Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Understanding football: the offensive line


Recently I was hanging out with Harinder, and I got to talking about how I wanted to learn more about football. I mean, I can follow a game just as well as the next guy, but I don't really know much about plays and formations, or what the strategies are in designing and running them. (BTW, it turns out that the best way to learn this stuff is to play a lot of Madden. Which makes sense: probably the best way to become acquainted with any sport is to play video games of that sport. This phenomenon is the sole reason I know the offsides rule in hockey and can recite from memory the first line of the 1993 Detroit Red Wings.)

Anyway, at the moment the only real sort of football philosophy I've developed is this: it's all about the offensive line. To me, this is by far the most important component on the team, because a chain of dependencies makes it the case that everything falls apart when the offensive line is ineffective. Consider:
  • Without good pass protection, the quarterback can't get the passing game going--his hurried passes are going to be inaccurate and lead to turnovers.
  • This causes the offense to become imbalanced: now you have to run it. But not only is your offensive line unable to create holes for your running back, but the defense is expecting the run. So the whole offense gets shut down.
  • A sputtering offense means your defense is out there most of the game, getting tired and demoralized.
A good offensive line, on the other hand, means that your receivers have plenty of time to run their routes and--provided the QB is any good--generate the threat of passing for big yardage. Meanwhile, since the defense is guarding against the pass it can't stack the box, which gives the running game room to operate. With a healthy running game going, the offense can manage the play clock, tiring out the opponent while giving the defense a good rest.

I realize this is all probably pretty elementary, but it's where I'm at right now.

(Photo by the no doubt aptly named Flickr user Monica's Dad.)

Legislative code

This Ezra Klein post is interesting because it explains how bills are actually argued and voted upon in "plain English", and then translated into legalese:
The bill is written in plain English so the legislators can actually grasp its provisions, and CBO scores that version. After passage, the bill is rewritten in legalese, and lawyers go back to make sure there are no discrepancies between the "plain English" and the legislative language. If there are, the legal language is rewritten to reflect the English.
I imagine that there must be very strong parallels between legal language and computer code. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to essentially come up with an IDE for legalese--where the text editor and maybe even an equivalent to a compiler would have some idea of the meaning of the content that was being produced (leveraging syntactic rules to do so). I wonder if there's the concept of "commenting your code" when you write legal language. I wonder what the best practices and conventions are.

Hmm.

You are ten years old. You've just gotten home and thrown your backpack in the corner and turned on the TV

I already linked this video on Twitter, but here it is again:



