat it
Brit it, bat it!

There's much to admire and enjoy about this, in a way that I can't remember enjoying a poem for years, if ever. Probably the most immediately grabbing feature is the wonderfully strong sense of rhythm. It drives me back to trying to remember which way round dactyls, spondees and trochees were when we learnt about different forms of classical meter at school years ago, but it's a poem that deserves to be annotated with crochets, quavers and the occasional dotted note. It would be hard to read this poem out stridently without it turning into at least a chant, if not quite a song. It's the most spondeetious development since Lenny Henry played Othello.

Visually, rather than reading it in your head, the economy of the poem is extremely striking. I would say "each line has only four syllables" but it's probably more accurate to say "each line has only two feet"... and that, in turn, is only true if you syncopate each Poetry line with the first foot of the next line, to regularise the meter further. The economy of punctuation is also striking with a minimum of commas and exclamation marks used sparingly enough to give them the emphasis they deserve.

These combine to contribute towards a tremendous sense of modernity, as befits a forward-looking poem anticipating the future. The selection of verbs is far more cutting-edge than I (from a position of ignorance) associate with poetry; I associate the "fab it" reference with digital fabricators, I'd never yet seen a reference to Twitter in a poem and the whole piece - though, happily, it doesn't attempt to cram itself into 140 characters - would probably work sent as a series of SMS texts. It's quick enough that you could happily read it in a tube train and get a smile on your face.

Lastly, there's a gorgeous selection of images hinted at by the verbs. While the poem presupposes a society in which poetry is perhaps more widely accepted and adored than might be the case, it clearly evokes a wide range of people who enjoy the para-religion of poetry in its various guises. The line "Twitter chav it" is particularly intriguing; while I don't think it's intended to imply that people who use Twitter are, in the modern British argot, chavs, it conveys a sense of people deliberately condensing their communication into passionate and not necessarily grammatical chunks. For what it's worth, the Tweets I follow are invariably thoughtful; returning to the poem, "Myspace chav it" or "Facebook chav it" don't nearly as precisely convey a sense of rapid-fire communication in a line of poetry, even though it may more precisely convey rapid-fire communication in the way I perceive they are used in practice.

It's a fast poem. It's a fun poem. I love it, and I don't generally sit down to take the time to react to poetry, but it's hard not to be grabbed by this. While I wish Carol Ann Duffy a prosperous reign as Poet Laureate - and has anyone said whether or not this will be a finite ten-year appointment like Andrew Motion's? - I'll be keeping my eyes open for more here. If I can't have someone on my Friends list become the next Poet Laureate (and, for instance, myfirstkitchen - in another ten years, why not?) then Anneliese Emmans Dean is, at this early stage, first choice in my putative Fantasy Poets League team.

Unrelatedly, Meg's sister latemodelchild has come to visit for a couple of weeks! I'm really glad she could make it here, we're all having lots of fun - including our lovely, silly cats! - and I think my sister-in-law is really enjoying the trip too, but a knock-on effect of space concerns is that I regard myself as "not online much" for at least the next week and a half.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID and/or (hopefully identified!) anonymous posting as necessary. Thank you!

Football news

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:55:13 GMT

All right, I've accumulated a number of links over the past months which I haven't got around to posting. At first I thought "well, I'll be able to clear them all in a single long post". In the spirit of trying to make more frequent, shorter posts, here is discussion of just three, all concerning association football.

1) Arguably, pound-for-pound, the most interesting league in English(-ish) association football this year is the Blue Square Conference South, one of two parallel divisions that form the sixth tier of football, so five promotions away from the Premiership. Its all-but-certain champions are AFC Wimbledon, formed in 2002 when Wimbledon FC relocated 56 miles north to Milton Keynes. AFC Wimbledon started their existence by being accepted into one of fourteen(-ish) parallel ninth divisions, the Combined Counties League Premier, and look set for their fourth promtion in seven seasons. A sense of natural justice will arise only when AFC Wimbledon earn another promotion or two after that, meet the Milton Keynes Dons, whom Wimbledon FC have become, and finally vanquish them.

The other unduly interesting team in the Conference South this year is Team Bath FC, anomalous within the football system for being "a fully-fledged football club within the environment of the University of Bath, allowing players to combine full-time training with a university course". They play at Twerton Park, a ground owned by Conference South comrades Bath City, their natural local rivals. The rivalry is unfriendly in some places; some accuse Team Bath of unduly lenient academic standards, effectively spending considerable amounts of the University's funding in order to get extremely marginal students onto degree courses purely for to strengthen their football team.

At this point I would say "remind you of anyone?" with not so much a specific target as an entire tradition in mind, However, not least because Team Bath FC's success has been relatively modest and has not become a particular draw for the university, the University objected to putting so many of their resources into the football club that the football club's participation within the football pyramid is being concluded. Iain interprets the situation as: "Apparently, it's no longer permissible for clubs in Division VI to share their grounds with someone else"; Team Bath FC claim that the Conference administrators have declared them ineligible for further promotion and that is being used as an excuse to resign their participation. It's possible that the University have simply decided not to renew their lease of Twerton Park as a money-saving measure; Bath City are apparently set to lose considerably from the conclusion of Team Bath FC's rent payments for the facilities, and a merger between the two teams was apparently even discussed. The University of Bath will continue to enter a football team into inter-university competitions, though not the wider football pyramid as present.

2) The Times report that bookmaker Paddy Power apparently lost over £500,000 as a result of the recent 4-4 draw between Liverpool and Arsenal. Most major UK bookmakers let you bet on the correct score for each match; only about a dozen or so different results happen more than 1% of the time (with about half being one of 0-0, 1-0, 0-1 or 1-1) and so most bookmakers will offer 100-1 against any score you name outside that dozen. Paddy Power, as so often is the case, are the anomaly and often quote odds for 4-4 draws and hammerings of up to 10-0, quoting odds of up to 500/1. The 4-4 Chelsea-Liverpool draw in the Champions' League a week or so ago had apparently caused them to have to pay out £225,000, and the Times claim that 537 punters placed a total of £1,027 worth of bets on the scoreline repeating itself, causing a payout of £514,527. Paddy Power have a titular fictional character who occasionally blogs and claims one gambler managed to bet £25 on the first 4-4 draw and then another £44 on the second 4-4 draw, the latter bet apparently returning £22k to one punter, who can't have been doing badly if he was able to throw £44 around on 4-4 in the first place.

It's surprisingly difficult to work out what the odds of a 4-4 draw "should" be. The The Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation has a mighty archive, but I haven't been able to find a distribution chart for results across all competitive games. The similarly wonderful Statto.com (Statto! Statto! Statto!) provide limited score distributions broken down by league and by season, but don't break down the realtive likelihood of the less likely results and don't seem to give amalgamated all-football results. The closest I've been able to find is this database from which I could extract 21,538 results from international football matches from 1920 to 2001. Of those 21,538 games, only 26 were 4-4, so (making wild assumptions about distribution) 500/1 is not a generous price for Paddy Power to offer in the long run, albeit one with whopping variance that has caught them out this time. They have since tightened their 4-4 odds in for some games to a particularly chiselly 350/1 or so.

Paddy Power will be delighted for the publicity as much as anything else. They have a history of shamefully ingenerous 115%-125% books (compare with betting on the flip of a coin and charging £5 if you lose but only paying out £4 if you win) but remarkably generous publicity stunts, like paying out on bets that Stoke would be relegated after one game (noting that Stoke are now eight points clear in 12th place) and paying out on bets that Man U would win the FA Cup back in February (noting that Everton knocked them out in the semi-final last week). This means that some PP bets have got to be +EV, if you can work out which ones and avoid betting on the vast majority which aren't.

It's always tempting to wonder if there's any possibility of match-fixing to take advantage of these generous odds, but it sems unlikely; PP restrict themselves to 100/1 against on correct score bets in matches outside the top couple of divisions, because surely match-fixing at the highest level would cause ridiculous amounts of stink were it to be discovered. It's also true that the Liverpool-Arsenal game had a ninth goal deep into injury time, but it was disallowed for offside. Can't imagine Paddy Power having had nearly as much on 5-4 either way as on the 4-4 draw!

3) The chairman of Bolton is touting a plan to extend the Premier League from 20 teams to two 18-team divisions, absorbing Rangers and Celtic from Scotland and presumably 14 other yo-yo "too big to go down" teams from the Championship. This is a blatant grab at redistributing TV rights money in a way that will suit some teams better than others and its success or failure (for it apparently needs 14 out of 20 Premiership chairmen to agree) will depend on sufficiently many teams considering the plan to be in their interest. It's a bit like the puzzle about dividing gold among pirates. Actually, it's a lot like that puzzle, if not strictly economically equivalent.

Discussions about football reorganisation rumble on all the time, and I can't help wondering whether the notion of a two-division Premier League (which you'd think would be called the Premier League and, by logical extension, the Deuxiem League) is in vogue at least in part due to ongoing discussions over a parallel development in Scotland. Scotland like rejumbling and restructuring their leagues more than most nations; perhaps England is just feeling left out. (Incidentally, I've long wanted a football management game which simulated this aspect of sports business development, by virtue of the competitions in the game evolving over time. Haven't had one yet, though.)

BBC writer Chick Young gives a fairly standard defence of the argument against the Old Firm leaving, which makes a lot of sense. My view is that it's just a matter of time, though whether it's to an English Premiership, some sort of pan-European league or a putative Atlantic League remains to be seen. I'll only start to take such discussions of potential moves at all seriously if I hear that broadcasters are planning to make the move worth people's while, simply because TV rights are such a large proportion of the football business these days. One to look at seriously only about 6-12 months before the TV rights deals come up for grabs, or if there's a serious shift in power with pay-TV giants across Europe preparing to co-operate to make football dance to their tune even more than at present.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID and/or (hopefully identified!) anonymous posting as necessary. Thank you!

Why I love Dreamwidth even before I have an account there, and why you might not

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:19:59 GMT

Blogging about blogging is the lowest form, as ever, but consider this a heads-up that I consider the omens point to Dreamwidth being a great, possibly the best, place to post for the next few years. Nothing lasts forever online, though the Long Now Foundation acts as if it is and Weaver's Week is well over eight, so about quarter of an Internet century old. That said, Dreamwidth looks like it has the sort of momentum in its development and in its nascent culture that it may be as exciting to be a Dreamwidth member as it ever was to be a LiveJournal member, even at LiveJournal's peak. In short, I consider Dreamwidth to be cool in a way that I haven't felt for any other communication platform for the last few years.

Some of you have been reading about Dreamwidth ten times a day on your Flist already and others may not be familiar. The idea behind Dreamwidth is that some of the people who worked LJ once upon a time are producing their own LJ-like web site that, in theory, will benefit from LJ's strengths but will avoid the errors that made LJ suck. It is based on the LJ code but makes the changes that should have been made but never were because they would have broken too many other things. It's not a project arising out of a grudge against LJ management, though frankly that would have been motivation enough. It's not a fandom project, though it will be fandom-friendly. (And, er, non-fandom-friendly, for people who aren't fans of anything.) Most importantly, there will be people working on it, both the owners and volunteers, aiming to make the project better (for their definition of better, which can broadly be considered "more capable" and "more usable") rather than more profitable. The site is currently undergoing closed beta testing, though open beta testing is expected to start around April 30th.

There is a school of thought that the adoption of Dreamwidth will mean "just one more tab to keep open", and I can sympathise. In recent discussions, people have suggested they want to have a single place where they can keep track of everything, and that's not so unreasonable a request - after all, it's how many of us have been trying to use LJ for years. Indeed, I myself have argued (paras 8-10) that there's a social benefit to everyone sticking together on the one service rather than scattering to the four winds, back when GreatestJournal (or was it InsaneJournal, or uJournal, or Blurty, or...) was offering icons up the wazoo. I still do believe that. It's just that these days, I am so dissatisfied with LiveJournal's operation and so enchanted with Dreamwidth's promise that I will do what I can for the discussion I want to follow to all be happening over there rather than over here. The benefits of supporting the DW movement do seem to me to outweigh the costs of splitting the discussion.

It's also relevant that most of us are now used to spreading ourselves over many sites in a way that we weren't, even just a few Internet years ago. I have accounts on InsaneJournal and IziBlog just to see Flocked posts from some of my Friends over there. I have an account on Facebook where I interact with relatives, co-workers and a few classmates. (I have an account on Friends Reunited, the UK cultural equivalent to Classmates.com, which I never use.) I have an account on LinkedIn in the vague hope that that counts as networking. Heck, I've even signed up to Twitter just because so many of you are on it. (After a few months, I've finally sort of got the point of Twitter. I have long insisted that "Microcontent is rubbish", and it is. More specifically, Twitter is for small talk, which is pretty much by definition inherently rubbish, but good for strengthening relationships. As I'm notoriously rubbish at small talk, I ought to start Tweeting just for fun and practice.)

So with this in mind, as soon as I can - and hopefully no later than when open beta starts, currently planned for 30th April - I am going to sign up for a Dreamwidth account and start regarding that as "home". I'm not going to stop reading you all over here, and I'm not going to stop posting things over here, particularly when I want to post content under Friends lock but want my Friends over here to see it. In fact, from the perspective of users over here who aren't over there, it'll hardly look like anything has changed. Culturally, though, I expect to regard Dreamwidth as my new Internet home and LiveJournal as just a mirror of it. Certainly I expect to give Dreamwidth the love that I had for LiveJournal in my first couple of years here, which has long since been frittered away.

This is all subject to change if something else proves to suit me better, of course, or if Dreamwidth proves sufficiently awful in an unpredictable fashion. An obvious problem is that Friends-locked posts will unfortunately work particularly badly when I Friends-lock in two different places and inadvertently split the discussion. This may be less problematic than only posting it to one of the two and requiring those on one to use the other. (Seeing my Flocked posts appear on both services is going to be annoying for some of you, I'm afraid, much like when we see people Tweet with a #fb tag and then see the Tweet pop up on Facebook as well. There's no good solution to this, other than my moving across to one or the other completely.)

All that on top of the fun of the username landgrab, of course, and watch me moan because I haven't upgraded my online home to prime username real estate yet. Sometimes people on my Friends list announce they have codes up for grabs, but these go in the wink of an eye rather than in "forty winks" - you really have not to snooze for more than ten minutes or so before you lose. Incidentally, denise currently subscribes to every new personal account during the closed beta period, so her profile lets you keep count of how many personal accounts there are (2,227 as I type, but who knows how many more by the time I post?) as well as all the usernames that have gone. That could be an opportunity for someone devious if they can work out how to use it.

Setting up at a new service will also give me a chance to reassess what I want my journal to do for me; I'm going to bring my userinfo up to date, it being a couple of years stale by now, and my interests no longer need be an attempt to get to exactly 150 forming a full A-to-Z. Hopefully I can get rid of some of my more encumbering notions of blogging as performance art and teach myself that it's OK to post shorter and more frequently. Hey, I've found my one true love through LiveJournal; I don't need (and certainly don't want) to have to go through that again. DW seems to me like a good opportunity for a fresh start and a chance to reinforce the relationships I have - and, no, this isn't a euphemism for defriending or deprioritising friendships with people who don't move.

Technically, currently the biggest advantage of DW is a feature I am unlikely to use in practice, the splitting of the concept of "friend" into "subscribe" (the "appears on your Flist" functionality of Friendship) and "access" (the "sees your Flocked posts" functionality of Friendship). I tend to think that people on LJ recognise that declarations of Friendship are not guarantees of full use of both aspects of the Friend functionality outside filters, and I'm sure that people will quickly make the same realisation on DW; we're going to filter as much as ever, whether or not we choose to use the functionality to make it explicit. (However, not at first; DW doesn't have filtering capability to begin with. It's high on the priority list, though.)

With all this in mind, bear in mind that I love DW to pieces. In the spirit of fairness - quite probably, fairness to excess, by presenting devil's advocacy that I think may overrepresent the opinion of a small minority - I'm going to admit that I don't think DW is perfect and I don't think DW is for everyone. Here are some of the reasons why DW may not be for everyone, but why these objections are not sufficient to put me off.

Before I start, it's relevant to distinguish between the Dreamwidth site and the Dreamwidth movement here, much as it is relevant to distinguish between the LiveJournal site and the LiveJournal codebase. The LiveJournal site runs on a mixture of free / open-sourced code and non-free code, with several different other sites running the free code - plus, usually, as little non-free code as they can get away with, or extra non-free code to make their site a more inviting proposition. The Dreamwidth movement has published a set of Guiding Principles, announcing a commitment to releasing code as open source. "We are committed to making it easy for others to install and maintain their own instances of our server code." Accordingly, I can think of some reasons why some of you might prefer to use another implementation of the Dreamwidth server code, once the DW server code is released.

The skeptical among you might now be reminded of the old LiveJournal Social Contract, which these days has turned into a redirector to a page with core values and technical goals. It's up to you how important a change at LJ this represents. A true pessimist might be similarly skeptical about Dreamwidth's ability to live by its Guiding Principles in the long term - or even feel that the establishment of such principles is necessarily setting the movement up for a fall. Anything is possible; when I say "nothing lasts forever online" above, it's somewhere between plausible and inevitable that Dreamwidth could jump the shark somewhere along the line due to bad fortune or bad decisions. However, I reckon that my near-seven-year LJ run is as long at one location as I might dare to hope for even with a wonderful enterprise. (I kept up physical diaries for about seven years, too, as it happens.) Remind me of this in the space year 02016!

It would be possible to object to the Dreamwidth site on the grounds that it is being operated by a US for-profit company owned by the two technical principals of the site, synecdochic and xb95. There are at least two potential criticisms here.

