I'm not a big New Year's Resolutions guy. Perhaps especially this year when the new year doesn't feel like it will actually offer anything "new" out of the gate on January 1. Last year's post of goals for the year was a reach to try to create some kind of rubric for judging 2011. But the thing I think is that having goals like that is like trying to decide who you want for President based on a single issue. What I mean is that things often come up that you don't expect, and it's those things that have a tendency to shape a term in office, or in the case I'm writing about right now, a year in the life.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Year In Review, Part 1
I wrote at the start of 2011 that, "At some point, I'll look back at 2010 and say "that wasn't SO bad." That time has come. I'm not exactly sure when that time got here, and interestingly enough I also sort of forget the parts that I thought would be "the good moments" from that year. At this point, I'm completely free to re-shape 2010 in my mind to whatever the hell I want it do be.
I certainly hope that at the end of 2012 I can say the same thing about 2011. For all I said in that post on January 1, 2011, that I felt I had not yet made the next step, it's still true. Maybe it will always be true. Maybe that's a defining characteristic for me, that there's always more for me to do or achieve. I notice that I said then that I didn't feel I had progress from 2010, though in the prior paragraph I said that I had gotten a raise and added a new job, and worked my ass off. Really, all three of those things are progress, in a way.
I certainly hope that at the end of 2012 I can say the same thing about 2011. For all I said in that post on January 1, 2011, that I felt I had not yet made the next step, it's still true. Maybe it will always be true. Maybe that's a defining characteristic for me, that there's always more for me to do or achieve. I notice that I said then that I didn't feel I had progress from 2010, though in the prior paragraph I said that I had gotten a raise and added a new job, and worked my ass off. Really, all three of those things are progress, in a way.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Intentionality and politics.
One of the highest bits of praise there is, I think, is saying that everything that a person (or an organization) does is intentional. The idea is that they are extremely intelligent and aware of what's going on, that nothing gets by them. It also suggests that they are focused, that they are not wasting words or wasting actions or wasting time. I like to consider myself fairly sharp, but I definitely don't fall into this category.
At some point in his 2008 Presidential Campaign, I began to consider that Barack Obama was doing everything intentionally. Now I'm not so sure. It seems to me that I've read a lot of criticism about Obama's presidency, especially recently with the President not vetoing a bill that allows the government to jail Americans suspected of terrorism indefinitely. Perhaps this is what's driving a lot of the status-updates I've been seeing recently about the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). Perhaps this is all holdover angst from the President and the Democrats capitulating to Republicans over the last three years despite having the majority of people in congress. In any event, I'm definitely wondering what the common thread is, here. What's he trying to do, exactly?
There's been a little talk on the radio recently of a comment Mr. Obama made last year that he would rather be a, "really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." Apparently, he is no longer willing to address that comment with the media. I think it would be difficult to argue that he hasn't been at least good; the Iraq war has been formally ended, Don't Ask Don't Tell has been repealed, Health Care Reform was passed in 2010, Osama Bin Laden has been killed... that's a fairly impressive list, I would think. But there's still a sort of energy around liberals that what's been done hasn't been enough. They'll look at the debt ceiling crisis, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the still-high unemployment rate and see a presidency that was big on promise, but just not there on certain results.
It's a lot easier to appear as though everything you do is intentional when there's nobody playing defense. That is, that another person's move can't force you to counter-move. You can have a great plan in chess, but someone may be able to play their game in such a way to nullify your plan. When you're campaigning, you don't have to worry about that. If you're making a work of art, you don't have to worry about that (If I didn't mention it before, I think Eternal Sunshine is also completely intentional). If you're a television station, you don't have to do that.
The Stranger today pointed me at a FOX News bit where they substituted in Barack Obama's photo for Mitt Romney. Sometimes it seems hard to believe that all the things they do over there are intentional, because there are a lot of small, "screw-up" type things like misspelling "Obama" as "Osama" early on. However, the sheer multitude of such "screw-ups" suggests to me that it's really not a screw-up at all. If people repeatedly screwed up a thing in a normal workplace, there would be a staff meeting to correct it and it wouldn't happen anymore (or at least with less frequency). The fact that this has happened time and time again tells me that it's being implicitly encouraged.
I really think sometimes that if you watch FOX News, it's really like watching the man behind the curtain do his thing. It's really out there for everyone to see. And then there's the worrying thing: how many people agree with it.
