Friday, 26 December 1997:

From Smart To Stupid

Went to work today. A lot of people underwhelmed by the notion of going to work the day after Christmas. I'm indifferent; the weeks of Christmas and New Year's are either a time to get a lot of work done with few interruptions, or a way to get very little work done because people and resources you need aren't there. So either way, you win, I suppose.

Having been smart enough to resist joining a football pool back in September (how can anyone think of football when there's baseball yet to be played?), I was dumb enough to join a playoff pool today. I'm still not all that interested in football; what interests me is the similarities and differences in the tractability of football statistics as compared to baseball statistics. They're such different animals, and I thought I'd try applying some of my baseball knowledge to football to see how useful it turned out to be.

So Wednesday I gave myself a 2-hour crash course on football stats, crunched some numbers in a spreadsheet, and came up with my picks. Just as with baseball, the stats I really wanted weren't readily available, so I had to compute them myself: Things like opponents' seasonal winning percentage for each team, and total points scored and allowed.

Anyway, my picks turned out as follows:

  1. Wild Card Round:
  2. Divisional Round:
  3. Conference Championship:
  4. Super Bowl: Denver over Green Bay, 24-21
I partly regret the Minnesota pick, since their season stats look good because of their first-string quarterback, who is on the shelf. But they still may pull it out; New York is not a good team. Also, if the game were in Detroit I could almost pick the Lions over the Packers, but they're not. In the AFC, Denver seems so much better than almost anyone else, though KC and Pittsburgh are both good teams.

Anyway, we'll see how this works out. Hopefully I can resist next year. I hope this doesn't mean I have to watch all these playoff games!

I'm more than half-done with MYST: The Book of Atrus, the first of the three prequels to the computer games MYST and Riven. It's not badly-written, although it reads incredibly fast and is short on dramatic tension. (A friend of mine tells me the second book, The Book of Ti'ana, is better.) It has some nice sketches of various scenes in the book, although the rendering technique far outstrips the composition, which is often unclear.

While reading it, it occurred to me that one of the disappointments of Riven was its narrow scope. Something exciting about MYST that was missing from the sequel was the thrill of going somewhere, and not being entirely sure if you'd be able to get back. in Riven, you spend almost the whole game on one world, and you only barely have the thrill of going somewhere else, to explore a new land wholly unconnected with the previous one. The thrill of the unknown and different is mostly absent once you get used to the basic environment.

I'm pretty tired. I think I've been sleeping even worse than I'd thought. Well, not to be misleading; I've been sleeping fairly well, but not enough, and not keeping regular hours, and my body is berating me for it. (Or maybe I just need to start taking naps. I've never been a nap person.) So I am going to trod off to bed and try to get back on schedule. Experience tells me I am a happier and more functional person when well-rested; I should listen to such experience more often.

But such is the nature of the human beast: The ability to learn from experience, and the ability to utterly ignore those teachings. Ah, well.

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