Further Thoughts on Joss Freaking Whedon

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” (Source linked below)

Regular readers know that we here at OaO espouse a view of our biological and conscious selves that states that we have at the core a brain like any animal, a very intricate and complex stimulus-response machine, but that we also possess a highly evolved ability to post-hoc narrate that stimulus and response; id est you respond to your surroundings and situations in some way and then, some number of microseconds later, you make up a story about why you responded that way. Sometimes that story models the actions of stimulus and response quite well (I decide to go down to the cafeteria and eat french fries because I'm hungry and the guy in the office next door has french fries and they smell yummy...mmm...french fries), and sometimes it really, really doesn't.

Humans, in the words of Neal Stephenson, are stupendous badasses. But an inescapable fact of our evolution from carbon chain to stupendous badass is that we got here by being unimaginable bastards. Nature, red in tooth and claw, did things we probably don't want to hear about in order for our genes to make it to this point. Somewhere along the line a particular strain of genes thought it might try cooperating with other gene pools instead of brutally trying to wipe them out and see how that worked out, and lo and behold it worked out pretty well. But we're still animals, and the cutthroat bastardry that got us here remains in our genes.

Say you're a male of a mammalian species, and you one day realize that the only way that your genes are going to survive is to impregnate a female and make sure that the resulting offspring survives long enough to reproduce. Then you realize that, as far as reproduction is concerned, your role as a male begins and ends at fire-and-forget (God, I love that metaphor). The gears and wheels turn in your animal brain some more and you realize, "holy crap, after she's impregnated she could just go off and take my offspring and I'd never know what happened to it. Or worse, she could go off and get impregnated by somebody else at the same time and I'd end up protecting somebody else's genes. I have almost no control over this process. This simply won't do." And Bam! You've got womb envy. The terror of not having control over the most basic needs of your genes causes the red-in-truth-and-claw part of your brain to kick in--it sees that the female of the species is generally smaller and weaker and can be physically controlled and decides that anything it needs to do to re-assert that control must be done.

When this mammal is also human and is well practiced in post-hoc explanations for its behavior it feels, you know, a little bit awkward about just exerting brutal control over half the members of our species, so we need to come up with a narrative about why that's okay. Sometimes...actually, pretty much all the time...we wind up with religious dogma. We couch our unimaginable bastardry in some story about how it's written in a Very Important Book that someone somewhere said it brings dishonor to our family when a woman has sex with the wrong person, and therefore she must be killed (or when the religion stops working, we couch our bastardry in made up science that purports to prove what the purveyors of that science already take as a given).

I believe and hope that the tide that made individual bastardry a successful evolutionary strategy has long since turned, and that cooperation amongst a widely diverse gene pool is replacing it as the best strategy for long term survival. It's only that these things happen on a much longer time scale than any human will witness that forces us to continue to endure the unimaginable bastardry that we do to each other. And it's the fact that we exist in such an in-between state that we live with such twisted justifications for that bastardry as "Honor Killings."

I wish we'd evolve just a little quicker, though.

Joss Freaking Whedon

Joss Freaking Whedon!

Monday Marginalia

First off, sorry about the mess. I realize my blog looks like complete ass right now, and would be an embarrassment even if I weren't someone who BUILDS USER INTERFACES FOR A LIVING, but...uh...nope, no, I got nothin'. It's bad. I will fix it soon.

UPDATE: I'm not convinced that this is much better, but I couldn't stand looking at it the way it was any longer. More changes sure to come./UPDATE

Second, the latest result of my cleanup work from my RPM Challenge album appears top left. It's your standard 80's New Wave rock song critiquing String Theory due to its untimeliness, and continues to herald my inexorable march away from alt-folkiness towards I have no earthly idea what.

On the topic of the RPM Challenge, apparently some fellow musician contacted Starbucks and got them interested in an Hear Music compilation of RPM artists, and I got an email this weekend that I was "nominated" (for some very loose definition of the term) to have a song on the/an album. This, as with all things that are both musical and make money, seems very very iffy to me, but who the hell knows.

Speaking of things in email this weekend, I also got a note from my old college friend Layne, to whom I hadn't spoken in years, and who now seems to be a food and travel writer living in Buenos Aires. This is, by far, the coolest thing that anybody I know is doing with their lives, so for starters I've added her blog Go Where the Taxista Takes You to the HBC. Read it and live vicariously.

