The GAA Battle

[Will]

[Q]ben03 Wrote:

 and if it weren't for mr. o'byrne we'd be even lower on that list[/q]

Hey, it's not O'Byrne's fault he's that big.  It's just good genes and upbringing. :-D

[ben03]

sure it is ... so i guess this explains his propensity for stupid penalties?

[Will]

[Q]ben03 Wrote:

 sure it is ... so i guess this explains his propensity for stupid penalties?[/q]

Well, some of us have been saying for a while that O'Byrne gets penalized simply because he's too big for his own good.

[ben03]

[Q]Will Wrote:

 [Q2]ben03 Wrote:

 sure it is ... so i guess this explains his propensity for stupid penalties?[/Q]
Well, some of us have been saying for a while that O'Byrne gets penalized simply because he's too big for his own good.[/q]
but holding/tripping/interfering your opposition directly in front of the referee is somehow not his fault?
your defense was the case with Stephen Baby but i'll have to disagree with you for big'ole #2.

[jeh25]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:
Once the record book is signed, it's possible to carry the save percentage out to two, three, or four decimal places of precision, but that's not the same as two, three or four decimal places of accuracy.[/q]

We get it Bill.  We know it isn't accurate. We don't care. You're missing the point.

As sports fans, we've agreed to to live by the fiction that:

a) the numbers are accurate
and
b) absurd numbers of decimal places have meaning.

LaDainian Tomlinson's 2,370 single season yards from scrimmage in 2003 are certainly not meaningfully different from Barry Sanders' 2,358 yards in 1997 given that there was certainly some error in spotting the ball on Barry's 335 rushes and 33 receptions. But they aren't listed as a tie in the books - by convention, we put Tomlinson ahead of Sanders.

Does the third digit in a playoff batting average really mean anything? Of course not. But we still talk about Barry Bonds' .222 average in the playoffs instead of saying he was 2 for 9.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:
A lot of this is a philosophical discussion and it's shaped by how you see the world or what your job is.
[/q]

Gotta disagree. We have a future judge, an ecommerce web programmer, a psychophysicist, and a rocket scientist here. We all use numbers very differently in our jobs, yet as sports fans we all seem to have reached consensus on how stats are used in a sports context.

You seem to want to make this a philosophical discussion to justify your assertion that 93.8 = 93.9, but you're running headlong into 100+ years of sports history here.




 

[KeithK]

[q]Or, you could use collegehockeystats.com, where all but PPG, SHG, and GWG are on a per-game basis.
[www.collegehockeystats.com] [/q]Ugh.  Did you have to point me to stats that show only one Cornellian in the top 50 (Moulson at #31) and two in the top 100 (Hynes at #57)? :-/

[Lauren '06]

[Q](Hynes at #57)?  [/q]
Wow.

[jtwcornell91]

Last year at the Frozen Four I made myself little cheat sheets to see how many minutes Jimmy Howard had to play, for a given number of additional GA, to break LeNeveu's 1.202271... GAA record.  In some hypothetical cases, I had to go to the sixth decimal place to  discriminate between them.  If Howard had been pulled at the 2:14 mark of the third period of the championship game, he and Lenny would literally have been tied.

[RichH]

[Q]KeithK Wrote:

Ugh.  Did you have to point me to stats that show only one Cornellian in the top 50 (Moulson at #31) and two in the top 100 (Hynes at #57)?  [/q]
Well, look at it this way.  Several people here have expressed some concern that all the scoring is coming from one source (#24).  One could use this as counter-evidence and re-make the "wow, this team is deep and doesn't rely on one line to get all the points" argument, especially when you throw in the #14 total offense rank.

Also, consider that the 1 PPG usually impresses us.  In the national picture, that gets you #57.  There are a LOT of NCAA D-1 players.  (1200+, by my dirty estimate).  

I'm more proud of our #1 Defense and #1 Scoring Margin rankings anyway, given our team philosophy.

[billhoward]

[Q]jeh25 Wrote:I get 47 mpg. What are you doing to reduce your oil consumption? [/q]

(You get forty-seven-point how many miles per gallon? Is that miles per gallon or passenger miles per gallon? A loaded SUV getting 11 miles per gallon does better than two people in a 30 mpg Focus SVT or one person in a 50 mpg alternative fuel car. 'Course, most of the time Shamu just has the driver, her not-hands-free cellphone, and her Starbucks coffee on the dash, so it's still 11 not 77 passenger miles per gallon.) My commuter vehicle gets probably 100 passenger miles per gallon and rides like it's on rails because it is.

