Is that an area of interest for you, Erik? It is in my family — my mom and I have a genetic mutation that makes our blood clot too easily. I’m with you, about Coumadin — you’re not mentioning the mood swings, by the way.

Anyway, this isn’t the place for it, but I’d be interested to know what meds you’re referring to.

Coumadin was first developed as a rat poison at the University of Wisconsin animal laboratories and called warfan – it’s some kinda anagram for UofW. It interfers with the synthesis of one of the coagulation cascade enzymes and can easily be reversed with Vitamin K. Internal bleeding with coumadin is relatively rare, but with severe consequences. Coumadin inter reacts with aspirin making taking the two in combination very, very dangerous.

The mechanical aortic valve replacements require coumadin therapy to protect against blood clotting on the metal valve surfaces and subsequent cerebral stroke. Since my valve is made of organic material I do not have the clotting risks. However, the life expectancy of my valve is ~10-15 years, whereas the the metal valves have considerably longer life expectancy. So, I’ll hafta do this again in ~10-15 years.

Turk’s big straw man head

Remind me of the last time you saw a straw man with a beard that righteous

Sign me up, that’s my dad too.

“It”, meaning the reference.

When I hear Chinese restaurant, I think “Seinfeld, four.”

Don’t stop … don’t stop …

Scoolmarm.

Scratch that: paragraph five.

First, yes, that is absolutely how you come off.

Second, I know all about your bona fides, which are better than mine, and that’s why Holly Hunter is marrying you and telling my six daughters that I’m dead.

Third, I think it’s a fallacy to think of Shapiro’s scheme as statistically oriented, or rather, it’s over-simplified to the point of being fallacious. His scheme his based on gathering huge amounts of data and doing everything possible understand it as decisions are made. That includes not just an advanced statistical approach but also demographic and psychological proflilng, and a major emphasis on standardizing the way that all evaluators (scouts and coaches and special assistants) talk about things and grade players. This could be as simple as sticking with the 20-80 system but just making sure that everyone means the same thing when they mark down a “40,” and I think it has a lot to do with just standardizing the jargon.

Which means, simply, that Shapiro’s methods can’t be broken down by evaluating his statistical evaluation — which no doubt is best-of-breed but still limited. The key thing is realizing that Shapiro understands those limits and is working with a lot more information than mere baseball stats.

Kansas.

Of course.

Some Pink Floyd has to be considered Prog, and it totally rocks

I am going to start rec’ing this. Just letting y’all know.

nope…

I definitely get the sense that Jay is bizarrely irritated about the coin-flip / momentum discussion, for one, although it’s obviously a broader diatribe (lowercase “d” and "t") than that.

GLBC Octoberfest. Only got three left.

I think you’re self-aggrandizing.

I think the way you self-aggrandize is by showing everyone how much more self-deprecating you are than everyone else.

I think this is exactly right. I was just recently thinking about how much nerdier my comments have gottten, and wondered if there was a reason — but I think the best explanation is that there’s no Indians baseball to talk about.

And attempts at self-deprecation are often missed, I think. For partly the same reason that it’s hard to be sarcastic online, or really do anything subtle, unless you’re intimately familiar with the people you’re talking to: a lot of that subtlety is usually conveyed in things like tone, in spoken conversation.

Beer. Absolutely. Not drinking tonight, but I had a yummy Indica IPA the other night.

I nominate Cleveland Crazy 29.

Nice avatar.

For what it is worth, I don’t believe there is much showing-off going on here. I’ve been challenged to learn things I had no previous understanding of—from your reference to Chinese Restaurant Process to Hans’ psychological models to Jay’s rigorous view of contracts (among other things). This is part of the fun. Nor have I found too much jerk or arrogant behavior. If I did I wouldn’t bother reading or posting.

That said, it’s all part of the rough and tumble. I like that about this site: Your assertions get challenged. You get called out for your statements, and it’s your responsibility to question others. You get knocked around sometimes. Jay ruffles feathers, but one is apparently permitted to ruffle back.

I, for one, have every intention of using the Bill James quote the next time I mix it up with Jay over what I deem to be his reductionist view of baseball. The next time Jay calls me out for being too touchy-feely about the game (or the next time I talk about psychology or process) I will have this ammunition.

I say keep up the good work, Logodaedalus. If people don’t want to read about stochastic processes they don’t have to. Reading here has forced me to rethink a lot about what I presumed I knew about baseball. It makes me enjoy the game more, which is saying a lot.

People who go ten miles off-topic and apparently are only posting to show how much they know about something that isn’t even baseball-related = annoying.

For me, this is a comment about Star Wars or Star Trek, nothing more.

chiz-icken-bizz’utt

The rant was not directed at you, but to the extent that your posts in part influenced it, it was moreso your off-topic stuff than the coin-flip statistics. As far as the coin-flip stuff, anybody can learn formulas, but somebody who really understands applied probability knows that there’s little point studying empirically an event that only happens about one time per year, i.e., a 3-1 lead in a best-of-seven major league baseball contest. At that point, to continue hitting the formulas over and over again really only demonstrates that the formulas are all you’ve got.

This seems like a good moment to trot out one of my all-time favorite movie quotes: “Logic is the beginning of all wisdom, but not the end of it.” That, of course, is Spock from Star Trek VI.

Back to the main point. Erik posited that people like coming here because there’s a bunch of nerds running around. I disagree with that. I don’t personally enjoy the hyper-nerdery, and I don’t think the great majority of our 200-ish active users enjoy it, and I don’t think our many thousands of everyday readers enjoy it. I think it’s the work of a small but verbose segment of our most active users, and I think very few people enjoy it. It is, if you will, the attempt of proudly uncool people to don a cloak of coolness of a different fabric, if you will.

And my intent, really, was just to point that out, to provide a little counterpoint. It is cool to be a total geek about baseball, and absolutely, let this be one of the few places where you can use your brain, where you don’t have to dumb down what you’re saying to anyone else. Beyond that, though, nerdy is just … nerdy.

(Cue the SNL sketch with Shatner at the Trek convention …)

Rec.