Minor Obstacles

The Chicago Cubs are in the news early this year.  No, they haven't found a way to get eliminated from the playoffs before the season starts.  It's because of their star rookie, Kris Bryant.  In Spring Training, he's hitting .425, with nine home runs in 40 at bats (non-fan's translation: really really good.) 

But this being the Cubs, it can't be that simple.  You'd think that such a strong performance would get him a starting job, but instead, they're going to send him to the minors, at least for now.  Although everyone associated with the team is saying that starting the season in the minors is the best thing for his development, no one really believes that.  The more likely reason for Bryant's demotion is due to the arcane rules governing baseball contracts.  Baseball players spend the first few years of their careers with the team that drafted them. And, if Bryant spends at least the first twelve days of the season in the minor leagues, then this year won't technically count as his first year in the majors, and he'll have to spend an extra year with the Cubs before he gets the opportunity to sign with another team.

So now baseball journalists are having conniptions over this. They're being deprived of seeing one of the most exciting young players (for two weeks) and worried that a team that typically needs all the help it can get will be deprived of a potential star.  And the integrity of the game and all that.

I admit, the situation is pretty stupid.  But I also don't get why everyone is getting so angry over this particular situation.  To understand better, let's look forward over Bryant's career:

• He spends several productive years with the Cubs
• In his final year before free-agency, he spends the first half of the year trying to concentrate on the game while his agent attempts to negotiate a new contract, and the second half with the Cubs shopping him around to contending teams.  He eventually gets traded for a prospect no one ever hears from again, and plays out the season for a team that gets eliminated in the first round.
• He signs a massive contract with the Yankees or Dodgers.
• He plays the next several years putting up big numbers for a team that chokes in the playoffs every year.  Eventually they win the World Series, he acts like it was the culmination of a long personal journey, while everyone else finds it kind of underwhelming.
• The Yankees/Dodgers decide they can't afford to resign him, and he spends the downside of his career playing a year or two here and there for second-tier teams that are making a half-hearted attempt to spend with the big boys.
• He gets named to the Hall of Fame, and the question of which team's cap he's wearing on his plaque becomes a challenging trivia question.

Out of all that, is two weeks in the minors to take advantage of a technicality really the strangest thing, or the thing that damages the game the most?  In our modern world of obscene contracts and revolving-door rosters, the integrity-of-the-game ship sailed a long time ago.

Driving Into The Light

Opel, the German car company, is working on a new feature where a car's headlights will point wherever the driver is looking.  That is, a small camera in the interior tracks the driver's eyes, and then turns the headlights to point in the same direction, lighting whatever the driver is looking at.  Is it just me, or is that an awful lot of work for little benefit?

I am, of course, trying not to be one of those people who thinks that everything in the world was just perfect at the time of his birth, and anything new is unnecessary.  "If headlights that pointed forward were good enough for my parents and grandparents, then they're good enough for anyone."  But still, I think there's a threshold before innovations become worth it.

I first started thinking about it when appliance makers started promoting the idea of the Internet-connected refrigerator. That's a concept that is still waiting to take off, even though it was proposed years ago, so I think we can safely say that it was an idea we weren't ready for.

I figured that you can understand it better if you look at another technology attached to fridges: the light inside. I don't know when they first started putting lights inside fridges, but you can bet that when they did, someone questioned its necessity.  And you can understand why: there was (I'm assuming) a time when a lightbulb in a refrigerator would have been prohibitively expensive, however convenient it is. But today, such a feature probably adds an insignificant amount to the price of the appliance, so why not?

At the time they first added Internet connectivity to fridges, it was still a pretty expensive compared to the price of the rest of the fridge.  Today, you could slap the electronic guts of a tablet on a refrigerator door without adding a lot to the price, so maybe it's ready to become an optional feature, but it's still not at the point of being as ubiquitous as the light.

But eye-following headlights?  If we get to the point where cars are so full of electronics that there's a camera on the driver's face anyway, and lots of computing power to recognize the driver's gaze anyway, then you're at fridge light level, and you might as well aim the lights where the driver is looking.  But for now, it's just something they can put on luxury cars so that people will feel like their high price tag is money well-spent.

Archived Files

They announced this week that they're bringing back The X-Files.  At first, that seems like typical risk aversion of the entertainment industry: why take a chance on a new idea, when you can recycle an old idea. That might be what inspired it, but I think it could work.  I watched the show for a while, but then drifted away when it seemed like the writers were just layering on layer of conspiracies on top of another just for the sake of filling episodes.  Since this revival is for a limited time (and creator Chris Carter has had a decade to think about it) it should have a well-thought-out plot.

