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The Fielder's Choice

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:38:51 PDT

Last night's Game 6 of the World Series was a pretty awful game on many levels, and yet at the same time one of the most amazing, dramatic games ever played. One (mis)play that jumped out at me (among many to choose from) was Texas Shortstop Elvis Andrus somehow turning a fairly routine ground ball hit to him in the bottom of the 8th inning into a hit for the Cardinals. He appeared to consider a quick toss to 2nd for a force out, which looked like a good play, and then instead threw (poorly) to first, too late (having hesitated) to beat the speedy Daniel Descalso. I believe either option would have been an out if executed correctly. You can't quite give Andrus an error on the play; the play was scored as a hit. But in my opinion it really was a bizarre form of fielder's choice. The Rangers "got out of the inning", as the baseball phrase goes, without giving up any more runs. But that extra out shifted the batters for the 9th (and then the 10th, and 11th) innings. It reminded me of Game 6 of the 1993 World Series between the Phillies and Blue Jays, won famously in the bottom of the 9th on Joe Carter's 3-run home run. In the bottom of the 8th, what should've been a routine 1-2-3 inning went all pear-shaped with 2 walks and a HBP. No runs were scored, but the extra at-bats set the stage for the top of the lineup to face Mitch "Wild Thing" Williams in the 9th. Whoomp, there it went. It's folly to play "What If?" in baseball... every play affects each that follows in a butterfly effect spiral. But similarly, it's a trap to focus too much attention on the "heroics" of the last play, the "clutch" hit, the "winning" home run, independent of the plays that came before. In the end, it can all seem so chillingly, awe-inspiringly predetermined. Do baseball players ever really have a choice? Do any of us?

Open Letter to Hall & Oates

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:18:27 PDT

To: Hall CC: Oates Desperate times call for new ideas. It's been nearly 30 years since the release of your hit single, "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)". We've seen terrorism, wars, economic collapses, and unprecedented natural disasters. The world has changed, and will change again. It's understandable to be pessimistic in the face of such dire circumstances. We're all human after all! But don't we have a responsibility to stand up in the face of such negativity? To be the change we wish to see in this world? It's time to move on from this tired, rusty "No Can Do" attitude. I hope you'll join me in agreeing that yes, at long last, we CAN go for that. Your 3,768,288,304th biggest fan, @peymojo

We Can Use Solar...

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:56:37 PST

About 8 minutes into this 60 Minutes piece on Bloom Energy and the Bloom Box fuel cell product, Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar is asked whether the device can be powered by solar energy. He replies, "We can use solar...". I've added the ellipsis to the quote because the edit at the end of that statement is what I'd call an unnatural edit. It's too quick, his intonation isn't right, his hand gesture is pregnant. It sounds like he was about to qualify his statement. There are many reasons a video editor might need to make an edit of this nature, but this one just smells funny. I'd like to see the original, unedited clip.

Revolutionary My Ass

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:47:50 PST

Why does Apple's new iPad use the "sync with iTunes" model for data management? Why not put it all in the cloud where it belongs? This seems to position it squarely as a computer accessory rather than as a computer replacement. Which in my mind is a huge, huge mistake. I don't want it to work well with my computer. I want it to be my computer. "Revolutionary" implies something along the lines of "out with the old, in with the new". Not "add this new thing to the old thing." Is Apple afraid they'd lose Mac sales if they made the iPad too awesome? There are many smallish nitpicks with this first iPad that I have no doubt can be worked out over time. I fear that this fundamental flaw in concept may limit the iPad forever.

Why Didn't Robinson Cano Call Himself Out?

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:51:49 PDT

In the 5th inning of game 4 of the 2009 ALCS between the Yankees and Angels, Jorge Posada and Robinson Cano were each tagged out at 3rd base by Angels catcher Mike Napoli. 3rd base umpire Tim McClelland called Posada out but Cano safe although it was clear that neither player had been touching 3rd base when tagged. A description of this play (and a few others) with video can be found on mlb.com. The discussions I've seen have focused on the blown call by McClelland. But why didn't Cano simply raise his hand and declare himself out? He must've known this was the case. You may laugh but I think this is a deeply interesting and important question. I'm not suggesting that any bang-bang play should be a candidate for this sort of self declaration, just that this extreme case was an opportunity for sportsmanship to win out over confusion. Put another way, how great would it be if Cano had done that? What a brilliant story it would've made! I believe this is how we should live our lives and raise our children and if we're going to support the concept of professional athletes we should hold them â�� of all people â�� to this standard. This is a much more interesting problem for MLB to consider than the question of the quality of individual umpires.

The (Broken) Natural State of Open Source

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:17:47 PDT

The natural state of a highway with a carpool lane is a free-flowing carpool lane and N lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. If the non-carpool lanes are moving freely, there's no incentive to carpool. Thus the sea of brake lights is the sign that the carpool lane is "working as intended." Similarly, the natural state of an open source project is lots of code that still needs work. If the code is all ship shape, the developers will get bored and move on to other projects. A project that "basically sort-of almost works" is the sign that open source is "working as intended."

TechCrunch, Puppet

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:53:39 PDT

Whether or not you think TechCrunch should be publishing the stolen Twitter documents, it's pretty awesome to think of this situation from the point of view of the documents themselves. How clever of them to choose Google Docs as their home and then to escape into the hands of a troublemaker. And then the best part: manipulating TechCrunch into releasing them to the public. We can basically think of TechCrunch as an information puppet: send it an email with an interesting payload and stuff gets published on the other end. How wild is that?