At some point in his 2008 Presidential Campaign, I began to consider that Barack Obama was doing everything intentionally. Now I'm not so sure. It seems to me that I've read a lot of criticism about Obama's presidency, especially recently with the President not vetoing a bill that allows the government to jail Americans suspected of terrorism indefinitely. Perhaps this is what's driving a lot of the status-updates I've been seeing recently about the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). Perhaps this is all holdover angst from the President and the Democrats capitulating to Republicans over the last three years despite having the majority of people in congress. In any event, I'm definitely wondering what the common thread is, here. What's he trying to do, exactly?
There's been a little talk on the radio recently of a comment Mr. Obama made last year that he would rather be a, "really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." Apparently, he is no longer willing to address that comment with the media. I think it would be difficult to argue that he hasn't been at least good; the Iraq war has been formally ended, Don't Ask Don't Tell has been repealed, Health Care Reform was passed in 2010, Osama Bin Laden has been killed... that's a fairly impressive list, I would think. But there's still a sort of energy around liberals that what's been done hasn't been enough. They'll look at the debt ceiling crisis, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the still-high unemployment rate and see a presidency that was big on promise, but just not there on certain results.
It's a lot easier to appear as though everything you do is intentional when there's nobody playing defense. That is, that another person's move can't force you to counter-move. You can have a great plan in chess, but someone may be able to play their game in such a way to nullify your plan. When you're campaigning, you don't have to worry about that. If you're making a work of art, you don't have to worry about that (If I didn't mention it before, I think Eternal Sunshine is also completely intentional). If you're a television station, you don't have to do that.
The Stranger today pointed me at a FOX News bit where they substituted in Barack Obama's photo for Mitt Romney. Sometimes it seems hard to believe that all the things they do over there are intentional, because there are a lot of small, "screw-up" type things like misspelling "Obama" as "Osama" early on. However, the sheer multitude of such "screw-ups" suggests to me that it's really not a screw-up at all. If people repeatedly screwed up a thing in a normal workplace, there would be a staff meeting to correct it and it wouldn't happen anymore (or at least with less frequency). The fact that this has happened time and time again tells me that it's being implicitly encouraged.
I really think sometimes that if you watch FOX News, it's really like watching the man behind the curtain do his thing. It's really out there for everyone to see. And then there's the worrying thing: how many people agree with it.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Baseball's Offseason
In sports, you have the regular season, the playoffs (or post-season), and the off-season. Sometimes people call the playoffs the "second season." Perhaps it's time now to talk about the supposed off-season at the third season.
When the Mariners were sort of floating around an even .500 record in June and then went on a streak of 17-consecutive losses (a streak with odds of 1 in 500... if the team was only playing .300 ball), a lot of the talk turned to the off-season. A lot of folks, seeing the struggling Mariners offense that finished last in runs scored in 2011 (and 2010, and third to last in 2009... you get the point), decided that the team needed to target Prince Fielder, heavy hitting--pun intended--first baseman from Milwaukee in order to fix it.
A lot of people like Prince Fielder, and word is the Mariners do, too. That's fine, but Fielder cannot be the entirety of the answer. Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp actually had the most home runs of any player in the National League. In fact, Matt Kemp nearly won baseball's batting Triple Crown (most home runs, highest batting average, and most runs batted in)! Not only that, but Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw won the Cy Young Award for the best pitcher in the league. The Dodgers went 82-79, just barely above .500. Signing one excellent player doesn't fix a team. Hell, two excellent players doesn't fix a team. The 1996 Mariners had Ken Griffey, Jr. and Alex Rodriguez on the team, who were the two best players in baseball (according for Fangraphs Wins Above Replacement. It's esoteric, but stick with me), and still managed to miss the playoffs.
The real question is if you can sign Prince Fielder and still upgrade the rest of the team to a point where the team as a whole is legitimately good. In the Mariners case, pretty much everything that's not second base and shortstop could use an upgrade. To the M's credit, they should manage some upgrade without lifting a finger; young players at first base and left field should develop into better players, and their center fielder Franklin Gutierrez figures to be healthier in 2012 than in 2011. Ichiro might bounce back, depending on what you think of his skills and his age. That said, I don't think the young players at third base are ready, and development isn't as predictable as we would hope.
Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times posted an entry to his Mariners blog that the team has more money to spend than we think. That article posits that teams could open up their budgets and not be "crippled by big contracts," which is a concern of a lot of people who are (at least somewhat) against the potential Prince Fielder signing. Thing is, most teams don't open up their budgets. The Mariners spent $117M on the 2008 roster that lost 100 games. When you don't get any success out of spending money, you have to wonder why you should spend good money after bad.
The other problem is, well, who's available? A lot of the available players this off-season seem to be more or less average. In certain cases, average is a lot better than what the M's have, but it's also difficult to want to spend a lot of money on an average player when there's a chance you can develop one for a lot cheaper.
