Statistically, the better decision would be to go for it, and by a good amount. However, these numbers are baselines for the league as a whole. You’d have to expect the Colts had a better than a 30% chance of scoring from their 34, and an accordingly higher chance to score from the Pats’ 28. But any adjustment in their likelihood of scoring from either field position increases the advantage of going for it. You can play with the numbers any way you like, but it’s pretty hard to come up with a realistic combination of numbers that make punting the better option. At best, you could make it a wash.

Coincidentally, this week’s Time Magazine had a blurb that pointed to a Sports Illustrated article about a high school coach who believes that if you go by probability, punting is NEVER the better option.

“I don’t believe in punting and really can’t ever see doing it again”. He means ever. Consider the most extreme scenario, say, fourth-and-long near your own end zone. According to Kelley’s data (much of which came from a documentary he saw), when a team punts from that deep, the opponents will take possession inside the 40-yard line and will then score a touchdown 77% of the time. If they recover on downs inside the 10, they’ll score a touchdown 92% of the time. “So [forsaking] a punt, you give your offense a chance to stay on the field. And if you miss, the odds of the other team scoring only increase 15 percent. It’s like someone said, ‘[Punting] is what you do on fourth down,’ and everyone did it without asking why.”

In The Billionaire’s Vinegar, there is skepticism regarding the provenance of a bottle of 1787 Yquem that was said to be owned by Thomas Jefferson at one time. Bottle owner Bill Koch has former FBI agent Jim Elroy dig into the background of this priceless bottle.

Elroy was drifting straight toward the same morass of subjectivity that had bedeviled all previous challenges to the bottles – the arguments of bottle variation, the blind street of Rodenstock’s reticence, the how-would-you-know-what-it’s-supposed-to-taste-like posture, Monticello’s skepticism versus the impossibility of proving a negative, the inadequacy of existing radio-dating methods, the sensory validations by such luminaries as Broadbent and Jancis Robinson, not to mention the disincentive for Koch to sacrifice a bottle that had cost tens of thousands of dollars for a test that might not be definitive. The odds were against his coming to any more certain a conclusion than had the few people before him who had questioned their bottles.

Talk about a lose-lose. The only real way to truly find out if your suspected-to-be-fake bottle is real, would be to open it and test its contents in a lab. But opening the bottle for testing, immediately makes the bottle worthless if it does in fact happen to be legit.

Now this particular bottle was said to be Yquem, which is no slouch of a Chateau. From Wikipedia:

Château d’Yquem is a Premier Cru Supérieur (Fr: “Great First Growth” or “Great First Vintage”) wine from the Sauternes, Gironde region in the southern part of the Bordeaux vineyards known as Graves.

In the Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855, Château d’Yquem was the only Sauternes given this rating, indicating its perceived superiority and higher prices over all other wines of its type. Wines from Château d’Yquem are characterised by their complexity, concentration and sweetness. A relatively high acidity helps to balance the sweetness. Another characteristic for which Château d’Yquem wines are known is their longevity. In a good year, a bottle will only begin to show its qualities after a decade or two of cellaring and, with proper care, will keep for a century or more, gradually adding layers of taste and hitherto undetected fruity overtones.

But don’t be intimidated by the flowery language regarding “fruity overtones” and “layers of taste”. Turns out it could all be B.S. According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, wine ratings and experts are about as reliable as a coin flip.

To test that idea, Mr. Hodgson restricted his attention to wines entering a certain number of competitions, say five. Then he made a bar graph of the number of wines winning 0, 1, 2, etc. gold medals in those competitions. The graph was nearly identical to the one you’d get if you simply made five flips of a coin weighted to land on heads with a probability of 9%. The distribution of medals, he wrote, “mirrors what might be expected should a gold medal be awarded by chance alone.”

I pitch Mint to everyone from investors to engineers, young and old, and I do it pretty much the same way: Here’s the problem in the market place, here’s how we solve it, and here’s how we make money.

Almost daily someone will ask me (personally or professionally) what it is that our company does. I can usually explain it somewhat succinctly, but I vary the level of detail and the angle of the response quite a bit depending on the audience. As a result, I’m definitely not as clear as I can be 100% of the time, and I assume that though people nod along with my explanation, they may not always understand what it is I am telling them.

I dig Aaron’s approach here, which is basically to have a single, simple, clear pitch that nearly everyone will understand.

• Bank of America Android App
• Twidroid (not “Twitdroid”) Twitter Android App
• Shop Savvy Android App
• Football Android App
• Manager For Android
• Qik Android App
• Flickr Droid – Not the best, but current Flickr Android App I’m using
• Android App
• Open Table Android App
• SMS Popup
• Where for Android
• Advanced Task Killer
• Locale
• Sports Tap
• Meebo Android App
• NYTimes Reader

If you’ve got suggestions for other must-have Android applications, please drop them in the comments below.

It really bothers me that the definition of success has changed from profits to followers, friends, and feed count. This crap doesn’t mean anything. Kids are coming out of school thinking, I want to start the next YouTube or Facebook. If a restaurant served more food than everybody else but lost money on every diner, would it be successful? No. But on the Internet, for some reason, if you have more users than everyone else, you’re successful. No, you’re not.

The full article is here.

It’s been ages since I posted anything even vaguely unique or substantive – something that wasn’t a just quick snippet, photo, video, or link. Which is why I have found myself moving more towards posting shorter, more frequent items to Twitter and Flickr, and finding a lot more satisfaction in doing so (though this wasn’t always the case).

Paul Boutin said it well in a recent Wired article:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

I think this is pretty dead on, particularly the last line, and so from now on, this site will mainly lay in state, and my new short-form world will exist on AndrewTeman.COM. Be sure and update your RSS feeds here if you want to follow along. It’s riveting I know.

The new site, as I said, will mainly be Twitter updates, Flickr photos, and some ancillary info pulled from my Delicious, Yelp, and Last.FM feeds, nice and simple. Granted there will still be things that I want to get out there that just won’t fit neatly into JPG format, or in 140 character strings, and for that, the blog will remain here in it’s current form, but with grossly sparse updates at very best.

It’s been a good run. Since May of 2004, there have been 815 posts, over 1,200 comments, and well over one million visitors.

See you over at the new place.

I love all of these songs, but I think I am partial to Little Saint Nick from The Beach Boys (just something about surfin’ Christmas music), and Run Rudolph Run from Chuck Berry. But as far as the best pure Christmas song, I think the Brenda Lee version of Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree is hard to beat.

As was the case with the cocktail party mix, this is in descending alphabetical order by song title. Also, there are two versions of Santa Clause Is Comin’ To Town, because both the Sinatra and the Springsteen versions are both fantastic….and different enough to appear on the same mix without being annoying.

Enjoy!

Julie and I hosted a little get together recently, and for background music, I tuned the iPod up to play my hand selected cocktail party mix that I made back in the spring. Now I know everyone has their own individual tastes, but I did get multiple unsolicited compliments on this mix at our last soiree, so I thought I’d post the track listing here.

The short back-story on the mix is that my searches for “cocktail party music” never quite yielded what I was looking for. I knew I wanted a good mix of classic cool music (aka, either genuinely classic as in old or just classic in sound), that would be good background sound, but not go unnoticed completely. This mix seems to have hit that spot that I was going for.

So if you are looking for some good cocktail party music, here is my recommended play list, not in any particular order…merely descending alphabetically by track name.

I have another popular mix of non-shitty Christmas music that I will post soon as well for those that may be interested.

Get All Of This Music On iTunes!

Whole bunch more here.