It's All Stats

That new Fil-Am coach of Miami Heat said it right: it's all statistics. Before you say that the Celtics-Lakers Finals was all magic and nostalgia and parquet flooring and fate, John Hollinger as early as March said that Celtics has one foot in the finals and the Lakers has one small toe jammed on it. He had them 1 and 3 in his power rankings. Utah is 2nd while Detroit is 6th. Spurs is 8th so stop fretting about a Detroit-Spurs shouldabeen. It's less likely. This was later changed to Celtics 1st, Pistons 2nd, Lakers 3rd and Utah 4th. At the start of the playoffs, Celtics is 72 percent likely to make it to Finals while and 54 percent as champs. Lakers was 18 percent in the Finals and 7 percent to win it all. Utah was 31 percent Champs but the intangibles were again at work here. Although the Las Vegas oddsmakers (Market) were more on the money. Two months this was the comparison. They don't know the power of Le Bron:
Boston - 42% (Hollinger) / 24% (Market)
Detroit - 12% (Hollinger) / 12% (Market)
LA Lakers - 12% (Hollinger) / 15% (Market)
Utah - 6% (Hollinger) / 4% (Market)
Orlando - 6% (Hollinger) / 3% (Market)
Houston - 4% (Hollinger) / 4% (Market)
San Antonio - 4% (Hollinger) / 12% (Market)
New Orleans - 3% (Hollinger) / 5% (Market)
Dallas - 3% (Hollinger) / 4% (Market)
Phoenix - 3% (Hollinger) / 10% (Market)
Denver - 2% (Hollinger) / 1% (Market)
Golden State - 2% (Hollinger) / 1% (Market)
Cleveland - 0% (Hollinger) / 3% (Market)

Home

Really bad news for the Spurs. Boston Globe, which knows what it's saying with the Celtics said that home court advantage is real. They gave reasons, like travel for the visitors, familiarity of turf and the psychological state of the home athletes. That means Manu is better off playing in Argentina.

Sci-Fi

Solaris (both versions), 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gattaca, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Alien (1979) are featured here for two things. One, all are great sci-fi movies. Second, they are great because their science is right. Right, Mr. Pasyon?

The Super Modern Kalesa

Iron Man, How to Recycle

25 Books for Sci Fi

io9 presents 25 books that sci fi fans and writers should read:

On the Origin of Species (1859), by Charles Darwin.
Male and Female (1949), by Margaret Mead.
Animal Liberation (1975), by Peter Singer.
Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), by Douglas Hofstadter.
Cosmos (1985), by Carl Sagan.
The Selfish Gene (1990), by Richard Dawkins.
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1995), by Laurie Garrett.
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher (1995), by Richard P. Feynman.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1999), by Jared Diamond.
The Elegant Universe (2000), by Brian Greene.
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography (2000), by Simon Singh.
The Well: A Story of Love, Death, and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (2001), by Katie Hafner.
The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (2002), by David Barash and Judith Lipton.
A User's Guide to the Brain (2002), by John Ratey.
How the Universe Got Its Spots (2002), by Janna Levin.
Why Things Break (2003), by Mark Eberhart.
Evolution's Rainbow: Why Darwin Was Wrong About Sexual Selection (2004), by Joan Roughgarden.
How to Survive a Robot Uprising (2005), by Daniel H. Wilson.
Illegal Beings: Human Clones and the Law (2005), by Kerry MacIntosh.
The Science of Orgasm (2006), by Barry Komisauruk, Carlos Beyer-Flores, and Beverly Whipple.

The Real Rule of Four

The mind can only remember four things at once. People thought the working memory was seven things (that's why the telephone numbers were seven digits) but now scientists realized we're dumber, sorry, more forgetful than that. This is also the reason why Mau stops at four women because he kept forgetting where to go home and what excuse for whom.

Uh-uh, Irisan People. There's Bad News for You

Short-term exposure to smog, or ozone, is clearly linked to premature deaths that should be taken into account when measuring the health benefits of reducing air pollution, a National Academy of Sciences review concludes. The findings contradict arguments made by some White House officials that the connection between smog and premature death has not been shown sufficiently, and that the number of saved lives should not be calculated in determining clean air benefits.

I Could Have Been an October Guy

Yes, before I can say "talent" and "boys of summer," there is a prosaic explanation.

Why Tom Hanks Heart Wilson the Volleyball

If you think this is the story of the Filipino referee who was caught taping (with his cellphone) female volleyball players of Ateneo showering, No. But according to my sources, he was not able to send it to his friends. He was a football referee, BTW, so he can not use "I thought they were hiding their pads there" excuse.
This is a about Castaway and why Tom Hanks loved Wilson. The University of Chicago said that lonely people (they brought their subjects to each of the Hundred Islands in Alaminos) tend to look for humanity in nonhuman things. "The team found a correlation between how lonely people felt and their tendency to describe a gadget in terms of humanlike mental states.”
The team is the UC team not the Ateneo female volleyball team. So no excuse for the referee either.

