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I was going to throw up something rather substantive this weekend, but instead I was occupied with something I might write about in the future. Or not. (It was boring, don't worry.) Two quick thoughts:

(1) I generally get annoyed when people cross subjective and objective types of reaction to art - actually, it pisses me off to an unreasonable degree. I especially find it annoying when people express a strong subjective opinion as objective fact, especially immediately after someone expresses exactly the opposite opinion. This bugs me most, because it seems most misplaced, with acting. If someone's just said that Joshua Jackson is really good on Fringe, and your experience is that he's an unwatchably bad actor, shouldn't you consider the fact that lots of people disagree? Shouldn't you say "Jackson just doesn't work for me, for reasons x, y, and z, and I'm somewhat perplexed that people think he's really good?" Why would you say "Joshua Jackson is wrecking this show with a horrible performance"?

I think I notice it here most because I often seem, on the one hand, less bothered by performances other people find bland or unconvincing, and on the other hand not especially impressed with performances other people thought were transcendent. This surely has to do with my own experience as an actor, which gave me lots of opinions (not necessarily any insight, though! - I wouldn't claim for a heartbeat to speak for other actors, or actors in general). So when everyone's bagging Anna Torv's performance in the pilot of Fringe, which I watched yesterday, I didn't feel one way or the other about it. And (uh oh!) when everyone was applauding Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, I wasn't especially impressed. I'm not going to be the "provocative" guy who claims that Ledger only got the acclaim because he died - I don't think that's true, except perhaps at the margins. And I thought the Joker character was very well portrayed/presented/whatever onscreen. It was very effective, and the thing that worked best about the movie for me.* But I felt a lot of it had to do with the writing and the costume and the makeup. Ledger's performance, in my opinion, was very very very good, and a lesser actor would have made a hash of it, but once you clear the hurdle of someone attempting to ham it up, I just don't think it was very hard. I don't think you needed to provide what the film required. There's multiple layers and complexities here - you could point out that much of the time a really great movie doesn't require Great Acting, and Great Acting in the way we understand it can seem kind of awkward and forced, which is how lots of people received, e.g., Sean Penn in Mystic River - but I just feel like whatever Ledger's considerable talents and potential, playing The Joker didn't sratch the surface. I have a suspicion that any of the other actors considered for the role would've evoked more or less a similar response. But all of that has to be filtered through my personal conviction that playing scary, creepy, and scarily creepily nuts isn't a particularly difficult thing to do, and that while Anthony Hopkins is enjoyable as Hannibal Lecter, he's just kind of dicking around artistically compared to something like Remains of the Day. (Which isn't a bad thing. Different movies have different requirements.)

*Which, incidentally, I liked more than the critics who hated it, but liked less than everyone who wrote hate mail to the critics who hated it; I thought it was inferior in conception and execution to Batman Begins. I have reasons for feeling that way, but they're incidental here and they don't add up to much that I would consider objective - well, I think my reasons are objective, I think it's a fact that the movie's plot doesn't work as well as its predecessor's, but whether that matters to you as much as it did to me is entirely up for grabs. The major reason I think The Godfather, Part II is better than The Godfather is because I think the sequel's story is infinitely superior in its construction - it's an artful structure, for one thing, and it manages to actually have a well-developed and coherent plot, as evidenced by one movie covering several months in some detail and the other one covering almost a decade in isolated scenes.

(2) I'm reading, and this will be entirely unsurprising, Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball. Two things that I find kind of jarring: (a) typos. Multiple types in the first couple hundred pages. It's really kind of perplexing to me. (b) the book makes basically no concession to the notion that someone unfamiliar with Simmons' column might be reading. If you start reading someone's column it becomes clear, if they have a particular personality or schtick, that you've stepped into an ongoing narrative, sort of like picking up a TV show in season 3. There are things that aren't really going to be explained for you any more. I would've guessed that in writing a gigantic (and so far, very good) book, Simmons might've gone a little out of his way to be more accessible to someone who didn't read his stuff every week. I guess I shouldn't have thought that, since he's said on his press tour that it's basically the same voice he uses for ESPN, but R-rated. (So far I'd call it a soft R. Mild language, drug use, suggestive situations, brief nudity.) So he makes a gimmick of providing fake explanations of his pop culture references for readers in 2025, but much of the ephemera about Simmons' style really would be inaccessible to someone reading in 2025, and some of it would be inaccessible now. Given that one of the delights of the book is that some of the facts he dredges up about the pre-24 hour news era of professional basketball are the sort of thing that require footnotes to say "Seriously, I'm not joking," which make plausible other wild facts which require him to footnote that he is, in fact, joking, it's jarring to find him making other jokes that a somewhat less savvy reader might not realize weren't true. The subject of the book is intended to be somewhat timeless, and in its substantive approach I'd say it is, but a lot of the flourishes sort of float by weirdly; if in a column Simmons talked about the debut of the Ralph Samson Face, even if he had to explain the Sampson reference (which he does in the book), the general schtick is understood for readers of his column previously familiar with the Faces of Derek Lowe, Peyton Manning, etc. I mean, you can sort of work out what's going on, I presume, but it doesn't flow as easily as it does for the experienced Simmons reader. Just think it's an interesting choice; I wonder if it'll affect the perception of the book years down the road. (One of Simmons' reasons for writing the book is that he quite correctly feels that, compared to baseball, there's an embarrassing dearth of quality basketball books, and his pick for the best ever, John Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, was out of print when I tried to buy it last year.)

