When I wandered into the kitchen this morning to make breakfast, there was a large bowl of split peas sitting on the stove, soaking in water, ready for soup. I am reasonably certain they were not there last night when I went to bed. I think we had a visit overnight from the Split Pea Fairy.
Fall
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone. . . . It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.”
– Bart Giamatti, from The Green Fields of the Mind (thanks to Michael J. Madison and many others who saw fit to quote this)
Or my buddy Jim Belshaw:
Baseball is finished for the year, but the World Series is just starting. It is the Bambino’s Paradox, the Goat’s Conundrum. Very strange.No Cubs. No Red Sox. No curses. No gauzy sentimental TV moments. No identification with futility, because like the Cubs and Red Sox, most of us know futility too well. Tragedy sticks to our ribs long after comedy has come and gone.
Jim is a fan of the Chicago White Sox, and loves to repeat this quote, from Jean Shepherd:
If I was ever ordered to storm a pillbox, going to shear, sudden, and utterly certain death, and told to pick my platoon, I would pick White Sox fans. I would pick Sox Fans because they have known death every day of their lives–and it holds no terror for them anymore.
The Sox haven’t won since 1917. Jim is a Sox fan.
Conspiracy
The folks at eBay pulled the auction of an “modern aluminum foil hat will protect your pet from the brain scanning rays of the NSA, fbi.com, and CIA satellites that are monitoring their little subversive thoughts”. Methinks Saskboy’s new technology is hitting a little too close to home, eh? The auction seems to be back up, but I’m suspicious.
Rush
“Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.”
Typing
Today we celebrate the memory of Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky – scholar, typist and unofficial patron saint of the Internet. It is said that the Episcopalian bishop of Shanghai spent twenty years translating the Bible into the Wenli dialect, disabled by Parkinsons (or was it stroke?) and typing all the while with one finger.
Something far greater than Jonah is there.
Russian Jew American Christian Chinaman
Yoked twenty years and more to your chair.
Who can bear to hear that this is God’s plan?
As Dave Barry would say, “I am not making this up.”
an anthem, ill sung
Pepys’ description of church today was a picture:
To White Hall chappell, where one Dr. Crofts made an indifferent sermon, and after it an anthem, ill sung, which made the King laugh.
Men Behaving Badly
Gotta love the New York Post: Fenway Punk was their cover headline, above a picture of a young and trim Pedro Martinez standing over – well, let’s let the Post describe the scene for you as Zimmer lumbered out of the Yankee dugout headed in poor helpless Pedro’s direction:
The lovable, roly-poly Zimmer headed directly for Martinez, awkwardly lunging for the hurler. Martinez sidestepped Zimmer,
grabbed him by the head with both hands and tossed him to the ground like a rag doll.“I was just trying to dodge him and push him away, and too bad his body fell,” Martinez insisted afterwards.
Too bad indeed, Pedro.
Protect Your Pet!
Daughter Nora sends along this:
This ultra modern aluminum foil hat will protect your pet from the brain scanning rays of the NSA, fbi.com, and CIA satellites that are monitoring their little subversive thoughts. You may not have considered this before, but your lead lined hat is worthless if your pet can give away your secrets to the very people most dangerous to you – your government!
But we both know that the government’s ‘pet mind reading threat’ pales in comparison to the unknown dangers of aliens reading your pet’s mind. The PFHT Special Edition [PFHTSE, pronounced Pfootsie], has a hydrocarbon-chain lining specially designed to filter the hydrogen band alien brain scans. This space age material may appear to the untrained eye to be just plain plastic shopping bag, but your pet will know the difference.
(I think I must have done raised her up good.)
Tools Etc.
Seth: Your Factories, Refineries and Tools is brilliant, but it may be built on a fallacy. Aren’t you asking for the development of a piece of computer software to solve a problem that is best solved outside the computer? You say it yourself:
So in the real world we have some great brainstorming tools. Whiteboards are my favorite, but cheap tablets of paper, giant sheets of poster paper, and groups of gathered people are all fantastic for different purposes (and different people). The basic limitation of the computer interface (relative to these other tools) is a deficiency in physical interface.
