Eugene Fischer

Month: May 2012

Tabclosing

Slimming down my browser again.

Myth #4: Scientists follow the scientific method as it was taught in high school: Observation, Question, Research, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion Truth: In reality, the way scientists work is more like: Fiddle Around, Find Something Weird, Retest It, It Doesn’t Happen a Second Time, Get Distracted Trying to Make It Happen Again, Go to Chipotle, Recall the Original Purpose of Your Research, Start Over, Apply for Funding for a Better Instrument, Publish Some Interim Fluff, Learn That Someone Has Scooped You, Take Your Lab in a New Direction, Apply for Funding for the New Direction, Collaborate With an Icelandic Poet, Eat Chipotle With an Icelandic Poet, Co-Write Scientifically Accurate Ode to Walrus, Get Interested in Something Unrelated, Apply for Funding for Something Unrelated, Notice That 20 Years Have Passed.

Go Spurs Articles Go

The San Antonio Spurs, perennially underrepresented in sports media, have been so phenomenally good this year that people are actually starting to write articles about them. There have been several nice ones recently.

  • “Gregg Popovich’s Portable Program” by J. A. Adande. An analysis of how the Spurs’ culture has led to success, and why it is now the model that other teams–especially small-market teams–are attempting to emulate.
  • “21 Shades of Gray” by Chris Ballard. A long and detailed character study of Tim Duncan, which ran as a cover story for Sports Illustrated.
  • “The San Antonio Spurs Aren’t Boring” by Kevin Arnovitz. A detailed analysis of the Spurs “motion weak” offense, and why it is both so effective and so overlooked by NBA fans.
  • John Hollinger, who I generally dislike for crimes against meaningful statistics, had a pretty great Per-Diem column on the Spurs’ season. You have to pay ESPN to read it, unless you manage to find it mirrored somewhere or something.
  • “Kawhi Leonard not awed by finishing fourth in Rookie of the Year voting.” More specifically, he said, “I wasn’t really looking at the rankings. It’s an individual honor. Congratulations to whoever won it.” That is either the driest humor out of a rookie since, well, Tim Duncan, or Leonard is in fact a machine built to be a San Antonio Spur. Noteworthy also is that, of the top 12 vote-getters for ROY, Leonard is the only one still playing. Congrats to whoever won that individual award, indeed.

Some rare good sports reporting from the usual suspects. For statistically defensible analysis, though, the gold standard remains The Wages of Wins, with important statistical backup from NerdNumbers, The NBA Geek, and Baskteball-Reference.com