Beaneball - Reading

The Inner Game of Tennis

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:39:02 -0600

Random House recently sent me a copy of W. Timothy Gallwey's classic "The Inner Game of Tennis", so I suppose it's only fair that I say a few words. I'm not much of a tennis player, and probably never will be. I likely won't join a club and thus worry about my placement on the club ladder. I probably won't play in tournaments. I do like hitting a tennis ball with A from time to time. All of this might make one think that I wouldn't get much out of a book about how to master the mental side of tennis, but of course, as you might predict from my paragraph and sentence structure here, that's not true. Gallwey's techniques, if you can call them that, are explicitly meant to be applicable to all kinds of sports and all areas of life. The basic take away is "stop letting your conscious take over". That is, don't think about your technique, don't think about the last shot you missed (or made), don't think about anything -- just do it. The key reason why Gallwey advocates this method is because he believes the part of your mind that controls your body during physical activity can't be made to understand the verbal language employed by the other part of your mind. Your body doesn't really understand "bring the racket back higher" -- it understands how it feels to bring the racket back higher and can replicate that motion as long as it doesn't have some inner voice shouting at it "higher higher higher!" (Or an ultimate frisbee example: your body doesn't understand "elbow out on the flick!" -- it understands how it feels to throw with the entire arm unconstricted, away from the body, without the whole upper part of your arm locked to your ribs.) As for how one is supposed to learn basic technique, Gallwey essentially advocates a combination of feeling it out for yourself, seeing what works, and watching other people. In the last, the key is not analyzing what they're doing and trying to translate their motion into language: don't go, "Ah ha, he brings his left foot back to that angle to prepare his forehand". Instead, just do what he did. Let your body emulate the motion. One does occasionally get frustrated reading the book because Gallwey makes it all seem so easy. Anyone who has tried to "just relax" or meditate or any other kind of activity where you have to turn off or ignore the constant babbling of the conscious mind knows how difficult this is. Gallwey does acknowledge that it takes a lot of practice, a lifetime of practice, really, but he doesn't really give much in the way of tips on how to accomplish this centeredness he advocates. (Of course, you should probably expect that he wouldn't -- after all, Gallwey's entire system is dependent on the idea that these things can't be translated into verbal language, so of course he can't tell you how to let go of the conscious mind.) Feel free to skip right over Pete Carroll's new foreword. It adds nothing to the book, and was presumably only written so that Random House could slap his name on the cover.

James Flynn & Walter Benn Michaels ...

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:11:49 -0600

... opposite sides of the world, same side of the debate. That is, read Flynn's passage:

Tolerance school fallacy ... Somehow my coining this term has not made it into common currency, but no doubt that is merely a matter of time. It underlines the fallacy of concluding that we should respect the good of all because nothing can be shown to be good. This fallacy puts a spurious value on ethical skepticism by assuming that it entails tolerance, while the attempt to justify your ideals is labeled suspect as a supposed source of intolerance. It surfaced in William James, was embraced by anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict, and is now propagated by postmodernists who think they invented it.

James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence?, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p.150. Compare this to Michaels' The Trouble With Diversity.

Intelligence blogging

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 07:51:53 -0600

[T]here is one way in which individuals can make their own luck. He or she can internalize the goal of seeking challenging cognitive environments -- seeking intellectual challenges all the way from choosing the right leisure activities to wanting to marry someone who is intellectually stimulating. The best chance of enjoying enhanced cognitive skills is to fall in love with ideas, or intelligent conversation, or intelligent books, or some intellectual pursuit. If I do that, I create within my own mind a stimulating mental environment that accompanies me wherever I go. Then I am relatively free of needing good luck to enjoy a rich cognitive environment. I have constant and instant access to a portable gymnasium that exercises the mind. Books and ideas and analyzing things are easier to transport than a basketball court. No one can keep me from using mental arithmetic so habitually that my arithmetical skills survive.

James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence?, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007, p. 87. So marry the smartest person you can find, read books like Flynn's, and take challenging classes in high school and college. The nice thing about the practical wisdom resulting from the Dickens/Flynn model (that is, the model of intelligence that results in the above characterization of individuals making their own luck) is that it can't hurt. Even if you don't actually gain intelligence, IQ, from taking harder classes, what do you have to lose? (Grade grubbers who only care about an impressive GPA to show the law schools need not comment.)

