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Books Lying Open
Soul-Devouring Worry:
Answer of the Day:
Curse of the Day:
Phrase
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Wednesday October 27, 2004 | |||||||||
| Quote
of the Day -- QotD Archives
"Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe." --Albert Einstein | ||||||||||
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For today there are new photo pages, a couple of news items, and then several recent reader emails on various subjects. With the link here from my resurrected D2 column traffic ticked up a bit last week, and also led to a burst of new emailers, many of them with a lot to say. I don't quite know what to do with all of the feedback yet, especially since several of the mails here mentioned the D2 column, and a lot of the D2 mails mentioned my blog. Where to post them? The other issue is that lots of the emails were very long and touched on numerous topics. It seems like a bit of a snub to reply to them with a "thanks for your thoughts." quickie, and a bigger snub to only excerpt and comment on one or two paragraphs out of a 12 paragraph email. On the other hand, isn't a short excerpt is better than none at all? I'll probably quote a bit tidbits and save the rest for an eventual mailbag, but since that section of the site is quite a few months backed up, who knows when I'll get to the October 2004 installment. And if I'll want to quote such long emails when the time comes, since after all, they were writing them to me, not as open letters to every site reader. First up, new site content and then two quick news items, if a post about a new rap video can really be considered "news."
¤ As promised above, there are three new photos pages. All three are in the Vacation Photos section, no matter how much that section title is a misnomer for two of these three new pages.
I've also added various recent photos to the Flux and Malaya photo pages. Why is it that as she looks better and better, I look worse?
¤ The head of the BBC's news operations has spoken out about media failures leading up the Iraqi war, and called out the US media for being gutless Bush sycophants. I mention this since I agree, but mostly because I thought he had a remarkably thoughtful and intelligent quote on the matter: ; but to do so they need accurate information, evidence that has been tested. And if a news organization imbues itself with patriotism, it inhibits itself from asking some of those questions."
¤ A new Eminem video has leaked online of late, and it's been in the news since it's controversial. No, not because he's making fun of Michael Jackson or Moby or some other easy target again. This time his target is even easier, but far larger. The song and video are all about Bush, or why we should vote against him this time, and while I don't think it's very politically persuasive or that Newsweek will soon be offering Mr. Mathers his own bi-weekly political column, the video is well worth seeing. The best link I've found for it is right here, courtesy of some guy's homepage on mac.com. It's certainly not Eminem's best or catchiest tune, and I wouldn't listen to the song on purpose, but I thought the video was great, and not because I agree with its political goals. It's very stark and visually powerful, has a plot, and leads up to a surprise ending. |
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 eader
mail time.
¤ Tuesday night I went out to early dinner and some errands with Malaya, and after we got home and relaxed a bit I vaguely remembered that there was a baseball game on, though I had hopes it would be almost over since as is always the case with baseball, I'm far more interested in the results than the process. So I turned on the TV and flipped channels a bit (I never know what channel anything is on, and despite living here for more than 15 months, I still have no idea what channels the local CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX networks are on since I never turn on the TV for anything but occasional sporting events.) and found the baseball game eventually. It was only the 6th inning at that point, but with Boston up 4-0 and Pedro cruising, it looked like defeat was well in hand for the Cardinals. Sure enough, they lost, and with the third game in the baseball World (North American) Series over, Boston is up 3-0 in the best of 7 series and my early prediction of StL winning in 6 games is not looking real good. Admittedly, I hardly follow baseball at all, and aside from seeing parts of a couple of the games as Boston came back and won the ALCS over the Yankees, I haven't seen any baseball playoffs at all, other than a pitch here and there while channel surfing. Still, a prediction is a prediction, and it looks like Boston's got the title wrapped up since as we all know, no team ever comes back to win a best of 7 series once they're down 3-0. There was a reader mail responding to my initial quick blog comments on the series, and with my predictive powers so aptly-exposed by the first three games, I thought I'd run that mail today. This comes courtesy of James.
