Archive for May, 2009
Matt Wieters got his first major-league hit tonight, a stand-up triple. I wondered: was he the first catcher ever to have a triple as his first hit in the bigs? This is the kind of question that the amazing Baseball Reference Play Index is made to answer, and the answer is nope: in fact, Yorvit [...]
Filed under: baseball, orioles | 2 Comments
Tags: baseball-reference, catchers, jeremy guthrie, matt wieters, triples, wieters, yorvit torrealba
One reason dilatation was on my mind was thanks to a very interesting recent paper by Thomas Koberda, a Ph.D. student of Curt McMullen at Harvard. Recall from the previous post that if f is a pseudo-Anosov mapping class on a surface Σ, there is an invariant λ of f called the dilatation, which measures the [...]
Filed under: math | 2 Comments
Tags: braid group, Burau, dilatation, Koberda, mapping class group, McMullen, nilpotent, pseudo-Anosov, thurston, topology
R.I.P. Kipp’s
Kipp’s Down Home Cookin’, my dependable local Southern take-out, is a recession victim. CJ referred to this place as “the cornbread restaurant” and thought theirs was the best in town; I can’t disagree. Also notable for mac and cheese, fried chicken, and creamed spinach, the last of which achieved one of my most exalted food [...]
Filed under: food, madison | 4 Comments
Tags: cornbread, creamed spinach, kipp's, recession
Baseball like it oughta be
I’m jealous that Tom and Mack were at OP@CY in person today to to see the Orioles’ crazy comeback victory, which ended when Nolan Reimold socked a three-run homer in the 11th for the gwaribbie. I was going to post that he was already the best Nolan in Oriole history, but when I looked it [...]
Filed under: baseball, cj, madison, orioles | 3 Comments
Tags: gay marriage, joe nolan, mallards, nolan reimold, reimold, sweden, wisconsin
Not the Blue Jays — and I knew it before the Orioles beat them twice in a row. They’ve been leading the division all season; but half their games have been against the woeful Central, while the other good teams in the East have been beating up on each other. If you keep their winning [...]
Filed under: bad statistics, baseball, orioles | 3 Comments
Tags: blue jays, matt wieters, wieters, yankees
Kottke has a scan of some correspondence between Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace: a DDL->DFW letter from 1997 and a DFW -> DDL from 1992. This from DeLillo is striking: Once, probably, I used to think that vagueness was a loftier kind of poetry, truer to the depths of consciousness, and maybe when I [...]
Filed under: books, math, writing | 4 Comments
Tags: david foster wallace, dfw, don delillo, end zone, infinite jest
The entropy of Frobenius
Since Thurston, we know that among the diffeomorphisms of surfaces the most interesting ones are the pseudo-Anosov diffeomorphisms; these preserve two transverse folations on the surface, stretching one and contracting the other by the same factor. The factor, usually denoted , is called the dilatation of the diffeomorphism and its logarithm is called the entropy. [...]
Filed under: math | Leave a Comment
Tags: curves, dilatation, frobenius, galois, idle speculation, thurston, topology
In which CJ is goth
CJ was on the phone with my mom for about fifteen minutes today. They were talking about my late grandfather, my mom’s dad, from whom CJ takes his middle name. I wasn’t sure how much CJ had understood, so after the conversation I asked him what he and his grandma had been talking about. “About [...]
Filed under: cj, family, offhand | Leave a Comment
Tags: death, goth
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