You Just Get More

Any old amateur blogger can reprint for you some funny and ironic political quote that, by the time it appears, everyone has already seen on account of they, too, watch The Daily Show (you dumbshit). But here at The Odds Are One™, we give you more. We'll actually delve into the quote, go the extra mile, give you that extra insight that you just can't get anywhere else. We can offer this unique service because we sit around reading our own damn blog while we eat dinner--that's just how pathetic we are. Or else it's because of how much we care about you, the loyal reader. I'm sure it's one or the other.

Anyway we here at the Odds Are One™ are reading the A.G. quote below and it's suddenly struck us, why would he say that? I mean, that's really weird. That's like, mental short-circuit weird. It's Meta-Freudian-Slip reverse syllogism weird. Let us go over what we know: Gonzales is an intelligent man, and quite possibly in some metaphorical and/or non-metaphorical sense, Gonzales has sold his soul to a neo-religious ideology that, as most of them do, tells itself that its actions are for the good of the many when they are in fact good for the needs of only a very few. I'll come back to that in a moment, but one other thing we should take as an a priori is that Gonzales is in fact cognizant of the fact that the attorney firings are in the news and that he is aware that he's there in the House testifying about it.

Here's what I'm coming up with:

The Slip seems pretty straightforward: he's been rigorously coached, or coached himself, to repeat that there was absolutely nothing improper about the attorney firings. But he clearly also knows it isn't remotely true. His cheatin' heart will tell on him. His conscious mind isn't going to let anything slip through his mouth that betrays this fact, but his subconscious is just dying to let it out, and subconscious outwits the conscious by constructing a reverse logical syllogism that Alberto's forebrain can't quite parse in time to intercept the FTP packet his cranial nerves have sent to his mouth. "If there were a crime present the press would be reporting on it. So clearly there is no crime here, because if there were...oh...crap."

At the same time, this seems to clearly pinpoint his own internal ethical compass. Imagine the logistical nightmare that you'd have to engage with in your moral center in order to be where Gonzales is: "Sure, I'm an intelligent man and I've done a lot of things you wouldn't have liked to have done in the name of the ideology but I was doing it for the benefit of the party by getting more members of that party elected to office, which I owe to the party because people before me did what they had to do to get me where I am so I can...do a lot of things I wouldn't have liked to have done...wait a minute, wasn't I just here?"

So he knows that he's doing something wrong here, but he tells himself it's not really wrong. If it were really morally wrong to fire attorneys for partisan gain/lie in front of Congress/Start A War That We Know To Be Wrong But Is For The Greater Good And Will Stabilize The Source Of Our Energy Needs For The Next Century Or Two And Will Hold Those Interests For Our Children And Our Children's Children So They Can Live In Peace And Security Even If The Rest Of The World Goes To Hell On Account Of Fuck Them...*ahem*, if doing any of that were really wrong, the Freedom of The Press, the great protector that is our Fourth Estate, would come to our rescue and report the truth, and the people would rise up against them. I'd aver he thinks this because he is a child of Watergate, but I'm just guessing. This must be the specific form his own personal cognitive dissonance is taking right at the moment he's speaking (or maybe this is just what's on his mind this month, or, you know, this career). "If what I am doing were wrong, the press would be reporting it and people would be demanding answers, but what I'm doing is not wrong and I know this because...crap...here I am again." In one sentence he's given you a perfect zen koan for his own personal mental state.

If in fact someone -- if a career investigator or prosecutors felt that we were making decisions for political reasons to interfere with a case, you'd probably hear about it.

Yeah, Al. You'd probably hear about it.

OaO Presents: They Actually Said That™*

And it would be pretty darn difficult, if not impossible, to make a decision for political reasons and expect to get away with it. If in fact someone -- if a career investigator or prosecutors felt that we were making decisions for political reasons to interfere with a case, you'd probably hear about it. We'd probably read about it in the papers.

-Alberto Gonzales, testifying in the House Of Representatives on May 10th. Transcript

*"They Actually Said That" is an utterly non-trademarked catchphrase about which The Odds Are One apparently harbors some feeble hope that...something...oh, fuck it.

Truth

Ah, you, writer of XKCD, with your minimalist line drawings and your nerdish, nerdish hilarity. How polished your humor, yet how jejeune your philosophy. Fear not, you too shall soon learn the precariousness of trying to model The Truth.

