I shouldn't even dignify this by linking to it
So, the other day, I was reading Slate, and I was bored -- but I repeat myself. Anyway, I noticed in the margins an ad for this Emode IQ test, and being bored, decided to try it.

Well, let me tell you: I've seen a lot of bad things purporting to measure one's intelligence over the years, but this one is awful even by those standards. Let's start with an example:

8. A fallacious argument is: Disturbing, Valid, False, Necessary

This question would be fine (if vacuous) on the SAT. It has absolutely no place on a test purporting to measure "intelligence". It's pure knowledge. But it gets worse. Consider, for example, this question:

2. Which one of these five is least like the other four? Mule, Kangaroo, Cow, Deer, Donkey

This is far, far worse. Not only is it also another pure-knowledge question, but like any really bad question, you can make pretty persuasive arguments for more than one item in the list: is it a kangaroo, which is a marsupial? Is it a mule, which is a sterile crossbreed? For that matter, is it a deer, which has antlers? Who the hell knows?

But the question that really set me off was this beauty:
25. A cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the ________ of nothing. Emotion, Value, Meaning, Color, Quality

An intelligence test is not a complete-the-proverb exercise. What were they thinking?!

A digression on music theory
So you've probably noticed that Coldplay's "Clocks" is pretty much omnipresent on the radio stations at the moment. Despite this, it's a surprisingly good song.

I'd like to talk about why I think this is an excellent song. This generally proves to be a frustrating exercise for both me and whoever I'm trying to talk to, since I always find myself unable to articulate exactly what I like and dislike in songs. I think that this is partially because, after years of listening to and playing classical music, I've developed an ear for the kinds of harmonies, cadences, and such which "sound good", but despite the rather surprising amount of music theory I've picked up, my pitch recognition skills are inadequate to say "oh, that was a very nice V-ii-I sequence" or somesuch. Heck, most of the time, without thinking about it extensively, I have difficulty picking up the key of a given song. Anyway, I'm sure what I'm going to say is probably somewhat wrong in the details (my music theory skills being quite rusty), but I hope it conveys the feeling well.

But anyway, what I like about this song:
1) It has a very nice sense of motion. This is the quality I most often look for in a song, and yet it's often very difficult for me to explain just where it comes from. Here, though, it's not too difficult: the arpeggiated chords (really, an underappreciated device in my opinion; another example of a song which uses this to great effect is the Doves' "Sea Song") keep the song moving forward, and do so in a very harmonious way. Something you also won't see very often in a song on the radio is this 3-3-2 rhythm (which I guess would be best classified as 8/8), which I think also lends itself to a feeling of motion.

2) It's very harmonious. Like I said, I can't really elaborate on this too much, but the chord progressions are, fundamentally, pretty. Since the harmony is a little more prominent than normal (the melody being pretty nondescript, when it comes right down to it), it's important that it fit together nicely for the resulting product to sound good.

That's really all I have to say. I'm going to go off and listen to it again now.

Irony of the day
So, as many of you know, I recently switched research groups up at LBL, moving me from ATLAS to CDF (if you actually care what those acronyms mean, feel free to ask). My new lab is almost directly across from my old boss' office, with the amusing result that I now see him much more often than when he actually was my boss. (Also, it surprises me just what a small percentage of the time he's actually in his office. It always surprised me when I went to his office and he wasn't there, but apparently that's just par for the course. I suppose particle physicists are very often not around, since they're often visiting, or at least videoconferencing with, a remote site.)

Behold the power of the Internet
So I was just engaging in some ego-surfing the other day, and was pleased to note that I have now achieved almost total domination of the top 50 or so hits (I don't remember exactly at which point I got bored, but it couldn't have been too far). What surprised the heck out of me was just how many of those hits came from this piece I wrote about ants infesting my hub. It kind of makes me wish I had crafted it a little better to withstand the ravages of posterity, but I'm still amused at just how much it got forwarded around.

Sosa update
So, apparently, the 76 of Sosa's bats that were confiscated after the game were tested and found to be clean. I find this a tremendous relief, not just because it makes sense (after all, if Sosa had more corked bats, you'd think that one of them would be noticed earlier) but because it raises my hopes that it won't end up tainting his whole legacy. It's possible that Sosa's explanation was legitimate; or perhaps, as I've seen suggested, he was just depressed by his slump and resorted to desperate measures, but either way, I'm hopeful that this was just a short-term thing.

Depressing link of the day
So, apparently, the average Ford of today has a worse fuel economy than the Model T of nearly a hundred years ago. Of course, Ford defends itself by pointing out that they can make more fuel-efficient cars (and some are indeed quite impressive), but the fact that the poor fuel efficiency is driven by marketing, rather than technology, is in itself more than a little bit depressing.

Scandal of the day
So, apparently, Sammy Sosa was caught using a corked bat.

Despite the fact that I've never been the biggest of Sosa fans (still bitter from his 1998 MVP win, I suppose), I really do hope he turns out to be innocent. His explanation is certainly plausible enough (though maybe that's just because I want to believe it), but who really knows? I guess they're going to look at the rest of his bats which they impounded, and hopefully they won't find anything more incriminating.

The question of just how beneficial the cork is is, of course, another matter. The physicists claim that cork provides a negligible benefit to the actual power you can impart to the ball, but it's of course quite difficult to measure the impact of a lighter bat in a game setting. And the sample size for corked bats being used in MLB is quite small (well, at least that we know of -- I have no doubt that it's noticeably higher than has been measured so far). Norm Cash produced arguably the greatest fluke season in baseball history (I'll bet even the most baseball illiterate fan can find it on that page) with what he later admitted was a corked bat; on the other hand, it didn't seem to help Wilton Guerrero much. Albert Belle certainly hit fine after his big corking scandal, though if Omar Vizquel is to be believed that's because all of his bats were corked. The other cases I don't know enough about to say anything useful, but it sure seems like the evidence is inconclusive.

In light of this, I guess I'm just disappointed that a player like Sosa -- who I think everyone can agree doesn't need cork to hit the occasional ball out of the park -- risked tarnishing his reputation (which, sadly, has pretty much irreversibly happened now) by trying this, even if his intentions were the best, as he claims.

Simpsons Quiz of the Day
Simpsons characters sure are a thankful bunch. Identify the source of each of these quotes (speaker and context):
1. "Thank you very much, State Supreme Court."
2. "Thank you very much, Warren Christopher."
3. "You're screwed, thank you, bye."
4. "Ja, thank you, ja, that's nice."
5. "Oh, thank you, kind innkeeper."
6. "Thank you, NASA."
7. "Thank you, door!"
8. "Thanks a lot, Steve!"
9. "Thank you! You have fulfilled our dreams and the dreams of our ancestors!"
10. "Thanks a lot! Now *I* look crazy!"

You can email answers to me, or just post them in the comments. Enjoy! Answers later.

Rant of the day
After working with code on physics projects for three summers now, I've come to a very simple conclusion: 95% of all physicists can't write good code to save their life. This is undoubtedly because they're just unfamiliar with the rules of good programming, so they tend to be extremely overly cautious in some areas and just plain sloppy in others. Physicist coding seems to follow a few simple rules, enumerated below. (All rants apply to C code. I could rant about the Fortran code too, but I think its mere existence is really all I need to say on that front.)

1) The purpose of -Wall is to produce all those pretty warnings. That gives you an impressive feeling of just how long your program is. (Seriously. I don't think I've ever compiled another person's code with -Wall which didn't produce at least two screenfuls of warnings. This is true even when their own makefile included -Wall.)

2) All functions must be declared "int", but if you don't really need to return anything, then don't bother with those pesky return() statements! Conversely, when calling a function that returns a value, you must always carefully save that value, even if you have absolutely no plans to ever do anything with it.

3) Code should never actually be deleted. If you need to take out a particular piece of code, always comment it out. After all, even if the old code is flagrantly wrong or outdated, you'll never know when you might need it again!

4) Loop variables should be given descriptive names such as "loopvar", thus freeing up the precious single-letter variable names for more important variables. The capital single-letter variables are used for strings, of course.

5) Comments of the form
i += 2; /* adds 2 to i */
are perfectly reasonable. Under no circumstance should a comment attempt to explain why one might want to add 2 to i, however.

6) Function prototypes should be strewn throughout the source file, preferably right in front of the function that needs to use the prototyped functions. Under no circumstances should they be placed in a header. Similarly, one never needs to include the header files for library functions -- the compiler knows what they are, right?

7) A char array that you're planning to use as a string should be as big as the number of characters in the string. (My favorite!)

8) The word "const" does not exist. (This might seem like a petty gripe. It's just that I always cringe when I see declarations like
char *filename = "some hardcoded filename";
and not just because of what's on the right side of that assignment.)

9) It's perfectly okay to name an ordinary variable LIKE_THIS, as long as you don't really plan on changing it. Similarly, a #define'd value you might want to name like_this, in case you want to change the value later.

10) Indentation, placement of braces, and so forth should be done as inconsistently as possible. To ensure the best possible performance in this area, maximize the number of people, each with their own programming style, working on a single source file.

11) Source code management does not exist. As per (10) above, have as many people as possible working on a single file at once. However, should you need to branch the code, make as many copies of the original source code as you need for each situation you might have to deal with and modify each one independently.

I'm sure I'll think of more items to add to this list as time goes on.

