Arguably the Happiest Day of the Year

Yes, it's that most magical of days: Opening Day. Baseball begins again in earnest. The games count. The weather (here) is awesome, all is right with the world.

One of my colleagues pointed me to a good blog post from NPR about the feuding "schools" of baseball fans:

In short, there is, at this point in history, an entirely unnecessary conflict between people who supposedly appreciate the art/ballet/magic/wizardry/magic-8-ball qualities of baseball and people who supposedly only like the boring/nerdy/soulless/drained-of-life qualities of baseball.

 I think that sums it up nicely, and unsurprisingly, I find myself with at least one foot planted firmly in each camp. There is (and ought to be) more than one way to appreciate and enjoy anything, including baseball. I love being able to crunch numbers (or ponder the numbers others have crunched) to try to understand the game a bit more. But I also love to sit out on a sunny day with an adult beverage, an unhealthy meal, and a child's wonder to watch players do things I could only ever dream of.

I'm sure the same is true of opera (maybe without hot dogs and nachos, but still) and many other endeavors. There is technical appreciation and aesthetic joy, and sometimes a blend of the two. I doubt there are enough fans of either sort (for either baseball or opera) to sustain the enterprise. These exhibitions have to appeal to a broad base of patrons to exist. And that's a good thing.

The NPR piece refers to the (sadly, defunct) blog Fire Joe Morgan, which I used to read all the time (and I still link to it over on the right!). I read it because it was interesting. I read it because it was funny. And I read it because it helped me to develop my own understanding and appreciation of baseball. I laughed. I kept reading. Much like I keep going to baseball games and talking with all sorts of different fans. It's fun. I like it.

I realize I haven't gotten around to writing about my trip to Spring Training this year. It was great. I will have to do that. Not only did I get to see my favorite team several times, I also got to see ballgames just for the fun of it, games I had no real rooting interest in. And it was joyous.

So today, we get to say it for real: "Play ball!"

Oh, and we get to say, for at least the next six months or so, "Ladies and gentlemen, the 2010 World Series Champions, your San Francisco Giants!" Can't get enough of that.

Yet Another New Firefox

I upgraded my browser yesterday to Firefox 4, and I have to say that in general I'm quite pleased with it. New features, fast, etc.

As with the Firefox 3.5 upgrade a couple of years ago, Mozilla has a cool page to monitor the downloads worldwide, and once again, it is powered under the covers by my company, SQLstream.

In case you feel like learning how we do our part of the magic, one of my coworkers has written a very good explanation of how it works. Yay!

Words Fail Me

Six months. Really.

It has come to my attention, via some of my throng of loyal followers, that I haven't posted anything for six months. Is it possible that I have seen nothing interesting that I wanted to share? That I've done nothing and been nowhere and simply have nothing to say?

As I look back at the limited posting I did last year, it's clear to me that I was not in a good place, posting-wise. Truly, 2010 was a pretty awful year for me. Indeed, had it not been for my San Francisco Giants winning the World Series (I managed to not blog about that...amazing!), I would happily wipe the whole year from my memory.

I meant to write about things, really. But I didn't.

So what happened? Lots. Most of which you don't want to hear about, and I don't care to write about (school turmoil, home remodeling, busy at work, child-care fun). You know...life. No big deal. But what really sucked the words out of me was this: my mom died. Indeed, I was managing to maintain my meager blogging efforts for the year right up to the point that Mom died. And then, nothing. My last blog post was on August 6th. Mom passed away on August 22nd, and then...nothing.

Sure, there was a lot going on: planning and executing memorial services, clearing the apartment, tidying up financial matters. That takes some time. But surely I could eke out a few moments to write something. Couldn't I?

Apparently not.

So when someone pointed out that it's been six months, and I really should write something, I spent some time pondering just why I have not been writing. I've decided to pin it on my mother. I don't blame her, but she's responsible.

You see, whatever I am as a writer I can pretty much attribute to my mother. She was a teacher, primarily of English, and particularly of writing. She instilled and nurtured in me a love of stories, of books, of libraries, of language. For a time I even worked as a writer and editor, pretty much entirely because she gave me the idea.

So I suppose it's ironic that she probably never read my blog, and probably wasn't even aware that I was writing one. I'm not even clear that she knew what a blog is. But no matter. What's sneaked into my consciousness is that at some level, I associate writing with my mother, much as I associate my day job (programming) with my dad. My parents represent very well the yin and yang of my existence, and I think losing Mom caused me to lose touch with that aspect of myself for a bit. At some level, even though she wasn't reading my writing, it appears I was writing for her, and without her there, I just didn't write.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is something else I'm missing. I suppose I'll figure that out. In any case, it's kind of nice to be writing again.