There's a lot of risk putting a ton of money into one player. If that player gets hurt, doesn't age gracefully, or has any number of other problems, the team is stuck and still has to spend the money. There's basically one team that regularly outspends its mistakes: the Yankees. The Red Sox could fall into this, too, but it's an order of magnitude smaller. The Red Sox' apparent mistakes in spending cost them the playoffs in 2011.
When the Mariners were sort of floating around an even .500 record in June and then went on a streak of 17-consecutive losses (a streak with odds of 1 in 500... if the team was only playing .300 ball), a lot of the talk turned to the off-season. A lot of folks, seeing the struggling Mariners offense that finished last in runs scored in 2011 (and 2010, and third to last in 2009... you get the point), decided that the team needed to target Prince Fielder, heavy hitting--pun intended--first baseman from Milwaukee in order to fix it.
A lot of people like Prince Fielder, and word is the Mariners do, too. That's fine, but Fielder cannot be the entirety of the answer. Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp actually had the most home runs of any player in the National League. In fact, Matt Kemp nearly won baseball's batting Triple Crown (most home runs, highest batting average, and most runs batted in)! Not only that, but Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw won the Cy Young Award for the best pitcher in the league. The Dodgers went 82-79, just barely above .500. Signing one excellent player doesn't fix a team. Hell, two excellent players doesn't fix a team. The 1996 Mariners had Ken Griffey, Jr. and Alex Rodriguez on the team, who were the two best players in baseball (according for Fangraphs Wins Above Replacement. It's esoteric, but stick with me), and still managed to miss the playoffs.
The real question is if you can sign Prince Fielder and still upgrade the rest of the team to a point where the team as a whole is legitimately good. In the Mariners case, pretty much everything that's not second base and shortstop could use an upgrade. To the M's credit, they should manage some upgrade without lifting a finger; young players at first base and left field should develop into better players, and their center fielder Franklin Gutierrez figures to be healthier in 2012 than in 2011. Ichiro might bounce back, depending on what you think of his skills and his age. That said, I don't think the young players at third base are ready, and development isn't as predictable as we would hope.
Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times posted an entry to his Mariners blog that the team has more money to spend than we think. That article posits that teams could open up their budgets and not be "crippled by big contracts," which is a concern of a lot of people who are (at least somewhat) against the potential Prince Fielder signing. Thing is, most teams don't open up their budgets. The Mariners spent $117M on the 2008 roster that lost 100 games. When you don't get any success out of spending money, you have to wonder why you should spend good money after bad.
The other problem is, well, who's available? A lot of the available players this off-season seem to be more or less average. In certain cases, average is a lot better than what the M's have, but it's also difficult to want to spend a lot of money on an average player when there's a chance you can develop one for a lot cheaper.
There's a lot of risk putting a ton of money into one player. If that player gets hurt, doesn't age gracefully, or has any number of other problems, the team is stuck and still has to spend the money. There's basically one team that regularly outspends its mistakes: the Yankees. The Red Sox could fall into this, too, but it's an order of magnitude smaller. The Red Sox' apparent mistakes in spending cost them the playoffs in 2011.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Bowling Post #1
I've been in a bit of a bowling slump recently. After shooting over 700 four times in the first seven weeks, I haven't done it at all in the last six. Since I've been bowling two leagues, I've been throwing more games, too. Since October 18, my last 700 series, I've been bowling nine times. I've actually managed to be above average four out of those nine times, but three of those were almost exactly my average. Four of the nine times were also particularly bad, an average of more than 10 pins-under-average per game. This was culminated last Wednesday by my shooting 159, 206, and 162, winding up 91 pins under my average series.
The problem is that my standards have been creeping up higher and higher as I go. Tuesday was rough, a 200, 215, and 193, but it was rough because I was throwing good shots that just wouldn't get the pins to fall. Wednesday was rough because I couldn't hardly get the ball to get to the pocket; it was constantly on one side and then the other, making it difficult to adjust for. I only managed 159 in the first game by throwing three strikes in a row in the tenth. I had enough of a roll going on that I pulled a 206 out in the second game, starting with four strikes, and then keeping spares going until the tenth.
There's sort of a Punnet Square of bowling in my brain; on one axis is the quality of bowling, and the other axis is the quality of carry (or you might prefer, "luck"). Good bowling and good carry is how I wind up shooting 700+. Good bowling and bad carry was my Tuesday. It was frustrating, but I knew that I was still doing well. Bad bowling and good carry can lead to average scores but be dissatisfying. Bad bowling with bad carry is how I wind up below 550. Particularly low scores tend to mean that not only am I not throwing strikes, but I'm leaving splits or missing spares.
