Yesterday, the Patriots went into halftime with a 14-10 lead. They didn’t score once in the second half, and went home on the wrong side of a 14-28 game. I said at the time that it reminded me a lot of last year. I pulled up some numbers to be sure. (The following stats are for all of 2009 and 2010, including both regular and post-season games. That’s a total of 19 games.)

• In regulation over that period, we were 11-7-1. The one "tie" went into overtime and the Broncos won on a field goal. (Don't get me started on sudden death overtime.)
• If the games had ended after one half, we would have been 14-3-2 over that period. If they'd ended after three quarters, we'd have been 14-5-0.
• Our total point differential has been 154 points in the first half, and -28 in the second half.
• The point differentials have been 38 in the first quarter, 116 (!!) in the second, 3 points in the third, and -31 in the fourth quarter.

Maybe we can lobby the league to switch to a 45-minute clock when they go to a 20-week/18-game schedule?

Since April 19, the Yankees are 71-47, Rays are 72-47, and the Red Sox are 70-48. It’s not that the Sox have been bad. In fact, in 2009 between games 13 and 131 they were 70-48, and in 2008 they were 69-49. They have been just as good as in previous years. The problem is that the team fell to a quick deficit and has been trying to catch two other extremely good teams. There’s a good chance the AL East will finish the year with two teams with 100+ wins, and Boston with 90+ wins. I’m almost certain this hasn’t happened as long as there have been divisions (1969). The closest I can find is 1977, when the top three teams in the AL East finished with 100, 97, and 97 wins respectively. But remember, that was a six-team division, not four.

To look at this season and draw the conclusion that we’ve had a bad year is to ignore the actual facts. We just haven’t had as good of a year as we needed to have in order to make up our losses in the first couple of weeks.

I’ve now played StarCraft 2 for two days. I’ve finished five missions on the single-player campaign, and played a handful of co-op multiplayer games. If you had asked me to describe the game based on the Beta, I would have said it was just StarCraft HD. Higher resolution, more beautiful, some new tech, but the gameplay is identical. The single player campaign, though, is where this game really shines. The original StarCraft’s single player was essentially a series of levels that got steadily harder and had some story connecting them. The sequel turns makes the stages non-linear, introduces credits as reward for some stages that you can then use to hire mercenary units when you’re in a bind for near-instant help or spend on research to improve units, and secondary objectives in some missions allow you to earn alien research points you can use to improve buildings. The original game only had ten Terran missions, and I’m willing to bet there are triple that in this game. Plus there are probably seven hundred achievements.

The multiplayer is fun, but you kinda need to be a semi-professional to do well at it. As Splatta said the other day, that seems too much like work.

I wrote about the failings of The Diamond Age in a message to my brother a week ago. Now that I have actually finished the book, I can say that my problems with it are still valid. First, the good: I don’t think there’s anyone better than Neal Stephenson when it comes to creating a believable universe around a technologically advanced future. In both this and Snow Crash, his world is fully realized and–more importantly–socially complex.

But The Diamond Age clearly is affected by Stephenson’s ongoing scatterbraineditis in a way that Snow Crash was able to avoid. It’s actually a pretty clear progression from the great plot of Zodiac through to the spaghetti nonsense of Cryponomicon. He creates this nanotech-infused world, introduces us to a few characters and gets us to love them and root for them. Hackworth vanishes from the storyline, then Miranda, then Nell seems to be the central character. Then she disappears when Hackworth reappears and now we’re supposed to care about Fiona for a chapter or two. Then Carl Hollywood becomes a central character. And what ever happened to Dr. X? What’s up with the Fists? Oh, here comes the Mouse Army seemingly from nowhere (or more accurately 200 pages ago). The conflict that supposedly gets resolved doesn’t even begin to appear until three-quarters of the way through the book. And now that I think about it, I’m not sure what the conflict was or even if it was resolved.

