I was in a small seaside town in Spain and struck up a conversation with a family. It developed that they’d rented a car and the dad had driven from Barcelona, while I’d taken the bus. In my mind I remarked “I make good money, I can pay somebody to drive me there so I don’t have to do it myself.” But probably, in the other dad’s mind, he was remarking “I make good money, I don’t have to ride the bus with a bunch of strangers.” The visible signs of richness are governed by which things you want to have, but a lot of the real content of richness has to do with which things you want to avoid.
Quomodocumque
Math, Madison, food, the Orioles, books, my kids.
Bagel, cream cheese, and kimchi
That’s it. No more to say. A bagel with cream cheese and kimchi is a great combination and I recommend it.
I dream of Gunnar
Last night I dreamed I found Gunnar Henderson’s apartment unlocked and started hanging out there. It was a really nice apartment. Dr. Mrs. Q was there too, we were watching TV, eating out of his fridge, etc. Suddenly I started to feel that what we were doing was really dangerous and that Henderson was likely to come back at any time. In a huge rush I packed up everything I’d left around and got myself out the door, but try as I might I couldn’t get Dr. Mrs. Q. to have the same level of urgency, and she was a little behind me. And as I was leaving, there was Gunnar Henderson coming up the stairs! I tried to distract him by asking for his autograph, but it was no use — he went into his apartment and found my wife there. I was freaking out, pretty sure we were going to arrested, but in fact Gunnar Henderson was very cool about it and invited us to a party some guys on the Orioles were having in a few months’ time.
Henderson really has been as good as I could have dreamed, not just in a “overlooking breaking and entering if the perpetrator is a true fan” kind of way but by leading the American League in home runs while playing spectacular defense. I was pretty pessimistic at the end of last season about the Orioles chances of getting close to a title again. I was both right and wrong. Wrong, in that I wrote
with an ownership willing to add expensive free agents to fill the holes, it could be a championship team. But we have an ownership that’s ecstatic that the 2023 team lucked into 101 regular season wins, and that will be perfectly happy to enjoy 90-win seasons and trips to the Wild Card game for the next few years, until the unextended players mentioned above peel off into free agency one by one.
That changed: now we do have new ownership, and a new expensive #1 starter in Corbin Burnes, and that makes a huge difference in how well set-up we are for a playoff series. You just don’t have to win many games started by anybody other than Burnes, Grayson Rodriguez, and Kyle Bradish, as long as those three stay healthy, and that’s a good position to be in.
But I was right about
But this year, both the Yankees and Red Sox were kind of bad, and content to be kind of bad, and didn’t make gigantic talent adds in a bid for the playoffs. That hasn’t been the case for years and it won’t be the case again anytime soon.
The Yankees added Juan Soto and are not the same Yankees we finished comfortably ahead of last year.
One of my main points at the end of last year was that the Orioles got really lucky in one-run games and probably weren’t really a 101-win team. This year, so far, we’re whaling the tar out of the ball and actually are playing like a 100-win team. That’s the big thing I didn’t predict — not just that Gunnar would be this good but that guys like Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser would be raking too.
I don’t think there’s any question the Orioles have made a real change to their hitting approach. It’s much more aggressive. Adley Rutschman, who used to battle for the league lead in walks, has only 12 in 51 games. But he’s still hitting better than last year, because some of those walks have turned into homers. In fact, the Orioles are second in the AL in home runs and dead last in walks. That’s just weird! Usually teams with power get pitched around a lot; and I think the Orioles are just refusing to be pitched around, and swinging at pitches they can drive in the air, even if they might be balls. Elevation is key; the Orioles have hit into only 20 double plays in their first 54 games, a pace of 60 for a full season; the lowest team total ever is the 1945 St. Louis Cardinals with 75, and that was in a 154-game season. Only two Iteams have ever had that few GIDP in their first 54 games, both matching the Orioles’ 20 exactly: the 2019 Mariners (finished with 84) and the 2016 Rays (87).
