You Can Be My Wingman Anytime

With all of the talk about Tom Cruise that's been floating around, I thought it would be helpful to tell a story of how I first became acquainted with Mr. Cruise.

As a child of the 1980s, I, like many people, was fascinated with the film Top Gun. I was in the third grade when Top Gun was released, and it instantly became my absolute favorite movie. It transported me to a new world, a world in which flying machines allowed people to do superhuman things. To me, the fighter pilots in Top Gun were both my role models and my best friends. For my eighth birthday, I received a box turtle that I immediately named Willis (after my favorite character on Diff'rent Strokes). Well, after I saw Top Gun, I changed my turtle's name to Goose, to honor the memory of Tom Cruise's lost flying partner.

As for me, I was always Maverick. I admired everything about Tom Cruise's character, and I was determined to be as much like him as I possibly could. When my family was driving around in our car, I would pretend that I was in an F-16 jet trying to defeat the enemy. When we were pulling into our driveway after going out, I would ask my dad if we could buzz the tower. When my dad would say, "No," I would say, "You have to say, 'Negative, ghost rider, the pattern is full.'"

One day I made my own helmet--I took a bicycle helmet, drew some stripes on it, and wrote "MAVERICK" across the front. I would wear it around the house and even in the car, I mean fighter jet. When it was time for my ninth birthday, I told my parents I wanted a Top Gun jacket just like the one Tom Cruise had. My parents asked if I wanted Legend of Zelda instead; I said no, that all I wanted was the jacket. My parents agreed to get it for me, but they made me promise not to wear it all the time.

On June 13, 1987, I got the jacket that I dreamed of. It fit perfectly, and I never wanted to take it off. Despite my parents' wishes, I wore it whenever I could. Not only that, I insisted on being called either "Maverick" or "Tom Cruise". One time, when my parents called me "Daniel" over and over again, I went to my room and refused to come out until they corrected themselves.

After that, my parents had a long talk with me. They said that they thought my Tom Cruise fascination wouldn't ever have lasted this long and they didn't know what to do. I can even remember the word they used: "unnatural". A couple days later they sat me down and told me of a decision they had made. They were sending me to get "help". At first I refused, and I even threatened to run away. My parents stood firm, and so every Monday and Thursday I went to my appointments. I didn't like it at first--I found it just painful, but after a while I got used to it.

Things have been different for me ever since. I hung up my Top Gun jacket for good, but my respect and admiration for Tom Cruise remain. In fact, the courage he showed in dealing with Goose's death provided me with a very important example whenever I had to go to my appointments.

Now, I consider myself a well-adjusted adult, and it's all thanks to the help that my parents got me as well as the solid example provided by Maverick. So thank you, electroshock therapy...and thank YOU, Tom Cruise!

Humming by the Flowered Vine

I have no idea why I like Laura Cantrell. Her music is at odds with everything else in my collection, but I can't get enough of her. Her third album shows once again why this New York country artist draws praise from music lovers of all types.

Cantrell introduced herself to the music community as the host of WFMU's "Radio Thrift Shop," in which she plays obscure songs of all genres from the last 7 or 8 decades. Her love of classic country is obvious on her show, and her albums showcase a timeless style that contrasts with today's Nashville sound, which she constantly criticizes though she was born and raised in Nashville.

On Humming by the Flowered Vine, Laura is joined by numerous guest musicians, which gives its songs a much more varied quality than her previous albums. This album has been much more meticulously produced, which, on balance, is a good thing. The added complexity is appreciated, but this album lacks the same "stepping into a time machine" quality that her first two albums had.

Like her two previous albums, this one has four songs written by Laura. A song she wrote for her first album, "Churches Off the Interstate," is the best song that's ever been written by anybody, and though none of her originals on this album is quite that good, they are better overall than her songs on any other album. I particularly like "California Rose," a tribute to Depression-era musician Rose Maddox.

Overall, this album makes me very excited. It follows the previous two albums nicely, but more importantly the progress it shows makes you anxious for what's to come in the future. Pay particular attention to "14th Street," written by Emily Spray, which I'm going to go ahead and unofficially declare a top three Cantrell song.

