After a solid week of practice, I’ve moved from getting the medium-level questions on my practice GMAT to getting hard questions. This is good, because the harder the questions you get (at least on the computer-adaptive test), the higher the score you’re eligible to get.
When I was preparing to take the SAT, one of the most important things I learned from my Princeton Review prep book was how to spot the trick questions and answers in that test. My Princeton Review GMAT prep book is doing the same thing, and I think it will be very helpful. With many of the wrong answers in the test designed to look “right”, it’s important to know how to spot these answers and stay away from them.
For many years, I imagined that my next test would be the GRE, either in Poli Sci or Psychology, depending on whether I wanted to be a spook for the CIA or an industrial psychologist modeling workplace behavior. Well, it turns out I’m taking the GMAT instead.
After leaving my Web design firm, I took a few months to really think about what I wanted to do next. Going to business school quite has filtered itself to the top of my list, and I’m very excited about the prospect. But the fact is, I’m behind.
Me and the Wonderful Girlfriend went to “Ojai”:http://ojairesort.com/, just north of Los Angeles, for a relaxing weekend getaway. It was exactly what we were looking for! We had great treatments (she came back from one literally glowing!), sat beside the pool for way too long, and ate great food at the cafe and at a little place called Suzanne’s. I read the entire latest Harry Potter and the Girlfriend read about 20 pages in _The Age Of Innocence_. I could go on and on, but how much can I write about doing nothing?
So I’ll just show y’all the “pictures”:/images/ojai/.
I watched the De La Hoya fight, I’ve seen many of the highlights on TV, I’ve read the commentators explaining why Sugar Shane got the belts, but I still think Oscar won.
Maybe I watched a different fight from everybody else (or maybe I was taken in by the HBO commentators, who were all pro-De La Hoya, their money boy), but here’s what I saw:
* Oscar dictated the pace of the fight for at least eight rounds
* Oscar dictated the nature of the fight for all 12 rounds
* Oscar threw more punches
* Oscar landed more punches
* Oscar’s jab controled Mosley for at least six rounds
* Power punches were about equal
* Mosley landed almost no combinations
* Oscar mostly landed jabs but got in combinations of his own from time to time
* Oscar never hurt Mosley
* Mosley hurt Oscar, very briefly, twice
This adds up to one conclusion: perhaps Sugar Shane was the better fighter, but he was *outboxed* by Oscar. And isn’t that the game?
Commentators seem to think different. The LA Times’s “Bill Plaschke”:http://www.latimes.com/sports/printedition/la-sp-plaschke14sep14,1,3186309.column?coll=la-headlines-pe-sports says that Mosley won because he drew blood, but that blood came from an unintentional head-butt, so if any judge took sanguescence into account in his or her scoring, that was simply an act of incompetence. The “AP”:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2003/more/09/14/box.mosley.delahoya.ap/index.html says that Mosley was more active and that was why he won, but the CompuBox punch tracker shows that Oscar threw 100 more punches, landed 100 more punches, and completely dominated with his jab. He also ran in circles around Mosley for all but the last round, so how could Sugar Shane have been the more active fighter?
Now, boxing is a game of rounds; one fighter must get ten points each round, the other most often gets nine. De La Hoya-Mosley II was a close fight, whoever you thought won, so I could see judges scoring many rounds for one fighter or another. This focus on small quanta (for instance, a flurry of aggression by Mosley) could hide trends that were strongly present through the whole fight but completely dominant at no single time, like De La Hoya’s control of the pace of the fight. So, I’m not saying that the fix was in here, I’m just saying that, in a Mosley win, you saw a few individual rounds being scored, not a whole fight.
So what ought Oscar have done to win? Well, the obvious answer is that he had to hurt Mosley at some point. Boxing is a violent sport, and the causation of pain is an appropriate metric for judges to use, but let’s be clear here, Mosley never really hurt Oscar either. What else? Well, let’s make a list of what Oscar didn’t do, and assume that doing some of these would have allowed him to win:
* Hurt Mosley
* Punch for power
* Stand and fight
That’s pretty much it, right? And what’s the list above? Well, that’s what a brawler does. That’s what a guy who comes in and goes toe-to-toe with his opponent for twelve rounds does. That’s *not* boxing. So, to win, De La Hoya had to be a fighter, a brawler, not a boxer. Is this what the great sport of boxing has come to?