Road trip to totality 2024
The last time we did this it was so magnificent that I said, on the spot, “see you again in 2024,” and seven years didn’t dim my wish to see the sun wink out again. It was easier this time — the path went through Indiana, which is a lot closer to home than St. Louis. More importantly, CJ can drive now, and likes to, so the trip is fully chauffeured. We saw the totality in Zionsville, IN, in a little park at the end of a residential cul-de-sac.
It was a smaller crowd than the one at Festus, MO in 2017; and unlike last time there weren’t a lot of travelers. These were just people who happened to live in Zionsville, IN and who were home in the middle of the day to see the eclipse. There were clouds, and a lot of worries about the clouds, but in the end it was just thin cirrus strips that blocked the sun, and then the non-sun, not at all.
To me it was a little less dramatic this time — because the crowd was more casual, because the temperature drop was less stark in April than it was in August, and of course because it was never again going to be the first time. But CJ and AB thought this one was better. We had very good corona. You could see a tiny red dot on the edge of the sun which was in fact a plasma prominence much bigger than the Earth.
Some notes:
- We learned our lesson last time when we got caught in a massive traffic jam in the middle of a cornfield. We chose Zionsville because it was in the northern half of the totality, right on the highway, so we could be in the car zipping north on I-65 before the massive wave of northbound traffic out of Indianapolis caught up with us. And we were! Very satisfying, to watch on Google Maps as the traffic jam got longer and longer behind us, but was never quite where we were, as if we were depositing it behind us.
- We had lunch in downtown Indianapolis where there is a giant Kurt Vonnegut Jr. painted on a wall. CJ is reading Slaughterhouse Five for school — in fact, to my annoyance, it’s the only full novel they’ve read in their American Lit elective. But it’s a pretty good choice for high school assigned reading. In the car I tried to explain Vonnegut’s theory of the granfaloon as it applied to “Hoosier” but neither kid was really interested.
- We’ve done a fair number of road trips in the Mach-E and this was the first time charging created any annoyance. The Electrify America station we wanted on the way down had two chargers in use and the other two broken, so we had to detour quite a ways into downtown Lafayette to charge at a Cadillac dealership. On the way back, the station we planned on was full with one person waiting in line, so we had to change course and charge at the Whole Foods parking lot, and even there we got lucky as one person was leaving just as we arrived. The charging process probably added an hour to our trip each way.
- While we charged at the Whole Foods in Schaumburg we hung out at the Woodfield Mall. Nostalgic feelings, for this suburban kid, to be in a thriving, functioning mall, with groups of kids just hanging out and vaguely shopping, the way we used to. The malls in Madison don’t really work like this any more. Is it a Chicago thing?
- CJ is off to college next year. Sad to think there may not be any more roadtrips, or at least any more roadtrips where all of us are starting from home.
- I was wondering whether total eclipses in the long run are equidistributed on the Earth’s surface and the answer is no: Ernie Wright at NASA made an image of the last 5000 years of eclipse paths superimposed:
There are more in the northern hemisphere than the southern because there are more eclipses in the summer (sun’s up longer!) and the sun is a little farther (whence visually a little smaller and more eclipsible) during northern hemisphere summer than southern hemisphere summer.
See you again in 2045!
Orioles 13, Angels 4
I had the great privilege to be present at Camden Yards last weekend for what I believe to be the severest ass-whupping I have ever personally seen the Orioles administer. The Orioles went into the 6th winning 3-1 but the game felt like they were winning by more than that. Then suddenly they actually were — nine batters, nine runs, no outs (though in the middle of it all there was an easy double-play ball by Ramon Urias that the Angels’ shortstop Zach Neto just inexplicably dropped — it was that kind of day.) We had pitching (Grayson Rodriguez almost unhittable for six innings but for one mistake pitch), defense (Urias snagging a line drive at third almost before I saw it leave the bat) and of course a three-run homer, by Anthony Santander, to plate the 7th, 8th, and 9th of those nine runs.