The Terminal

I finally saw The Terminal--what a great film. It's one of those rare movies that weaves an interesting story from the simplest of circumstances. It had only a few characters and took place in a single building and didn't have much of a plot, but I didn't want it to end. It was great to see the workings of this mini-society that we are all familiar with just in passing through, and the film shows that surviving the day-to-day drudgery has a lot to do with your temperament. And, best of all, I finally began to understand what all the fuss over Catherine Zeta-Jones was all about.

I'm tempted to say that Frank Dixon, the customs official portrayed by Stanley Tucci, suffers from Snidely Whiplash Syndrome, but I think his story is really a lesson in organizational behavior. I've been in organizations in which the management loses its people, and The Terminal reminded me a lot of those times. Dixon begins by trying to quickly get rid of Viktor Navorski, the Eastern European who doesn't have a home. His dismissiveness turns to curiosity, which turns to contempt. How people deal with the rules of a bureaucracy is a major theme of the film. In Viktor, Dixon sees his opposite, a man who finds joy in the hand he has been dealt rather than being hamstrung by the rules. Viktor's approach to life earns the appreciation of the terminal's hourly workers, giving him a power that sometimes conflicts with Dixon's positional power. By the end of the film, Dixon is trying to undercut Viktor to preserve the hierarchy and, presumably, the rule of law.

Many times, people who have risen to a position of power tend to take a fixed sum view of the amount of power, or love, or whatever, within an organization. They think that their position affords them x units, while the level of the organization below them is entitled to x-1, the level below that to x-2, and so on. When an underling gets some attention or does things in a new way, one reaction is to restore the "natural" order by leveling that person off. After all, more for them means less for you. But a good manager sees things differently. Think back to another Tom Hanks film, Big, in which an employee who is with the company for a week unexpectedly rises to a VP position. His unsympathetic rivals are jealous, while the CEO is portrayed as intelligent in a very practical and unpretentious way.

I've worked in the terminal before. Not an actual terminal, but a place where the smartest people were all at the bottom. I had a summer job at a book warehouse in which college students (and some graduate students) worked hourly jobs and had fun, supervised by high school grads and career book warehouse employees who were convinced they had a monopoly on the right way to do things. This is an extreme example, because the management had both less education and a worse attitude, but you can probably guess the result. We formed our own little society that had its own dynamics that were separate from those of the larger organization. Any time upper management came down to squash us, it just made the subculture that much stronger.

The only critique I have of The Terminal is that I didn't really buy Tom Hanks as a Krakozian refugee. To me, Mr. Hanks will always be a castaway, an astronaut, a computer-generated cowboy doll, a guy with AIDS, a kid in an adult's body, a retarded Alabama ping pong virtuoso, or a guy who cross dresses to get a good deal on an apartment. Or a mermaid.

The Top 25 Stand-Up Comics of All Time

1. Steve Martin
2. Bill Cosby
3. Andy Kaufman
4. Rodney Dangerfield
5. Bob Newhart
6. Chris Rock
7. Jerry Seinfeld
8. Ray Romano
9. Johnny Carson
10. Jack Benny
11. Bud Abbott & Lou Costello
12. Jay Leno
13. Jim Carrey
14. Flip Wilson
15. Dennis Miller
16. Sid Caesar
17. Dave Chappelle
18. George Carlin
19. David Letterman
20. Jerry Stiller & Anne Meara
21. Richard Pryor
22. Milton Berle
23. Sam Kinison
24. Eddie Murphy
25. Alan King

Notes: It's tough to rate people like Letterman in a list like this. If I were ranking funny people, he'd probably be #1, but he suffers from not having done much stand up.

A Mathematician at the Ballpark

Ken Ross's book A Mathematician at the Ballpark could just as easily be called A Mathematician at the Race Track, or at the Mall, or at the Grocery Store. It doesn't matter that a mathematician is at the ballpark if he refuses to talk about baseball.

The book contains eight chapters. The first, called "Who's the best hitter?", explains what goes into calculating batting average, OPS, and other statistics. Is it a useful chapter? Yes, if you don't already know how to calculate these averages. Of the next seven chapters, one doesn't even mention baseball, and a couple more simply use baseball examples to teach universal lessons, like explaining that if the Braves are 3:2 favorites to win a ballgame, that means that they will win 3 out of 5 times.

