And then a miracle occured:

Warmth.

I was hoping that today might be the day that the ice finally melted. But no. Maybe tomorrow we'll get an end of March present of no more ice. It is forecast to be the first 60 degree day of the year, with strong breeze, so we might get there. The geese have been standing out on the ice lately walking around like they're a bit confused.

Early Birds

Early spring, for we haven't yet hit 60 degrees this year, means the birds start to return.  We don't have as many here as we did in Michigan, which is sad, but we still have quite a few compared to when we lived in Utah.  We have a pond just outside our front door, and there is another larger pond/lake a half mile or so down the road.  I can run there in the mornings again now that the snow is gone, and it's a good place to see birds.

All winter we've had the Canadian Geese around that didn't seem to get the memo that they should have kept going south for a few more hundred miles.  Most of them left for the winter, but some of them are either hardier or dumber than the rest.  The geese have now been joined on the water with several types of ducks, which I don't bother trying to classify.  Robins are common here throughout the winter also.  Near our mail box we have some morning doves, which Shannon likes.

In the last 2 or 3 weeks I've seen more hawks hanging around tall polls.  And, to my particular delight, the red winged blackbirds have come back also.  Also around the pond in just the last 2 or 3 days there have been seagulls as well as what I think are killdeer.  No cardinals yet that I've seen, and it is a little sad how few there are here.  In Michigan we could look out in our backyard at pretty much any random time and see cardinals.  The only other birds that I'm particularly looking out for are the heron that were common at the pond last fall, and perhaps another eagle sighting like we had last year.

Even if people call me old because of it, I still like the birds, particularly because they haven't yet started waking me up at 5 am.

How to run in the coldest winter known to man

I think facebook has adequately covered the fact that this winter has been really, really cold.  I didn't know that highs of -15 °F were a thing, but apparently they are.  Cars that won't start and gigantic heating bills are no fun, but let's be real here - the worst thing about a cold winter is what it does to my running.

First off, let's get it out there that I'm no fan of treadmills.  The only thing sillier than running for an hour just to get back to your house where you started, is to run for an hour and never even leave your house.  Ok, there's one thing even sillier, and that is getting in your car and driving to somewhere that you can run for an hour without going anywhere and then get back in your car to drive home.  (Reminds me of Ocean Breeze Soap: "It's just like taking a cruise only there's no boat and you don't actually go anywhere.")  My disdain for treadmills thankfully coincides nicely with my complete lack of access to one.  Couple that with my miserly thrifty ways and there's no way I'm joining a gym for access to one, and that leaves going outside as my only way of running.

Running in the fall was great.  Once we got settled in Illinois, I put in 3 of my top 6 running months ever in October, November and December.  Those 3 months accounted for nearly half (49.7%) of my 2013 running total, and I was primed for an awesome winter.  Then, of course, the polar vortex settled in for an extended stay.  So, today I'm sharing what I've learned about winter running.

1. Windchill was invented for a reason.  I don't go running without checking the wind chill.

2. Spreadsheets are my friend.  Being me, I have a spreadsheet where I record the temperature, wind chill and what I wore for every run that I do.  This can help the next time I have similar conditions and I'm not sure what to wear.

3. Layers.  Layers keep you warm.  Even in winter, bottom layers need to be good clothes for running in, because you'll still sweat.  This primarily means no cotton.  Target has cheap athletic clothing.  A few weeks ago, I got a few things off the 80% off rack at Kohl's for even less.  (Spring is a good time to buy winter things.)  I don't own any running gear other than shoes that cost more than $15, I don't think.  Maybe those $35 shirts are somehow amazing, but I doubt it.

4. Know what gets cold first.  When temperatures start dropping, a hat and gloves are the first things to put on, and conversely, the pieces of "warm" clothing that I'll be wearing until early June this year, apparently.  After fingers and toes, it's upper body (more shirts) and then legs.  Provided my feet stay dry, toes really aren't an issue for me.

5. The coldest part of a run is 5 minutes in.  You start off warm from being inside, and start getting cooler at the start of the run.  As you run though, your body heats up and starts keeping you warm.  For me, 5 minutes is where the coldest point is.  So if I'm 3-5 minutes into a run and I'm cold, I know it'll get better.  If it's beyond that, it might be time to turn around.

