Orioles 13, Angels 4

I had the great privilege to be present at Camden Yards last weekend for what I believe to be the severest ass-whupping I have ever personally seen the Orioles administer. The Orioles went into the 6th winning 3-1 but the game felt like they were winning by more than that. Then suddenly they actually were — nine batters, nine runs, no outs (though in the middle of it all there was an easy double-play ball by Ramon Urias that the Angels’ shortstop Zach Neto just inexplicably dropped — it was that kind of day.) We had pitching (Grayson Rodriguez almost unhittable for six innings but for one mistake pitch), defense (Urias snagging a line drive at third almost before I saw it leave the bat) and of course a three-run homer, by Anthony Santander, to plate the 7th, 8th, and 9th of those nine runs.

Is being an Angels fan the saddest kind of fan to be right now? The Mets and the Padres, you have more of a “we spent all the money and built what should have been a superteam and didn’t win.” The A’s, you have the embarrassment of the on-field performance and the fact that your owner screwed your city and moved the team out of town. But the Angels? Somehow they just put together the two generational talents of this era of baseball and — didn’t do anything with them. There’s a certain heaviness to the sadness.

As good as the Orioles have been so far, taking three out of their first four and massively outscoring the opposition, I still think they weren’t really a 101-win team last year, and everything will have to go right again for them to be as good this year as they were last year. Our Felix Bautista replacement, Craig Kimbrel, has already blown his first and only save opportunity, which is to say he’s not really a Felix Bautista replacement. But it’s a hell of a team to watch.

The only downside — Gunnar Henderson, with a single, a triple and a home run already, is set to lead off the ninth but Hyde brings in Tony Kemp to pinch hit. Why? The fans want to see Gunnar on second for the cycle, let the fans see Gunnar on second for the cycle.

Alphabetical Diaries

Enough of this. Enough. Equivocal or vague principles, as a rule, will make your life an uninspired, undirected, and meaningless act.

This is taken from Alphabetical Diaries, a remarkable book I am reading by Sheila Heti, composed of many thousands of sentences drawn from her decades of diaries and presented in alphabetical order. It starts like this:

A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have man things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by the binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections. A book that does only one thing, one thing at a time. A book that even the hardest of men would read. A book that is a game. A budget will help you know where to go.

How does a simple, one might even say cheap, technique, one might even say gimmick, work so well? I thrill to the aphorisms even when I don’t believe them, as with the aphorism above: principles must be equivocal or at least vague to work as principles; without the necessary vagueness they are axioms, which are not good for making one’s life a meaningful act, only good for arguing on the Internet. I was reading Alphabetical Diaries while I walked home along the southwest bike path. I stopped for a minute and went up a muddy slope into the cemetery where there was a gap in the fence, and it turned out this gap opened on the area of infant graves, graves about the size of a book, graves overlaying people who were born and then did what they did for a week and then died — enough of this.

Show report: Bug Moment, Graham Hunt, Dusk, Disq at High Noon Saloon

I haven’t done a show report in a long time because I barely go to shows anymore! Actually, though, this fall I went to three. First, The Beths, opening for The National, but I didn’t stay for The National because I don’t know or care about them; I just wanted to see the latest geniuses of New Zealand play “Expert in a Dying Field”

Next was the Violent Femmes, playing their self-titled debut in order. They used to tour a lot and I used to see them a lot, four or five times in college and grad school I think. They never really grow old and Gordon Gano never stops sounding exactly like Gordon Gano. A lot of times I go to reunion shows and there are a lot of young people who must have come to the band through their back catalogue. Not Violent Femmes! 2000 people filling the Sylvee and I’d say 95% were between 50 and 55. One of the most demographically narrowcast shows I’ve ever been to. Maybe beaten out by the time I saw Black Francis at High Noon and not only was everybody exactly my age they were also all men. (Actually, it was interesting to me there were a lot of women at this show! I think of Violent Femmes as a band for the boys.)

