Last Words?

[Alydar in California]

JB has already handled much of this. What\'s left?

David Patent writes: \"Alydar, you are 100 percent correct on the epistemology/teleology issue. My mistake.\"

Thank you for admitting your error, David.

Patent writes: \"It has been 18 years since my justice class with Sandel.\"

Why did you write this sentence, David? There is a Sandel who teaches at Harvard. He is fairly well known. And on a different string, you wrote that you went to law school. Are you trying to tell us that you are a Harvard-educated lawyer? Why tell us? Why not prove it with the logic of your arguments?

Patent writes: \"I have already dealt with your and Alydar\'s point on how you get a tight range without changing variants within a race. All you need is to start with the hypothesis that you start with--the tight range hypothesis. As long as you apply it to every race then your ranges will work out nicely.\"

This is illogical crap. You have never made figures using the projection method, David. If you start making figures in a phony tight range, and if those figures are inaccurate, your figures will come apart at the seams. HP was right. You are making a fool out of yourself. See if you can follow this: A phony tight range means inaccurate numbers. When projecting figures, inaccurate numbers have the same effect as inaccurate result charts--everything goes to hell. THE HORSES ARE COMING OUT OF DIFFERENT RACES.

Patent writes: \"I\'m not disagreeing with that math.\"

Earlier, on the identical question, Patent wrote: \"Jerry--your math here is just wrong.\"

Patent writes some BS about not remembering the bet JB proposed to him:

David. You split the strings to cover your own ineptitude. Look the damn thing up. It \"invalidates\" half of your latest argument.

Patent writes that he has bought Thoro-Graph twice and is convinced Rags is better.

Why am I not surprised?

Going against the thrust of his previous statement, Patent writes that track maintenance doesn\'t significantly change the speed of the track.

Read Bruno De Julio in the archives. Read Jack Kaenal in \"A Breed Apart.\" Lose your blind faith. Open your eyes.

Patent writes that Ragozin\'s office is \"a bunch of communist/socialists.\"

Nonsense, David. If you read the Sheets board, you would know that Friedman wrote that Ragozin\'s office had conservatives and mushy liberals, too.

Patent writes: \"[JB] doesn\'t care about the track surface.\"

Later, Patent writes: \"It\'s not about motive, it\'s about philosophy.\"

David, I still have a soft spot for you, but I have to tell you that you have become a damn joke. If you disagree with this assessment, please let me know. I will happily argue this with you until there is nothing left to argue about. Never have I been so confident.

[Alydar in California]

Patrick Morgan: \"I have one use for you and it\'s not conversation.\"

I have one use for you, Patrick, and that is to get this string back on top of the board--where David Patent will not miss it. Because of his intelligence, arguing with him is a pleasure.

[Mall]

Intelligent? Probably. Logical,I don\'t think so. But the thing that I didn\'t understand was why you took him to task for disclosing that he graduated from Harvard Law School. The image I have now is the stereotyical one, funny looking bowtie with matching suspenders, Brooks Brothers, wing tips,etc, & all in the Vegas heat no less. I had my suspicions, but what threw me was that unlike every other Harvard law grad, DP took longer than the customary 10 mins(5 for undergrads) to make the announcement. Perhaps that has something to do with cyberspace, or perhaps DP\'s not part of the group that an entrepeneur I knew (who only made it to the 10th grade but who hired & fired quite a few Harvard Law grads over the yrs) was talking about when he told me wistfully: \"If there was only some way I could buy them for what they\'re actually worth, and then sell them for what they think they\'re worth, then I could get out of the plastics business and make some serious money.\"

[Alydar in California]

Mall: This is very funny.

I believe David is intelligent and logical. His problem here is that he\'s an advocate, and his client is guilty as hell. His only hope is jury nullification of logic, and he knows that.

The only reason I teased him about Harvard is that he is an inveterate teaser himself.

[dpatent1]

Alydar, Alydar, you just don\'t know how to change leads, do you?

Rolling up the shirtsleeves for another go-round here.

First, however, some preliminaries.

1) Yes, you have correctly identified Sandel.  I\'m shocked that anyone would have picked that up here.  He may be well known in political philosophy circles but 99.9% of the people in this country think Sandel is summer walking footwear.  I have not tried to tell anyone that I\'m a Harvard-educated anything.  I will always let my points speak for themselves.  BTW, I said I used to be a lawyer.  I haven\'t practiced in 5 years.  I have had three other careers, including an entrepreneur who ran a business for two years, so no wing tips, no bowtie.

2) Re: my views of Ragozin.  Yes they are sometimes wrong on a variant.  To err is human.  I\'m not claiming perfection, I\'m claiming superior underlying methodology.  Do I ever take them to task?  Yes, I have, esp. on customer service and their failure to make their product available online.  Luckily I can get it emailed to me now so the latter problem has been solved.  Do I like their editorial policy?  As a rule, No.  Specifically, I think it was dumb to delete Jerry\'s responses.  Will whining about it help anything?  No.  They delete most of my posts when I raise the issue of JB -- one recent exception being the Havre de Grace variant joke.  Am I grateful for this forum over here?  Yes.  Will it make me buy JB\'s product?  No.  