6. When it's been "too cold to run" for a solid week, at some point you just say "whatever.  I'm going running anyway."  That's the most important thing I've learned this winter.  What's the worst that can happen?  Ice starts collecting in your beard?  The cross country skiers look at you a little funny?  It's not so bad.  Obviously, there are points where it is physically dangerous to go out, but those points are further away than you think.  Last winter I'd run in temps (wind chills) down into the 20s and stay in if it was colder than that.  Last winter also wasn't that cold.  This year, I wanted to do a similar thing, until I realized that I'd never run again with those sorts of rules.  16 runs of 15 °F or colder later, I'm still alive, and all my toes still work.  In all honesty, 10° isn't all that much colder than 20°.  My coldest run this year was at -7 °F (wind chill.  Actual temp was +7 °F.)  I'm not saying it's fun, but it's doable, and I really can't emphasize enough the importance of just deciding to go, even if it is ridiculously cold.

7. Beards really do keep your face warm.  I know it's probably not for everyone, but I like 'em.  The moisture from breathing collects on my chin, and after a while, ice starts forming.  It gets a bit more interesting when all the hairs start freezing together, because then I can't flex my bottom lip around very well, because it's held in place by all those whiskers.

So, there you go, my cold weather running secrets.  It's not that complicated - you make yourself get off your rear end, go outside and run, but you're wearing 10 times as much stuff as in the summer.

Pickin'

I am an amazing college basketball picker.  I can pick the outcome of games with remarkable consistency.  Sadly, not in a good way.

Through the first round of the NCAA tournament (not the fake first round they invented a few years ago) I did . . . poorly.  I ended that round in the 3.8th percentile.  Yup, 96.2% of people are better than me.  I'm not sure if ESPN counts brackets that are left blank.  I hope not.  One thing they do count is all those silly brackets where someone picks Manhattan and Coastal Carolina in the championship game.  Those utterly ridiculous brackets are, well, ridiculous.  And I'm barely beating them.  So out of people who actually tried, I'm doing even worse than 3.8%.

How you ask? Well, the 1 through 4 seeds almost never lose in the first round.  This year, those teams went 15/16 (only Duke lost).  My bracket had all 16 of the 1-4 seeds winning, which means I got 15 right.  The other 16 games in the first round are a bit harder to pick for everyone, and near impossible for me.

For all the attention that 5/12 upsets get, 5 seeds still win 66% of the time.  6 seeds win 68%, 7 seeds 60% and 8 seeds 46%.  Pick wise, these games represent something reasonably close to a coin flip, which is why those perfect brackets are so hard.  If all 16 games were coin flips, the odds of getting a given number of games correct would be:

0 or 16 games: 0.0015%
1 or 15 games: 0.024%
2 or 14 games: 0.183%
3 or 13 games: 0.854%
4 or 12 games: 2.777%
5 or 11 games: 6.665%
6 or 10 games: 12.219%
7 or 9 games: 17.456%
8 games: 19.638%

Unfortunately for all of you, I don't really feel like taking the time to make a graph of that, or doing the math for the specific tournament games this year using number from kenpom or something like that.  (This will be left as an exercise for the reader.)  But, it's clear that in guessing coin flips, you're generally going to come out close to 50%.  In our 16 flip example, you're going to get 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 right 79% of the time.  How did I do?  I got 3 of the 16 games correct.  The odds of getting 3 or fewer games right? 1%  And that's how you end up in the 3.8th percentile.

While my picks were obviously terrible, the majority of the games were quite close:
I picked VCU over SF Austin.  They lost by 2.
I picked OSU over Dayton.  They lost by 1.
I picked UNM over Stanford.  They lost by 5.
I picked Cincinnati over Harvard.  They lost by 4.
I picked Providence over UNC.  They lost by 2.
I picked St. Joe's over UConn.  They lost in OT.
I picked Oklahoma over North Dakota.  They lost in OT.
I picked Kansas State over Kentucky.  They lost by 7.
I picked St. Louis over NC State.  They lost by 3.
I picked ASU over Texas.  They lost by 2.

All told, there were 16 first round games decided by less than 10 points, and I got 12 of them wrong.  Maybe I'm saving my luck up for one of these years when I can win big.

Hairy Problems

From now on, Shannon isn't allowed to leave the house without doing Ella's hair. A bun is the only hair do that will do these days, and until today, I've never done one before. But, when the tears are flowing, and shrieking fills the air, a certain resolve fills a man's soul, and he musters the courage and strength to do things he's never done before.

It's been almost an hour and it hasn't fallen out. Ella insisted that it needed 2 bobby pins. I don't know what they're supposed to be holding together, exactly, but they're in there.

March Math

March has arrived, which means, it's time to do some math.  This is a long standing tradition for me.  But I know that many* of you have been waiting two long years for more analysis of different NCAA tournament scoring systems.  Wait no longer, your time has come!

