One Of Those Ideas You Get While Lying In Bed Saturday Morning
What if we hollowed out the area below home plate at a major league stadium, and reinforced the ground there with steel so as not to affect play, except that at irregular intervals of about three years, when some steroid-pumped home-run king is at bat and a computer system detects a fastball coming towards the strike zone, a trapdoor springs open and a death-row convict is hoisted halfway out of the ground, so that the bat sprays his head all over the infield? I think it has the advantage of being quick and painless and less prone to failure than the injection method. And more importantly it would make baseball almost interesting enough to watch.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/9/11 10:05]
Some friends from Massachusetts with kids came down this weekend and we went to that big, intermittently bankrupt toy palace across from the Plaza hotel, F.A.O. Schwarz. It's surprising that we'd never taken our kid there. Out of several pretty cool things we saw, the coolest was a remote-control helicopter, which was to the bulky bungling models of our youth what your iPhone is to Gordon Gekko's monstrosity. It was only about six inches long and it moved like a hummingbird, hanging eerily still when directed to, and otherwise darting around with great precision. Am I missing something or are all the steps between this and a complete revolution in ground combat trivial? Add a feather-weight high-res video chip: trivial. Add a feather-weight transmitter to send video images to a hub up to 250 meters away: trivial. Add a compressed-air gun to shoot cyanide-tipped darts accurately up to 10 meters: trivial (for an organization with an annual budget of a half-trillion dollars). So it's not clear to me what, except maybe sportsmanship, is stopping us from flooding these (e.g.) Libyan battle-zone cities with hubs and helicopters, and having a team of networked American teenagers in their parents' basements slaughter the bad guys to a man.
Here's something to make my point more vividly (with models more advanced than what we saw at the toy store). Gaining the means to cleanly slaughter all our enemies seems like a small subset of what was solved here:
As often as not, when you ask our kid to read some letters, she spouts off some random string of letters because she thinks it's funnier than answering correctly. Except that for some reason her "random" string is now almost always S-P-O-Y-N. She wrote those letters on the chalkboard this morning and I said, "That spells 'spoyn'. What does 'spoyn' mean?" --"It's something that happens in Africa." "Africa?" --"Yeah." "What is it that happens?" --"It's really bad." "Really? What?" --"It's when a rock falls on a car."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 4/5/11 21:14]
We use my blackberry as the sovereign remedy with Jacob. Bump your head? Here's a Blackberry to play with! Squirming crazily while we are trying to change a diaper? Here's a Blackberry to play with!
I would be very worried about diluting the impact of a flashing object by providing one for general use.
[Ben A.: 4/1/11 09:21]
The "gadgetwise" blog on the NY Times just had a post about classic children's books released for the iPad. It renewed my interest in getting an iPad for our kid, who (like all kids apparently) immediately understood its user interface when she played with one at a friend's house, and loved playing some vaguely educational games on it. I'm just torn because if we got one, she would constantly be either using it or clamoring to use it. As it is, she's always demanding to see Donald Duck YouTube videos on my laptop. I wonder what Ben A's position on this is.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 3/31/11 13:42]
My current job is one block from the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which happened exactly 100 years ago. There's a big commemoration today. If only the commemorators understood that the real lesson is not a need for more job-killing regulations -- it's a need for lower taxes, which let hard-working small business owners maintain a decent profit margin without chaining their employees to their stations!
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 3/25/11 09:50]
You know what's even worse than LIFO in city schools? FIFO for humans! It does not make any sense that humans should be laid off from mortal life on a largely first-in first-out basis, rather than on the basis of merit. Some very old people are wonderful human beings, and some young people are total failures!
[Ben H.: 3/19/11 09:55]
I don't want to put too many words in Colby's mouth, particularly as she'll give you her own unmediated opinion on Sunday. However, the thrust of her view is that LIFO is really a side-show, since layoffs don't take place very often and nobody has formulated a reliable, objective set of criteria to judge teacher quality. Further, marginal changes in teacher pay will not attract or repel qualified candidates as powerfully as teaching conditions. People underestimate how unpleasant classroom conditions can be: huge numbers of students crammed into small, decrepit classrooms, constraints against imposing effective discipline, absence of curricular support, etc. An extra few thousand dollars a year will not make it worth anyone's while to cope with these vexations large and small.