Today's playoff picks / Why I'm not going to be an agent

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 12:39:45 -0600

I have no documentation of this, but I had both the Colts and Seahawks in yesterday's games (the Colts because they're a vastly better team than the Chiefs and the Seahawks because they were playing at home). I figured the Seahawks game would be close, but obviously you can't anticipate the craziness that ensued. I'll try to go 4-0 today as I pick Philadelphia and New England to win. Those aren't exactly controversial picks, although some people will get seduced by the Giants' offensive talent. The Patriots-Jets game is tough because while I'm not a Patriot-hater, they're not my favorite team to root for, and I really like Chad Pennington and Eric Mangini, so I'd like to root for the Jets, but I just don't think they're ready to beat Bill Belichick in the playoffs.

Also, check out this story in Variety and/or Jerry Crasnick's book License to Deal to see why I've completely abandoned the idea of becoming an agent. It's a ridiculously cutthroat business, and I'm not the type of person that would succeed there, I think.

Freedom of Expression

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 18:15:39 -0600

I finished Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. There's a lot to recommend it, including the fact that McLeod is a UMass-Amherst grad (his PhD, anyway) and that he's generally very angry about the continued legal sanctioning of the stifling of creativity in America (and beyond). That said, I don't know if I'd call it a good book. I sort of felt while reading it that he didn't say anything you couldn't go find out in Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. That's not entirely fair, because there is lots and lots of interesting material cited as examples of what our culture could be if the muffling effects of intellectual-property law could be re-lessened. For example, McLeod writes about sampling in hip-hop, collage in subversive art, and Todd Haynes's (in?)famous Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Each story is compelling, but I never really felt it all come together. Which is not to say his point isn't clear. It certainly is. But is it clear because it's obvious from the first five pages what his point is, or is it clear because he's structured his book and his anecdotes in such a way that each one makes his argument a little clearer, a little more convincing? I'd say the former. Then again, I'm biased. I did read Free Culture. I'm predisposed to agree with these ideas, and I'm already more familiar with them than McLeod's intended audience might have been. Could this book, then, serve as a primer, a gateway to Lessig's books (which themselves could be gateways to more technical work by other lawyers and academics)? Maybe. If I were making a personal recommendation, though, to someone interested in finding out a little more about, say, the file sharing arguments, I'd advise skipping straight to the head of the class with Lessig's work. I ought to note, also, that McLeod has done an interesting thing and made his work freely downloadable (as a PDF) at his website (linked above). The book is licensed under a Creative Commons license (the same license, actually, that I use on this site).

Lessig's "The Future of Ideas"

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 20:20:11 -0600

I'm working my way backward through the Lawrence Lessig trilogy, having started with Free Culture, which I wrote about last July. I just finished The Future of Ideas on the train today. The themes are, of course, very similar. Where Free Culture dealt with (duh) cultural things like music, art, and literature, however, this book dealt more with technological and business-oriented innovation. His concerns are essentially the same in both cases: the government is moving too quickly to entrench the Old in their positions, granting them extended copyright, liberal patent, and other protections, all to the detriment of the New. His point is not that the New should win for the sake of being new, but that general human progress is made by allowing new technology and practice to overtake the old. If we continue putting in hurdles for the New to jump, we'll significantly retard their ability to innovate, leaving us stagnant in the hands of the Old, who, for perfectly sane business reasons, have no desire to make radical changes. The Old merely want to get marginal increases on what they've already got. The unfortunate thing about what Lessig says is that his solutions are so pie-in-the-sky. They always involve the government finally standing up to big business and saying, "Hey, you know what we're going to do? We're going to do what's best for the people." Of course, that'll never happen. It's in the nature of our big-money political system that the in-power (both business-wise and political-wise) stay in power, and even if Lessig sells three million copies of his book, that's not going to write a campaign check for any Senators.

Joe Morgan vs. Moneyball

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 16:17:30 -0500

Here's an article in the San Francisco Weekly about Joe Morgan and why he hates Moneyball. It's worth a gander. I picked up the link from Aaron Gleeman.

