– Too many things to list, but great stuff (particularly on coverages) over at Brophy’s site.
– Manny Diaz’s Danger (Fire) Zone: Burnt Orange Nation and Barking Carnival both with some solid analysis of new Texas DC Manny Diaz’s defense.
– Maybe it’s my bias, but I’m from the “If you got two then you ain’t got one” school of thought:
A lot of people talk about our quarterback situation saying if you don’t have a starter, you don’t have a quarterback. I disagree. We have two really good quarterbacks. Both of those guys are great players, great people, exceptionally talented, outstanding team players, and really want to win. – Purdue Coach Danny Hope
– This sentence is accurate: “He was fine, but seriously, this cast of coaches is the exact opposite from the polished evangelists of the SEC.” Also, management books and Butch Davis.
– The Senator (and Joe Posnanski) on … well it’s hard to describe; just read it.
– Making the leap: Camp for incoming college freshman.
– Darren Sproles to New Orleans. Swapping out Reggie Bush for Darren Sproles seems to me an upgrade at that hybrid/scatback position for New Orleans. Thoughts?
– Klosterman on the fastest human alive.
– Jerry Joseph basketball scandal.
– The book review that killed John Keats.
– Old movie plots technology has destroyed.
– Discounting future values:
This so-called exponential discounting — reducing the value of something by a fixed percentage for each unit of time — is standard practice in economics. It comes into play whenever people consider investing for long-term payoff, whether by building railroads for high-speed trains or reining in carbon emissions to preserve the climate. . . .That’s the message of a recent paper written jointly by John Geanakoplos, an economist atYale University, and Doyne Farmer, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico. They argue that economic discounting as currently practiced is logically incorrect . . . . Economists like exponential discounting because it seems “rational”; in particular, it discounts equal periods of time equally. The standard analysis also assumes that the discount rate remains constant. That assumption is rather peculiar, Geanakoplos and Farmer point out, given that interest rates bounce up and down all the time — and the interest rate at any moment should be closely linked to the discount rate, to reflect how cash investments gain value through time.
Revising the assumption of a never-changing discount rate leads to results totally at odds with current economic practice, Geanakoplos and Farmer have shown. To understand their argument, consider the next half-century. Year by year, the true discount rate (which no one knows precisely) will probably fluctuate in some complicated way, following one of many possible up-and-down paths . . . .
That’s simple enough, but here is where things get interesting: In calculating this average, some paths turn out to contribute far more than others. In particular, paths that descend into relatively low rates and stay there for many years have a disproportionate effect — a path at 1 percent for 50 years, for instance, counts 20 times as much as a path running along at 7 percent. Change 50 to 500 years, and the difference becomes 10 trillion times.