A few comments:
  • Oh God, that Kid Sister/My Buddy song. It stays with you.
  • "Airlandia"? A world where "everything is powered by wind"? HELL FUCKING YES. I have no recollection of these toys, and it doesn't even seem as though there was any cartoon that actually accompanied them. It was just this entire concept and basic storyline introduced within a 30 second commercial. You especially have to love the "fighting for air against the tyrants of wind" line, too. I wish I could see recording studio footage of the grown men who sang the chorus, "Air Raiders, the power is--in--the--Air Raiders...." Also, a really nice touch: you hardly notice it, but at the very end of the commercial it shows a kid falling away from the camera (getting blown away from the camera, perhaps?), and then the Air Raiders logo appears. He probably ended up in the same dimension that you get sucked into when you lose at Crossfire.
  • I also have no recollection of Freakies cereal. It looks God awful. And it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense: why are these cereal aliens modeled after the Beach Boys? They're all wearing Hawaiian shirts and the song sounds like it's supposed to be the Beach Boys. Did kids even know who the Beach Boys were? Who are they targeting with this? Also, the name "Freakies" is a horrible name. Also: it's kind of cheating to make the mascot of a cereal a big, misshapen cereal-like lump and then turn around and pretend that you made the cereal into the shape of the mascot.
  • Flintstones: weak.
  • Wow, Video Art. I love how high-concept and stylized the commercial is--and man would it be cool to have one of those today. Sixteen colors!
  • Screw Alpha-Bits.
  • If I was friends with the Turtles, and they slept over, in the morning I'd always be like, "Hey, you want Golden Grams for breakfast???", and they'd be like, "Fuck you", but then like, "Wait, do you have Golden Grams?", and I'd be like, "No, I was only joking", and then they'd look a little let down maybe?
  • I really, really like the ice cream cone cereal commercial. Ice Cream Jones has got to be near the bottom of the heap in terms of forgotten cereal mascots. I imagine he parks that ridiculous cart outside a run-down apartment building in a bad part of town, goes into his sparsely furnished apartment, and drinks and cries. Also: I love how they just beat you over the head with their mind-bending concept of an ice cream cone cereal. The kid at the end (who looks vaguely stoned, I might add) says it best: "Mmmm, ice cream cone cereal." They might as well have just showed 30 seconds of silence with nothing but big block letters that said "BUY ICE CREAM CONE CEREAL NOW". Actually, I would like to see a commercial done in that style some day.
  • I totally remember this Honeycombs commercial. Aurally the most visceral parts are the "Yeah yeah yeah" and "no no no", but visually I have to say the most visceral image is the calipers holding the piece of cereal with the ruler on the robot measuring it to be a full inch. As a kid I never understood what this was supposed to prove or why I was supposed to care if the individual cereal bits were big. Baffling, but there you have it. Also: Hannity & Honeycombs.
  • That kaleidoscope thing is WEAK.
  • I remember a different version of the Connect Four song, where it goes: "Go for it--connect four!" Maybe that came later.
  • Ahh, Duck Tales bumpers.
By the way, I have to say that I've always been fascinated with cereal and the way it's marketed. It's like this weird perfect intersection between children and capitalism that produces a marketing Galapagos Island of exotic cartoon characters and high concept junk food. I imagine that someone from Russia visiting here in 1982 would have been utterly astonished by the sheer number and variety of sugary cereals available, and would have immediately realized that Communism didn't stand a chance.

PS: It's been a long-standing dream of mine to create a children's cereal called Basically Just Sugar.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

On Newsies

Here's a video I made a while back that was lying around on my computer; I went ahead and uploaded it to YouTube, because, hey, that's what you do.


Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Sadly relevant


From The Onion.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Modernity, torture

My Blogger Dashboard is littered with half-written posts about what I'm about to talk about--it's just very hard to express clearly, and I'm still finding my way--but I'll just go ahead and try to blurt out something short that hopefully is not complete gibberish.

I've been trying to figure out what lies at the very, very center of modernity and Western thought and so forth, and I think it's something like this: that the whole thing rests on a single foundational insight about truth, namely, that no one is infallible. Or, put another way: it is always possible that you could be wrong.

Everything seems to derive from this one bedrock principle. The moment you acknowledge that any view uttered could be false, any position held could be wrong, it becomes clear that you must assume a position of doubt--one that always leaves open the possibility that you are wrong and that some dissenter is right. And the next thing that springs to mind is a model--the "marketplace of ideas"--where no viewpoint is prohibited (because it is possible that this viewpoint is correct), and where the correct and good viewpoints rise to the top. And in this model, the more that is contributed--the larger the marketplace--the better, because it increases the chances of a good viewpoint emerging. And besides the marketplace being larger, we also want it to be more diverse, because this too will increase the chances of finding a good viewpoint. And suddenly, we begin to structure our ontology around this epistemological need: we view society as consisting of "individuals", rather than the less granular unit of society that is centered on the family or clan, which has the effect of increasing the number of nodes in the marketplace. We encourage "individualism", which increases the diversity of the marketplace. We encourage "equality", so as to maximize the interactions between nodes, which generates more possibilities. Every facet of liberalism, and the general direction of liberal progress over the centuries, seems to be in the direction of increasing the magnitude, the kinetic energy, and the combinatorial explosiveness of this abstract marketplace, which is ever-ratcheting upward to higher and better truths. And it will never stop, because we will always think: well, it is possible that we are not now at the highest and best truth, because it is always possible that one is wrong.

