I already posted this at my Xanga site so maybe some Harding people would read it, but I thought this was cool enough to post here as well.
Some interesting things from around the web:
If you’re a baseball fan, I hope you’re reading the blogs of Dan Fox and J.C. Bradbury on a regular basis. Bradbury is a fellow Braves fan and an economics professor at the University of the South, and both are contributors to the Hardball Times, which is perhaps my favorite site for interesting baseball articles. Fox also writes a lot about Christianity on his blog, which is always a plus.
Anyway, both Fox and Bradbury recently posted in the last day about President Bush’s nominee to head the Federal Reserve Board (to replace Alan Greenspan), Ben Bernanke. I’m normally very hard on Bush for his stances and decisions on other issues, but this looks like a very good decision on his part. Bernanke is a very well-respected economist whose goals include making the Fed’s policy moves a bit more transparent.
Where does Bernanke get his ideas? Apparently, he’s a baseball fan and a fan of Bill James (who coined the term “sabermetrics”). His philosophy is similar to that of most sabermetricians, and his plan for the Fed is “to come up with a statistical formula that processes this information and gets the best forecast” (according to a Columbia colleague of Bernanke). David Leonhardt’s article on the NY Times is great if you want to know more about Bernanke, including his thoughts on ERA as a measure of pitcher performance.
I already like the guy. One point for Dubya.
jfwiii.net 