To recap past work, the standard scoring system for most NCAA brackets doubles the point value per game each round (1, 2, 4, . . ).  The drawback here is that the final two wins by the champion accounts for 25% of all possible points.  This means that if you have the champion correct, it is essentially impossible for anyone who does not have the champion correct to beat you.  In any office/friend sized competition, you can pretty much just have people pick a final four and a championship final score and save yourself all that time agonizing on all those 6/11 matchups.  They won't ever matter in this scoring system.  Now that I've got the results of the last 29 years of NCAA tournaments in spreadsheet form (just the totals, not year by year) we can look at the value the various seeds provide.

1 seeds have never lost an opening round** game, so they're good for an automatic 4 points in the first round.  They have a 87% winning percentage in the second round, so they're worth about 7 points in that round, the 11, 13, 15 and 20 points in the other rounds.  Total, the 1 seeds produce about 69 points each year, out of 192 total points, or 36.1% of the total available value.  Yes, over 1/3 of the whole contest is just knowing that the 1 seeds are the best teams.  Not surprisingly, the 2 and 3 seeds also provide a lot of value, with 17.9% and 13.0% of the total points coming from those spots.  Pictures say it better, so here's a graph.



The key point here is that life drops off in a hurry.  The championship game is worth 16.7% of the total, which is more points generated that the average total value of every 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 seed.  This is what has always struck me as being lame.  All those 5/12 upsets are what make us love the tournament, but the bracket contests measure something entirely different.  It also means that even when 13 seeds do manage to win a game or two, they aren't producing any value to those who managed to get it right anyway

Occasionally, you will see a bracket that doesn't crank up the value of each round as much, incrementing by one each round.  This decreases the value of the final games significantly, effectively increasing the value of the earlier rounds, and since the early rounds are where the lower seeded teams can make some noise, they see an increase in value with this scoring system.




The 1, 2 and 3 seeds all see a decrease, while every other team goes up, except for the 16 seeds which are stuck at zero.  If one of those 16 seeds ever manages to pull off the upset, it would be huge.  They've lost 116 straight, so if you manage to pick it right, you should be pretty stoked, but all it gets you is a single point.  It does knock a 1 seed out, which will damage other people's brackets, but despite predicting the greatest upset in 30 years of tournament history, you're still going to get creamed by anyone who picked the winner correctly.
So, I proposed a system where you get bonus points for upsets, which brings value back to the lower seeds.  Basically, you take the exponential point value per round (1, 2, 4, 8 . . .) and add on the difference between the seeds, multiplied by the round they're in.  (12 over a 5 in the first round is worth 1 + (12-5)*1 = 8 points.  8 over a 1 in the second round is worth 2 + (8-1)*2 = 16 points.)  Here's the graph:

A big win for the little guys!  The top seeds take another hit, and every team from the 4 through 12 seed have relatively equal values (except for the poor 9 seeds - they just suck).  The system has down sides.  It's a bit harder to implement (warning: math).  Point values of games depend on who makes it there (and who wins) so numbers aren't comparable from year to year, and it is very difficult to look ahead and see what might happen in the bracket.

Of course, I can take this a step further.  The idea I've been pushing here is basically that the system should be weighted such that the value of a win should be inversely proportional to it's likelihood.  We could do that.  In this system, you just need a table of values (which I'm looking at) that tells how many points each seed gets for each win in each round.  For 1 seeds, that would be 1.0, 1.1, 1.5, 2.5, 4.3, and 6.4 points for each win.  For 2 seeds it is 1.1, 1.5, 2.1, 4.6, 9.7 and 29.0.  And so on and so forth.  Of course, it doesn't work at all for projecting a value for an upset that has never happened before, but the system gives out 116 points for a seed reaching a round that has only happened once, so that would be a place to start.  But this method feels inelegant.  Why? Because I say so.  I realize it's no good reason at all, but that's true of all of these systems.  The contest can be whatever you want it to be - or at least, whatever you can convince your friends to play with you.


* if we define "many" as "greater than zero"
** I will never recognize the first 4 games as legitimate

All these years, you've been doing it wrong

I'm sure most of you are familiar with TED talks.  For those who aren't, TED is an acronym for "Technology, Entertainment, Design" and is a conference that gets a very diverse set of people together who give talks on pretty much whatever they want.  It's been around for 30 years, but now that we have this internet thing, a lot more people can see it.  There are good TED talks, and boring TED talks, and sometimes they stray a little too far into entertainment, with the presenter trying to convince me that their study of whatever is somehow the most important insight into the world that has ever been.  But, there is one talk that did change the way I go about life.  I think about it most days, and now I'm sharing it with you.

It's not about education, body language or leadership skills (3 most popular talks with over 15 million views each).  Nope, it's a far more important topic: How to Use a Paper Towel.