I think the choice to bind the Dreamwidth site by US law is more dictated by the fact that its two principals are based in the US than anything else. It seems likely that someone could use the Dreamwidth code to start another site in a different country whose legal system might suit you better, and this may be a better fit for your needs. I suspect that some of the DW code will have been written in an attempt to meet the requirements of US law - most specifically, the existence of COPPA meaning that web sites must treat their members under the age of 13 in different ways. Perhaps a Dreamwidth-affiliated site hosted in another country would have to partially rewrite the code to strip out irrelevant COPPA protection and to obey local laws, such as EU data protection legislation. If this is sufficiently important to you, you may find yourself unable to support the Dreamwidth site while still supporting the Dreamwidth movement.

Some might object to the Dreamwidth site on the grounds that it has been designed to operate as a for-profit corporation. This is, essentially, the first issue addressed in Dreamwidth's Business FAQ document. I'll leave it to you to decide how convincing the reasons they give are. I'm not sufficiently expert to know whether there are alternative ways that the enterprise might have been designed within US law which might have resulted in a non-profit or a co-operative while avoiding the 501(c)(3) problems. The company is clear about what it intends to do with its profit, and also clear about the process if the two principals get sick of running the site; a lesson learnt, among other things, from the last days of brad at LJ.

It also helps convince me that the heart of the business is in a place that I like, for-profit or otherwise (though it might not convince you) that synecdochic has written about her background and her intentions for Dreamwidth's place in life. Beside that, even if DW had been set up as a not-for-profit, that doesn't mean that the principals couldn't have acted for their own benefit rather than that of the site - for instance, by paying themselves unduly high wages. The site's commitment to open operations should make such abuses clear and thus almost vanishingly unlikely.

There are a large category of people who will practically not be able to use the Dreamwidth site, whether they approve of it or not: those who do not speak English. LiveJournal has always placed considerable emphasis on the variety of languages in which the site can be used; this has resulted, among other things, in the site becoming one of the foremost, if not the foremost, Russian-language blogging platforms. However, the site's attitude to translation works better in some cases than others; as new pieces of text are added to the site in the native English language, they may not necessarily be added to other languages for some time, if at all. There are some occasions where phrases may be combined in ways that make sense in English grammar, but may not work so well in other languages. Lastly, LJ tags are designed to make sense and be easily memorable abbreviations in the English language, whichever language you may be working in. It works well enough in some languages for the site to be popular in some countries, but it's clearly not perfect.

The Dreamwidth movement takes an alternative approach to this. The Dreamwidth site will only ever be in the English language. However, the site's commitment to open source means that it ought to be relatively easy for (almost?) the entire code to be run by someone else in another language, who may well want to sort out all the translation issues into a single language at a single stroke. Accordingly, over time, we might expect there to be a Russian-language implementation of the Dreamwidth code, a French-language parallel Dreamwidth site, a German-language one and so on and so on, as well as likely several parallel English-language implementations of the code. Again, this has the drawback of splitting locked discussions among many destinations.

The Dreamwidth movement aims to solve this by a notion sometimes referred to as "federation", whereby users who have accounts on multiple Dreamwidth or LJ codebase sites ought to be able to see posts that they can see under Friends-lock on one site at all sites in the federation - and all this without compromising the security of the Friends-locked posts to the outside world. This has got to be the true killer feature for Dreamwidth, if they can make it work well, for those of us who might not want to have to track several different sites. It's also a heck of a technical challenge, and currently it's unsolved - it's just ("just"!) bug #710 on the Dreamwidth Bugzilla. However, it's listed as a bug that is blocking the open beta, so presumably a cunning plan is in place. The whole operation does rely on OpenID to some extent, which some have argued against, though I'm not sure how current the OpenID criticisms are.

As a thought experiment: could someone start a rogue site using the Dreamwidth code, attract users to it who start federating Friends-locked posts from other sites to this rogue site and then start publishing the Friends-locked posts in public? Surely it's possible, but presumably it's no more of a concern that a site that might make Friends-locked posts that are posted there public.

Iain once posted five tests, as was in vogue at the time, of ways in which he might have liked LiveJournal to develop. I'm fairly sure that some of the above properties of the Dreamwidth site will act as a disincentive towards his participation, but he may have more time for the movement at large. The concept of federation, if well implemented, should go some way towards easing his concerns regarding the legal basis of the site and his concerns regarding the single geographical basis for the servers. It's also been publicised that another feature stopping open beta is the revamping of the journal style system so that people might change their styles by use of the web standard CSS system rather than LiveJournal's rather opaque and proprietary S2.

There is something of a common theme to some of the above: there are lots of developments that are currently blocking open beta, but not in place. You can see the bug counts on a frequent basis, but the race against time is a difficult one. Even when the site enters open beta, ready for prime time or not, there are a long list of plans for features to be implemented. There's so much that's to be done and yet so much not yet done.

But there's so much that has been done; see the bug counts, and see these fascinating descriptions of how much can be done in just one week. See how many people are working on the project! See how many people are volunteering on the project already, and how many more are signed up to volunteer once further infrastructure is in place. The staff page shows that many of these have some fairly ideal credentials, too.

This shows that the project has momentum and talent and dedication and love behind it. Dreamwidth is making so much progress that it's hard not to love it. This is as fascinating and exciting as projects of this type come. That's why it's just damn cool, as far as I'm concerned, and that's why I want to associate myself with it, in whatever way, shape or form. To an extent, I'm not even sure how much I care to what extent the Dreamwidth project meets all its goals, so long as the momentum remains so strong and the project develops in delightful ways, even if they aren't necessarily the delightful ways I'd have thought or requested. It's a delightful case of open source volunteerism against the establishment that LJ has become.

Part of this inevitably reflects a degree of cult of personality; something doesn't become cool unless there are cool people working there. One more reason why you might not love the Dreamwidth project is if you have something against its principals, but I absolutely do not.

It's true, and it may be relevant to some people, that synecdochic (in another guise) ran LJ Abuse for some years, at a time when they did some questionable things. To some people, that may be a strike against her ability to run another similar site. While I don't necessarily agree with all the things that happened, I think it would be blinkered to hold these past events against her; while the "I was only obeying orders" defence is stronger in some circumstances than others, I think that running the site and setting its policy is as good a chance for her to show how she'd like to run a site, given the relative lack of constraints at DW that were in place at LJ. If you must, judge her on how she runs things by choice, rather than how she ran things by compulsion. Her reflections on her time in charge of LJ Abuse and how DW abuse might be different are a revealing starting-point, and I like what I see.

It's an oversimplification to say that I think Dreamwidth is cool because I think synecdochic is cool, but it would be wrong to say that that isn't part of it. I get the impression that she'll co-run the site with insight, love and an ingrained streak of wisdom that other people just won't have. azurelunatic has this fascinating post about the trials and tribulations faced by LJ over its years, and what sort of things that LJ users might want from someone running a site. She is a tremendous communicator and fiercely charismatic. Furthermore, she has major, major kudos just reflected from being held high in the opinions of some of those whose opinions I trust.

Voting for a place to focus your social networking is like voting for a political party. Anyone can promise anything, but at the end of the day, probably the most important factor is how people react to the developments which could not have been predicted. Due to their backgrounds and the way they present themselves in the rest of their lives, I'm far happier to put my trust in the Dreamwidth principals, their hopes and their vision than I am anywhere else. In short, I vote Dreamwidth. You might not; there are some of you who, I suspect, will only really ever be happy to vote for themselves - or, depending on how you interpret the paradigm, not vote at all. Placing your trust in an organisation with something as emotive and significant as an online home is an issue that many are struggling with; the_shoshanna has this post, well worth reading, about how she came to the decision for herself. Nothing is certain, but I'm convinced that Dreamwidth is as good a bet as anywhere.

That said, it's important to recognise that synecdochic is a fairly frail flower, who - mixing metaphors like a cocktail - piles her plate exceptionally high despite a relatively short supply of spoons. While there's sense to the cliché that "the only way to get something done is to make sure that a busy person does it", I'm glad that it's not just all her; xb95 also looks like an exceptionally competent brain and thus a very strong bet, and the strength of the rest of the volunteer team cannot be underestimated. (The fact that the two disagree on so much, and yet seem to be so good at co-operating to form a consensus from different starting-points, is another major reason for confidence in the site management.) I'm very glad indeed that the "sale of the site" policy has been codified in the Operating Procedures, and it more or less clears my qualms about what might happen in the case of a brad-style burnout. However, LJ lasted a long time and developed a long, long way before the burnout, so I'm hopeful for a good run.

And yet there was a point when I seriously thought that DW wasn't going to make it. Case in point: look at the archives of the dw-discuss mailing list, or - at least - the volume of discussion from month to month. DW was touted as "coming Summer 2008!"; when September rolled around and discussion on the list dried up, I thought it was a still birth. Seems that LiveJournal, Inc. firing people at the start of 2009 - barely legally, but with a horrible lack of class - was just the spark that the project needed. That sort of downtime reminds me that nothing is guaranteed, and every web site out of your control is always, in part, going to be a gamble. You know what? I don't mind that. In fact, it's part of the fun!

The excitement I find in Dreamwidth is watching the development of the functionality and the culture, whose priority I perceive to be more about having a service that the developers themselves want to use and less about making money. Remind you of anything? Could my strong feelings just be nostalgia for the brad days of LiveJournal? Perhaps; after all, the Golden Age of anything is "just before you discovered it"...

Sidenote: the current raw LJ stats make interesting reading, with the newbyday figures being as strong as they have ever been. I don't think LiveJournal's going anywhere, days after its tenth birthday. However, look at the bottom of the stats page and the graph of age distribution. Can't help feeling that an awful lot of those "29-year-olds" aren't going to be legitimate somehow, and I wonder just how many of the new users might be similarly spam-scented.

Long-shot Prediction Game: the results

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:11:22 GMT

A shamefully long time ago, I proposed a multi-stage prediction competition pertaining to twelve moderately unlikely events which might or might not happen, with a focus on the last five months of 2008 and the first month of 2009. Now we're well into 2009, the long-complete competition is starting to get rather rancid. Let me put it out of its misery before the stench of pallor completely stinks the place out.

First, we determine which - if any - of the twelve long-shots did come to fruition, like so. Again, I wll point to Iain's commentary on the matter. Returning to the original ordering, the twelve propositions were originally quoted as follows:

* Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher.

This did not happen. I don't believe that any of Brent crude, New York light sweet crude or West Texas Intermediate crude traded at above $148/barrel. It's cute to note that this was a case where a long shot came to fruition, but the long shot was in the opposite tail of the curve to the one about which I enquired.

* BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750.

This did happen, dropping to lower than 4500 in October and as low as 4095.23 early last month. I don't claim this to be as reliable a barometer of the global economy as I might have liked it to be, but I'm not sure there are significantly better ones that could be tracked over the course of the year.

* John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats in the 2008 US Presidential election.

This did not happen. There were no faithless electors and, as expected, John McCain won only 173 seats. (Well, votes; "seats" represents UK parliamentary vocabulary carried over in error.)

* Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister of the UK, Labour Party leader or both.

This did not happen. At times it seemed plausible, though.

* The USA to win at least one more gold medal than any other single country at the Beijing Olympics.

This did not happen. The USA won 36 gold medals, China won 51. (Now if I had specified medals of any colour, the USA would have outperformed all others, but I did not.)

* The New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII, expected to take place on or around February 1, 2009.

This did not happen. The New England Patriots did not even make the play-offs, though as they had a better record than any other team not to make the play-offs, they might reasonably place themselves thirteenth at worst. Debates as to whether the 11-5 Patriots might be a more appropriate play-off team than, say, the 8-8 Chargers are possible.

* Microsoft to make a takeover bid for (or merger bid with) Yahoo that Yahoo's board of directors accept or recommend acceptance.

This did not happen. However, it's a story that still commands discussion and may be just a matter of time.

* Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher.

This did not happen. I declared three sources to be acceptable; the W3 counter reported 32.07% in September aggregating figures for versions 3.*, 2.* and 1.5 (so 1.5 to 1.5.0.12), but I don't think it would be reasonable to estimate usage of browsers from the 1.0 branch and from pre-1.0 branches to exceed 33% as required. TheCounter reported usage figures around 20% and Net Applications had figures around the same mark. Firefox usage increase seems to be decelerating, at least partially due to acceleration of usage of Safari and Chrome, and partially because MSIE 7 really isn't so bad any more.

* The Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie, i.e. Harry Potter 6, to gross at least $285,000,000 at the US box office by (and including) the weekend concluding Sunday February 1st, 2009.

This did not happen, because the release of the movie was postponed. Alas! Should the delayed release make it to US$285 million - plausible, because the upcoming July release might suit its brand of Fine Holiday Fun well - then a grumble would be entirely justifiable, though unsuccessful.

* One or more of Prince William, Prince Harry, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie to marry publicly.

This did not happen. A new hat was not required.

* USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran.

This did not happen. Handy word, "overt". (I am not claiming that there were any covert ones, though...)

* There will be no more than two major hurricanes (category 3+) in the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season.

This did not happen, sadly: Bertha was category three and Gustav, Ike, Omar and Paloma all were category four.

Thus, in conclusion, one (1) of the twelve long-shots happened. The prediction part of the game ran over two rounds: the first round saw people estimate the number of items which would happen over the time period, and the second round saw people effectively wager points on each of the twelve propositions at community-defined, and community-refined, odds. So now let's find out who won!

In the first round, players participated in two ways: firstly by estimating the number of events that would happen and secondly by suggesting which would be the most likely and least likely to occur.

The number of events that actually happened was one. Of the twenty entries to the first round, nineteen estimated the number of long-shots that would take place, with the estimates ranging from two to eight. "Well done, everybody!", as Chris Tarrant says, regardless of how well or badly the just-asked audience have actually done. The two players who nominated two events score nine points, the seven players who nominated three events score eight points and so on. Three bonus points are awarded to each of the nine players saying that the stock market drop was among the four most likely to happen; two penalty points are deducted from the single player saying that the stock market drop was among the four least likely to happen.

These bonus points make the difference, as of the two players who said that two long-shots would happen, one would nominate the stock market drop as among the most likely, scoring +3 points, and the other would nominate the stock market drop as among the least likely, scoring -2 points and eliminating herself from contention. Sorry, huskyteer; with a score of 12 points, the winner of the first round is Iain, who once wrote at daweaver. Well done, Iain!

In joint second place, with eleven points (eight for a nomination of three events plus three for proposing the stock market drop) were bateleur, quintus_marcius and jaydlewis. In joint fifth place, on ten points (seven for nominating four events plus three for the stock drop) were enfarcer, sir_quirky_k and malachan. Scores were as low as five, four and technically zero.

In the second round, players chose for each of the twelve propositions whether they would prefer to earn a large score in the unlikely case of the long-shot occurring or a small score in the likely case of the long-shot not occurring. Accordingly, the twelve propositions are scored like so:

I choose to earn 53 points if "USA to win most gold medals in Beijing" happens, instead of earning 47 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 47 points.

I choose to earn 55 points if "HP 6 to gross at least $285 million at the US box office" happens, instead of earning 45 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 45 points.

I choose to earn 57 points if "BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750" happens, instead of earning 43 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score 57 points, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score zero.

I choose to earn 59 points if "Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher" happens, instead of earning 41 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 41 points.

I choose to earn 65 points if "Microsoft to takeover Yahoo" happens, instead of earning 35 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 35 points.

I choose to earn 68 points if "USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran" happens, instead of earning 32 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 32 points.

I choose to earn 71 points if "Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister, Labour leader or both" happens, instead of earning 29 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 29 points.

I choose to earn 73 points if "Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher" happens, instead of earning 27 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 27 points.

I choose to earn 75 points if "Named British Prince or Princess to marry publicly" happens, instead of earning 25 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 25 points.

I choose to earn 78 points if "No more than 2 major hurricanes in 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season" happens, instead of earning 22 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 22 points.

I choose to earn 79 points if "New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII" happens, instead of earning 21 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 21 points.

I choose to earn 82 points if "John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats" happens, instead of earning 18 points if it doesn't: players choosing to support the long-shot score zero, players choosing to oppose the long-shot score 18 points.

Accordingly a perfect score would have been available by only predicting the stock market drop long-shot and by refusing all the others. It would have scored 47+45+57+41+35+32+29+27+25+22+21+18=399. The highest score actually attained was 356, with the 43 points short of perfection due to incorrectly accepting the long-shots for hurricanes and the Patriots, and the winning player was quintus_marcius. Well done, David! David led almost from the start, though as he notes, he's played plenty of prediction games in the past, most frequently organised by gayparee, with no little success. This maiden victory is long overdue!

The minor placings are taken up by devjoe, scoring 297, missingdonut with 295, jaydlewis on 286, hedwig_snowy and his 266 then canadianpuzzler, at one point my own choice to win the whole thing, accruing 257 points. Scores were as low as 196, 193 and 162. I have a luridly coloured (but of course!) spreadsheet available with full scoring details.

I will note that I unofficially registered my predictions, which would have been good for 303 and thus sufficient for second place. However, the Rest Of The World who chose to oppose all twelve long-shots (for is making an entry selecting none of the choices different to not making an entry at all?) would have scored a moderately mighty 342. Possibly this does not reflect terribly well on all our performances, my own firmly included.

Thank you all for playing and apologies for the delayed results. I hope you enjoyed the game!

Reflecting on the game, I think my long-shots were slightly longer than I would have liked; they were intended to be about 20%-25% likely, thus making a result of only one turning out slightly disappointing, though probably not outside of tolerance. (If none of the twelve had happened, I would have been embarrassed.) Some long-shots were close - the Firefox one and, I still contend, the Microsoft-Yahoo! one being reasonably near misses - while others (oil prices, McCain seats) were spectacular misses. I rather enjoy that one of the long-shots was a miss for a reason very different to the ones we might have expected, but it's a shame it was the one regarding Half-Blood Prince after its postponement. It might have been interesting to run a two-tailed long-shot prediction game were you are able to predict long-shot low values as well as long-shot high ones, but I was deliberately trying to keep the complexity of the game low to attract players.