John Dvorak on Creative Commons

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 15:28:59 -0500

John Dvorak, who is, I suppose, a well-respected columnist in computer-geek circles, comes up blasting Creative Commons (CC) in his latest column. CC is, in its own words, "a nonprofit that offers a flexible copyright for creative work." Basically, you visit a website, answer three or four questions about what kind of "permissions" you want to place on your work (should it be reproducable for commercial purposes? How about non-commercial?) and they give you some code to put near the work (whatever it may be: blog, painting, video, etc.) to let everyone know what you're allowing and not allowing them to do with it. You should know that I am a supporter of the system (as you may have gleaned from my last post about Larry Lessig), so I may not be seeing things with a clear eye when I disagree with what Dvorak has to say. Regardless, though, away we go. Dvorak's first objectionable statement comes in his fourth paragraph:

I have begged critics of the system, such as The Register's Andrew Orlowski, to explain to me how Creative Commons works or what it's supposed to do that current copyright law doesn't do. He says, "It does nothing."

Uh, if you ask critics of the system to explain it, then of course they're going to give negative answers! That's like asking me to explain why George Bush's foreign policy is solid and then using my answer as evidence that it sucks. In the next paragraph, Dvorak writes, "Creative Commons is similar to a license." Actually, it is a license. The word "license" is splattered everywhere on the Creative Commons website. I'm not sure what he means by this, anyway. Is it a bad thing that a CC license is, well, a license? Why? In the same paragraph:

This means that others have certain rights to reuse the material under a variety of provisos, mostly as long as the reuse is not for commercial purposes. Why not commercial purposes? What difference does it make, if everyone is free and easy about this? In other words, a noncommercial site could distribute a million copies of something and that's okay, but a small commercial site cannot deliver two copies if it's for commercial purposes. What is this telling me?

The point is not that "everyone is free and easy about this." He mistakes people who use CC for a bunch of hippies who want everything to be public domain. Lessig in particular is a supporter of property and of intellectual property. He believes that America has gotten too protectionist about it, but he by no means believes that everything created should just sit out there for anyone to use and profit from. To answer Dvorak's question in the last sentence: What we're telling you when we don't want commercial usage of our work is that we don't want someone else profiting from what we've created unless they're going to ask us (and, most likely, pay us) for said work. If, however, some other blogger wants to take some idea that I have and build upon it on his (also non-commercial) blog, then more power to him. I have decided to allow a derivation of my work to appear on his site (with the restrictions that he must credit me and must license his work under the same license as I did mine). What I don't want is ESPN to steal my brilliant idea to make thousands of dollars if they're not going to pay for that privilege. In the next paragraph:

I could always use excerpts for commercial or noncommercial purposes. It's called fair use. I can still do that, but Creative Commons seems to hint that with its license means that I cannot.

Now Dvorak stops looking angry and starts looking ignorant. On the bottom of the page that explains the license I've chosen for this blog (clink the CC image or the text below it) are the words (in bold!), "Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above." I don't see anything being "hinted at" in that sentence. Lessig may be an idealist and an academic, but he's still a lawyer by training, and lawyers are nothing if not notorious for their attention to detail. Dvorak is worried that, because my license does not allow commercial usage of my work, he cannot excerpt portions of my response in order to respond in kind (basically, that he cannot do with my work exactly what I am doing with his) because he writes for a commercial site. That assertion, however, is flat-out wrong. Fair use is not being eroded by CC. If he wanted to quote something I said earlier and respond to it on the PC Mag website, he would be free to just as if I had any other copyright on this text. He next complains about the CC-Public Domain license.

If I write something on my blog, for example, and decide not to cover it with the general copyright notice, I can simply say that it is in the public domain and be done with it. I do not need permission from Creative Commons, nor do I need to mention Creative Commons or anything else.

His point is that CC is only serving as a middle-man here, not adding anything useful, and in fact complicating matters, since you could just write "Public domain" on the work and be done with it. What he misses is that not everyone understands copyright. Not everyone has read Lessig's books or other resources and realizes what their rights and freedoms are and are not. A middle-man is helpful in this case, because you may not realize that you can put your work in the public domain so easily. CC, in essence, eases your mind that everything is being done legally. Finally,

Years ago, to gain a copyright, you had to fill out a form and send in the material to the Library of Congress. Now you just use the word "copyright," add your name and a date, and publish it. What could be easier? Apparently simplicity was more than some people could handle, so they invented Creative Commons to add some artificial paperwork and complexity to the mechanism. And it seems to actually weaken the copyrights you have coming to you without Creative Commons.

