fling93 loves fishies

The difference between Baker and Alou

I wrote this the day after the San Francisco Giants lost to the Florida Marlins in the 2003 NLDS, and, in case you thought the whole "Alou communication" issue was manufactured by the media, I posted an earlier version of this on the SF Giants forum on October 4th, long before the players like Schmidt, Snow, and Cruz complained to the media about Alou's communication skills. When they did, I considered it confirmation of my theory. Here's my updated version:

The Giants lost a golden chance. But it won't be the last chance they get, especially if they can learn from this. The last thing I want the team to do is to take the wrong lesson and get rid of guys like Nathan and Snow and Cruz. Because what went wrong is a little more complicated than that.

Now, Felipe Alou and Dusty Baker are both very good managers with different strengths and weaknesses. At the risk of oversimplifying, Felipe is better at game-time strategies, and Dusty is better at getting the most out of his players. I don't know of a single manager out there who is as good as Felipe at his strength while also as good as Dusty at his. Maybe Joe Torre, but he's had much better options to work with (and didn't fare so well when he didn't), and doesn't need to do much game-time strategizing in the AL, so that's not a fair comparison. But the difficulty in managing is in making decisions to balance these two things, because sometimes they conflict.

Whom to Blame for the Recession?

Now that the economy appears to be on the right track again, I’d like to revisit what I think was the cause of the 2001 recession. I run across too many people who take a partisan stance and blame it on Dubya or blame it on Clinton. Really, the President doesn’t have as much power over the economy as most people think. While I’m no expert, I think the real answer is pretty simple.

Basically, this recession was caused by overproduction. Companies built too much stuff and ended up with too much inventory. When they finally realized this, they cut down production tremendously, laying off people, and cutting down their capital expenditures (CapEx) to buy equipment and parts from other companies, which had a ripple effect to those companies who also had to cut production. This is why you’ll hear some people refer to this as a CapEx recession (and I’d guess that many of them don’t actually know what that means, but just heard it somewhere and want to sound smart). Lack of consumer spending wasn’t really the cause. Corporate spending was.

PoMoSexuality

Last night, I attended a talk by Carol Queen, a cultural sexologist. The topic was a book she was the editor of, PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality. PoMo meaning, of course, postmodern. It’s a collection of essays that challenge the notion that homosexual, heterosexual, and even bisexual are adequate labels to describe the wide spectrum of human sexuality. In addition, such labels make the implicit and inaccurate assumption that one’s sexual identity cannot change over time.

Life Is But a Game?

This is just a random philosophical musing I had about life and games.

Determinism

In the movie Waking Life (and if you’ve seen it, here’s an excellent breakdown and analysis of the film), one character muses about whether life (or existence, or the universe, or what have you) is deterministic or not. Deterministic meaning that given a starting state, the rules dictate that the system will always go through the exact same states every time, ending (if there is an end) in the exact same spot. For example, the rule of gravity. Ignoring unusual circumstances, if you hold an object in the air and let it go, it will always fall and hit the ground, and (assuming air resistance and other variables remain constant) it will always take the same amount of time and strike the ground at the same speed (determinism is generally a nice thing to have in software design, as bugs are much more easy to fix if you can reliably duplicate them and if you can trace back cause and effect in a linear fashion).

Anyway, this brought to my mind the Game of Life designed by John Conway. No, not that old board game with the spinning wheel and cars and the colored pegs. You have a board made up of squares. Some of which are white. Some of which are black. Every turn, a square neighboring exactly three white squares turns (or stays) white (kinda like giving birth). Every square with more than 3 (overcrowding) or less than 3 (exposure) white neighbors turns (or stays) black. And this cycle just continuous indefinitely. Some starting patterns will die out and become permanently black. Others generate patterns that seem to change endlessly (indeed, I believe there’s an X-Windows screensaver based on the game). I imagine it’s called the “Game of Life” because the patterns behave like crude life-forms, but other parallels occurred to me later, which I’ll discuss at the end.

Why Parents Aren't Opposing the "Drug War"

Samizdata links a story about another instance of the Drug War going too far. From the original CBSNews article:

Gun-toting police burst into a South Carolina high school, ordering students to lie down in hall ways as they searched for drugs. The commando-style raid has parents questioning the wisdom of police tactics. The raid occurred Wednesday at Stratford High School in Goose Creek, S.C. Surveillance video obtained by CBS Affiliate WCSC in Charleston shows the police waving their guns and searching lockers as students lie flat on their stomachs or sides.

Many comments express surprise that the parents haven't thrown a fit over the civil liberties of their children being violated. I'm not surprised. I bet the parents fear their kids getting into drugs more than they fear the power of the state.

Political Compass

As most of you on the blogosphere already know, Tim Lambert has gathered a chart of where all the bloggers line up on the Political Compass, which measures where you are on a two-dimensional scale from Liberal to Conservative economically, and also on a scale from Authoritarian to Libertarian.

My results:

Economic Left/Right: 2.12
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.90

Putting me slightly to the right of center, but quite Libertarian. However, I sometimes drift closer to the middle economically (I once tested as slightly liberal at -.38).