Sometimes You Didn't Know What You Were Looking For

I'm very glad my RSS reader came pre-loaded with a feed to the Wired website. It's been very interesting and informative over the past few months.

This one, about what we're finding at the border of the solar system, is just cool.

This one is really up my Alley of Pet Subjects; it's about how new studies appear to demonstrate that succeeding or failing at activities like field goal kicking, or putting, or shooting a basketball, may directly revise your perception of the size of whatever it is that you're trying to put the relatively small object through. It's a cliche for basketball players who are shooting well (there's another line of inquiry that suggests there is no such thing as a "hot streak" in sports - I tend to come away from reading about the subject with the opinion that people are variously over-interpreting the data or the concept of a hot streak) to say that the hoop starts to look bigger; this is taken as a metaphor for confidence, but it may actually be marginally true! I'm ever fascinated by, and influenced by, information about how the brain mediates our experience of the world. I've remarked recently on several occasions, in several contexts, that I think I'm probably much more likely than the average person to distrust the evidence of my senses, and I have been ever since my 11th grade physics teacher had the class do an exercise which revealed our blind spot. After that, everything I've read or heard about how the brain is interpreting sensory data rather than just opening a window to it has stuck with me. I haven't dragged this back around to metaphysical issues (I was rather unfocused and directionless as a philosophy undergrad, and my nascent interests lay in the realm of ethical and aesthetic inquiry), but this all goes to some very basic Problems of Philosophy shit that I'd probably love to read about.

(Shooting a basketball is funny; you're far enough away that very minor divergences in technique can have disappointingly large effects on the trajectory of your shot, but any experienced player - or a novice with a cheesily inspirational coach - knows that the hoop is actually quite big, big enough to fit two basketballs simultaneously with negative space left over. This isn't as big a ratio as trying to throw a football through a tire swing, but shooting a basketball is easier than putting a spiral on a specific target, or at least that's what I think as someone who knows how to shoot a basketball but throws a wobbly pigskin.)

When the people around me at work became aware of the plight of Falcon, The Auspiciously Named Balloon Boy, I was in the middle of trying not to explode for work-related reasons. People started making funny word-noises, I turned around and saw a colleague was displaying on her computer some streaming video of a big puddle of mylar traveling to the left, and I said something like: "Whu?" I was briefed on what was then thought to be the situation (poor Falcon!) and then I made an exasperated noise and returned to my work, feeling at the moment as though the Balloon Boy was an enemy agent sent to try and provide auxiliary annoyments to hamper my productivity. I would like to think, though, that had I been in a newsroom while this story was being covered for HOURS, without the troubling distraction of new information to interrupt my mylar-obsessed musings, that I'd have started to wonder about some of this.

Put Me In, Coach

This is interesting.

I don't know if it'll be a positive or a negative or most likely a neutral factor for a Cowboys organization that's not exactly healthy at the moment, but compared to most reality TV shows out there it seems like it could be compelling TV without being embarrassing either to the viewer or the contestant. I also appreciate that despite the pitchline of using "football neophytes" they're actually, it seems, going to focus on guys who played college ball but for some reason or other didn't make it to the NFL, so there's some shot that the winner, having secured a slot in training camp, but actually be able to hope that he could possibly make the cut for the season roster (unlikely, though).

