Of Critters

This post is dedicated to small animals. Today as we enjoyed the warm sun in hammocks, the question was presented about the difference between worms and nightcrawlers. We learned that the term "earthworm" is sort of like the term "mouse." While we know what a mouse is, are we aware that there are several different species of mice with differences in size, appearance, diet, range, etc? The same goes for earthworms. When we use the term "worm" we usually refer to red worms also known as compost worms, They are known for being small, red in color, and excellent for use in compost heaps. Nightcrawlers, however, are more grey in color and can grow up to 14 inches long. Also known as dew worms, nightcrawlers are often seen at night when there is condensation on the grass and it is cooler outside. If you want to learn more about the fascinating difference between these underground allies of ours, visit this page. 

Now let us turn our attention to the boxelder bug. Boxelder bugs get their name since they're always hanging around boxelder trees. They are black beetles that can fly around if they so desire. You can tell it's a boxelder bug because of the way it is, and also since it has an orange x on its back. People always lose their minds about boxelder bugs ("Get it away from me!!! Please!!! Help!!!") but they don't do anything. They can't bite you and they can't sting you but they're just sort of there in the way. I suppose they're a pain as they congregate in huge groups and randomly just show up and cover patio furniture and whole sides of houses. 

Another fun critter is a snake. Snakes are highly underrated creatures and are quite fascinating if you think about them. Their ability to traverse such variable terrains at rapid speeds without limbs is astonishing. Most snake species you'll run into around Provo, Utah are nonvenomous and aren't trying to bit your hand
off. Because Aptive texted me this week trying to recruit me to spray pesticides this summer (hard pass), here is the weekly blog photo of a snake and an Aptive shirt. 

Celebrate the warm temperatures by going outside and appreciating all the underrated critters that are emerging after another cold winter.

Of Corn Doggies

Today I'm just going to write about a few different random things that really aren't related to each other at all besides being correlated in time. Yesterday was 50 cent corn doggy day at Sonic so you know we took advantage of that. Three of us went to the Sonic in Provo and they told us they were out of corn doggies which was very disappointing. We went to another Sonic and they granted our request for 11 corn doggies which were joyfully consumed. I think Arctic Circle still might have the edge in the corn doggy department, but 50 cents is a deal that must be taken advantage of. 

Partially stemming from the prior discussion of french-type fry preferences (see Of Fries), I've decided to make a 32-team bracket to help determine what local restaurant has the best fries (at least per people's opinions via an Instagram story poll). I've asked for submissions and have more than enough for 32 but not for the full 64-team bracket. Most people who've sent in submissions have said McDonald's, so I'm curious if they'll remain on top after all 31 matchups. I had their fries a couple weeks ago and I was actually sort of disappointed. Perhaps there will be another future post about fries – either regarding the people's choices of best fries or after having tried the best fries ourselves to see if my Instagram following has good taste in regards to fries.

Last night CHI had Provo Rec all to ourselves, which was a joyous occasion. There were games of basketball, volleyball, pickleball, and even some spikeball going. Volleyball is such an interesting sport because I've watched it for years so I know a lot about the intricacies about the game (positioning, tactics, rotations, etc) but I've never really played it. I played on Jordan High's club team for one year, but none of us had ever played before so it was pretty low quality volleyball. Since I know the game so well, I naturally assumed I'd be able to step out on the court and play at a high level. It was kind of fun actually performing way under my own expectations and not being "the guy" on any of the teams I was on. I knew where to be on the court, but my sets were not as buttery as I hoped, my passing could have been better, I tipped too often instead of getting a solid swing on the ball, I completely whiffed on a balls perfectly set to me, and I think I had maybe one block the whole night. It gave me a whole new level of respect for the skills and the athleticism of collegiate volleyball players. They're just at a completely different level, and it'll be fun to watch them in person tomorrow night. 

Shoeman spent the last few weeks collecting materials to build a forge outside and melt sheets of copper down to pour into a mold for a desk weight. He spent the morning melting the copper down to molten metal (very impressed he succeeded in that task) but then the crucible was too hot for the tongs. The tongs would bend as he tried to extract the crucible to be able to pour into the mold. He's going to collect a few more materials and give it another shot soon. Needless to say, it's always exciting to see what ideas this fine roommate comes up with, and highly entertaining when he actually goes through with them.

