Elementary Particles

Movements

2007-10-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

John McWhorter recanting the work of Eric Hoffer, from McWhorter's book "Winning the Race":

"The agricultural revolution pushed humans beyond our initial condition as members of small bands of people tightly bound by ancient communal imperatives, which served to maintain arrangements in which all participated directly in finding food and caring for children. Original man had few "choices" - individuality was a marginal concept. Maybe this one was a good whittler and that one sang well, but in the end, everybody in the village was in it together. But the development of larger societies left classes above the menial with leisure time, choices of specialized occupation - that is, more room for nurturing one's individuality.

Hoffer's thesis is that this very individuality is an unnatural condition, lending a sense of existential disconnection, so much so that it is almost intolerably threatening to many people. This makes membership in collective ideological movements spiritually attractive, in absolving them of the discomfiting responsibility of making their way as unbounded independent actors.

Hence, they embrace movements whose manifestos require elisions of empiricism and logic that appear bizarre to the outside observer, based on visceral sentiment disconnected from concrete reality. The Nazi sings of a mythical Aryan utopia in the past and singles out Jews as obstacles to the rebirth of that utopia. The Southern bigot fashions a plantation paradise and constructs an unempirical stereotype of blacks as rapacious animals. We look at Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will and wonder how so very many ordinary people could be marching in step to Hitler's mythological rantings, not understanding that the root of the allegiance was more a desperate self-erasure than constructive progress."

Need tickets? The economics of ticket scalping

2007-08-13T04:16:00.000-07:00

I'm always amazed by the existence of scalpers at Camden Yards. The Orioles play 81 home dates a year, and only 19 of those really have any kind of scarcity (9 Red Sox games, 9 Yankees games, and Opening Day). The other 62 dates one might as well walk up to the ticket window and save the uncertainty of a scalped ticket.

One might also wonder why it is that a stadium surrounded by police is also surrounded by scalpers brazenly plying their trade. On one occasion a scalper asked me "Need tickets?" as I walked past two policemen. I turned to one officer and said "Is he talking to you or me?" The officer scowled at me and said "Move it along."

So why do the police ignore the scalpers? Why do the Orioles allow a criminal element to color the experience of everyone attending their games (you cannot attend an Orioles game without being solicited, they stack scalpers two per square of sidewalk)?

The answer, as always, is find the money. A terrible team like the Orioles has a hard time selling tickets. The scalpers service three groups: the fans, the season ticket holders, and the Orioles. The first group is simple, on those 19 scarce dates of the year, a scalper allows someone to have that magical experience of walking up to the ballpark and purchasing a ticket to a sold out event. Said fan will be passing a huge profit on to the scalper, and I'll skip some controversy by not positing where said profits likely go...

The Orioles season ticket holders also benefit. Season tickets for a baseball team are in no way cheap, and it is impossible to realistically attend all 81 home dates. So one can easily defray the cost by selling off tickets, some use EBay, some use ticket brokers, some use the Orioles. If the scalpers went away, the fans that finance season tickets through them would have to scramble to make up that lost income, and would perhaps reduce their plan or cancel season tickets altogether.

Which brings us to the final beneficiary, the Orioles. Not only do they get a certain bump to season tickets, but they also sell tickets regularly to the scalpers. The scalper takes on a certain risk purchasing tickets to a weekend game with, say, the Mariners. I have frequently seen scalpers left holding unsold inventory that becomes worthless. Of course the Orioles would sell every ticket to desirable games, but they make gains in the extra sales on dates of questionable desirability.

So the next time you attend a sporting event and wonder why you are mobbed by people of ill-repute attempting to hustle you, don't wonder why the overtime-collecting cops aren't interested. Don't wonder why the team isn't interested. Everybody is making a nice dishonest buck.

EP Bumper Stickers Inc. #1

2007-08-10T05:08:00.001-07:00

Two of my loves are hypocrisy and creating bumper sticker ideas that are funny to perhaps only myself. I also love to walk and I carry a grudge against all those that eschew the simple pleasure of walking, or the responsible choice of public transit too often. And for some reason liberal hypocrisy tickles my fancy a lot more than the other side.