Having bought a good number of fights in the last few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the current system of three judges with hidden cards does not work. I’ve seen heavyweight fights bought, I’ve seen dubious decisions, and, for a sport with so many questions about its fairness, boxing needs a better scoring system.
There are a lot of options. Pro boxing could choose amateur boxing’s system, which is good but… But I think a good, easy-to-understand solution that takes into account that Boxing is a sweet science and yet still an art is actually to follow the example of many Olympic sports, such as, *gasp*, figure skating and gymnastics. Yes, boxing should have two components to each round’s score: one provided by CompuBox, worth up to five points, which tracks measurable things, such as punches thrown and punches landed (points can even be subtracted for undesirable actions, such as low blows and head butts). This will allow the more active fighter to get points for each round. The second component will be the current judges’ scores. Why incorporate them? Well, boxing, though sweet, is not entirely a science. We still need someone to keep track of non-quantifiable things, like who controls the pace of a fight and who looks scared. Judges can give 5 points to a round’s winner, 4 or 4.5 points to the loser. Judges’ jobs will actually be easier, because they don’t need to count punches, they just need to follow their gut feel for the round.
Let’s see how the fight would’ve been scored if we used my system above. We’ll presume the following, based upon the fight *I* saw:
* Oscar wins the first six rounds on CompuBox
* Sugar Shane wins the last three rounds on CompuBox
* Oscar gets one other round, Mosley gets two on CompuBox
* The winner of each round on CompuBox gets 5 points, the loser 4.5
* We use randomly-selected judge Christodoulu’s scoring for the judge’s score, cutting each fighter’s score in half to comply with our new five-point system
So here’s the actual score:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | Total | |
| Mosley | 10 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 115 |
| De La Hoya | 9 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 113 |
And here’s my suggested score:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | Total | |
| Mosley – Judge | 5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 5 | 5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 57.5 |
| Mosley – CompuBox | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 56.5 |
| De La Hoya – Judge | 4.5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 5 | 5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 56.5 |
| De La Hoya – CompuBox | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 57.5 |
Egads, add that all up and it’s a 114-114 tie! But, hey, it was a close fight. And the value of my scoring system is obvious in this case, because it shows the clear winner of the scientifically-measurable part of the bout getting a lift from that accomplishment. In fact, I probably could’ve given Oscar 8 rounds on CompuBox, which would’ve lifted him to the win.
Is this scoring system perfect? No, but the three-judge system is looked on with too much doubt by too many fans after fights like Lewis-Holyfield I and Saturday’s De La Hoya-Mosley II. If boxing is the sweet science, let scientists and tacticians like De La Hoya win over a fighter who has to brawl.
After much trepidation, I “upgraded to OS X”:http://juniorbird.com/archives/000008.html a little more than three months ago. An expert user of the Classic Mac OS, I braced myself for more than ten years of detailed knowledge about that OS to become immediately obsolete, and for various problems to become difficult and even unsolvable. I worked up my nerve to rely on a command-line interface, to keep track of obscure file locations and decode one XML-based preference file after the other. In return, I expected to get a moderately stable OS that gave me Bluetooth, hot new games and software and a built-in Web development environment.
Turns out almost nothing I expected about OS X was right. I didn’t have to delve into its UNIX underpinnings to get the darned thing to work; the system wasn’t moderately stable, it was rock-solid; fixing problems was easy; and I’ve only just now begun to touch the Web development features.
Where do I start with this review? Well, first let’s look at “the things I loved, hated and didn’t know what I thought about”:http://juniorbird.com/archives/000009.html when I first installed X.
h3. Things I Thought I Loved
*Bluetooth:* Yeah, this is great. What I said before.
*New Apple And Application Menus:* Ditto.
*The Look:* Ditto Ditto
*ODBC:* One of those things I expected I’d love, I haven’t touched this. Probably a side effect of not using the Web development features.
*Terminal:* Also barely touched this.
h3. Things I Wasn’t Sure I Liked
*Safari:* OK, I’ve changed entirely on this. I love Safari! It’s got all the features I need in a Web browser. Fast, stable, pop-up blocking, and I love tabs. I’d like better compatibility with some banking Web sites, and the whole ability to work with the window behind the active one is annoying, but it’s a great app.
*Those Buttons In Finder Windows:* Oddly, I think I use the Finder less now, so I rarely notice the buttons. Not useful items. More on the Finder later.
