Unanimity

Mariano Rivera was elected to the Hall of Fame, the first player ever to appear on every single ballot. Why has this never happened? Because there are a lot of ballots and thus a lot of opportunities for glitchy idiosyncrasy. In 2007, eight voters left Cal Ripken, Jr. off. What possible justification could there be? Paul Ladewski of Chicago’s Daily Southtown was one of the eight. He turned in a blank ballot that year. He said he wouldn’t vote for anyone tainted by playing during the “Steroids Era.” In 2010, he voted for Roberto Alomar.

Acclimatization

Walking to the gym today I was thinking, 10 degrees Fahrenheit — sure, it’s cold out, but when I lived back east I would have considered this brutally, unfairly cold. Now it’s an unexceptional level of cold, easily managed by putting on gloves and a hat.

Then I got to the gym and looked at my phone and it was actually -3.

Small baseball triangles

This all started when CJ asked which three baseball stadiums formed the smallest triangle.  And we agreed it had to be the Brewers, the White Sox, and the Cubs, because Milwaukee and Chicago are really close together.

But it seems like cheating to use two teams in the same city.  The most elegant way to forbid that is to ask the question one league at a time.  Which three American League parks form the smallest triangle?  And what about the National League?

First of all, what does “smallest” mean?  There are lots of choices, but (perhaps inspired by the summer we played a lot of Ingress) we asked for the triangle with the smallest area.  Which means you don’t just want the parks to be close together, you want them to be almost collinear!

I asked on Twitter and got lots of proposed answers.  But it wasn’t obvious to me which, if any, were right, so I worked it out myself!  Seamheads has the longitude and latitude of every major league ballpark past and present in a nice .csv file.  How do you compute the area of a spherical triangle given longitudes and latitudes?  You probably already know that the area is given by the excess over pi of the sum of the angles.  But then you gotta look up a formula for the angles.  Or another way:  Distance on the sphere is standard, and then it turns out that there’s a spherical Heron formula for the area of a spherical triangle given its edgelengths!  I guess it’s clear there’s some formula like that, but it’s cool how Heron-like it looks.  Fifteen lines of Python and you’re ready to go!

So what are the answers?

We were right that Brewers-White Sox-Cubs form the smallest major league triangle.  And the smallest American League triangle is not so surprising:  Red Sox, Yankees, Orioles, forming a shortish line up the Eastern Seaboard.  But for the National League, the smallest triangle isn’t what you might expect!  A good guess, following what happened in the AL, is Mets-Phillies-Nationals.  And that’s actually the second-smallest.  But the smallest National League triangle is formed by the Phillies, the Nationals, and the Atlanta Braves!  Here’s a piece the geodesic path from SunTrust Park in Atlanta to Citizen’s Bank Park in Philly, courtesy of GPSVisualizer:

Not only does it go right through DC, it passes about a mile and a half from Nationals Park!

Another fun surprise is the second-smallest major league triangle:  you’d think it would be another triangle with two teams in the same city, but no!  It’s Baltimore-Cincinnati-St. Louis.  Here’s the geodesic path from Oriole Park at Camden Yards to Busch Stadium:

And here’s a closeup:

The geodesic path runs through the Ohio River, about 300m from the uppermost bleachers at Great American Ball Park.  Wow!

Now here’s a question:  should we find it surprising that the smallest triangles involve teams that are pretty far from each other?  If points are placed at random in a circle (which baseball teams are definitely not) do we expect the smallest-area triangles to have small diameter, or do we expect them to be long and skinny?  It’s the latter!  See this paper: “On Smallest Triangles,” by Grimmet and Janson.  Put down n points at random in the unit circle; the smallest-area triangle will typically have area on order 1/n^3, but will have diameter on order 1.  Should that have been what I expected?

PS:  the largest-area major league triangle is Boston-Miami-SF.  Until MLB expands to Mexico City, that is!

Is the Dedekind sum really a function on SL_2?

Here’s an idle thought I wanted to record before I forgot it.