Is being an Angels fan the saddest kind of fan to be right now? The Mets and the Padres, you have more of a “we spent all the money and built what should have been a superteam and didn’t win.” The A’s, you have the embarrassment of the on-field performance and the fact that your owner screwed your city and moved the team out of town. But the Angels? Somehow they just put together the two generational talents of this era of baseball and — didn’t do anything with them. There’s a certain heaviness to the sadness.
As good as the Orioles have been so far, taking three out of their first four and massively outscoring the opposition, I still think they weren’t really a 101-win team last year, and everything will have to go right again for them to be as good this year as they were last year. Our Felix Bautista replacement, Craig Kimbrel, has already blown his first and only save opportunity, which is to say he’s not really a Felix Bautista replacement. But it’s a hell of a team to watch.
The only downside — Gunnar Henderson, with a single, a triple and a home run already, is set to lead off the ninth but Hyde brings in Tony Kemp to pinch hit. Why? The fans want to see Gunnar on second for the cycle, let the fans see Gunnar on second for the cycle.
Alphabetical Diaries
Enough of this. Enough. Equivocal or vague principles, as a rule, will make your life an uninspired, undirected, and meaningless act.
This is taken from Alphabetical Diaries, a remarkable book I am reading by Sheila Heti, composed of many thousands of sentences drawn from her decades of diaries and presented in alphabetical order. It starts like this:
A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have man things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by the binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections. A book that does only one thing, one thing at a time. A book that even the hardest of men would read. A book that is a game. A budget will help you know where to go.
How does a simple, one might even say cheap, technique, one might even say gimmick, work so well? I thrill to the aphorisms even when I don’t believe them, as with the aphorism above: principles must be equivocal or at least vague to work as principles; without the necessary vagueness they are axioms, which are not good for making one’s life a meaningful act, only good for arguing on the Internet. I was reading Alphabetical Diaries while I walked home along the southwest bike path. I stopped for a minute and went up a muddy slope into the cemetery where there was a gap in the fence, and it turned out this gap opened on the area of infant graves, graves about the size of a book, graves overlaying people who were born and then did what they did for a week and then died — enough of this.
Show report: Bug Moment, Graham Hunt, Dusk, Disq at High Noon Saloon
I haven’t done a show report in a long time because I barely go to shows anymore! Actually, though, this fall I went to three. First, The Beths, opening for The National, but I didn’t stay for The National because I don’t know or care about them; I just wanted to see the latest geniuses of New Zealand play “Expert in a Dying Field”
Next was the Violent Femmes, playing their self-titled debut in order. They used to tour a lot and I used to see them a lot, four or five times in college and grad school I think. They never really grow old and Gordon Gano never stops sounding exactly like Gordon Gano. A lot of times I go to reunion shows and there are a lot of young people who must have come to the band through their back catalogue. Not Violent Femmes! 2000 people filling the Sylvee and I’d say 95% were between 50 and 55. One of the most demographically narrowcast shows I’ve ever been to. Maybe beaten out by the time I saw Black Francis at High Noon and not only was everybody exactly my age they were also all men. (Actually, it was interesting to me there were a lot of women at this show! I think of Violent Femmes as a band for the boys.)
But I came in to write about the show I saw this weekend, four Wisconsin acts playing the High Noon. I really came to see Disq, whose single “Daily Routine” I loved when it came out and I still haven’t gotten tired of. Those chords! Sevenths? They’re something:
Dusk was an Appleton band that played funky/stompy/indie, Bug Moment had an energetic frontwoman named Rosenblatt and were one of those bands where no two members looked like they were in the same band. But the real discovery of the night, for me, was Graham Hunt, who has apparently been a Wisconsin scene fixture forever. Never heard of the guy. But wow! Indie power-pop of the highest order. When Hunt’s voice cracks and scrapes the high notes he reminds me a lot of the other great Madison noisy-indie genius named Graham, Graham Smith, aka Kleenex Girl Wonder, who recorded the last great album of the 1990s in his UW-Madison dorm room. Graham Hunt’s new album, Try Not To Laugh, is out this week. ”Emergency Contact” is about as pretty and urgent as this kind of music gets.
