I have moved my blog from wordpress over to ken.arneson.name. Update your blogrolls and RSS feeds accordingly.

Many reasons, but to sum it up in one word: simplicity.

To sum it up in a few more words: I have grown more and more dissatisfied with each of the available social media, each for its own quirky reasons. Moving stuff back to my own server will give me a more flexible canvas to paint things as I see fit.

I still don’t anticipate blogging regularly in the near term. But when I look out a little bit farther into the distance, when I clear more stuff off my plate, regular blogging seems more possible, if not more likely.

Continue…

The Mark Ellis trade market has suddenly picked up after couple of key broken bones to contenders. The Diamondbacks recently lost Orlando Hudson for the year, and today, Evan Longoria went down with essentially the same injury: a broken bone from a hit-by-pitch.

Ellis is hitting .231/.317/.361, which isn’t really any better than Orlando’s backup, Augie Ojeda (.257/.358/.324). So even with the defensive upgrade to Ellis, the Diamondbacks might not want to pay the price. Then again, Ellis would be going from one of the most difficult ballparks for hitting to one of the easiest, so his numbers would probably improve. Susan Slusser of the Chronicle adds her weight to this speculation.

This article suggests that the Rays will replace Longoria with Willy Aybar, who is hitting .225/.299/.379. Even with his bad season at the plate, Ellis would still be an improvement over Aybar at the plate, and is an improvement over anybody in the field. Now obviously Ellis isn’t a third baseman like Longoria, but current Rays 2B Akinori Iwamura played third base last year, so the Rays could switch him back. Although I’m not sure why the Rays wouldn’t just play Eric Hinske at third base over Aybar and never mind Ellis.

All of this assumes that Ellis has/will pass through waivers. There is no word on that.

Huston Street, unsurprisingly, did not pass through waivers.

If you were to ask me why I dwell among green mountains,
I should laugh silently; my soul is serene.
The peach blossom follows the moving water;
There is another heaven and earth beyond the world of men.

–Li Po (translated by Robert Payne)

I live in the suburbs in a mild climate. The average low in winter is only 13 degrees cooler than in summer. I drive on fully paved roads. I walk on fully paved sidewalks. The water I drink comes from faucets. The food I eat comes from supermarkets, wrapped in plastic and cardboard. Every tree I see has been deliberately planted there. The only wild animals I ever see, aside from ants and birds and squirrels, appear to me only on TV screens and computer monitors. If people around me get sick, they simply disappear into hospitals. I don’t have to deal with it.

When I leave my suburban environment to visit my cousins who live in the Swedish countryside, I am also struck how antiseptic my life seems in comparison.

Over there, we drive on dirt roads carved out of dense forests. We drink unprocessed milk, and eat potatoes freshly dug out of the ground. Summer bursts forth in June and vanishes in August, and while it lasts, the greens are more green, the reds are more red, the blues are more blue. We breathe a fresh summer air that is palpably different from the air of California. This air is not a year-round air; it smells of the intensity of life that knows its time is brief. The smell of a Swedish summer–I cannot capture it, or pass it on to anyone else who has not been there and smelled it themselves. It exists only in its own place, in its own moment. All this beauty is fleeting, and its temporary status makes it even more beautiful.

* * *

Is taking a photo or video of an event for later viewing worth it, even if it means more or less missing the event in realtime? What’s better, a lifetime of mediated viewing of my son’s first steps or a one-time in-person viewing?

—Jason Kottke, via Marginal Revolution

Continue…

The A’s are way too depressing to even think about, let alone write about. Let’s just forget them for awhile.

Instead, I want to share my favorite OMG! moment on today’s Internets, this blog entry from David Byrne:

Here is a photo from a NY Times article on a Northern California company that specializes in games and content for mobile phones. The CEO and founder of the company, Trip Hawkins (is that a movie name or what?), stands center. Looks like he spends time at the gym — and at personal grooming.

The guys slouched around him — overweight, balding slobs — are the guys who, I presume, do the grunt work in the company. If ever there was an image of animal social hierarchy this is it.