The Dedekind sum comes up in a bunch of disparate places; it’s how you keep track of the way half-integral weight forms like the eta function aka discriminant to the one-twelfth transforms under SL_2, it shows up in the topology of modular knots, the alternating sum of continued fraction coefficients, etc.  It has a weird definition which I find it hard to get a feel for.  The Dedekind sum also satsfies Rademacher reciprocity:

If that right-hand side looks familiar, it’s because it’s the very same cubic form whose vanishing defines the Markoff numbers!  Here’s a nice way to interpret it.  Suppose A,B,C are matrices with ABC = 1 and

(1/3)Tr A = a

(1/3)Tr B = b

(1/3)Tr C = c

(Why 1/3?  See this post from last month.)

Then

(see e.g. this paper of Bowditch.)

The well-known invariance of the Markoff form under moves like (a,b,c) -> (a,b,ab-c) now “lifts” to the fact that (the conjugacy class of) [A,B] is unchanged by the action of the mapping class group Gamma(0,4) on the set of triples (A,B,C) with ABC=1.

The Dedekind sum can be thought of as a function on such triples:

D(A,B,C) = D((1/3)Tr A, (1/3) Tr B; (1/3) Tr C).

Is there an alternate definition or characterization of D(A,B,C) which makes Rademacher reciprocity

more manifest?

Balonely, “Stories”

Oh and while we’re talking yelpy indie from outside the coastal capitals, I don’t think I mentioned how much I’m into “Stories,” by Spokane band Balonely:

 

The band is the guy you see playing guitar and his mom, who plays bass (seen in the video emerging from behind the bar.)  It totally seems reasonable to ask “how can young people playing electric guitar and singing about Stuff In Their Life still be interesting after all these years” but I’m still interested!  I love the way this kid duckwalks.  I love the way he lays out “Okay.  Uh huh” like a young Jonathan Richman.  I love the way he delivers “You know what they say, they say…”  Here’s Balonely on Bandcamp.  Whole record is good.  Hear also:  “Shape.”

Quad Cities (The Multiple Cat, pizza)

Once I bought a used CD because the name of the band was The Multiple Cat and the name of the album was “Territory” Shall Mean The Universe and just how could you not?  I was rewarded.  The Multiple Cat was a 1990s band in the Quad Cities (Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa, Rock Island and Moline in Illinois, headquarters of John Deere and hometown of Lara Flynn Boyle.)  I’ve never been there but I have listened to this album a lot. It is not quite as philosophical as the name of the band (Schroedinger?) and the name of the album (Wittgenstein?) suggest.  But very richly weird.  My top track:  North? which starts out as a kind of burbly, groovy chat-song and then about two and a half minutes in blossoms out into, I don’t know what, major-key chippy synths start to poke in, there’s a vocal line (“Saaaaay to me”) which I think must be sampled, it becomes majestic.  Hear also: My Year As a Girl, which is not about trans stuff as far as I can tell, but is, whatever it’s about, a real indie-disco stomper from years before Franz Ferdinand was everywhere.

Anyway, The Multiple Cat faded out and songwriter Pat Stolley got involved running Daytrotter.  But now it turns out they’re back!  Have been for a few years.  Their comeback record is called The Return Of.  Not The Return of the Multiple Cat, that would be too obvious, just The Return Of.  Highlight track:  “Vampire Bats, Mall Rats.”

In other Quad Cities news, their microregional pizza sounds pretty great.  On the other hand, the last microregional pizza I made a point of investigating, Old Forge pizza in Northeastern Pennsylvania, didn’t blow me away.

2018: The year of reading books that are older than me

I’ve started a program of picking a constraint every year and striving to make half the books I read satisfy that constraint.  This year it was to read books that came out before my own copyright date, 1971.  Here’s the 2018 reading list, with links on books I blogged about:

• 20 Dec 2018: Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
• 3 Dec 2018:  Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays, trans.) (161-180)
• 24 Nov 2018:  The Word Pretty, by Elisa Gabbert.
• 15 Nov 2018:  The Fiancée, and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov (Ronald Wilks, trans.) (1904)
• 19 Oct 2018:  Wieland, by Charles Brockden Brown (1798)
• 7 Oct 2018:  Bleak House, by Charles Dickens (1852-53)
• 6 Oct 2018:  Mr. Eternity, by Aaron Thier.
• 15 Sep 2018:  Mind and Matter, by John Urschel and Louisa Thomas.
• 6 Sep 2018:  A Spy In Time, by Imraan Coovadia.
• 1 Sep 2018:  Cat Country (貓城記), by Lao She (William Lyell, trans.) (1932)
• 10 Aug 2018:  Maigret and the Headless Corpse, by Georges Simenon (Howard Curtis, trans.) (1955)
• 31 Jul 2018:  Before The Golden Age:  A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s (Isaac Asimov, ed.)
• 26 Jun 2018:  Less, by Andrew Sean Greer.
• 20 May 2018: “The Young Newcomer in the Organization Department,” by Wang Ming (1956)
• 10 May 2018:  The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy (1958)
• 1 Apr 2018:  Indoctrinaire, by Christopher Priest (1970)
• 28 Mar 2018:  Riots (Problems of American Society series), Anita Monte and Gerald Leinwand, eds. (1970)
• 14 Mar 2018:  The Surprising Place, by Malinda McCollum.
• 9 Mar 2018:  99 Variations on a Proof, by Philip Ording.
• 18 Feb 2018:  How To Leave, by Erin Clune.
• 10 Feb 2018:  The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman.
• 27 Jan 2018:  Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1963)
• 20 Jan 2018:  The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard (1962)
• 19 Jan 2018: Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip 1895-1915 (Peter Maresca, ed.)
• 10 Jan 2018:  The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman.
• 4 Jan 2018:  Why Men Fail, Morris Fishbein and William White, eds. (1928) (second post)

Society is Nix and Before the Golden Age are slight cheats: both books came out after 1971, but they anthologize material written well before, so I decided they counted.

One of my goals in doing these theme years is the idea that a whole year spent in a part of the bibliosphere I mostly skip will broaden my reading habits permanently.  Maybe?  I feel like this list has more translated works than I used to typically read in a year, and maybe I can credit the 2016 theme.  But only 5 of these 25 books are by women, so my 2015 theme is maybe not doing its work.

Other notes:

Best of the year:  A lot of the theme books were good, but this year, for the first time, none of the theme books really excited me enough to enter my idiocanon.  I should have reread some Edith Wharton or something.

What I learned from the project:  Based on two examples, 19th century novels in English care a lot about the difference between how men should be and how women should be (I think contemporary English-language novels are still like this) and the plot is often driven by sums of money and questions about how they will be distributed (I feel like contemporary English-language novels are seldom like this and I wonder why not?)

Based on Wieland I think the prose style of 18th century English is just inevitably always going to be swampy going for me and I probably won’t push myself harder to read more.   It was pretty metal, though.  Wieland and Bleak House have spontaneous combustion in common, something you also don’t see much of in contemporary English-language novels.

The Dud Avocado was truly funny and reminded me that people actually wrote and published books in the 1950s that were quite sexually frank.  I thank whatever librarian at Sequoyah knew the book and put it out on the front table so browsers like me would see it.

Biggest disappointment:  The Drowned World is a super-famous and canonical SF novel and I just thought it was bad.  A few well-done set pieces but doesn’t really function as a novel or as science fiction.  If you were going to read Dangerous Visions-era SF with a similar title I would recommend Christopher Priest’s The Inverted World instead; he maintains the level of high mind-changing weirdness that Ballard only occasionally touches.

Outside the theme:  Four contemporary books I loved.  Malinda McCollum’s The Surprising Place is an anthology I’ve been awaiting for years.  The old stories are as great as I remembered.  The new stories even greater.  Aaron Thier’s Mr. Eternity is a concept novel (interlocking narratives ranging from the 16th century to the 25th) which shouldn’t work at all but kind of mostly does.  Many beautiful lines.  Sort of Cloud Atlas meets (T. Coraghessan Boyle’s) World’s End if anybody but me cares about those two books.  Erin Clune’s How To Leave is a very very funny take on living in Wisconsin and only gradually coming to grasp that you don’t live in New York.  Reader, I blurbed it!  I first met Elisa Gabbert as a commenter on this blog.  She  is great on Twitter.  So it’s not surprising she is great at pocket essays.  But it is surprising, happily surprising, that her small-press book The Word Pretty got noticed and raved about by the New York Times.  Sometimes the system works!

