Month: January 2006

Storage Update

The past few months have been full of wonderful announcements about increasingly large storage at ever declining per-gigabyte prices.

Pretty much most of the big manufacturers of USB key drives have released 4gb drives in recent months and street prices are starting to fall below $300 for some of these models. I’m a big fan of Memina’s Rocket (thank God they dropped the “Pocket” adjective as that was just too suggestive on a number of levels).

Meanwhile some companies have released 4gb SD cards. A-Data’s 4gb SD card goes for $215.99 at NewEgg.Com. Add that to Sony’s planned Sony Reader, and you’re able to carry about 5,000 books with you wherever you go.

And hard drive prices continue their amazing free fall. Internal 500gb SATA drives can be found online for about $360 — that’s 2 TB for just $1,440. That’s just $5.75 to rip and store a double-layered DVD. Ah, what a great time to be a digital pack rat.

Out of the Park Baseball Manager 2006

I’m not a big fan of baseball, but baseball sims are to die for and Out of the Park Baseball 2006 looks like it could be the mother of all baseball sims.

One of the things I’ve always liked about previous OOTP games is the ability to create and customize leagues in any number of ways. But the 2006 version looks to blow away its previous incarnations when it comes to customizing,

But the best is that you can have AS MANY LEAGUES AS YOU LIKE in your baseball universe. I think this may be the right time to bury the saying ‘how’s your OOTP league going?’ – it’s got to be ‘how’s your OOTP baseball world going?’ from now on.

So what does this all mean? It means that you can set up your virtual baseball world the way you always imagined. How about a world with a league in every country of the world, with 16 teams each? You can do that. And each of these leagues can have as many minor leagues attached to it as you want. Then you can add any historical season to your world, via importing from the free Lahman Database. Or if you want to mirror the current real life setup (including all minor leagues down to rookie ball), you just need to click a single button. Then add the Japanese league, Korean league, Cuban league, some winter leaguesÂ… you name it.

And if that’s not enough, the developer is vastly expanding the range of statistics that OOTP tracks,

So far, so good. Lately when you watch a baseball game on TV that has a statistically educated commentator (sorry Mr. Morgan, that doesn’t include you), you hear terms like ‘this guy is a tough out, batting almost .270 even with 2 strikes on him’ or ‘he has been successful at night this season, hitting 30 points higher than in day-games’. OOTP can do that as well, and even better, for every statistic of the basic stats sets tracked during the current season. Here are the splits that are supported in OOTP:

Overall, Vs Left, Vs Right, This Week, Last Week, by Month, Allstar Game, Spring Training, Playoffs, Home, Away, Grass, Turf, Day, Night, Pinch Hitting, Close & Late, Inning 1-3, Inning 4-6, Inning 7-9, Inning X, No Outs, One Outs, Two Outs, Runners in Scoring Position, Bases Empty, Runner at 1st, Runner at 2nd, Runner at 3rd, Runner at 1st & 2nd, Runner at 1st & 3rd, Runner at 2nd & 3rd, Bases Loaded, Two Strikes, First Pitch, Count 0-1, Count 0-2, Count 1-0, Count 1-1, Count 1-2, Count 2-0, Count 2-1, Count 2-2, Count 3-0, Count 3-1, Count 3-2, Behind in Count, Ahead in Count.

OK, thatÂ’s pretty cool already, right? So you can check out how your shortstop batted on the road this season. Or how many doubles your favorite pitcher gave up in June. Or the batting AVG of your cleanup hitter when heÂ’s up there with the bases loaded.

. . .

Anyway, I felt the more stats, the better. And it doesnÂ’t slow the game down! Also, all player lists can handle these stats, so you can check who leads your league in hitting with runners in scoring position against your own team.

That’s my kind of baseball sim developer. There is absolutely no such thing as too many stats.

Man, I can’t wait until this is finally released sometime in the next couple months.