From MakeStickers.com

I Just Think this is Cool

2007-08-08T09:05:00.001-07:00

I love football, both varieties, although I've only played the international game. I've never followed the EPL before, but I can say (without any remorse for bandwagoneering) after seeing this, I 'll keep an eye on Liverpool this year.

The Bambino, Hammerin Hank, and Miss Congeniality

2007-07-25T08:49:00.000-07:00

Reprinted and revised from a previous blog, seemed timely this week thanks to Mr. Bonds and the current World War against statistics and logic :

Here's why this Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds home run king stuff bothers me a great deal.
Babe Ruth had 9831 plate appearances in the live ball era (this is not necessarily a clear delineation, but I've started with 1920)
Hank Aaron had 13940 plate appearances in the live ball era
Babe Ruth hit 665 home runs in the live ball era
Hank Aaron hit 755 home runs in the live ball era

Sure Hank Aaron played longer and put up a bigger number. If that impresses you, you probably love Cal Ripken and favorably compare Bert Blyleven and Sandy Koufax, or Joe Niekro and Pedro Martinez. You could MAYBE, argue that Babe Ruth wasn't the best hitter that ever lived. The only acceptable argument is the level of competition, which I will unpack below. But Ruth is one of the top 500 pitchers of all-time, and could possibly have ranked much much higher. And although it is not frequently mentioned, he was in fact a fine defensive outfielder.

I should also mention that with 12469 live ball plate appearances, Barry Bonds has amassed 753 home runs.

Just in case this wasn't 100% crystal clear, here are the plate appearances per home run for live ball plate appearances:
Babe Ruth: 14.78
Hank Aaron: 18.46
Barry Bonds: 16.56
Babe Ruth was much better at hitting home runs than Hank Aaron or Barry Bonds; fact.

On the level of competition, I agree with the arguments about a non-integrated major league when Babe Ruth played. But I counter that with the fact that there was ONE major professional sport when Babe played. If you were going to be a professional athlete it was either baseball or boxing, and boxing would have picked up such an insignificantly smaller portion of the population, it isn't worth considering. If you were athletically gifted and wanted to earn money from it, you played baseball.

Pundits cry about the frequency of 50 homer seasons and 500 homer careers in the modern era, have any of them noticed the incredible shrinking ballparks, and the expansion of the league? Babe Ruth was regularly playing in ballparks that had much greater dimensions than anything we see today. Today's ballparks are by and large designed for runs and specifically home runs, because that's what crowds want to see. Also the league now has 30 teams, when it only had 16 in the time of Ruth. Isn't it possibly that the elasticity of pitching quality has not kept pace with that of hitting quality?

I think Babe not competing against Latino or African-American players is a detriment to his achievement, but I think it is equaled or even exceeded by the factors mentioned above.

Norwegian writers block

2007-07-22T07:35:00.000-07:00

From Knut Hamsun's powerful novella Hunger

"A couple of short sentences formed themselves with much trouble, a score of poor words which I tortured forth with might and main to try and advance a little. Then I stopped, my head was barren; I was incapable of more. And, as I could positively not go on, I set myself to gaze with wide open eyes at these last words, this unfinished sheet of paper; I stared at these strange, shaky letters that bristled up from the paper like small hairy creeping things, till at last I could neither make head nor tail of any of it. I thought on nothing."

As a creative person tinged with manic-depression it isn't much of a stretch for me to read the same in Hamsun. Was there ever a great artist who was not manic-depressive?

How to not inspire confidence in your readers Exhibit A

2007-07-15T18:54:00.000-07:00

I've been reading some education links fed to me by Mr. Tabor this weekend, and this lovely sales pitch from a dailykos article caught my ear:

"I am not a scholarly researcher, nor am I that well versed in the history of education in this country to call myself an educational historian. But I believe that for far too long we have made a mistake in approaching education."

If you don't study medicine, and you're not a doctor, it might be time to put away the stethoscope and stop writing prescriptions.