*iApps:* I tolerate iCal, which has the disastrous interface flaw that you need to tab from a field before it will keep the value you just entered in it. This means, for instance, that if you enter the starting time for an event and don’t tab away, the time will be reset to the time at which you entered the event. Since the single most important thing a calendar has to do is get the time and date of an event right, this is entirely unacceptable. iTunes is, of course, wonderful. Address Book and Mail are minimal and thus minimally acceptable, if at least free. iPhoto is a lot of fun but needs an “export” command badly so that you can adjust a photo in iPhoto and then save it to the Web or e-mail it to a friend.
h3. Things I Knew I’d Dislike
*The Dock:* I knew I’d dislike it, but I’ve tamed it to my needs. It’s actually not bad for switching apps and I like that apps in the dock (like my memory monitor) can show data and others (like Mail) can show state. I’ve abandoned it for application launching, and am happy enough.
*Those Flat Microsoft-Style Buttons:* What I said before.
*Buttons Without Tooltips:* These are awful and have caused me to make serious errors in the past. If you’re not going to have a label, you must have a tooltip. The automatic display of some sort of tooltip for every button must be built into the system.
*Brushed Metal Interface:* I hate to say, but it’s pretty pretty. It’s OK with me.
Of course, there’s plenty of things that I’ve discovered that I hadn’t anticipated:
h3. Things I Miss From OS 9
*Pop-Up Windows:* If you’re working, it’s convenient to have windows at your fingertips. It’s kind of too much to have tons of folders in the Dock, but I suppose I can try it.
*Extensions And Control Panel Folders:* It used to be, if you installed something that futzed with your system it went in these. Now, it goes in one of several Library folders or subfolders. Centralizing everything makes it easy to manage.
*Extensions and Control Panels Showing At Startup:* Not only did it make long startup times less boring, but it provided a lot of info about what was going on. The current spinning clock at startup doesn’t tell you what’s happening, which means that, if something goes wrong, you don’t know where, and it doesn’t pass the time, which makes it seem like startup takes even longer.
*Extensions Manager:* This let you turn various control panels and extensions on and off. Still necessary, because there’s all sorts of things you can install to tweak how your system works.
*Location Manager:* The old Location Manager really let you change location: internet access, printer, even the behavior of some apps and some system defaults could be changed based on where you are. The current Location Manager lets you change only network preferences. A lot more changes when you move around!
*Chooser:* I’m probably the only person in the world who will cop to this, but the fact is that the current location of the Network Browser is just too obscure, and Print Center is also too well-hidden. Both should be, at the very least, in the Apple menu; then they might replace the Chooser.
*Pull-Out Control Panels Menu:* Up through System 6, the Classic Mac OS had a single Control Panel application that let you cycle through various different things you could control. In System 7 and later (and in Windows ME and later, hint hint), you got a pull-out menu of all the control panels. Let’s be clear about this: when I select Control Panel, I never ever want to go to the main Control Panel application, I only want to go to a single Control Panel. There’s therefore no reason to drop me into the main app. In addition, the organization of panels is not as intuitive as it might be, which means that I often have a hard time finding the one I want. The old alphabetical organization worked well, once you were even slightly familiar with the system.
*Control Strip:* While I could see that this is just another place to secret settings, to me it was convenient way for power users to manipulate features they often fooled with. Plus, it could be made compact. Perhaps some sort of in-Dock application could replace it. The ability to put controls in the menu bar is not an adequate replacement, because there’s only so much space there and my apps need it.
h3. New Things I Love
*Stability:* I knew this would be good, but I didn’t appreciate how rock-solid X would be. I’m running at just over two reboots a month, and most of those come from installing apps. I’ve had maybe 3 real needs to restart in the last 90-some days.
*Transparency:* Not just eye candy, this gives things another way to set a visual hierarchy. Visual hierarchies are good.
*Shareware:* The release of X has definitely reinvigorated the Mac shareware community. Yay small clever apps!
*System-Wide Address Book:* I will never use an e-mail app that doesn’t use the Address Book, because having addresses available everywhere is so useful.
*Services:* Universally-available tools are great. Now if they were just there for Carbon apps…
*Real Multithreading:* The ability to really do work while you do things like large file copies, emptying the trash and even launching applications is great. X’s ability to enable you to work while an app launches surpasses, in my opinion, even Windows XP’s.