I don't even know how to respond to this. He completely misses the point of CC in that last sentence. Of course it weakens the copyright you would have if you just put "All rights reserved" on your site! That's the point! If you're using CC, it's because you don't want to reserve all the rights you have to the work. You've decided to waive some of those rights. If my work is really popular (it's not, but whatever) and I'm ok with other bloggers reproducing it, do I really want to put "All rights reserved" on my site, then have to deal with each case of usage individually? Of course not. I want to take care of large swaths of usage in one fell swoop, and that's what CC provides me. I honestly don't know, and maybe someone can tell me: is Dvorak usually this ignorant? Does he usually do this little research for his columns? I doubt he's stupid, but this article does not paint him in a good light.

More great stuff from Catfish Stew

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 14:15:58 -0500

Ken Arneson at Catfish Stew continues to write the best, most creative stuff of any A's blogger out there. Scratch the qualification: of any baseball blogger out there.

Free Culture

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 15:22:21 -0500

I finished Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture last night, and I think I have a new purpose in life. Ok, so maybe that's a little strong. The idea of the book is that media companies today are (a) bigger and more consolidated than in the past; and (b) have deeper and longer copyright protection than ever before. The combination of these two things, Lessig claims, will vastly reduce the ability of the citizens of this country to freely produce creative work because large portions of creative work are, in fact, based upon the work of the past. With mammoth corporations zealously protecting their copyright using squads of lawyers, people will have trouble accessing, much less using, culture from the past. Lessig's arguments are convincing and tailored to appeal to both those on the left and the right. He sometimes comes off as the ultimate free marketeer and sometimes as a big-government liberal. Whichever side he's arguing from, though, he makes his case well that big media has successfully lobbied Congress to pass laws that do not fit in America's tradition of "free culture." Many of his points revolve around the fact that the justice system in the United States vastly favors those who can pay lawyers for hours and hours of work, to the point that in many cases, justice can not be served at all. The bullying of alleged file sharers by the RIAA ("You might win if you fight us in court, but it'll cost more money in legal fees than you have, so we'll just settle for taking your entire life's savings.") is one such example. Whether or not I end up working in intellectual property (and the book has definitely pushed me in that direction), there are implications here for any area of law. Will I be able to do what I think is right and still make a living? How often, and to what degree, will I be forced to compromise my own values because they conflict with those of my client? How can I avoid such situations? These aren't questions I have answers to, and I'm not sure anybody else does, either. EDIT: (Cross-posted at Non Compos Mentis)

Neat newspaper site

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:37:17 -0500

Courtesy of Chris Lehmann's blog, here's a really neat site that shows the current front page of newspapers all over the world. Awesome!

A few non-baseball things

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Mon, 30 May 2005 18:09:25 -0500

On Saturday, we went and saw Mad Hot Ballroom, a documentary about public schools in New York City that have ballroom dancing programs. It was a pretty straightforward film, but I couldn't help but be impressed with the footage of the actual dancing competitions the kids entered. The crowd got very into it, awwww-ing at all the appropriate moments. I don't know whether it's playing widely outside of New York, but the opportunity to see 10 year-olds doing an impressive merengue and rumba should not be passed up. Last night, as I mentioned, we saw Crash, the Paul Haggis (the writer of Million Dollar Baby) film that grew out of his experience being carjacked in L.A. It was as bad as all the reviews said, unfortunately. A lot of good talent, including Don Cheadle, Brendan Fraser, Ryan Phillipe, Sandra Bullock, Terrence Howard, and Larenz Tate, went wasted. The theme of the movie, racism, would have been better approached in a much more subtle way. Modern incarnations of racism, after all, are more under-the-surface, more quietly insidious, than the view presented in the film, where everything, while mixed up and "not quite what it seems" (if the movie is going to traffic in so much cliche, then so will I), is quite overt: Matt Dillon is a blatantly racist cop; Sandra Bullock insists that her locks be changed again because a Latino man who she believes to be a gang-banger changed them the first time; a gun-shop owner calls an Iranian customer "Osama." We did get two great trailers, though: Hustle & Flow, also starring Terrence Howard as a pimp trying to make it as a rapper, which was all the rage at Sundance this year; and Rize, David LaChapelle's documentary about "krumping," a new dance form coming out of inner-city Los Angeles. The cinematography looks as fantastic as you'd expect out a renowned photographer and I expect that the dance moves will be as impressive as watching any extreme sports or And 1 video. Finally, I read the article in Sports Illustrated about online poker last night. As Wilson points out in this comment, it's really just an article saying, "College kids play poker online." It talks about people who made money, mentions a kid who's lost over $50k, and briefly says that colleges don't have gambling addiction programs, but that's really it. There's no real exploration of the issues of legality (that's relegated to a sidebar), no exploration of the addiction, no discussion of social and familial problems that are allowed to arise when money starts being lost hand over fist. Any or all of these themes would have made excellent articles on college kids playing online poker. Instead, we got something akin to Moneyball: a piece that was supposed to be about a larger point but devolved into a series of profiles of "interesting" people (the players were made much more intriguing in Moneyball).