Not that you asked for it, but my own view on this question is slightly different. I'll give it to you nonetheless.
We need to distinguish between the cyclical and the secular
The current spate of layoffs arises largely from cyclical stresses to local government budgets, mostly revenue declines. Whether teachers are overpaid or underpaid in a long-term sense does not bear on the question of layoffs. LIFO is a sideshow, because a well-run "human capital" organization should not manage cyclical budget stresses by shedding labor. Labor-shedding and labor re-absorption is just about the most disruptive and expensive way to manage cost. The bigger sin of unions -- much worse than LIFO -- lies in resistance to any measure of wage flexibility. When times get tough, wages need to fall. Revenues restored, wages can rise.
Threshold inadequate teachers should be fired when their inadequacy becomes manifest, not just when layoffs happen to occur
Administrators should not manage teacher quality by a randomly-occurring forced-ranking and culling. Average teacher quality should not depend on how large a set of layoffs happens to be. We need to separate the secular issue of improving teacher quality from the cyclical issue of layoffs.
We always talk about education as "investment". Let's consider it as such
The average urban public school district spends -- on a fully costed basis (many districts release costs excluding capital expenditures and incurrence of unfunded retirement liabilities) -- upwards of $20K per student per year. It seems implausible to me that on average $300K of recoverable NPV (to throw a number out there) is created per student churned out of the educational system. Compare the lifetime tax contributions of a Detroit public school graduate (or just attendee, since a lot gets spent on kids who never graduate) with those of a Mexican immigrant on whose education back in Mexico very little was spent. Does this amount to $300K?
We cannot spend more per pupil than we already do. The system will fall wildly out of actuarial balance. If, in fact, it takes more than $20K per student per year to turn out educated citizens, then we need a completely different system. To the extent teacher costs represent the bulk of this cost (see below) then we simply cannot afford what it costs to attract 1 million smart people to the profession. I'm not sure there are 1 million smart people in America willing to do the job at any reasonable price. We need to design a system that runs on something other than expensive smart people. We need to use technology, for example, to reduce the high-quality-human-brain intensity of education.
Nobody can explain BASIC cost arithmetic
An NYC schoolteacher gets paid something like $70K/year (less for less experienced, more for more experienced teachers). Fully costed benefits probably add another $30K. OK, 100K per year per teacher. Colby had 26 students. Of course, there are also some non-classroom teachers you need -- art, music, science. BUt say that each class requires 1.5 teacher FTE. That's $150K for 26 kids. Let's be generous and call it $6000 / child. Her classroom was a 30-year-old portable trailer. The school required her to design her own curricula, so very little ought to have been spent on expensive curricular systems. Now how do we get from there to $20,000 per pupil per year? And even if we cut teacher benefits 20%, it doesn't really make a huge difference, does it?
Ben H, what is Colby's take on Bloomberg's efforts to battle the teachers unions and their "last-in-first-out" layoff rules? Or on the apparent nationwide tide of sentiment against teachers? I am torn between animosity towards the unions (who brought us the infamous "rubber rooms" etc.) and a feeling that this is just another link in the feedback loop that will make us into the kind of society that Chomsky says we've been all along. As the view that public school teachers are parasites gains traction, politicians will have enough cover to cut their salaries and benefits more and more, increasing the fraction of teachers who are losers unable to cut it in private-sector jobs, leading the public to view teachers even more dimly, etc. More and more kids will be crammed into classrooms with dumber and dumber teachers, meaning ever more doltish cohorts slouching through the system. Meanwhile the elite will keep sending its kids to private schools.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 3/12/11 22:24]
What I remember -- or at least care to recall! -- is Gomes' elegant Clintonic-avant-la-letter coming-out. Gomes very publicly proclaimed his gayness on the steps of Memorial Church. Quite quickly, though, he followed this with a written statement that vouchsafed the fact that he had never consummated his inclinations. Well played, Reverend!
In the Times obituary for the great Peter Gomes, the following paragraph appears:
Then, in 1991, he appeared before an angry crowd of students, faculty members and administrators protesting homophobic articles in a conservative campus magazine whose distribution had led to a spate of harassment and slurs against gay men and lesbians on campus.