The concept of a long-shot prediction game still appeals to me, at least, simply because unlikely predictions are more interesting than easy-to-make ones. It would be very interesting to play a game that set out to reward those who could accurately distinguish a 10% long-shot from a 1% long-shot, but such a game would fairly necessarily be likely to be relatively complex - or, at least, rely on multiple trials of the long-shots in question, which is a facility that may not be available. It would be an attractive property to reward players' creativity in devising the long-shots, not least because they may well be more accurate at determining the length of a long-shot than I am. daweaver, as was, tried this in his 2006 prediction competition, which was closer to the mark, but I'm not sure it was quite there somehow. (Not least because I'm not sure what I'm looking for!)

Your thoughts and reflections would be welcome. I think I'll give this a rest for the remainder of the year and very probably next year as well, not least because I never really came up with a satisfactory name for the whole operation, though I may well participate in prediction games that any of you might run and would be delighted to learn of them. Besides, there are other - potentially more interesting - games I'd like to run online instead.

Rock'n'roll

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:52:53 GMT

Today seems like as good a day as any to post about a subject on which I post remarkably little: rock music. I post very little because I know very little. This is not one of my specialist subjects; if anything, it represents a considerable gap in my pop cultural knowledge, no pun intended.

Most of what I do know comes from listening to The Arrow, one of a small number of rock channels available to us on digital radio. I thought there were only two - The Arrow and Planet Rock - but a slightly fuller search reveals Rock Radio is a wannabe-national network with an affiliate here in the North-East. The venerable magazine Kerrang! has its own station as well, come to think of it.

There may well be scads of other stations available as audio channels on digital television, plus plenty of channels available over the Internet, of course, but in practice I don't go out and think "oh, I feel like listening to some rock music" - it's more likely to be the case that it's something on in the background on a night shift at work, with The Arrow being a fairly uncontroversial middle ground default option that we'd frequently listen to overnight back at the power station. (It was also a station that we could receive reasonably clearly, which was a rarer commodity than you might imagine. I can't immediately conclude whether being in the middle of tonnes of metal and industry would have been a help or a hindrance in this regard.)

Accordingly, here are thirteen songs that get played on The Arrow every once in a while, that I have worked out that I like. Now I know people can get almost territorial about their music, or about their music genres, so I'm not going to claim that these are classic songs, or even that these necessarily are rock music. (I'm not even sure that these are necessarily my favourite songs - for instance, I need to think about songs on a CD Meg kindly made for me, and whether they count as rock or not.) However, The Arrow played 'em, and I liked 'em. In no particular order:

Van Halen, "Jump" reminds me of this classic Flash movie about old arcade games. The big guitar solo is a highlight of both song and movie. The song's video can't be nearly as much to my taste as this.
Supertramp, "Dreamer" often had a line or two of the chorus sung at the power station. An in-joke about steam turbines then followed. Even without that, it's still pleasantly ethereal.
Meat Loaf, "Dead Ringer for Love" may strike the balance between grandiosity and tolerability best among ver Loaf's fairly ridiculous canon. For the longest time I thought the song concerned a dancing kangaroo, too. Sadly not.
Red Hot Chilli Peppers, "The Zephyr Song" has rather fewer laughs to it than the others, but also some lovely vocal harmonies. Can't work out why it's about a zephyr and not a zither, though.
REM, "Man On The Moon" is probably the only one of these to have featured in a gayparee lyric quiz. This scores tonnes of points for its subject matter and its sense of fun.
Doobie Brothers, "Listen to the Music" - now I'm sure I was first introduced to this song by some sort of dance remix in, probably, the early '90s, and I'd love to hear that again if ever I could find it. The original is cute in its way, though.
Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody", inevitably, again taking great benefit from its associations with a memorable film scene. It's fun to improvise lyrics to, very badly, as well.
Foo Fighters, "Learn to Fly" is probably the best rock song I can think of to listen to on a transatlantic flight. I did this on several occasions when Meg and I were long-distance.
Europe, "The Final Countdown" has a spectacular and very silly guitar section. I think this caught the imagination, at the time, of lots of very young people when it first came out, and I am no exception.
The Who, "You Better You Bet" sounds like it ought to be by Meat Loaf to me, but in a good way. Maybe Meat Loaf on a very good day.
Focus, "Sylvia" is a rare instrumental that got played on The Arrow and provided a really lovely change of pace. Given that The Arrow has no DJs announcing the songs and we can't get to the web site, finding out what this song actually was presented a real challenge.
Ram Jam, "Black Betty" is politically very incorrect, I suspect, but I heard it first as an instrumental used for a chart countdown. (Some of you may know where.) Considering that I regard myself as liking guitars less than many, there are quite a few songs on here because of their guitar parts.
The J. Gelis Band, (Angel in a) "Centerfold" is just plain silly fun for its singalong na-na-na line, plus has a self-indulgent false finish. One! More! Time!

I think I've demonstrated why I don't post about rock music very much.

The Damned United

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:36:41 GMT

Young man! There are many things I want to do before I start writing a LJ entry about something new, but sometimes you just have to reorder your priorities and strike while the iron is hot.

Arguably the most interesting thing to happen in English-language sport today (Felipe Sco-who?) is the announcement of firm detail from the fledgling United Football League, an initially US-based competition in professional American Football. Skip the official site, though, and get all your information from UFL Access, a well-informed and very well-written fan site with a vibrant web forum. I'm not normally a big web forum person, but have enjoyed this one.

The inaugural "premiere season" of the UFL is rather smaller in scale than people were hoping. Initial plans for eight (or later six) franchises, each owned externally, have been put off until 2010, with the investors they have attracted concentrating their efforts on a short season with home-and-away fixtures between four teams and an eventual play-off. The official press release names the four teams as Las Vegas/Los Angeles, New York/Hartford, Orlando and San Francisco/Sacramento; it seems likely that the split-site teams will play two of their home matches in one location and a third in another. Adding further cities still is not impossible, though the number of 2009 teams shall be four. (Five is right out.) In 2010, there should - could? - be sufficient investment to revert to the original plans for external ownership, one city per franchise and so on.

I posted about the UFL three posts (and three months, sigh) ago. It continues to fascinate me mostly at the level of geeking out about sports organisation, plus new ventures are always fascinating, plus taking swings at the NFL is always admirably ambitious, even if this one turns out to be a swing and a miss. Whether the UFL makes it or not, it will resolve the question "Can you found and fund a sports organisation in the style of many 21st-century technology companies?" The people on board have significant Wall Street and Silicon Valley experience, plus there are enough smart cookies on the football side to avoid inauthenticity. Oh, and the leader of the new investment group is the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the USA's House of Representatives.

The UFL faces many difficult challenges. While arguably the time to strike a new venture is now while so few of them are breaking ground, investment has been scarce and starting from a four-team basis will make the uphill struggle even longer, littered with corpses of other pro football ventures after the NFL extracted the juiciest parts. It should be a very entertaining ride, nevertheless, even if the web forum is as much of an attraction as the entity itself. (For much of late '07 and early '08, I was struggling and failing to write an article for here claiming that the proposed AAFL had hit written all over it and being negative about the UFL's chances...) The lead writer, Nation Hahn, is very good at what he does; probably the best starting-point is his two-part primer (part one, part two) of the UFL's first 21 months. His personal blog is fine, too.

Being sappy and egotistical, I wish him well at least in part because I recognise some of myself in him - or, more precisely, choose to project some of myself onto him. Let me tell you about my wonderful first job. I was a self-employed teleworking contractor working on the now virtually defunct web site of the Mind Sports Olympiad, and at the Mind Sports Olympiad events themselves. The concept was to establish an event, and a movement, that would do for mental sports like chess, bridge, poker, backgammon, go and so on what the Olympic Games does for physical ones. Compare with the more recent World Mind Sports Games. The Mind Sports Olympiad events in the UK are sputtering on annually, but have really been tailing off over the last few years; the smaller Cambridge events are rolling on and we have allies who do similar things, sometimes with our brand, in the Czech Republic and elsewhere.

The event was only a week or two per year, though. The vast majority of the upkeep of the web site pertained to the Mindzine, with news from all the aforementioned mental activities and anything else we could just about shoehorn in. We were very good at what we did, the team was lovely (I particularly happily enjoy remembering working with sir_gareth, amuzulo, godlovesevery1 and many others; ericklendl wrote a fine series for us once) and the work was fun. There were just two severe problems. One: surprisingly, painfully, unintuitively few people were interested in mind sports plural; there are more chess players or go players or poker players than generally-interested dilettantes who span the field. (I still don't want to believe this is necessarily correct.) Two: we didn't have a revenue stream.

This second problem was a rather severe one, and many investors ended up losing chunky sums that they had put into it. Many of the web site workers, myself firmly included, ended up not being paid for the last several months of work and there just wasn't anything left to sue. It was strange, it was irrational, it was built upon a big idea and it was pretty much the way things "worked" in the first .com bubble. Failures are useful feedback, though it's never clear whether a failure was due to an inherently bad idea or due to a bad execution of a potentially good idea. Having some self-employment experience on my CV probably didn't hurt me in terms of getting my later job, even though the transfer of skills was not an obvious one and nobody seemed particularly interested in the nature of self-employment.

And from here, it's not such a stretch to draw comparisons to the UFL. I dearly hope it makes it in a way that the MSO did not; it's a similar swing at a massive target, and there seem to be a lot of excellent talent, resources and good thinking behind it. Much as the MSO was a wonderful ride at the time, I have great confidence that the UFL will offer a fine ride, probably a much finer one, and think that UFL Access in particular will provide a grandstand seat from which to enjoy the ride.

The "BBC Sports Review of the Year" post of the year

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:59:36 GMT

~~The Credit Crunch has~~ Media pressures have forced a change in the Modern Pentathlon, that most idealistic (and militaristic) of twentieth-century Olympic confections, arguably reducing it to a quadrathlon. Specifically, the shooting discipline has been subsumed into the running discipline, which will now form a run with shooting interludes. The Biathlon, competed in the Winter Olympics and elsewhere, sets the precedent by illustrating that ski-ing and shooting can be combined into a single event that is not without considerable charm. A running-and-shooting biathlon seems a strange mix, though, but this is probably strange just through unfamiliarity. Well worth a try, but I'm not clear how this can be considered an improvement over the traditional "five"-inspired definition of a pentathlon. As ever, I would be delighted to be educated otherwise.

Changing subject somewhat, I do like the "Hurricane sprint" format of Nordic combined events, where time penalties (for competitors not finishing in first place of the first event of the competition) are replaced by distance penalties, but it must be awful logistically. I hadn't really thought about the consequences of people racing around with loaded weapons before, on the grounds that cross-country skiers are sufficiently gentle and sufficiently handicapped by their motion that they can reasonably be trusted to look after their armaments. Running around with loaded weapons, though, is somehow much stranger - almost like it's an event that should take place at the World Police (and Fire) Games and nowhere else.

The BBC have announced the shortlist of ten for the Sports Personality of the Year award this year, along with the nominations that generated the ten. To me, this is a stronger indicator of impending Christmas than the first mince pie. I analysed the 2006 contest, the perpetually wonderful and perpetually owed-nineteen-e-mails Iain analysed the 2007 event. Here are my thoughts on the 2008 line-up.

The first reaction is to note that 28 sets of nominations were made this year, down from 31 the previous year and 37 the year before. Digging through the BBC blogs, the Director of BBC Sport notes that "The editors are from the main UK daily and Sunday newspaper ((singularity sic)), with the additions of some Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and English regional titles. The full list will be published when we announce the nominations. Any variation between years is usually because not all choose to vote." An entirely reasonable starting-point, though it seems odd that more editors should choose not to reply to the invitation each year. Might fewer have been asked?

In the same post, the editor tackles the old "How can {s}he be Sports Personality of the Year when they haven't got a personality?" canard very simply by saying "I take the award as being for the sportsman or woman of the year, and "personality" is just a neater way of saying that. But back to the precedents - that's what it's been called since 1954!" This is entirely sensible and a perfectly reasonable thing to be considered definitive; it's just a shame that this is not widely known. (It's also a shame that the word "personality" was chosen rather than "participant" over half a century ago.) A "Sports Personality of the Year" award, with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink emphasis on personality, would be an interesting competition, but this is not that competition. I have no objection to such a contest, which would probably be Jeff Stelling vs. Ricky Hatton vs. Phil Taylor every year now that Daley Thompson has retired, but it's probably something for Nuts TV rather than the BBC.

There's even some explicit guidance about who is eligible in terms of nationality. I like the specific guidance that non-British personalities are eligible for the award if they are resident in the UK, they play a significant amount of their sport in the UK and (if a team member) they are being considered based upon their achievements for a UK team; this is very sensible. (We might consider this the Barry McGuigan exception after the very worthy 1985 winner.) Again, it's not widely known, which is a shame.

The 28 nominators each cast 10 votes among 35 candidates as follows:

1st equal with 28 nominations

Rebecca Adlington: a swimmer who won gold medals in the 400m freestyle and 800m freestyle at the Olympic Games, the most decorated British swimmer in a single event for a hundred years. (A counter-argument against her achievements is the old theory about swimming races at different distances being much less different from each other than running events at different distances.)
Lewis Hamilton: a motor racing driver who won the Formula One championship, at only his second attempt, being the youngest driver ever to do so. (A counter-argument against his achievements is the extent to which differences in machinery may have affected competitors' performances and the extent to which Formula One results can be considered disputable.)
Chris Hoy: a cyclist who won gold medals in the Team Sprint, Individual Sprint and Keirin events at the Olympic Games, the most decorated British participant in a single Olympic Games event for a hundred years. (A counter-argument against his achievements is the extent to which differences in machinery may have affected competitors' performances and the extent to which he was aided by his team-mates in events other than the individual sprint.)

4th with 26 nominations

Andy Murray: a tennis player who is fourth in the world according to the current ATP rankings, and who has recorded victories this year against each of the three players ranked ahead of him, two of whom are considered all-time greats. (A counter-argument against his achievements is that he has not won a Grand Slam championship this year and his performance at the Olympic Games was unusually poor.)

5th with 24 nominations

Joe Calzaghe: last year's winner, a boxer who took part in two light-heavyweight contests this year, gaining victories by judge's decision against Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr., both boxers considered the finest pound-for-pound at their peak, to improve his career record to 46 wins from 46 fights. (A counter-argument against his achievements is that he only fought twice in the year against opponents past their best.)

6th equal with 20 nominations

Ben Ainslie: a sailor who won the Finn class at the Olympic Games to earn his third consecutive gold medal (after a silver in 1992) at an Olympic Games. (A counter-argument against his achievements is the number of different sorts of sailing competition that exist and how difficult it is to compare their merit.)
Bradley Wiggins: a wonderfully-named cyclist who won gold medals at the Olympic Games in the Individual Pursuit and Team Pursuit, having previously won both those medals and a gold in the Men's Madison at the World Championships. (A counter-argument against his achievements is the number of different sorts of cycling competition that exist and how difficult it is to compare their merit, plus a relatively weak performance in the Men's Madison at the Olympic Games.)

8th with 19 nominations

Christine Ohuruogu: a runner who won the women's 400m track running championship at the Olympic Games, the only Briton to win an Olympic gold medal in track or field events this year. (A counter-argument against her achievements is lingering resentment at her having missed three drugs tests in 2005-06 and her subsequent requirement of appeals for eligibility to participate in the British Olympic team.)

9th with 15 nominations

Nicole Cooke: a cyclist who won gold medals in the women's road race events at the World Championship and the Olympic Games. (A counter-argument against her achievements is the number of different sorts of cycling competition that exist and how difficult it is to compare their merit, coupled with suspicions over the differences in equipment between competitors.)

10th with 11 nominations

Rebecca Romero: a cyclist who won gold medals in the women's Individual Pursuit events at the World Championship and the Olympic Games, having also been part of the Team Pursuit gold-medal team at the World Championships. She is also distinctive for having previously won a silver medal for rowing at the 2004 Olympic Games. (Again, a counter-argument against her achievements is the number of different sorts of cycling competition that exist and how difficult it is to compare their merit, coupled with suspicions over the differences in equipment between competitors.)

Outside the short-list of ten, and thus not earning counter-arguments:

11th with 8 nominations

Victoria Pendleton: a cyclist who won gold medals in the women's Individual Sprint events at the World Championship and the Olympic Games, having also been part of the Team Sprint gold-medal team at the World Championships. Copy, paste, replace "Pursuit" with "Sprint".

12th with 7 nominations

Kevin Pietersen: a cricketer, representing England, and sometime captain. Particularly noted for unusually inventive switch-hitting in a century scored in a one-day international against New Zealand.

13th equal with 5 nominations

Mark Cavendish: a cyclist who won four stages in the Tour de France, becoming the first Briton to win three stages of the Tour in a year. He also won the gold medal, with Bradley Wiggins, in the men's Madison at the World Championships.
Cristiano Ronaldo: a footballer who won the Ballon d'Or ("European Footballer of the Year") award given by Europe's football journalists by a convincing margin.
Theo Walcott: a footballer who has established himself in the Arsenal first team at the age of just 19 and who scored three goals for England against well-regarded Croatia in a World Cup qualifying match.

16th equal with 3 nominations

James DeGale: a boxer who represented Great Britain at the Olympic Games in the Middleweight class, winning the gold medal, having defeated strong opposition.
Wayne Rooney: a footballer who scored many goals for Manchester United as they won both the Premiership and the Champions' League in the 2007-08 seasons, and scored several goals for England as well.
Ellie Simmonds: a swimmer who won gold medals in two freestyle swimming events (100m and 400m in the S6 categories) at the Paralympic Games at the age of only 13.
Shane Williams: a rugby union player who led Wales to the Grand Slam in the 2008 Six Nations and was the first Welshman named IRB International Player of the Year.

