The hits just keep on coming

For those of you who haven't noticed, I have been absent from teh interwebs. Sorry. Life, you know.

I imagine, somehow, most of you managed just fine without my insipid aperçus.

This hiatus will continue for the foreseeable future while I wrestle with fixed point theory and lambda calculus.

Given the sense of duty your humble scribe feels towards you, dear reader, I tear myself away from precious moments of study to bring you this development, from the the folks who made free stats a commodity.

By the bye. Is NTRA.TV adrift somewhere in a brainstorm session or is that just too radical to conceive?

On Entscheidungsproblem and recursion

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-Albert Einstein

Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems.
-Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Except for simple problems, solutions consist of several pieces working together.

When writing code, the problem must be understood before the algorithm can be designed. Every decision should be designed before the code is written. This includes all parameters and aspects in which the solutions will apply and how they relate to each other once written.

Once understood the easy mistake is to write the whole code in one shot. The better, and in the long run, more effective manner, is to break each component down into individual parts and work on specific solutions independently.

You start with the original problem (Level 0) and figure out how can this be broken down into several subproblems (Level 1). Odds are, these individual Level 1 problems can break down into Level 2 and each Level 2 into Level 3 and so on. The trick lies in determining whether to break down each higher Level problem or continue with this algorithmic bifurcation to the lowest level (highest cardinal) component.

A rule of thumb says to pick the problem whose subdivision is obvious and continue in this fashion until the solution to each subproblem is so clear that it can be designed directly. By identifying the obvious problems, one is able to solve tasks that are relatively easy and the solution to other more complicated tasks becomes easier to discern. These more complex tasks, if approached in the same manner, prove easier to solve and one is able to complete the entire design without encountering any individual task that proves daunting.

The mistake, again, is to try to solve the entire problem all at once. Top down design works because it creates solutions for simple problems.

Building a solution from several pieces is simplified when approached individually. The first version of a solution is a working program with a single feature that is free of bugs. The program is saved and work continues on the next, easy to deliver, feature. That is saved and you work on the next. A working program with fewer features is always better than a nonworking program with everything under the sun.

David Allen, in his book Getting Things Done, advocates a similar approach to the execution of ones daily shuffle off this mortal coil. Pick a task, event, project, merger, acquisition...whatever, and break it down until you reach the point where you can complete one item on that list in under two minutes.

If I have to get my car fixed, that event is the end result of a series of individual tasks. I don't "get my car fixed"

I have to:

1. Find the number of a mechanic
2. Call the mechanic-or several
3. Schedule an appointment
4. Keep the appointment

Each of those tasks, in aggregate, results in my car "getting fixed". But if I had just said, 'Man, I need to get my car fixed, what a pain in the ass...screw it, I'll do it later.' Nothing would ever get done-and this is a relatively simple process.

Putting together a functioning, secure tote system or national regulating body of racing rules, could prove more challenging. Only if looked at as a whole.

At their core, projects are a series of deliverables accomplished by people by a certain time.

As Charles Emerson Winchester said, 'I do one thing, I do it very well, and then I move on'.

Buying time

On this week's Slate Culture Gabfest, the gang discusses a recent venture where they created a nondescript, bizarre montage of apocalyptic images, with insects, gas masks and mushroom clouds, topped with ominous narration and paranoid instructions to an equally nondescript website: vcantellyouwhy.com.

There was no product or meaningful message.

The commercial aired late night, during reruns of the Glen Beck Show.

Based on tracking information and the 1000 people who typed in the URL, those rapscallions at Slate, determined their little ad reached 1.3 million people.

Total cost: $1,300.

This made possible by the good people at Google and their TVads feature. This will allow anyone capable of using a camcorder and uploading video, to create TV advertising and have it broadcast nationally. One can bypass the marketing and network middleman and just buy time.

Thirteen hundred bucks to reach 1.3 million people. Waldrop has to have that in the petty cash drawer.

Learning from Alderaan

'I felt a great disturbance in the mutuels, as if millions of horseplayers cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.'
-Unknown

Clay Shirky discusses the collapse of complex business models in a recent post. The argument centers on the inability of complex structures to simplify their operations due to process and dogma.

