I’ve updated Foomatic-GUI to work with the changed autodetection code in the latest Foomatic printer databases, and made some minor additional fixes. Get it here.

I've also prepared debs of Foomatic 3.0.0rc1; you can download them from people.debian.org.

Until this weekend, I didn’t know who Barbara Cubin was. Now I do. This is the best they could do in Cheney’s former seat?

More, of course, at your one-stop shop for Republican shoe-eating coverage. There seems to be some debate as to whether she was just making a poorly-thought-out analogy or something worse.

Trent Telenko of Winds of Change.NET has an interesting post on the battles on the 3rd Infantry Division’s “Thunder Run” through southern Baghdad last Monday. Not only was it a more ferocious battle than reported last week, it turns out to have been as lopsided as the armored Battle of 73 Easting in Gulf War I. Trent writes:

Let’s put this in perspective. An American service company was ambushed not once, but several times in on a road in close urban combat. It was pinned down in penny packets that were not mutually supported. They were operating under rules of engagement that required warning shots before engagement and the smoke from burning vehicles cut line of sight to 300–400 meters. When the smoke cleared, there were 300 dead Iraqi paramilitaries in front of the support company made up of mechanics, clerk-typists, staff officers & NCOs for two dead Americans.

Compare that to the performance of conscript Russian armored forces in the first battle for Grozney in Chechnya where a Russian Motorized Rifle Regiment was wiped out with 95% of its 150 armored vehicles destroyed.

Or to the results of “Blackhawk Down” in Mogadishu where 18 American Special Forces died at the hands of the Somali Aideed clan.

Wow. Simply wow. RTWT™.

As a political methodologist (the part of The Discipline™ that specializes in probability and statistics), I probably ought to be more interested in baseball than I am. After all, baseball is the most stats-intensive sport in the world by far, largely because it consists of a large number of repetitions of people doing basically the same things—hitting, fielding, and pitching—over and over again, and large numbers of repetitions mean you can make good generalizations from the data. Of course, early in the season, your generalizations can be pretty bad.

David Pinto at Baseball Musings looks at the example of the Kansas City Royals, who are the only remaining undefeated team in the majors, with eight wins so far, but who have been predicted to only win 66 of 162 (or 40.74% of their games). It turns out that there’s an 11.1% chance that a team winning 66 games would have an eight-game winning streak during its season, which most statisticians would attribute to being within the realm of random chance (generally we like 5% as a cutoff).

For fun, extending it to a 9-win streak reduces it to 4.65% (below the 5% level), or just about 1 in 22. At that point, I’d be pretty confident that the Royals will win more than 66, since in 21 of 22 seasons a team that would eventually only win 66 would never have a 9-game winning streak.

For R geeks: evaluate either 1-dbinom(0, 155, dbinom(8, 8, 66/162)) or sum(dbinom(1:155, 155, dbinom(8, 8, 66/162))), depending on your mood. You should get 0.1110256. Change the 155 to 154 and the 8s to 9s to evaluate the 9-win streak hypothesis.

The Royals’ winning streak did end at nine games. Also, David Pinto talks some more about confidence levels (and generously links here) in this post; note that if the prediction had been 67 games, the probability of a 9-win streak would edge above the 5% confidence level (to 5.31%), which indicates both the arbitrariness of a chosen confidence level and that the Royals could still stink up the joint.

Jed Roberts correctly points out that David and I make an invalid independence assumption in the streak calculations that potentially overestimates the probability of a given streak occurring during a season. David also carries a lengthy comment from Michael Weddell on the significance of the Royals’ streak.

Need an explanation for the behavior of Robert Fisk and Eason Jordan? Look no further than Bitter Bitch’s interesting catalog discovery. Suddenly, it all makes sense!

Winds of Change.NET is carrying a guest entry by C. Blake Powers that thinks CNN may have revealed some things about its apparent collaboration with the Saddam regime to try to divert attention from others:

Somebody wants the obvious story pursued. Somebody is willing to live with the howls of outrage and calls for boycotts and such that will be generated. Why? Why are they willing to live with this? What scares them so badly that this is preferable?