2) Your advocacy on behalf of JB must surely be clouding your judgment.  Your boy has humiliated himself at least 3 times now in his spat with Rag\'s Pimlico numbers:

Exhibit A:
JB Assertion: Ragozin blew the 13th race.
Fact:  Even JB admits they got the 13th race about right.

Exhibit A1:
JB Assertion: \'I had to use a variant eight ( points slower than the previous race, which happened to be the Preakness...
If they are consistent with their avowed methodology, the figures will come up ridiculously slow.
Fact:  Ragozin used the same variant and got the right number.

Exhbit B:
JB Assertion:  Ragozin can\'t post the 13th race because it will expose him as the scoundrel that he is.  $1,000 bounty offered.
Fact:  Race posted.  Now JB has to pay $1,000 to his sworn and deadly enemy.  What a revoltin\' development.

Exhibit C:
JB Assertion:  They split the route/sprint variant.
Fact:  They did not split the route/sprint variant -- \"There was no short/long on Preakness day--the first two races (where the likelihood of a short/long would be the highest) have the same relationship to each other as the last two races have to each other.\" -- Len Friedman

Alydar, don\'t you ever ask yourself why JB is so obsessed with not only Ragozin, but 5 races on a card; actually 1 race on a card -- a race it turns out he was completely wrong in his assumptions on?  Shouldn\'t he be spending his valuable time making those great figures?  If Jason Kidd wasted as much time talking trash and getting in the face of his opponents as Jerry does, he\'d be playing in a pick up game at the \'Y\' real soon.

Now, onto your latest missive.

The tight range hypothesis.

Sorry, Alydar, but I am right here unless you are taking my general statement to a ridiculous extreme (my money\'s on that one since that is the pattern I see in these strings).  I am not claiming that every horse in every race gets a nice pretty number.  Obviously I can see that TG gave MDO a 10 (or something like that) in the Preakness.  The theory behind TG is that horses don\'t do certain things or are unbelievably unlikely to do certain things, like run 6 points off a top (just an example here, don\'t jump down my throat for using this illustration).  If you start with that or a similar assumption about the volatility of equine performance then your numbers will always be in a tighter range than someone who believes that horses can and do run 6 points worse.  That\'s just the basic math.  Yes you will have outliers, usually for horses beaten by 10, 15 or 20 lengths.  But overall your patterns will be tighter.  Are you disputing that?  And the repetition of tight patterns does not prove that your numbers are right, it only proves that you are applying your methodology consistently.
The only way to \'prove\' that I\'m right is to sit down with you and draw up some mock sheets using various assumptions.  If you want to fly to Vegas, I\'ll be happy to do that.

The Math

Alydar, you either missed the distinction between the two math questions or are just trying to score easy points with the crowd.  My point was that I would not dispute that 3.6 points was about 2% of the final time.  The math I disputed was whether 2% was the proper way to analyze the change in track speed.  But, to get around the point of disagreement I asked JB to show some history showing that a similar turf course under similar conditions will always or almost always get faster by 3.6 points.  So far, no response.

The Bet

Thanks to JB for reposting the bet.  Maybe I am inept but I got lost in the strings -- that\'s why I like to start new ones -- avoids the digging.

So, I will gladly accept the bet but don\'t hold your breath.  I go to the races maybe 7 or 8 times a year now -- KY Derby, Preakness, Belmont, BC, and whenever my wife goes home to visit her folks.  Sorry if that sounds like a copout but I think Brown would probably just say that Ragozin blew the variant once we do find such a race and I am proven right.  That\'s his M.O. (see the 13th race debate).

TG vs. Ragozin

Once I learned what JB\'s methodology was, I didn\'t need to do much more comparing.  As I have said over and over and over again, I think that the underlying assumptions and resulting behavior (changing a variant several points up then 8 points down one race later) will result in a product that is not useful to me.

Track maintenance

Alydar, read my post again.  I said routine watering of the track does not, in my view, change the variant from one race to the next.  Track maintenance can and does.  My point was and is that the superficial watering done in between races does not change the variant.  If it did, wouldn\'t we see a consistent pattern that JB could identify for us.  After all, it\'s routine -- it\'s done pretty much the same way on pretty much the same schedule at a given track.  Given the number of similar weather, wind, sun, etc. days at any track over a number of years, you\'d think that JB would have an automatic number he could plug in -- the \'water truck\' change.  But I will bet you (gentleman\'s wager) that JB moves the variant up and down due to water truck maintenance depending on the situation.

The political make-up of Ragozin\'s office

True but I\'m not speaking of the hired help here.