Thanks for the push. I hope I find something worthwhile to write about. I know I will have some words about Mom and Parkinson's Disease (oh, boy...you thought I went on about cancer!). But that's later. Right now, it's just worth it to break the ice, let you know I still exist, and get one post under my belt. More will follow.

We are All So Doomed

I guess I need to stop looking at the web. It's depressing enough to read stuff like Glenn Greenwald's description of what collapsing empires look like (here's a hint...look in the mirror). Cutting basic services in the name of austerity while spending profligately on foreign wars of choice, for example. Coddling the wealthy while making life harder for the common people.

But then I notice a link on the side of that piece that takes me to a very brief one:

What we see is at once hilarious, sad and perhaps deeply worrying. Do I need to explain? This is the state of airport security in the United States of America, and we, as American citizens, have allowed this to happen. Not only have we become willingly subjugated cowards, we've clearly lost our minds.

 *sigh*

Bloggers from History

I keep wanting to post stuff, but time gets in the way. Well, work and time.

Anyway, now and then I get inspired. I liked this line from PZ Myers:

Mark Twain would have been an awesome blogger.

He's right. Twain would have been great. Oscar Wilde, too. Will Rogers. Smart, opinionated, well-informed, and witty. Sounds like a great recipe for a blogger.

Who else?

Melancholy

I miss my dad today.

I mean, I miss him every day, but today should have been his 85th birthday. Unfortunately, he only got to celebrate 56 birthdays. So it's kind of hard to imagine what he would have been like at 85.

So I guess it's time for one more reminder: Take care of yourselves and each other. And do what the doctor tells you.

And if you have a little extra (time, energy, stuff), please consider sharing some of it with the American Cancer Society. They do amazing work supporting people with cancer and their families, as well as supporting research so that maybe fewer people will have to miss their dads (moms, siblings, cousins, friends...).

You get the picture. Thanks for listening.

Abstinence FAIL

My niece and I were chuckling (well, laughing out loud, really) over news coverage of a U.S. Congressman who resigned this week over an affair with a staff member.

The most amusing part was that the staffer in question had hosted a video interview with the Congressman on the topic of...wait for it...abstinence.

My niece turned a video still I found online of that fine piece of work into a motivational poster that she said I could share:

It Has Come to This

I wasn't aware of this incident until I saw this piece at Digby's blog.

During Monday's Phillies game, a person in attendance at Citizen Bank Park ran onto the field while the Cardinals were up to bat. According to those at the game, this fan was promptly tasered.

This is just amazing to me. We seem to have lost all sense of proportion. Having a young child myself, I'm used to hearing kids threaten death and dismemberment for all sorts of minor transgressions. That's developmentally appropriate at a certain age, but eventually we're supposed to grow out of it as we come to understand both physical and social realities. By the time we're adults (or even teens), we are supposed to have developed some sense of measured response.

But really. Fans (usually inebriated ones) have been running onto fields for a long time: At least as long as games have been televised. And I am old enough to remember the "streaking" fad. For those who are fans and want to watch the game, these things are an annoyance, but a minor one at most. You have a delay while the intruder eludes a few security guards or police for a few minutes, then they subdue the person, remove them from the premises, and the game resumes.

In my experience, the intruder usually eludes being captured for a few minutes, probably causing a little embarrassment for the pursuer, but truly nothing of consequence is happening here.

So why is it even remotely reasonable to use a weapon of any kind, much less a taser, to subdue such a person? Delaying a sporting event isn't a serious offense. No one is in serious danger of attack (though there have been assaults on players an coaches, nothing that remotely justifies this kind of response to someone just running around). Embarrassing security personnel isn't smart, but again, it can't possibly justify subjecting the interloper to this level of physical danger.

[As someone once wrote about the decision to run out on the field, it probably seems like fun at first, but once you get removed from public view, you may get a lesson on differing interpretations of the term "reasonable force," especially if you've made the security guard or off-duty police officer run around and look a little foolish. But that was talking about a little roughness, not electrical shocks.]

My hat is off to Digby for her ongoing coverage of the taser issue. The taser is a great example of how our society has become inured to violence and torture and how the threshold for these things has gotten ridiculously low. Are we really so culturally immature that we believe this kind of behavior is reasonable?

Climate Change and Economics

I nearly always enjoy reading Paul Krugman's work. Not only is he a brilliant thinker, but he's a very good writer, with a knack for making complex subjects understandable.