I snipped a paragraph where he talked about specific events in the Yankees/Boston series since I wasn't lying when I said I wasn't paying it any attention, and I had no idea who was hitting well in the series, or all year, or whatever. I really don't follow baseball in terms of individual performances. That being said, my impression of Boston and StL was that StL had 3 of the top 5 hitters in the National League this year, or at least I saw numerous articles about their 3 super sluggers. I knew Manny Ramirez was Boston's best hitter (and almost as bad on defense as he is good on offense) but my impression was that 1) Boston gave up a bunch of offense when they traded Garciaparra and someone else for a defensive specialist first baseman who never plays before the 7th inning and some other defensive whiz infielder, and 2) Boston is annually one of the best hitters' parks in the AL, while Busch Stadium in StL is a bit of a pitcher's park. Which means Boston's hitting is inflated compared to StL's, especially since one of Boston's best hitters is their Designated Hitter, while StL has to compare that to the no-doubt miserable hitting stats of their pitchers. So while for the season Boston may have had (taking James' word for it, since I'm not going to go look it up now) better overall hitting stats (as almost every AL team does thanks to the DH) I thought that if we equalized for the park factor and DH vs. Pitcher batting, StL was as good or better. (You must reverse this reasoning when evaluating their pitching, of course; so StL's looked better than it was and Boston's looked worse.) All that semi-logic seems to be pretty much irrelevant in practice though (as is all-too-often the case when it comes to sports and politics) since now that the series is going, StL's real problem in dropping the first 3 games is their dreadful pitching. The first game was 11-9 with tons of walks and horrible pitching on both sides, but then game 2 and 3 Boston had their 2 good pitchers going, and they won both games easily when the StL starters couldn't get outs and Schilling and Martinez could. And when one team has a 3 or 4 or 5 run lead going into the 8th inning thanks to far better pitching, that's pretty much that. In theory StL could start hitting in game 4, get some of the good-but-not-great pitching they had all season, and chew up Boston's lesser pitchers in game 4 and 5. If they got that far Boston would be scared, coming home with only Curt Schilling's woodshop-repaired ankle wobbling between them and a game 7 with the frequently-shaky Pedro Martinez on the mound. Do I think this will happen? Hell no. But given how accurate my pre-series prediction was, my confidence or lack thereof at this point isn't a real significant sign. You'll note that James was as wrong as me (so far) and most every other sports analyst in thinking it would be a close and competitive series. Also, he (and every other Sox fan) says they didn't just want to beat the Yankees, and of course they want to win the title... which is true, but at the same time they have to say that, since admitting that all they really wanted to do was beat the Yankees would make them seem obsessed and pathetic. So let's just agree that beating NY along the way to their first championship in 86 years made it all the sweeter. Lastly, the best part of his email? His coining of "loathable," which isn't actually a word, but really should be. I've always enjoyed the word "loathesome," but adding the "able" suffix to my verbal arsenal can only be a bonus.
¤ Our second mail comes in response to Monday's blog, in which I talked about a new and very detailed survey about what voters know and think about the candidate's positions on various issues. I found it interesting since likely Bush voters thought Bush's position on almost every major foreign policy issue was the opposite of what it actually is. For example, only 13% of Bush supporters knew that Bush opposes labor and environmental standards in trade agreements, while 81% of Kerry supporters knew that he supported them. My take on this is that more than 80% of Americans surveyed for this poll support labor and environmental standards (This isn't a great sample question, since just how you define those "standards" could be quite a lengthy debate., but just play along for now.) and since people tend to project their own hopes and beliefs onto the candidates, more than 80% of people thought their preferred candidate shared their beliefs. So in that way it's more about what people want their candidates to believe rather than about how much people really know of their candidates. After all, 81% of Kerry supporters said he was for it, and 87% of Bush supporters said he was for it. If you look at it that way the whole survey becomes more of a referendum on just how deeply unpopular most of Bush's actual policy positions are, and then you've got to wonder how he's done so well at fooling people and Kerry's done so poorly in exposing Bush's actual opinions. But I digress. Here's what Ryan had to say about the survey and my post on it:
I don't know that we can say what the poll "wants" us to believe. I mean they did their survey, and they got pretty unequivocal results. They just presented their findings; the fact that the numbers make most of us think that Bush supporters have very little idea what their guy actually thinks on issues isn't really PIPA's fault, is it? As for the numbers, 1/70,000 isn't very many... but that jumps to a slightly-less unimpressive 1/35k if you consider the usual 50% voter turn out, and it's actually quite a few for a national survey, depressingly enough. Check out this blog post I saw a link to today. I'm not going to get into the blog post content, which is about how many of the national polls are including more Republicans in their surveys and thus skewing their results towards Bush. Just look at the numbers, and you can see these in every news story about the polls as well; I just chose this blog link since it's an interesting post and collects a lot of numbers.