I used a couple hundred games of bowling data a couple years back and came up with a regression equation to predict bowling scores. Basically, for me, if I have exactly the same number of strikes as opens, I expect to shoot about 164. Every strike that I have beyond that with no opens is worth approximately 9 pins. In order to shoot 200, you need 3.75 strikes and no opens.
Now this is curious, because there is a thing called a "Dutch 200," in which a bowler alternates strikes and spares throughout the game. That would be six strikes and six spares. It would, in fact, be the most unlucky distribution of strikes in a game possible. The idea that you should be able to shoot 200 with 3.75 strikes and no opens suggests that in enough distributions of strikes, they come in successive frames. A strike and a spare is only worth 20, but two strikes and a 9-spare would mean 29 to the first strike, then 20 to the second. A game that starts with three strikes and makes 9-spares the rest of the way would end in a 212.
In any event, a 550 series is a 183.3 average, or 1.97 more strikes than opens per game. Considering that I've been throwing strikes at a 52% clip (even including this down sample), that's pretty disappointing. That's 5.72 strikes in a typical game (11 chances). That makes 3.75 opens per game, if I had been throwing that many strikes. That many opens would be damn frustrating. In this case, I haven't been throwing a great deal of strikes, so the opens haven't climbed through the roof, but picking up spares is a lot of "work," in bowling speak. Spares don't give you good games at this level, but they sure keep you out of bad ones.
On a day where I don't strike, opens are really difficult to overcome because I essentially need two strikes in a row to undo the score damage. With 10 frames and a need to get at least 5 strikes to make it to 211 (my Tuesday night average), an open is difficult to overcome, especially when strikes aren't showing up freely.
I can get really frustrated while I'm throwing open frames, but interestingly, it's difficult to tap into at this point. I was remarking the other day that I think I don't tend to act out too emotionally; or at the least, I don't tend to act out with a lot of negative emotion. I still have negative emotion just like anybody else, but I manage it differently, and when bowling goes poorly is the time I typically see it come out. I think that's a post for another time, but it so happens to be the post I was trying to make before all these numbers came out of my keyboard.
The problem is that my standards have been creeping up higher and higher as I go. Tuesday was rough, a 200, 215, and 193, but it was rough because I was throwing good shots that just wouldn't get the pins to fall. Wednesday was rough because I couldn't hardly get the ball to get to the pocket; it was constantly on one side and then the other, making it difficult to adjust for. I only managed 159 in the first game by throwing three strikes in a row in the tenth. I had enough of a roll going on that I pulled a 206 out in the second game, starting with four strikes, and then keeping spares going until the tenth.
There's sort of a Punnet Square of bowling in my brain; on one axis is the quality of bowling, and the other axis is the quality of carry (or you might prefer, "luck"). Good bowling and good carry is how I wind up shooting 700+. Good bowling and bad carry was my Tuesday. It was frustrating, but I knew that I was still doing well. Bad bowling and good carry can lead to average scores but be dissatisfying. Bad bowling with bad carry is how I wind up below 550. Particularly low scores tend to mean that not only am I not throwing strikes, but I'm leaving splits or missing spares.
I used a couple hundred games of bowling data a couple years back and came up with a regression equation to predict bowling scores. Basically, for me, if I have exactly the same number of strikes as opens, I expect to shoot about 164. Every strike that I have beyond that with no opens is worth approximately 9 pins. In order to shoot 200, you need 3.75 strikes and no opens.
Now this is curious, because there is a thing called a "Dutch 200," in which a bowler alternates strikes and spares throughout the game. That would be six strikes and six spares. It would, in fact, be the most unlucky distribution of strikes in a game possible. The idea that you should be able to shoot 200 with 3.75 strikes and no opens suggests that in enough distributions of strikes, they come in successive frames. A strike and a spare is only worth 20, but two strikes and a 9-spare would mean 29 to the first strike, then 20 to the second. A game that starts with three strikes and makes 9-spares the rest of the way would end in a 212.
In any event, a 550 series is a 183.3 average, or 1.97 more strikes than opens per game. Considering that I've been throwing strikes at a 52% clip (even including this down sample), that's pretty disappointing. That's 5.72 strikes in a typical game (11 chances). That makes 3.75 opens per game, if I had been throwing that many strikes. That many opens would be damn frustrating. In this case, I haven't been throwing a great deal of strikes, so the opens haven't climbed through the roof, but picking up spares is a lot of "work," in bowling speak. Spares don't give you good games at this level, but they sure keep you out of bad ones.
