Adventures in the Rockies

I just got back from a conference in Salt Lake City, which explains the lack of posts recently. Some interesting musings:

1) I got to check out the AAA Salt Lake Bees, an Angels affiliate. The stadium was nothing special. It was very hot, so almost everyone sat in the shade. They had a few local microbrews that I got to try. The biggest problem I had was that most concession stands were closed in the middle of the 5th when I went up to get food. I know sporting events cut off alcohol sales after a certain point, but food sales? The best part about the park was the beautiful view of the Rockies in the background. I'll post a pic when I get a chance.

2) Salt Lake City, at least the part that I frequented, seems to have a lot of homeless. It appeared to be more than Philadelphia, although by no means was I counting. Also, when asked for money from a homeless person, many people intuitively assume the person is just looking to buy alcohol. I often assume this myself. Well I passed a homeless person in Salt Lake City who specifically asked for money to buy whiskey. While I did not give him any, I applaud the honesty.

3) There is a brewpub in the city called Squatters Pub. Overall, their food and beer are not that great (another brewpub called Red Rock was better). However, they do have a beer called Polygamy Porter. The slogan on the tap handle was "You can't have just one".

4) The conference was on statistics and had a few sections on statistics in sports, the majority on baseball. I was only able to make it to one of these talks, by a UPenn professor trying to predict the number of HRs a player will hit by training his model on about 15 years worth of data. He claimed that if you assume that plate appearances are known (and therefore he's only predicting HR rate) his root mean squared error was less than 5. However, going into a season the PAs are unknown and would need to be modelled as well, he had not done this yet. An interesting talk, although I think his model left room for improvement. I need to find some free time to work on such a project.

5) I got to do some hiking up on some of the Alta ski resort trails. There is a small road only open in the summer that leads you to the top of one of the ski lifts and you can climb from there. The views were gorgeous, but we did not make it to the peak as the rain and lightning started. I did see a bolt of lightning hit on the mountainside facing us and lead to a big red flash. A little scary since it was not far from us, but very cool to see.