October 28, 2004
1918
The Red Sox got their championship; the Yankees got to feel what it's like to be on the losing side of a historic collapse; the Cardinals got to watch Albert Pujols, probably the best position player in the National League, strut his stuff in games that counted (and he'll be around; St. Louis, which is apparently packed with baseball nuts, has a legitimate excuse to say "Wait until next year"); and the rest of the world can finally, finally stop hearing about Beantown and its curse. I am not a Sox fan, although I work with Sox fans, I have lived within Red Sox Nation, and my mother is from Belmont, Mass. I know of the pain of the Bostonian baseball lover. But as sports pages spend the next few days running articles with titles like "Curse Reversed", it's worth noting that other cities have their own problems. The 1954 Indians ran up the best record in the modern history of baseball, but Cleveland hasn't won a championship since 1948. The city of Philadelphia hasn't had a championship, despite four frequently excellent teams, in twenty years. And I imagine that we're all going to have to hear about the billy goat if the Cubs ever make a run at the pennant again. Talking about curses is a fun way to distract from real issues, like the Sox's refusal to hire black players in the 1950s (while other teams, including the Indians, transformed themselves with the new talent), or an ownership's habit of running off players, or even the bad luck that Bill Buckner must curse every morning. But thanks to whiz-kid GM Theo Epstein (whose grandfather wrote Casablanca; I'm sure Boston thinks this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship), the wild card (which I still think was a bad idea), and a run of luck, the Sox are champions.
The fielding gaffes of MVP Manny Ramirez amounted to precisely nothing; Curt Schilling threw out his war game injury charts and played despite a hastily-sutured tendon injury; the Yankees collapsed in delightful, historic fashion; Cardinals slugger Scottie Rolen hurt his thigh and unexpectedly turned ice cold. Even Nomar's sulking, played out in the chain of events; without Nomar dogging it, the fans would never soured on him enough to allow Epstein to trade him and put together the team for the final run at things. Maybe the lunar eclipse really was a sign. And so next season fans will continue to see the Red Sox spend money like its going out of fashion, continue to see a bunch of idiots (in caveman-lookalike center-fielder and skateboarding former Pleasanton resident Johnny Damon's words) who don't run out grounders, continue to see an American League where pennants are won by huge-spending teams who can snap up free agents (the Sox have precisely two players who came up through their farm team) when they need power pitchers or a big-hitting middle infielder. What you won't see are any more references to 1918. The Red Sox, for better or worse, are no longer a symbol for inevitable failure, no longer a metaphor for situations designed to gin up hopes and blow it all at the last possible moment, again and again. They're just a pretty good baseball team in the AL East that wins championships now and again. They spend a lot of money and have irritating, self-absorbed fans. They've become a little bit more like the Yankees.
I wish my grandfather were here to see it.
October 25, 2004
Dilemmae
If the Red Sox are able to overcome Tim Wakefield's shaky command of the plate and their frequently inept defense to score more runs than the Cardinals, they win and the Cardinals lose. If Black manages to force checkmate, White loses the game. If a salesman sells a car objectively worth $4,000 for $5,000, the buyer has lost $1,000. These are known as zero-sum games; there is only so much winnable goodness to be spread around (entries in the win column; dollars in the economic system), so for one participant to gain, another must lose. On the other hand, many games are non-zero-sum; proponents of free trade, for instance, feel that net gains resulting from a shift in production to places with a comparative advantage, and they've got board games to back them up. A simple example of a non-zero-sum game is the prisoner's dilemma. Two criminals have been arrested and are being interrogated in separate rooms. If both refuse to talk, each will be out of prisoner in a year; if one plea bargains and confesses, he'll be out in six months while the other spends five years in jail; if both confess, each will spend three years in jail. The best solution for the criminals is for neither to talk, but can they really trust one another not to fink?