One area in which the book succeeds is in proving that "streakiness," whose existence has long been debated by sports fans and statisticians, does in fact exist. Sports fans have long looked for evidence that streakiness is exists in sports despite the number of mathematicians stacked against them. Ross does give evidence of streakiness in the final chapter; unfortunately it comes from another mathematician's research, comes from the sport of bowling, and is used simply to assume streakiness in other sports.

How sad it must be to be an academic looking for a real-world application for his research. We've seen great books like the Popular Culture and Philosophy series and Freakonomics show how seemingly impractical topics can be applied to life. The groundbreaking work of statistician Bill James has shown that baseball is rich with applications for hard math. But in order to create value for true baseball fans with even the slightest understanding of mathematics, you need to do a little more than explain what an average is or show how betting works. This book should serve as a lesson: if you have a field of study you want to connect with a market interested in a different topic, make sure you can connect the two meaningfully.

Three Days in June

Last weekend, I decided to attend an entire series for the first time in my life. I was partially inspired by the book Three Nights in August, which chronicles a series between the Cardinals and the Cubs. The series I went to was between the Cardinals and the Astros.

Game 1:
This is the one I was looking forward to the most. It was Chris Carpenter vs. Andy Pettitte, but more importantly it was an opportunity for my boys to get a little redemption and for me to be there to watch it. Last year in the NLCS, the Cardinals went 0-3 in Houston. Though the Cardinals have already won at the Enron Dome, er, Minute Maid Park this year, there’s a big difference between being there in person and watching on TV. I hadn’t seen any of the Cardinals’ previous victories this year, but I was there for a particularly gut-wrenching loss in game 4 of the NLCS last year.

It was my first playoff game ever--I went with my sister Cristina, and we wore matching Willie McGee jerseys, only to watch the Astros take control late with a Beltran home run. I felt horribly for a team that I had been with since spring training, but more than a little of my frustration was directed inward as my sister and I were treated less than hospitably on the way out of the ballpark. I’ve often said that only good can come from having a real investment in a sports team--whether the team wins or loses, you’ve gone through something with them that deepens your involvement and your appreciation. If I’m going to take that approach, I guess I have to accept that the games that get you down are part of that process. A lot of people, it seems, try for sports to be something else. These people live vicariously through sports in a very selective way. If their team does well, it gives meaning to their life and gives them a reason to feel superior to all the people whose favorite teams weren’t as fortunate. If their team does poorly they write the team off and call in to sports talk radio complaining about how the team’s a bunch of schmucks.

Tonight’s game I attended with my sister Cristina and my friend Elliot, who is an Astros fan but always tolerates my love of the Cardinals. We arrived in time for batting practice, and I got to see Albert Pujols play his own brand of “around the world”--starting with the right field foul pole, he would take turns hitting home runs into virtually every section of seats until he got to the no man’s land in straightaway center, and when he started hitting to left field he was content to keep hitting the railroad tracks.

The game itself may have been the best pitched game I’ve ever seen. Pettitte gave up one run through seven innings, and Carpenter was unscored upon through eight. The Astros had chances to get to Carpenter, the best being in the fifth inning. With a runner on third and one out, Willy Taveras failed to make contact on a suicide squeeze, and Adam Everett was quickly caught in a rundown. Then, Taveras singled to right, and Andy Pettitte was waved home from second. The throw from So Taguchi was a couple steps up the third base line, but remarkably Pettitte was just getting around third. The phrase “out by a mile” is so overused that it has lost all meaning, so I’ll just say that he was out by 30 feet. So, twice in the same inning, the catcher had the ball in his glove and saw a man making a beeline toward the plate while he was still only about halfway there. Which means that twice in the same inning, Yadier Molina saw two people running toward him who magically turned into giant gift-wrapped boxes with big, pretty bows on top, not unlike when the Tasmanian Devil would envision Bugs Bunny turning into a feast on a giant platter, complete with all the trimmings.