Much ado about QuesTec
For those of you non-baseball-followers reading this, you probably haven't heard much about QuesTec. (Those of you who have can skip this paragraph.) QuesTec is a system introduced by baseball last year, which uses computers to judge balls and strikes. Umpires who don't agree with the computer's calls at least 90% of the time can be disciplined by MLB. Needless to say, the umpires are hopping mad about this; perhaps slightly more surprisingly, the pitchers are equally irate. Curt Schilling, angry after a poor start, destroyed a QuesTec camera (in a karmic retribution thingy, he later broke his hand), and several members of the Braves also expressed unhappiness with the system after blowing a lead.

Perhaps much less surprisingly, the pitchers who were complaining were pitchers who did badly; I certainly haven't heard a pitcher who pitched a good game saying the first thing about QuesTec (nor, for that matters, have I seen any comment from the hitters). And this is pretty much human nature -- after all, a pitcher will naturally look for a scapegoat, and the QuesTec system is an obvious target -- a nice inanimate object to take out your frustrations on. Pitchers destroying hapless water coolers have been a fixture of baseball for years; why shouldn't QuesTec, which in a pitcher's mind can easily be responsible, be any different? And as Schilling himself admitted, his opposing counterpart on his day of destruction was pitching a two-hitter, so it's hard to argue that he was suddenly terribly hurt by QuesTec.

I don't mean to say that QuesTec is perfect, but I have to ultimately side with this quote from Sandy Alderson: "What this is about is Curt Schilling wanting pitches that are balls, called strikes... If that's what he wants, he should go to the rules committee. Otherwise, he should stop whining and go about his business."

Names
I have this weird paranoia about people's names -- I'm always afraid that I'll call someone I don't know all that well by the wrong name, and they'll think I'm a complete flake. This manifests itself especially strongly with my students; I usually pick up most of their names pretty quickly, but I'm extremely hesitant to actually use them. When I hand back labs or quizzes for the first time, I always have this fear that I'll give the wrong one back to somebody and they'll look at me disapprovingly, and even after that goes successfully (as it always has) I still feel wary.

The other day at LBL, I saw one of my former students. I remembered his name immediately (he was one of the more memorable people in the section), but I still didn't actually get around to using it. It's all very silly, I know, but I wish I could break myself of this habit.

I have the bestest timing ever
So I began work today. Work definitely looks like it's going to keep me busy for the near future, and my need to be productive means I'm not likely to be doing extensive blogging from there, either. So I may have to scale back my grand plans. Fortunately, they weren't actually that grand in the first place.

Forgiveness vs. responsibility for one's own actions
So I was just reading this article, "The Virtue of Hate". It argues that the main difference between Christianity and Judaism (aside from the whole Jesus issue, of course) is that Christianity belives that any sinner, no matter how awful, can ultimately be forgiven and redeemed if they accept Jesus, while Judaism believes that people should and must be punished appropriately for their misdeeds.

The article itself is very interesting, but I also find it fascinating that the Right (which tends to be Christian) tends to espouse the latter view, while the Left (which probably has the majority of Jews, and certainly has the majority of non-religious people) is much more strongly on the "forgiveness" side of the fence.

I'm not making any promises...
Before, I tried to make a conscious effort not to let my posts be just links to interesting things. There was no real rational reason behind this; it was mostly just a desire to be different for no particular reason (there's that perfectionist impulse kicking in again; if you want a reason why it took me so long to finally punt the offending post and get things started again, you need look no further).

Anyway, I think that it's probably more interesting to have a post which contains only a link to an interesting thing than no post at all (and hopefully you agree; if not, well, feel free to disagree!) So I'll probably be attempting to increase the quantity of content at least somewhat via this method.

A completely useless announcement
So this weekend we're hosting BANG 3, a puzzle hunt. BANG is pretty low-key, at least compared to ridiculous extravaganzas like The Game, which probably require months of planning, thousands of dollars of expenditures, and a cast of dozens if not hundreds. Ours is just a little simpler -- and cheaper -- but I'm still quite excited about it. All of this activity and effort I've been putting into it makes me regret the fact that I missed the couple of opportunities to go hunting this last semester -- a combination of too busy, too expensive, and too little interest from teammates -- but on the other hand it looks like there'll still be fun stuff this summer.

Catching up...the short version
So it's summer already -- my favorite season of the year, as I will generally tell anyone within earshot. Often mid-spring (early April or so, before final stress begins to weigh in) will compete for these honors, but this year the weather was really quite unimpressive up until about the beginning of May, so summer is the clear favorite for this year, barring meteor strike or somesuch.

Anyway, Mike's graduating, I'm moving on to a new research group (and very much looking forward to it), and I'm probably happier than I've been in quite a while. This is a good thing, I suppose, though I do wish I was a little closer to graduation myself.

Bet you weren't expecting this
All right, I've decided that it's time to brush the dust off of this thing and get to writing again. If you're wondering why the extremely long delay, it's because I got about halfway through the next installment of Sports Philosophy, got bogged down, and then never actually got around to finishing it, and then just kind of let things lapse, as you probably were able to figure out.

Anyway, for obvious reasons, I'm going to not announce a proud resurrection quite yet. If they're not obvious, it's because (a) if this burst of energy turns out to be fleeting, I don't really want to look like an idiot, and (b) it's more fun for me to tell people that this is back once I have 10-15 posts up to read, rather than just this one post telling you that this is back. Or maybe you'll just see this by accident and it'll be a pleasant surprise.

On comfort reading
A sure sign that I'm feeling in better-than-normal condition is when I get around to actually reading things. Normally, reading is one of those activities that I keep meaning to get around to but rarely actually do, since I always feel that I have work I should be doing instead of lazing around with a book. So when I can actually get myself to sit down and curl up with a good book, it makes me happy.

Of course, in these times I don't always have new things to read lying around, so often I'll find myself looking on my bookshelf. Peculiarly enough, this more often than not leads me to Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books. I first was recommended to the series on rasfwr-j (that's rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan for those of you not familiar with the acronym -- yes, I did read Robert Jordan once -- no, I don't see why that's relevant to my past -- can we please stop asking questions about that now?), and darned if I can remember who it was (Kate Nepveu, maybe?) who said that they were good comfort reading. And it's really true -- they're light enough that they're a pleasure to read, Brust has a delightful writing style, and the plot is sufficient to keep me entertained even though I know how it's all going to end. All in all, the perfect combination for something to read when I just want a nice break from the rest of the world.

(Whee, I sound like a back-of-the-book blurb.)

Sports Philosophy II
(Part 1 of a 3-part series, time permitting)

Ultimately, the goal of any sport is to determine who the best team is. Now, of course, the question of what the "best" team is a difficult philosophical nut to crack in the first place, and often you'll see heated arguments on this subject when the participants don't even agree on the fundamental goals they're trying to prove. So I'll try to tackle the question of what makes a better team from several different angles. In the scientist's way, I'll start out with a deliberately simplified model.

Consider three teams (which, for lack of imagination, I'll call A, B, and C). They play a round robin, at the end of which each team is 1-1. This is the classic Circle of Death you'll see in quizbowl tournaments all the time. To make the example a little more fleshed-out, add, say, five more teams which always lose to A, B, and C, so we have a eight-team division with three teams at 6-1 and three teams at 2-5. Now, let's make an assumption that these results fairly reflect the quality of the three teams. This is arguably not a safe assumption, but we're not going to get interesting results without dong something, so we'll make it. And I can certainly think of quizbowl tournaments where this would be an accurate thing to say. Okay, now it's pretty obvious that we can say that A, B, and C are of the same intrinsic quality (assuming that it's meaningful to speak of an "intrinsic quality" in the first place; again, without making this assumption we're not going to get very far, so I'm just going to say it and move on).

Now, let's conduct a little gedanken experiment. Suppose team C's bus gets stuck in snow, or they forfeit all of their games due to their star player accepting throwback jerseys, or something else happens to take them out of the picture. All of a sudden, we have a pretty surprising result: team A is now 6-0 and team B is 5-1, so pretty much anyone sane would say that team A has done better than team B, despite the fact that our assumption that their intrinsic qualities are the same still holds.

All right, this might seem a little excessively contrived, but let's add another little wrench into the gedanken experiment. Let's say team A suffers a loss to team F somewhere along the line, so now team A and B are both 5-1. Now, we've made team A worse than its previous baseline, so if our previous assumption still holds true (and I sure haven't done anything to change it), then team B's intrinsic ability is actually a little better than team A. And yet, based on the fact that team A has beaten team B head-to-head, you'd see most people agree that team A is the better one.

At this point, I suppose you're going to say that this experiment is arguably a little silly. And so it is -- after all, just because our mythical team C exists in this case doesn't mean that we can always add a mythical team C to any given setup like the one above. Nevertheless, I think this serves to illustrate a broader point: many people, given two teams with equal records, will value a "good" win over a "bad" win, especially in the case of a head-to-head tiebreaker. But the team who loses the head-to-head tiebreaker has suffered a "better" loss than the other team, by definition. Why should we believe there's any a priori reason that a "good" win plus a "bad" loss is somehow indicative of a stronger team quality than a "bad" win plus a "good" loss?