So I was most pleased to see his piece today on climate change.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. It was climate change and what we referred to at the time as the "greenhouse effect" that led me to study environmental science in college and to focus on the public policy aspects of that field. The intersection of science, economics, and politics is a fascinating, complex, and rewarding area, but not without its frustrations.

I recommend that you read Krugman's article. He concludes with what I think is meant to be a hopeful summary:

We know how to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. We have a good sense of the costs — and they’re manageable. All we need now is the political will.

Unfortunately, as he demonstrates earlier in his analysis, political will is hard to come by these days. Recent events haven't demonstrated to me that either the American body politic or its "leaders" have either the understanding or the backbone to make difficult choices. I fear we will dither ourselves into catastrophe.

Units of Measure

And while I'm uncharacteristically blogging, I ought to mention another fine Berkeley guy: Art Rosenfeld. He started out as a particle physicist, but the energy crisis of the 70s spurred him to turn his attention to energy efficiency.

He's now retiring after a long and distinguished career, and some of his colleagues have proposed naming a unit of measure (specifically a measure of energy conservation) after him.

Regardless of whether that takes hold, Rosenfeld has had an enormous influence over our world. For example, his research on reducing the size of the ballasts used by fluorescent lights led to the development of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), which currently save huge amounts of electricity.

Rosenfeld also gets a lot of credit for the "California miracle," also known as the "Rosenfeld effect": California's per-capita electricity consumption has remained essentially the same since 1970, where that of the rest of the country has increased by about half. Through a combination of technologies, building codes, and other public policies, California has led the way, largely propelled by Rosenfeld.

My wife, who works in energy efficiency, got to go to Rosenfeld's retirement dinner this week, and it must have been a great event. His influence will continue to be felt both in the state and throughout the world.

Remembering Mario

No, not Super Mario: Mario Savio.

I never got to meet Mario, but as a student at Berkeley, I lived in a world that he helped shape. Walking through Sproul Plaza almost daily, it was easy to see the impact of Savio and the Free Speech Movement.

Even today, the FSM is remembered at the cafe in the undergraduate library.

Anyway, the linked review from The Nation is interesting, and makes me want to read the book.

What's in a Name?

A friend just pointed out to me that one can look up one's name in the Urban Dictionary. I thought the results for my nickname were particularly hilarious. I quite like:

2. v. as 'chard something up'. To, by error or misfortune, destroy iredeemably a situation that might otherwise have been promising or a suitestormme (see suitestormme).

Life is fun sometimes.

Crocodile Tears--For What?

Yesterday, the "big news" was that Mark McGwire finally admitted to using steroids during his baseball career.

Frankly, I have trouble seeing this as anything newsworthy, other than maybe the fact that a baseball team is actually hiring McGwire to work for them again. I'm all for forgiveness and redemption and all that, but really, you don't go hiring Al Capone to run BATF.

OK, here's my big problem with the McGwire admission: he's not sorry. He cheated through much of his career, and he clearly feels bad about it, but seems to think he was doing it for a good reason, so we should just forgive him. This, for me, was the money quote:

“I did this for health purposes. There’s no way I did this for any type of strength purposes,” he said.

Uh-huh. And why is that OK? You weren't trying to be a stronger ballplayer, you just wanted to recover quicker, or heal or prevent injuries. It's not like that would give him a competitive advantage over other players or anything. And then, he doesn't even take responsibility--it was the times, you see:

“It was a wrong thing what I did. I totally regret it. I just wish I was never in that era,” he said.

Yeah, because if there hadn't been those illegal drugs tempting you, you just would have lived with your injuries, put your tail between your legs and gone quietly home while someone else played ball. Bull. You cheated. You knew what you were doing, and you did it anyway.

And finally, the weaseling in his press statement about why he didn't come clean five years ago when he "testified" before Congress:

After all this time, I want to come clean. I was not in a position to do that five years ago in my congressional testimony, but now I feel an obligation to discuss this and to answer questions about it.

Uh, "not in a position"? What better position than when you have the attention of the whole country, broadcast live on C-SPAN and ESPN? I guess it's better to wait five years, then put out a press statement to clear the air for your new job. After all, it's all about you.

And that's bad. But even worse to me is the guy who is hiring him, again: Tony LaRussa. LaRussa was McGwire's manager when he broke into the majors with Oakland, then brought him to St. Louis later on. And now he's hiring him as his batting coach in St. Louis. LaRussa has insisted until yesterday that he had no knowledge, no idea that McGwire was juicing all those years. That doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. LaRussa has been covering for McGwire (and therefore himself) for years. LaRussa has a fabulous (and IMHO, inflated) reputation as a baseball "genius" (I mean, he has a law degree from Florida State!) and humanitarian (largely for his work in animal rescue). But somehow he was unaware that the man he worked with for fifteen years was ballooning himself like a cartoon character and then lying about it. I offer you the opinions of baseball columnists Terence Moore and Ray Ratto. Neither seems to find LaRussa credible on this issue, either.