But I came in to write about the show I saw this weekend, four Wisconsin acts playing the High Noon. I really came to see Disq, whose single “Daily Routine” I loved when it came out and I still haven’t gotten tired of. Those chords! Sevenths? They’re something:

Dusk was an Appleton band that played funky/stompy/indie, Bug Moment had an energetic frontwoman named Rosenblatt and were one of those bands where no two members looked like they were in the same band. But the real discovery of the night, for me, was Graham Hunt, who has apparently been a Wisconsin scene fixture forever. Never heard of the guy. But wow! Indie power-pop of the highest order. When Hunt’s voice cracks and scrapes the high notes he reminds me a lot of the other great Madison noisy-indie genius named Graham, Graham Smith, aka Kleenex Girl Wonder, who recorded the last great album of the 1990s in his UW-Madison dorm room. Graham Hunt’s new album, Try Not To Laugh, is out this week. ”Emergency Contact” is about as pretty and urgent as this kind of music gets. 

And from his last record, If You Knew Would You Believe it, “How Is That Different,” which rhymes blanket, eye slit, left it, and orbit. Love it! Reader, I bought a T-shirt.

Writing exercise: poll report as dialogue

I’m not sure if I mentioned that I’m teaching a first-year undergrad seminar on “Writing and Data,” in some respects patterned after the Writing Scientists’ Workshop I ran last year. With 18-year-olds it’s a little different; for one thing, I find that doing two hour-long workshops in a row gets a little long for them, so I’m doing two 45-minute workshops with an in-class writing exercise in between. Last week’s worked particularly well so I wanted to record what I did. We started with this piece from Pew, “How Many Friends do Americans Have?” Because I want them to think about conveying the same information in different registers, and in particular writing more “conversationally,” I split the group into pairs and asked each pair to write a dialogue which conveyed some of the information from the Pew piece. I gave them 15-20 minutes to do that, then had each pair act out their dialogue. I had been wondering whether to have everyone start from the same source or let people pick; in the end, I was glad we were all working from the same article, because it was instructive to see how many different ways the same information could be deployed in speech, or an imitation of speech. If there’s one thing I’m trying to get across in this class, it’s that writing is much, much more than the factual information it conveys.

Rangers 7, Orioles 1: This was our chance

A lot of people are going to tell you that the Orioles, who won 101 games this year and have by all accounts at least half an above-average major league lineup still in the minors ready to play, are positioned to be a dynastic power in the American League for years to come.

Nope. Wrong. I wish it were so. But this was the year the Orioles needed to win. And they just got dismally swept out of the ALDS by the Rangers. So that’s it.

Yes, all the guys they say are good are good, and are going to stay good. Adley’s good. Gunnar’s good. Grayson’s good. The guys that haven’t even played yet are good.

But this year, both the Yankees and Red Sox were kind of bad, and content to be kind of bad, and didn’t make gigantic talent adds in a bid for the playoffs. That hasn’t been the case for years and it won’t be the case again anytime soon.

This year, almost nobody got injured — we didn’t have John Means for most of the season, and Cedric Mullins missed some time, but basically everybody was healthy and we played at full strength. Next year, we already know Felix Bautista is gone for 2024. And we won’t be as lucky as we were in 2023 with the lineup.

And this year, we had an incredible, unsustainable record in one-run games, and finished 7 wins better than our Pythagorean record.

This is a good team. I like watching them. You could even say that, with an ownership willing to add expensive free agents to fill the holes, it could be a championship team. But we have an ownership that’s ecstatic that the 2023 team lucked into 101 regular season wins, and that will be perfectly happy to enjoy 90-win seasons and trips to the Wild Card game for the next few years, until the unextended players mentioned above peel off into free agency one by one.

It’ll be better than the last five years have been, that’s for sure. But if we wanted to win a World Series, this was our chance.