Pitch To Contact

The Seattle Mariners went into spring training this past March with a new mantra from their pitching coaches: "Pitch to contact." They apparently had t-shirts made up, which, in case you were never in Glee Club in college and don't know this, is completely cheesy. The antithetical philosophy would be to try and strike out every batter a pitcher faces, and this indeed has some drawbacks--trying to strike a batter out in baseball will generally require more pitches, whereas if the batter puts the ball in play, he could conceivably get himself out with one pitch. Moreover, a strikeout pitcher might try to throw more finesse pitches that are harder to locate, and end up walking a lot of batsmen, which puts him in trouble in an inning, and forces him to throw a lot of so-called "stress pitches." A pitcher who racks up higher pitch counts will get tired sooner in the game, and so on and so forth.

There's also (seemingly) a statistical basis for this philosophy, too. Statistical analysis has shown that once a batter has put a pitched ball in play, the pitcher has little to no control over whether it becomes a hit or not. There's a statistic called Batting Average on Balls In Play which measures how successful batters are at reaching base safely once they've hit a pitch (assuming that it doesn't go over the fence for a home run, in which case there's usually nothing the defense can do). This number tends to sit in a range centering around about 30%, but has very little correlation from pitcher to pitcher and year to year--if a pitcher has a .280 BABIP one year, it's as likely to be .330 as .280 the next season (knuckleballer pitchers, such as Boston Red Sock Tim Wakefield, tend to be the exception to this rule of seasonal correlation, but that's another story). Sometimes a ground ball gets through the infield for a single and sometimes the shortstop gets it for an easy out, and this outcome has little to do with the pitcher and a lot to do with a) how much ground the defense behind him covers, and b) luck . So if a coaching staff knew (or thought) they had a good defensive team, pitching to contact would appear to make a lot of sense.

The Mariners apparently have a lot of written or unwritten philosophies like this. They coach their hitters to be aggressive, and look for a good pitch to hit early in the count. They also toyed, more last season than this, with being aggressive once they got on base, trying to go from first to third on a single, for instance.

In tonight's game, in the top of the first inning, Vladimir Guerrero came to bat against Mariner pitcher Jarrod Washburn with a runner on first base. Here is the book on pitching to Vladimir Guerrero: Under no circumstances should you pitch to Vladimir Guerrero. He can hit pretty much any pitch anywhere near the plate and hit it very hard. He is an extremely good hitter. If you were to, for some reason, ignore this information, and throw him hittable pitches, he would hit them. Hard. Pitching to contact against Vladimir Guerrero is a bad idea. It is bad. Bad. Bad bad bad. A better strategy would be to throw unhittable pitches far out of the strike zone and hope he swings at them or just walk him than, rather let him beat you with his bat. Vladimir Guerrero took the very hittable pitch he was thrown and deposited it into the left field bullpen for a home run. Later in the game he came to bat with another runner on and doubled, Mariner pitchers apparently being unable to parse blatant object lessons.

Jarrod Washburn was doing pretty well so far this season: he'd managed to win more games than he lost while sporting a very good earned run average for the most part by throwing strikes and letting hitters get themselves out. By coincidence, Jarrod Washburn had also been facing some baseball teams with pretty poor lineups. But throwing hittable pitches to batters who are good at hitting hittable pitches is highly likely to eventually result in bad outcomes. Similarly, when the Mariners tried to always take that extra base, it worked some of the time, and some of the time the ball wasn't hit far enough or they were facing a team with canon-armed outfielders and they just ran themselves into outs. As for their "aggressive" approach to hitting, when the Mariners face pitchers who tend to throw strikes early in the count, they tend to do pretty well. When they face pitchers who aren't as good, who have trouble hitting the strike zone with regularity, they tend to do poorly--they frequently get absolutely stymied by pitchers who have just come up from AAA, going up hacking at the first pitch that looks hittable instead of letting the pitcher get himself into trouble by walking batters and running up his pitch count...sounds a little bit familiar, doesn't it? Seems like there's some sort of object lesson there.

You Knew (Him) Better The First Time You Met Him

You knew him better the first time you met him.
The first sight of his face and you recognized him instantly.
And when you first heard it, the sound and timbre of his voice,
Though not exactly what you expected,
Was exactly what you expected.

But then you meet a lot of people, and there isn't space in your brain
To store that first image of everyone
(and anyhow you could never have held onto that one perfect moment of knowing).
So to save space you took the aspects of him
That were sort of like the aspects of all the other people you meet
(who themselves weren't quite like that either),
And made yourself a model of him to hold on to.