And from his last record, If You Knew Would You Believe it, “How Is That Different,” which rhymes blanket, eye slit, left it, and orbit. Love it! Reader, I bought a T-shirt.
Writing exercise: poll report as dialogue
I’m not sure if I mentioned that I’m teaching a first-year undergrad seminar on “Writing and Data,” in some respects patterned after the Writing Scientists’ Workshop I ran last year. With 18-year-olds it’s a little different; for one thing, I find that doing two hour-long workshops in a row gets a little long for them, so I’m doing two 45-minute workshops with an in-class writing exercise in between. Last week’s worked particularly well so I wanted to record what I did. We started with this piece from Pew, “How Many Friends do Americans Have?” Because I want them to think about conveying the same information in different registers, and in particular writing more “conversationally,” I split the group into pairs and asked each pair to write a dialogue which conveyed some of the information from the Pew piece. I gave them 15-20 minutes to do that, then had each pair act out their dialogue. I had been wondering whether to have everyone start from the same source or let people pick; in the end, I was glad we were all working from the same article, because it was instructive to see how many different ways the same information could be deployed in speech, or an imitation of speech. If there’s one thing I’m trying to get across in this class, it’s that writing is much, much more than the factual information it conveys.
Rangers 7, Orioles 1: This was our chance
A lot of people are going to tell you that the Orioles, who won 101 games this year and have by all accounts at least half an above-average major league lineup still in the minors ready to play, are positioned to be a dynastic power in the American League for years to come.
Nope. Wrong. I wish it were so. But this was the year the Orioles needed to win. And they just got dismally swept out of the ALDS by the Rangers. So that’s it.
Yes, all the guys they say are good are good, and are going to stay good. Adley’s good. Gunnar’s good. Grayson’s good. The guys that haven’t even played yet are good.
But this year, both the Yankees and Red Sox were kind of bad, and content to be kind of bad, and didn’t make gigantic talent adds in a bid for the playoffs. That hasn’t been the case for years and it won’t be the case again anytime soon.
This year, almost nobody got injured — we didn’t have John Means for most of the season, and Cedric Mullins missed some time, but basically everybody was healthy and we played at full strength. Next year, we already know Felix Bautista is gone for 2024. And we won’t be as lucky as we were in 2023 with the lineup.
And this year, we had an incredible, unsustainable record in one-run games, and finished 7 wins better than our Pythagorean record.
This is a good team. I like watching them. You could even say that, with an ownership willing to add expensive free agents to fill the holes, it could be a championship team. But we have an ownership that’s ecstatic that the 2023 team lucked into 101 regular season wins, and that will be perfectly happy to enjoy 90-win seasons and trips to the Wild Card game for the next few years, until the unextended players mentioned above peel off into free agency one by one.
It’ll be better than the last five years have been, that’s for sure. But if we wanted to win a World Series, this was our chance.
Underestimating Shakespeare and real numbers
Sam Bankman-Fried, mostly famous for being a high-profile effective altruist and subsequently defrauding lots of investors, had something to say about Shakespeare:
To do certain types (not all types) of EA you have to believe that the utility of an outcome is a real number, though it might be hard to measure, and that your uncertainty about an outcome is captured by a real number between zero and one, and that it makes sense to multiply those two real numbers.
If you get used to thinking this way, you might also become inclined to think that “literary greatness” is a real number. And if you thought literary greatness was a real number, you might find it reasonable to think of it as a random variable about which you could formulate probabilistic claims. And that’s where you get the SBF Shakespeare argument.
Mathematicians know real numbers very well; we know what they’re like and we know most things are not like them. We also often admire Shakespeare, but I think this is coincidental.
Quomodocumque