That, my friends, is Silicon Valley in a perfect nutshell. There’s a set of Alpha Males, driving around in shiny new BMWs, wearing expensive designer “casual” clothes, discussing all their latest and greatest deals, bragging about their latest round of golf, perfecting their preening to impress anyone who will listen. Then you have a set of out-of-shape dudes in t-shirts and flip-flops who don’t have time to play golf, and wouldn’t care to if they did, because they’re too busy, you know, makin’ stuff. The Venn diagrams of these two sets barely touch.

I shoulda learned to play the guitar. I shoulda learned to play them drums. Money for nothing and the chicks for free.

I remember one time I was wearing a 49ers t-shirt with a picture of Ronnie Lott on it. I walked into the CEO’s office (in one of those rare moments of Venn diagram intersections), and I think the words that came out of his mouth were, “Oh, Ronnie Lott! I played 18 holes with him yesterday,” but the words I heard him say in my brain were, “I am an alpha male. I hang out with alpha males. You, however, can only manage to wear the image of an alpha male. Therefore, you are not an alpha male.”

When I get frustrated about the A’s, and I don’t feel like blogging about them, I think about that moment. Athletes are the alpha males of our popular culture; their status-to-actual-societal-value ratio is way out of proportion. So why the hell do I keep feeding their egos by doing exactly what they want me to do, and obsess about their success?

I really ought to have more dignity than this. I should be an alpha male! I should be the obsessee, not the obsesser! But it’ll probably never happen. I’m such a beta male, it’s pathetic. And probably, if you’re reading this, so are you.

I have written a lot of stuff on the web. When you post stuff, you can expect a certain amount of feedback. And of all the things I have written on the web, the one single thing I have received the most grief about is this:

Picking the Detroit Tigers to win the AL Central.

I have had people, including my own relatives, question both my sanity and my sobriety. I was also called “Booji-Boy with a fork”, which may or may not be a compliment, I’m not sure. Look it up, and you tell me.

In response to these responses, let me respond, while I can, with the current standings in the AL Central:

1. Detroit (2-0)
2. Cleveland (2-1)
3. Minnesota (1-1)
4. Chicago (1-2)
5. Kansas City (0-2)

Do I need to tell you that this is the exact order I predicted for the AL Central standings? Yes, I do. This is the exact order I predicted for the AL Central standings.

So there. :P Phhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhfffffffffffffffffffft!!!!!

Last night’s game between the A’s and the Angels was baseball nirvana.

It was exactly the kind of game I love. Pennant race, division rivals, team aces (Bartolo Colon and Barry Zito) matching zeros head-to-head, crisp defense, extra innings, and the game decided by a small break off a top-notch reliever. (Well, perhaps not so small: Bobby Kielty hit a monster home run off a Frankie Rodriguez fastball.)

For a regular season game in August, it doesn’t get any better than that.

I had speculated that my desire to win might make this series too too tense to take. But as the game progressed, desire dissolved into appreciation. I became consumed by the sheer aesthetic joy of watching a game well played.

I’m not sure why. Games like this, with so much impact on a pennant race, usually have me shouting things at the TV, and throwing things at the sofa. But perhaps, spiritually, it was exactly the attitude I needed at this moment in my life.

It was a lesson in the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism: desire is the cause of suffering. By about the fourth inning or so, I had let go of the desire to win. The game became bliss.

When Robb Quinlan hit the home run to tie the game in the eighth, it did not bother me. Everything was exactly as it should be.

I’m sure this moment of spiritual ‘enlightenment’ is temporary. It is comforting to know that this mental state is available to me when I need it. But I am not a monk trying to follow The Path. When my psyche is ready to handle the suffering, I’ll be back to my old ways, wanting to win. I have no desire to live without desire.

* * *

Or perhaps this ‘zen’ feeling isn’t really a religious experience at all; perhaps it’s just brain chemicals. In Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson explains how his wife had a very calm, almost indifferent, reaction to September 11, because she was breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding, and other life experiences that involve intense emotional attachment, such as childbirth and sexual climax, causes a chemical called oxytocin to be released in the bloodstream. Oxytocin puts you in a calm and nurturing mood. It’s an alternative survival solution to the fight-or-flight stress responses: tend-and-befriend. It’s the chemical of social bonding, parent-child bonding in particular.