This is not to say I oppose looking at indicators like strength of schedule -- in fact, I think it's something all-too-frequently overlooked (I'll talk about this more in the next part). But unfortunately, a lot of the time, strength of schedule is used by boosters of a particular team who will say things like, "Well, our team beat X, Y, and Z, and they're all good teams, so that must mean they're good!" while completely overlooking that the team also lost to J, K, and L, which were pretty bad teams. There are two sides to every coin, and if a good win is accompanied by a bad loss, then there's no basis to judge it better than a good loss and a bad win (in the absence of other information, of course). Trying to get further rankings out of this basis is merely trying to get something from nothing, and is essentially circular reasoning.

In the next part, I'll try to actually accomplish something productive.

A digression on the scientific method
I'm sure you've all seen this in some form, but I like laying it out clearly.

Suppose I have two coins. One of them is a two-headed coin; the other one is a normal coin. I choose one of them at random and flip it; it comes up heads. What is the chance that it is the two-headed coin? Well, this is a pretty simple exercise in using Bayes' Theorem. The total probability of getting heads is 3/4, and the total probability of picking the two-headed coin and getting heads is 1/2 x 1 = 1/2. So, by Bayes' Theorem, the probability of it being the two-headed coin given that it came up heads is P(2-headed given heads) = P(2-headed and heads) / P(heads) = (1/2)/(3/4) = 2/3. No problem.

All right, let's move on. I have a coin, and I flip it. It comes up heads. I say, "I have a theory: that this happened because this is a normal coin." My friend comes into the room and says, "Oh yeah? I have a better theory. Your coin came up heads because it was a two-headed coin. And look! You just proved that my theory has a 2/3 chance of being correct." Well, yes and no. If we assume that, a priori, the coin was equally likely to be a regular coin and a two-headed coin, then yes, it's true that the coin has a 2/3 chance of being two-headed. But we have a better knowledge of the a priori distribution than that -- we know that normal coins are far, far more common than two-headed coins, so the probability of it being a two-headed coin is still very small, even given this one piece of information.

But notice the key feature of this: the experiment (such as it is) can't give us a full picture of which hypothesis is more likely without some a priori assumptions about which hypothesis is more likely in the first place.

So, I'll bet you can see where this is headed. I have a coin, and I flip it. It comes up heads. I say, "I have a theory: this happened because this is a normal coin." My other friend walks in, and says, "Well, I have a theory that this happened because invisible angels manipulated the trajectory of the coin to make it come up heads." The scientific method is completely helpless to resolve this dispute; you have to use your own a priori knowledge to adjudicate it. This is where we like to talk about what makes a theory "scientific", but all that really means is setting out an objective framework for deciding what's likely in the first place and what's not. It's a big mess.

On the Commodification of A Priori Egalitarian Systems
(Why yes, I am feeling in an academic mood today. How could you tell?)

So, I'm sure you've read this study of the economy of Norrath. (For those of you who haven't: Norrath is the virtual world in the game EverQuest, and this paper is a fascinating analysis of its economy. Possessions in the virtual world are often bought and sold online for real money; you can even establish an exchange rate given these transactions, in which the Norrathian platinum piece comes out as stronger than the lira or yen. But if you haven't, read the article. It's fascinating stuff, and humorously written.) Now, as you might expect, all characters are created equally; everyone starts out as a Level 1 weakling with nothing to his, her, or its name. In EverQuest's many predecessors (note: I've never played EverQuest itself, but I'm familiar with MUDs, the ancestor of MMORPGs like EverQuest), the only way to build up your character was by expending time in the virtual world -- time spent improving your character's abilities, obtaining equipment and money, and forging friendships and alliances with other characters. But now, with the ability of outside wealth to influence a player's ability, one can substitute cold, hard US cash for expenditure of time in the world of Norrath. As Castronova notes, "Unfortunately the equality of opportunity is beginning to erode...It has become possible to start a new avatar and use US currency to instantly endow it with vast virtual riches and expensive equipment." (p. 15) I've seen enough complaints about rich kids buying their way to success to figure that this is an issue which makes people unhappy, and with good reason. (If you want to get all Marxist, you can insert the appropriate rhetoric: the bourgoisie, with their capital -- capital not even acquired within the world of the game! -- can use this capital to take advantage of the labor of the proletariat. Wasn't that fun?)

Now, Sony has attempted to prevent this kind of trading (not, of course, for any kind of socialist utopia reasons, but because they believe -- arguably correctly -- that the game's property is their intellectual property), but although they've tried to stamp out auctions in eBay and Yahoo, it's awfully hard to prevent the black market. Castronova says, "My impression is that the ban has had little impact on trading. Sony, effectively the government of Norrath, is fighting a war of trade restrictions that no government has ever won." (p. 19) The truth is, as long as these commodities have value to people, they will be bought and sold, regardless of what Sony wants to enforce.

It's hard to feel too worked up about this issue, since it is a game I don't play after all (although I suspect I might be a little annoyed if I actually did play the game). But an issue that hits a little closer to home is the Google vs. SearchKing issue. Now, of course I fully support Google; it's hard not to feel that businesses like SearchKing are a little sleazy. Google has always cast itself as the promoter of egalitarianism; their description of PageRank touts itself as relying "on the uniquely democratic nature of the web" and strongly emphasizes that only a page's merit will determine its PageRank. But reading through this article, and then James Grimmelmann's article in LawMeme (another excellent read), brought me to this open letter from SearchKing CEO Bob Massa. The letter, of course, portrays SearchKing as a company just trying to help those struggling little mom-and-pop web sites; you can make your own decisions about just how truthful it is, but Massa makes a very troubling point in his letter: "People are going to start selling PR [PageRank] regardless of what Google does. If there is value in it, someone is going to sell it."

And the simple truth is, regardless of whatever the truth may be about SearchKing's real mission, Massa is right. In the world of Google, a high PageRank is valuable, and, well, if a less-reputable site wants to offer money to a site with a high PageRank to get them to link to them...Google can try to go after the SearchKings of the world, like Sony can go after the obvious auctions on eBay and Yahoo, but on a practical level, there's no way to stop it. You and I might find it distasteful, and Google almost certainly has an interest in quashing it, since it reduces the value of their rankings without any compensation to Google, but that can't stop it from happening. Does this mean that I think PageRank is ultimately doomed? I have confidence that it's currently too impractical to significantly boost one's ranking this way, especially when the alternative of making a higher-quality site is available, but the fact that SearchKing had succeeded in improving the reputation of itself and its clients does indicate that it can be done. The invisible hand is just too powerful in these situations; a black market will always spring up even if the government tries to prohibit commerce in these goods.

J-Lo, and how we know what isn't so
(apologies to Thomas Gilovich for stealing his title, and my readers for inflicting this rhyme, but I couldn't resist)
So, it's a well-known fact that Jennifer Lopez has a large butt. It's been the (ahem) butt of a thousand remarks (the majority unflattering; although I can believe that at least some of them are in a positive spirit, there's certainly a fair amount of meanness in a lot of what I see, too), but they say any publicity is good publicity, and it certainly hasn't hurt her. After all, if you were to walk up to a random stranger on the street and ask them to name you someone with a large butt, they'd almost certainly put her near the top of the list. I could go on about how this is some reflection of how America always wants to find fault in its celebrities, but that's not really my point here.

The point is that the emperor has no ass. That is, if you actually ask anyone reasonable, they'll agree that her butt is by no means larger than average. It might be slightly above the average of Hollywood, but it's hardly large, even taking Hollywood as a norm, much less the American populace, where it's still definitely below average (to state the obvious). Why does this happen, then? Well, it got started out somehow, and people liked to talk about it (for whatever reason), and since no one was particularly interested in arguing the other side (what's the point, after all?), it just spread to the point where, if there's anyone in America who hasn't actually seen J-Lo, they're probably convinced she must have a butt the size of Refrigerator Perry.

Now, in J-Lo's case, this is pretty harmless (and, despite the meanspiritedness, probably beneficial, on the whole). But the way with which something with such a tenuous basis in fact can spread to the point where it becomes accepted as common knowledge, simply by virtue of being constantly repeated, is more than a little alarming.

Tom Tomorrow can tell where I'm headed with this.

Thoughts from the road
As you probably know if you've ever driven on an interstate, usually whenever there's an exit sign on the right, there's a corresponding sign on the left telling you where the continuing freeway goes. "280 San Jose", or whatever. When I was driving in Southern California this weekend, I was inordinately amused when I found myself on 605, and those signs read "605 THRU TRAFFIC". The freeway wasn't actually notable for going anywhere, it was just there to carry traffic. I think there's some kind of deep social commentary to be gleaned from this.

On another note, my luck finally ran out and I got a speeding ticket. Oddly enough, despite my having pondered this very question often while driving, I still was momentarily stymied when the officer asked me if I knew how fast I was going. Part of it was that I actually didn't, since I didn't have my eye on the speedometer at the moment, and part of it was that I was trying to figure out what the best answer was. Finally, I figured that I probably shouldn't say anything over 90, and I wasn't sure anything under 90 was plausible, so I settled on that and hoped it was actually accurate. He seemed to agree, so I guess I was right.

Sports Philosophy I
The team that you normally root for is in the conference championship (or league championship, or whatever), and loses. When the Big Championship comes around, assuming all other things equal, do you:
(a) root for the team that your team lost to, so you can say that you lost to the best team?
(b) root against the team that your team lost to, out of revenge?
(My own answer, somewhat cowardly: it depends on exactly how they lost, but normally I trend closer to (a) than (b).)