However, I do wonder at the selection of positions for the contestants. There'll be six wide receivers and six defensive backs (the guys who are more or less responsible for defending wide receivers). The offense/defense thing makes sense, and wide receiver/d-back is one of the more glamorous positions out there; an extremely casual fan like myself can certainly name more receivers than offensive linemen. But of various positions on the football field, wide receiver seems like one of the least likely ones at which you could find a body of guys with NFL level ability who haven't already got a cup of coffee in the league. Everybody in the NFL is surprisingly agile for their size, but NFL wide receivers are freakishly quick considering that the prototype right now is probably about 6'4", 215 lbs. Plus they can jump really high. I would think you'd be much more likely to be successful if you were looking for, say, tight ends, who are about the same height (trending taller) but need to weigh something like 250 lbs. An NFL tight end needs to be faster than the average guy his height and weight, but not to the explosively quick degree a wide receiver does; after the sheer bulk requirement, it seems like one of the less demanding positions in terms of the physical restrictions needed to be competitive. There's just a lot more big guys who can hustle quick and hit hard than there are NFL-quality greyhounds.

Actually, I'd expect that there's also a lot of NFL-caliber quarterbacks floating around. Pro teams are notoriously bad at being able to project who will or won't be a successful quarterback, and rely on a lot of physical data that's marginally relevant at best. I'll bet there are a lot of guys who are good enough to be a backup QB in the NFL but aren't because they're 5'10" or had a shitty Wonderlic* score or something like that.

* I took the Wonderlic, which is some sort of weird intelligence assessment test, when I signed up with a temp agency after graduating from college. I don't know what my results were, but maybe I should consider that they never called me for work evidence that I don't look too impressive on a Wonderlic. It was a weird test, but my best understanding is that it tries to measure decision making and pattern recognition under considerable time constraints. That seems like a valuable skill for QBs to have but there are a bunch of great ones who've famously done poorly on the test, and frankly I think the intellectual aspect of being a QB is oversold. Football in general is a pretty heady game considering all the hitting that goes on, but just because the QB has the ball in his hands doesn't mean he's got the most intellectually challenging job. Basically he needs to see the open man and recognize if a defensive back is trying to bait him into making a pass. The guys who actually score highest on the Wonderlic are offensive and defensive linemen, which is funny given stereotypes about football players, since they're by far the biggest men on the field. The adage is that the closer to the line of scrimmage you play the smarter you need to be (at least smart in the ways the Wonderlic cares about) and it makes sense, because the o- and d-lines are always shifting and trying to fool each other into misrecognizing what's going to happen once the play starts. The ability to instantly perceive what's actually going on and put your considerable bulk in the best position to thwart it is what makes a great line, and a great o-line can make mediocre "skill" players look like Pro Bowlers (and a great d-line can make them look like chumps).

And While I'm Out On The Internet

This is a better and more interesting article than you'd think from briefly considering the concept: "Hey, MMA is like gay porn!" I'd say the final twist on page three is kind of stupid and offputting but I don't actually have any knowledge of or insight into what gay porn is like. (Really!)

We Can Be Randomer

Stray thought from the other day:

There's all sort of little stories or little elements of stories or ideas floating around in the general category of "time travel could be a mechanism for creating wealth." As in, your knowledge of the historical monetary value of a stock or some collectible item, or the outcome of sporting events, can be used to continually and dependably realize huge profits on relatively small wagers. What inexplicably popped into my head (I wasn't even especially thinking about time travel) is that this basically only works one way. If I'm based in the timeline that, well, I'm actually based in (born in 1982, a young man in 2008), I can (setting aside all issues and paradoxes and what have yous stemming from the time travel itself) hope to travel into the future, find out the 2009 NBA champion, and put a lot of money on that and wait to collect. Or travel thirty years into the future, find out what stock was to the 2010s and 2020s what Apple and Microsoft were to the 1980s and 1990s, get in on the groundfloor and wait to reap the benefits.

What I can't hope to do is travel backwards from my base-timeline and win money by betting on the Mets to win the world series or buying a 1959 Gibson Les Paul and bringing it back to the present day when I could sell it for 100x the original list price (not adjusted for inflation, but still). I could do it on the very short term (go back and bet on the Celtics to win the 2008 championship, e.g.) except that would start raising paradoxical issues. But I really couldn't go back to 1986 or 1959 or whenever to make any money, because I'd have no way to pay for anything. Currency design keeps shifting and old designs are intentionally sifted out of the market. If I go back to 1959 no one would recognize my cash as legit legal tender; they'd think I was a particularly inept forger. Credit cards would be declined and checks, if they don't look too different, might be successful as long as I made sure to get out of town before the thing bounced - which raises an ethical wrinkle as well, since I'm now not only depriving someone else of the chance to honestly make the remunerative decision that I'm making with the cheat of hindsight, but then I'd also be actually stealing. The only way to work it would be to take something back in time to sell or pawn, but then you start having to do the math of what you could take back from 2008 that would be sellable in 1959 *and* which would allow you to turn a profit when flipping back and forth between FY1959 $ and FY2008 $. There are potential workarounds or you could do them in stages, but they'd all take a lot more work than just finding out that FutureTech stock is going to be worth $150 a share (in FY2008 $!) in 2020, and take away from the elegance of the idea.