On a day where I don't strike, opens are really difficult to overcome because I essentially need two strikes in a row to undo the score damage. With 10 frames and a need to get at least 5 strikes to make it to 211 (my Tuesday night average), an open is difficult to overcome, especially when strikes aren't showing up freely.
I can get really frustrated while I'm throwing open frames, but interestingly, it's difficult to tap into at this point. I was remarking the other day that I think I don't tend to act out too emotionally; or at the least, I don't tend to act out with a lot of negative emotion. I still have negative emotion just like anybody else, but I manage it differently, and when bowling goes poorly is the time I typically see it come out. I think that's a post for another time, but it so happens to be the post I was trying to make before all these numbers came out of my keyboard.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Eternal Sunshine
I re-watched "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" this weekend, and I'm pleased to say that it's still my favorite movie.
If you haven't watched it, maybe you should stop reading this post now.
If you haven't watched it, maybe you should stop reading this post now.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Well That's Interesting
If I recall correctly, I mentioned in The Haiku Thing a week or two ago that one of the things I like to do at times is revisit stuff that I've done and do it again. I don't think it would go too far to say that blogging is one of those things that I've done in the past and this blog (and its content plan) are a shift, trying to make me do this again.
A tension, however, lies within another recent post (No Days "Off"), in which I really do enjoy keeping myself running and going and doing. I think when I was writing the most in livejournals, I was in high school. High school was marked in part by my regular almost overuse of the Internet in order to interact with people. That is, not a lot of my friends from school lived within walking distance (more like an hour-bus ride at best), and I didn't have a car (or an interest in driving), so I got a lot of my social interactions online.
Aside from that, senior year of high school is probably the time where I got into the method of continually doing things like I try to do now. Between bowling and baseball and getting involved in drama club that year, there really wasn't a whole lot of time left; the rest of it was usually spent at home with the Internet on. So I still did an amount of blogging and instant-messaging to keep up my social.
There was plenty of time when nobody was on, however, and I think I kept myself decently up-to-date with politics and the media. Truly original content is hard. I think it becomes a lot easier to write when you're discussing a think that's out there in the public like the News Of The Day or the most recent Most Outrageous Thing To Happen On TV. To reiterate, it's easier to provide commentary than to provide content.
The way I live right now makes it more difficult to produce commentary, however. I think I'm actually less informed now than I was years ago, but that's because I -- like all other adults -- have things to take care of like finding jobs, paying bills, getting or making food, and planning my next week. When all that's up in the air and I'm running in between things, there's much less time to read the news or pick up a New York Times and see what's happening. I don't feel like an active participant, and I bet a lot of you don't, either.
It may change for me, though, because without full time indefinite employment, I will need to take it easy on spending money. I'll probably travel around less, rein in some spending, and maybe that will get me to think more about what's going on. And maybe I'll find writing a little bit easier with more external things to comment on.
A tension, however, lies within another recent post (No Days "Off"), in which I really do enjoy keeping myself running and going and doing. I think when I was writing the most in livejournals, I was in high school. High school was marked in part by my regular almost overuse of the Internet in order to interact with people. That is, not a lot of my friends from school lived within walking distance (more like an hour-bus ride at best), and I didn't have a car (or an interest in driving), so I got a lot of my social interactions online.
Aside from that, senior year of high school is probably the time where I got into the method of continually doing things like I try to do now. Between bowling and baseball and getting involved in drama club that year, there really wasn't a whole lot of time left; the rest of it was usually spent at home with the Internet on. So I still did an amount of blogging and instant-messaging to keep up my social.
There was plenty of time when nobody was on, however, and I think I kept myself decently up-to-date with politics and the media. Truly original content is hard. I think it becomes a lot easier to write when you're discussing a think that's out there in the public like the News Of The Day or the most recent Most Outrageous Thing To Happen On TV. To reiterate, it's easier to provide commentary than to provide content.
The way I live right now makes it more difficult to produce commentary, however. I think I'm actually less informed now than I was years ago, but that's because I -- like all other adults -- have things to take care of like finding jobs, paying bills, getting or making food, and planning my next week. When all that's up in the air and I'm running in between things, there's much less time to read the news or pick up a New York Times and see what's happening. I don't feel like an active participant, and I bet a lot of you don't, either.
It may change for me, though, because without full time indefinite employment, I will need to take it easy on spending money. I'll probably travel around less, rein in some spending, and maybe that will get me to think more about what's going on. And maybe I'll find writing a little bit easier with more external things to comment on.
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