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October 22, 2004
A brow like Shakespeare, a face like Satan
London in the early years of the twentieth century feasted upon the fruits of an empire upon which the sun never set; from Burma to Rhodesia to British Honduras, the Union Jack flew proudly. Today the countries are known as Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Belize, and the British come, if at all, as tourists. As the nineteenth century ended, the Urabi revolt in Egypt and the death of Gen. Charles "Chinese" Gordon defending Khartoum against a Sudanese uprising at the end of the nineteenth century were a foreshadowing of the problems of empire. And the new century brought with it two surprises out China. In 1900, a mystical secret society known as the Fists of Righteous Harmony led the Boxer Rebellion against the European devils; in 1901, nine European nations, Americans, and the Japanese invaded, seized Beijing, and enforced the Boxer protocols. Four years later, after Russia violated the terms of the protocols by refusing to withdraw its troops from Manchuria, the Japanese declared war on Russia. The world watched, shocked, as the Japanese devastated the Russian navy in the Russo-Japanese War. The war seems today like a distant memory, but it was the first time since the Industrial Revolution that an Asian nation had so soundly defeated a Western power. The English called the nineteenth century struggle for control of central Asia the Great Game; the Russians called it a "Tournament of Shadows". England's refusal to supply coal to the Russians was a major factor in their defeat, but to Englishmen concerned with the fate of the new imperialism, the defeat of Russia only added new concerns. There was trouble stirring in the East, and that trouble was soon to gain a face.
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October 19, 2004
The cold equations
A few months ago, one of the writers for Physics World asked his readers to send in their nominations for the most beautiful equation of all time. Being a journal devoted to physics, and not economics or pure mathematics or accounting, the respondants offered a number of candidates in that field: the equation defining Hubble's constant, the Balmer formula, Maxwell's equations. (Strangely, Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation seems to have been relatively unpopular, perhaps because of lingering suspicions that Newton stole the idea from hunchbacked microscope enthusiast Robert Hooke. Given Newton's smearing of Leibniz over the discovery of calculus, perhaps the Physics World readership felt that the Royal Society, alchemy, and gambling studies were enough historical credit for the nonce.) I probably would have chosen a pure math equation, possibly the prime number theorem or one of the leading votegetters, Euler's identity, which elegantly ties together every important number in undergraduate-level math (e, π, i, 1, and 0). Of the nominees selected by the magazine's readership, I have a sneaking fondness for the oldest of them (not counting 1 + 1 = 2), however. Some 2500 years ago, Pythagoras of Samos was leading a cult of philosopher-mathematicians. Dedicated to studying the mathematics, purifying their souls, and avoiding beans, the Pythagoreans viewed mathematics as a window into the true nature of reality. They showed how to construct the Platonic solids, discussed the personalities of the integers, and proved an Egyptian theorem that today bears Pythagoras' name: "for a right angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides". The fact that a2 + b2 = c2 is hardly novel today (although there are some notable implications), and there are a staggering number of ways to demonstrate it, including some not based on geometry at all. Chinese mathematician Liu Hui proved it in the third century B.C. (had he been born someplace a bit more central to Western civilization, it might be known the Hui theorem); President James Garfield proved it; in Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter uses the fact that a computer has proved it as the starting point for discussing artificial intelligence and the meaning of creativity and intent. A sabremetrical formula for estimating a baseball team's expected wins shares its name. And once upon a time, a New York Times editorial urged humanity to contact Mars by means of carving a gigantic geometric proof on the Siberian steppes. Any equation can be simple or well-known or meaningful, but what could define beauty better than vast triangles carved into the permafrost in order to signal our intelligence to an alien race?
October 15, 2004
The stuff that dreams
There is a plaque that stands in an alley in San Francisco: "On approximately this spot, Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O'Shaughnessy." And it's true -- if you go to Burrit Street, you can see the spot where Brigid, that woman who told Spade that she was "bad, worse than you could know", knocked off a man with ten thousand insurance, no children, and a wife that didn't like him. The Maltese Falcon was filmed by John Huston, a screenwriter for Warner Brothers, who had been offered the chance to direct a movie of his choice. Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon had been adapted twice before, once as The Maltese Falcon and once as Satan Met a Lady (featuring a reluctant Bette Davis in the Sydney Greenstreet role). Huston, adapting the novel himself, thought he could do better. The signs weren't promising: Peter Lorre was a B-movie actor in America, best known as the Japanese detective in the Mr. Moto series; Greenstreet had never made a movie; Mary Astor was the second choice to play Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Perhaps with that in mind, George Raft turned down the lead role, and a character actor named Humphrey Bogart -- who had burst into prominence in another role Raft rejected -- was selected to play private investigator Sam Spade. Bogart mostly played heavies, the hood gunned down in the second reel. His friendship with Huston got him the lead (alongside Falcon costars Lorre and Greenstreet) in Huston's Casablanca, the best movie of the twentieth century according to the AFI -- "Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us," wrote Umberto Eco. Bogie became an icon because The Maltese Falcon showed he could play a hero. But how heroic was Sam Spade?