Some excerpts:

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change...Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

We may have passed the point of no return but ridding ourselves of the old ways might make this game better...thirty years from now.

Free stats...Not In My Back Yard!!!!

NBA has a free iPad app for stats. I imagine MLB and NFL have something similar.

How stupid they must feel compared to DRF and Equibase. After all, how can you make any money or build a fan base with free?

We fear change

The locus of my inertia disintegrates after the first five letters of the word. I don't do well in dynamic environments and I require predictability in order to feel comfortable. If asked to deal with change, I assume the fetal position.

So I recognize the intersection of confusion we find ourselves facing, on this side of the pond, as it pertains to the synthetic question.

All else being equal, are synthetic surfaces inherently safer? I have no idea.

Statistics, such as they are, seem to indicate so but statistics can mean whatever you want them to mean. Smart people on both sides of the argument make valid claims and I fall on the side of any well maintained surface possessing the requisite level of safety.

I don't know enough about the facts to speak cogently on the subject but I imagine an underlying truth exists. I think the culprit lies in the spastic and discombobulated manner in which the game has approached the game in general and the synthetic question in particular.

A more reactionary and fear stimulated response, I cannot imagine. Some tracks have synth, others don't. The synthetic tracks vary as well; no standard exists. What is the point? Where does it all tie in?

There is no narrative. Nobody is directing traffic.

This year the US showed poorly in Dubai and with the BC two years ago, players and breeders sense a shift in the wind. The Crist v Kling debate misses the point.

This game relies on the bettor for funding, by choice. The game has done an amazing job at making itself a black hole for casual fans and without them, you don't get advertisers.

So if it wants to rely on the bettor for its cash it has to cater to the bettor. Provide them with value and consistency of product. Give them a reason to keep churning. Swapping surfaces and regulations like Tiger swaps companions, is as stupid as Tiger is an unconscionable cur.

Pick a direction and go with it. Have the courage of your convictions.

Murder the unchosen idea.

The parties are too busy looking out for themselves, throwing whatever at the wall, in some desperate attempt to find the proverbial silver bullet. They refuse to take a step back and look around, then wonder why everything is going to shit.

Apparently, handicappers in the US don't like synthetics because they are new and remove the historic predictability of dirt surfaces. California was speed favoring, the rail at Aqueduct in winter...

Handicappers can't get a handle on the synthetic question because there is no system to its implementation, handicappers don't have a baseline yet to figure it all out.

Santa Anita is on its, what, third synthetic surface?

The KD trail snakes around SA, TP, OP, Aqu, GP, Haw, Kee and FG. The three synth tracks in there have different surfaces, I think, so different techniques apply and horses bounce from one to the other.

The system is new and non-standard. That does not lead to good things.

Breeders, I imagine, won't appreciate the change because the horse we have in the game today doesn't stack up to the proposed change in direction. Drugs and speed madness have arguably weakened the breed here and shifting to synthetics carries with it a change in breeding focus.

Trainers have their own problems with the surfaces and bring their own baggage and rigidity to the issue. Most still look at scientific approaches to training much like the Church looked at Galileo.

The BC is discussing having SA as the permanent host site. If the track stays synthetic what will that do to the breeding industry it purports to showcase? What will dirt tracks do? Have their own championship event? Will there be an alternate championship?

Do we end up with two leagues, like the NFL 40+ years ago? The East v. West as it was 50 years ago in this sport, where California horses were considered inferior.

Perhaps this will involve a change in thinking. A change in training.

Everybody targets the KD and all else be damned. Maybe if the game provided incentive for horses to stick around past their three year old season, there would not be such a mad dash to get a horse to the KD and ruin it in the process.

What if an incentive existed for a horse that won the KD, BC Unisex Classic and the Dubai World Cup? It wouldn't have to happen in order either; just ever. Make it a ridiculous amount too. (Dr. Evil voice...$30 million dollars) Insure against the loss. Maybe the KD winner would stick around a few years. Make it $50 million if the horse wins the Triple crown along the way.

It will never happen. Because change is bad.

"'Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,' said the Rat. 'And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all.'"
- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

I got your tweet right here

I think there is a race in Kentucky, on the first Saturday in May, that might do a little better.

Of course, I think they could do it gratis.