The next time you saw him, you noticed he had a crooked tooth,
And that the cut of his hair didn't quite match the person you had modeled,
(and maybe he laughed a little too loudly and awkwardly).
And you thought, "oh, well he doesn't quite fit into my model of him,"
But you needed the model in order to hold on to him (and everyone else),
And so the thought became, "Oh, well. He doesn't quite fit."

And that would have been that,
Except
That years went by
And you were lucky enough to forget him.

And that next time your old model was long since lost
And you had again that one perfect instant of recognition,
The one you couldn't hold on to,
That you held on to just a little bit longer this time,
Long enough to realize that you knew him better the first time you met him.

Flight

I took a flight home; it was yesterday, across the country East to West, brief stopover in Denver. They show this "The Amalgamated Air Freight and Passenger Network" on the little view screens in addition to, or in lieu of on shorter flights, the movie (for a definition of "Amalgamated Air Freight and Passenger" that's approximately equivalent to, "an airline I flew yesterday that I don't feel like naming"). Within this particular collection of programs, they were showing a small collection of truly bizarre 30-second commercials you'd never see on television. You've seen them on flights: The International Organization of Gemologists. Tourism Greece. Time Share Villas in Place You Have Never Been But Looks Kind Of Chic And Old World. And one for the C.I.A. I'm watching this particular ad, and I'm thinking, "Why, now that you mention it, yes...I am a patriotic American and I do want to serve my country in the clandestine services...no...wait a minute..."

Something happens to you when you fly. This American Life once did a show about how people cried at incredibly trite movies they saw on airplanes. A recent article in Slate examined the types of things that get sold in the Skymall and tied it in with some twinge in the ancient corners of the evolutionary brain:

[O]ne is aware of how absurd it is to be suspended eight miles high in a metal container, only some poorly understood laws of physics keeping you from plunging abruptly to certain death. In some still-not-entirely assimilated region of the limbic brain, one's time is about to run out every second, thus the attraction of all those devices that somehow contain time, tame time, break time down into tiny dials within dials....

This totally happens to me. I don't know if it's the lessons of the world learned by my ancient ancestors of pre-history that makes me suddenly inspired by a call to duty from the C.I.A. when, in fact, I loathe the C.I.A. and everything it stands for, I have been the least patriotic person in America ever since the word "patriotic" was redefined to mean, "agrees with the policies of George W. Bush," and the first two things I think are wrong with the world are 1) Capitalism, and, 2) The C.I.A. Clearly the spooks have done extensive market research to determine where best to place their ads, because if I am suggestible to the siren song of covert ops at 35,000 feet, then everyone is.

In addition to crying at stupid things, thinking while flying makes me believe insane things are possible, such as if I could just figure out how to make myself blog every day, that I could grow an audience that wanted to read my musings on music, technology, and philosophy. It makes me think how I started posting songs on MacIdol, and 500 people I've never even met listened to them, and some of them even seemed to like them, and how I quite enjoyed that. I thought, what if I could get 5000 people to listen? If that, what if I could get 50,000? Like I said, crazy shit.

Next: Crazy Shit!

OaO Vocabularity Of The Day™*

Godwin's Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

*"Vocabularity Of The Day" is not actually trademarked in any way.

far and away

this is going to sound stupid, but air travel is pretty medieval. not literally of course. literally, if you'd told someone in the middle ages that soon enough people would get into huge phallic metal boxes with wings and 200 plus other people and thus be able to travel 3000 miles in a mere eleven hours, that middle ages person would have been mighty impressed.

but this is the future as t.g. pointed out sunday when we were video chatting with our six week old nephew for whom that will be totally normal. so the yelled at by crazy woman in security, ban on drinking water nevermind hand lotion nevermind cup of yogurt, take everything out of your bag, disrobe entirely, not making anyone feel or be safer fiasco that is the airport, followed by the very teeny spaces, we are going to charge you fifty bucks for that exit row, we are going to feed you six mini pretzels in five hours, and please don't even fantasize about being able to pick up that pencil you just dropped because it ain't gonna happen that is flying, followed by the waiting for an hour after just to find out that they didn't bring your luggage then waiting in line to tell them about how they didn't bring your luggage then being promised it will be there by 3:00 the next day then 5:00 then 6:30, nevermind your dinner reservations, and no one ever saying wow we're sorry we lost your luggage, well that's crap travel. medieval. our children (or maybe theirs or maybe theirs) will consider these tales with the horror with which i regard lack of indoor plumbing, no central heat, and most aspects of medieval life.

