Morgan Wick

Thoughts on the Super Bowl of the Ultimate Answer

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I was going to write a post that explored what might have happened if Brett Favre hadn’t thrown an INT in OT of the NFC Championship Game, which would have basically resulted in the greatest Super Bowl in history no contest, but I came under the weather in the middle of last week, and I can’t really concentrate on much of anything under such circumstances.

As it is, this game is definitely one of the greatest Super Bowls in history, but I’m not sure it’s the hands-down greatest. Part of it is also part of the reason I didn’t want to coronate Super Bowl XXXVIII, which XLII is definitely greater than: the slowness of scoring in the first quarter, in this case the entire first half and third quarter, during which most of the scoring effectively came in the first quarter.

But another part of it? No one (well, maybe except people in the Big Apple) is going to remember this Giants team as Super Bowl champions, unless maybe they turn it into a dynasty of their own. They’re going to remember them as the team that dethroned the perfect Patriots.

The story writes itself fairly well, but I just can’t shake the feeling that the better team did not win this game – that the Giants are champions more by dint of their role in a fantastic story, one that really stretches out over the whole season, than by any actual achievement. Part of it is the rather nondescript nature of the Giants. There’s a definite story surrounding Eli Manning but he needs to show that he really does have his brother’s genes in subsequent seasons. It’s nice that Michael Strahan, Plaxico Burress, and company get rings, but none of them are stars the way the quarterbacks and, sometimes, backs and receivers are. Green Bay would have had a better story: Brett Favre winning a Super Bowl in the twilight of his career and almost certainly pulling a Jerome Bettis afterwards. (Which is why I have less of an issue with the Steelers’ Super Bowl XL win than the Giants’ win here, despite the officiating controversies in the former game and the fact that I myself am a Seattlite.) The Cowboys… well, if this were a youth league or even college, a Cowboys-Patriots Super Bowl would basically have been a ready-written sports movie. But the Giants… the Giants are boring. Let’s face it.

About today’s strip: I did, of course, make the strip before the game, but it did cross my mind that the Giants could win the game. I decided I would keep the first panel regardless of the outcome because… well, you’ll see when you see it.

Making life a little bit better…

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I learned some basic PHP in a day and scrapped together a PHP script to handle the archive of the strip. Before, I uploaded an updated index page, an archive page for the new strip, and the strip itself when it was time to post. Now I simply upload the strip and add needed metadata to a database. It’s not much more work, but it will be an infinitely lesser hassle if I need to make changes later, and it will facilitate a future archive search function, as well as other cool archive functions. The only change you’ll notice is in the URLs. The strip is still accessible from the old URL.

Also uploaded a change to the title image I had thought I’d made already.

Okay, maybe I’ll be alerting you to new comics every day after all.

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I’ve started to waffle on the issue of whether to post on Da Blog every time I post a new strip. Each strip page is mostly images and the content of each strip does not appear on the page itself, and neither does “Sandsday” (except for, effective today, the main comic page). Although I have noted a growth in readers of Da Blog, it’s been fairly uneven; although December 29 was the last day I had no readers of Da Blog at all, I’ve had two days of only getting one hit since then. Moreover, it hasn’t really carried over into readers of the strip, and I may be suppressing the growth potential of the strip by not opening it up to the scrutiny of search engines. And if I’m not getting at least one reader every day, there’s hardly any point in me making a strip every day. I made this first batch of strips well in advance, so I’m not exactly entertaining myself with them, at least not on the basis I’m posting them.

Which means it’s time for another Da Blog poll! I want to find out if you think – at least for the time being – I should post on Da Blog whenever I have a new strip. It would be more than just a line saying, “there’s a new strip”, but it would have some sort of background behind it and might serve as a supplement. The exact content would probably vary on a case-by-case basis.

This poll will run until it’s time for the 2/3 strip to be posted.

I personally would have preferred a Pats-Packers Super Bowl…

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I mean, that would have basically guaranteed the best rating in Super Bowl history, right? A quest for perfection combined with the most popular and revered QB in America who might have a chance to end his career Elway-style with a Super Bowl win? Over a team a significant proportion of the country does not like because they think Tom Brady is too much of a celebrity, Bill Belichick is too inhumanly cold, and the whole team cheats. (As recently as Christmas I got a comment attacking me for my Patriots Run to 19-0, which has been updated by the way. Belatedly.)