I presume this refers to the (in)famous Peninsula "Exploding Pink Triangle" issue. Do either of you recall anything even vaguely resembling a 'spate of harassment and slurs' in the wake of that? Or was it instead the article about the dance (at Winthrop?) where some guy hit on a football player's visiting 16 year-old brother and subsequently got punched out? As I recall basically everyone held up Peninsula as a figure of fun, right? Someone even wrote a poem to that effect...
[Ben A.: 3/2/11 11:24]
Bloomberg Beyond Satire
Over the last year, representatives of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg quietly reached out to a handful of the country’s top journalists with an intriguing job offer: Divine and distill his unique brand of political philosophy and disseminate it around the globe for an annual salary of close to $500,000.
A Google recruiter contacted me, and set up a phone interview / computer science test for me. It's in about a week. You take the test on a Google Doc with the interviewer watching it. The problem is that when I go the Doc in question it says "access denied." I emailed the recruiter about this and he said sorry, let me double-check that. This was a few days ago and I still don't have access. Now I'm wondering if this isn't really a pre-screening: if you were really a computer stud, you'd find a way to hack into the document. Have I failed already?
I've been working on my math project a lot since the holiday season ended and I hadn't set up a new software development gig. (Job offers welcome. Help Obama fight unemployment!) The first few weeks I made some progress and in fact thought that only some i-dotting and t-crossing would be needed to finish a basic "proof of concept" paper. (I suppose in math every proof is a proof of concept ... .) But as usual I realized that I was wrongly assuming something about the structure I had defined. So there was an additional puzzle to clear up. Namely, whether certain curves in space can be bent in a way that preserves certain relations between them. For ten days or so I've been fruitlessly staring at sketches of these curves and trying to get some kind of toehold on the problem. Then it occurred to me that you could represent the curves with those flexible metal tubes used for desk lamps, and represent the relations by rigid rods connecting, in a certain way, some metal rings that can slide up and down the curves. If I built the model, I could resolve my perplexities, not by frustrating cogitation, but by yanking really hard on the thing and seeing if it moves. I think I'd proceed with this plan if it didn't risk putting me on the track of that mashed-potato-sculpting dad in Close Encounters ...
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 2/25/11 22:40]
Factoid
Was watching a Sesame Street video last night with the kid and they talked about the colors of the rainbow, Roy G. Biv. Question: Indigo? Why is that a canonical spectrum color? Wikipedia:
Newton divided his color circle, which he constructed to explain additive color mixing, into seven colors. His color sequence with the unusual color indigo is still kept alive today by the Roy G. Biv mnemonic. Originally he used only five colors, but later he added orange and indigo, in order to match the number of musical notes in the major scale.
Before there were intelligent beings, they were possible; they had therefore possible relations, and consequently possible laws. Before laws were made, there were relations of possible justice. To say that there is nothing just or unjust but what is commanded or forbidden by positive laws, is the same as saying that before the describing of a circle all the radii were not equal.
Updated Study on the Value of Going to a Selective College
Dale and Krueger update their blockbuster paper. NYT account here. Once again, they identify incoming student quality as the key determinant of future earnings. A student who can get into Yale but goes to a less selective school will on average do as well as the same student who actually matriculates in New Haven.
Some thoughts:
It is hard to believe that selective colleges -- the ivies in particular -- do not have a major influence on what one could describe as 'Mandarin-class' careers -- law, elite journalism, consulting, finance. But perhaps there's enough of a re-set at the graduate level to account for this (the best student from Urbana-Champaign can still go to HBS or Yale Law).
[Ben A.: 2/22/11 01:29]
A Book I'd Like To See
Baudrillard wrote a book with possibly the best title ever in the field of French paradox-mongering: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Well, someone in the U.S. needs to follow that up with The Gulf Oil Spill Did Not Take Place. You could easily get a book's worth of reflections out of the contrast between nine months ago -- when the apocalypse was upon us and we were all flogging ourselves for letting the EPA get so lax and corrupt -- and today, when the majority of House members will casually tell you that the idea of environmental protection is pernicious and the EPA should be castrated or abolished.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 2/20/11 01:35]
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:
1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
Consider Albert Q. Mathnerd, a math undergrad at MIT ("Course 18" we call it). He works hard and beats his chest to demonstrate that he is the best math nerd at MIT. This is important to Albert because most of his friends are math majors and the rest of his friends are in wimpier departments, impressed that Albert has even taken on such demanding classes. Albert never reflects on the fact that the guy who was the best math undergrad at MIT 20 years ago is now an entry-level public school teacher in Nebraska, having failed to get tenure at a 2nd tier university. When Albert goes to graduate school to get his PhD, his choice will have the same logical foundation as John Hinckley's attempt to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan.