And it's further evidence of the Britishization of American television.  On the other side of the pond, TV seasons are shorter and made at irregular intervals.  That way there are fewer filler episodes and less of the out-of-ideas shows blundering along looking for inspiration.  And actors aren't committed to doing only that show and no other projects for years on end. 

Between the specialty channels and on-demand services, the audience has come to accept more free-form television formats.  The original X-Files could have benefited from it, hopefully this new incarnation will succeed because of it. 

I Didn't Need To Read The News Today, Oh Boy

I've always hated it when headlines tell you obvious things. To me, news is defined as being surprising. So a headline like "Obama Does X, Republicans Furious" is not news. But you could argue that such headlines contain some information, even if it's just that things are proceeding normally. "Sun To Come Up Tomorrow" at least confirms that the earth is continuing to spin on its axis.

But then there are the headlines that literally contain no information. There's a great weird I learned in mathematics for this: tautological. It means something that is obviously true, like 1=1. But you see it outside of math too. For instance, you might see a headline like, "X Happens, Critics Sceptical." That doesn't tell you anything, because a critic is someone who is sceptical. It's like saying "Pedestrians Walk."

But now there's a new class of useless headlines, and I'm not sure what to call them. If that first class is "things that we already know," and the second is "things that have to be true," then the third class is "things you didn't already know, or even consider, but that you immediately understood the moment you read about it." My first example of this last type of headline is, "Why You Shouldn’t Watch Porn In The Same Room As Your Parrot."  Which you can learn about here if you really need any more explanation.

Reading The Lettuce Leaves

Today, I bought lettuce. The selection was pretty poor, with only a few, wilted heads available. I'm assuming that's a product of the ongoing drought in California. I’m not sure how many people are aware of how much we rely on California for food. We think of it as being all about the entertainment and technology industries, and other than that, it’s all surfing, earthquakes, and mountains. But they also produce half of America’s fruits and vegetables. That makes me wonder: what is the rest of the U.S. doing? If California provides food and ideas, and China makes stuff, what are the other 49 states spending their time on?

But back to dry, dry California. It’s slowly dawning on people that there isn’t going to be an easy solution anytime soon, so they’re going to have to think about where they can cut water use. And a lot of people are looking at agriculture. It uses most of California’s water.

The Economist, for instance, demonizes farmers for taking so much water for something that makes up such a small part of the state’s economy. That sounds good, as long as you don’t remember that it’s providing half the country’s fruits and vegetables, so perhaps that is worth forcing someone in Anaheim to water the lawn every-other week.

We allocate resources in our society with a mixture of capitalism and government policy, and the result often doesn’t make that much sense. In this case, it seems to be the worst of both worlds: water use doesn’t make sense according to cold economic equations, and it’s not exactly environmentally conscious either. This is one of those cases where it becomes hard to tell the political sides apart. Conservatives would point out that deregulating water prices would lead to more efficient use, because water would be too expensive for water-intensive uses. And that would probably lead to reduced water use, and benefit the environment, which liberals would like. But it would also price the poor out the market, which they wouldn’t like. And once that Anaheim suburbanite can’t water the lawn, conservatives will sour on the idea too. So this is one of those frustrating issues where we can’t use a knee-jerk solution, and will actually have to think about it.

Back To The Future

In the past I've speculated that the internet is so big that it has moved on from everything being on the internet somewhere, to putting every combination of things on the net, starting with geeky things. That had been further confirmed today: superheroes combined with the stars of British post-punk? check. 

(That was pretty funny, but they should have included "The Uncanny XTC-Men.")

I made the mistake of glancing at the comments, the first of which speculated that the 80's musicians featured would be before-the-time of most of the site's readers. Subsequent comments didn't come right out and say, "shut up you humourless troll," but their praise of the content seemed to imply it.

That stuck in my mind because later in the day I heard the song "Lifted Up" by Passion Pit on the radio, which has the corus, “1985 was a good year.” That’s odd, since their singer-songwriter Michael Angelakos was born in 1987.  So what's with young people hanging out with their parents' decade?

I noticed a long time ago that there's a kind of constantly moving window of nostalgia. When I first became conscious of popular culture in the 1980's, nostalgia pretty much meant the birth of rock and roll through to the end of the 60's. As time went on, the seventies were added, and then the fifties were quietly dropped. That always seemed sad; it's bad enough when your favourite music slips out of style, but it has to be much worse to know it will never be back.  So I've been kind of dreading the day when I will take my place along side the Chuck Berry fans on the Island of Unwanted Culture.

