Very interesting Madden article

And now for something lighter- ESPN has a very cool article on the history of Madden football.  It seems like this happens every year about now (the game comes out on Tuesday), but this is probably the most interesting one I've seen.

A few interesting tidbits:

• Trip Hawkins (the man basically behind Madden Football) originally wanted to feature Joe Montana, but he was unavailable.
• The first Genesis version (which was a big hit) was done by a different couple developers, who decided to take the game in a different direction.
• John Madden turned down the opportunity to buy stock in EA at the price of $7.50 in 1989.  The price right now is only $17, but I'm sure it has doubled and redoubled since then.
• And the most interesting tidbit- Electronic Arts actually developed the Joe Montana football title for the Genesis, that was branded Sega.  I have no idea why Sega would pay them to do it- of course they neutered their own game.

Also, not sure how much longer this will last, but if you're interested in picking the game up, Amazon has a $20 credit if you preorder.  Not sure how much longer you can preorder- but $20 back is pretty good.

It's been a few days

I was planning on giving me cowriters a chance to chime in with something, but they've said nothing the past few days, so here I am again.  I'm going to try and keep this brief, but I did want to at least address Prop 8.  There are two points that I'd like to make:  First, I think it's ridiculous that it even existed in the first place.  There might be some legal merit to the pro-prop 8ers argument, but morally, I think that it just falls apart.  Second, I want to complain briefly about our legal system; about the fact that something as serious as this can be gamed, and that the pro-gay side seems to have a flawed gameplan.

Ok, first with prop 8 itself.  It seems like there are a few different kinds of people who were arguing for prop 8.  The easiest to dismiss were the flat out bigots.  People who don't like gays and would do anything to marginalize them.  I know that the constitution would frown upon this, but I think that those people should be marginalized; at the very least, we should take their right to vote away.  It frustrates me so much that you can have an intelligent person sit down, weigh the pros and cons of something, and cast a vote, and then Cletus Van Damme can come in right behind him and cancel him out.  I don't have a great solution for this, but it still pisses me off.  If you just threw the flat-out bigots out of the voting, prop 8 would have lost at first anyway.

There are a couple other subsets of people who seem to vote against it.  Rather than listing every group, though, I want to focus on the only one that I think makes sense: the people who are afraid that gay marriage will make gayness more acceptable- that it will somehow lead to more people being gay.  In a perfect world, I would require a person who was going to vote that way to confess to something along the lines of "if it weren't for peer pressure, I would be a homo myself".  If they say something like "that's ridiculous", then my response would be "you're a liar".  Either you're lying about your own repressed homosexuality, or you're lying about your reason for voting, and you belong in line w/ Cletus.

Also, the arguments that are made are just so offensive- The "slippery slope" argument, that allowing gay marriage is only one step away from promoting pedophilia or bestiality.  That's just flat-out ridiculous (and I know a thing or two about ridiculous arguments, I once wrote a paper advocating the removal of the soft-serve machines from my college cafeteria b/c the "freshman 15" were costing the young ladies attending school there thousands of dollars in future earnings.)  Anyway, the reason that I say these arguments are ridiculous is there's no relation between homosexuality and pedophilia or beastophilia.  If anything, there's a closer link between catholocism and pedophilia :p  I know that's a low-blow, but I can't help but put myself in the shoes of some gay person; it would enrage me to be compared to someone who likes to get boned by horses or bone little kids.

On to the legal system itself.  Like everything else, I don't have a solution, but it sucks that now this case is going to be escalated (eventually to the supreme court), and instead of there being seven independent legal scholars up there, we have seven people who were hand-picked by someone who, by definition, is wrapped up in the ridiculousness that is politics.  I know that some justices have changed their perspectives since getting to the court, but some certainly haven't (and I'm not just complaining about the conservative justices).  In this case, it appears as though there is plenty of law on either side of the debate for an intelligent person to make a sound legal argument.  That means that the supreme court isn't compelled to rule one way or another, so they're going to be going based on their own personal beliefs.  There will be a majority, and there will a dissenting opinion.  I just hope that Scalia and Thomas are joining or writing the dissent, not the decision.