Pedro Martinez, Bill James, and the Human Brain

2007-07-08T06:22:00.000-07:00

I sometimes think about placing Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract in my bread drawer, to see if its ability to stay forever fresh is transferable. Perhaps more on that later. I love teaching through comparisons between sports and science or life, and vice versa. Bill makes a great one here, and it's about the greatest pitcher that ever lived (well maybe):

"Stephen Jay Gould once expressed the thought that, when the time comes that we finally understand the difference between the mind of a man and the mind of a monkey, it will turn out to be something simple like this - that a man's mind is not vastly different from a monkey's mind, but rather, the human is capable of vastly more because some small advantages for the human create enormous differences by making combinations with one another, and with the other parts of the mind.

I think of that in connection with Pedro. How can he be so much better than the other pitchers? [...] he is vastly better in toto because he has some additional factors - his ability to change his arm angle, his ability to change speeds on all of his pitches without losing control - which interact to make geometric combinations."

Beethoven's Quartets and the fossilization of memory

2007-07-06T11:25:00.000-07:00

A quote from Joseph Kerman's seminal work "The Beethoven Quartets." Kerman's point is already an abstract meditation on the problem of historical memory, but I don't think one need even look back centuries to get his point. The decay of detail and the curse of causation takes hold within our own lifetimes, over the years or months or weeks of experience as memory fails. Kerman speaks of a prediction of future greatness by Beethoven's patron Count Waldstein:

"Not having been there, with Waldstein, we can only establish contact by imposing upon people, art, and events a retrospective order that is quite another thing than the rich disorder of involvement. History for us has whitened actuality into abstraction. The immediacy of artistic struggle becomes a set of trends, points of contact, and lines of development relating works of art; isolation may make them appear more impressive, yet the impressiveness is lonely [...]"

Unitas

2007-07-05T10:31:00.000-07:00

Gino Marchetti was a Hall of Fame defensive end for the Baltimore Colts. His quote below, from Tom Callahan's exceptional biography Johnny U sent chills down my spine the first time I read it, and the five times I re-read it immediately afterwards. The necessary context is that the Colts had come from mediocrity to contend for the NFL Championship they would win in 1958. Johnny Unitas had been a nobody on the team until former starting quarterback George Shaw got hurt. The phrasing and pace of the words are excellent, almost as good as verse:

"That's the satisfaction we were beginning to feel in nineteen fifty-seven. You're at the absolute bottom, getting the shit kicked out of you, and you slowly start to rise, and you keep climbing, a little higher, a little higher, until you've come so far that you're almost there. In a way, that's my earliest memory of Unitas. I've thought about this a lot. I honestly don't have one specific first memory of John. Hell, I hardly remember him being in training camp in fifty-six. I don't think anybody really noticed him until Shaw got hurt. I can't say exactly when it was, but one of the first conscious thoughts I had about John, studying him from across the room, was, Here's a guy who's done some bad losing and has had enough of it."

Ethics

2007-07-04T23:12:00.001-07:00

This snippet from the Kierkegaard Wiki caught my eye. No original scholarship, I just liked the turn of phrase:

"Ethics is something a person does for himself, with the realization that his entire self-understanding is involved. The meaning of his life comes down to whether or not he lives out these beliefs in an honest, passionate, and devoted way."

One of the great boons of self-awareness is the ability to maintain a higher degree of intellectually consistency. My own experience in a sales environment has demonstrated that people will consistently behave towards others with treatment they would not accept from others. Removing them from their in-group or home locale drastically increases their tendency to do so.

Welcome

2007-07-04T11:28:00.001-07:00

A new blog is born, and somewhere an old blog dies. I've had personal blogs in the past, but I always grew tired of that game. The people I really wanted to share my life with didn't need to read the blog, and the people that didn't fit into that category, well, who needs 'em. This will not be a series of personal anecdotes. I intend to use this blog as a record of the information and experiences I find notable, for my own benefit, and who knows, potentially for the benefit of the masses (or mini-masses).