20th equal with 2 nominations

Ryan Giggs: a footballer who created many goals for Manchester United as they won both the Premiership and the Champions' League in the 2007-08 seasons, at the age of 35. He has also earned many other accolades for longevity and accumulated achievement.
David Haye: a boxer who took part in two contests this year, gaining victories by knockout against Enzo Maccarinelli to win a third concurrent cruiserweight championship and Monte Barrett to establish himself among the highest-regarded heavyweights in the world.
Louis Smith: a gymnast who won a bronze medal in the pommel horse event at the Olympic Games, becoming the first Briton to win an individual gymnastics event Olympic medal since 1908.

23rd equal with 1 nomination

Mark Beaumont (The Scotsman): a Scottish cyclist who holds the world record for circumnavigating the world by bicycle, completing his 18,297 miles route having taken 194 days and 17 hours, shaving around a third off the previous record.
Michael Bisping (Daily Star): a kick-boxer and jiu-jitsu participant who won three contests at Ultimate Fighting Championship events this year.
Danny Cipriani (The Sunday Express): a rugby union fly-half who replaced Johnny Wilkinson and swore in TV interviews.
David Coulthard (The Evening Standard): a formula one driver who retired from the championship this year after fifteen years, having earned more points over his career than every previous driver except four.
Luol Deng (The Voice): a basketball player for the National Basketball Association's Chicago Bulls and the Great Britain national basketball team, who signed a six-year contract worth a guaranteed US$71,000,000 this year.
Aaron Hadlow (Sport Magazine): a professional kitesurfer who won the Pro Kiteboard Riders' Association World Championships for the fifth consecutive time this year. I hadn't heard of him before, either. Burly!
Ryan Moore (The Liverpool Echo): a flat racing jockey who was Champion Jockey in 2006 and 2008.
Ronnie O'Sullivan (The People): a snooker player who won the World Championship, the UK Championship and the Premier League this year.
Paula Radcliffe (The Sunday Times): a runner who won the New York City Marathon, raced in the Olympic marathon despite being not fully fit (finishing 23rd) and won the Great South Run 10,000m road race.
Laura Robson (Zoo Magazine): a tennis player who won the Wimbledon Junior Girls' Championship at the age of 14 years old.
Justin Rose (The Scotsman): a golfer who represented Europe at the Ryder Cup. Not actually Scottish.
Jason Smyth (Belfast Telegraph): a visually-impaired wheelchair racer who won two golds for Ireland in the 100m and 200m T13 categories at the Paralympic Games.
Ruby Walsh (Daily Star): a jockey who is the reigning Irish National Hunt champion jockey, his sixth time of claiming that title.

Time does not permit me to analyse these findings tonight. I did enjoy many of the single nominations, and some of the calls for those who might have been nominated. A former feature on the Sports Review of the Year was a round-up of all this year's British world champions; it was noted that Chrissie Wellington was the first Briton to win the (women's) Ironman World Triathlon Championship, winning two other Ironman-length events and the Long-Distance (something like two-thirds-Ironman) World Championships. It would also be an excellent chance to give credit to the likes of Aaron Hadlow, as nominated above, and British Mind Sports Personality of the Year, two-time World Memory Champsion Ben Pridmore. (I note that none of the go, Scrabble, chess, draughts, Othello or poker players were that great this year, and the bridge team who won the UK's only gold medal for England at the World Mind Sports Championships are a team.)

It's a very difficult choice this year. I am delighted to see six cyclists within the top fifteen and four in the top ten. I would be happy to see Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins or Rebecca Adlington win this year; while Lewis Hamilton's achievement is very considerable, I would like him to win the Formula One world championship next year as well and then I would happily vote in his favour. (I'd also like Ben Ainslie to win another gold medal at the next Olympic Games, where a fifth consecutive Olympic medal surely qualifies for a Redgrave-esque SPOTY title on a rollover basis. Knocking him down to second or third because the first one was, gasp, silver would be churlish.) In practice, I think it's hard to choose among the top three. This is definitely an extremely strong crop of contenders.

In conclusion, I strongly support Iain's call that the public should be able to cast a vote at the start to generate a set of nominations, as well as picking from the accumulated collection of nominees. If nothing else, it would give the viewers the chance to be reminded of the parameters of the competition - specifically, the definitions of "British" and "personality" as pertaining to this competition, as well as the way that the shortlist is generated. Even if the viewer poll generated nominations for Mick Gault, Steve Peat and Darren Kenny in 2006, that is no bad thing; while the award is the main goal and a place in the top ten shortlist impressive also, any sports participant who earns even a single nomination should be proud of an exceptional achievement.

"It’s the sport of kings, better than diamond rings"

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:48:42 GMT

I have reason to believe that there will be a particularly interesting development in world sport on Monday as there may be the announcement of significant new information about a new American Football league in the US, the strangely-titled United Football League. (What torn-asunder things are being brought back together?) Despite the name, the organisation represents the most significant challenge to the dominance of the National Football League for some time. Since about February, I've been following UFL Access, rather a good blog about the foetal league, and lurking within its forums. The smart money is on the league starting with six teams, and Sports Illustrated have suggested they are most likely to be as follows: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Orlando and - possibly - Hartford, CT.

Professional American Football in the US is all but synonymous with the NFL, but there have been plenty of other professional leagues over the years. A gold medal goes to the American Football League, which forced a merger with the NFL on fairly even terms in 1970. Silver medals go to the All-American Football Conference of the 1940s and the United States Football League of the 1980s both established American Football presences in cities that the NFL would later go on to absorb - in the case of the AAFC, even with names intact. Bronze medals - and that's being generous - go to the World Football League and the not-an-abbreviation XFL which were less successful still, with their impacts on pro American football being more accurately measured in terms of a few players, a few rule changes or a few presentation techniques.

New pro American Football ventures tend to be based on the presumption of the existence of unserved markets, both geographically and televisually. Las Vegas has not yet had a major league franchise in one of the big four US sports due to connections with sports gambling and Los Angeles lost its NFL connection in 1995. Austin and San Antonio, but very unlikely both, have also been mentioned as unserved markets in this regard. Televisually, NBC lost the rights to broadcast the NFL in 1998 and strongly considered starting a football league, in association with partners, simply because they thought it would bring good TV ratings. (Lest we forget, the XFL, which broadcast on NBC, actually attracted astonishingly low TV ratings in practice; this is a large part of why it only lasted one season, though game attendance levels were solid.)

There also exists indoor American Football, most famously in the shape of the Arena Football League, but also in similar - less significant - incarnations. If you're not familiar with Arena Football, it follows many of the rules and conventions of the outdoor game, but has been adapted and downsized to take place in buildings with central arenas which might host professional teams in either basketball and/or ice hockey. To an extent, the Arena Football League acts as a developmental league to US pro football, as (effectively) does the Canadian Football League. Other semi-pro outdoor football leagues exist at local levels. The closest that the NFL has come, so far, to having a formal developmental league has been the World League of American Football, which resurfaced as NFL Europa and had a long run. (See also the Football League of Europe, an interim measure stopping the gap between the two, which represents an interesting enterprise that is, strangely, written about in detail on German-language Wikipedia and not yet touched on the English-language one. A rare gap!)

It's interesting to compare the history of pro American Football to that of other pro sports in the US; similarities can be drawn. In football, the NFL absorbed the AFL and took clubs from elsewhere. In basketball, the NBA originally arose as a merger of two previous leagues; later on, it absorbed the American Basketball Association (in what can, culturally, be considered to be a reverse takeover) and eventually launched the NBA Developmental League as a farm system. In baseball, Major League Baseball represents a hundred-year-plus effective merger between the National League (originally Association) and the American League (ditto), with a long-established minor league system; indeed, the American and National Leagues almost had the Pacific Coast league as a competitor on equal league before they forced it to be recognised as - if this isn't a contradiction in terms - a senior minor league. (One round of MLB expansion was, effectively, to absorb the Continental League - a would-be third major league - before it properly started.) In hockey, the NHL absorbed many of the best teams from the World Hockey Association rather than deal with it as a competitor and has adopted the American Hockey League as an almost-exact-partition farm system, almost analogous to that of baseball. In short, major leagues will tend to merge with their competitors, or at least absorb their strongest markets, and will tend to set up their own development leagues with the avoidance of competition possibly in mind.

All of this skips past the existence of college American Football, about which I have written previously. I continue to be fascinated by college football, though. (Well, up until the past 28 or so hours, since when it has ceased to exist with a crashing halt. Ahem.) One question that I have considered is why college football remains so prominent and yet professional football does not have a long-term flourishing minor league. The gut reaction is that it's all to do with tradition, but it may be possible to be more specific than that. Spectator sport is rich in tradition, particularly in the USA. Now it's a reasonable question to ask in which countries spectator sport is not rich in tradition, but I tend to draw on the old saw that "the United Kingdom is a country where a hundred miles is a long way and the United States is a country where a hundred years is a long time" and opine that sport in the United States punches above its weight, or more precisely in this case its age, in terms of the creation and celebration of tradition.

American football is a minority interest sport in the UK; the BBC's free-to-air live coverage of the most recent Superbowl, combined with the (subscription) coverage on Sky, had a peak TV audience of 1.2 million viewers in a country of 60 million inhabitants, only half a million or so of whom stayed until the end of the game. (I wasn't one of them, for instance, due to work commitments.) College football does exist but is not really followed at all in the UK. We don't really have the tradition of devotion to university sports, with the exception of the annual Oxford vs. Cambridge Boat Race - and, to a lesser extent, the corresponding rugby union fixture.

BUSA, the British Universities Sports Association, is the British counterpart to the powerful and famous NCAA. They held as many of their national championships as they could in a single four-days-long Olympics-for-British-universities-style event in Sheffield, the British University Championships. Presumably this is the way that Sheffield can reuse all its Universiade infrastructure. How many UK cities would be capable of hosting this in future years? Possibly as many as six or eight... (Ahem. If this sounds familiar, then that's because this article is the longer one that I once said I might or might not get around to writing.)

Returning to the US, college (university) sports have a far stronger tradition than UK readers might anticipate. Indeed, American football played between colleges was a major attraction for decades at the start of the twentieth century, long before the professional game caught on. In fact, college football probably consistently drew bigger attendances than professional football until at least the 1950s. (I note that the biggest college football stadiums still hold very considerably more than NFL stadiums, but it's not unfair to say that the professional game draws more attention than the college game these days.) There are many people who prefer college football to pro football. (I'm married to one!)

It's probably a historical and geographical accident that university sports are not more popular in the UK; association football (soccer) clubs were formed from late in the nineteenth century and cricket had been governed by the counties for decades before that. (The counties are still influential in association football at the grass-roots level.) By the time Britain had the attention to spare on spectator sports, a pattern had already been established of dedicated sports clubs rather than university teams.

There are a couple of other factors, largely forced by the size of the country and the relationship between country and states. I suspect that the British feel much less attachment to their local university than Americans do, by virtue of the tradition being for funding to be made available for Britons to attend any British university of their choice, rather than the US pattern of funding being disbursed on a state-by-state basis and providing a great incentive for people to continue their education in their current state. (I also suspect that the small size of the UK compared to the US means that people pay more attention to local - i.e., state - matters in the US where the same degree of UK attention would be devoted to national issues, with US traditional terrestrial broadcast networks essentially being conglomerates of local enterprises.)

With this in mind, I shall tip my hat to the never-kicked-off All American Football League, which seemed to be a way of drawing upon college football traditions and provide a college-football-like experience outside the traditional college football season. It's a compelling concept, but wasn't properly funded or marketed. Perhaps part of its failure was due to the strength of the tradition that football is played during the conventional late-autumn-to-early-winter football season whereas the AAFL intended to play during the spring; compare with the USFL and WLAF as other spring football leagues that didn't catch on. I can't help thinking that a minor league might have more chance competing against the NFL pre-season, though summer may not be the best time to play in practice, especially with baseball so dominant. (There are other alternative league ventures under way, but they are considerably less promising than even the UFL.)

It's also interesting to consider which principles do have the strength to become traditions in practice as well as in theory, for what is a tradition if not the implementation of a principle repeated sufficiently many times with sufficiently little change? The whole existence of spectator sport depends in part on people's own self-confidence; the expression "I support team A" has a lot in common with the almost-never-expressed-out-loud statement "I consider team A to be the best because they are supported by me personally and I am always right". In essence, part of the purpose of supporting a sporting team is to give you a reason to oppose, with whatever level of passion you choose, those who support sporting teams which aren't yours. Consider the number of terrace chants whose functions are to express a communal hate of some other team. What other reason for spectator sport might there be? (The Onion speculates...)

(One other fascinating, but almost completely unrelated, issue of sporting tradition concerns the recent development of FC United of Manchester. It is a rare thing that a sporting establishment should have a manifesto, but the unfortunately-initialled FCUM do and it makes perfect sense under the circumstances. "FC United of Manchester is a new football club founded by disaffected and disenfranchised Manchester United supporters. (...) FC United of Manchester is intended to create a football club which addresses the concerns which many Manchester United fans have had over the last decade or more with how the club and football have developed, culminating in the club's takeover by Malcolm Glazer." Brilliant; a football club with more of a positive reason for existing than most. Alternatively, AFC Liverpool, in a very similar way, may be more to your taste. Other fan-owned sports teams may have come about in a different way, but the spin-off club concept may spread to other teams that have sufficiently alienated their supporters yet.)

Bear in mind that a lot of people care about alternative football only as a possible route towards getting high-level sport in their town; if further expansion of the NFL is unlikely, and franchise relocation always dubious, then a second major professional league seems to be the obvious way forward. You just know that there are bound to be many sports owners who would be considerably more interested in a UFL expansion team, should the league gain any traction at all, than in being one of the first people onto the metaphorical dance floor. The NFL commissioner has spoken on the record about the possibility of a developmental league some day; I think a lot of people would be happy if that was where the UFL eventually found its niche.

It's always nice to challenge some established patterns, too. The whole "world league" proposal - regardless of sport - won't go away, either; the NBA commissioner has talked openly about the possibility of European expansion, and there has been demonstrated to be some level of interest for American football in Europe. I note that the last NFL Europa season's attendance figures were its highest yet, indicating that there is a fan base in Frankfurt sufficient to support some sort of team, and the NFL International Series games have always drawn massively and sold out extremely quickly. This doesn't necessarily mean that UFL franchises outside the US would be guaranteed hits, but it certainly shows potential.

The XFL failed, in part, because the quality of their games was notoriously poor, not least because the players had little experience at playing together and so the teamwork was weak. It's not as if the XFL's players were necessarily bad; after all, there are thousands of players who can fill massive stadia in college football, and thus have demonstrated that they are by no means bad, but do not make it in the NFL. (Everything₂, which as we all know is written by Wikipedia's more interesting writers after they've had a few drinks and so cannot be distracted from their ranting, has a fascinating analysis of its failure.) In contrast, the UFL at least has plenty of football expertise - as well as marketing expertise - behind it and would hopefully make wise decisions like ensuring there would be a proper pre-season so that the teams might get used to playing together and thus be able to produce attractive football to watch. This brings us back to what is speculated to make up part of the December 1st UFL announcement.

The question remains whether the UFL has any real hope of doing at least as well as other competitor football leagues that have existed; while several very rich executives have signed onto the project and they have a clear indication of what is required to be involved for the league to make it in the long haul, one poster to the UFL Access forums points out how little we know about the UFL so far, not least whether they have commitments from potential club owners willing to invest a rumoured $60 million per club on this new enterprise. (There was, at one point, a concept that the UFL itself might own a third of each club, an external owner another third and the fans the remaining thirds. That hasn't come to fruition; one cannot blame the credit crunch as such, but it might have had more luck as a concept three years or so ago.) Even if the UFL manages to get as far as having a first season, its extended success depends on it not losing so much money so quickly that the owners decide to abort early.

Accordingly, the UFL would probably be considered a major success, in alternative football terms, if it managed to re-establish Los Angeles and Las Vegas as professional American Football cities. I think most alternative football fans are interested in the ride that following the new league might provide, bearing in mind that there is so much that still needs to be done before the league ever kicks off. Yet, yet, there's so much potential in the football market that even a league that made many mistakes, but none fatal, might still be a thing of great beauty. Fingers firmly crossed!

Singing and dancing

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:48:39 GMT

bookshop made a great post - not at all an infrequent occurrence - only the second part of which I intend to tangentially address today. (If the post in question becomes locked in the passage of time, no harm; hopefully this is sufficiently tangential not to require context.)

Polls before post-amble, if you please:

View Poll: Does "ars gratia artis" mean that those who shake their booties necessarily have great booties to shake?

I have a long-standing peeve with the world that, at least in my experience, those who sing or dance (or act, or play an instrument) are often assumed to be doing so by way of performance for the benefit of those who witness the art; accordingly, it is considered acceptable to judge those who engage in art and it is considered acceptable to critique or unfavourably judge their performances. Accordingly, there are many who will not engage in such artistic activities for fear of being judged, which is very sad. I think the world would be a little brighter if people really would sing and dance as if nobody were watching. Doing so when nobody is watching is an excellent way of doing this in practice.

At one level, it's pleasant to see singing and dancing attain a higher profile on TV at the moment, not that I tend to watch the shows in question; conversely, I fear that the shows reinforce the acceptability of judging the performances and the principle of negative entertainment to be gained from mocking performances considered poor. Similarly, this gives me a principle by which to reconsider my strongly favourable stance towards the likes of Dance Dance Revolution and Singstar; surely playing and, by the context of the game, failing is to be preferred to not playing at all?