Of Statistics

Today's blog post is dedicated to my wonderful, faithful friend named statistics, or "stats" or "bae" for short. As is the case with any of these writing exercises disguised as blog posts, this post will focus on whatever subject happens to be on my mind on Thursday evening or Friday morning. 

I'm currently working on a project with the BYU volleyball team. In different interviews and conversations with friends and enemies, I've been asked what exactly my project consists of. I want to practice giving a concise response that explains the nature and extent of the problem in terms a normal person would understand, so here is an attempt:

An important metric to look at while analyzing team performance is serving performance and efficiency. A common, yet ineffective way to accomplish this is by looking at the number of service errors and aces. While a good step, it's hard to really see how effective a server is by the number of serves that immediately end the point since the majority of the serves stay in play. Each serve and serve receive is graded. We're focusing on serve receive grade, meaning the player on the opposing team who makes contact with the ball after the serve is graded on how well he passes a ball. 

Using data from about 48000 games from 2016-2021, my job is to sort all the serves in to buckets on if they were perfect passes, positive passes, average passes, incomplete passes (ball goes all the way back over the net), poor passes, failed passes (service aces), or if there was no serve receive grade (service error). What we're looking for is called the first ball side out percentage, which is the percentage of times the receiving teams wins the point on that very first possession. We want to find the overall first ball side out percentage for men's volleyball, as well as the expected first ball side out percentage for each of those serve receive buckets. 

When the pass is perfect, the setter is in perfect position to run the offense. He has the option to set the pin hitters, set the middle, set a back row attacker, or dump it himself. However, with a poor pass the setter is off the net and his options are basically reduced to setting the pin hitters. With fewer options, the serving team has a better idea of where to set the block, how many blockers to send, and allows the remaining defenders to properly position themselves to dig the ball and continue the point. 

Having the coefficients for each category will allow for in-game analysis of serving performance. Using only aces and errors, it is hard to tell how effective a player's serving is with, for example, high numbers in both aces and errors. Are the 3 aces worth 4 free points from service errors? Hard to tell. However, since we expect the FBSO to be lower on poor passes than on perfect passes, we can get a good read on how truly effective these servers would be. Despite not having an ace, a player could have a very low expected FBSO. This tool provides coaches with better service indicators to enable them to be able to properly instruct players to either continue with the same serving strategy (speed, location, serve type, etc) or make adjustments to be more effective. 

As part of this project I'm also pulling out the expected FBSO for individual players. This will allow coaches to see how their players stack up nationally on the service efficiency spectrum and to be able to provide their players with individual benchmark goals to work towards. 

It's been fun watching the volleyball games this season in a new light. Understanding the impact of a good or a bad serve receive has really opened my eyes to why these numbers would be so useful to have as a coach. I'm grateful for STAT 495 R, Zach Knowlton, and BYU Men's Volleyball, especially Devin Young and Giuseppe Vinci, for the opportunity to do this project.

Because pictures are fun, here is one from Devin's senior night when he was still winning the MPSF as a player, not as a coach.

Of Shrubbery and Geocaching

As promised, this week's edition of Brigham's Buckets will focus on some random fun facts on shrubbery and geocaching. These riveting subjects stem from a conversation with Amber Mercer when she spotted approximately seven deer eating leaves outside the Richards Building last Thursday the 18th of February at 6:01 pm MST (see photo). Somehow that deer sighting led to an information exchange involving facts about shrubbery and geocaching, which we will now discuss.

The term "shrub" can be used interchangeably with the word "bush." If you've ever laid eyes upon a bush, you've seen a shrub! Shrubs can be differentiated from trees by an inspection of the base of the plant. A tree has one single trunk that emerges from the earth and splits into different branches well above the ground. A shrub, however, splits into several different branches right from the base and lacks a single trunk. A hedge is made up of several different shrubs that together form a conglomerate landscape feature. 