All in all, I’m impressed with X. It works well and it does what I need. Best of all, after working in it for just 90 days, I already feel like I’m as efficient in it as I was in 9, with all the years of experience I had there. It’s a gimme of an update, and I’d recommend it to anyone.
What is it good for? Well, apparently, absolutely nothing.
Where are we today with Gulf War II (or III, if you count that little scrap Iran and Iraq had for 10 years in the ’80s)? Well, we’ve appropriated (or are appropriating) $187 billion for the war so far (that’s nearly 9% of the entire budget for “FY 2003″:http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/04feb20020800/www.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2003/pdf/bud34.pdf). We’ve not got the oil going yet, so there’s no money in that, but at least Halliburton’s busy rebuilding the country. We alienated many of our closest allies, including Germany and Russia, we scared the crap out of North Korea so that they want to have nuclear weapons, and we may have convinced Iran that they need nukes too. We’ve done little damage to Al-Quaeda, and haven’t apparently decreased Palestinian suicide bombing any. Oh, and an American soldier or two seems to get killed every couple of days over in ol’ Mesopotamia.
All in all, this is a pretty depressing bill of sale. Makes ya wonder what the administration was up to when they decided to invade, eh?
It’s easy for an administration to get drawn into something bigger than it expects; happened to Kennedy, Johnson, even McKinley. Doesn’t necessarily say anything bad about the administration; things look different before you get into a conflict than when you are actually in it. The question is: was the Bush Jr. administration dragged beyond their anticipated scope of involvement, or did they just not have a plan?
Well, if they had a plan, such a plan would include:
# Specific goals to be accomplished within Iraq
# A timeline for said goals
# A plan to provide sufficient forces to take the country and accomplish said goals
# Funds to allow deployment of troops and other expenditures required to accomplish said goals
# A clear timeline or set of objectives that will clearly establish criteria for the withdrawal of US forces (in other words, a way out)
Do we have any of those things?
# Well, there’s clear goals — the destruction of the Ba’athist party is obvious. Other goals are not so clear. Did we really worry about Iraq’s WMD program? If so, we sure haven’t accomplished the goal of destroying it (although we certainly disrupted it). Do we just want to steal Iraq’s oil? Do we want to profit off of rebuilding it?
# There’s been no publicly-released timeline, and comments surrounding the latest budget request suggest that our commitment in Iraq is open-ended
# Unless the plan was to get out in much less than a year, we clearly don’t have sufficient forces to occupy Iraq. To have an adequate rotation policy we’d need to have less than half of the forces deployed there that we currently have. It’s hard to believe that anyone thought that 75,000 troops would be adequate to occupy Iraq (although as few as 25,000 would be enough if domestic Iraqi forces were available to police the country; it’s unlikely that the administration planned on this because they dissolved the Army, and it could take more than a year to build a new one — a fact which they knew beforehand).
# It’s hard to know if funds were allocated. Certainly making multiple budget requests doesn’t look good. Even worse, there’s no plan to pay for this — just an increase in the deficit. And, while $187 billion is a lot, it’s not really that much to invade, occupy and then rebuild a country. Heck, we’re asking other countries for more money! Sounds like the Bush administration didn’t have money put aside beforehand.
# It’s not at all clear what would allow us to get out of Iraq. The administration hasn’t set any clear standards or timelines, at least publicly, and I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t.
So there’s no evidence of a plan. Instead, it looks like the Bush administration just decided to invade Iraq, then did it. Let’s see what this lack of a plan got us:
* We invaded Iraq, on our own dime, risking our own men and women
* We pissed off loads of people
Given all that, we could’ve at least run the show, keeping the oil and using the reconstruction of the country to provide American jobs, but now:
* Now we’re begging other countries to pay
* And we’re asking them to send troops
* And in return for all of this, we’ll give up control
* Oh, plus the Iraqis might get their country back right quick.
And that, boys and girls, is what you get if you don’t have a plan. Moral: always have a plan, even if it’s awful. A plan is better than no plan.
If the Bush administration had a plan, they could have:
* Developed a multinational coalition, had outside funders and troops from the beginning, and embarrassed the French and Russians by forcing them to veto a resolution passed by the majority of the Security Council, or
* Moved in with enough forces and money to run the show ourselves and gain all of the benefits ourselves
Instead, we got neither. Plan, folks, plan.
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