Review of Nickel & Dimed

I generally don't go to the theatre much, and when I do, mostly just for mainstream musicals, like Rent or Les Miz, or an occasional Shakespeare in the Park. So last weekend we saw Nickel and Dimed at the Brava Theatre Center in San Francisco (extended through November 22nd). It's a Joan Holden's stage adaptation of Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Nickel and Dimed: (On) Not Getting by in America, which covers Barbara getting into the shoes of America's working poor to see how she would fare.

2003 NL Manager of the Year: McKeon

Well, the 2003 Manager of the Year awards were announced today, and Jack McKeon won in the NL (Tony Pena in the AL). He was followed by Dusty Baker, Bobby Cox, and finally Felipe Alou. I know many Giants fans may feel shocked and/or disappointed by Alou in fourth place. Personally, this was pretty much in line with what I expected, and indeed, I think it's pretty fair.

Calpundit on the Steel Tariffs

I’m in the process of setting up the new server, so in the meantime, in case you haven’t seen these already, Kevin Drum has some insightful observations here and here on the WTO’s retaliation over those steel tariffs Bush passed in March, as well as on Bush’s likely response.

Update 12/04/03

Bush caved in, thank goodness. Of course, he’s claiming he didn’t.

My Wife's in the Paper!/PBA Ban

My wife was in the paper yesterday, featured prominently in a column in the San Jose Mercury News by Sue Hutchison (on the Web for a limited time -- probably a couple of months). It describes how my wife, Erika Jackson, is preparing the San Jose State chapter of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance (FMLA) to spread the word about the growing threat to abortion rights, particularly President Bush's recent signing of the partial-birth abortion (PBA) ban. My wife's very active on campus (particularly for women's issues), so she's mentioned in the school paper quite a bit, but this was the first time she's appeared in a "real" paper, so she's quite excited, and I'm very proud of her.

New Server is Up

If you're reading this, then the new server is up (yay!). Welcome! I've tried to keep the look and feel pretty similar, with most of the enhancements in the archiving. Let me know what you think (especially if it looks wrong in your browser -- I've only tested it on Opera 6 and IE 5 and 6). Still minor work left to be done, but I think it's time I get away from the tinkering and back to the writing...

Embarrassing Problems in Touch-Screen Voting

The more I hear about the touch-screen voting system from Diebold Election Systems, the less I like it. Yes, I used the system myself in the local elections on November 4th, and purely from a user-interface standpoint, I did find it a vast improvement over the old punch-card ballots. However, I noticed a few disturbing problems, which I'll get to later.

Analysis of Matrix Revolutions (Spoilers!)

Warning! Spoilers for The Matrix Revolutions below! If you haven’t seen the film, I do also have a non-spoiler review, but do not continue reading this article unless you’ve already seen the film or don’t care if you have it spoiled for you!

Last chance!

Okay, you can’t say I didn’t warn you…

Review: The Matrix Revolutions

Saw The Matrix Revolutions twice in the past week (although I only watched Reloaded once). I’ll start with a non-spoiler review here, and in a separate post I’ll go into a deeper analysis of what I think it all meant. Basically, it’s better than Reloaded (definitely much better paced) while not nearly as good as the first one. That’s pretty much what everybody else says. All-in-all, a pretty wild ride (albeit with several cliches and some degree of predictability). The ending, however, was initially disappointing and unsatisfying, but I got a deeper appreciation of it and the film and the trilogy upon further reflection. But let me start with the surface stuff.

Cirque du Soleil: "Alegria" and HIV Policy

My wife and I went to see Cirque du Soleil’s “Alegria” today (yes, it’s “Alegria”, not “Allegria”), up in San Francisco near Pac Bell Park. Got first dibs at tix as one of those perks of being a SF Giants season ticketholder (of course, the perk that really mattered to us were the playoff games, and unfortunately there were only two of those this year — call us spoiled for being disappointed with that). It’s the third Cirque du Soleil I’ve seen. I caught “Dralion” when it hit San Jose on its tour several years ago, and then “O” twice in Vegas (my wife has also seen “Mystere”).

My Hair Is Blue!

Well, not all of it, just in patches and chunks. And given that the rest of my hair is black, it's actually not immediately obvious unless the lighting's really good. And yes, it's on purpose.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, fishies are so cute, the way they swim around... if only they were furry so you could pet them, like kitty cats, but then the kitty fish couldn't roam around your place unless you filled it with water, which is so damn inconvenient, so what we really need are anti-gravity kitties with fins... Ooops, that's what I'm thinking... err... I mean that's what somebody else (who's really weird) is thinking. You're probably thinking, so, what the heck is a 30-something Asian guy doing with blue hair?

Break for the Holidays

I'm flying down to Southern California tomorrow morning to visit my folks for Thanksgiving. I don't have a laptop yet, so I might not update this site very much for the next week, and even if I do, it'll probably be pretty useless stuff, like, "Mmmmmmmm! Yummy food!" Come to think of it, that'd probably be more interesting than the stuff I usually post.

Anyway, take care and have a Happy Thanksgiving! I'll be back on Monday.

Mmmmmmmm! Yummy food!

Mmmmmmmm! Yummy food!