I really wanted to love this one, especially since I liked the world so much more than the virtual reality world of Snow Crash. But at least in that book, there was more or less a single conflict, clear protagonists (one was even helpfully named Protagonist). When Stephenson writes sprawling epics, he forgets to put in a direction for the story to go.

Someone should make a blog based on the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. Each week (or twice a week, or daily, or something), there’d be a post which would discuss a single sequence. It’d give some glance at the theory and some history behind the concepts, be they Turing machines, prime numbers, set theory, or bi-directional graphs.

I’m adding this to my “to do when I retire” list.

I’m still a little too tired to intelligently compose all of my thoughts about this weekend’s PAX East, but I’m going to do my best.

1. Without a doubt, the best part of the weekend was the half a dozen times we trekked up to the room with a bunch of standup machines from the American Classic Arcade Museum. Brian tried to get anywhere at all in Dragon's Lair (and succeeded, I think). M and I played Frogger and Pong (both predate a "free play" dip, so you had to get free tokens from an attendant). We played a whole bunch of Flash Gordon pinball. The graphics on Asteroids are eye-piercingly bright. Ms. Pac-Man has legs and she chases furbees. Winner of the award for "game I never heard of before but loved": Omega Race.
2. The worst part of the weekend was the Friday night concert. The concert itself, actually, not so bad. But we showed up about 90 minutes early for the line to get good seats in the balcony. And then what do they do? They force the people in the front of the line to fill in from the sides first. Guh. We argued our point and the excellent Enforcer agreed and let us move. But then the concert started like an hour late and I didn't want to listen to three hours of opening acts to get to MC Frontalot. So I listened to the Protomen and then told myself I'd see Frontalot another time.
3. PC freeplay was fantastic. A couple hundred high-end computers all set up and networked and with a bunch of Steam games loaded up. We played hours and hours of Left 4 Dead 2. I think I might buy it.
4. Console freeplay was also good, especially if you show up early. We went first thing both Saturday and Sunday, and was able to grab a game with almost zero wait. But by the time we left each day, there was a big crowd. Played some Boom Blox (which I was told by an passer-by is the "best Wii game"), and Little Big Planet.
5. The expo floor on Friday: a madhouse, totally terrible. On Sunday: much better. Big ups to Slam Bolt Scrappers, a fun indie multi-player Tetris-inspired battle strategy game, and Split/Second, a beautiful racing game that gets the HUD just right (i.e. almost none at all).
6. 3D displays were all the rage, especially at the nVidia booth. Worth it? Sometimes. Will they take off? Not sure. Raise your hand if you're looking forward to wearing special glasses to play games.
7. Starcraft II was at the nVidia booth (or maybe just near it), but the line was about five people deep and it was clear that everyone wanted fifteen minutes with the game. They could have planned that booth better.
8. Wil Wheaton was great. He mentioned Pandemic during his keynote, and implied that it was a fun co-op board game. We tried two or three times to get it from the library, and the one time it was available, I didn't take it because it's a 4-player game and we had a group of seven. Since then, I've heard two or three negative reviews so I'm not sure what to think anymore.
9. We did get Bang! from the library, which was great fun. We also played a bunch of Fluxx (including the Monty Python flavor) and Munchkin Fu (ninjas) and Munchkin Booty (pirates) at the same time. I won a Munchkin silver piece when an Enforcer walked by just as we were packing up.
10. The Hynes Convention Center is kind of a dump, and was clearly not big enough for the crowds. I hope they move it to the BCEC next year. PAX East has a three-year contract, but I think the two conference centers are managed by the same company, which would hopefully make moving it pretty easy. Update 29 Mar, 2pm: Huzzah, confirmed! PAX East 2011 and 2012 will be at the BCEC!
11. Added 29 Mar, 2pm: The swag bags you got at the door in contained a really small (30 cards?! Really?) but playable Magic: The Gathering deck. Firstly, I hope the guy who came up with the pre-built Magic deck got promoted. Secondly, we were able to sit down in line and start playing four-person Magic games without having to try to remember the rules at all. There were several "riding a bike" similes made.