And so the whole liberal project, it seems to me, has this epistemological obsession--a core skepticism that we can ever be certain of the Truth--leading it forward by the nose. (A lot of this, it's interesting to note, is intensely Cartesian: not just the fact that it is founded on a non-negotiable kernal of doubt, but also this very dualistic relationship between the material world and the mental world of the marketplace of ideas. This dualism is really brought out, I think, by the liberal conception of punishment as physical confinement. Crime--doing harm to others--is bad, because it inhibits or destroys other nodes in the marketplace. So by physically confining the criminal node, you prevent this harm from taking place--while also maintaining, to the greatest possible extent, the effectiveness of the criminal node. Note that we do not prohibit criminals from reading or staying connected to the world, nor do we limit their free speech rights. In typical dualistic Cartesian fasion, we jail their bodies but not their souls.)

Anyway, getting back to torture: torture seems to be the precise antithesis of this model and this way of thinking, because it leverages the body against the soul, imposing the will of the torturer node onto the torturee node. Nodes are only valuable in the marketplace so long as they are independent of each other and actually contributing original material; coercing a node to think and express certain thoughts removes the independence of that node--reducing it to a mere extension of some other node's will. When the node is tortured, it is, for all intents and purposes, destroyed. Worse than destroyed, even: enslaved. Converted into a puppet that is wholly controlled by some other individual, and yet nominally still a node-in-good-standing in the marketplace, it submits ideas and thoughts as if they sprung ex nihilo from an independent will but in fact they are the utterances of the zombified empty hulk of an individual. The torturer--the puppeteer--is thus in a position to illegitimately reap all the epistemological benefits of an "independent" voice that just so happens to say exactly what it wants to hear.

Now, some clarification here. What I'm laying out here occupies kind of a weird space. It's not the actual moral argument against torture; rather, it's sort of the--I don't know--anthropology of reasoning out of which the moral argument arises? I don't know. That might be nonsense, but as I said at the outset, I'm still feeling my way on all this.

EDIT: By the way, I notice that the little image I used for the post says something interesting--that modernity is the "yearning for the infinite". I would say this has it backwards: we're not yearning for the infinite, but rather, due to our axiomatic commitment to doubt, we condemn ourselves to infinite yearning--a state of affairs that I think is problematic in a lot of ways, and that I plan on talking about in a future post.

An appreciation

I liked this bit of writing for an ESPN article about USC's loss:

Things move quickly now-a-days and everyone wants quick analysis. They also want that analysis to be sweeping and dramatic.

And, if said analysis is wrong, well, things move quickly now-a-days so there's new dramatic analysis to distract and sweep away that which is so five-minutes-ago.

So we have Washington beating USC, 16-13.

General conclusions thus far.

Washington is back!

USC is sunk!

The former seems more valid than the latter, but both hang on a small sample size.

Let's look at the two sides and how they emerged from Saturday's stunning game.


I wish all news writing was this smart and punchy.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Ac-a-dem-ics

The interim Tennessee president tells it like it is:

"Lane [Kiffin, Tennessee head coach] comes from the Pac-10, which in many respects is the epitome of great academics and great athletics, as this past weekend showed on several different levels, including to us. When we lost to UCLA, we lost to a better academic institution, too."

It is true that, as far as non-sports-related prestige goes, the Pac-10 is pretty up there: Stanford, Cal, UCLA, USC, Washington--these are all genuinely good schools.

They should combine football rank with US News and World Report college rank to generate a Total Awesomeness rank. I'm almost positive Cal's ridiculous #8/#21 would put it first in the nation.

EDIT: It turns out Cal would be tied with #3/#26 USC! We either have to beat them Oct. 3 or, like, take out their film department.