in the vast expanse of human history, this tale of woe is going to be our hallmark i think. our lives are marked in so many ways by being so far away from so many of the people we love so much. can you imagine that that wouldn't be totally formative? so many of the people we love are somewhere else all the time! how can we survive with so much love somewhere else? in the middle ages, very few people had this problem because they didn't love people far away. folks mostly stayed put and loved people nearby. soon enough we'll have, i don't know, bullet trains, teleportation, a pod system...something. how far from video chatting can that possibly be? so really, it's only this time and this place -- this blip -- with all this far away love. and it's unacceptable to me. un-ac-ceptable. physicists: no one even cares about string theory. where's the teleporting?

meantime, some of you -- and you know who you are -- really need to move to seattle. or invent teleportation. or buy an iteleporter. or an ipodsystem. but not that kind.

--mtg

Super Pop-tastic

"Albert Einstein," my father-in-law is fond of saying, "Would have given his left nut for a pocket calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and take square roots." Forced into using pencil, paper, and a slide rule, the technologically penurious fellow could only manage to, you know, utterly revolutionize physics. On the other side of the coin, I have a pocket calculator that possesses somewhat more computing power than the guidance system that landed the lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility, and yet it hasn't enabled me to revolutionize physics. As you might guess, I miss a lot of the points that my father-in-law tries to make.

In this case, though, I believe that the point he's trying to make is something like, "Technology, dude. Holy. Living. Crap." This struck me a couple of days back while using a piece of software that the Apple Computer Corporation gives away for free when you buy one of their computers, merely the raw editing capabilities of which Phil Spector would have given his left nut for in 1965 (insert current-events-related Phil Spector joke here. Myself, I've nothing). In spite of the fact that my profession and my main hobby are pretty heavily tied up in it, I'm not usually one to get moony over technology. But I never stop being amazed at the fact that I live in a time in which there exists a common household appliance into which one can plug ones guitar and, some time later, a finished album pops out.

Garageband won't make me the Beatles, but then the Beatles couldn't create a symphony orchestra and an "ahh" singing choir, mix them together under a song they'd already recorded, have a drifting pan from left to right and then flange the whole thing...okay, fine, they could and did do that. But they couldn't do it in their basement. My point is this: fuck the fucking Beatles. Also that there's a new song up. As you were.

Next: Technology: Do you own enough?

Axiom of Choice

My first website, something like "http://math.wisc.edu/~mariz/", hosted a little set of puzzles called "The Math For Poets" page. It had graphics drawn in pencil and scanned in, and one of those moire-ish blue repeating backgrounds that was popular in 1996. Between the VAX server that hosted it and the general bandwidth of the universe back then, you would be lucky if it only took a minute for a page to load. How sweet and innocent we were then.

One of the exhibits on the Math For Poets site was about the Axiom Of Choice, presenting Bertrand Russel's explication thereof in puzzle form. It went (not really at all) as follows:

You are born on earth and live to a ripe old age but along the way choose the wrong religion and end up in hell (sorry about that). You are assigned to the Lord High Asmodai's Scrum team, and he resources you to the "Sock Sorting" line from the task list. He takes you to a room where there are infinity pairs of socks. He says to you, "We need to designate a new collection of socks, and this collection must contain exactly one sock from each pair in this room." He then gives you a collection of supertask performing daemons and instructs you that all you have to do is tell them which sock to take from each pair and they will create the new set of socks. "Huh, that doesn't seem so bad," you think. You go to the first pair of socks and point to one of the socks, and the daemons instantly grab it and pull it into the new pile. Then you go to the second pair and point to a sock, and instantly the daemons grab it. Then you go to the third pair, then the fourth pair, then the fifth, then you note again that there are infinity pairs of socks, and a sinking realization begins to claw at you. You refer back to the task list and note that the "Sock Sorting" line item has been budgeted at "infinity man-hours". You become desperate. In an effort to halve the development time, you try pointing to socks from two different pairs at once. While the daemons are able to add the socks from two piles to the new pile exactly as fast as they can add one (that is, instantly), you soon realize that infinity man-hours divided by two is still infinity man-hours. Lying on the floor and pointing to socks with your feet and hands at the same time has the same, null, effect. Even the Agile Business Methodology cannot help you. You go to your Stand-Up Meeting every morning, reporting that yesterday you sorted socks, today you will be sorting socks, there are no blocking issues, and your Scrum task has infinity hours remaining. This is how you spend eternity.