Perhaps because I’ve spent the last five days intensely tending to my daughter’s illness, my bloodstream is flooded with more oxytocin than usual. The testosterone-driven fight-or-flight response I normally have to the stress of a baseball game got replaced by a completely different and opposite response.

* * *

Hmm…maybe there’s Mel Gibson movie to be made from this. I’ll start working on the screenplay right away.

Brown is not my color, but I’m sure I’ll find some excuse to wear the Barry Zito necktie I got at the A’s-Phils game on Father’s Day. For a brown tie, it looks pretty good.

* * *

To get the tie, I had to arrive pretty early, so I got a chance to watch the Phillies take batting practice. It kinda threw me to look out on the field and see the Phillies wearing blue uniforms. Thankfully, they changed to gray for the game.

If I had judged by batting practice, I would have thought that Jason Michaels was the Phillies best hitter. (Although I arrived too late to see Abreu and Thome.) Michaels was hitting line drives all over the yard. That continued into the game, as Michaels hit a bases loaded, 3-2 get-me-over fastball for a line drive 2-RBI double in the first inning. After that, the A’s pitchers started feeding Michaels off-speed slop instead of batting-practice fastballs, and they held him in check.

The game played out like a vintage 2000-04 A’s victory: the A’s pitcher (Joe Blanton) kept the game close; the A’s made the opposing starter (Jon Lieber) tire early (a sixth-inning rally) by making him throw a lot of pitches, got a big hit (by Adam Melhuse) against the middle relief (Ryan Madson), and then finished it off with a solid bullpen performance (Justin Duchscherer, filling in for the injured Huston Street).

* * *

After the game, the A’s let dads run the bases with their kids, so I took a home run trot around the bases, just to see what it was like. For some reason, the Coliseum looks an awful a lot smaller from second base than it does from the second deck.

* * *

In Swedish, the word “haren” means “the rabbit”. With a name like that, Dan Haren should be a speedy leadoff type instead of a pitcher. But I like the sound of “Danny The Rabbit”. Makes him sound like a gangster.

* * *

Haren avoided the big inning blues again last night, and won his fourth straight start.

Haren pitched aggressively all game, and didn’t start to nibble when he got into jams. I was most impressed with his ability to jam Richie Sexson with inside fastballs. He got Sexson to pop out three times with the same pitch. Heck, if the plan works, stick with it.

* * *

Haren had a little help from Nick Swisher, who robbed Jeremy Reed of a home run with a leaping catch above the yellow line. Swisher also had a couple of big hits, thanks to some stubbornness by Aaron Sele.

Swisher hasn’t shown yet that he can hit major league breaking pitches. Sele’s game plan against Swisher was apparently to get ahead in the count with off-speed stuff, and get him out with a well-placed fastball. Sele had three opportunities to strike out Swisher with his curveball, but gave him something straight each time, and Swisher took advantage twice.

In Swisher’s first AB, Sele had Swisher looking foolish with two consecutive curveballs, but Sele inexplicably followed that up with something straight and out over the plate, which Swisher hit for an RBI double to left-center. Then in his next AB, Sele tried to sneak a fastball past Swisher on a 3-2 pitch, and Swisher took him deep.

Heck, if the plan doesn’t work, stick with it anyway.

In Swisher’s third AB, with two outs and two runners on base, Sele again got two strikes on Swisher with curveballs, and again followed it up with a fastball. This time, Sele got his way, though, and Swisher grounded out to second.

* * *

Mark Kotsay hit a three-run homer in the eighth to ice the game. Not quite sure why Mike Hargrove left Jeff Nelson in to face Kotsay with lefty Matt Thornton ready in the bullpen, but I’ll take it, thank you very much.

Kotsay has been battling some back troubles recently, putting him into an 0-for-16 slump, dropping his average and OBP about 30 points. So the homer was a nice way to bust out.

