The Messy No-Hitter
I am not much of a fan of sports. When the sports comes on the network channels, I switch to another channel. I resent it, further, when basketball or football games go longer than they should and start wiping out the local news on the weekends. Fortunately I have the Web here to find the news whenever the networks see fit to bomb them out with sports.
However I do have an affinity for baseball, which dates from my childhood days. I especially like finding unusual things about baseball. For example, what I might term the minimum games (some would say "extreme" games, but that word is used far too often). These are the shutout, the no-hitter, and the perfect game. A pitcher (or team) shuts out the opponent when the opponent scores no runs. A pitcher earns a no-hitter if the opponent gets no hits. A perfect game is where no one on the opposing side at all reaches first base. Such a game must be 27 straight outs. Recently a no-hitter was pitched by a committee of pitchers.
A pitcher always wins a shutout, since a team must score runs to win. A pitcher always wins a perfect game, since a team must get runners on base to score runs to win. However, a pitcher need not win a no-hitter. It is easy to get on base without a hit. Usually a no-hitting pitcher will win, but sometimes he doesn't. In 1961 Harvey Haddix of the Pittsburgh Pirates pitched 11 straight perfect innings. That's right, 33 straight outs against the Milwaukee Braves. Unfortunately, the Pirates could not score and so the score remained 0-0 and Haddix had to continue to pitch and pitch. In the 12th inning, the Braves got runners on base and won with a 3-run homer (actually that was a 1-run double, but that's another story). So the longest number of perfect innings was pitched by a pitcher who lost.
Today I saw a web page which has a collection of what are called "messy" no-hitters. This included the one in 1990 by Andy Hawkins in which he pitched an 8-inning no-hitter but allowed the White Sox to score 4 runs, while his Yankees reversed the pattern and got no runs on 4 hits. But the one that took the cake was one in 1967 between Detroit and Baltimore. Barber of the Orioles pitched 8 2/3 innings in which the Tigers did not get a single hit. But they did walk 10 times, got hit by the pitcher twice, and were the recipient of a wild pitch once. Further, Barber pitched 300 pitches, about half of which were balls. But what stuck out about this game was his statement afterwards: "They probably didn't get a hit because I didn't throw anything close enough to the plate." It shows that sometimes an achievement is not that much of an achievement, but it also shows there is more than one way of achieving your goals in baseball. This game shows that it may be possible to throw all out-of-zone pitches and still win, provided you get them to swing once in a while into strikes and outs. I will mention other baseball situations like this in future blogs; they show that goals in baseball are not that clear-cut.
A Journey through Blogrealm
Blogtrek
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2003/06/12
2003/06/11
Does Hillary Clinton have charisma?
Now the fuss in the media is about Hillary Clinton. She just finished publishing a book and she has appeared on 2 TV shows including a Larry King show. According to her the adventuring of her husband to other women did hurt the marriage a bit but the marriage survived it; she and her husband were united against the prosecutors and the hypermedia who sought to blow the crisis up for whatever they can get. But now the question is: can Hillary run against Bush in 2004 and defeat him? She is not an announced candidate and is possibly eyeing 2008 instead, but a sizeable draft-Clinton movement could persuade her to change her mind. How would she stack up against Bush?
A Democrat in a race against an incumbent can influence the race in only one way by him or herself, namely by being charismatic. This is the one Lichtman key that a Democrat can control. So is Hillary charismatic? I'd say so. Look at all the people who come wanting her to sign their copy of her book. Look at all the media attention. Why? To me she is an excellent speaker, and she seems to champion the cause of women everywhere, because she is assertive and speaks her mind. She is especially popular with them and can be expected to take much of their vote if she ran against Bush. However, she is abrasive at times and for some reason men find her threatening. I don't find her threatening. But as long as there exist men that find her threatening, that may be a point against her being charismatic. But just about every charismatic politician - both Kennedys, William Jennings Bryan and so forth have had an unusual number of enemies. So that may not say that she is not charismatic. In my opinion she is; at least she is more so than any of the Democrats now running. If so, then if she runs, she will cause Bush to lose Lichtman Key 13. This means that only two more keys are needed to topple Bush. If the economy totters - and the rising costs of oil and gas could do that - and if something else happens, such as a scandal, a major riot, or a third party candidate getting more than 5% of the vote, then Bush will be defeated in 2004. It still is a long shot, but I believe that it is the best chance the Democrats have. 2008, schmoo-thousand eight. The Democrats need to persuade Hillary to enter the 2004 race, and to enter it now.