Motive and Philosophy

The term \'motive\' as it was used by the poster to whom I was responding, was given a sinister tint, as in \'motive for a murder\'.  My response was simply that JB has a philosophy about equine performance.  That is what drives his variants.  The track surface is malleable, assumptions about equine performance are not.  Thus, it is accurate to say that he does not care about the track surface.  Any adjustments made are in service to his ideology about \'tight ranges\'.  Does that not make sense?  Is that at all inconsistent?  No, I didn\'t think so.

Your assessment of me

Gosh, Alydar, please don\'t call me a joke.  A \'damn\' one at that.  I might just go throw myself from the Eiffel Tower (the local one).

Looking forward to the next one.

[Alydar in California]

Okay, David. This reply takes the [expletive deleted] cake. Please do me a favor. Go through the old strings, which you have intentionally spread out all over the place, and answer my (and JB\'s) questions. Please do it before midnight. Ignoring them ain\'t cutting it.

Now I need someone to do me a favor. Can someone, anyone, please tell me what buttons I need to push in order to reply sentence by sentence, right under David\'s words? This is going to be one of the longest replies in message board history, and retyping his words will take me forever and be extremely confusing. I can be reached at: LindsayD88&yahoo.com

Thank you.

[Alydar in California]

Make that LindsayD88@yahoo.com

I can\'t tell these symbols apart late at night.

[dpatent1]

You really do believe that Ragozin was on the grassy knoll, don\'t you?

[dpatent1]

Oh, and Alydar, give me a break.  Brown has ducked every single substantive issue I have put in front of him (his usual way is just to throw something back at Ragozin and not deal with my question to him) and you haven\'t answered many if any of my questions to you.  I have dealt with every issue that it is possible to deal with on the board, or that deserves a response, to my best recollection.  Maybe you don\'t like the substance of my responses but I have been a heck of a lot more responsive than you and JB.

[dpatent1]

Sorry for the multiple consecutive postings:

Alydar, I\'m in San Diego until Monday so take your time with your post; and please try to stop oversimplifying for the sake of making a point just to play to the partisan crowd that lives over here.  You are not, from what I can tell, a simpleton, so please don\'t post like one.

[HP]

(Crowd of reporters milling around. David Patent, Alydar and TGJB are at the podium. Robespierre is giving his analysis of an upcoming race, and when TGJB speaks, he holds up an airhorn and drowns him out, and then continues his analysis to the Rag Partisan Crowd. Police barricades separate the Partisan Crowds, and several officers struggle with Jerry Jr., who is yelling about censorship and hypocrisy. Patrick Morgan is looking to get up on the podium to reach Alydar, but he is distracted and stops by Robespierre to ask for some numbers. HP is listening to the Crazy Cabbie - Stuttering John fight on Howard Stern on his Walkman at the bar).

Reporter #12: (Winded from getting banged around in the press moshpit). David, David Patent, what about the weasel issue that\'s been raised? Why don\'t you think this is worth responding to? Isn\'t this getting lost in all this figure making stuff? Isn\'t this really is a separate issue?

TG Partisan Crowd: Yeah, what about that hey.

HP: Yeah, what about that hey. (Looks at a piece of paper. On the paper it says - Loaf of bread. Whole milk. Buy lottery ticket and pick up shirts). How about a beer down here huh, I gotta get going. (To himself) Harvard. (Spits).

[TGJB]

I’m going to leave most of this to Alydar. Briefly:

Your A—I predicted 3 possible things they could do with the race, the third of which was hedge. That’s what they did, and that’s why it was almost right—meaning almost in line with his too-slow Maryland numbers. Your misrepresentation of my position is intentional.

A1---They did not use the same sprint/route relationship as earlier in the card—if they had the 13th would have come up too slow. They had the right idea (completely contrary to what they posted several times in defense of Wood Memorial and other numbers, which hypocrisy was the second  of the 3 possibilities I laid out), they just didn’t go far enough—they hedged. If they had applied the same logic to the relationships between the 11th and 12th they wouldn’t have blown the Schaefer figure, at least not that badly.

B---I didn’t say it would expose him as a scoundrel, just as either dogmatic in the face of strong evidence or a hypocrite. I would say I got my money’s worth, especially since Friedman conceded that there is no fixed relationship between sprints and routes, which by itself undermines most of the “logic” underpinning your comments of the last 2 weeks.

C---“Fact”: Friedman made a statement. Fact: The relationship between the 6th race (route) and the 8th and 9th (the next two dirt races, sprints) on Ragozin is almost 3 points different than that between the first and second, and the 13th to the 11th and 12th.

That would be me, responding directly to your points. You could try that some time. Whoops, I forgot—they taught you at Harvard Law that it is better to be “right” than right.

[superfreakicus]

alydar --

are you seriously retyping everything you reply to?


dude..........

have you thought about maybe copy/pasting?

(ordinarily I wouldn\'t help you prolong this bs, but I\'m sure you\'d do it w/or w/o me.)

[TGJB]

Tell you what , slick. You make a list of the questions I\'ve \"ducked\", and I\'ll do the same, and we\'ll both answer them point by point, deal? Bet you shift the ground.

[superfreakicus]

you\'re ducking the belmont day contest.