I, being a godless heathen, also wind up in hell where I am assigned to your Scrum team. The Lord High Asmodai, or "The Big L.H." as I like to call him, assigns me the "Shoe Sorting" line item from the task list. I note with trepidation that it, too, is budgeted for infinity man-hours. And indeed, my task is virtually the same. I am assigned a set of supertask-performing daemons and am told that I must create a new collection of shoes by selecting a shoe from each one of infinity pairs of shoes. Immediately I am broken and devoid of all hope, for I have seen you at Scrum each morning, reporting that your progress on the Sock Sorting task has gone from infinity hours to infinity hours, suffering the humiliation as Big L.H. publicly berates you for your lack of progress and threatens to stick you with a "Not Achieving" rating for the next review period. I walk into my room filed with infinity pairs of shoes, my supertask daemons in tow. I stare at the infinity pairs of shoes. The daemons hover nearby, awaiting their first instruction. Then, suddenly a thought occurs to me. I turn to the daemons. "Create a new pile of shoes," I say, "by taking the left shoe from each pair." In a flash of supertasking, the daemons create a new pile made up of infinity left shoes, and my once seemingly Sisyphean task is instantly completed. The Scrum burn-down chart drops below the red line for the first time in thirteen billion years. The Lord High tells me he likes my bias for action and my ability to self-manage to project actualization. Then we do lunch.

Next: What the hell was that all about?

Jon Stewart is my hero, too

Echoing Mita, I'd like to say that there are few people who understand what's actually going on in this country today as well as Jon Stewart does.

JON STEWART: And by the way, that was all just — that was a game, and he knew it, and the guys on the committee knew it. And for the President to come out after that and say, "Everything I saw there gave me more confidence in him," that solidified my notion that, "Oh, it's because what he expected of Gonzalez was" it's sort of like, do you remember in GOODFELLAS? When Henry Hill got arrested for the first time and Robert DeNiro met him at the courthouse and Henry Hill was really upset, 'cause he thought Robert DeNiro would be really mad at him. And DeNiro comes up to him and he gives him a $100 and he goes, "You got pinched. We all get pinched, but you did it right, you didn't say nothing."

BILL MOYERS: Gonzales said nothing.

JON STEWART: Right. And "you went up there and said nothing. You gave them no legal recourse against you, and you made yourself a smart man, a self-made man look like an utter pinhead on national television, and you did it for me."

(The transcript of the Bill Moyers interview)
Next: Whatever it is that comes next!

Gap

My last book read was David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, which I completed whilst the Gadflies were on vacation a few weeks ago. Mitchell comes highly recommended from mtg these days, and BSG is certainly one of the best books I've read in quite a while. mtg, as everyone now knows, is a teacher and scholar of English, and her recommendation of this book came with a heavy emphasis on the brilliance of the author's use of language, which she mentioned roughly every other second while she was reading it.

I read the entire book and it did not once strike me that the language was beautiful. What struck me was that the book was awesome. All I noticed about the language it was written in was that it matched the narrator (who is a 13-year-old boy growing up in England in the early 80's). Anyway, I wasn't reading the language, I was reading the book.

These days I'm listening to the Shins' new album. It's brilliant--but much the way mtg reads a book through the language, I'm not really listening to the songs. I'm listening to the instrumentation: Fender panned right doubled with a synthesized marimba playing a simple scale, the bleed of the snare across drum mics, vocals with a vocoder effect, Leslie wheel and heavy compression on another guitar (Gibson?) doing arpeggios panned left, etc. In the same way that one can't look at a printed word without, microseconds later, reading it, and microseconds after that having Wernicke's Area translate it into meaning, I can't just hear a song as a song anymore. I miss this sometimes.

I've started going back and remixing the album I did in the month of February, and the first track appears at the top of the list to the left. For the n of you who end up hearing both versions (where n is an integer approximately equal to 4), you'll probably notice that the crunchy guitar sound has been replaced by a sort of dry echoy guitar, kind of an old-timey sound (it's spring reverb for those of you...uh...never mind. It's spring reverb, Sam), and that you can hear the vocals better. To me it sounds like a completely different song, except that to me it didn't really ever sound like a song at all, just a collection of instruments playing. I kind of have to take it on faith that there's a song in there.

Next: More "songs"!

Season Preview

With baseball season nigh, it's again time for some baseball blogging. Here are a couple of notes from the baseball offseason wire this past winter.

