Happy New Year

How about this for new years trivia:
It's December 29th, and this is my second post of the year.

*tear*

Maybe I can do better next year.

Take 2

I know I havn't written in a while, but I've had some writer's block at work. I'm hoping some blogging will cure it.

Life is busy. I now stay home with Kyle in the mornings while Mindy works. Mindy's new job has been nice from a monetary standpoint, but it means we have less time together. That's not as fun as you might think. I also watch a little boy, William, for a couple hours in the morning. I'm convinced they conspire between the two of them to make mornings more interesting. One takes a morning off, while the other finds new ways to mess up something. Maybe we should get out of the house more often.

At work, I'm somewhat proud of implementing my simulation to run on a cluster (think large network of computers). UA has a cluster for general research purposes (and another, larger cluster being installed soon). I havn't run anything huge yet, I've gotten enough of a speedup in computation time to claim the new implementation a total success. It always seemed that the old implementation would limit the quality of simulations I could run before a deadline. Now I can be happy for the next few months thinking everything is faster. If history is any judge, It won't be long before I find some way to be dissatisfied again.

So, you think YOU are smart

What you see here is Kyle plugging RCA cables into the front of the TV.

Yes, the corresponding colors are correctly connected.

I'm turning Pro

It's looking increasingly likely that there will be a spot for me next year in the Tour de France.

Boo Rasmussen

I saw a movie

It's somewhat ironic to me that the Transformers motto is "more than meets the eye", yet the movie relies on visual appeal.

Luckily, visual appeal is all this movie needs.

To the San Antonio Spurs

I hope your National Championship means as much to you as it does to me.

Not Convinced

I know the Suns have been out of the playoffs for a while now, but I was out of town. Plus, I'm still bitter. Given the sleazy way the Spurs played I must find a way to say that they are not a better basketball team - and I have.

Sure the Spurs won the series 4:2, but did they significantly outscore the Suns? Let's do a test of significance.

We are trying to show whether the Spurs score minus the Suns score is statistically different than zero. A simple paired t-test will suffice. This test will show whether the difference in scores is due to random game to game fluctuation, or whether the Spurs statistically outscored the Suns during the series and are therefore a better team. If the Spurs score was statistically different (i.e. 'significant'), the P-value will be less than 0.05.

Lets look at some data:
Format (Spurs Score, Suns Score, difference)
Game 1: (111, 106, 5)
Game 2: (81, 101, -20)
Game 3: (108, 101, 7)
Game 4: (98, 104, -6)
Game 5: (88, 85, 3)
Game 6: (114, 106, 8)
Average: (100, 100.5, -.5)
Std Dev: (13.3, 7.9, 10.8)

And finally:
t-value: 0.1136
p-value: 0.9140
Degrees of Freedom: 5

Wow, not even close to significant. In fact, the Suns averaged more points than the Spurs in the series, thanks to their 20 point victory in game 2. Even if you don't include game 2, the P-value is barely less than 0.25.

In review, I must recommend the Suns-Spurs series be extended a few more games.