I have been accused of having a blind spot on this issue, having rooted for Barry Bonds for so many years. I will admit having suspicions for a long time, despite Bonds' denials. I will say this: he has been consistent with his stance that he did not knowingly use banned or illegal substances. That may not prove true, but I have no knowledge one way or the other. What I do know is that it was apparent during that era that some, indeed many, players were juicing. The fact that Bonds stood out among them does not diminish for me the achievements. He was the exciting player in an era of exciting players, some or all of whom may have been enhanced.

To me the bottom line is that one can never know all the details of who did what or just how much it helped them. McGwire claims he would have hit just as many home runs without enhancements. We'll never know, and that's too bad. What we do know is what happened: We saw, we cheered, we enjoyed. It's time to stop looking for which numbers need to have asterisks by them. Instead of moralizing about the past, we should learn from it and move on.

Baseball and other sports have always had their share of people trying to find advantages outside the game itself: doctored balls, amphetamines, steroids, altered bats. In a "game of inches," even tiny changes can make a big difference.

What we need to look out for is those who excuse or condone such behavior. People like Tony LaRussa or Bud Selig, the owners, managers, agents, and players who either supported or feigned ignorance of the drug problem that was making them rich, need to come clean about their culpability.

My Broken State, Part WAY Too Many

It's not getting any better.

The Left Coaster has a good piece today about the ongoing death spiral that is California these days:

Anyway, that’s basically it, nothing has been solved in California in all of 2009, there are no solutions in sight to solve any element of our revenue problems, and we will continue to abuse our little people in a stupid, cruel twist of human life that was never, ever necessary. As always, it was so easy to be so much better than this, the problems we face aren’t difficult to solve, but the Republicans have abandoned public service altogether, they’ll bring all of us down if they can’t get their way.

This on the tail of last month's news that California's roads, once the envy of the world, have almost slipped to the worst in the country. And the worst are in the major metropolitan areas.

Mark Watt, executive director of Transportation California, a labor and heavy construction industry group that works with TRIP, said the state's failure to raise the gasoline tax since 1990 combined with the recession-related decline in driving leaves the state with far too little money to maintain and rehabilitate highways.

"We've got to come to grips that we have to pay for it or we have to live with it," he said. "We need new revenues to dig through the backlog we're building."

It just keeps rolling. Downhill. You don't get what you don't pay for....

Terror, Paranoia, and Silliness

I always wondered when the Underpants Gnomes were going to go bad. Apparently many others fear this a lot more than I do.

As usual, Tom Tomorrow has his finger on the crazy.

Friends and Family

Time for one last post this year, I guess!

Sometime in the fall of 1987, I got my first apartment on my own. I had been sharing apartments with others for years, so I needed to acquire a lot of furnishings. As luck would have it, my friend Rod had recently moved into a house, and the previous owner had left a couple of pieces in the basement that Rod didn't want, so I inherited a big, solid woodblock chair and a credenza.

The credenza I ultimately gave away a couple of years later before I moved back to California. But I kept the chair. And it has followed me through several more moves, and eventually settled in our living room, where it became a favorite place for my daughter to curl up and read. It was quite worn and shabby, but the cushions and upholstery were really soft, so she liked it.

When we bought a ski house this summer, we decided the chair should move up there, and my mother-in-law took it upon herself to make the chair nicer. I had been thinking of reupholstering and restuffing the cushions, but she took it to a whole new level. Not only did she find terrific fabric with bears and moose on it, but she took the whole chair apart, refinished the wood, and just did a tremendous job of making it a whole new chair.

And here is the final result:

Not the best photo in the world (all I had with me was my iPhone), but you can see how cool it is! I know Rod, in particular, will appreciate the appropriateness of the moose motif. Hard to believe that this chair that has been cast off a couple of times and dragged across the country and around the state now has a whole new life. It's a really comfortable place to site and read or work.

So thanks again, Rod, and thanks to Cathy and her minions who made the whole refinishing and reconstruction project come off so well. I plan to enjoy this chair for many more years to come!

Who Could Have Predicted?

A year ago I was gloating about President-elect Obama's choice of John Holdren to be his science advisor. And I'm still quite pleased with the choice.