In google search for "arbiter morum." Also for the really excellent "lepidoptera era I toppled" which is about the most perfect Nabokov appreciation imaginable.
[Ben A.: 2/7/11 00:06]
After Long, Ignominious Reign, Crank Deposed
I'm not talking about Hosni Mubarak. Rather, it's NYT Magazine "Ethicist" Randy Cohen who has fallen from his lofty perch. Much as in the Middle East, media revolutions percolate from one stagnant backwater to another. Joining Cohen on his way out, semi-autistic interviewer Deborah Solomon! Don't worry, though, upper-middle class New Yorkers and their cultural trans-Hudson allies won't suddenly need to decide for themselves such recondite questions as whether it's OK to tip your doorman if you know he might use the money to buy unhealthy sugary snacks for his children. The Ethicist column will continue under a new arbiter morum.
[Ben H.: 2/5/11 10:54]
Marketing Genius
I'm shopping around Austin for some office space. A broker took me up to a small office on the top floor of one of Austin's oldest skyscrapers, the 1905 Scarborough building. The chipper landlord's broker pointed out the windows. "You can open the windows all the way, unlike in most buildings." I gave her a quizzical look.
Trust me, others have made the same connection. The investment community has looked at this vehicle with a jaundiced eye for a long time. It's founder is a flamboyant character and the fund has distinguished itself largely through its unusually aggressive world-wide marketing. Superfund is basically a quant hedge-fund, but its capital comes largely from retail investors. Given the stiff competition in the quant field, and Baha's atypical background, some people aired suspicions that Superfund was a Ponzi scheme. The fund got battered in 2009 and suspended redemptions for a while.
[Ben H.: 2/2/11 09:57]
Meanwhile On The Less-Well-Thought-Out End Of The Marketing Spectrum
Directly across 5th Ave from the main public library I saw an investment business, with LED stock tickers spinning across its facade, framing its own sign: "Superfund: The Future Of Investing." Fantastic name. Only I would have chosen a different tag line: "Superfund: Toxic. Asset. Cesspool."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 2/1/11 22:39]
Advertising As Mirror
We can use the recent great leaps in the field of advertisement targeting as windows on our own souls. If I'm watching the evening news and am endlessly bombarded with products for hemorrhoids, constipation, and incontinence, I may be motivated to get off the couch and take some steps toward personal rejuvenation. If, more to the point, I'm listening to my radio station of choice, and hear advertisements from a consortium of cork producers lauding the virtues of natural corks over synthetic corks in wine bottles, and realize that I can be counted on not only to drink lots of wine but to be in a social position to influence vintners on their product decisions -- well, I have to ask myself if I've floated too far from the real America, and need to take steps to get back down to earth.
Then there's the inescapability, plaguing all of us without respect to where or how we live, of product slogans with Real. Clever. Punctuation. What I conclude from this is that the human race deserves immediate extinction.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 2/1/11 22:09]
We've lamented this before, but I think the full scope of the horror needs to be stressed.
A friend was showing off his periodic-table app on his iPad, and I clicked on rhodium. Its entry begins as follows:
"Rhodium is famous for its extraordinary price swings. If you had bought a pound of rhodium in January 2004 and sold it in June 2008, you would have multiplied your investment by a factor of 22."
Three guesses as to the month and year of the bandarlog post in which I first wrote: "A very useful metal, and yet one whose price hasn't been pumped up in the last few years like the precious metals' has. I'm putting all my money into rhodium." And three more guesses as to how much I actually bought.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 1/23/11 18:53]
Harper's editor's written endlessly pornographic I Beat Meat (5,6)
I believe Itchy and Scratchy had been poached by the Gabbo show.
Punctuation outside quotations seems better to me also. This view correlates with exposure to the use/mention distinction.
[Ben A.: 1/18/11 23:05]
An Internet Post Makes Me Think Critically About My Assumptions And Change My Behavior
No, really! And speaking of weird typographical quirks that nobody has had the courage to challenge, somebody needs to explain to me why putting sentence-ending punctuation inside quotes is "correct." Completely illogical! And don't get me started on the French practice of putting spaces before exclamation points !
p.s. love the Itchy and Scratchy replacement -- I couldn't quite recall the back-story -- did a cartoon writers' strike force Krusty to get some Czech filler?