Old stuff I meant to read and didn’t get to:  Rereading The House of Mirth.  Reading Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End which I have often started but never finished.  Ditto The Man Without Qualities.  I was going to read more classical stuff but never even got to the point of figuring out what to plan to read and not get to.  Just in general I think I spent too much time in the kiddie pool of the pre-1971 20th century, a period I’ve already spent a lot of time reading.  After all, when I was a kid, there wasn’t much else.

Edits

New Year’s Eve is a time to think about what we’ll remember from the year about to expire, so this is a post about memory.

A few years back, Christina Nunez, who went to high school with me, wrote a blog post which included this recollection of the history class we both took:

This class was supposed to be an “honors” class, but it slowly became apparent that we were learning nothing at all outside of the reading and research we were required to do on our own. The classes were taken up mostly by two things, in my memory: watching videos about cathedrals, and listening to our teacher talk unrestrained about stuff that had nothing to do with history. Mr. C was a relatively tall, big man with a belly, a mustache somewhere between horseshoe and walrus, and a very sharp, incisive way of speaking. His way of holding forth made you feel—in the beginning—that it might be important to listen, because something was going to be revealed. He would punctuate his lectures, which often had nothing at all to do with history, with questions to the group. “Who here has ever had a dream?” he would ask, and we raised our hands, and then waited for the point.

Later, we learned not to bother raising our hands or waiting for the point.

…

Toward the end of the semester, a kid named Jordan had taken to sitting in the back of the class on the floor, backpack in front of him, and sleeping either slumped over or with his head lolled back against the wall. This was typical teen behavior made slightly untypical by the fact that Jordan was an academic prodigy. He was the kid who got a perfect score on his SATs before we were even supposed to take the SATs…

So when a kid like Jordan sat at the back of class sleeping, it was amusingly refreshing, because kids like us who got placed in those classes tended not to be the ones sleeping at the back of class. But it was also a little unnerving, because he was signaling a truth that was sort of scandalous for this particular track at this particular school at this particular time: this class and this teacher were an absolute fucking joke.

Mr. C tolerated this open act of defiance from Jordan for I don’t know how long before he finally got sick of it. One day, he began yelling. Jordan ignored it at first, but then he was roused to perform a sleepy, casual and yet brutal takedown of Mr. C as a teacher. It was something along the lines of I don’t need to take this class, you have nothing to teach me, I am learning nothing here that I can’t learn from a book. Et cetera. Mr. C lost it. I think spittle formed as he ordered Jordan out of the classroom. The kid picked up his backpack and walked out. I had never seen Jordan act remotely disrespectful, and had never seen a teacher so boldly—no, deservedly—challenged, and it was kind of thrilling but also a little sad. All of us, including Mr. C, were wasting our time in that room, and there was really nothing to be done about it.

That’s a pretty great story!  It obviously made a big impression on Christina, and why not?  I did something memorably crazy and out of the ordinary.

But I don’t remember it.  Not at all.  Not even with this reminder.

It happened, though.  Here’s how I know.  Because what I do remember is that I wasn’t allowed in Mr. C’s classroom.  I remember sitting outside in the hall day after day while all the other kids were in class.  Who knows how long?  I remember I was reading a Beckett play I got out of the school library.  I think it was Krapp’s Last Tape.  It never occurred to me, in the thirty years between then and now, to wonder what I did to get kicked out of class to read Beckett by myself while my friends were open quote learning close quote history.

I opened up a Facebook thread and asked my classmates about Christina’s story.  It happened; they remembered it.  I still didn’t.  And I still don’t.

It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I would do, does it?  It doesn’t seem to me like the sort of thing I would do.  My memory of high school is that I followed all the rules.  I went to football games.  I went to pep rallies.  I liked high school.  Or did I?  Maybe, because I think of myself as somebody who liked high school, I’ve just edited out the moments when I didn’t like it.  Who knows what else I don’t remember?  Who knows who else I was angry at, who else I defied or denounced, what else got edited out because it didn’t fit the theme of the story?