But it appears that Holdren is in the cross-hairs of the anti-science crowd:

But thanks to the magic of the Internet, right-wing blogs, newspapers, and television networks have seized on Holdren's old work and painted him as a wild-eyed environmental extremist — a crazed, misanthropic ideologue bent on controlling our lives and mass sterilization.

But the reality isn't quite like that:

Holdren and Erhlich considered a variety of other options for limiting population growth. Perhaps we could slip sterilization drugs into the water or food supply. Or force the mothers of illegitimate children to give them up for adoption. Or force pregnant single women to marry or have abortions. Ultimately, they decided that such options probably won't work. But they didn't exactly recoil from the ideas in moral horror. And therein lies the rub.

The article does a good job talking about the nature of scientific investigation, and how politics doesn't handle that well. For example:

At a time when populists distrust expertise, every scientific endeavor is politicized, and the Internet preserves your every utterance, it's getting harder and harder for scientists to do what they're supposed to: think out loud.

And this:

Nothing is more complicated than the weather, and as scientists try to predict the future of climate change, they're bound to make mistakes. But Holdren is operating in a different world now — a world where complexity is a liability or an irritant, where nuance is ignored, and activists on all sides strip away context as they search for something that can kill your career when framed in the right way.

Good article, especially for the local alt-weekly. It does a good job of comparing Holdren's situation with that of Van Jones, who shares local roots.

Anyone who has actually met or talked with John Holdren, even a little bit, knows that he's not a crazed, genocidal, eco-terrorist. He's a calm, thoughtful, and intellectually honest man who doesn't shy away from the findings of science or the hard policy choices they might dictate. At the same time, it's easy to envision him dispassionately evaluating even extreme policy options and dismissing them without getting riled up. He's a scientist. That's what they do.

One of my favorite memories of Holdren's class at Berkeley was his lecture on carcinogens. Instead of either dismissing or hyping the risks, it was all about evaluating the research and the numbers, even if it meant that peanut butter or tasty, dark beer might turn out to be seriously dangerous. He was trying to teach us to think like scientists and evaluate the evidence.

But our current political discourse doesn't have much room for nuance or dispassion. It's all about sound and fury, which has no place in scientific discussion.

I know Holdren is capable of handling the storms that are already swarming around him. I just hope the same is true of those around him, because I think he can be a tremendous contributor to solving some of the key issues facing the country and the world.

What Digby Said

I think Atrios or someone should have a copyright on that title, but whatever: Digby is right, as usual:

There were those who warned that allowing anyone president to have unaccountable powers would lead to every successor to fight to maintain them. But no one wanted to believe that a nice Democrat would ever do such a thing. Ahem:

Read it. And weep.

For Real This Time

Real ski weekend this time.

Started off with Opening Day at Alpine Meadows on Saturday. Although they only had two lifts running, the runs they had groomed were in really good shape. They had a few glitches with the new RFID gates at the lifts, but overall, things went well, and it was really fun. I'm glad we had a few practice turns last weekend at Northstar.

Rumor was that there would be snow pretty much after we left on Sunday, but the snow came early. And since we needed to get home early on Sunday, we decided to blow off the skiing and head out early. But a couple of accidents had closed the highway, so we decided to buy some groceries, head back to the house, and hunker down.

Here's what the deck looked like early on Sunday afternoon (it had been clear in the morning):
Then it really started snowing. Ski resorts were closed due to high wind. We stayed hunkered down. And when I got up Monday morning, the deck looked like this:
Needless to say, no heading home. Jan did go ski at Alpine, where she said the powder was excellent. I was under the weather with a headache, and besides, I needed to work. By today the roads were clear and we could drive home easily. So we've already had many of the season's experiences.

Looks like a great start to the season's snow, though. I can't wait to get back up on the hill!

Taming Snow

We couldn't help it. We really wanted to go skiing. In November. The opportunity rarely arises.

So we went to Northstar-at-Tahoe, which has minimal snow coverage so far. In fact, it was kind of surreal riding the lifts and seeing bare ground all around the groomed runs. Basically, they seem to have been making snow every night they could, and grooming the heck out of it.

So I have to say I was kind of surprised that the skiing was actually pretty good. There were only a few lifts and one or two ways down from each, and nothing very challenging, but hey, it was snow, and we were skiing!

On the other hand, there was this sort of weird feeling that we were skiing on a movie set or something, that if you ventured a few inches off to the side, you'd go through the scenery and there would be nothing there.

On still another hand, they were charging full price to use a very small portion of the hill, which felt a little like a rip-off. But did I mention we got to go skiing on Thanksgiving weekend?

And in one more week, we can hope for some real snow when Alpine Meadows opens.