With all that in mind I have to ask: is out just me, or are the eighties hanging around longer than expected? Although the generational troll in the comments I mentioned earlier has a point about today's young people not being familiar with eighties musicians, the counter-argument is that demographics be damned, people just keep revisiting that decade.  I mean, two different Ghostbusters reboots?

You wouldn't think the eighties would be the decade that keeps going and going.  The people who have the closest connection to it are Generation X, who are fewer in number.  Maybe it's just a fun decade; you can image how much trouble the Internet is going to have doing a mash-up of Lord of the Rings characters and Grunge stars.  Maybe it's how easy it is to consume media today.  For instance, I as a child didn't really have a chance to view movies from thirty-years earlier even if I had the inclination to do so.  But the various incarnations of home video has ensured that - starting in the eighties - people can revisit past movies.  Whatever the reason, I won't be questioning the decade's longevity, since it keeps me from feeling too old.

Locked Out

I was going to use this door...

...but I can't use the push bar, since it's locked.

So was there something it was locked to?  Sometimes you see a bike lock around a tree or lamppost with no bike in sight.  I always take note not to buy that type of lock.

It's Pat

It's St. Patrick's Day Eve.  Excited?  Me neither.  This year, I'm getting the impression that no one is really enjoying it. It's always been kind of a difficult sell: it's a holiday focused on heavy drinking and stereotypes.  So it's great for drinkers (who get an excuse to drink) and children (who have a nice easy topic for the day's colouring assignments.)

For anyone else, there's not a lot.  You wear green, and either drink enough to regret it, or avoid the people who are drinking.  Actual Irish people are uncomfortable with the caricaturing.  And this year, I even found people online getting riled up over abbreviating it as "St. Patty's Day" rather than the apparently correct "St. Paddy's Day."  You'll notice that the tag I've been using on St. Patrick’s-related articles uses the former.  Whoops, sorry I disrespected the religious figure we honour by wearing silly hats and drinking to unconsciousness.

So we need a new way of celebrating St. Patrick's Day.  I'm not sure what that could be.  Perhaps emphasize Celtic music? Play up the snake-charming angle?  Competitions to read Ulysses in twenty-four hours?

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #22

You know the girl with that song, "Too Hot To Hold" that MuchMusic plays to satisfy Canadian Content regulations?  Well one day she'll be inducted into the Canadian Music Hall Of Fame.  Okay, we are talking about the Canadian music industry and its awards, so you might believe that.  But she'll actually deserve it. 

Red Red Wine

Rumour has it that once again, the Ontario government may open up sales of alcoholic beverages to supermarkets. You'd think this would be a fairly popular thing outside of the remnants of Canada's temperance movement. But there's actually a lot of criticism: it'll be harder to get alcohol in smaller places, they'll concentrate on main brands, rather than the wide range you get on dedicated wine and beer stores.

Those aren't necessarily bad arguments. But they are arguments that can be made about virtually any product. For example, if we mandated that crackers had to be sold in government -approved stores instead of supermarkets, they'd have a nice selection of imported and craft crackers, and small towns would be assured of basic service from their local C.C.B.O. (Cracker Control Board of Ontario) store. There'd be negatives of course: it would be inconvenient buying your soup and crackers at different stores. And if you don't like the service, you're out of luck.

The fact is, we in Canada have made the general principle that goods and services should be provided by private businesses unless there's a compelling reason for the government to do it. I don't have a problem with re-examining that philosophy: if you think we'd be better off with the government providing all or most services, put that argument forward.

But the fact is that isn't a very popular point of view. So it's frustrating to see this more-or-less decided point re-opened and re-argued. Given how economically conservative our society has become, there shouldn't be this much opposition to deregulating alcohol sales. Or conversely, given how much opposition there is to deregulating alcohol sales, other conservative economic initiatives shouldn't get the wide support they do.

Either way, it seems a lot of us have difficulty recognizing patterns or thinking in the abstract. We have to learn to think through the consequences of of our guiding principles, and use those principles to guide our decisions so that we don't start from scratch in reasoning out every question.