Obligatory (somewhat belated) Columbia post
First of all, my condolences to the astronauts' families, and really everyone in the space program. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about, since many people have trod that ground already. My concern is really: where does the space program go from here? The Shuttle is (was?) an incredible feat, reducing the feat of going out into space from inconceivable into something we thought of as nearly routine (with this a rather rude reminder that it wasn't, after all). But I felt that after Challenger, NASA became a little more timid in its approach. Rather than continuing to push the frontier into new and exciting missions, they contented themselves with staying what they already had and were comfortable with. Not to say that there wasn't an awful lot of valuable science done on the Shuttle missions (John Glenn aside) -- but it really represented to me a failure of the will to explore new frontiers, and this disappointment only got more acute as I saw the new and truly innovative programs (X-33, for example) die for lack of political will over the Shuttle. Gregg Easterbrook presents a much more forceful case that the Shuttle should have been scrapped long ago; I can't say I completely agree with it, but the fact that the Shuttle has pretty much precluded NASA from undertaking other large projects is quite unarguable.

My hope is that this will finally kick NASA into expanding into things we should have done years ago. My fear is that NASA will become increasingly timid and we'll become even more reluctant to expand the limits of human knowledge.

I'm baaaack!
Okay, I've designated January (retroactively) as my official Month of Hiatus, and now that that's all done with, I can go back to working through this rather alarmingly large (and, in some cases, unfortunately outdated) backlog of ideas. Enjoy! That is, if you haven't wandered off to greener pastures already.

Quick football note
Those NFL.com commercials have elevated my dislike of Michael Strahan from "strong" to "burning".

Thoughts on regime change
One thing that struck me while I was pondering international politics yesterday is that, sometimes, it seems as if we feel that we can achieve democracy in other countries overnight. Fundamentally, I suppose the four-year (or eight-year) lifetime of an American president ensures that people won't consider the effects of a policy longer than 10 or so years down the road. But I think the fact that this misses is that it really does take an extraordinarily long time to achieve stable, productive regimes. Our own country was 150 years in the making, and even after getting our nice Constitution it wasn't like the country lived happily ever after afterwards. Now, it's certainly true that we can hope that maybe with the guidance of those who have already made it through, we can help the Third World countries reach our level more quickly, but I think that it is going to be a much slower process than anyone can hope, and in the middle of that process it's going to be pretty unpleasant.

Of course, while we forget that it took 400 years to bring our nation to the point where it is today, it's equally easy to forget that, just 60 years ago, the whole world was at war. It surprises me, reflecting on it sometimes, just how quickly people's mindsets have shifted from being a world at war to having known essentially nothing but peace. So this does give me hope that, if we can ever bring stable governments to the countries that need them, it will be possible to forget past hatreds and injustices. But maybe that's just the optimist in me speaking.

Personal luck: high
Recently, my luck seems to have been better than average. At our pre-Christmas poker gathering, I did much better than I usually do. It wasn't that I was playing fantastically well (though with a few egregious exceptions, I thought I was playing decently); rather, it was that in the hands where it's ultimately pretty much luck that determines the winner (and often, those hands tend to be the biggest pots, for obvious reasons), luck usually came down on my side.

When we were bowling yesterday, I also felt luckier than normal. In fact, my whole score was different than normal: normally I pick up surprisignly few strikes and instead rely on picking up a lot of spares off 8s and 9s. Yesterday, though, I was bowling a ridiculous number of strikes -- some earned, but many which on other days would have earned me nasty splits. But I was opening practically every frame I didn't get a strike on -- when I looked at the end-of-game statistics, I had 12 open frames, 5 spares, and 14 strikes. That's way out of character for me -- normally in 3 games it would be something like 8, 16, and 6, respectively.

Yes, I know there's no such thing as a lucky streak. But I'm going to enjoy this one anyway.

And my hubris is punished
Looks like I spoke too soon on Neifi Perez, what with the Giants signing him to a 2-year, $4.25M contract. It's things like this that drive me nuts -- it's one thing to trade away your #1 pitcher because you claim that you don't have the $4.4M he's due in 2003. It's an entirely different thing to take that $4.4M you didn't have and spend it on two of the stiffest stiffs this side of the Tin Woodsman. I just hate, hate moves like these.

Merry Christmas!
I'm currently at home in SF, so expect a little lull here. But I hope that you're all enjoying a wonderful day today.

Maybe I'm just a pessimist
So I was reading this David Brooks article in the Atlantic Monthly. It's fascinating, because it essentially describes a world completely alien to me. When I look at the person I am and the people I know, I don't see a generation of people basking in their artificially inflated senses of self-worth, their existence validated by meaningless benchmarks like the color of their credit cards; rather, I see the exact opposite: a group of people always striving to live up to ever-increasing standards, who, despite a large quantity of objective evidence of their intelligence and abilities, still believe that they're not as good as everyone else out there. While Brooks believes "we are convinced that we are running our own lives quite well, whereas the idiots around us are screwing up theirs," I often feel like I'm the only one who's unable to keep his own life together, while everyone else is able to do a great job running theirs, and I know that this viewpoint is hardly unique among my friends, either.

Ahem. That ended up being a little more bleedy than I wanted it to be.

Yes, it's time for another baseball post
...but don't worry, the amount of actual baseball in this one is not that great.

Despite the fact that the Giants have undergone huge offseason renovations to a team that just barely missed capturing the World Series, I've found it hard to get worked up over many of the moves made. I think that's because a lot of the people who have departed were people I alternately loved and hated: Dusty Baker, Jeff Kent, and even Russ Ortiz all fall into that category. Sure, I loved that Baker was able to hold together a fractious clubhouse and consistently coax maximal effort from his players, but I hated that he couldn't make a good tactical move to save his life and consistently played washed-up has-beens over players who at least had a chance to be good. I loved Kent when he was knocking in astronomical numbers of runs, but I hated him when he was swinging a weak bat and allowing pitchers to walk Barry a record number of times. And Ortiz, I loved him when he practically single-handedly won the Braves series and pitched like a true #1 starter, but I hated him on those days when he couldn't find the strike zone to save his life and when he was banished to the bullpen in 2000. So, while seeing them go (especially Ortiz, who is the only good pitcher the Giants have developed in my lifetime) was hard, it also brings hope that maybe their successors won't infuriate me in quite the same way (of course, also fear that their successors won't be able to fill their shoes).

The arrivals...well, Marquis Grissom certainly elicited quite the string of profanities from me (Neifi Perez I found it hard to get worked up about, since I didn't think the Giants were serious about him, and fortunately I was proven right when they non-tendered him), but the rest, while solid signings, are essentially replacements for the personnel they're losing. So it's hard to get too worked up about them; none of them is really a superstar, so while I can hope that they'll do a better job than those they replaced, it's not like their signings guarantees the team's improvement, either.

Of course, maybe all of this is just my defense mechanism at work again, not letting myself hope for too much.

Today's insight into my psychology
So, today, while I was driving home, I had just gotten off the Bay Bridge, and my mind wasn't particularly on matters of driving (actually, I was thinking about plumbing), when suddenly I was startled out of my reverie by the sudden sound of a siren behind me. I instinctively braked, but the cop (a motorcycle cop, which is my excuse for not having picked up on him in my rear-view mirror) showed that he wasn't after me and immediately sped by me. I suppose he was heading to something requiring his attention further down the road. Of course, I wasn't doing anything particularly illegal, but I almost certainly was over the actual speed limit (I mean, in that area it's pretty much impossible not to be, except of course during heavy traffic periods), so I was certainly glad to have not received a ticket.

I felt surprisingly shaken afterwards, though. I don't know why; I can understand feeling nervous and twitchy after having just been in a near-accident (which is certainly the case for me), but it's not like a ticket is all that bad (well, I suppose it can be, financially speaking, but it doesn't have the same emotional impact). In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that the same is true for me about any "near miss" kind of situation: afterwards I always feel relatively drained and shaken, even if the thing I was missing wasn't all that terrible or traumatic. If I had to guess, I would say that since the bad event didn't actually happen, my mind can exaggerate it as being worse than it would actually be (certainly something I'm guilty of doing not at all infrequently), and thus feel more relieved about avoiding it than the event warrants.

It's like clockwork, I tell you
As anyone who knows me can attest (and I believe everyone reading this falls into that category, though who knows?) during the semester it's, um, rather difficult for me to get me to wake up on time for class. Yet, as soon as the break begins, my body has no problem waking itself up at 9:30 despite the fact that I have nothing to do. Not that I mind having a healthy sleep schedule, mind you, but it's just a little frustrating.

On the bright side, I've had a chance to continue my productivity. Over the past couple months, all of those little things have been piling up, things which are individually easy to deal with but when accumulated into a huge mass become quite daunting. Now that I don't have anything else to worry about, I can tackle them one by one and slowly whittle the pile back down to reasonable size. Plus I get the wonderful feeling I get from having my life be at least somewhat more organized.

Me vs. Technology: The Road To Victory
So I finally triumphed over the irritating problem which was plaguing IE (apparently, the application installed DLLs which were too new for my old, antiquated version of Win98SE, so I had to install new ones), which prompts me to go on this tangential rant.