Paywalls vs. Paytraps

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:36:49 PDT

The big issue with paywalls for news content isn't the barrier to primary consumption. If people value your stuff, it's reasonable to expect them to pay. The killer is in propagation of your content. A paying subscriber can't effectively forward your content to non-paying consumers. Because of this your information will lose to information that can be propagated freely in the competition for the scarce resource of attention spans. Perhaps a paywalled-content provider could design a special "share this" mechanism that would allow information to be shared (temporarily?) more freely. Perhaps this would be less of a "paywall" and more of a "paytrap". Hmmm. Is anyone already doing this?

Is "Free" Inevitable?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:53:35 PDT

Some thoughts on the Malcolm Gladwell / Chris Anderson / Seth Godin / Mark Cuban discussion of "Free". The discussion is centered around the idea that information (in various forms) is trending heavily towards being free and the notion that this trend is essentially inevitable. My take: First, what we're calling "free" is more like "cost smooshed into nearly untraceable oblivion". For a song I've downloaded for "free", the cost of the internet connection, the playback device, even the "cost" of hearing that same song used later in a crappy TV ad, are each too far removed from my acquisition of the song that it's tempting to call the song "free". But is it? Second, the key question when discussing an "inevitable" change: once the change has been made, will reversions pop back up? In a world where all information is free, will non-free information emerge again? If yes, then the suggestion that the trend to free information is inevitable is naive. Information doesn't really care about being "free"; it seeks efficient distribution. It seems that making itself "apparently free" to the consumer is highly aligned with that goal. 100,000 years ago, all information was free. What we have today is far more intricate, far more interesting.

Information Is Now The Dominant Life Form On Earth

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:02:21 PDT

It's possible that this has been true for some time, but I'm calling it now. Twitter is the turning point. We'd like to think that we're the ones in control. And of course we almost are. We're active participants. But we've reached the point where the information shapes us, and our actions, to its ends. Congrats to @jack, @biz, @ev, and the team for creating Twitter. But in a very real sense, Twitter was created by the information. It had to be created, it didn't really matter how or by whom.

It's Its

Fri, 29 May 2009 15:37:16 PDT

Some thoughts on the use/misuse of "it's" vs. "its". When so many people make the "error", it may be time to blame the language, not the people. If you can tell right away from context that someone has used the "wrong" one then the value of having the distinctive punctuation would seem to be greatly diminished. In the modern SMS / IM / twitter communication world, shorter is better, often even at the expense of "proper" usage. Based on the above, I suspect "it's" is likely to disappear from common use over the longer term arc of the English language.

Tweeting From Space

Sat, 16 May 2009 15:58:37 PDT

Is @Astro_Mike tweeting from space? [ I love the view into an astronaut's life provided by @Astro_Mike on Twitter. Great great great. But I'm a troublemaker. ] According to this AP article, he emails his tweets to Houston and officials there post them. If I write down a tweet on a piece of paper while on a roller coaster, then SMS it to Twitter later, was I tweeting from the roller coaster? If I call a friend of mine from a hot air balloon and tell them what to tweet using my account, am I tweeting from the balloon? If an official in Houston tweets on the behalf of an astronaut in orbit, is that a tweet from space? Perhaps a person sitting at a web browser in Houston with @Astro_Mike's password is just another Twitter interface, like a phone client or custom app. Perhaps a <= 140 character thought recorded in some way + the intent to tweet it is sufficient to call it "tweeting". I'm not convinced. But it's a fun philosophical debate. What do you think?

The Day Twitter Died

Thu, 14 May 2009 14:35:20 PDT

It's unbelievable there's this thing in twitter where sometimes you have a @ character and it's the thing at the beginning and it replies and then you see it when other people do it and you can tell when they reply to your friend but also when they reply to other people but then twitter changed that yesterday and it isn't the better way I liked it I'm so mad it's completely ruined I want the @ thing at the beginning like it was before dammit why do these free websites think they can just change something like that it makes me mad I know I'll tweet out a bunch of things with a # character in it that'll teach em I'm going back to myspace wait no I'm not.

Top 5 Offensive Sports Franchise Names

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:01:49 PDT

5. Kansas City Midgets 4. Atlanta Homos 3. Portland Retards 2. Washington Redskins 1. Los Angeles Niggers

Swine Flu

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:54:02 PDT

A thought about Twitter, media, and the rapid spread of misinformation regarding the Swine Flu: The name "Swine Flu" is, on its own, brilliantly tuned for redistribution, misunderstanding, and exaggeration independent of the transmission medium. It's just dripping with infectious nastiness. If all you knew was the name you'd be wise to steer clear of pigs, pork, farms, crowds, public restrooms, you name it. Seriously. UPDATE: Iowa City Press Citizen article Vilsack: Don't call it 'swine flu', courtesy @buzzblog on Twitter. UPDATE 2: AP article WHO to stop using term 'swine flu', via @NewsHour on Twitter.

"$1 Million"

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:21:31 PDT

I was reading this great article by Mike Fish on espn.com about Lenny Dykstra's crazy post-baseball business dealings and legal troubles when I came across a style detail that I found curious. About two-thirds of the way through the article, Fish quotes Dykstra as saying "I mean, $1 million? A Web site?". The thing I found curious was the use of "$1 million". What did Dykstra actually say? "One million dollars"? Or "One million" where the concept of dollars was implied? I can't tell. It's a silly detail, surely inconsequential to the story, and yet - as a quote - I'd expect it to be unambiguous. It seems that the $ symbol can't be reliably used as shorthand in a quote. I find this interesting.