Rooting Interests
Can you watch a sporting event dispassionately, without rooting for one side or another at all? I’ve tried, but I can’t do it. To some extent, I always end up picking sides. For me, it’s impossible to...
View ArticlePut on my Linking Cap
I’ve got a blog post that’s about 33% written, and every time I write more, it remains 33% written, because it just keeps growing, and I can’t figure out how to break it up into smaller parts. So in...
View ArticleWillpower Bias
This past weekend, I pulled out some crates so we could put away our Christmas ornaments. My two-year-old daughter decided she wanted to pretend she was a Christmas present, and climbed into one of...
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Brainyball: The Sequel to Statistics
Our old friend Moneyball will be making a comeback this year, when the film starring Brad Pitt gets released this September. Let me declare seven months ahead of time that I am sick of hearing about...
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Why a no Chicken?
In a recent episode of Louie, Louis CK tells a joke that he admits he doesn’t know how to finish. It involves a duck who thinks he’s special because he has a green head. This blog entry — heck, this...
View ArticleNotes on Thinking, Fast and Slow: Chili Davis
I got a Kindle today, and one of the first books I bought was Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to a book more than this one, a summary of how the human...
View ArticleBoth Neuroaesthetics and its Critics are Off Track
Alva Noë has an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he rips into the young science of neuroaesthetics: What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to...
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MLB’s Customer Alignment Problem
As Apple announces the iPhone 5 today, I want to make a confession. It’s a bit embarrassing for someone like me who has spent his career in high tech, but here goes: I don’t have a cell phone. At...
View ArticleA Baseball Learning Matrix
Russell Carleton has an interesting article today on Baseball Prospectus today about the “Search for an 80 Brain“. He explores whether the difference between prospects who make it and those who fail...
View ArticleNeurohumbug
Early in my life, I really didn’t have any sort of vision for a career. I just kind of drifted towards whatever opportunities came to me. I had an aptitude for computers, partly because my dad, who was...
View ArticleWe We We All The Way Home
Yesterday, I mentioned in passing how I enjoy baseball on two levels: one level in rooting for my team, and another in the aesthetic quality of the game. The day before, I defended the idea of...
View ArticleMuscle Metaphors
The A’s making the postseason has hurt the discipline I’m trying to develop as a writer. The little brain tingle I get from reading articles about the A’s or talking about the A’s on Twitter right now...
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QWOP as an Example of Muscle Metaphor
Jon Bois has a fun story over on SB Nation today about QWOP, the stupidest, most aggravating, hilarious video game ever made. I enjoyed the reminder about the game, because it illustrates what I wrote...
View ArticleQuantum Moneyball
Just before the beginning of this sentence, this essay could go in an infinite number of directions. But now that the first sentence has been written, the number the infinite directions it could...
View ArticleHow to Remove the Yahoo Sports background image on Chrome
Yahoo Sports remodeled their site this morning, and it’s awful. Mostly, I think, because the new background image on is really distracting and annoying. So I decided to zap it. Here’s how I did it, and...
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The Long, Long History of Why I Do Not Like the Josh Donaldson Trade
Once upon a time, about a billion years ago, life was simple. Everybody lived in the oceans, and everybody had only one cell each. This was quite a fair and egalitarian way to live. Nobody really had...
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The Data/Human Goal Gap
As I was writing a letter to my third-grade daughter’s principal in support of a change in homework policy (a letter which I’ve posted here), it occurred to me I was making a point about a phenomenon...
View ArticleOne Small Step Towards a Theory of Pitch Sequencing
Three years ago, I wrote an article called “10 Things I Believe About Baseball Without Evidence“, in which I hypothesized that it ought to be possible to develop some sort of theory of pitch...
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