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 1/17/11 22:55]
Not having a TV, we use YouTube when we need to immobilize the kid for a substantial period of time. She has learned how to move the mouse among the "related videos" at the end of a video, and so to extend the period as long as we desire. The weird thing about YouTube's "related video" function -- perhaps we could get around this by changing some personalization setting -- is that it doesn't filter by language. So if you're watching old Mickey Mouse cartoons, say, you're never more than 2 clicks from a Portuguese-dubbed episode. On at least three occasions I've been surprised to hear Portuguese coming from the living room. Today she got to a Donald Duck episode dubbed in some Eastern European language. The really weird thing was that the dubbed lines seemed not to correspond to what the chipmunks et al. were saying. It sounded like a single uninterrupted discourse by one man. And it got more and more impassioned, leading to the striking incongruity of Chip seeming to explain to Dale why the South Slavonians are subhuman rabble whose destiny is to dissolve under the triumphant boot of the North Slavonians.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 1/16/11 19:19]
Disappearing Working Class Jobs, Underground Edition
Colby laughs at me for my stubborn resistance to the replacement of cash transactions with electronic payment. My tendency to pay for restaurant meals with greenbacks marks me out, in her view, as a suspicious character. I, on the other hand, claim that I wield my paper-stuffed wallet as a shield against the state-corporate financial panopticon. Colby today noted this Slate article that connects falling street crime with the decreasing use of cash. Fair point. Yet, isn't this anothe tragic example of the disappearance of solid, semi-skilled middle-class jobs from America? 25-years ago, a high-school graduate could make a good living as a mugger or a stick-up man. Now, peculation requires knowledge of computers and electronics. You can't surreptiously steal credit card data with a knife and a beefy frame. It's yet more evidence that America needs to get more kids to college!
[Ben H.: 1/12/11 16:11]
I Was Not Dreaming of a Meteorologically Active Christmas...
...but I got one anyway. We spent our holiday with Colby's family in their new home of Santa Barbara. In late December, this should represent a trade-up from Austin, but luck did not favor us. We arrived in the middle of some of the worst rains SoCal has experienced since the '98 El Nino season. Colby's parents' place, which ordinarily commands an impressive view of the harbor and Channel Islands, might as well have been located inside a giant cotton-ball. Except, the inside of a cotton ball would have been drier. We showed up to the sight of the basement flooding. I drove through the torrents to Home Depot, where I bought a shop-pump, some garden hose and a lamp-timer, out of which I fashioned a stop-gap sump-pump, which was enough to keep things under control until a real sump and sump pump could be installed. In the end, nature did favor us with a couple of days of glorious SoCal sunshine. We can't complain. It could have been worse -- we could have been buried under two feet of snow! I wonder who's shoveling a certain stretch of Warren Street...
[Ben H.: 12/29/10 13:23]
Your First Mistake, My Dear
Julian Assange stands accused by two women of sexual assault. They allege that he had unprotected sex with them despite their repeated insistence that he use a condom. One of the women claims that he did use a condom, but somehow sabotaged it. Ladies, you really went to bed with the founder of WikiLeaks expecting he'd use a condom? To the victim who claimed prophylactic sabotage: the man is an apostle of leaks! To both victims: the man openly proclaims his emnity to barriers of any kind to dissemination of information. Hint: DNA is information and unprotected sex is its dissemination!
[Ben H.: 12/21/10 17:32]
Borders
And Borders honored your card after all these years? Impossible! Congress told me that the issuers of gift cards are all greedy cheats (corporations) tricking you (with various forms of subliminal advertising and other kinds of frightening marketing juju) into forgetting your card in a shoebox somewhere while they deplete its value with sneaky inactivity charges and (gasp!) expiration dates. That's why they took time out of the their busy schedule to include gift card provisions in the CARD Act. But the CARD Act provisions only came into effect this August and I remember that you got married several years ago. I can only conclude that you, Ben A, are lying, probably because you're a paid shill of the greedy gift card cartel, which, as innocent people obliviously settle down to their Christmas gift-giving ritual, insidiously plots a repeal of the CARD Act!