Now the fuss in the media is about Hillary Clinton. She just finished publishing a book and she has appeared on 2 TV shows including a Larry King show. According to her the adventuring of her husband to other women did hurt the marriage a bit but the marriage survived it; she and her husband were united against the prosecutors and the hypermedia who sought to blow the crisis up for whatever they can get. But now the question is: can Hillary run against Bush in 2004 and defeat him? She is not an announced candidate and is possibly eyeing 2008 instead, but a sizeable draft-Clinton movement could persuade her to change her mind. How would she stack up against Bush?
A Democrat in a race against an incumbent can influence the race in only one way by him or herself, namely by being charismatic. This is the one Lichtman key that a Democrat can control. So is Hillary charismatic? I'd say so. Look at all the people who come wanting her to sign their copy of her book. Look at all the media attention. Why? To me she is an excellent speaker, and she seems to champion the cause of women everywhere, because she is assertive and speaks her mind. She is especially popular with them and can be expected to take much of their vote if she ran against Bush. However, she is abrasive at times and for some reason men find her threatening. I don't find her threatening. But as long as there exist men that find her threatening, that may be a point against her being charismatic. But just about every charismatic politician - both Kennedys, William Jennings Bryan and so forth have had an unusual number of enemies. So that may not say that she is not charismatic. In my opinion she is; at least she is more so than any of the Democrats now running. If so, then if she runs, she will cause Bush to lose Lichtman Key 13. This means that only two more keys are needed to topple Bush. If the economy totters - and the rising costs of oil and gas could do that - and if something else happens, such as a scandal, a major riot, or a third party candidate getting more than 5% of the vote, then Bush will be defeated in 2004. It still is a long shot, but I believe that it is the best chance the Democrats have. 2008, schmoo-thousand eight. The Democrats need to persuade Hillary to enter the 2004 race, and to enter it now.
CD Pollution
The ability to store and process data has grown tremendously in the last 15 years. In 1988 a typical computer had about 20 MB of disk space. Today's computers have 20 GB - that's a thousand times more. However, our ability to efficiently store the data on appropriate media has not kept pace very well. In fact it has become distorted so badly that it threatens the environment. In the old days, you stored your data on a 360,000 byte 5.25-in floppy disk. Then came the 3.5-in disk which can hold 1,440,000 bytes. The hard disk came next with 20,000,000 bytes of data. If you wanted to take some data somewhere in 1994, you would have used 3.5-in floppy disks. In 1995 or so came the Iomega Zip disk™. All at once 100,000,000 bytes were available on a disk only slightly thicker than a floppy! But what happened to about 10,000,000 bytes, or 10 MB? There was nothing convenient to put it on. If your data was 1.45 MB and could not be split onto two floppies, you had to use a Zip disk and put your data on 100 MB of storage space, or a little like having a mouse in a cathedral. One thing was OK, however. The 100 MB was expensive; it was about $1.20 a disk.
Things have gotten worse since then. The recordable compact disc came next. Now you can record your own data CDs. Each CD contained a whopping 650,000,000 MB of data, on a disk that now costs a mere 40 cents. Think of it. 6 cents per 1,073,741,824 bytes. An encyclopedia can easily fit onto such a disc. They come in two forms: CD-R and CD-RW. The CD-R is the dirt cheap one, but once you record on it, it is recorded on it forever, much as on an ordinary music CD that you buy in the store. You can't change or erase it. Copying data to such a disc is fast. It takes only about 5 minutes to store half a gigabyte. So if you want to back up your files, you buy Cds at the store. You buy cds every time you want to back up your data, and you throw the old CDs away. This is where it gets wasteful. Because it is cheap to record once and only once, once its usefulness has ended, it gets thrown into our landfills or whatnot and it piles up there, creating pollution. CD-Rs are not the most environmentally friendly medium. Further, if a file on a zip disk was a mouse in a cathedral, a 1.45 MB file on a compact disc is a wasp in a cathedral. An enormous amount of capacity goes wasted. Why not a Zip disk? Because they are much more expensive.
