Common Sense for Lots of Things That Don't Matter (And Some That Do)
Introduction Apparently, I like doing sports forensic analysis. I must, since I'm clearly not doing it for the money. So here's a third installment, after my look at Derek Fisher's 0.4 shot and Mookie Betts's encounter with Houston's right field fans . This makes it two for three on forensic analyses done many many years after the fact, haha. Let's set the stage: It's October 29, 2014. The San…
[ This post is adapted lightly from a Facebook post I just made. ] <tl;dr> The Atlanta crime doesn't need to have been racially or sexually motivated, per se , for race or sex to have been a factor. </tl;dr> So the other day, about a week and a half ago, I was accosted at the drug store where I was picking up some medications for the family. Harassed, really. Some fellow had come in line behind…
At work, I run a mathematics colloquium that meets every other Thursday. I don't always present—I probably present about 20 to 25 percent of the time—but I did a recent one on the behavior of high-dimensional spaces. I then came upon an oddity that I thought was worth sharing, for those three or four of you who might like that kind of thing. In this presentation, I made reference to some…
Because I apparently don't have enough random crap on my plate, I occasionally participate on Quora. I'm there as Brian Tung; I'm not hard to find, other than you actually have to want to find me, and so far, that's not a very common thing. Anyway , I often find myself embroiled in various debates (generally well-mannered, if not always good-natured) about various sports rules. Most recently, the…
Bottom line up front: This is probably going to end up long, longer than it is now. That might be true no matter when you're reading this. (Update 2022-01-26: I have indeed added more to it, mostly in the last section.) A couple of years ago, I detailed on this blog a series of Chinese novel reading projects: 西遊記 Journey to the West by 吳承恩 Wú Chéng'ēn, 生死疲勞 Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by 莫言…
I got the tl;dr out of the way in the title. I've written previously about the value of multiple points of view (literal points of view in this case, but I think it's valuable for figurative points of view, too). Last night, in Game 4 between the Boston Red Sox and the Houston Astros, was another example. Here's the situation as it was in Houston (the location is kind of interesting, though not…
One of the best-known phenomena in the insect world is the unusual recurrence of various populations of cicada. There aren't any cicadas out here on the West Coast, where I live , but they are endemic to the Northeast. The periodical cicadas (there are non-periodical cicadas, apparently) are notorious for having life cycles that are synchronized to one of two (relatively) large primes: 13 years…
I participate from time to time at a site called Math StackExchange , where users ask and answer questions about mathematics. Most often, the questions relate to a student's coursework, but there are some deeper questions as well. It's one of a family of similar StackExchange sites devoted to a wide variety of topics, only some of which are academically inclined. One question that comes up every…
The last of four Chinese novels on my reading list, 錢鐘書 Qián Zhōngshū's 圍城 Fortress Besieged , is its author's sole piece of long fiction, he having turned his hand to literary history and criticism after the cultural turmoil of China in the 1950s and beyond. It is also at once the funniest and most tragic of the ones I read, too. The novel's title shares its second character with another one of…
Third on my Chinese novel reading list was 邊城 Border Town , by 沈從文 Shěn Cóngwén. This slender volume, occupying only seventy or so pages at 16 point Chinese type on my tablet, was the shortest of the four I read, by a substantial margin, and by the time I got to it, I had advanced sufficiently in my literacy that I was able to read through this book in about two weeks. Central to the story are an…
The second Chinese novel in my reading program was Mo Yan's 生死疲勞 Life and Death are Wearing Me Out . This absurd tale of reincarnation and redemption is the author's own choice for the work that best represents his world outlook. If so, his outlook is sardonic, dark, and cynical indeed, yet still leaving room for optimism for the future—if only the distant, distant future. 莫言 Mo Yan—literally,…
As I mentioned previously , my first Chinese novel reading project was 西遊記 Journey to the West (1592). Attributed to 吳承恩 Wú Chéng'ēn, it is considered one of the four great classic novels of Chinese vernacular literature. Serious Chinese literature was not to be written in Vernacular Chinese, or 白話 báihuà, which literally means clear speech, but in Classical Chinese, or 文言文 wényánwén. Classical…