There has recently been considerable controversy about the continued performance of one participant in Strictly Come Dancing, the British original version of the Dancing with the Stars format; John Sergeant - while, I agree, markedly less accomplished than his rivals - is really not at all bad a dancer. His cha-cha-cha which earned 12/40 seemed to me to be comparable with the standard that I might have achieved as an 11-year-old having danced for an hour a week for two or three years. Considering he's only been doing it for one week, that's pretty damn good. (It's far from being as good as you would expect from someone who took part on their show to back up their claims of being an excellent dancer, but that's not necessarily the case regarding John Sergeant's participation in the show.) John Sergeant's performance compares very favourably with the likes of, say, David Dickinson.

There do seem to me to be some definite steps in the right direction. When you engage in a choir, or at least a singalong, or take part in a ceilidh (compare with contra dancing in the US, I believe, though I may be wrong) then at least there is some agreement as to the goal for which you're all headed, or at least a sense that you're all on the same team. Some won't sing or dance even in explicitly non-judgmental co-operative performances for fear of being criticised, which is not as joyful as it could be. One of the things that most delights me about baseball is the wide acceptance of the tradition that everyone sings the same song - with the possible exception of the identity of the team for whom we root, root, root - in the seventh inning stretch; I love reading about other sporting crowds similarly singing and chanting and reflecting the play of the sport in their reaction, even if the usual standard of this is, frequently, rudimentary and base. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing!) When this is done wittily then it's a remarkable performance, and spontanaeity infecting thousands or tens of thousands to sing with one voice is a force of nature. The power of, say, a charismatic church becomes clear.

All this comes before we consider the many other artistic types of endeavours that exist: writing, drawing, artifice, handicrafts and comedy probably follow along similar lines, though there may well be boundary cases. (Comedy possibly has most potential, of these, to provide a disbenefit when performed badly.) This is probably the point at which my old contention that keeping a public LJ is, at least in part, performance art of a sort comes back to bite me!

Where were you when...?

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:19:50 GMT

Like so many others, Meg and I are very tired today after staying up well into the night to see the results and the speeches. It was worth it and we are overjoyed.

In my lifetime, I can remember this sense of political euphoria once before: May 1st, 1997, when Tony Blair led the Labour Party to a landslide victory. It was a crushing defeat for the Conservative Party that had won four consecutive elections. Tony Blair proved to be far from a perfect Prime Minister, but the Labour Party administration was such a breath of fresh air, and such a change, from what had gone on previously that that was our moment. I have happy memories of a wonderful party in person that night; I will have happy memories of a wonderful party online last night. (However good President Obama turns out to be, he'll be so much better than the alternative in just the same way as Prime Minister Blair was.)

Now the difference between Labour and the previous four terms of Conservatism may or may not be bigger than the difference between Obama and the previous eight years of Bush, I don't know; we shall see, in time. It's not unreasonable to quantify the Obama change as being a more dramatic one by virtue of ending centuries of Presidency by one skin colour; it makes me wonder whether Margaret Thatcher becoming the UK's first female Prime Minister in 1979 was felt to be just as dramatic a change, at the time, by those who loved what she stood for.

The projected resolution of California 8 and Florida 2 is, of course, bigoted, regrettable and offensive, but folk's wonderful words of hope ring true. Defeat prejudice? Yes, we can.

One Man Mindzine

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:48:20 GMT

For about nine happy and lucrative months, followed by another nine or so increasingly unhappy and decreasingly lucrative ones, my job was to be part of a team that updated the Mind Sports Olympiad's web site. In the sort of business plan that made sense only during the first .com bubble, most of our effort was spent working on the Mindzine, an online newspaper of mind sports news. I like my current job, but the MSO team was great and working with them was an even better job still. Unfortunately, there were a lot of people whose bills the site did not pay, and the Mindzine is history. Had I a clone - or, better still, many clones (and I'm sure I've had this feeling of deja vu somewhere before) - I'd love to contribute to a continuation of the Mindzine concept. Well, probably for one day only, I shall, and I shall have no editors telling me to blue-pen my ruder remarks.

The headline must be the World Memory Championship held in Bahrain at the weekend. Local coverage reports that the wonderful Ben Pridmore beat over forty competitors from four continents to regain the title he first won in 2004. (Accompanying it is US$10,000, which is worth considerably more in pounds sterling now than it was when Ben set off for the event.) The official site was reasonably good at updating with results event by event, but gave up towards the end of the second of three days, so I don't know the final scores. I also refuse to link to said official site because its header contains copious egomaniacal pictures of people, some of whose behaviour I consider to have been weak-minded, greedy and disloyal - and the perfectly nice Dominic O'Brien, too.

This is an excellent result - truly, the real winner is the sport of memory itself - as Ben is, I have long contended, a lovely bloke. He has a delightful blog which shows his self-effacing and whimsical nature off to a tee. Ben gains 150 cool points from me for, frankly, really not taking the whole memory thing too seriously, and another 150 cool points for not only having an avowed passion for furry web comics but also cheerfully sharing his own. (Including his slashier work.) I am delighted that Ben won; I'm sure he won't take offence at me saying that it's wonderful to see that an exceptionally talented and sufficiently hard-working amateur (which is intended as no slight; lest we forget, the word amateur is derived from the Latin verb amare, to love) can beat the professionals who aren't nearly as much fun. The campaign to have Ben Pridmore win a nomination for Sports Personality of the Year starts here.

In Chess, the world championship match between Viswanathan Anand of India and Vladimir Kramnik of Russia continues today, with the tenth game in progress as I type. The match is to be held over the best of twelve games, with tie-breaks if required, so 6½ points required to win the match; of the nine games so far, Vishy has won three and drawn six to lead the match 6-3 and Kramnik needs to win the last three in a row to even force a tie-break, though he has promised to fight to the end. The Week In Chess has commentary updated frequently and you can follow through to other sources of live commentary out there, some even free.

Staying with chess, the European Club Cup took place in Greece last week and was scarily strong. Out of the 32 players in the world that FIDE rate at 2700 or more, 22 of them played in the event. Top seeds URAL Sverdlovskaya ended up beating the other 63 teams, with six match wins and only one defeat. I'm guessing that Sverdlovskaya is the team location and URAL refers not to the mountain range as much as the motorcycle manufacturer of the same name. The only match they lost was against second seed MIKA chess club of Armenia, who wanted to play like Bob Fischer, but his brain was too mad. (I could play black! I could play white! I could play pawn to e4! Could be in zugzwang, could take en passant, could take a Grandmaster draw...) Ahem. Next up: two weeks until the Olympiad, the national team competition, which may be a shade stronger still. Russia start favourites, as usual, but only finished sixth last time.

Swiftly onto puzzles, where the 17th World Puzzle Championship takes place this week in Minsk, Belarus. having been changed from an abortive hosting bid by Lithuania four months ago. You can see the instruction booklet (.pdf) and, man, do the puzzles look imaginitive, in the usual WPC fashion. Hopefully there may be people keeping us up to date in worldpuzzle, but I wouldn't count on it. I look forward particularly to learning about this year's play-off format and seeing if we have another ninth-to-first climber like Pal Madarassy, from Hungary, last year.

The UK team is sadly missing some of the usual suspects, but Steven Barge justifies his place as top UK finisher in the US Puzzle Championship used as our qualifying test. (George Danker came 6th of 19, Simon Anthony 7th and Ken Wilshire has extensive WPC experience.) Wei-Hwa Huang (who approaches Pridmore-like levels of loveliness and blogs as onigame) is the man on form; Thomas Snyder (motris - also apparently lovely, though I have not yet had the pleasure of verifying this loveliness in person) reports on having just lost the US Sudoku Championship to him in an exciting final. The usual suspects - Ulrich Voigt, Niels Roest and many others - will likely loom large.

Earlier in the month we had the World Mind Sports Games, another attempt to stage a multi-sport festival like the Olympics, except for mind sports. As is traditional for such things, the home nation swept many of the gold medals; part of this reflects China's massive talent, part of this reflects the presence of Xiangqi - Chinese Chess - as a discipline (oddly enough, China went 5-for-5) and part of this makes you question just how international an event it was after all. I suspect that the Chess event was rather less world-class than the rest, not least due to the existence of the near-simultaneous European Club Cup, but the other four events look as definitive as hoped. England won a gold medal and two silvers, all in bridge; our national women's team beat all 53 opponents, with our national open and world under-21 teams coming second out of 71 and 18 respectively. Damn fine show!

One particularly interesting WMSG participant was Joanne Missingham of Australia, who made it to the quarter-finals of the Women's Individual Go tournament. Sensei's Library: "Born in Brisbane, Queensland on 26th May 1994, Missingham moved with her family to Taiwan when she was four years old, and started to play Go at the age of six. Two years later she passed the amateur 1-dan milestone. In 2005 she moved with her family to San Diego, California, USA; In April 2008, she moved to Tianjin, China, where she studied with Wu Kai until her promotion to professional shodan in July 2008." She's already representing Australasia in open tournaments and is clearly on the fringes of world class. (Students of go prodigies - specifically, the one who came to MSO 4 in London in 2000 - might care to compare against the progress of Liao Xingwen, born just three months earlier and now pro nidan.)

The American Go Association made far too little fuss of the hidden jewel in their crown while she was Stateside; born to Australian and Taiwanese parents, Joanne is likely to be the public face of Australian go for years or decades to come. As nobody has claimed Google-dibs on the phrase "the next Rui Naiwei", let me do so, as knowingly ridiculously presumptuous as it is to compare a 14-year-old new pro with the first woman 9-dan. It's almost as if the universe recognised the lack of a strong female lead in Hikaru no Go, Umezawa ("Go Go Igo") Yukari apart, and provided a real one. Remember, though, she's fourteen, so I suggest Joanne No Go would be a no-go.

Going back to the World Mind Sports Games, the International Go Federation had a really interesting daily blog. Of particular interest to me is this quote: "In response to a question from a British reporter, he urged people to work for Olympic recognition of mind sports, similar to the recognition gained by the paralympics, as a key step toward holding another World Mind Sports Games after the London Olympics and Paralympics in 2012. He added that if London decided against this, another city was already fully prepared to host the event." At this stage, I'd bet small money against London hosting in 2012. It's all down to sponsorship; while the Chinese-language WMSG homepage suggests success in finding sponsors, I'm not as confident that London might. Should the International Mind Sports Association remain as puritanical about restricting themselves to four mind sports and only grudgingly letting Xiangqi in as a fifth, it may well essentially be their loss.

Endgames: link of the indeterminate time period is New in Go. The Mindzine used to have Go coverage that was second to none; New in Go has one of our two sources putting out general interest stories to give the best English-language coverage of Oriental Go around, as ever it was, but this time without having to worry about the audience focus being on mind sports in general rather than go in particular. The London Games ~~Fridge~~ Fringe takes place this week, with a live-action '70s arcade game making a pong around Spitalfields over the next two days. Operation: Sleeper Cell has just broken its most recent Cancer Research UK fundraising barrier; fans of "microfilm" and/or "bespoke leather" should hie themselves to the forum forthwith.

Long-shot Prediction Game: quick update

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:52:32 GMT

This is good enough proof as far as I'm concerned that the BBC Global 30 did indeed drop below 4750 for two periods at around 8am GMT today, even though the "52-week low" figure quoted may only represent the lowest daily closing figure. (Which is odd, as being an international index, there's almost always at least one market open on which a BBC Global 30 stock may trade.) Possibly that is as low as it might go, but there might be further to fall yet. Accordingly, the long-shot that "BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750" has been proved true. (And, yes, I normally do use Firefox, honest. Trouble is, my Firefox currently has 214 tabs open, so isn't the most suitable thing from which to take a grab...)

The Beijing 2008 web site medal table seems to be as authoritative a source as I can imagine for medals won at the Olympic Games in Beijing. Accordingly, the long-shot that picked "the USA to win at least one more gold medal than any other single country at the Beijing Olympics" has been proved false.

Considering the National Hurricane Centre as definitive authorities on the matter, their monthly reports for July confirms Hurricane Bertha was a category three major hurricane, August confirms Hurricane Gustav was a category four major hurricane and Septmeber confirms Hurricane Ike was a category three major hurricane. Accordingly, the long-shot that "there will be no more than two major hurricanes (category 3+) in the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season" has been proved false.

quintus_marcius is the early leader, being the sole predictor to suggest both "BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750" would be true and "the USA to win at least one more gold medal than any other single country at the Beijing Olympics" would be false, but his lead is not massive as he incorrectly went for the "there will be no more than two major hurricanes (category 3+) in the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season" long-shot. More to come over the following months!

That time of the year again

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 21:23:28 GMT

OK, gang, about once a year I write about the world of chess. (2007, 2006, 2005.) It's chess season!

Headlines:

* World Champion Vishy Anand of India is preparing to defend his title in a match starting next month against the 2006 (and, arguably, 2000-2006) World Champion Vladimir Kramnik of Russia. We're still dealing with the aftermath of the dozen or so years of dispute where there were two world champions, but there's not a great deal of dispute these days.
* Garry Kasparov retired from competitive chess in 2005, though still occasionally plays quick chess and gives simultaneous displays. These days he is a political dissident heavily associated with the "The Other Russia" coalition.
* There is no identifiable single strongest player in the world these days - as ever, being World Champion doesn't mean you're going to win every time - with a rough top half-dozen or so. Anand and Kramnik are up there along with continually-improving Norwegian prodigy Magnus Carlsen and perennially-there-or-thereabouts hot-and-cold blowers Veselin Topalov, Alexander Morozevich and Vassily Ivanchuk, from Bulgaria, Russia and the Ukraine respectively. This rating chart is updated as frequently as possible; Topalov is currently top of the list, but there's no more than a game or two in it among the top six.
* When Vladimir Kramnik was World Champion in 2006, he played a six-game match against the Deep Fritz computer program and lost 4-2. This, as much as anything else, has been taken a sign that the best computer probably is better than the best human at chess these days. (Remember, Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997, then there was a streak of drawn computer-versus-super-GM matches from 1999 to 2003.)
* Among British players, Michael Adams rolls along happily as being easily the best but is no longer thought of as a major threat on the world stage and Nigel Short continues to wither slowly. (They both came joint second in the recent Liverpool Chess International EU championship, but took rather different routes through the Swiss to get to 7½/10.) David Howell is the best of the rest among active players, but a long way behind and only number ten in the world for his age of almost 18; merely brilliant rather than world class.

I continue to be fascinated by the United States Chess League, and continue to regard it as a well-run possible model for other similar ventures. I'm going to write less about it this year than last year, which was less than the year before, because it is on a steady path towards maturity with a reasonably well-defined form.

The league has expanded from 12 teams last year to 14 this year with the addition of teams in Chicago and Arizona, both in the Western division, meaning that the Carolina team bounce between the conferences for a third successive year. (Hopefully they will settle in their natural home of the East for good.) It's noteworthy that this year there was no public call for applications from potential expansion teams, suggesting that there may have been enough sufficiently strong applicants in previous years that they may have been waiting in the wings. Going by league commissioner IM Greg Shahade's comments last year, there may be a pause from the continued expansion in the near future. I have a suspicion that involving yourself in the USCL community early seems to be a good way to raise your profile if you have ambitions to run a team some day.

The strength of the league continues to increase. While not all of the players involved are American, FIDE say the USA has 36 Grandmasters and 51 International Masters among their active players, with another count suggesting there are 17 Grandmasters and 34 International Masters involved in the USCL - representing a slight advance on the simplification last year that around half of the top players in the country are involved.

The second highest-rated active player in the US, Hikaru Nakamura, played for the New York Knights in the USCL last year. His first season was not a happy one; he lost this remarkable game through playing recklessly quickly and I half-recall comments attributed to him that he may have not been taking his first season entirely seriously. He has a blog, which is reasonably breezy stuff, though with plenty of game analyses for the purist; he mentions that he has moved to Vancouver (a city about which I have heard much good) and that he travels about three hours each way to play for the Seattle Sluggers this season. I'm not aware of multi-season commitments for USCL players; moves from season to season are not uncommon, but broadly tend to be incidental due to life movements rather than motivated by financial concerns.

The other big move has been Jaan Ehlvest, who was on the fringes of world class at his best, moving from scoring 3.5/4 for Philadelphia in 2006 to playing for Tennessee this year. I'm not certain of the story here, but with Jaan on board (specifically, on board 1) the popular but habitual basement-dwellers of the league have even managed a narrow victory over last year's champions, the Dallas Destiny. In my interview with the league commissioner last year, he emphasised his desire to keep the league competitive and all the matches interesting; this year is a ringing endorsement of the extent to which the league design has succeeded in its aim.

The league design remains distinctive. In each match, a team is composed of four players from a roster of eight, with the criterion that the four players' average USCL rating must be lower than 2401. (2400 is legal; even 2400¾ is rounded down to 2400 and so legal.) The wrinkles to the system are that the presence of female players in the team raise the cap by ten points each, that high-ranked players are counted as being ranked at 2590 even if they're higher than that and that teams are allowed to pick which rating list, from any point during the past year, they use for their entire roster. Accordingly if you have a fast-improving player, it might be in your interest to use a rating list where they were rated at 2166, the figure that applies for USCL calculations for the entire year, when their most recent rating is 2321 and even that may not reflect their current strength. (As a case in point, those figures were taken from San Francisco's Daniel Naroditsky, who won the under-12 World Chess Championship in 2007.)

The league's fourth year has just completed the sixth of its ten weeks of regular-season play. In the Western division, San Francisco lead the way on 4.5/6, with Dallas and Seattle the best of the rest on 3.5/6; in the East, Queens lead the way with 5/6 after a 5-0 start, in only their second season, with New Jersey also impressing on 4/6. There do seem to be two main ways to USCL success; the first is to concentrate on players who are underrated by their USCL rating figure (principally by fast improvement, but possibly also by having their extremely high strength capped at 2590) and the second - which may be rather harder to achieve - is just to have your players perform out of their skin. There were analyses of the rosters at the start of the season (West and East) which have proved insightful, except to say that Boston and New York have not so far performed to their full potential; in fact, New York's 1/6 start is the talk of the league.