Identifying The Stigma

The British (but widely-exported) TV show Top Gear has been in the news this week. Host Jeremy Clarkson has been suspended after his latest incident of bad behaviour.  That's been followed by an on-line campaign from fans to have him returned.  Clarkson appears to be following the same cycle of public offence and forgiveness as Don Cherry and Rush Limbaugh.  Each is fuelled by a fan following in their respective countries that loves their idol more than they're willing to admit, and a public that has a short memory.

It's reminded me that I've been meaning to revive my lapsed attempt at a regular feature, Things I Should Like, But Don't, examining things that seem to be right down my pop-cultural avenue, but that I somehow don't appreciate.

I Should Like:
Top Gear 
 
Why should I like it?
Cars, sarcasm, British humour: there haven't been three things I like this much in one TV show since Sex, Toys, and Chocolate. (Which I didn't like either.)

Why don't I like it?
The problem is that Clarkson and friends don't understand the Jon Stewart Principal of Televised Snark:

• If you're going to be very critical of people and things, you'd better back it up with evidence.
• Being widely critical is easier to take if it's served up with a big dose of self-deprication. 

Dry British sarcastic humour rides a knife edge: when combined with a righteous cause, it can be highly cathartic. But when applied arbitrarily, it comes off as sadistic. And that's my problem with Top Gear. Rather than being interesting or informative, it just seems like three guys being jerks because they can. What could be a fun skewering of the absurdities of modern cars devolves into Simon Cowell Goes Driving.

XX: The Unknown

Yesterday was International Women's Day.  It doesn't get a lot of publicity, but there seemed to be quite a few people and organizations making note of it.  As someone interested in science and technology, a lot of my chosen media streams focussed on women's contributions to those fields.  That's good, since those are often overlooked.

And generally, they did a good job getting publicity to women in science.  By that, I mean that we're slowly discovering that there are women in science other than Marie Curie.  I was also glad that Hedy Lamarr's contribution to communication technology was portrayed more accurately.  In recent years, I've seen some people describe it as her inventing Wi-Fi in the 1940's.

But I have to take issue with the treatment of computer scientist Grace Hopper.  Everyone focuses on her finding a moth in an early computer, leading to the terms, "bug" and "debugging."  Yeah, that's nice and everything, but she also invented the compiler!  Yes, I know hardly any non-programmers know what that means, but it doesn't change the fact that it's really important, and worth mentioning ahead of some cute anecdote.  After all, we all know that Einstein came up with the Theory of Relativity, and endlessly quote E=mc², even though hardly anyone one knows what it means.

Other than that, nice work.  Maybe next year we can practice saying "Crick and Watson and Franklin."

Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

You probably saw that sorry this week about three plane that skidded off the runway while attempting a landing at LaGuardia airport in New York. Wow, it's scary to think how close that was to a massive tragedy. Just think, if that plane had landed properly, those passengers would have had to go through LaGuardia.

Alright, I have to confess: I’ve never been to LaGuardia. But I know of its reputation thanks to endless jokes, mostly from late-night monologues. I mentioned something like this a while back, especially about French jokes that everyone gets but many probably don’t know why. In this case, the joke came about because of the concentration of media New York. So now people all over America know the reputation of this airport that most of them have never been to.

Usually a joke - however silly - has its roots in real life. So what is the point of making a joke that is based on qualities you know nothing about? Is it still a joke if it’s based on things you know only from hearing other jokes. I mean, would it be funny if I made a joke about how people from Abilestan always have bad hairstyles? What if the only thing you know about Abilestan is that the people there have bad hairstyles, and the only way you know this is that I’ve just told you?

It’s sort of like when a sitcom character becomes the butt of jokes. Usually humour at the expense of a fictional character are funny because those characters remind us of people we know. But sometimes the character is its own joke; I think Kramer from Seinfeld would be an example. Of course, there’s a joke to be made here about matching New York’s other airport’s with Seinfeld characters, but I’ll have to wait for monologues to teach me more about their personalities.

Rediskovery

Every time I get a new computer, I go through that ritual of copying files from the old computer to the new one.  That means all the software I use, as well as documents, pictures, music, information, and unfinished projects. 

Everyone does this, but it's worse for me.  I've always been a pack rat in real life, and that trait has transferred to the virtual world too. I'm forever shifting around a snowballing load of data from one hard drive to another.  This process originally had to be done by floppies and the magic of PKZip.  Then it was a pile of CD-ROMs. I still have a drawer of them, both purchased disks of applications, and the disks I'd burned of my own data.