It remained a one-run game until the ninth inning, when Pujols homered to the train tracks in left, just like in BP. All in all, the game was one of the best I’d ever seen. It was tight the whole way through, with a plenty of exciting moments. And best of all, it allowed me to forget about last year’s playoffs.


Game 2:
Today was Astros Umbrella Day. It’s a good thing the umbrellas weren’t handed out for yesterday’s game, or most of them would have found their way into the third base coach’s back.

Before the game began I told my sister, “This game has the potential to get lopsided.” I should have said, “This game has the potential to get silly.” That’s the kind of win that’s especially demoralizing--the win where the other team has given up on trying to keep its game face and is all about having fun. The game has gotten so out of hand that you can no longer pretend you’re in an actual competition. It’s like when a basketball game is a blowout by halftime and the game ends with all the starters who are sitting on the bench giggling at the guy who hasn’t played all year and jacks up threes every time the ball touches his hands.

The Astros threw Wandy Rodriguez against Jason Marquis, and it looked instantly like a mismatch. Rodriguez had pitched only 11 innings through two starts, and had an ERA of about six and a half. Marquis, on the other hand, has been pitching very well and has such a good bat that he’s been used as a pinch hitter a few times this season. Heck, his batting average is about 25 points better than anybody in the Astros’ lineup.

The strike zone in today’s game was as big as I’ve ever seen, which surprisingly led to a glut of runs. After both teams traded runs in the first and failed to score in the second, things really got interesting in the third. Marquis led off with a single, Eckstein followed with a single (he took second on a throw to third), and Pujols was intentionally walked after an Edmonds strikeout. Reggie Sanders then homered, which brought out a smattering of boos from the crowd. The Cardinals plated two more runs before Jason Marquis came up again, this time with a man on and two outs. His second hit of the inning was a home run that cleared the right field foul pole by ten feet and had the ‘Stros fans booing like crazy. The Cards fans, on the other hand, were trying to hold back the giggles in a hostile environment. After that, Brandon Backe, scheduled to start in just four days, settled things down in two innings of work.

The Astros made a game of it, closing to within two runs only to lose 11-9, but the only really interesting part of the last six innings was the seventh inning stretch. Before we started singing, the public address announcer encouraged everyone to open their umbrellas and twirl them. And they did, which was bizarre.

Game 3:
Going into this day, I had only two questions: Would the Cardinals get the sweep? and Would the roof be open?

I’ve grown used to the roof at Minute Maid Park being closed, but I’ve never understood it. I always thought it was universal that people liked to see the sun shining during a ballgame, but apparently a lot of Houston prefers to have the roof closed.

I guess I should have had Roger Clemens on my mind as well. This was my first time to see him pitch in person, but for whatever reason he’s not high up on my “must see” list. Here are some of the guys I’ve made a point to see in person: Willie McGee, Tony Gwynn, Ozzie Smith, Dwight Gooden, Alex Rodriguez, and Joey Gathright (okay, so you think the last name doesn’t fit in. Just wait.) Here are some players who are next on the list: Greg Maddux, Ichiro Suzuki, and Vladimir Guerrero. But Roger has never been one of those guys I’ve ached to see. Still, the matchup was attractive. Clemens was pitching against Mark Mulder, and the last time they got together the Cardinals won 1-0 in ten innings.

The Cards looked good early, getting three runs off Clemens in the top of the first, which you would figure might hold up considering the Astros scored a total of 11 runs in Clemens’s first 7 starts. But the Astros scored five runs in the bottom of the inning, giving him more run support than in any game this year.

After two innings, with the score still 5-3, I noticed that Clemens had thrown 53 pitches and Mulder 40, and I decided to track pitch counts, figuring that the team that could get into the bullpen first could have a leg up. It didn’t work out that way. Clemens settled down with innings of 15 and 11 pitches before throwing 20 in the 5th inning and departing after giving up a hit to lead off the sixth. But Mulder was chased out after failing to retire the first two batters in the bottom of the fourth. The score didn’t change much--the final was 6-4, and the Cardinals never really looked like they were going to make a run.