The week 7 fixtures look awesome to me. Normally there are one or two highlight matches on a Monday, with the remainder taking place on a Wednesday; this week, we have four on the line-up for Monday Night Chess and three of them look like absolute scorchers that would grace the championship match with style. Among the six teams in those three marquee matches, all six have exciting GMs on their top boards and four have found ways to sneak a GM in on board two while still making the rating cap. Boston - New York is the classic Eastern division rivalry with the series evenly split at 4½ matches apiece, but Queens - New Jersey may be even more exciting still this time round, with exciting players down the roster for both teams, with Board 4 featuring two of a very small number of the most exciting up-and-comers of them all. NJ Knockouts captain GM Joel Benjamin writes about the season to date in a lovely, lovely piece. The New Jersey Knockouts have got a stellar line-up; if they're taken at all lightly, it's probably due to - of all the things - their underwhelming name and logo.

Another pleasing development in the progress of the league is the extent to which it's attracting more publicity. The new Chicago Blaze team play in the suburb of Skokie; Skokie's mayor made the ceremonial first move for one of their matches. Likewise, there was coverage in the Boston Globe of a Boston - New York match in week one, simply because the Boston - New York angle is good enough for Boston column inches whatever the sport. On top of that, there are an increasing number of bloggers and fan journalists writing about the league, mostly within the chess community. All baby steps along the way towards getting the league covered as if it were any other sports league.

Once again, the league has been sponsored by PokerStars; the figure is unknown, but probably around $1,000 per team for the season. There's also sponsorship for the "Game of the Week" and "Game of the Year" competitions. The ICC are considered sponsors in kind for providing the online infrastructure to host the matches; the site's admins perform a lot of good work. Teams are encouraged to seek their own sponsors in addition, which happens to a greater or lesser extent from team to team. Some sponsors provide public space for the matches to take place in their home town, which is valuable in its way; other sponsors donate cash to the teams. (See, for instance, the Boston Blitz sponsorship page, who are particularly successful.)

I have a theory that there is something of a hierarchy of potential sponsors. The most desirable sponsors are companies who produce general-interest products: an airline, a drink manufacturer, a credit card company, a food company. Second most desirable are companies who are prohibited from advertising in other ways: gambling companies, tobacco companies. (Arguably, if you consider the most prominent general-interest companies in sports sponsorship, their products might often be considered at least as big a social disbenefit to the world.) Third most desirable are companies who produce goods related to the sport they're sponsoring; you knew that snooker was in trouble when one of its principal sponsors was a manufacturer of snooker equipment. (It's not the most encouraging sign, somehow, when local chess associations sponsor their teams; you would imagine that a local chess association's support would be taken for granted anyway.) Outside this categorisation altogether, though highly welcome in their own way, are private patrons who provide funds without necessarily expecting anything in return.

It's interesting to think about the future of the league. Gradual expansion seems to be the way ahead, though it has already been suggested that this expansion certainly will not take place indefinitely and potential new teams are going to have to become more and more convincing in their applications; at fourteen teams, the league doesn't feel small any more. Should PokerStars rein back their sponsorship, it seems possible that some of the top stars might no longer participate, but there are surely enough players who would play for the love of the game and the love of their team that the league would not collapse or contract. The biggest challenge that the league may face in the near future would come if Assistant Commissioner Arun Sharma can no longer devote the same amount of time to the league that he has done in the past; in this fascinating interview he suggests that this may be his last season. He has done a great amount of hard work with dedication and talent; he may be very difficult to replace. (Oh, and the web site could stand a complete overhaul.)

There have been a number of rule changes this year compared to previous ones. The ruleset got considerably longer, but most of the rules were just filling holes and fleshing out some of the nuances of behaviour that might be considered reasonable or unreasonable without every possibility being spelled out explicitly in advance. There's a rule about "the only window you're allowed to have open is the ICC one" which caused a second glance, but there's nothing to stop you from running firewalls and virus checkers in the background. These are surely good things to run in a way that analysis engines would be bad.

One version of this season's ruleset did not include the rule whereby teams including female players in their lineups were permitted ten extra points of flexibility to their rating cap. I was not the only person to notice this rule was missing; a comment at the end of the interview poses the question. It's rather a big and fundamental rule to forget to include in the ruleset, but the managers were notified of this, the rule continued as ever and no drama ensued. This may be the biggest technical misstep in the running of the league so far and yet it was resolved without controversy; surely this handy piece of damage limitation has to be a sign that the league is well-run.

More interestingly is a change to the level at which the highest-rated players' ratings are capped. In season one, players' ratings were capped at 2600. In season two, this cap was lowered to 2590, and it was suggested that this level might drop by ten points a season for the coming four seasons, with the season three cap being 2580 as planned. However, for season four, the rating cap has gone back up to 2590. How unexpected!

This has been queried, with the rather surprising justification for the rule change that "We changed the rule back to 2590 because we just felt that it was becoming too big an advantage to have high rated players." A curious motivation. I note that many teams have used their sponsorship money to attract high-rated players; for instance, see Alex Shabalov in the Boston Globe saying that he explicitly moved teams because his new team would offer better conditions. It's tempting to wonder about some of the other top-rated names, as well.

Yet it has also been noted that the champion teams seldom - never? - actually feature top-rated Grandmasters in their championship-winning line-ups, preferring a more balanced approach. Given that it's just as valuable to win a game on Board Four as it is on Board One, perhaps the most valuable players of all are the underrated ones who might still score 80% over the course of the season but, due to their inexactly low rating, permit stronger team-mates further up the list. Perhaps the likes of Daniel Naroditsky deserve to be the most valuable free agents of all.

There's also the question about how important it is to the league to have the country's best players involved; the Commissioner has acknowledged "I’m sure players have refused to play due to lack of sponsorship. I’m sure that if we get more sponsorship, even more top players will want to compete." It may be more compelling to the general fan to see matches between 2600+-rated players on the top boards; it takes a degree of appreciation to understand why GMs and IMs may be left on the bench by their teams in favour of a legal line-up whose games might not have the same luster. (I wonder whether there might be merit in, in a future season, a policy whereby the rating cap is relaxed by 10 points in the post-season and 20 points in the final - or would that be too close to suggesting that football finals be played with 12 players on the field per side instead of 11?)

Again, we return to the Commissioner's words from his last interview. "If there were no rating cap, the league would be completely uncompetitive, which would make it uninteresting for the teams, fans and players, as there would be virtually no drama in certain matches." At this point, we turn to the UK's premier (face-to-face!) team chess league, the 4 Nations Chess League - almost always abbreviated to 4NCL - which avowedly does not have a rating cap and which has its first matches this weekend. (Or, if this entry gets much longer, this weekend past.) It's interesting to compare and contrast the two, especially when considering how well the rating cap does or doesn't work.

The 4NCL has its own share of interesting changes from the previous season. The most notable is that previously there were three divisions of 12 teams at the top of the league, which has been reformed to two divisions of 16 teams. (Below there is a super-division organised as a Swiss competition with lower barriers to entry.) These 16 teams in each division are split into two parallel sections of eight, separated so to even out predicted strength, with the sections performing all-play-alls in the first seven weeks of the season. Each section is then split into an upper four and a lower four, with the two upper fours and two lower fours combining to make new leagues of eight, though this time the leagues are identifiably serial rather than parallel. You carry forward your results from the three teams you've played already, plus your results in the last four matches against your four new opponents, to provide a final placing. I believe that the Top 16 league in France works in a similar way and it seems to work well enough; providing competitive games and avoiding uncompetitive ones is always a bonus by itself.

However, there's something that worries me about the 4NCL. Last season, Division 1 was won by Guildford-A&DC 1. As last year, A&DC refers to the A&DC HR consultancy founded by IM Nigel Povah, who is a loyal patron of his team, plays for the club at a local level and has been instrumental in bringing many strong players into the league to provide line-ups like this one, which is (nearly?) entirely composed of GMs. Without rating caps but with sufficient sponsorship, you get matches like the 2005-06 title decider, as strong and exciting an eight-board match as you are likely to see - likely stronger and more exciting than most six-board matches in the Chess Olympiad or the European Clubs Cup.

The problem - if you choose to see it as a problem, and I'm only about 80% sure it is one - comes when you realise that first and second place have been taken by Guildford-A&DC1 and Guildford-A&DC2 respectively for each of the last two seasons. That's just not so interesting.

The problem is compounded by the radically different business model in the 4NCL to the USCL, whereby teams pay moderately substantial sums to enter the competition (£300 in the first division) which is paid out as pretty considerable prize money. This year you win £3,600 for winning the first division, £1,800 for coming second in the first division and nothing for coming third. What this means is that the Guildford-A&DC squad appears to have scooped the entire first division prize fund for each of the last two seasons. I'm not sure how much Guildford-A&DC have had to pay in conditions to their players, and whether the club has returned a profit; I'm also not sure how much the third-placed teams of the last two seasons have similarly wagered and lost in an attempt to bring home the spoils. It certainly can't be good for morale, or for potential team patrons who might be prepared to fund professionals' involvement.

There's also the wrinkle that no club can have more than two teams in any one division. Guildford-A&DC have five teams overall; two in the first division, one in the second division and two in the third division. Theoretically, between them, they might scoop 91% of the prize money on offer this season - and the "no more than two teams per division" rule might see the first two teams take the top division prizes next year, the third and fourth team take the second division prizes next year and the fifth and putative sixth team clean out the third division pool. That wouldn't be consistent with a league run for the benefit of all its participants.

There is a logical consequence of this. Hilsmark Kingfisher - third place in 2006/07, after having perfectly climbed through the divisions in 2002/03 to 2004/05 - and Wood Green - champions in 2004/05 and 2005/06 - have decided that they are no longer contributing to the Guildford A&DC beneficiary fund and taken the logical decision to aid their chances. They have merged teams to form first and second teams of a club named, in a highly unwieldy fashion, Wood Green Hilsmark Kingfisher. Presumably the two teams would have enough strong players between them to challenge against the might of Guildford. Sure, this creates another extremely strong team for the league, but it also creates another relatively weak one.

The other problem I have with this move is that it creates a team that's very hard to get behind, to root for. Wood Green are a long-established chess club in North London. They have long submitted teams in other competitions and have a strong record in the (as was) British Chess Federation's national club championship. (They've won the London Chess League six years running.) If you live in London - particularly North London - then there's a clear reason to support them. Likewise, Hilsmark Kingfisher are a team with a history. I want to say that they may be a new version of the Midland Monarchs who won in 1997/98 and disappeared without trace... oh no, the Midland Monarchs are the team who renamed themselves the Betsson.com team in a sponsorship deal.

This goes back to my grumble about the hierarchy of sponsors; the 4NCL has a long history of teams renaming themselves due to sponsorship deals and prized names being lost. The champions from the first season, the Invicta Knights, merged with Home House to become Invicta Knights Home House in, ooh, 1999 or so. Then they became sponsored by GM David Norwood, who renamed them after the IT company of which he owned 20%. Then this company, Index IT, was acquired by stockbrokers Beeson Gregory and the team changed its name again. Beeson Gregory dropped out of the league a couple of seasons back and I can't remember why. I also completely lose track as to where The ADs (sorry, now The Gambit ADs) come from. The renaming of teams is a horrible mess and it's not tracked properly, to say nothing of team mergers.

You see the problem? The USCL gets it very, very right in having teams associated with cities and providing proper rooting interests - more to the point, rooting interests where each team can have hundreds of thousands or millions of natural fans. By contrast, through the lack of respect paid to team history and the lack of presenting reasons to support a team for which you do not yourself play, the 4NCL gets it very wrong. Now the USCL might struggle in the future should a team ever drop out of the league; is the situation like the MLB where the franchise is associated with a team nickname rather than a city and so a club's history might be shunted from city to city? Grief, I hope not; I hope we never have to find out.

Now as I've posted in the past, US and European sports leagues often have different goals, with US leagues being planned organisations that have goals of trying to provide an interesting league for the fans and make a profit for their teams, whereas European leagues go "OK, here are some teams who want to compete in a league and prove they're the best. Great! We'll work on the planning and the profit later". Neither approach is absolutely right or wrong, but the consequences of the teams' will to win are natural and frequently frustrating; European leagues are forced to be reactive to their teams' developments, whereas US leagues may be proactive in dealing with them.

It often makes me smile when I see Greg Shahade talk about the extent to which he has deliberately designed the league, playing around with schedules and playoff formulas with specific aims in mind, how the #1 seeds are intended to have a particular chance in the post-season and so forth. It often seems completely arbitrary as to what is, or should be desirable; but there evidently is hard thought that goes into all the decisions.

There are many considerations that apply to one league but not the other, because they have different physical constraints and set out to achieve different goals. The 4NCL is a rare opportunity for people to get to play full-length, face-to-face, FIDE rated, games at a high standard; people plan long weekend trips around it, so the concept of 4NCL postseasons or any variability from a league format cannot be possible. (Arguably the 16-team divisions offer something a little more like a postseason and exciting final rounds.) The fact that the games are rated may, alone, be enough to ensure all the players take every game in every match seriously, which is something Greg has said he has had to go out of his way to ensure in his design. The 4NCL's team problems illustrate what can go wrong when you run a league without extensive top-down planning, and specifically show why you might want to consider a rating cap. I don't think that the 4NCL's problems necessarily will happen without one, but evidently they can happen and in this case have happened.

If I were redesigning the 4NCL then I would strongly reconsider the financial aspect of the business model and the focus upon prize money, which evidently isn't working wonderfully. Having prize money is nice, but (especially when split eight ways) isn't substantial enough to be tremendously attractive and necessitates an entry fee which is not inconsiderable. It might well prove a popular move to cut both the prize money and the entry fees considerably; if not, it might well be worthwhile reconsidering the prize structure so that many teams stand to be competing for the money at the end of the season - small graduated payments to possibly as many as 10 teams in the top division (so that even teams outside the top eight still have something to play for other than avoiding relegation) and more than two teams in the lower divisions.

I still think there is scope for an internet chess league in the UK - after all, the USCL has shown how well it can work - and the 4NCL may be the best way to put the infrastructure in place. Certainly I would insist on no more than one team per club; not sure about the rating cap, but I'd look at a "teams must be representative of their club" rule in the style of the old BCF National Club Championship, coupled with incentives to get strong players to disperse among many teams, or at least disincentives to stop squads forming super-teams with no natural constituencies. A part of me is rather dubious about the concept of professional chess players in the Western world in this day and age in the first place, but I fear that it might not be possible to run a strictly amateur league.

Another event that started very recently is the first World Mind Sports Games, taking place in Beijing and at least trying to capture some of the tail-end of the Olympics fever, even if possibly not actually reusing the infrastructure. The web site isn't brilliant, but the more I read it and think about it, the more I consider they're doing a pretty good job. The event consists of tournaments in chess, bridge, go, draughts (i.e. members of the draughts family - the 10x10 game popular outside the English-speaking world, as well as the 8x8 game we know as checkers) and Chinese Chess. It is not clear whether the last of these is a one-team concession to the host nation as it is clearly the least global of the five.

The part that sticks in my craw is the introduction which claims that there has not previously been a multi-sports festival for mind sports. This annoys me because there has; it is the Mind Sports Olympiad, it's been running for twelve years and I've long been involved with it. I know that at least the World Bridge Federation know, or at least knew, of our existence; the fact that the other mind sports federations either never knew about the MSO or chose to ignore it indicates how little success we had at becoming a major player on the world stage. There was some success outside the specialist field with the first event, and to a lesser extent with the third and fourth, but it's been downhill all the way since then.

I will give the organisation points for covering their event both in Chinese and in English, which is the minimum an event that claims to be global but takes place in China should shoot for, but we never got even close to a sniff of coverage of UK-based Mind Sports Olympiad events in a language outside English. (MSO branded events in other countries - Korea, Italy, the Czech Republic - used foreign languages, but I don't think they were bilingual either.) The web site is very light on reportage in English, which is probably an unreasonable request for non-native-language coverage, but at least it has the scores updated in full on a daily basis, and they claim to have live webcasts in three mind sports. There were years when I put a daily bulletin together both in print and on the web, and was responsible for getting results online, and sundry odd jobs as well, with very little by way of staff; it can be done by one person who knows what to do and is willing to put in ten 10-14 hour days in a row, but it's a lot to ask. But, hey, I strangely enjoyed it at the time.

It's not clear whether the first World Mind Sports Games will be the only World Mind Sports Games. It's quite possible that China might decide that it rather likes hosting World Mind Sports Games and host them again in the future. (Not every year, though, please. We proved that's a bad idea.) I note that there are half a dozen prestigious sponsors listed on the Chinese version of the web site and clearly there's the budget for a pretty impressive set of logistics. There would be sense in trying to establish the World Mind Sports Games as a quadrennial event that follows the Olympic Games around, like the Paralympics does, and doubtless several other events do as well. We all know that all multi-sports festivals want to be the Olympics, at the end of the day, so tagging along may be the best on offer.

With the Olympic Games coming to London in 2012, I have more than an academic interest in this. If the so-called International Mind Sports Association, or the mind sports' governing bodies, can get the brand moving to the point where sponsorship isn't as almost-impossible to find for the World Mind Sports Games as it was for the Mind Sports Olympiad, I can point to a number of people who have unique experience making them well-qualified to host a World Mind Sports Games in London, not least because we've got lots of years' experience in finding out how not to do so. I can also point to a number of people who will want to be involved but under no circumstances whatsoever should be allowed within firing range of such an event. More some other day, doubtless.

Lastly, as a result of my interview with the USCL commissioner last year, I was one of four people to win a copy of Engaging Pieces by Howard Goldowsky kindly donated by the author in return for one of the most interesting USCL interviews of 2007. I'm not a habitual book reviewer, but a few words about the book would not go amiss.