These days, computers often think that they're smarter than me. This is often true; for instance, when installing software, I trust that they've done their job right (although apparently, someone hadn't in this case), and let things proceed and hope that nothing goes wrong. A lot of the time, though, it's not. When it comes to, say, Word's spelling and grammar checker, I'm way smarter than Word, and so I'm perpetually annoyed by its claiming that it knows the English language better than I. Of course, I turned off such features on my own computer long ago, but they're still an irritation whenever I have to use a computer where I can't freely change the settings. And, increasingly, there are such helpful features which can't be turned off -- one of the things which drives me craziest about IE is the fact that whenever you select a word, it helpfully selects the space after the word, so that if you paste it somewhere it'll be fine. All very good -- except this feature causes me 100 times more aggravation when I don't want it than in the occasional case when I do.

What we really need, rather than trying to make computers smarter, is to make them realize when they're not smart enough. Or, in the words of Chuang Tzu: "He who knows he is a fool is not the biggest fool; he who knows he is confused is not in the worst confusion." If more people were working on Artificial Humility, I wouldn't have to deal with my computer constantly trying to correct me when it, not I, is the one that's wrong.

The pervasiveness of popular culture
So someone brought a radio to the 7b grading festivities yesterday, and so I spent the 6 or so hours I was in the 7b office listening to Alice. Now, I pretty much never listen to the radio these days -- at home, I don't even have a radio; although I could listen to what the Internet offers me, I usually just stick to the contents of my various playlists, and on the road, I prefer to listen to the various CDs I have than take my chances with the airwaves. So I was more than a little bit surprised to realize that I had heard pretty much every song on the radio that they played. (Oh, sure, I don't claim to have been paying 100% attention, so I'm certain I noticed the songs I had heard before precisely because I had heard them before.) I've heard Avril Lavigne, and Vanessa Carlton, and Alicia Keys; I've heard Jack Johnson and John Mayer; I've heard Nickelback and Coldplay and Five for Fighting, in most cases more times than I wanted to -- despite having made no effort to seek any of them out. I guess this illustrates that I can't escape from the music surrounding us even if I want to.

A Grader's Complaint
So, my last work, done yesterday, was grading for the 7b final, and given the fact that I was already running on empty, my grading there probably did not represent my best work. However, if you do it right, grading can be pretty mechanical; the trick is properly setting the mileposts for people to be awarded points (my own grading scheme being somewhat of a hybrid between the holistic grading scheme that we're supposed to use in 7b, where points are assigned on the level of understanding that the student exhibits, and the more traditional "assign a point value to every important step" method; while the former is a really nice idea, it's a lot harder to implement in practice than the latter, so I often use accomplishing a particular step as a proxy for reaching a certain level of understanding, thus nicely tying the two together).

Unfortunately, I (in strict accordance with some law or another) got awarded the most unpleasant problem to grade. On the first midterm, the professor had posed a problem involving a submerged lead ball; as a result of the buoyant force, it had an apparent weight less than its real weight. Then, everything was heated up, so that the lead ball expanded (the water, too), changing the apparent weight. So far, so good. Now, the professor wrote the problem such that there was a certain percentage change in the temperature, figuring that this would cause all of the other variables to cancel out and leaving you with a percentage change of the apparent weight, obviating the need to, say, provide the other variables. A fine idea, except that it didn't work -- you still needed to know some of the initial variables in order to get the percentage. So, you would think he had learned his lesson. But no. On the final, he did the exact same thing -- posted a problem in which the initial percentage change was given, and no other variables, figuring that the variables would cancel -- but again, they didn't. This resulted in his having to issue a clarification midway through the exam, and subsequent student confusion, which was reflected in the exams I had to grade.

That wasn't really the worst of it, though. The most annoying thing was that, fundamentally speaking, there were two ways to do the problem: a right way and a wrong way. (For those interested in the technical details: The problem asked for the change in resonant frequency in an LC circuit when the position of a dielectric in the capacitor was changed by a little amount. The right way was to use the Chain Rule to obtain dw/dx. The wrong way was to compute the old capacitance and the new capacitance, subtract the two, and attempt to find the change in the resonant frequency.) Now, for people who went the right way, if they erred, it was pretty easy to identify where they had strayed from the path and award partial credit appropriately. Unfortunately, those people were significantly in the minority behind people who went the wrong way. Now, it is possible to get the right answer using the wrong way (it does work, just not very well, if you carry everything through very carefully), and so of course I had to give full credit to people who did manage to make it all the way through to the final answer this way. But if you went astray along that path, things got unpleasant really quickly, making it impossible to determine really how much credit they deserved; their understanding was completely obscured. So I had to just assign a uniform partial credit to the large number of people who suffered that fate.

Back from the dead
So I'm finally done with all of my work! Yay! Now I can finally kick back and enjoy some hard-earned relaxation, which will hopefully mean a regular stream of posts here.

It's amazing how productive I've already been this morning; my room, which has been slowly decaying over the past three weeks, looks better already (although there's still a long way to go). I guess you can get a lot of work done when you don't actually have anything to do. On the downside, IE is still behaving badly. It seems like a rogue application I installed overwrote a few of the DLLs it uses with inferior versions, resulting in predictable chaos. I might as well take this moment to rant for a bit: back in the days when I was an avid Mac user, people like Kenshin who were trying to convince me of the innate superiority of the PC would always complain that in a Mac, you couldn't take a close look at the inner workings (the implication being that you couldn't fix them if they went wrong), while with the PC you had ready access to everything. Well, this was a blatant lie then, and it's a blatant lie now. My tools for fixing a problem like this are pretty much the same on both sides of the divide: see if any settings are wrong; if not, reinstall and hope that fixes the problem. Seriously, what else am I supposed to do? Track down the offending DLL and replace it? Yeah, right.

Why I am such an excellent typist
Hey, I'm no Nietzsche, but I figured some self-investigation is in order.

While procrastinating today, I went to PopCap to fool around with their games, and on a whim (though I had really come to play Insaniquarium), decided to try their typing game. Not surprisingly, I effortlessly blew through the game until I reached the "off-the-map" area and it just reached inhuman levels. Whenever people ask me, "How did you become such a good typist?" I'm always slightly at a loss. I mean, part of it is that I've been on computers for a long time, and typing on them (since, heck, back in those days all you could do was type) equally long. And when I was a kid, I certainly went through my fair share of typing programs. (I actually liked a lot of the typing games, in the same way that I liked the really old-school Oregon Trail, before it had any graphics, when to shoot things for food you had to type words like "BLAM" or "POW" as fast as possible.) It wasn't that the typing programs gave me good technique, though; my habits had already been solidified long before my first encounter with Ms. Beacon (actually, I don't remember what my first real typing program was, but that's as good a guess as any), and they're certainly not really all that close to what's recommended. (Whenever I type on a split keyboard, for example, I get frustrated quite rapidly, because I often find my index fingers falling into the crevasse in the middle. If this doesn't prove that my habits are less than perfect, I don't know what does.) It's possible that it was merely the practice that these programs gave me, rather than any technique I learned from them, that gave me the skill that I have today. But, well, the same is true for a lot of kids (especially today), and it's not hard to see that the majority of them aren't particularly good typists despite having done it so much. So I can't really use that as a complete explanation.

Maybe it's a natural skill? In that case, why couldn't I have ended up with a natural skill that would impress the ladies a little more? Or at least one that would be more useful in my chosen line of work?

Obligatory haiku rant (or, proving my point below)
Literarily speaking, very few things get me more riled up than some idiot slapping seventeen syllables together in a 5-7-5 pattern and calling it a "haiku". (I will confess to engaging in this pastime in my weaker moments, but I'm attributing it to "youthful indiscretion." And unlike certain members of Congress, I actually was young when this happened.) There are two reasons why this annoys me:

a) It's not a haiku. A haiku, properly speaking, is not just 5-7-5; it also needs to contain a seasonal element (loosely speaking; I know this definition isn't precise). I think the part that grates on me about this is the blatant cultural insensitivity; it's as if people are saying "oh, here's this cool Japanese thing; I'll use it without bothering to actually learn anything about it," in a way that embodies the worst ugly-American stereotypes. Obviously, I'm overprojecting in this, since I'm sure that that doesn't represent a whole bunch of people who do this, but the fact that it is (almost certainly) happening some of the time does annoy me. It's not the whole story, though; I still eat "burritos" (actually, burritos are a singularly bad example for this point, come to think of it, since they're allegedly not even authentic to begin with -- perhaps I should say "tacos" -- but anyway, you get the point) without feeling that they're an example of horrible American cultural imperialism (although it certainly could be argued that they are; I defend myself against such thoughts by comforting myself with the fact that at least I'm aware of the fact that these are hardly an authentic rendition of Mexican cuisine).

