Deano6

Has anyone mentioned that Swansea beat Chelsea away in the cup tonight? Looks like a pretty full strength team too. So much for "nobody could compete with them"!

How come you never mentioned this before?

What if he's REALLY good looking?

I couldn't do an 8am start, I sympathise with the guy. I struggle to make it in for 9am most days. If he makes it up at the end of the day, I don't really see the problem. I didn't catch what the job was tho.

Tax reasons innit.

How come you're not at the game, Turky?

Is Jack Stephens anywhere close to first team standard, to fill in at right back?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxztnnAMmUw

Are you saying someone has actually called a taxi for Guly? ...or are you just stalking him in your spare time?

I think it's one of those where either of you could be right, or wrong, you just have to be clear what your premise is. The problem here is that, for example, 17th place has 38 points and 18th has 35 points. On the one hand, you could say that 18th would have needed to get (at least) 3 more points to stay up, and so in that league 38 points was the 'minimum needed to stay up'. Alternately, you could say that the additional 3 points 17th place got above 18th were irrelevant and they could still have stayed up if they hadn't got them, and so 35 was the 'minimum needed to stay up'. I don't think there's a right or wrong way to look at it, but I'd prefer to look at the higher placed 17th position scores as that gives the performance of teams that did stay in the division, which is what you are hoping to emulate. 18th places may have been relegated a few games before the end and given up, lowering the points total they might have got, or generally have fallen way short of a points total that would have kept them up in any season. I note that the statistical blog linked above suggests that the points total needed this year may be lower than I remember in previous years. The "What If" table implies that a total of 34-35 is the point at which the chances of being relegated drops below 50% (albeit that's still a scarily high chance). While obviously it's based upon its own set of assumptions that you could argue over, I think it follows from the fact that at the halfway stage there are 5 teams averaging less than a point per game (ie 38 over the season).

What is going on at our own club that is of such interest right now? Seems to be a dull news period. Even the mainboarders have by-and-large given it a skip.

Unlike most here, I actually agree with the OP. Take out Lambert, who himself has not been at his best recently, and we have a woefully weak set of strikers. Just Mayuka and Rodriguez?? 1 goal between them at this level (yes I'm aware they haven't played too many games, but still!). I'd rather have Le Fondre, Pogrebnyak and Jason Roberts than go it with just those two.

Actually this is the adaptation of the play. Exactly the same songs / scenes etc and put together by Cameron Mackintosh. If you want an adaptation of the book see the 1998 Liam Neeson film with Clare Danes, which has no singing. I could not conceivably be more excited to see this. Got tickets booked to see it when I get back to NY on 31st, and have had the songs in my head all week. I am a little worried about Crowe's part in this, and also reckon I'm gonna come out thinking "Why couldn't they have just sung it properly??" Found Jackman's Who Am I, one of the most climactic moments in the show, to be a little underwhelming from the youtube clip... [video=youtube_share;xx7K42uyrts]

Beats the hell out of internet vvanking, which is what you'll be doing in your spare time otherwise. I'm not knocking internet vvanking mind.

I had been thinking he was just a pretty face, but this bear has a brain!

What about the song?

Better than all the above... [video=youtube_share;fCNvZqpa-7Q] Merry Christmas, Turkish Delight!

I think we should sell him and be left with a strike force that has scored one league goal all season. Seriously, do we have the weakest set of strikers in this division? I think so.

In theory they could go as granular as they want, especially with the advent of increasing computing power and statistical software packages making it far easier to run the models in a fraction of the time. In reality they tend to use postcode districts (ABXX, ignoring the last 3 digits after the 'space'). Any more granular than that and you are getting into spurious reliability and you don't really have enough historic data compiled to tell you anything useful - certainly not for the cost of how much more complex you are making it. So yes, you may be suffering for the area you live in, though there are other factors taken into account such as occupation, whether you keep it in a garage or on the street etc... Even then, there's about 3,000 postcode districts which is too many to handle, so each gets given a rating on a particular scale, as determined by each insurer. Typically an insurer will use between 10 and 20 such categories, and these ratings will lead to a "multiplier" factor being applied that could increase your premium 2-3 times from the lowest (safest) possible. One such ranking scale is ACORN, which allocates districts to around 50 socio-economic classes (you can even take a free lookup trial on their website to see how your district performs if you register, I believe). For an interesting high-level look of how your district ranks, see here. I'm not sure what the source of their data is, every insurer will be different, but it gives you a flavour for the kind of work that is done. And if you are interested in looking into this a bit more (in between your moon-based research ), this presentation has some good info and is an easy read.

It's a very well regulated market, and those regulations are only going to get stricter in the next couple of years when Solvency II comes in. The costs of entry into a market like this are very high and the profit margins in it are very squeezed by how competitive it is. That said pooling large quantities of vehicles makes results very predictable, and in the UK they are only really susceptible to concentrations of claims such as in big freezes or the recent UK floods. On the point of insolvency, I guess you mean specifically UK motor insurers. There are plenty of examples of reinsurers going bust after a catastrophe like Katrina in 2005, life insurers going (Equitable Life in 2000 most famously) and of course pretty much all mortgage insurance companies after the financial crisis (eg FGIC, AMBAC, MBIA, Fanny Mae & Freddie Mac). Asbestos became a huge emerging issue in the 80s and wiped out many insurers, nearly taking down the whole of Lloyd's of London with it. In answer to your question, probably AIG in 2008 should have, but got bailed out by the Fed, though you will rightly argue it wasn't it's personal auto business that got it into trouble. These days insurers do need to hold a lot of capital to guard against this happening (making it pretty expensive) and will also have a substantial amount of contingent capital they can call upon should they get into trouble. For these reasons they often die a "slow death" and will go into run off (cease writing new business) or be purchased by a competitor before they go bust completely, so don't make the headlines.

Middle of Chapter 6 it all started to get a bit American Psycho. I fully expect Chapter 7 to see the introduction of a wheel of brie and a rat.

I don't get it. This has all the hallmarks of a trolling post, but I agree with every word. Have I just been mugged off? Am I missing something?

How are you explaining that 0.5=1/2, and why does the concept not then work for 3/4?

Don't worry, she only wears Stone Island and Lacoste on match days. It's very important for her not to be mistaken for a scarfer by her neighbours in Minnesota.

Does the club do ladies as distinct from men's replica shirts, or are they all one and the same? I'm not talking about polo shirts etc but the actual home shirt. You do not need to know why.