[Ben H.: 12/21/10 17:28]
Found Treasure and Investment Advice
A few weeks back I found a Borders gift card in amongst old wedding presents. I took it in to buy gifts today and found -- amazing -- $200 on the card. My first thought was of gratitude to Deb's friend Wei, who had been so generous. I looked him up this evening and found to my delight that his idea of a specialty lab making mouse knock-outs, appears to have (awesomely) grown into a thriving business. Could not happen to a nicer man! God Bless America!
My second thought after my usual pro-American-dream fervor was: "wow, who would have thought a Borders gift card would be about as good a store of value over a decade as the S&P 500!"
My third thought, this will make a good lead-in to posting on of Christoph Niemann's fabulous illustrations re: my new investing strategy.
I loathe Michael Moore, who it should be recalled, was the signal example of partisan entertainment characterized by lying, self-importance, and delusion long before hating Glenn Beck was cool. So it's a great pleasure to see his serial mendacity called to book in the Guardian, of all places.
[Ben A.: 12/19/10 16:10]
Man of the People
We have both a nugget button and a pizza button on our stove. Alas, none of our appliances dispense Fiddle-Faddle
The New State of Baseball
Hamels as #4 is daunting. But let's not get carried away. The real action remains in the AL East. Ben H, what's your take on the state of the Godzilla-Megalon battle?
[Ben A.: 12/15/10 23:16]
Snobbery
In choosing appliances for our new kitchen I made a point not to get this oven because it features a "chicken nugget" button -- "Easily bake perfect chicken nuggets with the touch of a button!" Ugh! Yet I somehow gave a green light to this microwave that also has a "chicken nugget" button! I'm going to have to put a piece of tape over it and write "gnocchi" or something.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 12/15/10 21:27]
Cashman's strategy is evolving. He's now acquiring flamed-out aces after they collapse rather than before. It might not win any more games, but it will be cheaper and less disappointing.
[Ben H.: 12/15/10 14:22]
Philly?!
Lee, Halladay, Oswalt, Hamels! How does such a second-tier city get a first-rate pitching rotation? How would you like to face that in a playoff series.
Pretty scary. Almost as scary as walking down a street in Philly after dark.
One can give many reasons why Lee turned down a richer deal from the Yankees, but I wonder if at the top of that list is the fate of previous ballyhooed ace acquisitons by the Yankees. The South Bronx soil seems to contain a vein of pitching kryptonite.
Lee might do well to take a little less cash in order to avoid the risk of turning out like A.J. Burnett, Carl Pavano, Jose contreras, Javier Vazquez (twice), Kevin Brown, Kei Igawa...
You guys have heard me lament that the pre-school is shutting down so our kid needs to go through the Manhattan preschool admissions wringer again. Today she went to a "play date" at a Montessori school where the kids do puzzles and drawings and blocks while a teacher in the corner jots down notes that will determine their fates. (Or that fraction of their fates not already determined by their parents' publicly ascertainable wealth.) Our kid acquitted herself honorably. I'm afraid I may have undone her work afterwards though: the admissions director saw her leaving the school with her little scooter and no helmet. And then she had to draw attention to this fact by pointing at some other kid and saying "I want a helmet too!"
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 12/4/10 22:53]
Blockbuster
Hyperbole is hard to avoid in discussing the Red Sox's acquisition on Adrian Gonzalez for Casey Kelly, Anthony Rizzo, and Reymond Fuentes. Some points:
1. Few hitters suffer more from their home park than Gonzalez did at Petco. At home in San Diego over the past three years, he posted a batting line of .257/.384/.439. On the road, those approach Albert Pujols territory at .310/.390/.599. Over the past three years Gonzalez hit 37 home runs at home vs. 70 on the road. 70! 70 in 927 at bats!
2. Gonzalez's inside-out swing seems tailored for Fenway. The first graph below shows Gonzalez's home runs and fly-outs at Petco in 2009
In this chart, an enterprising person has helpfully superimposed the outline of Fenway's dimensions over a charting of Gonzalez's fly ball outs.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (need to remain calm. need to remain calm)
3. Gonzalez is 29, and a good fielder.
4. The reported deal provide the Padres with Casey Kelley, Anthony Rizzo, and Rey Fuentes. They are all talented prospects. None has ever played above Double-A. The best prospect in the deal, Kelley, is a starting pitcher, with all the notorious high risk of a pitching prospect. This is a good trade.