About stats and decimal places, in a parallel universe, or maybe next week, I could just as happily argue the opposite, that USCO should bring the stats out one more decimal point to keep sports fans happy. (If we take out back and shoot every announcer and writer who mentions a key three-pointer or game tying goal with "51.2" WTF difference does it make not 51 seconds left, I'd cease and desist.) In fact with the USCHO save percentage table, it's so narrow you'd swear there's one more decimal place and it's just not showing up on your PC.

As a service organization that wants to keep readers happy, USCHO should probably keep the stats lovers happy. It ticks off more people to see two decimal places than it annoys people seeing three places (me and Edward Tufte if he even gives a rap about hockey). And it should list the top 100 scorers the way collegehockeystats.com does - or the whole of Division 1 for that matter - but it doesn't.

[Beeeej]

Nobody's asking USCHO to carry GAA out one more decimal place.  We're asking them to stop representing two different GAAs (despite them appearing the same as a result of rounding) as a tie.

Beeeej

[jeh25]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

 [Q2]jeh25 Wrote:I get 47 mpg. What are you doing to reduce your oil consumption? [/Q]
(You get forty-seven-point how many miles per gallon? Is that miles per gallon or passenger miles per gallon? A loaded SUV getting 11 miles per gallon does better than two people in a 30 mpg Focus SVT or one person in a 50 mpg alternative fuel car.

[/q]

Rule #2 on eLF is never to bring up alternative fuels while I'm in the room - just ask Hovorka or VJ.  (Rule #1 being don't piss off certain people or you'll find your browser magically forwarded to goatse.cx...)

But since you asked, that would be 45.8 vehicle mpg over the life of the car. But then again, I regularly carpool with my boss once or twice a week, so on those days, I get 91.6 passenger mpg.

And then I run a ~B40 biodiesel blend from time to time (11 of my last 32 tanks to be exact) which displaces 40% of my petroleum usage on those tanks. Thus, I'd be getting 76.3 miles per petrogallon when driving solo, or 152.6 passenger miles per petrogallon if I'm carpooling...

Your point about passenger miles is well taken, but I disagree with the assertion that a loaded SUV getting 60, 70 or even 80 passenger mpg using gasoline is better than a solo driver 50 mpg vehicle using renewables.  Hell, even a Sebring getting just 20 mpg on E85 is getting 133 miles per petrogallon.

[billhoward]

[OT] Good stuff so long as one includes the energy input at the other end. We (Americans) are more concerned about MPG, when we're concerned about it all. The Europeans' hot button (other than not liking the president) is global warming although when you aggressively tax any engine larger than a lawn mower, that tends to drive up MPG.

Too bad there isn't a way to measure and tax (just kidding; hello, big brother) one's total energy consumption. It's easy to hang it all on the car. A couple lives in a 4,000 square foot house with drafty windows and a 65" plasma TV (500W dissipation) and drives a Prius, they're not 100% earth friendly.

Okay, back to the important stuff like 2, 3, or 4 numbers of precision.

[Greg Berge]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:Too bad there isn't a way to measure and tax (just kidding; hello, big brother) one's total energy consumption. It's easy to hang it all on the car. A couple lives in a 4,000 square foot house with drafty windows and a 65" plasma TV (500W dissipation) and drives a Prius, they're not 100% earth friendly. [/q]
Aren't their fuel, heating and electricity consumption the measure of their energy consumption, and the cost (including taxes) the penalty for it?

[jeh25]

[Q]Greg Berge Wrote:

Aren't their fuel, heating and electricity consumption the measure of their energy consumption, and the cost (including taxes) the penalty for it?

[/q]

Except that regulators keep electricity and natural gas pricing very low as freezing fixed income old people to death is bad PR.  

Conversly, if you can afford a McMansion, the cost of heating and cooling it isn't gonna make you choose a smaller house. Still, that status symbol has an huge environmental footprint in terms of total energy demand.

Bill is absolutely right that its too easy to place all the blame on the transportation sector. The guy that lives in a 2000 sq ft house 4 miles from work and drives an 8 mpg Excursion has a much smaller energy demand that the guy that lives in a 4000 sq ft McMansion and commutes 30 miles in his 30 mpg Audi or 45 mpg Prius.  Yet culturally, we allow the Prius owner to feel morally superior to the Excursion owner.

One solution would be progressive pricing on electricity and natural gas where the first X kWh or CCF costing less, but I'm not holding my breath. The problem is harder with fuel oil since it isn't metered monthly.