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October 11, 2004
First in war, first in peace, last in the National League
Washington is no Cleveland. ESPN has dubbed Cleveland "America's Most Tortured Sports City", with its seemingly unending string of agonizing sports losses. Cleveland, 1974, edges out Washington, 1964 on the list of horrific years for cities in sports. But after a brief flirtation with excellence and a run at the Stanley Cup, the Washington Capitals have descended into consistent mediocrity; the Washington Wizards are jokes, among the worst franchises in professional sports; and surely zillionaire adman never imagined the trials he'd endure after buying his favorite boyhood team. What a city with three mediocre teams needs is a fourth to root for, and so DC stole the Expos, giving the good people of Montreal an excuse to shout "Allez les Expos!" one last bitter time. Not to dismiss the thrilling 1925 World Series, featuring the great Walter Johnson, but was robbing Montreal of its miniscule baseball tradition worth the inevitable pundit blatherings about baseball in the nation's capital, the shameless pillaging of the public trough that stadium deals represent? (And 70% of the city doesn't even want the team.) Washington is a football town without a decent football team, but the Senators -- or Nationals, or Grays, or Monuments -- seem unlikely to capitalize on their lack of success; under the control of the 30 other major league owners, the Expos were bled down to nothing. As recently as 1994, they were a powerhouse; last year, they lost nearly 100 games. And so they will rumble into Washington. The last two teams to play in Washington struggled and ended up in Minnesota and Texas. Who knows if the third time will prove lucky? Perhaps DC should name its team not after senators or monuments but after an American hero and a team that, unlike so many others, almost never let fans down.
October 10, 2004
Go ask Alice
Were a Victorian Englishman of good breeding seeking a book for his children, he would have many choices; the explosion of publishing had trickled down into the children's market, producing a wealth of offerings. Many were didactic and moralistic; many were repetitive and wooden; many, then as now, were both. But in 1865, there would have been only one choice: the phenomenally best-selling and critically acclaimed book by an obscure Oxford lecturer in mathematics named Charles Dodgson. Dodgson's had entertained his boss's daughters on a rowing trip in the summer of 1862, and the story he told the Liddell sisters -- Edith, Lorina, and most especially Alice -- were going to make him famous beyond his wildest dreams. Child mortality was a constant concern in nineteenth century London, so children needed to learn right from wrong lest they go to Hell. But despite his position as a deacon -- at one time in line to become a rector -- at Christ Church, Dodgson wasn't concerned with children's spiritual salvation; he had embraced heterodox ideas, rejecting the idea of eternal damnation. Boys of Dodgson's class were expected to learn the manly virtues of honesty, fair play, and hard-charging competition at sports. But Dodgson, unlike Tom Brown, had loathed his time at Rugby School. He was terminally shy, uncomfortable around other boys, unathletic, a stammerer. What Dodgson liked was little girls, logic, the theater, nonsense, and the light verse he tirelessly penned under the name "Lewis Carroll".
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October 07, 2004
Hello operator
Once, there was a company with a monopoly so entrenched, a technological advantage so large, a place in the economy so vital, that the government felt that it needed to step in to protect consumers. Actually, it was more than once; ever since Henry Lloyd started raking muck and talking about exactly how the Vanderbilts operated, making moves against the largest and most competition-free companies in the country had been a pursuit of the federal government depending on the political climate; the Sherman Antitrust Act wasn't only for hassling unions. And so it was that, in addition to railroads and oil companies, the Federal Trade Commision has occasionaly seen fit to investigate information technology. U.S. vs. Microsoft gave Larry Lessig a platform, David Boies a new career, and the world quality entertainment, but it produced little else. The antitrust case launched against IBM in 1972 was such a notorious debacle that many claimed that antitrust was dead. But against the technological juggernaut of the American Telegraph & Telephone company, the FTC drew blood, spurred innovation, saved money for tens of millions of Americans, and crippled one of America's most storied companies.
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