[Ben A.: 12/4/10 22:01]
We need to move beyond the old politics of partisanship. We need a new politics, one where we'll all come together and do what I want.
[Ben H.: 12/4/10 10:45]
I only hope that dollar coin didn't have as its motto "the Hero of Many a Well-Fought Bottle"!
Speaking of sketchy numismatics, I want some assurance that the states displayed on the back of quarters these days bear no relation to the legal tender status of the quarter. Otherwise, I'm going to start shedding the "Illinois" and "California" coins that have accumulated (on my floor, naturally) and hoard "Wyomings" and "North Dakotas" instead...
Talk about devaluing the dollar! I have a month-long subway pass, and two days ago I went through the 14th-and-8th station turnstile only to realize I'd forgotten to go the ATM just outside the entrance. So I went back out, got cash, and tried to come back in, but the screen said "just used." So I went to the guy in the booth and he said you have to wait 18 minutes in this situation for the card to be accepted again. This isn't the point of the story -- it seems a reasonable policy to me -- the point is what happened when I put a five dollar bill into the machine to get a one-ride card. The change included (as it has for many years) dollar coins. Now, let's resume the history of dollar coins a bit. First there was the Susan B Anthony failure. Then there was Sacagawea dollar, which as I understood was only marginally more accepted. Now I've been in and out of the country over the last ten years, so I probably missed a lot of the debate/discussion surrounding dollar coins. But at some point a few years ago I saw a dollar coin with the same color and size as the Sacagawea, but with some more conventional profile on it -- a Founding Father, I think. So, I thought, maybe they switched to this person and that's that. But the subway machine gave me a dollar with Franklin Pierce on it. Are you serious? This is legal tender? It seems like there are no longer discrete coin-launching events, but a kind of continuum of dodginess that these dollar coins seems to keep descending.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 11/26/10 20:04]
That's a headline from the WSJ that's supposed to alarm the reader but I just chuckle because it's so trivial in comparison to a story I heard from my colleague Mike (a.k.a. Mikhail) whose dad used to be in the Soviet navy. Apparently he was in a truck convoy carrying some nukes across Russia, and the soldiers in the convoy subsisted solely on two things, lard and vodka. To minimize risks of treachery the commanders put a bunch of redundant trucks in the convoys and the drivers didn't even know whether they had the real nukes or not. This stratagem did not mitigate their consternation when they realized that one of the trucks was missing, its utterly shitfaced driver having taken a wrong turn a few versts back, and that of course he had the real nukes in his truck.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 11/22/10 22:47]
Islamic Enlightenment
From the NYT :One of the [Saudi-backed] textbooks, according to a BBC article about the program, prescribed execution as the penalty for gay sex, and outlined differing viewpoints as to whether death should be by stoning, immolation by fire or throwing people off a cliff. To me this sounds like a giant step towards enlightenment -- the idea that intelligent people with different viewpoints must reason about the demands of justice, rather than just accepting scripture blindly.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 11/22/10 19:27]
The Unstoppable Awesomenity Of British Place-Names
From a NY Times article on Prince William's engagement to Ms. Middleton: "Several generations back, Mrs. Middleton’s great-grandfather worked in the village of Hetton-le-Hole in a coal mine."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 11/21/10 21:09]
So, Prince Williams is going to marry a commoner, I have read. Really. From "William the Conqueror" to "William, Who Stoops to Conquer Her", royalty has come down quite a bit!
[Ben H.: 11/16/10 17:36]
Excellent
Let me simply quote another blogger:
I'd like to remind our readers that Sarah Palin's Alaska premiers this Sunday at 9:00 on The Learning Channel. In the first episode, Palin and family go salmon fishing and see bears in the spectacular Alaskan wilderness.
I'm hoping this becomes a regular thing with potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates. I'm really looking forward to Mitch Daniels's Indiana ("Barley actually grows quite differently from wheat."), Mike Huckabee's Arkansas ("You don't need any special training to be a snake handler."), Chris Christie's New Jersey ("This type of crime scene is pretty typical for Newark."), Mitt Romney's Massachusetts, Michigan, Utah, and California and Newt Gingrich's Fox News Studios.