Now, it is true that you can argue that the seasonal motif is something which isn't necessary in modern haiku, or haiku in English. This is, to some extent, true. But given that every instance of the type of haiku I'm complaining about slavishly adheres to the 5-7-5 pattern -- which is indisputably something more worth changing if you're actually trying to "translate" the haiku form into English rather than just carrying it over directly -- it's pretty clear that their authors haven't actually thought about those issues, so I'm hardly going to give them a free pass on that score.

b) It's bad art. The haiku form, because of its constricted nature, requires a fair amount of effort to produce a good work of art. Unfortunately, to the average person focused on cramming whatever they want to say into this arbitrary seventeen-syllable form (and I say "arbitrary" quite deliberately, because while it is by no means actually arbitrary, from the perspective of the person I'm criticizing here, it might as well be), producing something pleasant artistically is the last thing on their minds. The result is something which is not any more worthwhile than if the author hadn't gone to all that bother to put it in 17 syllables, and which is often quite a bit worse, given the circumlocutions, peculiar word choices, awkward word breaks, and other devices people use to fit their thoughts into the 5-7-5 Procrustean bed. I suppose, as long as I'm wildly generalizing, I'll speculate that people like this are exactly the kind of people who go to a Jackson Pollock exhibit and say "What's the big deal? My 4-year-old could do that!" Haiku is their way to be the metaphorical 4-year-old in the art world; the rules are so simple (or so they think) that they can produce art just by following them. Of course, what they produce isn't really art, just as if they toddled into the garage with fingerpaint, they wouldn't get Blue Poles Number 11, either. That is to say, there is more to art than just following the rules, no matter how simple they may seem to be, and disregarding this fact is ultimately just going to produce something annoying.

Anyway, you might think that this rant might be inspired by TMQ's haiku feature. It's not, actually; while this particular feature has been annoying me since pretty much its inception, my irritation at improper haiku extends well before then. This does seem to be a particularly egregious example, but rest assured that this is always something I'll notice, regardless of its origins.

My Faustian bargain (not literally, fortunately)
So, my past three years in grad school seem to have followed a very consistent pattern: I delay doing my work during the semester as long as possible, and then at the end I frantically attempt to make it up (or at least as much of it as possible). This provides me with the benefit of being slightly happier during the semester, at the cost of a couple of weeks of pure misery at the end. As you might have guessed from the two facts that (a) it's the end of the semester and (b) I haven't posted here in a week (thus undoubtedly disappointing my legions of loyal readers), I'm currently enjoying the less-appealing end of the bargain.

This has provided with an opportunity to meta-procrastinate by looking at my procrastination habits, at least. When I first feel like I have work to do, I'll try to decrease the number of activities which explicitly feel like not-work, like, say, leaving the apartment, or playing games which will obviously take up a large amount of time, or writing blog posts. This doesn't stop me from engaging in activities which are kind of like work, although they're not the work that needs doing; when I'm in heavy work periods, suddenly I feel the need to do the dishes, or clean up my room, or organize the contents of my hard drive. Then, as time goes on and there's not any fake work left, I'll lower the threshold for what constitutes "doing something productive", so that writing blog posts or emails or reading news now counts as "work" for the purposes of avoiding real work. Thus, the post you see before me. Eventually, I'll reach the point where not even my procrastination abilities can save me from actually getting work done, but as you can see, I haven't actually reached that point yet.

Fodder for both sides of the cell phone debate
A Harvard study shows that cell phone usage in cars does cause an increased number of accidents, but that the economic benefits of cell phone usage is comparable to this cost. (This article is frustratingly vague about whether the benefits refers to the benefits of all cell phone usage, or just the benefits of using your cell phone in the car, which is a rather important difference.)

While my attitude towards cell phones has mellowed considerably over the past few years, I still have no patience for people who act like idiots on the road, for whatever reason (save your snide remarks, you), and so I do reflexively feel annoyed when I see people talking on their cell phones, probably out of the fact that this may cause them to do something stupid.

The thing I fear the most are the cell-phone defenders pointing to this and saying that it's still worth it on a utilitarian basis. I have one word to answer that: externalities. If you plow into me because you're blathering on your phone, I certainly don't reap any of the benefits of your usage.

Stupid NFL quote of the day
No, don't worry, this isn't going to be a regular feature...if it were, I wouldn't have room for anything else in the blog. But I have to comment on this:

Vikings linebacker Henri Crockett (formerly a Falcon), on Falcons quarterback Michael Vick: "He's changed the game. There are going to be no more pocket passers anymore.'' Leaving aside the fact that comments like this have been made every time a "scrambling" quarterback has made a splash in the league (most recently, Donovan McNabb, but going all the way back to Kordell Stewart), the simple truth is that Vick's success may cause other quarterbacks to try to imitate Vick's style, but you know what? They're not going to succeed, because they don't have the talent that Vick does. Unless they come out with human cloning a lot more quickly than I suspected...

Semper cras
If I ever have a Latin motto -- for a family crest or something (you know, just in case I get knighted) -- that'll be it. Here's my recipe for making sure not to get any work done on a 4-day weekend:
1) On Thursday, think "well, it's Thanksgiving, so there's no need to worry about work today. I still have plenty of time."
2) On Friday, think "well, I've earned a day off, and I still have plenty of time, so I'll worry about it on the weekend proper."
3) On Saturday, get a chance to see three old high school friends, one of who is just visiting for the weekend from Annapolis, one of whom you haven't seen since his recent return from Japan, and one who you have no good excuse for not seeing, but who you haven't seen in a while. Stay up until 6:30 am having fun and reminiscing about old times.
4) On Sunday, wake up feeling absolutely terrible (partly from lack of sleep, and partly from an incipient cold), and have to decline all offers to do something interesting because "I have to work". Sigh.

Paul's thoughts on game design
This kind of post, like a post on racism, is a post that everyone will write sooner or later, but I've just been thinking about this lately while playing Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 is a fine game; it's stunningly beautiful, but there's nothing revolutionary about the gameplay itself. It's basicaly the same formula used as in the previous Warcrafts and Starcraft, with the occasional tweak or enhancement here and there. The enhancements are useful, but they don't make a major change in how the game works. I'm somewhat disappointed, but given the success of the franchise, and the fact that this is by no means a bad game, who cam blame them for not wanting to tinker with success?

Anyway, so here are my thoughts. Note that these are not necessarily my opinions on how to build a good game, but rather how to build a game that I like. I could be egotistical and claim the two are one and the same, but I'll save that for later.

1) No waiting! By far the quickest way to make me dislike a game is to force me to wait for a long time while nothing is happening. Most games avoid the obvious forms of this trap; the much-loathed (and rightfully so!) Star Control 3 is the only game I can think of offhand in which you do just have to spend a fair amount of time waiting. This is one of the downsides of the SimCity-type games, also, in that often you have to wait a while for your money to build up (though in some games, like SimGolf, you can do other things, like play golf, while waiting for the money to flow in). But there are more subtle forms of this, too; excessive use of video, for example, is sure to annoy me -- the occasional usage is fine, but if it becomes too prevalent, what's the point? Final Fantasy games are especially egregious in this regard; not just because of the FMV, which on its own wouldn't be really horrible, but because of the constant repetition of videos that you've already seen -- things like battle transitions, spell animations, and so forth. When you see them once, fine, but once you've seen them for the 250th time, you just want to smash your machine. I think this is the strongest reason for my disenchantment with the FF series over the years. But don't worry, I'll be picking on FF much more throughout this post.

An even more subtle problem is much more perniciously widespread -- games in which you don't have to explicitly wait, but in which the optimal strategy would involve a lot more waiting (or repetitive tasks) than the normal strategy. There are a lot of games, for example, in which you'd be better off if after every encounter, you went back to the source of health, or waited for your spell points to recharge, or whatever. No one (except for perhaps the really obsessive-compulsive type of person) actually does this, but the fact that you could be better off (and in some really close battles, it becomes necessary) if you did do this is more than a bit annoying.

The next two are closely related, so I'll put them together.
2a) Doing something you know you can do is not interesting. Doing something you didn't know if you could do is interesting.
2b) Repetition forced on you by the game is bad. Repetition forced on you by yourself is good.

That is to say, any task which you have to do not because it's challenging (and by "challenging", in this context, I mean "something you could potentially fail at"), but simply because you have to do it in order to proceed with the game, is ultimately boring. This is why (to pick on RPGs again) the task of mindless leveling up is so reviled: it's not at all difficult; pretty much anyone could do it with their eyes closed, but you have to do it in order to get through the game. Square cleverly addressed that problem by largely eliminating the need for leveling up, at the cost of making the entire game non-challenging. Whoops. This applies to tasks within the game, of course, but also to tasks outside of the game: I don't particularly enjoy games which force you to make a map or write down copious quantities of information, since, hey, I know I can make a map; the act of doing it is pure busywork. I'll make exceptions if the mapmaking is relatively interesting in and of itself, but if it's just something I need to do, why bother?

Moving into the second half of my bipartite statement, it's equally frustrating to try a task which was interesting the first time round, but which you were able to accomplish, and then have the game tell you, "That's nice. Now do it again." This probably sounds like a broader statement than I intend it to be; if, say, you have to fight three of the same monsters in succession, but the first one weakens you enough so that the second is more difficult, and thus you have to plan ahead to defeat all three, that's fine. For example, the penultimate stage of Mega Man 2 (or any other Mega Man, for that matter), where you have to fight all 8 bosses again, but in one stage, is perfectly acceptable, since now you have to not just beat them, but do a good enough job beating each one that you have enough energy left to beat the rest, too. But (hey, look, I'm picking on FF again) part of the thing that annoys me about Final Fantasy is that all the fights are pretty much the same, and (with a very few exceptions, like FF1, which is part of the reason I still enjoyed it more than any other game in the series) each fight largely doesn't affect the outcome of the next, so it's all just the same with no larger strategy required.