And who knows what’s happening now that I’ll later edit out of my 2018?  Maybe a lot.  Most things don’t get blogged.  They just get lost.  You can’t have a new year unless you get rid of the old year.  You keep some things, you lose more.  And what you lose isn’t random.  You decide what to remove from yourself, and, having decided, you lose the decision, too.

Cities, Villages, Towns, and Scott Walker

Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly Robin Vos, still smarting from Scott Walker’s loss in his re-election bid, said “Evers win was due to Dane County and the City of Milwaukee.”  It’s typical GOP politics here to split off Madison and Milwaukee like this, as if liberalism in Wisconsin is a pair of dark blue inkstains on an otherwise conservative shirt.

Not so.  There are liberals all over your shirt, Mr. Vos.

You can find tons of interesting data about Wisconsin elections in Excel spreadsheets at the Wisconsin Elections Commission page.  This already gives you the ability to do some quick and dirty analysis of where Evers’ victory was won.  In Wisconsin, every municipality is either a City, a Village, or a Town, in roughly decreasing order of urbanization.  So it’s easy to separate out Wisconsin into three parts, the Cities, the Villages, and the Towns.  This is what you get:

CITIES:  Walker 542148 (40%), Evers 808145 (60%)

VILLAGES: Walker 257858 (55%), Evers 208596 (45%)

TOWNS:  Walker 495074 (62%), Evers 307566 (38%).

That’s a pretty clear story.  Evers won in the cities, Walker won by a bit in the villages and by a lot in the most rural segment of the state, the towns.

But wait — Madison and Milwaukee are cities!  Is that all we’re seeing in this data, a distinction between Madison and Milwaukee on the one hand and real Wisconsin, Republican Wisconsin, Robin Vos’s Wisconsin, on the other?  Nope.  Take out the cities of Milwaukee and Madison from the city total and Evers still gets 521265 votes to Walker’s 477447, drawing 52% of the vote to Walker’s 28%.  There are decent-sized cities all over the state, and Evers won almost all of them.  Evers won Green Bay, he won Sheboygan, he won Appleton, he won Wausau.  Evers won Chippewa Falls and Viroqua and Oshkosh and Neenah and Fort Atkinson and Rhinelander and Beloit.  He won all over the place, wherever Wisconsinites congregate in any fair number.

Craig Gilbert has a much deeper dive into this data in the Journal-Sentinel.  The shift away from Scott Walker wasn’t just in the biggest cities; it was pretty uniform over localities with population 10,000 or more.  Update: An even deeper dive by John Johnson at Marquette, which brings in data from presidential elections too.

There’s a general feeling that the urban-rural split is new, a manifestation of Trumpian anti-city feeling.  Let’s look back at the 2010 election between Scott Walker and Tom Barrett, an election Walker won by 7 points.  2010, when Donald Trump was just Jeff Probst in a tie.  But the urban-rural split is still there:

CITIES: Walker 505213 (46%), Barrett 603905 (54%)

VILLAGES:  Walker 207243 (59%), Barrett 143297 (41%)

TOWNS:  Walker 416485 (62%) , Barrett 257101 (38%)

Here’s the thing, though.  You can see that Walker actually didn’t do any worse in the towns in 2018 than he did in 2010.  But his support dropped off a lot in the villages and the cities.  And if you take Madison and Milwaukee out of the 2010 totals, Walker won the remainder of Wisconsin’s cities 53-47, which is actually a bit ahead of his overall 2010 statewide margin.

I don’t think Donald Trump has made Wisconsin politics very different.  I think it’s still a state that calls its own tune, and a state where either a Democrat or a Republican can win big — if they have something to say that makes sense all across the state, as Walker and Ron Johnson used to, as Evers and Tammy Baldwin do now.

 

 

 

The great qualities with which dullness takes lead in the world

He firmly believed that everything he did was right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way — and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes lead in the world?

(William Makepeace Thackeray, from Vanity Fair)