I was a bit surprised by the reaction by some Yankee fans to the Peter Gammons Kotsay-to-the-Yanks trade rumor. The commenters who looked at his current numbers and decided they didn’t want him are quite mistaken. Kotsay is exactly what the Yankees need right now, and if they got him without breaking up their current roster, I think they’d win the division. His defense would fill their biggest hole, and his approach at the plate is very much in the style of the 1996-2000 champions. He’s a perfect fit. But if I’m Billy Beane, I’m doing everything I can to keep him from exercising his right to become a free agent at the end of the year, and to keep him around as long as possible. I love the guy. I’m only giving up Kotsay if it kills me.

* * *

Rich Harden returns to the mound tonight, meaning Ryan Glynn probably goes back to Sacramento. It also means the A’s are finally starting to look like the team we were hoping for at the beginning of the year. The A’s are 13-7 since Bobby Crosby came off the DL.

Now, get Harden and Street back on the mound, and let’s have some fun!

There’s a Star Trek: TNG episode where the Good Guys come up with a paradoxical logic puzzle that is designed to drown the Borg Collective in a massive feedback loop, trapping the Bad Guys in a neverending attempt to solve an unsolvable puzzle. Paralysis by analysis, if you will.

I wanted to respond to Brandon Chizum’s article comparing baseball and wine. What Brandon is trying to describe is the aesthetic experience: the sensation we get when we experience a pleasurable work of art, and how this sensation can be common across separate art forms. I started to try to describe this sensation scientifically, as a function of the brain. But I didn’t realize that Brandon’s article was, for me, a Borg Logic Trap.

My response kept growing and growing until it was no longer a short blog entry, but had evolved into some kind of horrific five-volume Manifesto Of All Things Ken, with no end in sight.

So I gave up. But I just wanted to say that there’s nothing particularly unique about the link between baseball and wine. You could find similar links between Skateboarding & Flower Arranging. Or Sumo Wrestling & Opera Singing. Or Marilyn Monroe & Manny Ramirez. Or Greg Maddux & Gilgamesh. Or…

This is your brain. This is your brain on fire. Stop, drop and roll.

For you see, art is like a program fed into an automata, and the automata goes into a certain state when…

Honey, where’s the remote? Oh, never mind, I found it. Click.

So then, the information “Oakland cuts Eric Karros”, is input into my brain, and my brain outputs “Not Surprised”. First of all, Karros didn’t hit. Duh. But there’s also the fact that Oakland first basemen have a rather unique requirement in their job descriptions: with all that foul territory, they need to be able to run down foul popups. Scott Hatteberg is pretty darn good at it. Karros, on the other hand, looked like a horse trying to swim through quicksand.

BLUB BLUB BLUB BLUB BLUB. BLORP.

So Will invited me, Ken, to join this blog, and I asked Will what he expected from me, and Will said “Write whatever you want Ken” and I thought “OK, simple enough, I can do that.” But then Will introduced me. It started off nice:

“He’s full of heart (sure) and humbug (definitely), intelligence (perhaps) and vinegar.”

Vinegar? I’m full of vinegar? Now I’m confused. What does that mean? If Will is expecting vinegar out of me, I’d better go do some research and find a definition:

Vinegar can be made from any fruit, or from any material containing sugar. [It is produced by] fermentation of natural sugars to alcohol and then secondary fermentation to vinegar.

Apparently, Will expects me to take something sweet, like baseball, and make it rot–twice.

My role here isn’t discourse; it’s decomposition.

—

So now I’m feeling a little déjà vu.

Ten years ago, I was working for a struggling database company called Ingres when Computer Associates bought us out. CA planned to lay off most of the company. The other database companies started recruiting Ingres employees like mad. Sybase hired an airplane to circle our building with a recruiting banner. Oracle held a special day just for us, and Larry Ellison himself showed up to encourage us to join his team.

Ellison was so charismatic that if he had produced a contract right then and there for me to sign I would have signed it, no questions asked. (Charisma wears off; I later declined an Oracle offer.)

Although I was dazzled by Ellison’s charm, I can only remember one thing he said. When asked what he thought about CA, Ellison paused, then said, “Well, every ecosystem needs its scavengers.”