As for the roof, it stayed closed. With the roof closed, Minute Maid feels more like a shopping mall than a ballpark, especially since last year’s playoff atmosphere has given way to a quieter, less lively crowd that has already seen its share of bad baseball this year. Leaving the stadium, I had kind of a mixed reaction to not being talked to by any overzealous Astros fans. It was nice not to get the drunken yelling that had greeted me almost a year ago, but today’s silence was more about apathy than politeness, which is no good. But the weekend was great overall--I’m going to have to do this again.

Hey Little Twelvetoes…

Every once in a while, an idea comes along that is so perfect that it can only be held onto by the biggest ivory tower eggheads in the world. Occasionally, an economist, game theorist, or mathematician will reveal to his other cloistered colleagues an idea that actually holds some practical benefit for the world at large, but mostly these ideas are meant to entertain people who want to think that it matters to speculate on the implications of time travel or cold fusion or the like. One such idea is base 12, which is simultaneously one of the most sensible and most ridiculous ideas in the world.

Last summer I was interviewed for a book on people's quirks, And I Thought I Was Crazy!. The author, Judy Reiser, was trying to get at why one of mine had to do with the number 12. (To find out what the quirk is, you'll have to buy the book.) I told her that 12 has always been my favorite number and that a lot of it had to do with the special place that 12 has in our world. Twelve describes an awful lot of things considering that we live in a base 10 world, which I've never understood but always thought was noteworthy. I thought this was pretty idiosyncratic, but I recently discovered that I have a few kindred spirits.

When I say we live in a base 10 world, I simply mean that we use 10 digits to count and perform arithmetic. The Romans based their number system on 5s and 10s, and Arabic numerals (which we use today) have standardized base 10. Thanks to this system, we can multiply by 10 just by adding a zero, which is much easier than resorting to Roman numerals.

Though we live in a base 10 world, it seems as though we really want to be in a base 12 world. Whenever possible, we express important measurements in terms of 12 rather than 10. We use 12 inches in a foot, 12 months in a year, 12 hours on a clock, and we group items for sale in dozens more often than we do tens. We do this because thinking in terms of twelve is natural, while thinking in terms of ten results from our awkward attempt to make something from the fact that we have five fingers on each hand.

In 1934, F. Emerson Andrews proposed simplifying our numbers by moving to base 12. Base 12 conforms to more of our units of measure, plus it is easier to multiply and divide in. Because 2, 3, 4, and 6 divide evenly into 12 (as opposed to only 2 and 5 for base 10), multiplication tables are much simpler, and fractions like 1/3 and 1/4 could be expressed simply as 0.4 and 0.3, respectively. Andrews suggested that we take what we now know as the numeral 12 and begin writing it as “10,” while inventing two new numerals (he called them dek and el) to replace the old 10 and 11. (For more information on Andrews and his ideas, please visit the Dozenal Society of America.) This little change has innumerable effects on the way we view the world, which Andrews detailed in his book New Numbers: How Acceptance of a Duo-Decimal System Would Simplify Mathematics.

Americans have often been ridiculed for our stubborn refusal to accept the metric system, but it’s possible that we are holding on to a superior form of measurement that is waiting only for a superior form of counting to come along. Most nations have no trouble reconciling their counting and their measuring because they have adopted the metric system, which means that they have no problem saying that a football player is 185 centimeters (1.85 meters) tall. In the United States, 72 inches does not come close to meaning 7.2 feet because it is based on twelves. If, however, we went to base 12, it would instantly become much easier to make these kinds of comparisons.

Basic arithmetic would become amazingly simple, too. I won't reproduce a multiplication table here, but suffice it to say that if you saw it you would wish we were using it. Because 2, 3, 4, and 6 all divide evenly into 12, they would all essentially be as easy as multiplying by 2 or 5 in base 10.

This is an excellent exercise in new math, but what does it all matter? Could we ever actually make the change from 10 to 12? I enjoy reading about how much better base 12 is, but it bothers me that I have yet to find anyone who has set out to determine whether we could get there.

Transitioning to base 12 may in fact be the most challenging net present value problem ever devised. The costs are unknown, the benefits are difficult (if not impossible) to quantify, the time frame is unknown, and the discount rate--well, good luck.

