Steve Stricker

I have nothing personally against Steve Stricker. Well, not nothing; I believe he's a fairly intense huntin', fishin' type, though not quite as flamboyent about it as Boo Weekley. But I don't really have any reason to dislike him as compared to your ordinary PGA Tour professional.

But I don't enjoy watching him play. Johnny Miller and Dan Hicks were discussion him, and Johnny Miller described his game as being "comfortable" to watch, mentioning that he didn't do a lot of scrambling and "hoping for good breaks" but was just consistently down-the-middle. I have a better word that "comfortable" for Stricker's game: boring. Unspectacular. He doesn't hit amazing shots. His swing is the opposite of energetic (and yes, this matters; one of the things I like about Tiger Woods is that his swing is very, very energetic, while at the same time being so rigidly precise and elegant). He has a very good version of a very conventional short game. He's a very good putter, but mainly in the sense of almost never missing in the 5-10 foot range; he is neither, to my knowledge, particularly stunning inside that range or outside of it, and he lacks the icy consistency that makes Tiger so remarkable on short putts. He doesn't make a lot of eagles, and yes, that is a function of length, but I think it is honestly true that the kind of game that includes the possibility of eagles is more exciting to watch. His best strength seems to be that he hits his short clubs very close to the hole, on average, which is certainly something I respect; however, hitting to 13 feet from 75-100 yards is basically what pros are supposed to do all the time; anything worse constitutes a distinct mistake, so this also looks kind of like a general low rate of mistake-making. He is very, very consistent; that is, I think, his main selling point, but he is consistently good, not consistently great. Tiger Woods is consistently great. Phil Mickelson is inconsistently great.

As I said, I have nothing against him; unlike with Boo Weekley, I don't root hard against him in general, though I did today in the simple interest of having an interesting tournament, which we did kind of have. But I just don't enjoy it when he's the one who's in the lead and taking up all the air time. And I hope Phil wins at Pebble Beach next week and takes back the #2 spot. Phil deserves the #1 spot much, much more than Stricker does, since he's, you know, the second-best player of this era, and Steve Stricker is, in all honesty, not in the top-10.

Quote of the Day

I'm on a blimp
I'm on a blimp
Everybody look at me
'cause I'm dueling on a blimp

I'm on a blimp
I'm on a blimp
Take a good hard look
At the motherf@cking blimp!

   - Seto Kaiba and Malik Ishtar

2012 Landscape

So, I took some data from Gallup's "State of the States" report, most notably about party ID and Obama approval. What I did was take their total 2009 Obama national approval number, 57.2, and then adjust it down to 50%, with a commensurate increase in disapproval. Applying this -14.4 shift to the 2009 approval data from each state, which is admittedly a net +9 landscape since there were, evidently, 9 points of "undecided" in 2009, I got an interesting landscape.

The gloves, they are off

So, some Obama nominee finally got their confirmation vote today, after Republicans held her nomination up for nine months... and those Republicans who must've thought her just so hideous they needed to use every tool available to block her ascent to power must've voted against her, right? Well, no, actually, the vote was 96-0. And there have been plenty of other times when a nominee was delayed for a loooooong time only to get at least 70 votes. You know what I say to that? If this is the general principle now, that not only do legislators vote against cloture on anything they would vote against but they actually vote against cloture on things they end up voting for, then from here on out, there are no rules. The majority party is not bound by any code of "fair play" while the minority is being this dickish. Budget reconciliation, early and often? Go for it, please. Recess appointments? I do usually think they're sketchy, but given how out-of-hand things have gotten, have at 'em. See, I think it's true that to a certain extent Democrats in the minority would go along with the "vote against passage = vote against cloture" principle. But what I think you would never see Democrats do it try to filibuster something they would vote for. And if they did try, the Republicans would flay them alive for it in the media, who would actively participate in the flaying. I wonder why the media isn't going after Republicans for this? Maybe we expect them to be assholes?

Non-Ideological

Here's what I think Obama means when he says he's "not an ideologue" or is in favor of "non-ideological" policy making:

"The facts have a liberal bias. I don't."

That is, he wants to convey that he's not against, say, privatization because of some sort of inherent Socialistic nature but rather because it doesn't work. Well, uhhhhh.... that's actually why people have inherent socialistic natures, me included. Hey, if it works, if he can convince people that believing what you believe because you believe it is factually correct makes you not an ideologue, instead of making you an ideologue, more power to him!

Hypothesis Testing Does Not Exist

I just got out of stat class, which was mostly spent recapping the last bit of first semester. Toward the end the professor, who has what I think is a thick Greek accent, talked about how if you phrase a hypothesis test with the null hypothesis as "X = a" and the alternative as "X = b", you get very different results from if you phrase it with the null as "X = b" and the alternative "X = a". Now, I'm not entirely certain I'm right about this, but I think that part of the reason this very confusing fact happens is that hypothesis testing does not exist. In reality, the thing called "hypothesis testing" is really just a somewhat muddled and overly discontinuous* rearrangement of confidence values.

Not Even Good Vapid Crap

Bob McDonnell's response to Obama's State of the Union was just pathetic. I just made myself watch it. I think the Bobby Jindal staging was probably better, because while that was pathetic, at least it admitted as much. This looked like it was pathetic, but didn't know it. The whole thing just looked like a cheap imitation, rather than a response which is, after all, a different thing. I found the applause-line thing particularly hollow as well, and I think I know why: at the State of the Union, you have the full Congress assembled, along with the Court, and that group is never likely to tilt more than 60-40 in either direction. There's intrigue in the applause: will the opposition party stand? How about for the popular, consensus programs? If so, that's significant: it means the President has the opposition at least convinced it would look really really bad to appear virulently opposed. If not, that's also significant: it means the opposition is virulently opposed. This room was full of a presumably hand-picked crowd. Hell, for all I know they were paying the black woman behind him to sit there and smile. They probably weren't, but there was no one in that room who wasn't there on condition of supporting him. In fact that was the only criterion for being there, whereas the guest list for the SotU is automatically derived from governmental status.