What do I mean by the second sentence there, "repetition forced on you by yourself is good"? Well, to me, the epitome of a good challenge is something at which you don't succeed the first time, and have to try it again a few times, slowly gaining proficiency until, finally, you're good enough to make it through. The number of repetitions...well, that depends on how long each repetition is. If it takes a couple of hours each time you fail, I'm not a big fan of this model (Panzer General, I'm looking in your direction; see also (3) below), but for a minute or two, I'm willing to put up with trying quite a few times. But the point is, if you are good enough to pass the thing the first time, you should only have to do it once, not more just because the game designers are too lazy to come up with a better way to occupy your time.

This description somewhat reminds me of my spelling and grammar courses in the 5th and 6th grades; each week began with a pretest on the stuff we were covering that week, and if you did well enough on the pretest, you could skip the rest of the work for that week. I was a big fan of this system, because I was able to pass nearly all of the pretests (I think the pronoun one was the only one I didn't make it through), and so I didn't have to do completely unnecessary work. I think the same principle applies here -- if you're good enough, you shouldn't have to do unnecessary things. Of course, if this is true for a significant proportion of players out there, it's probably a sign that something is wrong with your difficulty. Which brings me to my next point...

3) The difficulty should be right. Correctly articulating my philosophy here is going to be difficult, especially since it's often self-contradictory, but the statement in bold is pretty self-explanatory, don't you think?

Seriously, though, ideally a game should be challenging at the beginning, when you're just learning, and still challenging at the end, when you're much better. The latter is complicated by the fact that as the game goes on, not only do you get better, but in many cases, so does your character, or your car, or your empire, or whatever. This isn't always a problem (as in, say, Super Mario Bros.), but it does seem that a lot of the time, game makers don't take this factor into account, and so as the game goes onward, it gets easier, often to pathetic levels. Obviously, this problem is more severe in games which don't have adjustable difficulty, but I don't intend to say that just being able to change the difficulty solves all problems, either; one of my (few) complaints with Warcraft 3 is that the "Normal" level is too easy, and the "Hard" level too hard. This is probably just a reflection of my own skill -- I'm decent, but by no means good, at RTS games in general, so the Normal level isn't much of a challenge, but I'm not good enough to tackle Hard. But since a single mission on Hard can take quite a bit of time, I'm less inclined (as (2) above might indicate) to put in the effort to improve enough to do it, so I have to content myself with something that's too easy. A perfect example of a game that does difficulty right is F-Zero X, which, when we first got it, was quite difficult at the Beginner level. Then, we got better, got through Beginner, and it was quite difficult in the Normal level. But eventually, despite it seeming impossible, we made it through...and this process proceeded through four levels of difficulty. It was perfect, in that there was always a challenge available even though our skills improved a great deal over the course of playing the game. And, of course, it didn't take all that long to play any individual course, so we could try a lot of times, even if we only improved a bit each time, and eventually end up a lot better.

There are right ways and wrong ways to make a game more difficult, of course, and unfortunately more of the latter than the former. Time limits often fall into the latter category; there's nothing more frustrating than doing really well and knowing you would have had no problem winning, except that you run into an arbitrary time limit. I don't mean to say that all time limits are bad; indeed, often they provide just the right degree of challenge to a game. But sometimes it seems that time limits are just used as a crutch by designers to artificially add difficulty, and this can be more than a little aggravating. Computer cheating is another obvious example; to pick the most heinous example I can think of, in the old Nintendo version of Super Off-Road (my favorite game in the arcade, back in those days), there were just certain races that you could never win, because the computer would just go much faster than you could ever hope to go. A slightly less-obvious instance of bad ways to make a game difficult are "instant loss" scenarios, where you can be doing excellently overall, but if you carelessly let a certain unit get destroyed, or accidentally go into the wrong place, or whatever, you instantly are defeated. Saves can help to avoid most of the damage from these, but if you design the game so that when you instantly lose you can restore from a save, what the heck is the point of having the instant losses in the first place?!

All right, now for the self-contradictory part. I suppose this part of my philosophy can be summarized as "lose quickly, but win slowly". To me, there are few things more frustrating than spending a large amount of time going through a game, only to discover at the end that I lost, and not only that I had lost, but that there was really no point I could go back to to reverse my decline, but rather that I had pretty much been doomed from near the beginning, so that I had to go allll the way back to the beginning and start over again. Again, this ties in with the whole "don't want to repeat myself a lot if it's a lot of time" thing from above; if at the beginning, I quickly lose, that's no big deal, since then I can go back and correct what I did wrong. But if the feedback cycle is that much longer, then it's much less effective. On the other hand, a very serious problem in many Civ-type games (at least at the levels which I can handle!) is that the game is essentially decided in your favor very early on, and the large portion of the rest of the game is just spent mopping up the remnants or doing whatever tasks you have to do to ensure your victory. (Admittedly, this problem is exacerbated by my perfectionist nature, where I'm not content just conquering the world/galaxy/universe, but have to make sure I colonize each planet, or whatever. But even still, even if that weren't the case, there's often a lot of dead time after you can tell who the winner is.)

Unfortunately, these two goals are somewhat at odds; after all, if there's a certain point after which I don't want to lose, then it means that everything after that part is meaningless, since I'll win, right? Well, the trick to resolving this paradox (and you might see it, too, if I tell you that I initially phrased this part of my philosophy as "lose early, but win late", before realizing the problem in this statement) is that it's okay to lose in the late stages of the game, but it should be possible, even when you lose late, to go back not too far and still have a fighting chance at winning the thing, rather than having to start all the way over from the beginning. Not lose instantly, of course; as you might have seen above, I have a great deal of dislike for that concept, but just something that won't require that much to undo.

4) You should always know what you did wrong when you fail. This is one of the things that frustrates me about the Sim series of games -- sometimes it seems like you've built a perfect city, or planet, or golf course, or whatever, and yet people still aren't coming, and you don't know how to fix it. (Between this comment and my comment in (1), it might seem like I dislike the Sim games a lot more than I do. This is not entirely true -- I played the original SimCity into the ground -- but I'll admit that I couldn't get into SimCity 2000, pretty much exactly for this reason.) This is hardly limited to this particular instance; for example, in racing games, sometimes I'll feel like I've run the perfect race and yet I'll still lose, and it's not at all clear what I need to do in order to not lose. (This is why computer cheating, aside from the obvious reasons, is particularly wicked -- if the computer is just flat-out better than you, then sometimes it's hard to see what you can do to beat it, especially if that requires something devious or underhanded.)

To tie this back into the big picture (and mix metaphors while I'm at it), like I said, one of my favorite things is improving my skills to defeat a challenge I couldn't initially overcome. If I can't actually see how to improve my skills, then I'm at a loss, and more often than not will wander off to something else.

5) Good graphics or sound or plot will not make up for bad gameplay. But the converse is true: good gameplay can make up for a variety of sins. I know I've expounded on this at length to most people who care, so I won't bother belaboring the point, especially since it is pretty obvious, after all. But this is why I still enjoy some classic Nintendo games: sure, the graphics and sound might be terrible, but some of them are still fundamentally fun games to play. I certainly don't oppose good graphics and sound; other things being equal, I'll certainly be glad to have them, and they can elevate a game from really good to the pantheon of great games, but they alone cannot save a bad game.

I know that David will disagree with the "plot" part; he plays Final Fantasy games essentially for the story, with the game really the secondary part of the experience. I, however, can't do that (especially since who's able to follow the typical Square story anyway?).

6) Make the burden on the player light when you're beginning (but it's certainly okay -- in fact, really necessary, if you want your game to have any degree of complexity -- to increase it as time goes on). I suppose this is just another way of saying "easy to learn, hard to master", though I had something more specific in mind. Heroes 2 is one of my favorite games -- and in my opinions, one of the best games ever -- but it does have a significant disadvantage: while it's easy enough to pick up the basics of the game, it's very important, even very early on, to be able to assess the relative strengths of armies, and this requires a great amount of detailed knowledge about the individual units. The game does considerately provide a quick reference card containing this exact information, but it's still suboptimal to have to consult this card time and again until you've reached the point where you've learned enough about the units not to have to constantly look at it.

The same applies to a lot of interface decisions, too. For example, in a typical RTS, you don't have to learn the hotkeys for each unit and building at the beginning; at the outset, you can just click on them, until you can learn the hotkeys and use them instead. This process is also generally facilitated by the fact that once you've learned the names of the buildings, the hotkeys are usually pretty intuitively obvious. (Actually, this is a gripe I have about Warcraft 3 -- it seems like they've gone to maximal effort to make everything start with the same letter. I keep wanting to build a Burrow and nearly building a Barracks instead, until I notice that it's the wrong size, and I have several times built a Barracks when I meant to build a Bestiary. But I digress.)

Fortunately, games have gotten a lot better at this over the years, in that most complicated games will gradually break you in by starting out with limited units or buildings or whatever available and gradually expanding them over time; it's been a long time since there's been a game for which I've had to read a substantial amount of the manual before beginning, and I hope I won't have to deal with such a game in the future either.

And now, if you've made it this far...
7) Use saves wisely. This is a pretty wishy-washy statement, so let me expand on it further. I've often expressed my view that the modern ability to save your game pretty much anywhere, any time, as opposed to never (in most Nintendo games) or at least only at infrequent times and places, has done a lot to make games a lot less interesting than before. On the other hand, saves are to some extent a necessary evil; after all, they're pretty much a sine qua non for any kind of extended sports game, and (as I remarked above in my "lose quickly, win slowly" comments) for an extended strategy game they're essential to be able to provide a challenge without making said challenge excessively frustrating.