Well, in addition to preemptive ass-coverage for when it comes out that CNN has been collaborating for access in other world capitals (and anyone who’s heard a CNN Havana bureau report knows they’re toeing Castro’s line as closely as Jane Arraf toed Saddam’s), it’s possible—and I stress possible—they’ve been complicit in identifying opposition figures within Iraq, thus endangering them, or have provided information streams beyond broadcast information to enemy forces. One possibility: it’s hard to believe that CNN didn’t know where its embedded reporters were located, although that information wasn’t aired, and that information could have been covertly passed to Baghdad, either through Iraqi moles or deliberate acts by CNN employees.

Then again, maybe there isn’t really more to the story (beyond the widespread, and valid, critique of CNN’s so-called “sanctions coverage”). But some enterprising reporter may want to start digging, nonetheless.

In response to my posting regarding my good friend and fellow graduate student Sean-Paul Kelley, a reader of Signifying Nothing was kind enough to write a response.

Subject: Hey, Asshole!

Well, hey to you too, “Hamilton K. Barton <GPIKNIK@aol.com>”. However, I suppose that since I’m only Cc’d, he’s probably actually calling Sean-Paul an asshole, since that’s whose address appears on the To line. Ah well, I’ll live.

Do you have to actually leave your house to participate in the APSA, ACM, or the SPSA (non card carrying) organizations. When you are dealing with something as actual in fact as war, the events are so in your face, ( look at the cameras on Fox and MSNBC some time and tell them that they are not plagiarizing each other) and true to life, that we all seem to have the same reality of what we see and hear. The events are so intensely real, it is almost impossible to not have the same exact response as the person next to you, or the person 5,000 miles away. When someone is trying to keep us informed as diligently as Mr. Kelly is, you can hear the troops have overtaken Saddam Int. Airport, and quickly type “Troops have overtaken Saddam Int. Airport!” A Blogger is a Blogger. Mr. Kelley has actually put himself in a position to be a contributing member to society positively affecting other peoples financial state in this tumultuous economy and still keep us informed. If he were to give us information based on emotion, (Sean Paul Kelly is a Flaming Asshole, I have butted heads with him before.) I would probably have some complaints.

You’ll notice that those cameras on Fox and MSNBC have text in the corner saying who actually set up the cameras, like “Abu Dhabi TV” for example. You see, it would be plagiarism if they just stole Abu Dhabi’s work and pretended that it was their own. Like Sean-Paul stole Stratfor’s work and pretended it was someone else’s.

And, actually, I called Sean-Paul a “Flaming Jackass.” Sheesh. Get your facts straight before sending hatemail.

Why don’t you spend some more time actually criticizing the crap that you put on your web site instead of the information on others? You remind me of the type of little piss ant pussy that got your ass so constantly kicked in high school that you have nothing else to do besides keep hiding yourself behind degrees and titles which give you a false sense of importance. One of the many reasons that I am sending you this response to your totally off base criticism, is that I am presently listening to an interview with Mr. Kelly on an interview on the Jack Ricarde show on 550 KTSA. You reap what you sow. See me in 15 years when you are still chasing acronyms to put behind your name and Mr. Kelly is affecting the world with legislation and charity.

Hmm. Well, hopefully he’ll actually be doing his own work then, instead of just taking Stratfor’s work and passing it off as developed from his own independent sources.

A blogger passes on information and, and yes, he admitted to using information from others. He is not in Iraq, Dumb Ass! He does not by trade benefit from passing on information. We benefit by his ability to pull together information and interpret this information from his, yes education. Not his meaningless titles.

Yes, it’s always nice to benefit from taking credit for something you didn’t do yourself. For example, I’m so inspired by your defense of Sean-Paul that now I’m planning to just retitle someone else’s dissertation instead of writing my own. After all, as long as I get a job it doesn’t really matter if I stole someone else’s work to get it, no?

I really would like for you to bring your backwoods mississippi (no capitals on purpose, and one of my partners was born in miss., and got out as soon as he could) ass to Texas and see how a real state works without the benefit of having to hide behind the revenues of gambling.

One of your partners? Are you sure you don’t live in Utah?

As for Texas, it’s a fine state, and I’m proud to have it in the union. Where would I be without my good buddy Laurence, for example? (And I love all my friends in Utah too, even the polygamous and polyamorous ones!)

Please just mind your own business, and don’t pull others down to make yourself look more worthy than you really are.

Ok, I promise never to mention any wrongdoing I ever see anyone else engage in ever again in my life.

Humility: def. Knowing exactly who and what you are, coupled with a sincere desire to become what you could be.

Wow. Did you get that from a motivational poster?

Look forward to your response.

You’re reading it, Hamilton. Thanks for writing!