An odd thing to say, really, considering that Oracle itself was scavenging for new employees out of the remains of CA’s kill. But heck, Oracle is a fabulously successful company. CA eats pond scum, and you are what you eat, but they’re also a fabulously successful company. Decomposition is good business.

—

Businesses are born, they merge, and they die. Blogs are born, they merge, and they die. If the baseball blog ecosystem needs a scavenger to feed off the rot, to pick upon the bones of last week’s news, I am happy to serve it. Being recruited, being wanted, being needed, whether for software or for blogging, is a wonderful feeling, even if I may not deserve it.

So thank you, Mr. Carroll, for the seat
inside your friendly bar across the street.

And Mike Crudale.

This is the sixth in a series of six articles.
Preview. 1. A New Science. 2. A Brain Lesson. 3. Hypothesis. 4. Some Explaining to Do. 5. A Lifetime of Art.

Beyond just explaining observed art phenomena, I imagine that this hypothesis could be used to make the creation and criticism of art more efficient.

The creation of art is a feedback loop between Android Brain and Animal Brain. Android Brain works through the steps of creating a work of art. The steps involve speaking in the language that Animal Brain understands: novelty, patterns, emotions, satisfactions and alarms. Animal Brain gives the artist feedback about the quality of the artwork, about whether new nondeclarative memories are being formed by it. Based on that feedback, the artist, in Android Brain mode, then alters the work.

Many artists just trust their own Animal Brain feedback and follow that. For those who are successful doing that, good for them. Don’t change a thing. But I think many artists would probably see the quality of their work improve if they had some good guidelines for Android Brain to follow.

Good rules can help artists be more aware of the choices they have and tradeoffs they make. Android Brain is built for step-by-step instructions. It’s methodical. There are already many good instruction books for artists to follow, but I think we can use the language of memory formation to make our explanations more precise.

Such explanations would not only be useful for pure artists, but also for advertisers and producers of goods whose measures of success are not counting new memories, but counting sales. As Virginia Postrel points out in her book The Substance of Style, aesthetic quality is becoming an important part of our economy.

A similar feedback loop pertains to art critics, too. Animal Brain is the source of our reactions. Android Brain has facts and rules about how art should work. It’s the source of our explanations. A good critic will move back and forth between Animal Brain and Android Brain, testing what their rules tell them against what their actual reactions are. If their reactions differ from their rules, they’ll adjust their rules. The goal of art criticism is to explain to Android Brain what’s going on in Animal Brain.

Some bad critics favor one system or the other. A bad Animal Brain critic will have a reaction and try to explain it without using any logic at all: I opine, therefore I’m right. That’s not helping Android Brain, which wants logic. A bad Android Brain critic will have rules about what art “should” be, and analyze according to those rules. But if you’re not testing the rules for accuracy against Animal Brain, you’re likely to have ineffective rules.

I can imagine people reacting negatively to thinking of art as a form of engineering. Even to me, it feels like the magic of it might be diminished. But because of that inaccessible data inside of our Animal Brain, I think art will always retain a certain mystery. The conversation between Animal Brain and Android Brain need never end.

To work with things is not hubris
when building the association beyond words;
denser and denser the pattern becomes–
being carried along is not enough.

Take your well-disciplined strengths
and stretch them between two
opposing poles. Because inside human beings
is where God learns.

  –Rainer Maria Rilke

   from Just as the Winged Energy of Delight
   translated by Robert Bly
   in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

And finally: A summary in haiku form

Do baseball statistics need better marketing? I don’t know. Do foul poles need better engineering? Does infield dirt need better tech support?

Bah! I hate February.

Months and months of winter. Indoors, confinement. Outdoors, concealment, under layers of jackets and ski hats and scarves. Long dark nights. Clouds, rain, snow and cold.

Every year from mid-February through early March, I suffer the symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. My emotions bubble to the surface, ready to pop at the slightest touch. I get extremely irritable. I get angry for almost no reason. Setbacks make me depressed. Sometimes I even have panic attacks.

The same brain chemistry that makes you sleepy at night and alert in daylight causes SAD. A long winter with little sunlight builds up a light deficit in my brain. In February, the debt becomes due. My mind goes into a haze.