Shrubs can be tricky as they can be subsetted one step further into what are known as "subshrubs." These little guys are basically just smaller versions of shrubs that don't ever grow to be as tall. They've even been described by some as "not as going up." Another tricky thing about shrubs is that sometimes the line between shrubs and trees can be rather grey. In fact, some plants can even be classified as both shrubs and trees! Fascinating stuff.

Geocaching wasn't a thing until the early 2000s, which was actually surprising to me. The government did not release GPS tools to the general public until that time, so I guess geocaching would have been basically impossible without some device that tracks your precise location and the precise location of a cache. 

In what would seem to be a rather innocent and uneventful activity, geocaching has actually led to some wild stories. Below are a few:

• Some hikers got lost and in their desperation found a cave in the snow. In it was a geocache and they were able to use the coordinates from that to call in search and rescue.
• While looking for a geocache some people discovered a car in the bottom of a ravine. Upon investigation they found a person in the car that was somehow still alive and they were able to get the person rescued.
• Several people have fallen from cliffs while searching for geocaches.

There is a geocache at Kiwanis park that we successfully discovered last night. Luckily it involved no traversing ravines or cliffs to find, and to spice things up we added a cool mummy finger puppet to it for the next time. Thanks to Amber Mercer for her research and insights on shrubbery as well as for her photo of the RB deer. 

Of Basketball

I miss basketball. This morning I decided to stay home from campus since my only class is live remote anyways, so during my lunch break I wandered upstairs to talk to my neighbors for a bit. They had a basketball chilling on the living room floor which of course I picked up and practiced my shooting form several times. I then noticed they had a full length mirror on the wall, and my form looked to be in surprisingly good condition (Shayne, notice how there is no hyphen between surprisingly and good since surprisingly ends in ly). 

It's been since the end of June since I've balled. Last year we had a great group of ballers in my elders quorum and we'd rent out a gym in the RB to play in every couple weeks. I hope my jumper hasn't dipped to Russell Westbrook levels in this COVID-affected year. I'm grateful that despite my own lack of participation in the beautiful game the game continues onward. 

Watching Anthony Edwards absolutely destroy a man tonight with a poster dunk was a sight to behold. We mustn't forget about Steph Curry and the Warriors mounting an epic comeback a couple days ago against the Heat while playing with no bigs and Wiggins on the tallest guy on the court. Can we talk about the NBA without talking about the atrocity it was that Luka is starting in the all-star game over Dolla Dame? I actually like Luka a lot so no disrespect to him at all, but he hasn't been as good this season as he has been in prior years and Dame has been playing out of his mind. But then again this was probably the best thing to happen to Damian Lillard because now he'll use that as even more fuel to convince people to (as he said) "put respect on his _______ name."

Basketball is a large reason I'm studying statistics. In high school I watched the beginning of the analytics revolution in the NBA and how Steph Curry fueled that by his incredible scoring efficiency and deep three-point range. I love the data visualization Kirk Goldsberry did in Sprawlball and what he continues to do on Twitter. I love playing basketball, I love watching basketball, and I love how statistics and basketball overlap.

Here is a photo from the last time I played basketball at the Tueller reunion. Stay tuned for a riveting post next week featuring random facts about shrubbery and geocaching. 

Of Rain

The sound of "Sleeping Lessons" by The Shins again awoke me this morning, and with it came the sound of rain outside. Why on earth is it raining in February? The weather this winter has been very strange, and even though I am still yet to ever strap on skis or a snowboard, I'm disappointed in the lack of snow. Pretty much every single weekend forecast has shown snow Thursday - Sunday and almost every week it's either not snowed, snowed a few flakes, or rained like today. 

This weekend we should be in Tampa at our second ultimate tournament of the season. Last year at this time we were given the gauntlet of playing the 1st, 4th, 5th, 14th, 17th, 18th, and 20th ranked teams in a two-day span. This year I'm sitting in Harold writing a blog post and wishing my Vans didn't have a split in the seam on the left shoe that got the toes and ball of my foot wet. I'm wearing my Waffle House hoodie today instead of enjoying a peanut butter/choco chip waffle and a bacon hashbrown bowl. It is insane that Monday will mark an entire year since our last collegiate or club ultimate game. I don't think anyone anticipated COVID shutting down sports and life for so long, and it's still very unclear as to if or when we'll have competitive games again. 