The book is a compilation of Goldowsky's chess writing. The highlight is the extensive first section, containing a dozen interviews with prominent chess personalities, but the second section has half a dozen short chess-themed stories and the third contains four essays. Some of the pieces have dated slightly; each one is ascribed a foreword and a postscript with the historical context behind each piece, which aids considerably.

Goldowsky shines in his interviews, particularly when his interviewees prove expansive and interesting. Interviews by e-mail can sometimes be a little stilted, as the medium naturally lends itself to asking many questions in parallel, rather than the back-and-forth of a dialogue. The interviews which took place in person have a much more conversational feel to them and illustrate the difference between an interview as such and a mere question-and-answer session.

Five of the interviews are with authors; probably the most famous is Paul "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" Hoffman, who has considerable chess journalism to his name as well as the smash hit Erdos biography. Another standout subject is Mig Greengard, whose gossipy Daily Dirt blog is probably the must-read in chess. (Mig's a fine writer and has a sense of humour that you just don't get elsewhere in chess, but it's annoying when his cattiness falls on one of your favourites.) I also particularly enjoyed reading what Greg Shahade had to say about the USCL after week one of season one, Mark Glickman on chess ratings and the Glicko system and an executive from the planned EdgeTV channel that never made it to fruition. They all have something to say and Howard has a real talent at extracting it from them.

The fiction is less to my taste; I can't help feeling that the scenarios he has written don't paint chess in its most favourable light. The chess hustler is a theme that crops up more than once, curiously, considering how infrequent a phenomenon it is in real life. I enjoyed taking a detour to Washington Square Park where the hustlers congregate last time I was in New York, but didn't feel like paying $5 for a lesson with some bile as a free gift. Perhaps the chess hustler is the closest you can get in chess to the equivalent of poker's ramblin' gamblin' tales. The essays display Goldowsky's customary high standard of writing, but sometimes the postscripts give you the feeling that their subjects may have been a little ephemeral. There's nothing wrong with that, but there does seem to be a feeling of "historical interest" to some of the pieces; probably this is par for the course for any anthology.

It is said that the reason why publishers don't publish more picture books of horses is because the target audience is so small. The book isn't going to be sold to people who like picture books, and it isn't going to be sold to people who like horses; in order to buy it, you've got to like both picture books and horses. In order to enjoy this book, not only do you have to enjoy writing about chess - though there are only one or two games listed, so happily for me no great skill is required - but you also have to enjoy interviews and/or fiction and/or essays. (Happily, the and/or parts of the second criterion make it an easy one to meet.) If you do fit both halves of the target market, there are parts of this book that are the best of their breed, and almost all of the rest is clearly very well-written even if it doesn't do much for me. (One of the stories, a satire, is a swing and a miss, but it's short.) In short, the unhelpful old cliché firmly applies: it's exactly the sort of book you'll like, if you like that sort of thing. I certainly did - but, then again, it is.

Long-shot Prediction Game: initial commentary

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:04:09 GMT

Doesn't the world feel just the tiniest bit less... screwed than it did a month or two ago?

This is in response to the long-shot prediction game. Iain (the blogger formerly known as daweaver) has written a fascinating assessment of the twelve propositions and his reasons for accepting or rejecting them. As has happened before, he has saved me writing much of this article. (It's tremendously convenient when this happens!)

When I decided what the twelve propositions for the long-shot prediction game should be, my original intention was to provide a variety of propositions that I considered to be something like 20%-25% likely. Later on, I realised that it didn't really matter how probable I considered them to be and that the game would not necessarily work more or less well if there were some propositions which were more likely than others - and if it led to making some propositions simpler to adjudicate, so much the better.

Let's consider the twelve propositions individually.

USA to win most gold medals in Beijing: This one clearly wasn't a 20%-25% likely proposition, being much closer to even money. Indeed, shortly before the Olympics, you could get 5/6 against China and also 5/6 against the USA topping the medal table. (Not sure whether that was based on the "most golds" or the "most medals" metric, and dead-heat rules may apply when this proposition clearly calls for an outright win.) Analysts are split on the issue, with Luciano Barra's methodology predicting a win for the USA and Sports Illustrated's potentially pessimistic prognostications favouring China. Under current form one would have to back China, but I'm not completely sure that the current Chinese lead in the medal table isn't at least as much a result of the order in which the events are competed as it is a result of Chinese performances.

Incidentally, it's interesting to me to see the predictions for the team from Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and, sotto voce, associated Crown Dependencies). Considering the targets set by UK Sport, I suspect that British performances at this Olympics will be considered to have been about 60% awesome and 40% patchy; clearly the cycling team has massively, almost praeternaturally, overperformed compared to expectations, the rowing and sailing teams have done very well and Rebecca Adlington has carried the swimming team single-handedly.

It is difficult to conclude on the performances in other sports - and, as I type, we've just won a silver in the high jump, of all the things, which must be considered a glorious surprise - but archery, judo and shooting must be considered disappointing at least. (Incidentally, what are the comparative angles subtended at competition distances by the inner gold in archery, the 10-point circle in target shooting and the treble 20 in darts?) Just as well that the cyclists outperformed their target by six medals to make up for those three sports underperforming by six.

HP 6 to gross at least $285 million at the US box office: Poo, I was looking forward with great interest to seeing how this one would turn out, but the postponement of the release of the movie has put paid to that. There are compelling arguments both in favour and against this proposition.

Against:
* It's been a bad year at the US box office due to the credit crunch and the relative decrease of importance of cinema, with receipts below those of last year in real terms - and, had it not been for The Dark Knight, down in gross terms as well.
* Surely Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix gained from the fact that the ~~final~~ seventh novel-length book in the series was released a week afterwards, and Pottermania presumably must decline now that the seventh novel has been released.
* There is a well-known major spoiler for the plot of Half-Blood Prince, which can't help the film's prospects.
* As bateleur points out, I was only considering data from the first eleven weeks or so of the film's receipts, not that that should make more than a very few percent difference.

For:
* The US moviegoing public have been starved of a box office sensation for months, with The Dark Knight showing what can be achieved when the right film does come along.
* New screens are still being opened and ticket prices are going up.
* Half-Blood Prince has every prospect of being a much better movie than Order of the Phoenix, just by virtue of containing a story reasonably widely considered more entertaining and far more cinematic than its predecessor.
* If James Bond movies keep setting franchise records, why not Harry Potter ones?

After considering whether or not to void the category, I fear that I will have to be literal rather than liberal and declare that - unless the release date is changed again, and stranger things have happened yet, albeit infrequently - the movie is likely to have generated zero US dollars at the box office before the deadline. (The sporting thing to do would be to allow Twilight box office returns to count instead, but this would be illogical.) If I were to void the category and the release date were to revert to before the deadline, we'd all feel like right bananas.

Random weakly-related question. It is widely believed that the Deathly Hallows movie will be released in two parts. I wonder if the second movie will conclude with the epilogue from the book? If so, will I be the only one walking out of the theatre rather than watching the epilogue, then walking back in for the credits?

BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750:
Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher:
USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran:
John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats:

Iain correctly points out that there is a degree of correlation between the results of these propositions - indeed, arguably, the most likely numbers of long-shots to occur are, possibly, two followed by five and only then three or four.

Isn't it wonderful that the price of oil is only - "only" - in the low $110s per barrel! Certainly the $200 figure was one of the hardest to set, and from memory it was set when prices were in the high $130s and rising. The principle behind it was that oil prices had risen by about 50% in the last six months, so I was asking you to speculate whether it might rise by another 50% in the next six months. Given that the oil price has rewound so far, a $200 barrel looks somewhat further off. Nevertheless, it could be argued that speculators managed to double the price of a barrel of oil, so perhaps they might manage to make it double again. (Or halve it from its recent peak, which would suit me down to the ground as a consumer.)

Iain points out that the recent fall in oil prices has correlated almost exactly with the strengthening of the US dollar, as investors favoured oil and gold in response to the weak US dollar and retreated from commodities as the US dollar started to strengthen once again. There are some other fundamentals (i.e. solid reasons for prices being what they are) at work, too: demand in the US actually falling as a result of price increases, supply problems caused by Atlantic hurricanes and African instability being less bad than feared and political pressure to keep supplies flowing.

The selection of the 4750 target level for the BBC Global 30 was based on similar logic - a fall of some number of points over a period of time could conceivably be repeated over the next six months. (An arithmetic application of global recession, in this instance, rather than a geometric one.) We hear discussion of possible impending bank failure in the US which might set the rest of the stock markets tumbling in sympathy.

The possibility of an air strike on Iran came directly from this one on InTrade. I saw it, I liked the sort of probability estimates it's coming up with and the fact that I'm settling up until the end of January 2009 probably puts the event fairly squarely in my desired probability range. (Part of the whole thesis of this enterprise is to see whether there's any sense trusting in the opinions of prediction markets, after all.)

The market about McCain was inspired by the fascinating (and distinctly plausible) FiveThirtyEight.com. They have a model which simulates the US presidential election and they run it 10,000 times daily. I picked the target level of 336 because the Electoral Vote Distribution seemed to suggest the chance of the election turning out with 202 or fewer Obama Electoral Votes looked like about a fifth. I'd like to see the simulated probability distribution function integrated into a cumulative probability distribution, to see if my guess of 202 is about right.

My gut suspicion is that if there is an increased prospect of conflict in Iran then US voters are likely to prefer a continuation of the current administration, even if they don't have a "war president" as such. I also suspect that such conflict would have economic knock-on consequences likely to trigger the stock market decline and oil price increase propositions.

Microsoft to takeover Yahoo: doesn't look so likely any more, but these things have a habit of rumbling on and later bids might come at any point.

Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister, Labour leader or both: this is a classic betting market. Paddy Power now offer only evens against Brown going by the end of 2008, so would presumably quote slight odds in favour of Brown going in the timescale we're considering. On the other hand, they're quoting a slightly silly 120% book, so they probably think it's really about a 40%-45% likely proposition. Remember, you never see a bankrupt bookie. (Except John McCrirrick, and possibly Angus Loughran might well have been doing his share of laying on the exchanges as well as backing...)

Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher: this is the one where I don't agree with Iain's assessment; I chose 33% as a level which was about 20%-25% likely, not almost impossible. Remember, I specified three different counters, and the W3 counter global stats for July suggest a combined share for Firefoxes 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 and 3.0 of 29.68%. That represents a gain of 0.66% over the previous month, but this comes after a period of relative stability for the browser - only an increase of 1.29% over the six months, suggesting a figure possibly around 31% by the end of January 2009. There's always the possibility of retreat, too; Firefox 3.0 isn't going to be released every month, after all.

Named British Prince or Princess to marry publicly: yeah, I was struggling with this one. Looks pretty unlikely to me. Sorry, huskyteer. On the other hand, if you turn out to be correct here, you have the job of Royal Correspondent for life.

No more than 2 major hurricanes in 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season: Hurricane Bertha briefly crept in to Category 3 to count as one of the two. Of course, intensity of a storm doesn't necessarily correlate terribly closely with the damage it does. Needless to say, we all hope for a minimum of damage and loss, even if some of us are hoping for a couple more Category Threes. Always interesting to see if the predictors break down along national lines - whether US inhabitants know something the rest of us don't, or vice versa - but I don't immediately spot a pattern.

New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII: as long as Cheatin' Bill Belichick is in charge, and there isn't a mass personnel exodus, the Pats are going to be there or thereabouts. Backing one team against 31 is always taking a punt, but this prediction market is offering you odds of 79/21 for your money. (That's about 3.7/1.) Given that the markets are quoting it as a 3/1 to 3.5/1 shot, I reckon this is the juiciest opportunity of the twelve.

If I had been playing along, I think I would have gone for the two longest shots - I choose to earn 79 points if "New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII" happens, instead of earning 21 points if it doesn't and I choose to earn 82 points if "John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats" happens, instead of earning 18 points if it doesn't - and left the other ten alone. Some of the others are very closely priced decisions, though, which is what I was hoping for.

While three stages to the voting procedure are quite enough, if we wanted to add a fourth, we could open a market on which of the 21 players is most likely to win the prediction game. :-) My money would be on canadianpuzzler, who has avoided what has turned out to be the HP6 trap and who (like me) favours the Patriot and McCain long-shots. On the other hand, he has chosen to follow six of the long-shots, which is rather more than most, and I reckon most of them aren't too generously priced. (Conversely, the players who have only selected one or two long-shots went for USA gold medals and/or HP 6, neither of which is looking too sharp.) I don't have a strong feeling about this one at all.

Heck, we could open a virtual stock exchange in which stock exchange players trade funny-money contracts concerning the performance of prediction game players! Then we'd start to speculate over who's going to win the virtual stock exchange game... :-)

I do think there's scope to play lots of interesting games on LiveJournal, even if I can't really work out cunning ways to take advantage of the fundamental social nature of the service. (I'm not yet doing anything more sophisticated than the old play-by-mail publish-the-results-to-all-in-a-'zine days, except with a more convenient user interface.) This may be an attempt to harness the wisdom of crowds, something very weakly related to the Delphi method. There are more games to be played in the future.

For instance, I really enjoyed the points race in the Olympic cycling and have a suspicion that it ought to be possible to do a cracking cycling game on LJ. (I'm thinking one lap per day for 160 days...) It ought to be able to come up with some sort of ruleset which will permit people to submit orders with fewer than 30 seconds' worth of thought, default neatly when people forget to submit orders (which they will, probably more than half of the time) and still offer interesting decisions that simulate the quandaries of when to time your charges in order to win the sprints or attempt to gain a lap on the pack.

Much more simply, anyone for a game of Breaking Away? :-)

The weight is over

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:59:46 GMT

The heat is on, the time is right and Going For Gold turns 21 this year. (I might have guessed it turned 20 this year, by virtue of its original prize being a trip to watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, but it makes sense that it started in 1987 so that it might finish in 1988.) All of this acts as preamble to the fact that the 2008 Olympic Games are now underway in Beijing. Happily I have a break between shifts starting on 8/8/08, which will permit maximum viewing, but really I don't think many of the team will mind doing night shifts at work at the moment because there'll be plenty of top-class sport to watch between trades.

True to form, I woke up at two in the morning (so 42 hours ago as I type) with a heavy cat stretched right out like a star between my legs and couldn't get back to sleep. Accordingly, with the main sporting programme barely three hours old - he said, sidestepping football's early start - I set up the air mattress in front of the TV for a mixture of sport viewing and sleep as my body dictated. The BBC are serving up typically half a dozen sports at any one time if you're watching by satellite; their number 1 choice was dressage, or at least the dressage section of the (don't call it "three-day") eventing competition. My tolerance for equestrian ballet can be measured in seconds rather than minutes so I started sport-surfing quickly.

I caught the end of a first-round (thirty-second-final, if you will) match in the ladies' singles badminton and was reminded of a reverie regarding the fairness or otherwise of sports whose matches are organised into games and thus a competitor might lose a match by, say, 21-0 19-21 19-21 and thus lose by one game to two despite having won 59 points to the opponent's 42. Sports which collect games into sets like tennis and darts are even worse still in this regard, though I do notice that at least one darts tournament that has moved away from the sets paradigm and merely has its matches being "best of large odd number", which makes more sense to me. Charles Dodgson ranted about lawn tennis in a similar fashion, if I recall correctly.

Badminton held my attention for only a few minutes, as did ladies' beach volleyball. (It's impressive how much of a court can be covered by just two players.) Between beach volleyball matches, I flicked over to some weightlifting. Ooh, I had forgotten just how much I like weightlifting. It's a great sport, sorely underappreciated outside Olympics fortnights, and I'd love to get the chance to watch it more frequently. It hits the fortius of citius, altius, fortius pretty squarely and its Olympic pedigree is second to few; while it's not been an ever-present, it appeared at the first International Olympic Committee games and has only missed a couple of appearances since then.

I admire weightlifting for its purity and for the certainty of telling who has won. Sure, judges are required to tell whether the form of a lift is valid or not, but which Olympic sport doesn't have some sort of human refereeing? (Some might consider the 100m track sprint to be the Olympics' blue riband event, but a degree of judgment is required over the start; remember the Linford Christie disqualification in the 1996 final.)

In each of the two disciplines, the competitor gets three attempts to raise a bar at the weight of their choice, with the stipulation that the weight on the bar can never fall. (Effectively, you've got to call or raise.) Compare this with the high jump, where you get three attempts, the count reset after each successful clearance. (Sure, there aren't two disciplines in the high jump, and lifting a weight is probably more exhausting than making a high jump, but those high jumpers have it easy.) There's also a brilliant tie-breaker; should two competitors lift the same weight, the tie is broken in favour of the lighter competitor. (The competitors are all weighed to the nearest ten grams, too.)

I saw the women's "up to 48 kg" category in the weightlifting. It was great fun. A Japanese competitor wrapped herself in, I think, a towel with a great big embroidered Stitch, from Lilo and Stitch. A coach of a competitor from Chinese Taipei had an awesome comb-over. Even Sir Bobby Charlton would have been impressed; he did a lot with just three strands. There was even controversy when the judges ruled 2-1 in favour of a lift from a French competitor being of good form, the jury overruled the judges and declared it no lift. I didn't know weightlifting had a jury that could overrule judges; it may be an Olympic competition stipulation only.

All of this excludes the fascinating decisions about what weights to attempt to lift; it's very easy to wait too late before you come in, record three failures and end up with nothing whatsoever to show for your efforts. (Remember, even Sergey Bubka, quite literally the ne plus ultra of pole vaulters, recorded no height in the 1992 games at Barcelona.) With only three attempts possible, it's not nearly as safe as it ought to be to deliberately come in at a light weight for your first lift and get a safe score on the board.