Jim Zwick: Twain's Main Man and Pinoy Ally

Jim Zwick, 51, an American Studies scholar whose specialties included Mark Twain, political history, and the educational usages of the internet died Thursday (January 24, 2008) at his home outside of Syracuse, New York. Zwick was the author of numerous noted books and
articles on Twain, anti-imperialism and other topics. Major
publications included the books Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire, Inuit
Entertainers in the United States, and Confronting Imperialism: Essays
on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League. He was a frequent
contributor to a wide range of journals and anthologies. Zwick began
creating websites in 1994. He created and ran the Mark Twain site at
About.com, later consolidating his many writings into the widely cited
Boondocksnet.com, which was included in the reading list of Mark Twain courses at universities worldwide. In 2000, he ran the author's posthumous online campaign for the Presidency, MSNB's top-ranked campaign website. With his unique perspective, he provided consultation and commentary for documentary films including Ken Burns' Mark Twain. Living in Hong Kong during the 1970's, his language skills allowed him to travel extensively in the Peoples' Republic of China in 1979, long before the current openness. He later traveled in the Philippines, and was long active with the Friends of the Filipino People. Zwick also served on the Executive Committee of the Mark Twain Circle. Zwick received his BA at Earlham College in 1981 and his MA in Comparative Politics and World History at Syracuse University where he continued to do post-graduate work and teach for some time. He attended Wethersfield High School and the Shanti School in Hartford. Zwick is survived by his father and step-mother Frank and Lynn Zwick of Myrtle Beach, SC, his sister Joan Zwick of Tolland, brothers David
of Old Saybrook, Douglas of Los Angeles, and their families. He is predeceased by his mother Joan Jenkins Zwick, and sister, Susan Laurie Zwick. Memorial contributions may be made to Human Rights Watch, 350 5th Avenue, 34th Floor, New York, NY 10118 (www.hrw.org/donations).

The Life of a Blog

You write your blog. Then hit "Publish." Do you know where your blog goes? You have no idea

Why I Chose Cate Blanchett in the Oscars

Because I believe in probability and there is a study made by sociologists Nicole Esparza of Harvard University and Gabriel Rossman of the University of California, Los Angeles using the Internet Movie Database (yes, the IMDB which you surf for a chance that you will find your name there) for every Oscar-eligible film made between the founding of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 1927 and 2005.
They said that an Oscar nod can be ascertained before the cameras whirred.
So one unsurprising thing, you make them laugh? Sorry. You have nine times more chances if you make them cry. No chance at all if you wanted to make them cry but the audience ended up laughing.
The studies next observation is so obvious: the fewer movies shown, the bigger your chance to be nominated. Actresses were more than twice as likely to be nominated as actors for any given performance, so Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie had it so good. But the real reason is still probability: there were fewer roles for women.
Now the billing factor.
"Actors and actresses were also more likely to receive a nomination if they had a history of being named at the top of the credits, had been nominated for an Oscar before or if they appeared with previously nominated writers and directors."
So there: Cate Blanchett.

Glowing Cats

Three kittens in Korea were cloned by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene. The press release siad that the cloing "could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases." That may seem the best way to justify what the Korean scientists really wanted all along: a glowing cat. Under UV rays, the cats (they were born last January) do glow.

Jerboa

I used "jerboa" in Scrabble TM once and now that it is a rodent. But this is my first time to see it on video. And it turned out, this is the first time it was filmed. It is small and lives only in Gobi Desert in Mongolia, the driest place in the world. It is also nocturnal and has the biggest ears compared to its body. JDV would be so proud.

Attractiveness and Heredity

They have proved it on fruit flies (how did scientists know attractiveness in flies? They held a beauty contest) and now they want to make a sweeping genealization in the whole animal kingdom: attractive fathers beget desirable sons. Now I pity the sons of my friends.

Filial Cannibalism

Eating your offspring may sound unthinkable, but animals from fish to birds are known to do it. Scientists have been unsure why such a behavior would have evolved, but a new study sheds light on the factors that may drive some parents to eat their young. Zoologists have observed filial cannibalism, the act of eating one's offspring, in many different types of animals, including bank voles, house finches, wolf spiders and many fish species. Paradoxically, all of the species also care for the young that they don't eat. Scientists were hard-pressed to explain how such seemingly opposing behaviors could co-exist in the same species and reasoned that there must be some evolutionary benefit to the practice. More

Kronos eating his son

Frog

The French would love this story. A restaurant in Quanzhou in China decided not to kill a frog and instead display it in thier tank. It has six legs, you see. Now coincidentally, we had a case of an Indian na ipinaglihi sa eight-armed god and indeed had eight hands. But they lopped off the extra limbs and the fun is now only imaginary. You know phantom limbs, where a person whose arm had just been lopped off would still feel that the cut arm is still there and sometimes it also feel pain.

Danton Remoto, Meet Your Inventor

Alcohol Slows Dementia

Non-drinkers would get demented about this but Time Magazine reports that alcohol slows down dementia:

Anyone who reads a daily paper could be forgiven for wondering how carbs, alcohol, fats — a whole host of things, really — can be reported as healthy one day and unhealthy the next. Of the conflicted bunch, however, alcohol just might be most enduringly confusing: scientific studies proclaim that it protects against heart attack and stroke, while others suggest it promotes violent tendencies or destroys the liver. Why the mixed messages? A new study demonstrates what can go wrong. The latest in a long line of research on alcohol's benefits — sure to cause a stir — is a paper by geriatrics researchers at the University of Bari in Italy appearing in the May 22 issue of Neurology, revealing that the progression of dementia may be slower in people who drink moderately than in teetotalers. A survey of elderly Italians — 1,445 of whom had no cognitive impairment and 121 who suffered mild cognitive impairment (MCI) — found that, over 3.5 years, those with MCI who drank less than one drink a day progressed to dementia at a rate 85% slower than those who drank nothing. Drinking more did not seem to be better than drinking nothing. Expect big headlines to follow: "Booze boosts the brain"; "A drink a day keeps dementia away."

And then NFL players also have this problem about dementia. Read