If you want to know what being homeless in Saskatoon looks and sounds like, it sounds like Rhoda.
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The best filibuster of all time?
Patton Oswalt’s Star Wars Filibuster on Parks and Recreation.
Deepwater Horizon: Surviving the oil spill
Three years on from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which devastated the Gulf Coast of the US, the residents of Grand Isle, Louisiana, are still living with the effects of the disaster.
Mike Smith’s Smashing Comeback
As a former goaltender, Mike Smith was totally in the right.
Paris in Winter
Paris strikes me as both a city that is built on a pedestrian scale and one that cars that can still navigate around in due to the Napoleonesqe wide streets and boulevards (needed to mark an army down). That being said, those skyscrapers just randomly placed throughout the city is not a good look for any city.
Bridge lights done right
When Saskatoon put up lights on the Traffic Bridge, it was mocked because the lines of the Traffic Bridge aren’t that pleasing (and the lights highlighted that) but also because they rarely worked right. When they did work, the motion looked like something you would see on the Vegas strip. Year after year, something was always working poorly and in the end, the entire thing was an embarrassment to the city. Despite our inability to do it well, San Francisco has. They have done an amazing job showing us how a project like this is done right.
Hopefully if we ever decide to light a bridge up again, we do it correctly.
The End of the Line
I took some time to watch The End of the Line (you can find it on Netflix) this afternoon.
Back in 2003, I posted about what happened to the Newfoundland cod fishery. It’s worth reading again.
The Watchmaker
Also by Dustin Cohen (the director of The Shoemaker) has done The Watchmaker about Brooklyn Watches. Another story about life in Brooklyn.
How the Toronto Raptors are using technology to improve the team (and find it’s flaws)
A fantastic piece from Grantland
It is a very impressive piece of work. “Most teams are using spreadsheets or just using our reports,” says Brian Kopp, executive vice-president at STATS. “The Raptors go a step beyond that, which only a few teams are doing, and their visualizations are the best I’ve seen.”6
That does not mean it has been an easy sell to the team’s coaching staff, though Sterner and Nori are enthusiastic about analytics and have helped craft the ghost defense. Everyone likes the ghost system, but some of the larger analytics-related issues have caused friction between the front office and some of the coaches — even if everyone involved is mostly polite about it. “It’s always going to be a challenge,” says Ed Stefanski, Toronto’s executive vice-president of basketball operations. “A lot of high-level coaches have come out against analytics, but it’s the wave of the future, and you’ve got to jump on.”
Bryan Colangelo, the Raptors’ GM, had already set Toronto on the SportVU path before hiring Stefanski in the fall of 2011, and Stefanski credited Colangelo with pushing the Raptors in the right direction.
The coaches, even the most receptive ones, seem to view analytics and SportVU mostly as a tool to confirm what they already think and know. Some samples:
Dwane Casey, Toronto’s head coach: “It’s a good backup for what your eyes see.” Casey added, “It may also shed light on something else,” a sentiment both Nori and Sterner echoed at points. “But you can’t make all your decisions based on it, and it can’t measure heart, and chemistry, and personality.”
Sterner: “It helps reinforce your gut. Most of the time, your gut is pretty much right.”
Nori: “More than anything, it’s a tool to help confirm what your eyes see.”
The analytics team agrees that most of the new knowledge will be along the margins — that coaches leaguewide get most of the big, systematic things right — but that the analytics will nonetheless offer more in the way of new discoveries that might contradict what we think we know. “A lot of coaches will say how great it is that analytics confirm what they already see,” Boyarsky says. “The fact of the matter is, that’s not really true.”
An example: The analytics team is unanimous, and rather emphatic, that every team should shoot more 3s — including the Raptors and even the Rockets, who are on pace to break the NBA record for most 3-point attempts in a season.
So basically the Toronto Raptor’s computers are analyzing and second guessing the play and coaching of the Raptors. Amazing the amount of variables they are dealing with.
A New Generation of NDP Ads
Good job by the NDP in getting a good Cam Broten ad out this quickly. The ads hit television tomorrow. That the NDP website has now been updated to feature Cam.