To me, it seems the obvious thing to do, assuming you're in the shape of your life, to attempt three weights as follows: Personal Best minus 10% to ensure you avoid a zero, then a lift to equal your Personal Best, then a lift to increase your Personal Best. Surprisingly many lifters came in too high and failed on their first attempt; I suppose the argument for their actions would be that the safe weight that they might get on the board is so far away from putting them in medal contention that it's not worth having, but surely "a success at a lousy weight and then two fails at a good weight" has got to be worth so much more than "three fails at a good weight", especially if sufficiently many people do try for too much and end up recording no score.

I also have the faintest of suspicions that this may not be the very strongest of Olympic competitions, relative to other Olympic competitions. People can participate perfectly well at levels of performance 20% under the World Record, and there can't be many other competitions where that's the case. (For instance, you don't see many men's 100m runners clock 12 seconds.) Athletics and swimming have a qualification system based around every competitor having to have achieved a certain standard; weightlifting starts with a certain number of competitors in the competition, then tries to allot the available number of spaces to apparently suitable contestants. I have a suspicion the standards-based model works better, but may be more expensive to implement, which may be why it's only used for the apparent prestige sports.

After the weightlifting was a tiny bit of judo, which - as ever - was impressive but impenetrable. Judo is one of those sports whose tournament format includes a repechage that is almost never properly explained; with a bit of investigation, the format is pretty simple. It's single elimination until the last 16 (and there were 33 competitors in the lightest weight men's competition, requiring one match in the thirty-second-final round and 31 byes) and double elimination thereafter, with the wrinkle that the final two in the no-loss bracket compete for gold and silver and the final four in the one-loss bracket compete for two bronzes. Why there isn't one bronze awarded in the one-loss bracket is unclear, but I might point at the prcedent set by the two bronzes awarded in boxing. (By comparison, the repechage in Taekwondo in 2004 is totally screwed up - if you're not beaten directly by either finalist, you don't get a chance to have a second elimination. Why is that a good way of organising things?)

The only sad thing about weightlifting is that they have got rid of the wonderfully evocative names for weight classes that they used to have up until the adjustments in 1996. Weight class names, especially deprecated ones, are sporting trivia taken to their most trivial, but I love to see the various sports' struggles to come up with something appropriate-sounding for categories of not-quite-unrestricted-weight contests. Pro boxing has the delightfully daffy "cruiserweight", a name for which I have never seen an adequate explanation, and amateur boxing used to cop out by declaring "heavyweight" to be a restricted division itself with "super-heavyweight" being unrestricted. Judo fares no better, with its contribution being "half-heavyweight". Weightlifting might be (or have been) the most bizarre of them all, with classes called "light-heavyweight" (fine), "middle-heavyweight" (yerrrsss...) and "first-heavyweight" (!!) as well as "heavyweight" and "super-heavyweight". It makes "bantamweight" and "welterweight" sound comparatively sensible.

So hurrah for weightlifting and hurrah for being able to watch it. The BBC are broadcasting, usually, five additional streams of Olympic broadcasting by satellite and three additional streams terrestrially. Effectively, as well as the well-known BBC One, BBC Two and the digital-only BBC Three and BBC Four, there exist BBC Five to BBC Nine in a way that would make Austin Powers' head spin. These additional BBCs can be addressed by pressing the red button on satellite while watching Olympic broadcasting; terrestrially, three of these streams are broadcast with default channel numbers 301, 302 and, er, 81, the third replacing BBC Parliament for the duration of the games. Oh, and Eurosport have a channel or two of action as well, should you like ads and different commentators with your sport.

I'd be delighted to know what other broadcasting systems worldwide do to bring a selection of sports to their viewers. I haven't actually seen all that much of the BBC presentation yet, not having been in the right place at the right time to see a broadcast begin, and this is a surprisingly important part of the Olympic experience. (Isn't it?) I have happy memories of the 1992 games, being in Tenby on our last family holiday, at least as much as anything else due to the magnificence of Freddie Mercury's Barcelona, with an assist from Montserrat Caballé. It was delightful to see this recognised by the Guardian in their recent sports presentation Joy Of Six, which gives Barcelona its pride of place.

However, however, that page manages to bring forth something somehow more delightful still. With a ba-ba-baaa sequence that knocks that of even the mighty Jim'll Fix It into a particularly cocked hat, let's go to Brazil for the awesome 1970s opening sequence and closing sequence of the magnificently-titled, magnificently-sung Esporte Espetacularrrrrrrrrr. It's pure sporting... Scorchio!

Long-shot Prediction Game: final probabilities

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:49:57 GMT

OK, here's the third and final part of the long-shot prediction game. It's a few days later than planned, but life and LiveJournal have a nasty habit of getting in the way.

There were 11 entries shading the probabilities of the twelve long-shots up or down, ten through the poll and one by e-mail. Assuming that everyone who offered an opinion on one poll but not the other deliberately failed to reply to one of them, Two people submitted probability statements without having submitted "most likely" and "least likely" nominations, which is perfectly welcome. Thank you to all eleven of you, and also to those who looked at the twelve statements and thought "Hmmm... they all look about right, so I don't need to vote at all".

USA to win most gold medals in Beijing.
6 say "lower than 52%", 1 says "higher than 52%", nobody reverses their previous estimate.

Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher.
4 say "lower than 50%", 1 says "higher than 50%", three of the "lower than 50%" people are going back on their previous nomination as "most likely".

BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750.
2 say "lower than 47%", nobody says "higher than 47%", one of the "lower than 47%" people is going back on his previous nomination as "most likely".

HP 6 to gross at least $285 million at the US box office.
1 says "lower than 46%", nobody says "higher than 46%", nobody reverses their previous estimate.

Microsoft to takeover Yahoo.
2 say "lower than 36%", 1 says "higher than 36%", nobody reverses their previous estimate.

USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran.
2 say "lower than 33%", 1 says "higher than 33%", nobody reverses their previous estimate.

Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister, Labour leader or both.
1 says "lower than 31%", 1 says "higher than 31%", one of the "lower than 31%" people is going back on his previous nomination as "most likely".

Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher.
3 say "lower than 28%", 2 say "higher than 28%", nobody reverses their previous estimate.

New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII.
4 say "lower than 25%", nobody says "higher than 25%", nobody reverses their previous estimate.

No more than 2 major hurricanes in 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season.
4 say "lower than 24%", 2 say "higher than 24%", nobody reverses their previous estimate.

Named British Prince or Princess to marry publicly.
3 say "lower than 23%", 2 say "higher than 23%", one of the "higher than 23%" people is going back on her previous nomination as "least likely".

John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats.
Nobody says "lower than 10%", 4 say "higher than 10%", two of the "higher than 10%" people are going back on their previous nomination as "least likely".

I have decided to award a swing of 1% per opinion or 3% when the opinion involves invalidating your previous conviction that an item was one of the most or least likely.

The panel have collectively concluded that best estimates of the probabilities of the twelve long-shot events occurring after July 31st, 2008 and before February 1st, 2009 (unless otherwise stated) are:

USA to win most gold medals in Beijing.                            47%
HP 6 to gross at least $285 million at the US box office.          45%
BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750.               43%
Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher.                             41%
Microsoft to takeover Yahoo.                                       35%
USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran.     32%
Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister, Labour leader or both.  29%
Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher.                              27%
Named British Prince or Princess to marry publicly.                25%
No more than 2 major hurricanes in 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season. 22%
New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII.                      21%
John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats.           18%

So we now have as good a set of probability estimates as I consider this method is likely to produce. I invite you all to favour, or oppose, each long-shot at true odds. For each of the twelve boxes below, please select the box if you prefer to back the long-shot and have a small chance of winning big points, or ignore the box if you prefer to oppose the long-shot and have a big chance of winning small points. Hopefully the consensus of opinion will make things sufficiently close that each choice is tricky.

View Poll: Long-shot Prediction Game poll, part three

As I have been behind the pace on getting this process started, I suggest that I will keep the poll open for a little over 72 hours and close it when I get up on the morning (BST) of Saturday 9^th August. Hopefully this will be before too many gold medals will have been awarded. Sadly there does exist the possibility of "past-posting" - that is, if one or more of these events happens between the time I post the poll and the time I close it, feel free to jump on it and earn yourself guaranteed points.

I reckon that the average score in this game should be around 253 points. If you choose to oppose all 12 long-shots and none of them happen then you'll score 348, which may be a winning score, but it only needs two or three of them to happen and you'll drop off the pace... :-)

Long-shot Prediction Game: early probabilities

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:32:07 GMT

Thank you to the twenty players who made submissions for Phase 1 of the long-shot prediction game. It probably needs a slightly better name at some point.

Of the twenty submissions, sixteen were perfect in every way. One had five nominations for "most likely", which is easy to deal with; we'll just lop the bottom one in the list off, Procrustean stylee. A second was missing a numerical nomination for how many were likely to occur. A third only had one nomination for "least likely to occur" and a fourth only had three nominations for "least likely to occur". Sadly there was some overlap between the latter two, otherwise I might have cobbled together a nineteenth submission of "four least likely"s. As it is, I fear it's probably best to ignore both incomplete submissions. I fear that incomplete entries must be scored as pessimistically as possible.

From the 19 entries that submitted nominations for "How many of the twelve events will occur?", the mean number was 4.052. As this suggests that the typical opinion was 4.052 of the 12 events would occur, this tends to suggest that the consensus opinion was that the average event on that list was 4.052/12 = 33.77% likely to occur. Amending submitted answers as discussed, and folding in the two sets of submissions received by e-mail, the conclusion (after rounding to the nearest 1%) from the 20 sets of "four most likely" and the 18 sets of "four least likely" is as follows:

Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher.
70% say "in the four most likely", 22% say "in the four least likely"

USA to win most gold medals in Beijing.
60% say "in the four most likely", 6% say "in the four least likely"

HP 6 to gross at least $285 million at the US box office.
55% say "in the four most likely", 17% say "in the four least likely"

BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750.
45% say "in the four most likely", 6% say "in the four least likely"

Microsoft to takeover Yahoo.
35% say "in the four most likely", 28% say "in the four least likely"

USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran.
35% say "in the four most likely", 39% say "in the four least likely"

Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister of the UK, Labour Party leader or both.
25% say "in the four most likely", 33% say "in the four least likely"

No more than 2 major hurricanes in 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season.
25% say "in the four most likely", 56% say "in the four least likely"

Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher.
20% say "in the four most likely", 39% say "in the four least likely"

Prince William, Prince Harry, Princess Beatrice and/or Princess Eugenie to marry publicly.
15% say "in the four most likely", 50% say "in the four least likely"

New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII.
10% say "in the four most likely", 39% say "in the four least likely"

John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats.
5% say "in the four most likely", 78% say "in the four least likely"

Now here comes the arbitrary, faffy bit, which makes stage two of the process necessary. If the panel agrees that the average event is 33.77% likely to occur, those events most frequently named as among the four most likely to happen presumably have a higher chance of occurring than that. Conversely, those events most frequently named as among the four least likely to happen presumably have a lower chance of occurring than that. Trying to work out how much to finesse this 33.77% chance in each case is the tricky bit.

I am going to use an extremely naive metric based upon percentage saying "among the four most likely" minus percentage saying "among the four least likely". This does not distinguish between an event where nobody says "among the four most" or "among the four least" and an event where half say "among the four most" and half say "among the four least", but as we're more interested in a single point estimate of probability rather than any degree of confidence in the point estimate, this is as reasonable a starting-point as any. Unless, of course, any of you have thoughts about designing a better one to use next one.

The panel have collectively concluded that first estimates of the probabilities of the twelve long-shot events occurring after July 31st, 2008 and before February 1st, 2009 (unless otherwise stated) are:

USA to win most gold medals in Beijing.                            52%
Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher.                             50%
BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750.               47%
HP 6 to gross at least $285 million at the US box office.          46%
Microsoft to takeover Yahoo.                                       36%
USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran.     33%
Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister, Labour leader or both.  31%
Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher.                              28%
New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII.                      25%
No more than 2 major hurricanes in 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season. 24%
Named British Prince or Princess to marry publicly.                23%
John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats.           10%

You may note that these probabilities sum to 405%, roughly consistent with the mean opinion that 4.052 of them will happen. The second part of the process - and, I promise you, there are only three parts - is to use whatever extra information you may have received between now and then to reflect whether any of these probabilities are too high or too low. If about as many people say that a probability is too low as say it is too high, then it's probably about right. If there's much stronger support for one sentiment than there is for the other, then (assuming rational behaviour, as we are doing throughout, motivated by the abstract prospect of winning a game) the stronger-supported sentiment is probably more likely to be correct.

Particular emphasis will be given to people who have previously said that an event is among the four most likely to occur and then claim that the probability estimate is too high, or people who have previously said that an event is among the four least likely to occur and then claim that the probability estimate is too low. This sort of U-turn is, I would argue, more significant than the word of someone suggesting reinforcing their previous contention that a long-shot was either relatively likely or relatively unlikely to occur. (If you didn't participate in the first stage of the game, you're still welcome to submit your opinions.)

Given that I go back to work on Friday morning, and given the times it took participants to respond to the poll if they did so at all, then I'll seek to wrap this up on Thursday, probably in the early evening, British time. All events are shorthand for the ones described and clarified previously.

View Poll: Long-shot Prediction Game poll, part two

Long-shot Prediction Game

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:04:59 GMT

New Year is probably my favourite time of the year to read blogs. I love it when people do year-in-summary reviews and build up a string of sets of results from year to year so that you can compare things easily. I also enjoy Iain Weaver's annual predictions; Iain makes interesting predictions of relatively unlikely events, and then - with admirable integrity - goes and marks the success or failure of the previous year's predictions. He marks himself harshly; even though his raw score is not high, considering how long many of his shots are, I consider his record to be remarkably good. Even many of his misses are near, interesting and insightful. The only other similar prognosticator I can compare Iain to is Robert X. Cringely, who has predicted annually in a similar way.

I love reading interesting predictions. Anyone can make safe short-odds claims, but I'd take a handful of unusual and correct pot-shots over stating the bleeding obvious any day. (Or perhaps what is the bleeding obvious for some well-informed commentators may be an unusual pot-shot to myopic ol' me.) Accordingly, while we've played prediction games in the past - Iain's even run a couple, though rather intricate ones - there is often a tendency for the games to reward conservatism and selection of relatively likely options. There are things you can do with scoring systems, but they don't make the underlying prediction targets more interesting. I would be more entertained by a prediction game dealing with plausible long-shots - ideally ones where players make the plausible long-shot predictions, but a cunning mechanic would be required to ensure, er, length of shot.

This is not quite that game. This is an attempt to see whether my Friends list can produce a prediction market worth a damn by trying to form a consensus opinion of just how unlikely some moderately unlikely events are.

Below, please find twelve moderately unlikely events, all of which would be slightly surprising, hopefully none of which are completely implausible. Unless otherwise stated, I am interested in whether they might happen after July 31st, 2008 and before February 1st, 2009, excluding these boundary dates, considering local time zones as appropriate. Hopefully these are moderately international, or at least skewed towards the predicted audience.

Finance:
* Oil to trade at $200/barrel or higher.
(Any of Brent crude, New York light sweet crude or West Texas Intermediate crude, which are trading at around $143.)
* BBC Global 30 stock market index to drop below 4750.
(It is currently valued at 5230 and was based at 5000 in September 2004.)
Politics:
* John McCain to win at least 336 Electoral College seats in the 2008 US Presidential election.
(George Bush won 286 Electoral College seats in the 2004 US election.)
* Gordon Brown to stop being Prime Minister of the UK, Labour Party leader or both.
Sport:
* The USA to win at least one more gold medal than any other single country at the Beijing Olympics.
(At the 2004 Olympic Games, the USA won four more gold medals than second-placed China.)
* The New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLIII, expected to take place on or around February 1, 2009.
(They won their first 18 matches in the previous NFL campaign, only to lose Superbowl XLII. See also the so-called Super Bowl curse.)
Internet:
* Microsoft to make a takeover bid for (or merger bid with) Yahoo that Yahoo's board of directors accept or recommend acceptance.
* Firefox usage to reach 33% or higher.
(Source: any month or any quarter reported by W3 Counter global stats, TheCounter global stats or Net Applications stats. See recent stats for comparison.)
Entertainment:
* The Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie, i.e. Harry Potter 6, to gross at least $285,000,000 at the US box office by (and including) the weekend concluding Sunday February 1st, 2009.
(Counterpart figures for the previous five Harry Potter movies.)
* One or more of Prince William, Prince Harry, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie to marry publicly.
Other:
* USA and/or Israel to execute an overt air strike against Iran.
* There will be no more than two major hurricanes (category 3+) in the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane season.
(Current predictions are for two to five.)

My questions: how many of these will occur? Which are most likely? Which are least likely?

Formally, let's incentivise you to predict rationally through a scoring system whose incentives are hopefully not too skewed. Please predict how many of these twelve events will happen; earn 10 points for being exactly correct, 9 points for being incorrect by one in either direction, 8 points for being incorrect by two in either direction and so on. Please select which four of the twelve are most likely to occur; putting my Bayesian spectacles on and conflating probability with results from single trials, three bonus points will be awarded for each of your "most likely to occur" selections that do occur. Please select which four of the twelve are least likely to occur; two points will be deducted for each of your "least likely to occur" selections that do occur.

Also, shout up if it is not clear how any of these will be assessed. Should you spot a reasonable way in which any of these possibilities could be described as being neither true nor false, or where it is not clear how the claims of truth or falsehood will be authenticated, please comment sooner rather than later. You can safely assume that I am prepared to interpret these moderately liberally - or, at least, that I am unlikely to be swayed by pedantry. On the other hand, if what you consider an important distinction that I may not have taken into account is what you fear I consider pedantry, I will appreciate it if people quibble early rather than waiting to see if it'll make a difference in the scoring.

Predictions are visible to all and can be changed up until the point at which I close the poll. The closing date and time will depend on my real-life demands, but I intend it to be before I go to bed after my day shift on Tuesday 8th July.

View Poll: Long-shot Prediction Game poll, part one