As everyone who cares already knows, the health care reform bill passed the House late last night. From a policy point of view, it’s a really great thing. The individual insurance mandate combined with the ban of dropping insurees or excluding care for “pre-existing conditions” will be big. In fact, the individual changes that the reform puts in place are widely supported.

But there are a lot of mitigating circumstances that are keeping me from celebrating today. The accounting hand-wave tricks that are in the bill to make it look like a budgetary winner are disgusting. The complete inability for the Democrats to get any moderate Republicans on board with what is a very centrist bill (not to mention the couple dozen moderate Democrats that voted against it) is a real shame. And as a pro-choice liberal, I can’t help but feel disappointed that anti-choice conservatives get to keep any of us from helping poor women get abortions, but I couldn’t keep my money from being used to invade Iraq.

In the end, I simply hope the administration learned a couple of important lessons. Most importantly, if Obama wants something to happen, he needs to be more engaged from day one. I also hope that this reform’s passage helps conservatives realize that the Tea Party’s scorched earth methods aren’t going to work for them and compromise really is a better idea.

I just updated plutor.org to Wordpress 2.9.2 (from the antiquated 2.7). It went smoothly on my end, and it looks like everything’s still up and running, but please let me know if you see any smoke.

The Academy doubled the number of slots for Best Picture nominees (to ten!) but it hasn’t really helped my Oscar scoresheet. Just like past years, I’ll go over the nominees and admit exactly how many movies I haven’t seen this year.

Goose eggs, across the board. In fact, the only nominated movies I saw this year were Coraline (Best Animated Feature Film), Sherlock Holmes (Art Direction and Score), and Star Trek (four nominations, all FX-related). But like usual, there are a whole bunch of movies that are high on my list: Up, Inglorious Basterds, District 9, and The Blind Side (Best Picture? Wow. I loved the book, so I need to see it.)

If I see all of those before March 7, I’ll finish with 8 points, which would tie with my final score last year.

Update: I did manage to see all of the above-listed movies. Expanding Best Picture from 5 to 10 let some great-but-not-fantastic movies in. District 9? Blind Side? Who really thinks those might deserve Best Picture?

Looking back, 2009 was great year for my reading list. Although I only read three fiction books (not counting the collection of Science Fiction I used as waiting-for-inter-library-loan filler), they were all remarkably good. Next year’s list is likely to be very interesting. Not only am I trying to figure out how to fit my new Kindle (thanks, Mom and Dad!) into my reading habits, but I also hope to get fiction recommendations from other people for 2010 so I can try to divide my time 50/50. Right now there are four books on my nightstand, and they’re all non-fiction. What a bad start to that New Year’s resolution.

Here are the books I read this year, and my thoughts on some of them:

• The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
• The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
• Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman - Probably my favorite book of the year. It's got a superheroes-are-imperfect Watchmen vibe going on, but it's less of a distopian view and more of a "day in the life of" the participants. I'm also apparently a sucker for novels with an alternating first-person gimmick (see also The Time Traveler's Wife). I'd be lying if I said I didn't visualize Neil Patrick Harris as the super-intelligent villain.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - This is the first book that I think I've read that has colored the way I read other non-fiction books. How Bill Gates got a lot of computer experience in High School in the 70s was an especially interesting bit.
• Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen
• The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft by Ulrich Boser
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: 25th Annual Collection by Gardner R. Dozois
• Born to Run: The Rise of Ultra-running and the Super-athlete Tribe by Christopher McDougall - Started out slowly with some interesting ultra-runner stories, and escalated into a fantastic tale about the author taking part in a 50-plus mile run in the Mexican desert with some professionals and some legendary native runners. Makes a persuasive case that long-distance running is the reason humans started walking upright.
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy - No, wait, maybe this is my pick for book of the year. The Road was intense and bleak and depressing. My favorite thing about this book is that McCarthy didn't try to give it a story arc or a moral or a hero. It's just a guy and his son trying to get by in an impossible situation. So real, so tragic.

See also 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.