December 7, 2006

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) -- The Atlanta Braves swapped a starting pitcher for bullpen help Thursday, sending oft-injured lefty Horacio Ramirez to the Seattle Mariners for reliever Rafael Soriano.

December 13, 2006

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Second baseman Jose Vidro would be sent to the Seattle Mariners by the Washington Nationals for two prospects in a tentative trade that is pending physicals for all players involved, a person with knowledge of the deal told The Associated Press on Wednesday night.

If you follow the Mariners at all (hi, Greg) you know that the trades listed above were widely reviled in the online Mariner fan community. The problem wasn't so much that they were terribly lopsided trades (they were), but that these trades revealed a fundamental difference between the business philosophy of Mariner management and that of sane people.

In the Mariners' division, the American League West, is a baseball team called the Oakland Athletics. Since 2000, the Athletics have finished first, second, first, first, second, second, and first in their division, and made the playoffs five out of seven seasons. In every one of these seasons they had a payroll that was roughly half that of the Seattle Mariners, and in the bottom half of payrolls across baseball. The Mariners, after making the playoffs in 2000 and 2001, have finished second, second, fourth, fourth, and fourth in the division. In business speak (and I am paraphrasing the words of another Mariner blogger), the Mariners have a competitor who year after year puts out a (frequently vastly) superior product at half the cost.

The way that the Athletics do this is a mystery to absolutely no one. Michael Lewis wrote a very popular book about it. This book rubbed a lot of people in baseball the wrong way because, in short, they thought it threatened their jobs. The baseball blog linked above is an excellent analysis of Moneyball as it relates to the Mariners vis-à-vis the Athletics, so I won't do that here.

If some things go right for the Mariners this season--if Felix Hernandez develops into an ace, Raul Ibañez keeps hitting, Adrian Beltré hits a little more, and the bullpen isn't quite as terrible as it looks like it might be--the Mariners could contend for a division title. However, if pretty much any one of those things doesn't happen or any starter gets injured, the Mariners are looking at finishing fourth out of four for the fourth year in a row. The problem with that is that the M's are sporting a payroll of $111 million, which is third highest in baseball behind the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox (both of whom, while prognosticators are universally picking the M's to finish last in their division, are expected to make the playoffs). What the Mariners did this offseason was to trade away young, cheap, actually or potentially good players for old, expensive, mediocre veterans who were once good (well, Horacio Ramirez was never good, so I don't know what they were thinking there). The Mariners have the third highest payroll in baseball and they're going to break camp with Rey Ordoñez on their roster, a player who's been out of baseball for two years, and proved over the course of over 3000 at bats that he simply can't hit Major League pitching. $111 million dollars ought to buy one hell of a baseball team, but the Mariners have taken it and bought a baseball team that will have to be lucky not to finish last in their division.

Next: More Frequent Blogging!

Variable Interpolation

Latest thing posted in the kitchen at work (above the coffee maker, asking people to make coffee if they take the last cup). Hilarious only to people as dorky as I:

Oh no! Only half a cup! Who did this to me? WTF? Life sucks!!! Why $DEITY Why?

Next: Humor for the masses!

be minus

teaching is a very very great job. very very great. however...
the problems with grading are myriad and insurmountable.
here is a brief list:

1) i suck at it. it takes me forever. then i feel guilty about how it takes me forever and how i suck at it and how if only i were better/smarter/cleverer/more focused/more efficient/of greater will, well surely it would take me only a third the time.

2) if ever it doesn't take that much time, i feel guilty about how it doesn't take that much time, and if i really cared, i'd spend more time at it.

3) this never happens.

4) if i don't feel guilty about its taking too much time and i don't feel guilty about its taking too little time, i feel guilty about the evidence it offers. clearly, i am not a very good teacher. if i were, my students would write better papers. at the least, they would do the things we spend hours and hours in class and in my office chatting about the relative wisdom of their doing. such as employing commas. or support for their arguments. grading is like those horrible exaggerated claims about sororities where they make you take off all your clothes and then they circle the places you need to lose weight. it is like being naked and someone circling the parts of me that are no good -- the part that taught about introductions and conclusions, the part that talked about integrating quotations, the part that offhandedly mentioned proofreading when clearly that part needed at least half a class session.

5) it does no good. it doesn't help people learn. it just upsets them.

