NBA Commissioner Adam Sliver, thinking out loud the other day, mused about how to make his sport's game broadcasts look more like a video game, with things like onscreen stat windows and such that are linked to the player. He thinks that would be a way to draw more eyeballs to those broadcasts, or at least keep folks from tuning out.
Aside from the clutter making it harder to watch the game, Silver overlooks a significant difference between the video game screen and the actual game screen: The former features action controlled by the viewer, which makes the real-time stat windows important to gameplay. When the clock ticks down, you want the ball in the hands of the best shooter and stopping to check a stat sheet kind of mars the flow.
But an actual game is not controlled by the viewer, shouted suggestions at the TV screen notwithstanding. So the stats will just clutter that screen.
I feel pretty safe about baseball either way, though. If the idea is to try to keep the attention of modern microscopic attention spans by clogging things with information, baseball should be safe. Its intermittent activity and measured pace would mean that the stat windows would stay stationary for most of the game -- and they would probably be taken down after not very long because baseball resists efforts to bring artificial excitement to that pace. We can hope that perceptive folks would see this before such an idea is tried and we have to put up with it before its inevitable disappearance.
Of course, Chief Baseball Officer Joe Torre is known for supporting stupid ideas for changing the game, so we may have to endure the experiment anyway.
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Never Ending Battle
When DC Comics did it's "New 52" retcon several years ago, I thought it was pretty dumb.
When Grant Morrison revealed a villain plaguing Batman was actually his supposedly-dead father, Thomas Wayne, I thought it was pretty dumb. I also thought it was pretty dumb that Thomas Wayne was, instead an immortal evil ancestor of Bruce "Batman" Wayne, also named Thomas.
When DC moved into its "Rebirth" storylines, I was hoping that some of the New 52 silliness would go away, and it seems like it has.
But then stuff like this creeps in the back way, and I just give up. BTW, spoilers for the current Superman storyline at the link, so don't look unless you already know the story or don't care about finding it out without reading it.
When Grant Morrison revealed a villain plaguing Batman was actually his supposedly-dead father, Thomas Wayne, I thought it was pretty dumb. I also thought it was pretty dumb that Thomas Wayne was, instead an immortal evil ancestor of Bruce "Batman" Wayne, also named Thomas.
When DC moved into its "Rebirth" storylines, I was hoping that some of the New 52 silliness would go away, and it seems like it has.
But then stuff like this creeps in the back way, and I just give up. BTW, spoilers for the current Superman storyline at the link, so don't look unless you already know the story or don't care about finding it out without reading it.
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Number on a Napkin
In some contexts, the number on the napkin was the prize of the evening -- an attractive person of the opposite sex had responded to witty overtures and winning ways, and graced one with a phone number to be used for later conversation and arranging another meeting.
Nowadays, of course, one gives someone else one's digits, usually entered into a cell phone. As in the days of the desired napkin, those might be false -- but a quick call can show that even before one leaves the bar, so that alternative targets may be selected.
Physicists are not like other people. During December 2013, a group of them gathered at a bar and they also wrote down numbers on a napkin: Their best guesses as to the final estimate of Planck's Constant that would be generated by their particular project.
The group worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which was trying to measure the constant in order to help redefine the kilogram. Earlier definitions relied on the International Prototype Kilogram, a physical object created in the 19th century to be the standard weight. Over time, its weight and mass have varied -- not enough to make much of a difference when someone stands on the scales or smuggles cocaine but more than enough to hobble scientific experiments requiring precise measurements.
At its 2011 meeting the General Conference on Weights and Measures decided to redefine the kilo in terms of Planck's Constant. Different groups have been experimenting to find more and more exact figures for the constant, and when the NIST group made the most accurate determination to date back in 2013 the team gathered to celebrate.
During the celebration, the ten gathered wrote down their own guesses as to what value would eventually be submitted to the General Conference:
The napkin was sealed in a plastic bottle and put into the foundation of the next level of the project, NIST-4. Recently, the project was able to make a determination of even greater accuracy with its NIST-4 device, and checked the numbers against the final submission. Shisong Li of China (5th from the bottom) earned the prize, as his guess of 6.62606990000 × 10–34 was closest to the submitted value, 6.626069934 × 10–34.
Another celebration followed, this one featuring a rum cake with the submitted value in icing. In some areas, it seems, physicists may be quite a bit like other people.
Nowadays, of course, one gives someone else one's digits, usually entered into a cell phone. As in the days of the desired napkin, those might be false -- but a quick call can show that even before one leaves the bar, so that alternative targets may be selected.
Physicists are not like other people. During December 2013, a group of them gathered at a bar and they also wrote down numbers on a napkin: Their best guesses as to the final estimate of Planck's Constant that would be generated by their particular project.
The group worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which was trying to measure the constant in order to help redefine the kilogram. Earlier definitions relied on the International Prototype Kilogram, a physical object created in the 19th century to be the standard weight. Over time, its weight and mass have varied -- not enough to make much of a difference when someone stands on the scales or smuggles cocaine but more than enough to hobble scientific experiments requiring precise measurements.