Here is the AP top 10, rejiggered to include academic rankings:
  1. USC (3+26=29)
  2. Cal (8+21=29)
  3. Florida (1+47=48)
  4. Texas (2+47=49)
  5. Penn State (5+47=52)
  6. Brigham Young (7+71=78)
  7. Alabama (4+96=100)
  8. LSU (9+128=137)
  9. Mississippi (5+Tier 3)
  10. Boise State (10+not found!)

Crisis on infinite CNNs

I haven't posted much since coming back from vacation because every time I sit down to knock something out, I find myself staring off into the middle distance and going, "Urrrmmmmm..."

The thing is, politics is, for the most part, pretty dumb. As in: not intellectual. It's a lot of people posing--affecting airs of being Serious or outraged, of thinking themselves caught up in some exciting, historical struggle for Something Or Other. But most of these people--the politicians, the pundits--they're just so awfully mediocre. Such forgettable people. And sometimes I think it's a real shame that I spend so much time and energy engaging with all of it. Just what do I think I'm doing, exactly? What is this, this me giving my two cents about every dumb non-issue that comes down the chute from the NYT, Sullivan, Yglesias, and the rest of it?

The thing is, I'm not really a guy who does a lot. It's not like I'm particularly politically active, or go volunteer and so forth. I'll donate some money here and there, but nothing that requires a whole lot of commitment. Even when it came to Obama, the most I could muster was dragging Marian along to go knock on a few dozen doors. I never even made a phone call. So: it's not like I'm some "player" and that this blog is, I don't know, doing something for me. It's pretty much just here because the thing I really like to do is to argue and write essays and try to find clever ways to be contrarian.

And, you know, that's fine. But what I'm finding is that, well, politics isn't a very great vehicle for the kind of argument/essays/etc. that I had in mind. I mean: how many times can you argue for things on the merits? It's not like there are many issues out there that are genuine puzzles that need solving; the issues are long solved, it's just that what remains is the purely political task of getting them implemented. But that requires political action--not further discussion.

So, I dunno. I'm thinking of taking a step back from all the nonsense. For a while I thought about trying to introduce into the blog what is probably my biggest competitive advantage as a writer--some comedy--but honestly I just can't think of an angle. I mean, I think if I could carve out a niche as sort of a funny Yglesias, that would be something, but, man, would that ever be difficult pull off...I think you can end up in partisan-hack territory real quick with that. But there are other things, too: for example, I like how Coates' blog is a little more personal and veers into pop culture more. So, like I said: I dunno. I guess we'll see what develops.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Back

Well, I'm back from The Burning The Man. I was a little bit in suspense coming back, since I hadn't had access to any media whatsoever, and lots of crazy stuff can happen in a week (for example, Katrina happened during Burning Man--so when my friends got back from it, there was this whole crazy "Um, New Orleans was destroyed while you were gone" talk). But alas, things seemed to have been churning on like normal.

About the speech tonight, I will say that I side with Matt Yglesias with regards to the heckling issue:

Personally, I sort of liked Rep Joe Wilson’s idea of introducing British-style heckling to the halls of congress; totally disrespectful and out of step with American tradition, true, but their tradition is better. Unfortunately, Wilson was also lying about the point at issue and will thereby set back the cause of heckling by decades.

I would add that I think there probably used to be a fair bit of heckling back in the old days, when Congress behaved more or less like a country bumpkin version of the Drones Club.

Also, I think this wins for best description of what went down as the heckling was going on:

All eyes turned in the South Carolina Republican's direction -- including Obama's, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's and Vice President Joe Biden's.

Wilson, looking agitated, leaned forward and began tapping away at his BlackBerry, as if he were Googling up proof that the president had, in fact, lied.

"Shame on you!" shouted someone from the Democratic side. "Throw him out!" shouted someone else. First Lady Michelle Obama, seated behind and above Wilson, seemed to mouth a drawn-out "damn" at the scene unfolding before her.

That's pretty good.