See the total numbers? They did four national surveys and talked to a total of 4386 people, which breaks down to just 1097 per week, or about 1/3 as many as the PIPA study sampled from. And this is a Gallup Poll, perhaps the best known polling organization, and they're handicapping the president race based on barely 1000 people per survey? I don't know how they carry out their surveys, but I'd imagine it's just a few questions, of which only two really matter: 1) what is your political affiliation, and 2) who are you going to vote for. And they can only get 1100 results a week for that? Compared to the Gallup survey the PIPA one is practically an essay test, with over a dozen questions tracked on their results, and I'd assume they ask lots of others as well to assign people by demographic settings, geographic region. True, 3000 people isn't a hugely-representative sample, but getting 3x as many as Gallup does, and getting them to answer 3 or 4x as many questions either speaks very well of the PIPA survey, or highlights just how lame and lazy the polls tracking candidate preference are.
¤ A mail from JR about a recent book review:
They de-UK'ed the spelling here, and it's "color." If any Pratchett books include the word "humour" you can be sure the US version will drop the "u" as well. This is America, we have no time for extra U's! This reminds me though, of years ago when I was first creating the Dii.net items section, and as I prepared to do the page header graphics for the Armor pages Elly and I engaged in a lengthy debate as to whether we should spell it "armor" or "armour." The issue would never have come up except that it was her website and she is English, where they spell lots of words with an extra "U." I eventually won out on my "armor" spelling since after all, that's how it's spelled in the game; there ain't no UK localized version of D2. I wouldn't have minded "armour" though, just because it has that extra classical/medieval oomph. It also reminds me of the minor controversy when the first Harry Potter book was changed to The Sorcerer's Stone in the US, rather than The Philosopher's Stone as it was called in the UK. There was much tut-tuting about the illiteracy of the US reader, but I never paid the issue any attention at the time since I wasn't reading the books. I have since read them as well as seen the first movie, so I am now entitled to have an opinion. Flux says... good job on the change; it makes the book sound more exciting and mysterious, and also, I have no idea why it was ever called "Philosopher's" at all. In my mental lexicon a philosopher is someone like Socrates or Hegel or Nietzsche ; a guy who thinks and analyzes and comes up with new theories about society and human behavior. There was no one at all like that in Harry Potter 1 and frankly, the book should have been called "The Alchemist's Stone" if you want to be literal about it. I see Sorcerer's or Wizard's as reasonable substitutions though, since you might debate about who the pronoun is referring to: the alchemist who made the stone? Or one of the four sorcerers who seek it: Harry, Dumbledore, Voldemort, or even the Dark Arts teacher as Voldemort's agent? In any case, I didn't read about any alchemists in HP1, so the UK version of the title would have left me confused, unless that word is commonly used as a synonym for "wizard" or "sorcerer" in the British Isles?
¤ And lastly, here's a mail from Caaroid about something else in Monday's blog:
Well, all marriages for other people. Since all of us reading this are very different and much more logical in how we went about picking our partners. Right? As a counter argument, I never really talk about my mom and stepdad, other than mentioning it when they're in town, but they have a lovely marriage. They spend time together every day, they have numerous common interests, they never fight; always talking things out calmly, and they're really quite an inspiration to the rest of us. Of course they're both therapists with decades of work experience dealing with dysfunctional people (the rest of us), they've only been married for about 12 years, and they both had an earlier marriage that ended in divorce. So while they're an older couple, they aren't one of the long time 30 or 40 or 50 year couples that live in the same house while having less actual personal interaction than your average new roommates. Caaroid has a point though; doesn't it seem like far more old couples are basically miserable with each other than are still in love? It's a pretty sad commentary about the human existence, but sadder yet is the fact that virtually all of the people in those old couples would be even less happy if they were divorced or widowed, and doomed to grow old alone. And with that cheery thought, I shall end today's blog. See you Friday, if you don't spend the next hour reading and rereading the last paragraph while the lifeblood slowly drains from your slit wrists. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
have a long list of relatively unimportant real life things to talk
about on the blog, but since it's late and there are several long reader
mails and replies below, and I worked for several hours yesterday to
finish the three new vacation photo pages linked to below, I'm going to
save that conversation for next time.