There is another type of compact disc, the CD-RW, only twice as expensive as CD-Rs. These are friendlier to the environment. You create and delete files on them the way you would on a floppy or hard disk drive. However, these are impossibly slow, and they can be read only on CD-RW drives. I tried to back up files recently to a CD-RW and every time it would get hung up on the 25th megabyte and not do any more. I had to give up on it and use CD-Rs and pollute the environment. Why can't they make a better CD-RW? I hear instead they are making DVD discs with 5 GB or so of capacity. That's right, now your 1.45 MB file is a flea in a cathedral. We get better ways of saving hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes onto a medium to stay forever and forever, but we still have nothing efficient for 10 MB worth of data. Computer manufacturers, surely you can give us better options than these.
The ability to store and process data has grown tremendously in the last 15 years. In 1988 a typical computer had about 20 MB of disk space. Today's computers have 20 GB - that's a thousand times more. However, our ability to efficiently store the data on appropriate media has not kept pace very well. In fact it has become distorted so badly that it threatens the environment. In the old days, you stored your data on a 360,000 byte 5.25-in floppy disk. Then came the 3.5-in disk which can hold 1,440,000 bytes. The hard disk came next with 20,000,000 bytes of data. If you wanted to take some data somewhere in 1994, you would have used 3.5-in floppy disks. In 1995 or so came the Iomega Zip disk™. All at once 100,000,000 bytes were available on a disk only slightly thicker than a floppy! But what happened to about 10,000,000 bytes, or 10 MB? There was nothing convenient to put it on. If your data was 1.45 MB and could not be split onto two floppies, you had to use a Zip disk and put your data on 100 MB of storage space, or a little like having a mouse in a cathedral. One thing was OK, however. The 100 MB was expensive; it was about $1.20 a disk.
Things have gotten worse since then. The recordable compact disc came next. Now you can record your own data CDs. Each CD contained a whopping 650,000,000 MB of data, on a disk that now costs a mere 40 cents. Think of it. 6 cents per 1,073,741,824 bytes. An encyclopedia can easily fit onto such a disc. They come in two forms: CD-R and CD-RW. The CD-R is the dirt cheap one, but once you record on it, it is recorded on it forever, much as on an ordinary music CD that you buy in the store. You can't change or erase it. Copying data to such a disc is fast. It takes only about 5 minutes to store half a gigabyte. So if you want to back up your files, you buy Cds at the store. You buy cds every time you want to back up your data, and you throw the old CDs away. This is where it gets wasteful. Because it is cheap to record once and only once, once its usefulness has ended, it gets thrown into our landfills or whatnot and it piles up there, creating pollution. CD-Rs are not the most environmentally friendly medium. Further, if a file on a zip disk was a mouse in a cathedral, a 1.45 MB file on a compact disc is a wasp in a cathedral. An enormous amount of capacity goes wasted. Why not a Zip disk? Because they are much more expensive.
There is another type of compact disc, the CD-RW, only twice as expensive as CD-Rs. These are friendlier to the environment. You create and delete files on them the way you would on a floppy or hard disk drive. However, these are impossibly slow, and they can be read only on CD-RW drives. I tried to back up files recently to a CD-RW and every time it would get hung up on the 25th megabyte and not do any more. I had to give up on it and use CD-Rs and pollute the environment. Why can't they make a better CD-RW? I hear instead they are making DVD discs with 5 GB or so of capacity. That's right, now your 1.45 MB file is a flea in a cathedral. We get better ways of saving hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes onto a medium to stay forever and forever, but we still have nothing efficient for 10 MB worth of data. Computer manufacturers, surely you can give us better options than these.