At its 2011 meeting the General Conference on Weights and Measures decided to redefine the kilo in terms of Planck's Constant. Different groups have been experimenting to find more and more exact figures for the constant, and when the NIST group made the most accurate determination to date back in 2013 the team gathered to celebrate.
During the celebration, the ten gathered wrote down their own guesses as to what value would eventually be submitted to the General Conference:
The napkin was sealed in a plastic bottle and put into the foundation of the next level of the project, NIST-4. Recently, the project was able to make a determination of even greater accuracy with its NIST-4 device, and checked the numbers against the final submission. Shisong Li of China (5th from the bottom) earned the prize, as his guess of 6.62606990000 × 10–34 was closest to the submitted value, 6.626069934 × 10–34.
Another celebration followed, this one featuring a rum cake with the submitted value in icing. In some areas, it seems, physicists may be quite a bit like other people.
Monday, September 11, 2017
Marketing
If philosophical debates were like this cartoon from the Existential Comics page, then a lot more people would probably study philosophy a lot younger. It might then be possible that folks in their early 20s would legitimately know a significant percentage of what they already think they do.
That would be a development Bernie Sanders would hate since it would probably mean he'd be a selectman in some Vermont hamlet isolated by snow nine months out of the year instead of a senator and the root cause of Hillary Clinton's failure to be president. But not to worry, according to news stories about Mrs. Clinton's book, she has a lot of other people to blame and it'll take her some time to go through the other seven billion people on the planet before being left alone at last with the only real culprit,
That would be a development Bernie Sanders would hate since it would probably mean he'd be a selectman in some Vermont hamlet isolated by snow nine months out of the year instead of a senator and the root cause of Hillary Clinton's failure to be president. But not to worry, according to news stories about Mrs. Clinton's book, she has a lot of other people to blame and it'll take her some time to go through the other seven billion people on the planet before being left alone at last with the only real culprit,
Sunday, September 10, 2017
Keyboard Stilled
Jerry Pournelle, half of the duo that produced the great Mote in God's Eye and Lucifer's Hammer, passed away a couple of days after returning from a science fiction convention.
Other than having just sent a finished manuscript to a publisher or just told the best joke in the room, finishing a fun con is probably the way in which Pournelle would most like to have stepped off this mortal coil. Most modern military sci-fi and space opera traces roots back to his work in the early 1970s. His right-leaning libertarianism makes a lot of people see him as one of Robert Heinlein's truest heirs in both tech-savvy "hard" sci-fi writing and cantankerous politics.
Pournelle's collaborations, with Niven alone or with Niven and others, will probably outlast some of his own work in terms of impact on the science fiction field. Re-reading some of what I enjoyed as a young Friar exposes some of the weaknesses of a solo Pournelle work, a few of which are mentioned in the review of Mote linked above. But none of those collaborations would be what they are without him, and so he himself has stamped something indelible on the genre.
Other than having just sent a finished manuscript to a publisher or just told the best joke in the room, finishing a fun con is probably the way in which Pournelle would most like to have stepped off this mortal coil. Most modern military sci-fi and space opera traces roots back to his work in the early 1970s. His right-leaning libertarianism makes a lot of people see him as one of Robert Heinlein's truest heirs in both tech-savvy "hard" sci-fi writing and cantankerous politics.
Pournelle's collaborations, with Niven alone or with Niven and others, will probably outlast some of his own work in terms of impact on the science fiction field. Re-reading some of what I enjoyed as a young Friar exposes some of the weaknesses of a solo Pournelle work, a few of which are mentioned in the review of Mote linked above. But none of those collaborations would be what they are without him, and so he himself has stamped something indelible on the genre.
Saturday, September 9, 2017
Script Doctor Needed
So depending on which media bubble surrounds you and your opinion, you have probably heard about two Hollywood showfolk offering opinions on the causes of the devastating hurricane which hit southeast Texas and another which is about to hit Florida. Jim Culver, writing as JimmyC on the Threedonia blog, compares the two here. Threedonia's a pop culture site written from a mostly conservative perspective that I often like to read even if it does sometimes show less charity towards people holding other points of view than I'd hope to see.
But Culver is about the only writer who's drawn the comparisons between press coverage of comments from Kirk Cameron and Jennifer Lawrence on the brutal storms and their impact on the United States. He points out that Cameron's comments have drawn the usual derision from the usual suspects who claim that the born-again actor says Harvey and Irma are signs of God's wrath against a US that has fallen away from God. This repugnant and wrongheaded view is a lot more common than it should be, usually voiced by folks like Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell or others blessedly lesser known.
The only problem, Culver says, is that Cameron didn't say the hurricanes were God's punishment. He said we don't know the reason behind them -- other than understanding the basic meteorological processes involved -- and so the best response is a humble acknowledgement of the awesome power involved and a commitment to pray for and help the victims.
Lawrence, on the other hand, is characterized in the Fox News story about her comments as having said that the hurricanes are Mother Nature's wrath against the us for having elected Donald Trump. Now if supernatural beings were in fact punishing the U.S. for things, it's hard to argue that they would just gloss over electing a venomous charlatan to its highest office (TM George Will).