With my most recent new computer, I had to go through the process again.  And since I also have to install Linux, there's even more work to do.  It took a while, but I got my personal files transferred, and all the applications I regularly use installed.  That night, as I was putting the computer (a laptop) away, I picked it up and felt the CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever tray give a little under my hand, and it only then occurred to me: hey, this computer has a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever drive.  I mean, yes I did know that; I had taken notice that it had one before buying it.  But here I had done all that installing and copying without using the drive.  The software was mostly downloaded, and my files were copied with either thumbdrives or back-up hard drives (or in some cases, cloud storage.)

In fact, it was only today that I finally opened the tray and used the drive. This was to go looking for fonts from old CD's of graphics and word processing programs.  Wow, when did CD's get so big?  And jewel cases are so thick and heavy.  You can't fit that in your pocket, how are you supposed to carry it around?

It's All Hindi To Me

Sometimes learning requires effort.  Of course, that's how our schooling works.  But as adults, we realize that some learning works best without pressure.  It's better to allow learning to be more organic.  For instance, they say the best way to learn a language is not to take lessons, but to go to a place where the language is spoken, and immersing yourself in it.  Of course, that requires a fair amount of effort, but the point is that you're not being "taught" the language; instead you're absorbing it from around you.

So I've always wondered how long it would take to learn a language spoken around you if you weren't really trying.  It's not quite the same thing, but at the University of Waterloo, you overhear conversations in other languages frequently throughout the day.  I was disappointed that I didn't subconsciously pick up any knowledge.  I'd like to think that if humanity conquers all disease and greatly extends lifespans, that accidental learning will just be a part of life.  You'll be in your second century of university, picking up degree number fifty, when you suddenly realize you can speak Mandarin.

I'm trying this on much smaller scale, by watching coverage of the Cricket World Cup.  I'm hoping that just casual viewing will permit me to eventually understand what is going on.  I'm not totally clueless on the sport; I understand mainly what is going on.  But I'd like to understand something of the strategy, not to mention understanding the stats.  Most sports have, you know, a score.  But with one team batting at a time, they rarely give you any idea how the teams are doing.  I'm pretty sure this "run rate" thing can be used figure that out.  But I still don't know what is high or low in that field.  It would be nice if the commentators would throw us a bone now and then.  You know, "blah blah blah blah blah... and that's good."

It's Gotta Be Da Symbol

I remember when the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies entered the NBA and choose their names, they were congratulated by marketing experts. The reasoning was that by choosing animal names, they could easily create a nice recognizable logo that could be put on all kinds of products. Remember, this was the mid-nineties, when Michael Jordan was at the height of his fame, and every teenage boy on earth had at least one item of clothing with the Chicago Bulls logo on it. These marketing experts believed that the Bulls' marketability was due to their colourful, recognizable, easily reproducible logo.

That was the point I realized that most of the self-appointed experts commenting on things in the media are idiots. Really, they expected us to believe that the ubiquity of that symbol was due to the bull himself, with no credit apparently going to that Jordan guy, or the Nike marketing machine.

...and upside-down, it looks like an angry robot reading a book

But there is something to be said for a symbol's ability to, you know, symbolize. I mean, I'm sure the 90's Bulls could have used the poop emoji as a logo and still would have sold a billion shirts and hats, but that's assuming it's a recognizable poop emoji. If a team has a plain, forgettable logo, its hard to convey their fame and adoration into merchandise sales. As an example, the New York football Giants and San Francisco baseball Giants have both won multiple championships in recent years, but their lack of real logos have prevented them from becoming popular on clothing.

This all came to mind recently because the Raptors - in their latest attempt to turn the page on their sorry franchise history - have adopted a new logo, and it's a basketball with the seams shredded, presumably by a Raptor's claws. So rather than show the raptor, it shows indirect evidence of the raptor's presence. It's clever. Not quite Hartford-Whalers-negative-space-H clever, but pretty clever. But the point is, the logo doesn't have a raptor, the distinctive aspect of the team. Those marketing experts from twenty-years ago would be horrified.

I'm not really sold on it either. It's nice and simple and reasonably attractive, but not real distinctive. As many fans have been pointing out, it looks quite reminiscent the symbol of the Brooklyn Nets, who are not only a hated rival, but also one of the ultimate how-the-hell-do-we-get-a-logo-out-of-this nicknames.

I've found a number of fan-made logo proposals on the net from the last few years. Some are amateur, some urge new nicknames altogether (especially reviving the "Huskies" name.) But some are actually pretty good. Good enough that I'd choose them over the new logo.