A teammate expressed to me this week that he was having a hard time staying motivated with nothing really on the horizon. It made me to take a step back and think about how motivated I am. After thinking about it briefly I concluded that I've actually loved those early mornings. I love getting up and getting in hours of work with the boys before morning classes. I'm willing to wake up at 5:30 most mornings because I like playing competitive ultimate, and you cannot find that at Kiwanis park playing pickup with your fhe group. I love hitting the gym and translating that strength to more physicality, durability, and explosiveness on the field. I love the associations I've been blessed with in my years playing this sport.  

After further thought I realized that this motivation/interest principle totally applies to school, work, and other undesirable tasks. On Monday I'll spend several hours either downloading 4500 + xml files one by one or creating some tool that will automate those downloads. I'm excited about it because I'm very interested in this project for the BYU men's volleyball team. Other school assignments or other life tasks aren't nearly as exciting, so I need to be better at looking at the big picture and greater purpose and letting that provide me with motivation to get after things. 

Happy Valentine's Day from CHI from Tampa, 2020

Of Fries

The last few weeks have been spent engaging in the same passionate debate with an old roommate on whether McDonald's or Wendy's have better fries. It's a no-brainer that McDonald's has better fries; fries from Wendy's are way too salty and the quality between batches of fries is wildly inconsistent. One day you'll get a bunch of flopsy fries, sometimes they're crazy salty, and once every so often you'll get a batch that are great. People like Wendy's for the 4 for $4, not the fries. If fries weren't included in the 4 for $4 would anyone actually order fries at Wendy's? I think not.

Anyways, this debate with my friend started when he and a couple friends went to a few different fast food joints, ordered fries from each, and then performed a "blind taste test" to see which one was best. For starters, their sample size was pathetic (only 3 or 4 people as the tasters) and there was nothing blind about the experiment since they all knew what fries they were tasting. They decided that from their taste test there was conclusive evidence that Wendy's fries were not only better than McDonald's but that they were the best fries at fast food locations. You cannot draw conclusive evidence from an experiment that breaks every rule of statistics. This isn't breaking some obscure, higher-level statistical theory but rather basic principles from STAT 121 which just about everyone at BYU has taken some point. The smaller the sample, the greater the variation and less conclusive the results. Personal bias stemming from a non-blind experiment introduce invalid results. I like statistics, but I love statistics done right.

To prove my point, I posted a poll on my Instagram story asking people if which fries they preferred. I didn't include a picture of any fries (which could subconsciously introduce bias) nor did I put my personal opinion anywhere and let the poor people who choose to follow me vote on their preferred fries. Though I'm happy that McDonald's pulled through (currently 126 - 109 or a (.54 - .46 split), I'm disappointed in how close it was. I'm confident that with a larger sample size (235 is way bigger than 4) and no personal bias we are able to see the true results: 

I'm losing my faith in the opinion of the general public over non-important issues like fries and NBA All-Star voting. I'm sad that people jump on trends so easily and actually think that Wendy's fries or better or that Trae Young should be in the all-star game or be considered as an MVP candidate. On what planet would you take Trae Young over Ja Morant? Both are lottery pick point guards drafted to turn their respective franchises around. Ice Trae arrived as the newest member of a garbage team and now the Hawks are... still garbage. As a rookie, Ja became the leader of his team and led them to a play-in game for the playoffs (in the West by the way). Ja Morant has not been described as a piece of tissue paper on defense as Trae Young has been. While it is fun to watch Trae put up 30 points, do some street ball dribbles, and pull up for 30-footers, he's not helping that franchise become a contender. How are people voting for James Harden after a season where he refused to play for the Rockets until he was traded? In that downtime the dude put on like fifty pounds. Klay Thompson is apparently one of the leaders in votes in the West despite playing zero games and being out for the entire season with a torn achilles. 

I guess my point in this is that we often get caught up in the fun trends and don't take five seconds to actually look closer and make a more sound analysis. McDonald's fries > Wendy's fries, Ja > Trae, and slightly overripe bananas > slightly underripe bananas.