It's only four and a half minutes long, so you should go watch it, but it comes down to this: Americans use 13,000,000,000 pounds of paper towels each year.  If you didn't want to count those zeros, that's 13 billion pounds.  (About 40 pounds per person.)  Reducing paper towel usage by 1 towel per person per day would save 571,230,000 pounds of paper each year.  So, what's the trick?  It's a very complicated process that involves two steps: 'shake' and 'fold'.  (Don't worry, he demonstrates each step.)  I've used it, and it works.  For those of us that use public bathrooms regularly (work, church, etc.) it's easy to do.

This is an example of my favorite kind of environmentalism: the obvious kind.  There is literally no reason not to use fewer paper towels.  Well, maybe those 3 seconds extra it takes are that important to you, but I doubt it.  It works just as well, and saves money that can be used for things that I think are more important, like my paycheck.  (Yes, it's a small thing, but there's probably a good quote about "small things making great things come to pass", or "an error of only a few degrees" makes all the difference, or long journeys begin with a single step, or something like that. If I can think up a good quote, maybe I'll post it later.)

The US burns about 365 million gallons of gasoline each day, roughly 1 gallon per person.  Aggressive driving reduces fuel efficiency and does very, very little for you.  We aren't all aggressive drivers, but if 10% of the population could save 10% of their fuel by not riding my bumper and cutting people off wherever possible, that could save 3 million gallons of fuel ($10,000,000 worth) each day.  Whether you think global warming is an issue or not, there's not much use to burning ten million bucks worth of gas if you don't have to.  Examples abound, feel free to share your favorite one, but it's amazing how often we can all be wasteful, and half the time what we're wasting most of all is our own money.  So go save the world, one paper towel at a time.

Dinner Time

This is what what diiner has become at the Blockburger house. Basically, unless you have specifically told her that she needs to stop reading, Julia's nose is in a book. Evidently, today we forgot to reiterate the 'no books at dinner' rule. We're pretty lax at breakfast and lunch, but we usually try to get everyone paying attention to each other at dinner, rather than books.

I'd include a picture of Ella eating dinner, but that's a sight rarely seen around these parts.

Working on the Weekend

It's the sabbath, and today I'll spend part of the day at work.  Of course, I'd rather observe today as a day of rest, but it hasn't worked out that way this week.  It's not all that bad (sabbath wise) as I won't be going in to work until 8pm, so I can still get in the important things like church and the Sunday Afternoon Nap.  The nap is particularly important, as I'll be staying up all night babysitting a furnace, because that's part of life doing R&D on a process that takes multiple days.

We could pretend that this is going to be some weighty discussion of the balance between keeping the sabbath day holy and dealing with the realities of employment, but it's not.  Really, my whole purpose here is to get to the story of the last time I had to work on Sunday.  It's been about 14 years since I got my paychecks from the most anti-sabbath employer of them all: BYU.

I spent a year at BYU washing dishes in the Morris Center, which fed all the residents of Deseret Towers, you know, back when that still existed.  (DT is gone, but I believe the Morris Center is still there.)  As those DTers still needed to eat on Sunday (man cannot live on vending services alone) we were obliged to put in some 4th-commandment-breaking hours.  The dishroom scheduling policy seemed to have the motto that once you've broken the sabbath, you might as well go all out, so when you were scheduled on a Sunday, you worked pretty much all day.  As I recall, once a month or so I have to skip out of church early to head over there and deal with the onslaught of DT eaters.  We'd be minimally staffed, and the hours were limited a bit which guaranteed a steady flow of work hour after hour.  On the upside, I think the students were all a little nicer on Sunday, and we probably had an increase in nice notes that would come down our little conveyor belt thanking us for our efforts.

So, there you have it.  Working on Sunday, even at the "Lord's University".  Ah, the crazy things you do in college.

Excellent Comment

My blog got a new comment today, but it was on an old post, so I was afraid that everyone would miss it, unless I brought some attention to it.  And some things are worth bringing attention to.  The commenter chose to remain anonymous, but here are his important thoughts:

So you're worried striped respect ugly without snow to ear smile, and it is the responsibility of human beings, to hear Te me? " 

In retrospect, it has supported the following, the entire contents of the bag, can I ? "Clause smiled lights to the top of the sink, I made a bee that?" 
The doubt how you can think again I ", find the places, She is probably 

"Well," You'll deal with the landlord that she, but it is not even true this?" 

" is angry silent? police. 

"Ngrn Sasagawa wall has 確呼 Barre. pickup also has a receiver has to tell. " 

day very good mood, what the right Re] If you can not be, her body, "I am this but who. then you'll regardless of the bell"

So there you have it.

(I deleted the incorrectly formatted links selling Prada handbags (legit, I'm sure) that were scattered about the . . um . . story?  Oh, and I translated it out of Japanese, too.  I know my blog can lead people to believe I have a large Japanese following, and you'll be surprised when I tell you that I don't.)