For me, anyway. This is, likely, the first in a series of posts, and ironically, one I'm writing as I come to the end, temporarily, of a reading program that has covered a couple of years. You see, over that time, I've read four Chinese novels of varying era, genre, and style, in the original Chinese: 西遊記 Journey to the West (1592), 生死疲勞 Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), 邊城 Border Town…
Although I live in California, this actually has nothing to do with rainfall. Earlier this month, the Chicago Cubs ended a century-long drought—that is to say, they hadn't won the World Series since 1908, a span of 108 years. (I suppose it's really 107 years without a title, since there's a span of a year even between consecutive titles.) In so doing, they defeated a team that has now gone 68…
Whether you're pleased or dejected this morning, I think there's very few of us who aren't stunned by the result in the general election yesterday. In particular, polling was way off—even exit polls, which are supposed to take the pulse of voters as they leave the booth. How did they get the result so badly wrong? (Pre-count models showed Clinton with an average of about 300 electoral votes, and…
My favored mailreader is mutt . The running joke is that I like it because it's conspicuously antediluvian. Well, I don't dislike it for that reason, but there are better and more accurate reasons for why I actually like it. The first and most important reason is that it has support (after a fashion) for tagging of mail messages. I grew up (so to speak) on the Berkeley mailreader, which stored old…
Ornette Coleman died today. And with him died any chance for an authoritative version of his treatise on harmolodics, which he had reportedly been working on for decades. Oh, I daresay we may eventually see some fractured notes (pun intended) about harmolodics, but we will not see the definitive statement of what it is. To be sure, it's entirely possible that any treatise about harmolodics would…
This article makes for interesting reading, and I love the introductory comic. But despite making some insightful points, this open letter tends to put up a barrier to progress—a barrier that could be resolved with a more conciliatory approach, I believe. Some of the problems are minor: The letter is repetitive. Homework creates a burden for parents. It also takes away time. It also causes…
What follows is a bit I did over at Math StackExchange. Posting it over here was an experiment in whether the mathematical typesetting would transfer correctly in a copy-and-paste. For the most part, as long as I leave it alone, it seems to have done so (modulo the line breaks being lost in the shuffle). Euler's equation e i π + 1 = 0 is considered by many to be the most beautiful equation in…
Possible last lines for AMC's Mad Men . Status Quo is God : "Don. Don Draper." Status Quo is God (subverted): "Dick. Dick Whitman." Wrong Series: "Everything is all right." Pete Campbell Being Pete Campbell: "Oh Peggy." Matt Weiner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself: "I'm faaaaaalllllliiiiinnnnnngggggg." The Long Con: "I always thought my death would be meaningless, and whaddyaknow." (And who do…
Bill Nye, he of Science Guydom, recently had this to say about creationism and evolution, and the debates between them. I have mixed feelings about his position on debating creationists. I sort of agree with him that there should be debate—although I view most televised debates as theatre without much illumination—but I think he goes about it in an ineffective way. And it's sort of lampshaded…
Today, in purely descriptive blog post titles... Baseball Hall of Fame voters have been getting in their annual opportunity to gnash their teeth and/or practice their sanctimony, as a result of drugs that were first banned by the sport barely a decade ago. It's become a thing, by which I mean that it is now possible to get all "meta" about it and write not only about the Hall of Fame itself, but…
The other day, I was listening to sports radio, which I used to do quite a bit. It's been a while now, though. This time, they were chatting about how the Los Angeles Dodgers and Anaheim Angels*, the local baseball teams, did very little at the trade deadline. (One of the trade deadlines, rather. There are a few of them, apparently.) One of the speakers thought the Dodgers should have done…
So, this happened. And I have to wonder—are we supposed to be impressed by this fine? Because I'm pretty sure Phil Jackson isn't. I don't know if Phil was aware that this was a violation of league rules. I kind of suspect that he was; it doesn't strike me as the sort of thing he'd do without even considering whether it broke the rules. I don't say that just because I'm somehow impressed with his…
I don't want to become a downer, I really don't, but when the urge to write hits, I write, and here I am again with another post on prejudice. I will admit that the immediate trigger for this post is the Elliot Rodger case, but although that's obviously at the forefront of our minds right now, let's not kid ourselves into thinking that a year-and-a-half from now, anyone not directly connected with…