But watching the original interview with Lawrence or reading the quotes from the stories makes it hard to characterize them as "blaming Trump for the hurricanes." There's a connection, but it's pretty round-about. Lawrence suggests that climate change has made hurricanes worse, human beings cause some of the worst of that change and need to take it seriously, but the nation's leader denies such a connection. The fever swamp of outrage in response to his immaturity and shoot from the lip Tweeting is depressing enough. Combine it with the images of devastating flooding and damage and it's all a lot for people to take.
Now, is that the kind of gauzy reasoning one might expect of a 27-year-old asked about subjects on the public radar but a little beyond her expertise? Pretty much. Is it, "Jennifer Lawrence blames hurricanes on nature's wrath over Trump election?" Nope. Not even close enough for horseshoes.
Script doctors are writers brought into a production to fix problem areas or scenes, or occasionally by actors who want a favorite scribe to reconfigure their dialogue into styles they have an easier time working. In the current situation, the popular wisdom is probably that Lawrence and Cameron need script doctors to stop them from crediting physical phenomena to vengeful deities.
Since neither of them really said what the popular wisdom says they did, then the real need for a script doctor is for the media outlets which inexplicably pay attention to what folks of everyday intelligence say about stuff, just because those folks happen to be famous. And then get it wrong.
But Culver is about the only writer who's drawn the comparisons between press coverage of comments from Kirk Cameron and Jennifer Lawrence on the brutal storms and their impact on the United States. He points out that Cameron's comments have drawn the usual derision from the usual suspects who claim that the born-again actor says Harvey and Irma are signs of God's wrath against a US that has fallen away from God. This repugnant and wrongheaded view is a lot more common than it should be, usually voiced by folks like Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell or others blessedly lesser known.
The only problem, Culver says, is that Cameron didn't say the hurricanes were God's punishment. He said we don't know the reason behind them -- other than understanding the basic meteorological processes involved -- and so the best response is a humble acknowledgement of the awesome power involved and a commitment to pray for and help the victims.
Lawrence, on the other hand, is characterized in the Fox News story about her comments as having said that the hurricanes are Mother Nature's wrath against the us for having elected Donald Trump. Now if supernatural beings were in fact punishing the U.S. for things, it's hard to argue that they would just gloss over electing a venomous charlatan to its highest office (TM George Will).
But watching the original interview with Lawrence or reading the quotes from the stories makes it hard to characterize them as "blaming Trump for the hurricanes." There's a connection, but it's pretty round-about. Lawrence suggests that climate change has made hurricanes worse, human beings cause some of the worst of that change and need to take it seriously, but the nation's leader denies such a connection. The fever swamp of outrage in response to his immaturity and shoot from the lip Tweeting is depressing enough. Combine it with the images of devastating flooding and damage and it's all a lot for people to take.
Now, is that the kind of gauzy reasoning one might expect of a 27-year-old asked about subjects on the public radar but a little beyond her expertise? Pretty much. Is it, "Jennifer Lawrence blames hurricanes on nature's wrath over Trump election?" Nope. Not even close enough for horseshoes.
Script doctors are writers brought into a production to fix problem areas or scenes, or occasionally by actors who want a favorite scribe to reconfigure their dialogue into styles they have an easier time working. In the current situation, the popular wisdom is probably that Lawrence and Cameron need script doctors to stop them from crediting physical phenomena to vengeful deities.
Since neither of them really said what the popular wisdom says they did, then the real need for a script doctor is for the media outlets which inexplicably pay attention to what folks of everyday intelligence say about stuff, just because those folks happen to be famous. And then get it wrong.
Friday, September 8, 2017
Lexicographical Rubbish Heap
Stories appear each year that announce new words which make it into the dictionary, but how do dictionaries decide what words to leave out?
There is indeed a process. Online dictionaries don't remove words, since a single entry takes up very little data and you might as well keep everything. That's what search engines are for, after all.
But printed dictionaries sometimes have to, because otherwise even the simplest editions, designed to help students or people learning to speak English as a second language, would get too cumbersome to use. Several categories exist before a word completely disappears, such as notations that it is historical (Now hist.), or even an obsolete (Obs.) term. If a word hasn't been used since about 1930, it gets labeled obsolete and is a prime target for reduction depending on the purpose and scope of a dictionary.
The cutoff is much earlier if the word is an obsolete or compound form of a current word, about 1800. So there goes our hope of never hearing about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders again. On the other hand, they provide solid job security for the word "carbuncle."
There is indeed a process. Online dictionaries don't remove words, since a single entry takes up very little data and you might as well keep everything. That's what search engines are for, after all.
But printed dictionaries sometimes have to, because otherwise even the simplest editions, designed to help students or people learning to speak English as a second language, would get too cumbersome to use. Several categories exist before a word completely disappears, such as notations that it is historical (Now hist.), or even an obsolete (Obs.) term. If a word hasn't been used since about 1930, it gets labeled obsolete and is a prime target for reduction depending on the purpose and scope of a dictionary.
The cutoff is much earlier if the word is an obsolete or compound form of a current word, about 1800. So there goes our hope of never hearing about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders again. On the other hand, they provide solid job security for the word "carbuncle."
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