O’Reilly’s Baseball Hacks

If you’re like me and think baseball sucks but baseball stats rock, then O’Reilly’s upcoming Baseball Hacks might be just the thing for you. According to the PR blurb at O’Reilly,

This comprehensive guide walks readers through the sport’s core statistical categories, and then demonstrates how to use this data to truly understand baseball. Statistical analysis, data mining, probability, forecasting, and other valuable tools are examined.

Heh — he said data mining. Seriously. You know you want to learn how to compare teams and players with lattices (PDF).

This is supposed to be released in February.

Ricky McGinn, the 2006 Version

The main problem with being opposed to capital punishment, as I am, is that there are a lot of organizations also opposed to capital punishment who seem to be run by Michael Dukakis liberals — the sort of people who will fight tooth and nail for convicted murderers but lack empathy and understanding of the horrors that crime victims go through that is what really drives support for capital punishment in my opinion.

One of the most idiotic things that comes out of this excessive focus on convicts is that anti-capital punishment groups tend to latch onto this person or that person whom they believe to have been wrongly executed or about to be executed, only for evidence to emerge that confirms the guilt of the individual. Moreover, the individuals such groups tend to latch onto are the sort of career criminals who are obviously guilty that it raises a serious question about just how gullible/rational some in the anti-capital punishment movement are.

Back in 2000, it was Ricky McGinn who was the star of the show. McGinn claimed he had not raped and murdered his 12-year-old niece step-daughter as a Texas jury had found, and opponents of capital punishment claimed DNA tests of pubic hairs and semen would prove this. Then Gov. George W. Bush granted a temporary 30 day reprieve for McGinn so such testing could be conducted. Rather than exonerate McGinn, of course, the testing showed that the killer was either McGinn or a very close maternal relative. McGinn was executed shortly afterward.

More recently, many anti-death penalty groups hopped on the Roger Coleman bandwagon. Coleman’s case is especially egregious. He was convicted of the 1981 rape and murder of his 19-year-old sister-in-law, and executed in 1992.

Coleman was an immediate suspect in the murder because there was no forceable entry at the murder scene, Coleman had left his job at a nearby mine at the end of his shift shortly before the murder giving him time to carry out the killing, and the fact that Coleman had a previous conviction for the attempted rape of a teacher. At trial, evidence against him included pubic hairs found at the scene that were consistent with Coleman’s and DNA tests that established he was part of the 2 percent of men in the country who could have contributed the semen found at the scene.

To put it bluntly, there was an overwhelming amount of evidence that Coleman was the killer, and yet numerous anti-death penalty groups and activists got on the “Coleman was innocent” bandwagon. Many bought Coleman’s claim that he simply did not have time to go from his job to the victim’s house and commit the murder. For example, according to the New York Times,

In 1988, James C. McCloskey, a divinity school graduate and founder of Centurion Ministries Inc., a group based in Princeton, N.J., that advocates for inmates it considers innocent, took up Mr. Coleman’s case and spent four years reinvestigating it.

Mr. McCloskey concluded that Mr. Coleman did not have the time or motivation to commit the murder, raising questions about the jailhouse confession and the forensic evidence. He asserted that Mr. Coleman had been wearing clothing covered with coal dust but that no dust was found at the scene, and he offered evidence pointing to an alternative suspect.

As in McGinn’s case, the DNA test confirmed the state’s verdict — Coleman was guilty as hell.

The upshot is that, as I’ve predicted before, DNA testing is going to ultimately reinforce support for the death penalty rather than lead to some new widespread anti-death penalty movement. Capital punishment supporters will point to these results as well as the extensive DNA testing that occurs in cases today to argue that whatever problems there may have been with determining guilt in the past, that DNA evidence makes many verdicts as close to incontrovertible as any system is ever going to get.

Sources:

Warner Orders DNA Testing In Case of Man Executed in ’92. Maria Glod and Michael Shear, Washington Post, January 6, 2006.

DNA Ties Man Executed in ’92 to the Murder He Denied. James Dao, New York Times, January 13, 2006.