Underestimating Shakespeare and real numbers

Sam Bankman-Fried, mostly famous for being a high-profile effective altruist and subsequently defrauding lots of investors, had something to say about Shakespeare:

Literary critic, Sam Bankman-Fried, on Shakespeare: pic.twitter.com/AjrsWv60JF

— Aaron Gwyn (@AmericanGwyn) October 6, 2023

A couple of thoughts on what this has to do with effective altruism.

To do certain types (not all types) of EA you have to believe that the utility of an outcome is a real number, though it might be hard to measure, and that your uncertainty about an outcome is captured by a real number between zero and one, and that it makes sense to multiply those two real numbers.

If you get used to thinking this way, you might also become inclined to think that “literary greatness” is a real number. And if you thought literary greatness was a real number, you might find it reasonable to think of it as a random variable about which you could formulate probabilistic claims. And that’s where you get the SBF Shakespeare argument.

Mathematicians know real numbers very well; we know what they’re like and we know most things are not like them. We also often admire Shakespeare, but I think this is coincidental.

New York (list form)

Went with AB to New York for three days and this is what we did/saw/ate, in rough chronological order:

Korean barbecue at Antoya, Natural History Museum (including new Gilder wing and finally re-opened Northwest Coast hall, my favorite), belly lox from Zabar’s eaten at Riverside Park, Little Shop of Horrors revival, bubble tea, slice at 2 Bros, breakfast at Katz’s (people, if you can stomach a 3/4-pound pastrami sandwich at 10am this is absolutely the way to beat the line), the Strand, shake at the original Shake Shack, The Play That Goes Wrong, observation deck at Top of the Rock, MUJI, Churrascaria Plataforma, breakfast at Junior’s Cheesecake, the Intrepid museum, the Staten Island Ferry (why is this free?), old high school friend, old grad school friend, Korean fried chicken at Turntable Chicken Jazz, one final bubble tea.

Transportation note: we didn’t take a taxi or Lyft the entire time. I understand why almost no US city can have a subway and bus network this thick and this good, but boy is it nice. (Maybe relevant is that we didn’t leave Manhattan the entire time except for the two-block radius around the ferry terminal on the Staten Island side.)

Surprises of Spain

CJ and I took a father-son trip to Spain (or, depending on how you partition nations, to Spain and Catalonia.) A very enjoyable, nimble, seat-of-the-pants-planned trip. Just back yesterday.

Some things I found surprising about Spain:

• Pollworkers for elections are chosen by lot from the population, the way juries are in the United States. If the pollworker assigned to a polling station doesn’t show up, the police can select an unexpecting voter and assign them to work the polls on the spot.
• Crosswalks aren’t really at the intersection, but set back quite a ways from the intersection, maybe 10% of the way to the middle of the block. This seems like a good system!
• I expected to enjoy seeing Harry Styles play the Estadi Olimpic in Barcelona but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
• I didn’t understand how much the Catholic Church is wound into the government there. To some extent this is lingering Francoism, to some extent just how Spain has been forever. There are religion classes in public schools, and when you do your taxes there’s a box you can mark that allocates 0.7% of your taxes to the Church. In the Granada Cathedral there was a free newsletter which turned out to be entirely devoted to convincing readers to mark the box.
• Burrata, which I think of as Italian food, seems to be a standard menu item in Spain. I think it’s been fully incorporated and is now also Spanish food.
• We went to a sports bar in Barcelona to watch Carlos Alcaraz play in the Wimbledon quarterfinal. We expected to be among a crowd of cheering fans but in fact the bar wasn’t even showing the match until we asked the bartender to put it on, and it took him quite a while to find the channel. Alcaraz is one of the biggest Spanish athletes in the world, so why is this? Some potential explanations: 1) Watching sports in bars isn’t popular in Spain (evidence; there weren’t very many sports bars listed!); 2) In Barcelona, Alcaraz is seen as Spanish-as-opposed-to-Catalonian; 3) Tennis just isn’t a popular spectator sport in Spain. I don’t know which it was!
• Also, the sports bar was founded in 2008, is called “Obama Gastropub,” and has a… colonial British Africa theme? Like, khaki jungle gear and 1920 maps of Africa everywhere? Very weird.
• During the brief period of anarchist rule in Barcelona before 1939, the radically anti-clerical Republicans dug up the bodies of priests and nuns from under the church and displayed the decayed corpses in the town square, as a way of falsifying the popular belief that the clergy lay undecomposed beneath the earth in preparation for their eventual bodily ascension.
• CJ and I went to a bullfight in Madrid. I’m not sure what I expected — but I did not expect it to be as thoroughly sad as it was. I had taken the name to mean that a bullfight was a fight. But the actual name for this event in Spanish, corrida, makes no such promise, saying only that the bull will run. At the beginning, it does run, even jabs with its horns a little bit. But then the picadors wound the bull and the banderilleros drive barbs into its neck. At that point, the bull looks tired and confused. It is clearly not mad anymore. It would be happy to walk away and call the whole thing off. And then the matador, who at this point conveys no sense of being in danger at all, whose spangly uniform is not even mussed, drives a sword into the bull and the crowd sits and waits while the bull vomits a dribble of blood, starts to wobble, and then finally goes down to its knees and dies. And then everybody cheers. And then the horses drag the bull’s body across the ring and a couple of janitors sweep dirt over the bloody trail. I don’t know what I saw, but it wasn’t a fight. There were six bulls slated to be stabbed that night but we left after two.

Giants 15, Brewers 1

I like a close, hard-fought game as much as the next baseball fan, and I’ve seen a lot of those lately, but there is a peculiar and specific pleasure to the game in which the team you’re rooting for gets absolutely, relentlessly pummeled. It was a beautiful night on Friday, though chilly enough that they closed the roof at American Family Field. The Brewers were in their City Connect “Brew Crew” uniforms. We got there just as Christian Yelich was grounding into an RBI double play with the bases loaded. That was about as good as it got for Milwaukee. Freddy Peralta, starting for the Brewers, didn’t have it. The next reliever didn’t have it either. Ethan Small, brought up that morning from triple-A Nashville, didn’t have it, and by that time the game was out of reach and Craig Counsell just left Small up there on the hill to take his lumps and save the rest of the pen. The Brewers were booting balls, botching throws, just generally Bad News Bearsing it out there, and the crowd was, well, good-natured. Like I said, it was a beautiful night. Our guys were having a bad day and we were there for them.

Mike Brosseau moved over from first base to pitch the ninth and it was a real pleasure to see the Giants’ batters stymied at last, unable to adjust to the 68-mph fastball and the changeup that cruised in at 62. He got them 1-2-3. By that time a lot of fans had gone home. But we stayed through to the end. And you can see us pretty clearly, sitting along the third base line above the Giants dugout, in the broadcast.

Next visit to AmFam will be when the Orioles come to town. So I’m hoping to see the Brewers lose one more time this spring.

Coinages

I was just at a conference where someone asked me if I had coined any mathematical terms. Well, sort of! I was the one who decided on the name “FI-modules” for the abelian category Tom Church, Benson Farb and I wrote about in this paper. More informally, I’m pretty sure I’m the originator of using “Bhargavology” to mean “the program of counting arithmetic things by putting them in bijection with orbits of the integral points of a group acting on the integral points of a space.” At least, I can find this usage in emails I wrote in 2003, after Manjul’s thesis but before any of the papers came out. And that still seems to be something people say.

My coinages have not always been successful. Nobody ever again mentioned the “esperantist graphs” from my paper with Hall and Kowalski. (They were named so in honor of Harald Helfgott, who speaks Esperanto, and because in some sense they are typically graphs we hope are expanders.) Nor did “superduperstrong approximation” catch on.