2003/06/10
Kugel and the International Space Station
Last night I went to a meeting of the Richmond Astronomical Society. Afterwards, a bunch of us congregated at the Science Museum of Virginia, where the meeting was held, to look at the Earth water kugel. This is a huge, 45-ton or so ball resting on a fountain so that it is supported by the water. The kugel can be spun on this as the water cushion behaves like Teflon. Some of us wanted it to stay still and point at an angle of 23 degrees, so that it was oriented like the real Earth. Not only that we wanted it to spin precisely at the same rate the Earth spins. But later at night I gave the globe a few good heaves and it was spinning rapidly on an axis that was not the polar axis.
We hung around a little later because someone found on the web that the International Space Station (ISS) was going to make a pass at 2133 (9:33 pm) on 2003 June 9. At 2132, sure enough, between the eyes of Gemini (Castor and Pollux), the station appeared. It was brighter than Arcturus but fainter than Jupiter. It passed from right to left, towards the south, and went high, near where the moon was. It came within a moon's radius of Spica, then it went on down to the southern horizon and winked out when it hit the Earth's shadow. It was worth waiting on a work night to see. I had seen the Shuttle and ISS before but every time is a sight to behold. A steady beacon (not flashing like an airplane) drifting across the sky, brighter than just about anything else in the sky, something that our grandparents never saw during their youth. Like the Mars probe, it beckons us out to space, to make it a station on our way to exploring the heavens.
Last night I went to a meeting of the Richmond Astronomical Society. Afterwards, a bunch of us congregated at the Science Museum of Virginia, where the meeting was held, to look at the Earth water kugel. This is a huge, 45-ton or so ball resting on a fountain so that it is supported by the water. The kugel can be spun on this as the water cushion behaves like Teflon. Some of us wanted it to stay still and point at an angle of 23 degrees, so that it was oriented like the real Earth. Not only that we wanted it to spin precisely at the same rate the Earth spins. But later at night I gave the globe a few good heaves and it was spinning rapidly on an axis that was not the polar axis.
We hung around a little later because someone found on the web that the International Space Station (ISS) was going to make a pass at 2133 (9:33 pm) on 2003 June 9. At 2132, sure enough, between the eyes of Gemini (Castor and Pollux), the station appeared. It was brighter than Arcturus but fainter than Jupiter. It passed from right to left, towards the south, and went high, near where the moon was. It came within a moon's radius of Spica, then it went on down to the southern horizon and winked out when it hit the Earth's shadow. It was worth waiting on a work night to see. I had seen the Shuttle and ISS before but every time is a sight to behold. A steady beacon (not flashing like an airplane) drifting across the sky, brighter than just about anything else in the sky, something that our grandparents never saw during their youth. Like the Mars probe, it beckons us out to space, to make it a station on our way to exploring the heavens.
Mars Bound
We are headed to Mars again. Once again a rocket has taken off, carrying with it a probe to plunk down a Martian golf cart on the planet and rover all over the place observing and testing, with the objective of finding water, and maybe life itself, if they exist on the Red Planet. I saw this launch today. I came to a hard point in my work today so I went downstairs to the cafeteria to get a snack. On the way I saw the TV screen and a rocket on it, and I heard 15, 14, 13, 12, … . Whaaa?? I thought this may have been a recording. But it said "LIVE". This was the real thing. The launch that had been postponed because of bad weather. I realized that that is indeed what I heard. I heard "15, 14, 13, 12, … . Not only that, but I heard "11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Ignition, and we have liftoff". It really happened, at exactly 1400 (2 pm) today, 2003 June 10. I next saw a camera on the spacecraft video behind, and I saw the ground receding. This was exciting. It was just like the movielet "Powers of Ten". First the landing strip appeared. Then the coastline. Then the vast expanse of ocean and a cloak of clouds, and finally the curve of our planet itself. It no longer was a scene in central Florida. It was a view of our planet, our blue marble, from space. It was the world this probe was leaving behind, going out and finding out if indeed there is water, or life, on one of our neighboring worlds, Mars, in the Great Year of Mars, when the planet is closer to us than at any time in the past 50,000 years. Because of this it will take only 7 months to reach its destination on 2004 January 4. Maybe then, in the fourth year of this Millennium, if we are lucky, we may find out if indeed, we are truly alone. I am looking forward to it and hope they succeed this time.
