Unfinished Projects

Well, I started with a monthly music post just in January, thinking ‘surely I can handle a once every 30 days type of blogging commitment’. Well, the answer is that I certainly listen to enough music every month, but even this laid-back schedule greatly overestimates my blog-diligence.

But, here I am now, and like I said, I did listen to plenty of music in February. The number one contributer to rocking Colin in February was M.O.T.O., hands down. My month started off with a M.O.T.O. show at the Empty Bottle (the Dials also played and they were really good too). M.O.T.O. play Ramones-ish 4-4 punk and pretty much epitomize for me the idea of a Chicago garage punk band (even though they came to Chicago from New Orleans by way of Boston). Every song follows a simple formula — three or four chords, a couple of lyrics, with a short guitar solo after the second verse — and then achieves it perfectly. Here’s a clip (from a different show) of what was probably my favorite song of the night, ‘I Hate My Fucking Job’.

I picked up their album ‘Raw Power’ at the show and have been listening to it pretty constantly since. I just have to lament that I didn’t I know about these guys back when I was in high school. I can’t really think of anything that would have been more awesome back then than a song titled ‘Flipping You Off With Every Finger Of My Hand’. I guess that I haven’t exactly grown out of it yet, so that’s cool. Also, M.O.T.O. play shows pretty much constantly in Chicago, so check it out when you get the chance.

However, I don’t know that all of my hyping of punk bands is really going to go over that well with the like two people who read this blog, so let’s talk about some other styles of music too. In February, I started listening to Mudd Up!, which is a weekly radio show broadcast on wfmu (I just download the podcasts from this page here). The show covers all sorts of beats-based music (hip-hop, electronic, songs for the club but also some pretty abstract stuff) with an international focus, especially Latin American and Caribbean music but also African, Asian, and so on. The host, DJ/Rupture, is a pretty rad musician himself (I saw him play a cool set, opening for the Ex around a year ago). Anyway, I’m digging this show a lot and it is always great to have something that shows up new and fresh every week.

Ok, I’m pretty much done with writing for now, so everything else from February is going into the honorable mentions category. The means Mark Sultan’s solo rocking garage album, awesomely titled ‘The Sultanic Verses’, the Quix*o*tic album, ‘Mortal Mirror’, which I picked up from the Hyde Park Records discount cd section (I’m probably going to have to devote a whole post to those discount cds some day), and ‘Flip Your Wig’, a classic Hüsker Dü album that has been blowing me away. Once again, I’m not really covering any new music. If that’s what you’re hoping for, don’t hold your breath.

linkety-link-link

The last website for Jenn’s and my radio show stopped working a while ago because of some problem with the php installation on the computers at work. So, instead of just moving it, I decided to spend way too much time making something snazzier looking (but lower tech). Check it out here and let me know what you think.

There’s only a few playlists up there so far, but the rest of them are sitting around awaiting minor formatting, so they’ll show up soon.

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but it took me a long while to get around to making these calculations. See, I went to this party to watch the Oscars. I’m not really a big awards show person, so I was hoping to just ignore the television and focus on eating good food (I made a delicious frittata). However, there was an additional aspect to this party, which was a betting pool where everyone tried to pick the winners in 24 categories. I didn’t really want to expose my ignorance by picking a bunch of stinkers, so I went with a pseudo-random strategy for filling out my ballot.

Pseudo-random sounds very fancy, but really I should have just gone ahead and used a random number generator. The method that I did use took a bit longer to calculate, didn’t do anything that the rng wouldn’t do, and had one small drawback/feature (discussed below). For each category, there were between 3 and 5 nominees (usually 5), listed in alphabetical order. The pseudo-random variable that I used was the number of letters in the name of the first nominee (this was a person for some categories and a movie title for others). To generate my pick, I would raise 2 to the power of that number, subtract 1, and mod it with the number of nominees to determine who to pick.

In this formula, x is the number of letters in the first nominee’s name, Ni is the number of nominees in the categories, and Xi is the index of the nominee that I pick, counting from 0. One problem with this formula, which make me think that I should have just used a random number generator are that some people or movies were obviously nominated in many categories, and if they were at the beginning of the alphabet (‘Bourne Ultimatum’, for example) then the same value of x was used for multiple categories. A second problem is that there was one category (Best Documentary Short Subject) had four nominees; since 2 to some power minus 1 is always an odd number, my formula could only take the values 1 or 3 (not 0 or 2). However, I think that overall, my formula did accomplish the goal of being totally uncorrelated to any of the criteria used by the Academy, and therefor qualifies as pseudo-random.

Now then, here is a plot (with a logarithmic y-axis) showing the probability of getting any particular number of correct answers through random picking. The red line is calculated exactly, by generating all possible permutations of the ballot (there are 2.7 million ways to arrange 12 correct and 12 incorrect results!) and using the actual number of nominees in each category. The black curve is a binomial distribution where the probability of success in any category is 21.23% (there are 113 nominees for 24 categories). Obviously, the black curve is an excellent approximation of the actual probability distribution.

So, the big question is how many correct predictions I made. Well, the expectation value is 5.245 correct guesses. And… I only got 3 right. The probability of getting 3 or fewer correct answers is 19.56%, so you could say that I got somewhat unlucky. However, Jenn did a very good job of showing that the Oscars are most likely not a random process by correctly guessing 15 of the winners. The probability of randomly picking at least that many correct results is only 0.00186%!!