It’s not so bad here in America. In Sweden, where I’ve spent three winters of my life, the symptoms are far worse. That far north, the sun only spends a few hours each day in the sky. It peeks up over the horizon and drops right back down again. It provides no warmth. It’s just a little yellow dot off in the distance.

In the fogs of February, the sun is an abstraction. Joy is an abstraction. We can talk about them, but they are not real to me. The only thing that seems clear is that full control of your thoughts and feelings is an illusion.

The most religious experience I’ve ever had was after my first winter in Sweden. One day in late March, I walked outside. The temperature was probably about 10 degrees C (50 degrees F). The snow was melting all around. I looked up, and was stunned. I could actually feel the warmth of the sun on my face.

A true miracle.

At some point during the long Swedish winter, I had ceased to believe in the sun. I had become a solar atheist. But with a single, real sensation, I was born again. For several minutes, I just stood there, absorbing the warm rays like a dry sponge sucks up water. Hallelujah!

Back in the USA, it’s baseball that February transforms into abstraction. There are no games, no trades, no real baseball experiences. Baseball talk just feels hollow, without substance. You can try to touch it, but like fog, you can’t grab it. It’s not there. Everything seems absurd, like so much infield dirt tech support.

But in March, the first game I hear on the radio from spring training is my salvation. The rhythm of the broadcast, the sounds of the ballpark, the unfolding drama of the game: my senses bathe in the return of real baseball. When I feel baseball again, I feel my true self returning with it.

So it’s mid-February now. Today, we are babysitting my wife’s eight-year-old nephew and five-month-old niece, in addition to our own two girls, ages 6 and 3. My wife is taking care of the baby; I’m trying to handle the other three kids.

The nephew is always hungry. No sooner do you feed him one thing, than he’s asking what’s next. Usually, I find it amusing. Today, I find it annoying.

My wife put on a John Denver CD to sing to the baby. I start making lunch. The baby starts crying. I am reminded how absolutely impossible it is to ignore a crying baby. Nature’s perfect annoyance. My wife gives her a bottle. Things quiet down again, for the moment.

So John Denver sings. I cook. And a strange sensation comes over me. I am being profoundly moved by the music. A deep, emotional reaction. To John Denver.

That just ain’t right.

At that moment, I realized that my February blues had set in.

The baby starts crying again. Bottle won’t help this time. Can’t figure out what’s wrong. My three-year-old picks this moment to become jealous of the attention her mother is giving someone else’s baby, and starts a temper tantrum. “I want to throw all the food in the world on the floor! I want to break every window everywhere!”

I want to do something, anything, to make them stop crying.

The baby suddenly reveals what’s wrong. She also reveals she is ready for a larger diaper size. End temper tantrum: three year olds find messy diapers fascinating. Relief.

The stereo switches CDs: Carole King, Tapestry. I finish cooking lunch, and put it on the table for the kids. I go back to the kitchen, sit down, put my head in my hands, and breathe a deep heavy sigh. Three weeks to go.

Carole King sings:

Snow is cold, and rain is wet.
Chills my soul right to the marrow.

I won’t be happy till I see you alone again.
Till I’m home again and feeling right.

I wanna be home again and feeling right.

Nephew cleans off his plate and asks for more. He impatiently tries to con the girls into giving him some of their food. The girls respond by trying to annoy him. They start bickering.

I have a strong urge to put a stop to it. Instead, I put a stop to myself. I don’t need to control everything that’s going on. I can’t control everything. Control is an illusion. At some point, insisting on it is counterproductive. Let it go. Let the kids play.

Oh, and the original question: do baseball statistics need better marketing? My opinion: there are only 30 people in the world, one for each team, who need good baseball statistics. To the rest of us, statistics are an illusion: a trick that somehow we can control the fates of our favorite teams. We can’t.

The illusion is nice, but at some point, you’re better off just stepping back and taking a deep breath. Let the kids play.

I think that young A.J. Burnett
Has said something he might regret.
The feeding hand
If bit, gets you canned,
Just go ask Peter Arnett.