(One possibility that just occured would be to do things in stages. Go back in time and get enough local money to hop around buying up comic books that will be valuable in the future, jump forward to the late 80s or early 90s and sell your small but highly desirable collection, roll that money into something else that'll escalate in value, and keep going. The problem with travelling back for massive sports bets or winning lottery tickets is that you need an excuse or mechanism for turning the money into cash - or buying something else again - before bringing it back to the present. Bank accounts get us back into the various paradoxes I was trying to avoid by examining the simple mechanisms of how you'd try to make money.)

So if you ever wondered "Hey, what's some of the stuff Medrawt thinks about that he'd randomly share if he were in my presence but since he's usually alone just vanishes into the ether?" well, there's an example. (Although I've actually already told someone this particular idea, but I'd also already decided to blog it when I did so.)

Other random thing: I flipped through the latest Popular Science in a Walgreens because the cover promised a piece on baseball pitching, which is a subject that fascinates me much more than baseball itself. The piece was a lame dud - it diagrammed the mechanics that go into throwing serious heat without getting into any of the business that mystifies and fascinates me. Yeah, it puts ridiculous stress on the tendons in your elbow, but why is the ability to do that 100 times every few days so rare, and why is the ability to do that with pinpoint accuracy so much rarer, and what exactly is going on in the arm of guys who can hack it in the Show vs. someone like me? I'm undersized for a prototypical modern MLB pitcher - guys in the Clemens/Schilling/Beckett mode, 6'5" hosses - but I'm a bigger guy than not, and if I'm not especially strong at the moment I certainly could be (will be?!?!) if I lifted weights more regularly. Forgetting accuracy, there's no way I could throw a baseball half as hard as an MLB pitcher; I doubt I could generate the sheer physical power to come close. (And that's half of what fascinates me about pitching; pretty much every other impressive sporting activity is, beyond a relatively low physical threshold, more about skill than raw physical potential [until you wrap around to the people who do physically impressive things while engaging in impressive sporting activity]. Anybody can hit a ground stroke as hard as a pro tennis player, but few can hit it that hard with the accuracy and spin of a pro; anybody in shape who's 6'3" should be able to dunk [and plenty who are shorter can as well] but running a pick and roll in the NBA requires ball control, court vision, and decision making-at-extreme-speed beyond most people who aren't already running pick and rolls in the NBA, not to mention the purely physical requirements.)

ANYWAY

the pitching "article" was a dud but there was this fascinating / frightening bit on research into the inhibition of the protein myostatin. Myostation itself acts as, I guess, a limiter on muscular growth; when it was inhibited in lab mice they doubled in muscle mass. Myostatin absence is also apparently a naturally occuring mutation in some cases - there's one human toddler, a few breeds of cow, and Whippets. The article in Popular Science did me the service of informing me about the existence of Bully Whippets. Go here (not the Popular Science article) if you want to read more, or just to look at what a Whippet - which normally has the physique of a dog deep in the throes of cocaine addiction - looks like when it's born with the body of a steroid abusing weight training Rottweiler. Further down the page there's also a picture of a spookily muscled cow. (Also, people in comments seem to think these photos are faked - or there's straightfaced joking I don't know about since I've never seen that site before - but basically the same photo of the same dog showed up in what I assume is still a reasonably respectable national publication, so I'm working under the presumption that there's credibility here.)

No one knows what happens to the development of a human brain with this condition - as the article linked to here points out, we traditionally think that the brain requires a reasonable amount of fat to develop, and if everything stays the same the kid in the article will wear his teeth to the bone trying to eat enough food for his metabolism to allow him to store any fat - but so far he seems like a healthy kid. (I mean, he's a freakishly "healthy" kid, but you know what I mean.) What I wonder about but amn't going to do the research on is why this doesn't appear to be a progressive condition; the muscles experience a massive development over what they normally do, but only to a point, unlike many instances of gigantism, where the individual in question keeps growing until what we'd consider a premature death.

Maybe I should travel to the future and check out what companies developed mysotatin inhibitors as a safe performance-enhancing supplement, and then come back and buy their stock.