So why not stick with those real world brainstorming tools? Our brains have evolved over some 3 million years or so to interact with information in a three-dimensional world, with physical and spatial clues playing an important role in the cognitive process. That’s why the pad and pencil, and the whiteboard, work. An attempt to replace this may be doomed to failure.
See, for example, Gladwell’s argument in The Social Life of Paper (I think we’ve talked about this before, Seth?). “Paper,” Gladwell writes, “enables a certain kind of thinking.”
The case for paper is made most eloquently in “The Myth of the Paperless Office” (M.I.T.; $24.95), by two social scientists, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. They begin their book with an account of a study they conducted at the International Monetary Fund, in Washington, D.C. Economists at the I.M.F. spend most of their time writing reports on complicated economic questions, work that would seem to be perfectly suited to sitting in front of a computer. Nonetheless, the I.M.F. is awash in paper, and Sellen and Harper wanted to find out why. Their answer is that the business of writing reports — at least at the I.M.F — is an intensely collaborative process, involving the professional judgments and contributions of many people. The economists bring drafts of reports to conference rooms, spread out the relevant pages, and negotiate changes with one other. They go back to their offices and jot down comments in the margin, taking advantage of the freedom offered by the informality of the handwritten note. Then they deliver the annotated draft to the author in person, taking him, page by page, through the suggested changes. At the end of the process, the author spreads out all the pages with comments on his desk and starts to enter them on the computer — moving the pages around as he works, organizing and reorganizing, saving and discarding.
Without paper, this kind of collaborative, iterative work process would be much more difficult. According to Sellen and Harper, paper has a unique set of “affordances” — that is, qualities that permit specific kinds of uses. Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. (In another study on reading habits, Sellen and Harper observed that in the workplace, people almost never read a document sequentially, from beginning to end, the way they would read a novel.) Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. And it’s tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text. Digital documents, of course, have their own affordances. They can be easily searched, shared, stored, accessed remotely, and linked to other relevant material. But they lack the affordances that really matter to a group of people working together on a report. Sellen and Harper write:
Computers are terrific tools for the actual typing of words, and for searching through vast quantities of text. But let’s be cautious in assuming that makes them useful for actual deep cognitive interaction with the resulting information.
The Economics of the Sacrifice Bunt
Both Lissa and Malcolm Tredinnick pointed me to this, a delightful PBS piece about the economics of decision-making in baseball. Its authors use baseball as a set piece to illustrate the fundamentals of behavioral economics – the notion that the whole idea of perfect markets and rational actors trying to maximize their self-interest is, in reality, a bunch of bunk.
JIM SHERMAN, Psychologist: The idea that if the outcome is good, the decision must have been the right decision. Well that’s not true. Sometimes good outcomes are based on bad decisions and sometimes good decisions lead to bad outcomes.
PAUL SOLMAN: These and other all-too-human tendencies, say Sherman and Thaler, lead to a game replete with irrationality. Such as only using your star relief pitcher in the last inning, and only if your team is ahead.
JIM SHERMAN: The guy who ends the game is called “the closer.” And the guy who pitches before him is called “the setup man.” Now it’s clear which you’d rather be– you’d much rather be the closer than the setup man.
LITTLE LEAGUE COACH: You did a great job, all right? I’m very proud of you.
PAUL SOLMAN: Closers get more fame, more money. But statistically, getting outs in the last inning is no more important than in, say, the inning before.
RICHARD THALER: Every out is important. And it’s no harder to get the last three outs than the previous three outs, and in fact, it can often be the other way.
PAUL SOLMAN: Then there’s another strategy that has become the way to do things: The sacrifice bunt.
RICHARD THALER: The book says in a close game, the first guy gets on, the next guy should try and do a sacrifice bunt to get him over to second base. And the analysis of that shows that you actually score somewhat fewer runs with a man on second and one out, than a man on first and no outs.
PAUL SOLMAN: So even when it advances the runner, the aptly- named “sacrifice” results in a too-costly out. This, in short, is not rational maximizing behavior, any more than an intentional walk is. Even if issued to baseball’s scariest hitter, Barry Bonds.
Pedro and the Rocket, this afternoon at 2 p.m.