We are headed to Mars again. Once again a rocket has taken off, carrying with it a probe to plunk down a Martian golf cart on the planet and rover all over the place observing and testing, with the objective of finding water, and maybe life itself, if they exist on the Red Planet. I saw this launch today. I came to a hard point in my work today so I went downstairs to the cafeteria to get a snack. On the way I saw the TV screen and a rocket on it, and I heard 15, 14, 13, 12, … . Whaaa?? I thought this may have been a recording. But it said "LIVE". This was the real thing. The launch that had been postponed because of bad weather. I realized that that is indeed what I heard. I heard "15, 14, 13, 12, … . Not only that, but I heard "11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Ignition, and we have liftoff". It really happened, at exactly 1400 (2 pm) today, 2003 June 10. I next saw a camera on the spacecraft video behind, and I saw the ground receding. This was exciting. It was just like the movielet "Powers of Ten". First the landing strip appeared. Then the coastline. Then the vast expanse of ocean and a cloak of clouds, and finally the curve of our planet itself. It no longer was a scene in central Florida. It was a view of our planet, our blue marble, from space. It was the world this probe was leaving behind, going out and finding out if indeed there is water, or life, on one of our neighboring worlds, Mars, in the Great Year of Mars, when the planet is closer to us than at any time in the past 50,000 years. Because of this it will take only 7 months to reach its destination on 2004 January 4. Maybe then, in the fourth year of this Millennium, if we are lucky, we may find out if indeed, we are truly alone. I am looking forward to it and hope they succeed this time.
2003/06/09
V
I see they are bringing V back. They are going to publish a sequel. This story came out in the mid 1980s as a very, very long TV movie, exceeded in length only by the dragging episodes of a movie later in the decade that envisioned a US taken over by Soviet communism. V was about aliens who come in huge flying saucers over the cities and say that they are trying to protect our civilization, while preparing to eat us. People have compared the aliens or "visitors" to Nazis. The visitors take the form of lizards with human suits. A revolt against them was stirred up by Julia, whose forces chased them off into the wild black yonder near the end of the movie.
I am not sure this is the type of movie to bring back now. It is violent and favors small groups revolting against a society. While that may seem good, remember that the foremost group in our world doing that right now is al Qaeda. Many people, including perhaps most Arabs, will see the rebels as like al Qaeda and the visitors as like the US. The same holds true of Star Wars, where the Jedi Knights take the part of al Qaeda, and the Foundation trilogy of Isaac Asimov, featuring a rebel organization called the Foundation. Indeed, the translation of this book into Arabic translates "Foundation" as "al Qaeda". I would favor instead a movie which has people (or extraterrestrials) coming together and negotiating a brighter future for all.
I see they are bringing V back. They are going to publish a sequel. This story came out in the mid 1980s as a very, very long TV movie, exceeded in length only by the dragging episodes of a movie later in the decade that envisioned a US taken over by Soviet communism. V was about aliens who come in huge flying saucers over the cities and say that they are trying to protect our civilization, while preparing to eat us. People have compared the aliens or "visitors" to Nazis. The visitors take the form of lizards with human suits. A revolt against them was stirred up by Julia, whose forces chased them off into the wild black yonder near the end of the movie.
I am not sure this is the type of movie to bring back now. It is violent and favors small groups revolting against a society. While that may seem good, remember that the foremost group in our world doing that right now is al Qaeda. Many people, including perhaps most Arabs, will see the rebels as like al Qaeda and the visitors as like the US. The same holds true of Star Wars, where the Jedi Knights take the part of al Qaeda, and the Foundation trilogy of Isaac Asimov, featuring a rebel organization called the Foundation. Indeed, the translation of this book into Arabic translates "Foundation" as "al Qaeda". I would favor instead a movie which has people (or extraterrestrials) coming together and negotiating a brighter future for all.
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