Author Archives: Ted Berg

David Wright right

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Sometimes you have to be patient, and sometimes with the plan that you’re developing, the best signing you can make is not making one. You can’t go out there and succumb to different pressures, just for the sake of doing something.

– David Wright.

I’ve mentioned this before: Sometimes I think David Wright is a party-line team player committed to saying only the right thing. Other times I think he actually believes what he’s saying and has a great big-picture approach to the game, since what he does say tends to be pretty spot-on.

The latter is the case here, naturally. Like I said yesterday, the Mets need to do what the Mets need to do.

DC-area Papa John’s offering 10 free toppings because Ryan Torain rushed for 121 yards in a quarter

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No, I can’t find the rhyme or reason either. For a while, DC-area Domino’s offered one dollar off per pizza per Redskins touchdown, which was nuts when they scored six touchdowns that one time. Do chain pizza places in New York offer deals like this after Jets and Giants games? Could it ever be enough to prompt you to order from a chain pizza place in New York?

Fun fact: Someone in my office building today ordered Domino’s. In Manhattan. It was weird.

And furthermore, are there 10 toppings you’d want on a pizza, together, from Papa John’s? Former roommate Ted Burke suggests “10 times the regular amount of cheese,” which seems reasonable. Looking at the menu, I guess I could go pepperoni, ham, spicy sausage, regular sausage, beef (this is a topping?), bacon, canadian bacon, extra cheese, green peppers and jalapeno peppers. That might be a decent pizza.

Meta musings on the blogger-friendly front office

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James Kannengieser weighs in on speculation that Sandy Alderson’s candidness and accessibility to bloggers will affect the way bloggers cover the team. James is spot-on here. Everyone everywhere is susceptible to biases. Good mainstream media types and good bloggers will fight through them and strive to find some objective truth. Less discerning ones will cave to the spin they’re being sold. Providing access to bloggers will not prevent most bloggers from criticizing the team, it will make their criticism better informed.

Who is Tommy Lee Jones?

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The game show “Jeopardy!” will pit man versus machine this winter in a competition that will show how successful scientists are in creating a computer that can mimic human intelligence.

Two of the venerable game show’s most successful champions — Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — will play two games against “Watson,” a computer program developed by IBM’s artificial intelligence team. The matches will be spread over three days that will air Feb. 14-16, the game show said on Tuesday.

– David Baulder, Associated Press.

Awe-some. Finally, someone has thought to combine two of my favorite things: Jeopardy! and human-robot competition.

You may remember Watson from this post in June. At that point, Watson was still prone to prolonged bouts of answering “Tommy Lee Jones” to clues that had nothing to do with him. I really hope that happens again in the televised version, because computer malfunction is eminently more hilarious when it suggests the computer’s fascination with Tommy Lee Jones.

Also, if by some chance the correct response to every single answer in all three days of Jeopardy! play is “Tommy Lee Jones,” then you know the fix is in.

As of June the computer didn’t appear ready to beat the upper echelon of human competitors, so unless IBM has made some adjustments, smart money’s on Jennings or Rutter.

Of course, I imagine the computer has a reasonable advantage when it comes to betting in Final Jeopardy!, since presumably it has got some sort of matrix to determine the optimal bet given the amount of money it has relative to its opponents. At least I hope it has that. I always wish that existed when I pause the show before Final Jeopardy! and try to determine how each contestant should bet.

It would be kind of awesome if Rutter and Jennings had to conspire to beat the thing in the last round, though I guess that wouldn’t be in the spirit of competition. And it would be even more awesome if, as I suggested in June, Jennings uses the last bit of life in his battered body to scribble the correct Final Jeopardy! response, takes his last breath after learning he has defeated the machine, then is commemorated in folklore forever.

I mean, that would suck for him. But it’d make for a really good story.

Finally, it would be hilarious if all the conventional introductions and mid-game banter extend to the machine. “A computer from Hawthorne, New York: Watson.” Then at the break it tells Alex about the crazy time it got lost in Paris or something.