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.