6) seriously, the lowest possible grade one can reasonably give to a paper that isn't a total disaster is a B-. and i give lower grades than that. and then they freak out and scream and cry and get mad and sad and upset. and i do not like conflict. a C+ is not an ever so slightly above average paper. it is a pretty poor paper. then i feel guilty about grade inflation. then i spend an hour making margin notes and filling out a rubric and making lengthy end comments with praise as well as gentle suggestions. then i invite them to come chat with me about their grades in my office. then i feel guilty about how much time it takes. see #1.

7) all that said, there is really no way to communicate about writing in writing. ironic. at our favorite restaurant where, the other night, we were ordering cheese based on descriptions such as "earthy," "smooth," "balanced," and "barnyard" (by which they mean "smelly"), we were remarking to the waiter about how odd those descriptors are, and he said cheese is even harder to describe than wine. know what's harder yet to describe? why B papers aren't A papers. do students think, "hey, i got a B. B means good."? no. they think, "this paper is good, so why the hell isn't it an A?" one therefore needs must spend a lot of time answering this very question rather than going out to dinner for smelly cheese.

8) it is boring.

9) it is cold. especially when your husband turns off the heat so he can record music without also recording the blower.

10) oh the many many many other things i could be doing with my time which would be more productive or more fun or more entertaining.

11) blogging, however, is not one. i am so totally procrastinating right now. odds are, well, one that you can guess what i should be doing instead.

-- mtg (obviously)

The L.P.

As roughly half of you know, I spent much of my free time in February engaging in the RPM Challenge, which is the musical equivalent of National Write A Novel month. Thursday last being the deadline for having the thing postmarked, I burned the 11 songs I recorded in the month in their somewhat raw state, mocked up some liner notes, and dumped the thing in the mail.

I was working off a couple of themes for this project: it's a collection of songs, under my new Nom D'Art The Calculus Affair, that don't really fit my usual musical idiom (for the, you know, four of you out there who know what my usual musical idiom is), and it's also a musical tribute to a guitar: a 1955-ish hollow-body Gibson that I purchased a couple of years ago from Fronesis Père. I also played drums for the first time, which is a) harder than you think it's going to be, and b) way fun.

The official release party for RPM Challenge albums is March 30th, in a variety of locations, and at that time they'll stream all the albums from their website. I, on the other hand, have released the thing, mistakes and rushed mixing and all, here, with cover art/liner notes here. If you're in a singles frame of mind, people so far seem to be liking these:
Alexandr (You Forgot To Be In Time)
The Man Who Used To Hunt Cougars For Bounty
(long song titles are all the rage these days, I hear). I plan to eventually revisit and clean up the songs and post them to my site on MacIdol.com (which is semi-officially how I release music these days), but who knows when that will ever happen. One other small piece of musical news from Calculus Affair central is that Men Of Luggage, the song I posted here a couple of months back, is to be featured on a compilation put out by these folks, an organization that supports Heifer International (a favorite charity of the Gadflies) via music. I have no idea how certain this album is to ever appear in stores near you, but you'll hear about it here first if and when it does. In the meantime, a somewhat improved mix of the song appears from the speaker button on the MacIdol page linked above.

Next: Self-aggrandizement, but less blatant!

The Browser is the Web Service

Hard to imagine, I know, but there are actually other companies working on web services besides the Seattle-based e-commerce giant for which I work. And, in a violent betrayal of all business sense, today I'm hyping one of them: Yahoo! Pipes. The internets, as we all know, are not a dump truck. They are a series of tubes, and Pipes allows you to connect those tubes in whatever ways you might wish. Then it allows you to sort, edit, filter, &cetera them, and finally publish the results. What causes it to pretty much kick the ass of the web service world to this point is this: you don't have to be a software developer to use it. It's got a nifty little drag and drop UI; you type RSS URLs into text boxes, and connect those boxes into other boxes which perform operations like match text in entries or sort those entries by publication date. Here, for instance, is the UI for the blog aggregator I constructed. And the published results are here: The Hermeneutic Blog Circle Aggregator.

This is an unusually short post for me, so as an added bonus, here is an aggregated list of alternate titles I considered for this post:

• The Web is The Service
• The RSS Feed is The Message
• The Tubes Are The Dump Truck
• The Not Buffy is The Veronica Mars
• The Blog is The Unblog
• La Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe est Une Pipe
• The Stoat is The Potato
• The This List is The Thing That Is Not That Funny

Next: The Noun is the Other, At First Seemingly Unrelated Noun!