Finally, to the game itself.  If you win, you obviously can't appeal a case (there are probably some exceptions, but I was absent the day they taught the law in law school).  So, until the gays attacked prop 8 (and won), there was no way for a higher court to make a ruling.  There's probably something compelling them to attack sooner, rather than later (something like the statute of limitations), but with a Democrat in the White House, I think they should have waited.  All of the judges are old dudes and ladies.  Any one of them could have a heart attack at any time, not to mention the fact that they could die in a car accident, plane wreck, home invasion, any way that the average person might die.  From an "advancing your own agenda" point of view, the fact that there's a Democrat president means that any judge dying isn't a bad thing.  If it's someone who leans left, his replacement will be the same.  If he leans right, his replacement will vote the other way.  It seems like, as of now, the court leans a little bit right.  If I were trying to maximize the chance that prop-8 remained dead, I would have waited until the last possible second to get things rolling.

Also- this seemed topical.  The book "The Nine" talks an awful lot about the extraordinarily political nature of the supreme court.  I read it a while back, but I've lost my copy.  If you're pressed for something to read, it's worth the $11 that amazon is charging.

Making bets with friends without losing the bet or your friends

To make a long story short, I'm now fat and to try and motivate myself to get in shape, I'm about to start a bet with a few coworkers regarding who can lose the greatest percentage of their own bodyfat over a 3 month period.

Instead of going over my plan to lose the weight or trying to sell you something from Amazon (I did buy the calipers linked below, though- so if you want to play along at home, feel free to click through the link and spend the $6), I want to lay out four rules I've picked up, either in law school or in real life, that are instrumental in helping make bets with friends without losing anything (the bet or your friends). 

Rule 1:  Get everything in writing

Let's face it.  Bets sometimes (most of the time) are made in haste.  If your body has more testosterone than estrogen, you probably don't like someone putting forth an idea or dismissing one of yours without offering some hard evidence.  One type of exchange that frequently leads to a bet is this:

Person A:  I just ran a mile in 8 minutes- I'm exhausted.

Person B:  That's not hard at all, I could do that.

Person A:  I'll bet you $50 you can't do it.

Person B:  Alright, let's do it.

At this point, B doesn't know if A is serious or not, and A doesn't really know if B has accepted.  If one of them gets out a piece of paper, though, and starts ironing out terms, the other would definitely know that $50 is going to be changing hands in the near future.

Rule 2:  Make sure that the terms of the bet are clear

In contract law, there's something (theory maybe?) called "mutual mistake".  A good way to piss off your friends and lose money is to enter a bet without knowing exactly how one establishes he has won, and exactly what's at stake.  

To illustrate how easy it is to be in this universe without knowing it, I want to take a look at a bet we just made in the office.  One of my coworkers claimed that he would eat a ghost pepper.  We got the whole thing in writing, but one word was left a little vague.  Basically, there was a prize for him winning ($85 plus I would stop drinking the iced teas from our office fridge for a month, and restock the fridge for everyone else), and a penalty if he doesn't try ($50 chipotle gift card), and if he tries and fails, the whole thing is a wash.  The vague part of this agreement is the "tries" part:  Is it enough to lick the thing?  Can he take a small bite and give up?  Small bite and throw up?  Sit down at the table, smell it, and pass out?  Since there's no way that my coworker is winning this bet (he can't even eat jalepeno poppers w/ seeds), the crucial point is going to be determining if he actually owes the $50, or if it's a wash.

Late last week, we ended up agreeing that "try" is defined as getting at least a dime-sized piece of the pepper at least as far as his esophagus.  We're now good to go, but if we hadn't defined that before he actually sat down next to the pepper, this could have been a very frustrating situation.

Rule 3:  Don't make a (name redacted) bet

In the office, we have a recently coined phrase called a (name redacted) bet.  That's because of this particular coworker, who has a habit of making bets with little-to-no upside.  It sounds great to be on the other side of this bet (free money), but the trouble is, this type of bet is a close relative of the "illusory promise" you might be familiar with from contract law.  I have no idea about the legality of the situation, but the fact is, it's tough to collect from someone when he had no chance to collect from you.  In a strange twist, since it's so hard to collect if you win, making a bet like this sometimes can put you in the no-win situation.