The costs would occur mostly in the first few years. With two new digits, you would have to remake everything that displays arabic numerals (clocks, calendars, phones, calculators, computer keyboards, etc.). Computers would need to be reprogrammed. Everyone would have to be retaught, either through a sink-or-swim instantaneous transition or by learning to use base 10 and base 12 side-by-side for a few years, as some have advocated. Either way, the training costs would be phenomenal. Money would have to change, too. Given all the changes we would need to make (and their ripple effects) it wouldn't be difficult to imagine the costs being close to a year's worth of global GDP.

What of books that contain base 10? Would they be reprinted? What of history? Did Columbus sail the ocean blue in X44 (pronounced dek four four, or ten gross four dozen and four)? Was the Declaration of Independence signed in 1040? Do we change FDR's proclamation to read, "Yesterday, December 7, 1159, a date which will live in infamy..."? Will we all remember the tragic events of 9E (nine el), 11X9? These are ridiculous questions, but they would have to be dealt with if we were to attempt a transition.

How about the benefits of duodecimal? Forget that it would be easier to count in a duodecimal system--what does that mean? Well, if you and two of your friends went in together on something costing $100, you could pay for it with $40 each, rather than having to scrounge for 33 dollars and 33.333333333 cents. Area codes could contain 20% more phone numbers, which is important in this age of cell phones. And as far as all those little calculations that would become so much easier in base 12, for the sake of argument we can represent the value of that as $0.0001 (the incremental value of each measurement or calculation compared to base 10) times 50 (the number of calculations per day) times 365 (the number of days in a year) times 6.5 billion (the population of the earth), carried out every year until the end of time.

There are other benefits. We would probably be a much more musical society. Scales and chords can be tough to learn, and there are many people who have started to learn piano, or some other instrument, only to give up. But since an octave has twelve semitones, learning music in a base-12 world would be much more intuitive, and more people would be likely to stick with it. The fact that there are untold Lennons and McCartneys out there waiting for a number base that accomodates their lack of patience with music instruction has some elusive dollar value associated with it as well.

If you did a back-of-the-envelope calculation using these costs and benefits (even asssuming the most rosy scenarios), I can't see any way you would end up saying that base 12 makes economic sense. Which is why all the mathemeticians out there, when describing their base 12 utopia, should probably keep saying, "If man had been born with 6 fingers and 6 toes..." rather than "If we were to make the switch to base 12..."

Freakonomics

Freakonomics, the new book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, provides its readers a great set of tools in combatting our age of conventional wisdom and punditry. It's funny, subversive, and more than a little disturbing, but its lessons are quite useful.

People who have read James's Historical Baseball Abstract, Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation, and Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (which is probably nobody--I'm only two for three) will probably find that Freakonomics combines these three. Like Bill James, Steven Levitt has an uncanny knack for getting at the drivers of any phenomenon, and he is constantly drawing conclusions that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. (With James, these conclusions involve how to evaluate ballplayers; in Freakonomics they have to do with why crime rates rise and fall and how children become successful adults.) Like Axelrod, Levitt draws insightful conclusions about human behavior from piles of numbers. Like The Bell Curve, Freakonomics has occasionally wandered into the sensitive area of race and has been criticized for the methods underlying its conclusions.

Hardcore economists will probably be (and have been) disappointed by the book. The authors often leave aside the details of the methodology that produced their results, and they dwell on topics like correlation and causality and regression analysis, offering definitions that would be appropriate for people who are totally new to these concepts. Oh yeah, and the book's not even about economics.

I've found the book to be an excellent guide in avoiding some of the traps we all fall into. Though I'm familiar with correlation and causality, I (like most people) draw conclusions about causality when they are unwarranted, and Freakonomics helps train readers in thinking through causality more thoroughly. For instance: a child named Jake Williams will do better in life than a child named DeShawn Williams--does that mean that the name a child has matters in his development? Freakonomics shows that this is a pretty complex question.

Freakonomics is likely to follow in the proud footsteps of Good to Great and The Tipping Point, which is to say that it will be read in a lot of airport terminals by a lot men in blue shirts and sport coats for the next few months, only to be collecting dust on a bookshelf a year from now. Like any flavor of the month, you shouldn't use it as the basis for immediately changing the way you view the world, but neither should you forget its many great lessons when the next big thing rolls in.