The point at which I find saves problematic is when you end up saving before every single thing that you do, so that if it turns out wrong, you can just restore from the save. This is fundamentally silly, since it takes the game and completely reduces it into a series of disjointed separate challenges. How can you combat this problem? Well, you have 3 choices, as I see it: (a) Make each challenge easy, so that the player has no incentive to save. Well, this works, in a sufficiently trivial sense, but it also makes the whole game not all that challenging. This is definitely not the greatest solution, though it's one I've unfortunately seen more than once. (b) Prevent the player from saving all the time. As my words above might have implied, I think that this is generally a good thing, and definitely necessary in some cases (how would that aforementioned penultimate stage of Mega Man 2 be if you could save after each boss, for example? Extraordinarily pointless. Its challenge derives not from the difficulty of the individual tasks, but from the collective difficulty of doing them all decently well in one try.) In a game which is relatively easily divided up into individual tasks, this seems like the optimal solution -- don't allow people to save in the middle of a single task, but rather force them to master the entire task before proceeding. However, not all games easily lend themselves to this kind of division (how can you do this in Starcraft, for example?) So this brings us to: (c) Decrease the price of losing. This is actually a broader point worth making -- but I'm exhausted by this juncture, and so, probably, are you -- so I'll just say that the best way to prevent people from running back to the nearest save when they suffer a minor setback is to make sure that that minor setback isn't all that terrible. For instance, in Starcraft, if my attack force gets annihilated, I don't feel the need to immediately go back, because it's not that big a deal -- I can always build another attack force. This is one of the major things that distinguishes Civilization 1 from its successors, for example -- in Civ 1, if I'm way ahead, if I'm careless and the enemy sacks one of my cities, suddenly they can start building tanks and use them against me, so in defense I'm forced to save all the time to ensure that this doesn't happen. In Alpha Centauri, by contrast, if I lose a city, no big deal -- they can't get anything too far above their current technology level, so I can just work on getting it back without having to worry too much about the consequences.

All right. There's probably more to be said here (especially linearity and nonlinearity), but I think I'm best off saving it for another time.

Taking the scenic route
For a person like me, getting lost (assuming there's no one else there to be annoyed, and assuming you don't particularly have to be anywhere) can actually be a fun activity. It's essentially a puzzle, and solving it requires intuition (which is often wrong), knowledge (which is obviously imperfect), and sometimes the ability to follow signs (which are nowhere near commonplace enough to be useful).

Today, after dropping Joon off at Stanford, I realized I needed to get gas, but figured I would be much better off doing so in Fremont instead of in Palo Alto. So after crossing the Dumbarton, I continued past 880 in search of a gas station, and wandered a bit before reaching one (which was in fact much cheaper than it would have been in Palo Alto). After leaving, I decided to head in the direction which I thought I had come from, figuring that although it wasn't the same road, I would get to the freeway soon enough. Well, as it turned out (as I later learned by playing with Yahoo! Maps), in my wanderings, one of the streets I was on had curved 90 degrees, so that the direction I thought was west and back to the freeway was actually south (actually, closer to southwest and southeast, really). So, after driving for a while, and thinking "Hey, this seems like longer than it took to get here, maybe I'm going the wrong way", I was elated to find a freeway, except for the slight detail that it was 680. So, this time the puzzle beat me, although not critically so (although I did lament my lost time limping back to 880, which I also did the long way, via 238), but it was still an interesting challenge.

Hey, an actual baseball post
I haven't posted about baseball in a while, partly still from post-World Series letdown, partly because I don't want to bore my audience, and partly because there hasn't been that much to say, but I have to say this: the more I learn about the Mike Hampton trade, the more outraged I am.

Here's a recap of the facts, for those of you not familiar with them (i.e. 67% of my known audience; Matt, you can skip these next 5 paragraphs): In 1999, Mike Hampton established himself as one of the best pitchers in the National League; after several above-average seasons, in 1999 he posted a 22-4 record with a 2.90 ERA, and was probably the second-best pitcher in the league to Randy Johnson (at least according to the Cy Young voting, and to BP's SNWL figures). 2000 was his contract year, and the Astros didn't think they could keep him, and so he was traded to the Mets in the offseason, where he struggled a bit, going only 15-10, but still had an ERA of 3.14 and was easily still in the top 10 pitchers in the league. Naturally, then, he was one of the most-prized free agents in the market, and in a surprise to a lot of observers (myself included), he ended up signing an 8-year, $121-million contract with the Rockies.

If it had been any other team, I would have thought the investment worthwhile, if risky (after all, any 8-year contract is going to be risky); but Coors Field, because of its elevation, is murder on pitchers; no pitcher has pitched there effectively for an extensive amount of time. Their last big free agent pitcher, Darryl Kile, had posted excellent numbers before his trip to Coors, and when the Rockies traded him away, he went back to being an excellent pitcher, but his mile-high stay produced some decidedly unpretty entries in his pitching ledger. Apparently the Rockies hoped that he could be an exception to the trend (and some people thought he would have a chance, since he is an extreme groundball pitcher), but he was not; in 2001 he was 14-13 with a 5.41 ERA -- not as bad as it looks in Coors, but still hardly great, and in 2002 he regressed further, going 7-15, 6.15. It was clear at this point that the $120-million contract was going to be a rather large albatross, and so the Rockies certainly wanted to trade him, but who's going to take on such a huge contract for a pitcher whose reputation has been damaged?

Well, this offseason, the Rockies were able to answer that question, swapping Hampton to the Marlins for Charles Johnson and Preston Wilson, a pair of similarly bad contracts (5 years/$35M and 5 years/$32M, respectively, both ending in 2005), and some other minor entities (on both sides of the trade). The Rockies benefited from the deal in that they got a couple of players whose performance will be aided, rather than hurt, by playing at elevation, and they got out of their financial commitments three years earlier than they would otherwise. Even though the Rockies apparently agreed to pay about $11 million of Hampton's salary (plus $19 million more from a deferred signing bonus), it's not unreasonable to call it a win on their side of the ledger.

The Marlins, on the other hand, while they got someone who's likely to be a fine pitcher again with his return to sea level, didn't have the payroll room to take on Hampton, either. So, they moved him along to the Braves for Tim Spooneybarger. Spooneybarger is a perfectly decent reliever, and the Marlins may try to move him into the closer spot if they get tired of the other attractive-looking trade acquisitions they've tried in the spot (e.g. Braden Looper, Vladimir Nunez), but assuming that Hampton reverts to anywhere near his old form (an assumption I'll be making throughout; if you disbelieve this assumption, then my outrage is a little less justified, but I see no good reason to), his value will be far, far greater than Spooneybarger's.

Still, the Marlins get out from the contracts they were looking to get out of, and they at least get something, so it couldn't have been a total loss for them, could it? Well, I was willing to accept that, until I saw that the Braves were able to get the Marlins to pay $38 million of Hampton's contract, so that the Braves were responsible for only $35.5 million themselves. (Numbers courtesy of this ESPN article; for full details on Hampton's contract, see here.) That's right, the Marlins are paying $38 million for a pitcher who will never play for them. In fact, the $12.7 million a year that that works out to is greater than the Marlins have ever paid to a person who actually did play for them. Or, to put it a different way, the Marlins were more willing to pay more than half of their commitment to Hampton and have him not pitch for him than they were willing to pay the whole share and have him pitch for them.

So, why the outrage? Dave Pease, over in BP, makes a pretty good argument that we shouldn't necessarily consider the Marlins Big Losers in this trade, because it's not like in the absence of the trade, the Marlins wouldn't have been stuck with any bad contracts. They were stuck with Johnson's and Wilson's contracts to begin with, and given that as a starting point, they're still better off than if they had just done nothing (though, obviously, not better off than if they hadn't signed the bad contracts at the outset). But I think this misses the reason so many people look at this trade really suspiciously. My complaint is that the Braves get a pitcher who is likely to be a very excellent pitcher for a very, very low price (in fact, you'll notice that they're paying less for Hampton's services than the Marlins are paying to avoid Hampton's services), simply because they're in a position to take advantage of the fact that the Marlins are that desperate to avoid paying Hampton's full value.

In football and basketball, we see a lot of odd trades forced by the salary cap, where a team will often give away good players for essentially nothing just to clear up salary cap room. That's not all that different from what we have here, when the Marlins are giving up good players just to clear financial space. But what irks me is who benefits from these trades. In football and basketball, it's the teams who have the most salary-cap space to begin with. That might be arbitrary, in some sense of the word, but it is ultimately fair, in that all teams start with the same amount of salary-cap space, and so if you have less than other teams, it's your own fault, so to speak. But here, the Braves are the beneficiary not because they're wisely managed or because they've cleverly accumulated salary-cap space for such a contingency, but simply because they have more money at hand. And that's bound to make a lot of people, myself included, unhappy.

(I'll withhold my annoyed comments about the Yankees pursing Colon for now.)

My least favorite kind of weather
...is today's. Dark and cold, but not really the coldness...it's the wind, so loud you can hear it even inside, sending the leaves skittering across the streets. It's the last which gives me such a profound feeling of emptiness; everything is so dead outside, just being tossed by the merciless wind.

Make your own metaphor.