To give you an example, this coworker was recently helping me move out of my flooded apartment.  As it got late, I could tell that he was ready to call it a night, but I really didn't want to keep the uhaul for the extra day and spend another night moving my stuff.  So, I asked him if he would just sort stuff while I continued to make trips- he responded that there were "8 hours left".  To shorten the story- by the next day, we had a bet regarding whether or not I could get everything out of the place, with the help of another coworker, in under 3 hours.  (name redacted) realized that the bet was ridiculous, so he actually showed up and helped, and claimed that his help was the reason we made it, so the bet should be a wash.  I think that was kind of chicken-S, but I was in a situation where everyone was helping me move; combine that with the fact that he basically had no chance to win the bet, and I would have looked like a jerk if I'd seriously tried to collect.

Rule 4:  Offer Odds

If you're not familiar with odds, the basic concept is that they allow you to make any bet "fair".  For example, pretend that you want to bet on the outcome of a roll of the dice.  Obviously, the best number is 7, followed by 6 and 8, and then 5 and 9.  Unless you're dumb or have some special information, you don't want to be betting on the 6 while your buddy has the 7.  UNLESS, that is, you get paid more.  With dice, it's easy to figure out how to make it fair.  There are six different combos that give you 7, and five that give you 6.  So the person who is betting on 6 should get $6 when he wins, and the person betting on 7 should get $5.

The beautiful thing about odds is you can use them to make a bet that a person wouldn't otherwise take (the ghost pepper bet, for example) a reality.  If there's something that you think is highly unlikely (say 10-1), offer to pay the person $300 against his $50.  A lot of times, a person unfamiliar with betting will be intoxicated by the larger number and will gladly agree to something that has a negative expected value.

Strange Questionnaire

So I had planned on my first post being an introduction, just in case we someday get a fan or a follower or something.  Yesterday, though, something strange happened, so I'm going to start with that and get to the intro later.

Briefly, my wife attended a job fair for a well-respected and high-performing private elementary school.  Before she could even sit for her interview, though, she had to fill out a pre-employment questionnaire.  This isn't all that unusual, but the questions definitely were.  I'd post the whole thing, but there's a copyright on the bottom and there are some litigious mofos on the internet these days, so instead I'll just summarize:

The questionnaire was a liberal-hunt.  The questions it asked ranged from stuff like "should a parent pay her kids an equal amount of allowance if they don't do an equal amount of work?", to making a determination of what's more important to our nation's health:  Globalization or Sovereignty (A word that I've never spelled correctly without spell-check), to an incredibly subtle "In two sentences describe the benefits of socialism".

In my opinion, such a questionnaire is ridiculous.  First of all, just because a person thinks that it's OK for a mother to redistribute wealth among her children doesn't mean that person necessarily thinks that we should live in a communist state.  Second, (and I'm just guessing that there are right and wrong answers to the questionnaire, which seemed to be the case) it seems misguided to want an entire staff to share the same political views.  How are those students supposed to develop real critical thinking skills if they only see one perspective throughout elementary school?  Especially when you consider that most parents who would consider sending their children there probably have the same perspective, I don't think that "brainwashed" is an inappropriate term to be throwing around.

I'm sure that the other authors will have something to say about this, and I'm looking forward to an interesting and disrespectful conversation.

Finally, to test this more than anything, I'm including a link to the Football Outsiders Almanac, from Amazon. At about $15, it's cheaper than it would be direct from the Football Outsiders website, and it's an amazingly insightful book for a serious football fan.  Instead of the superficial crap you see in all of the fantasy football magazines (Tom Brady is accurate, Chris Johnson is fast), they take a look into a lot of subtleties of the game.   They have a lot of cool stuff going on, but the most interesting thing is that they try to measure the performance of non-marquee positions, and they also use unconventional stats.  For example, when you're watching a game, you know that a carry of 3 yards on a crucial 3rd and 2 is better than a carry of 5 yards on 3rd and 7.  They measure and adjust for that.  So, without boring you more- spend the $15 and buy the book.