Last time you can rely on Da Blog to tell you there’s a new strip up

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I’ve posted the new navigational interface. Now you can look at any comic in the short 3-strip history of Sandsday. Of course, it’s going to get a little hard as time goes on, so tomorrow I’m probably going to add a way to punch in a number and be taken to that comic. I do not intend to announce that change – it’ll be up by the time the fourth strip is up.

Building a brighter future… today!

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Okay, in my last post I said I would have a new comic at 11 PM every night. And this is a lot closer to midnight. Well, you see, I’m busy designing a whole navigational interface for the comic (now called “Sandsday”) and I was hoping to get it up tonight. It might still get put up later tonight, and it’ll be up tomorrow night at the latest. But for the moment, if you didn’t see yesterday’s first strip, you’re out of luck.

Drumroll please…

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…and this is what I was hinting about earlier.

Okay, it’s not exactly anything impressive right now. In fact at one point I was considering hosting it on Da Blog until I realized there wasn’t much point to that and hosting it on the web site allowed more potential functionality.

New episodes will appear each night probably around 11 PM PT, with some leeway. Although I had originally intended for the “web site news” tag to refer to every single change I made to the web site, part of the reason I’m not hosting this on Da Blog is that I don’t want it to take over Da Blog. Therefore I won’t post every time I put up a new episode. They’ll be going up like clockwork every night sometime after 11, so you know where and when.

A new way to watch election results

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(No, this isn’t what I was hinting at earlier.)

Assuming you live in the United States, you’re probably used to races being called virtually the instant the polls close. Networks, not wanting to deal with – heaven forbid! – uncertainty (or losing the scoop to a rival network), use exit polls to “cheat” and declare the winner of a race certain without having any actual results to go by. No doubt you may have been confused in 2000 when Gore was called as winning Florida when Bush was consistently leading.

I believe I have a better system to call results based on one thing and one thing only: the results themselves. But it appears complicated at first glance because, as it’s evolved over the years, it involves four different methods of calling a race – four different levels of certainty.

Projection was developed originally as a way for me to avoid having to wait for validation of a foregone conclusion. Used when one candidate leads another by a statistically significant margin consistently, it’s most akin to the networks’ approach but “projection” isn’t really the right word. It’s really more of an expectation. I think as of late I’ve been drifting towards using this as a reflection of what the networks call or aping the AP’s calls.

Auto projection and the other automated methods assume all precincts have an equal number of voters, which isn’t necessarily true but it’s good enough. If Candidate A leads Candidate B by A% to B% with P% of the precincts reporting, then with all percentages expressed as fractions of 1, if A%>B%+(1-P%), the race is autoprojected to A. In other words, A must lead B by at least the percentage of precincts not reporting. This one’s in here for its simplicity and the ability to provide some satisfaction before the really significant one.

Confirmation is a result of the implications of the above assumption, which indicates that A has really won A%*P% of all the votes in play. (Similarly, B has won B%*P%.) Thus, this test involves multiplying A% and B% by P%, and repeating the auto projection test: A%*P%>B%*P%+(1-P%). If A passes this test, and the assumption above is true, it is mathematically impossible for B to pass A. B has been “eliminated” and, if B was second, A is no-doubt-about-it first. A network using this system might still say A “has been auto projected” to win, but once A crosses that confirmation threshhold, you don’t say A “has been confirmed” – you say A has “won”, no doubt about it.

Majority confirmation is one I’m considering dropping. In a two-man race it’s the same as regular confirmation. In large or tightly contested races it might not occur, as I’ve found out in the early presidential primaries. In all races it’s meaningless because the confirmation threshhold has already sealed A’s victory, unless having a majority is meaningful in some way. It basically puts A up for confirmation but against the 50% threshhold instead of B’s reporting-adjusted maximum: A%*P%>.5.

I have tried to keep track of all of this in the past on the general election day, but with 435 House races, 33 Senate races, and 50 Presidential races, I have often lagged behind, which gets worse because I get hooked to what the networks are saying. I’d like to be able to get a constantly updated feed of results that I can plug in easily. The more effective solution at the moment is to enlist any of you who may wish to volunteer; e-mail mwmailsea at yahoo dot com or leave a note in the comments if you’re willing and able to take the challenge November 4. What I’d really like is for some way for a web page to automatically pull up results from a central file and I would only have to make the human projection at most, but even if it were possible I don’t have the requisite knowledge in stuff like JavaScript. Still, I do intend to hold a test of my own abilities to handle the system relatively free from distraction on Super Tuesday, February 5.