Ill-begotten Fame

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Sat, 28 May 2005 23:32:02 -0500

So over at Superchicken.org, there's this:

In this week's Sports Illustrated, there is an article about how college students play online poker. I don't subscribe to SI to read articles about online poker. If I cared at all about online poker, I would just play online poker. Even then I wouldn't want to read an article in SI about it.in SI. Probably the best part of the article is how several times it namedrops game theory, which is probably not a direction the majority of SI readers are comfortable with going. I guess it's cool that the article was written by a former contributor to Beaneball.org, but basically SI is just crap that I throw in the recycling bin every Thursday night.

Well, ok, neat, except no, Daniel Habib isn't a contributor to my blog, nor has he ever been. Would that he were, because I think he's a good writer and one of the few forward-thinking minds that Sports Illustrated has going for them. I can see where the confusion comes, though, because I once wrote this, with the title "Daniel G. Habib," which could cause confusion. It turns out, of course, that said post is the seventh result returned by Google for the search "Daniel G. Habib". I happen, by the way, to be looking forward to reading that piece. The featured site in the artwork, Pokerroom.com, is where I do my poker playing, when it happens.

New blog

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Sat, 14 May 2005 15:04:55 -0500

Here's a new A's blog that I noticed in my referrers log, called The A's East Coast Advocate (which is what I swore I was already, but I guess I didn't claim the name early enough). Corey makes me feel old, so I reserve the right to dump on him a little in the future. It'll make me feel more secure about my place in the world.

Benicio on Method

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 17:46:51 -0600

Thank goodness! Someone finally said it! Benicio Del Toro says in the current issue of Esquire (April 2005), "Researching a role isn't Method acting; it's common sense." Ever since I learned what Method acting really is (which is not so long ago, I'll admit; maybe a little over a year), I've noticed the complete lack of understanding in the press and even, perhaps, among actors, of what Method acting actually entails. When Viggo Mortensen wandered around New Zealand with a sword strapped on his hip, that wasn't Method; that was getting himself into a physical mode where he could convincingly play the character of Aragorn. When Nicole Kidman interviewed abused women for her role in The Human Stain, that wasn't Method; it was, as Del Toro alludes to, research that she would have been stupid not to conduct. Russell Crowe was quoted telling a story in the March 2005 issue of GQ:

Also, until I was 25, I had one tooth missing. When George Ogilvie cast me, he asked me about it, and I told him the story and that I thought it was very false of me to go and get a tooth cap. He was very nice about it, listened to it all, and said, All right, well, let me put it this way, Russell. Youre playing the lead character in my film, right? The character of Johnny has two front teeth ...

Chris Heath, the interviewer, responds, "He Methoded you into it!" No, he didn't! Method acting isn't looking the part, and that's all Ogilvie said: I want you to get your tooth capped so that you can look like the character I wrote. That's got nothing whatsoever to do with Method. From the website of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting comes this excerpt from the mini-bio of Konstantin Stanislavski, the creator of Method acting:

To reach this "believable truth," after years of research with actors of the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavski began employing new and original methods, such as "emotional memory." He felt at that time that to work on a particular emotion in a role that involved fear, the actor might remember something that frightened him from his own life. Stanislavski believed that an actor needed to take his or her own personality onto the stage when he or she began to play a character. This innovation was a clear break from previous modes of acting that held that the actor's job was to become the character and leave his or her own emotions behind. Later, Stanislavski concerned himself with the creation of physical entries into these emotional states, believing that the repetition of certain acts and exercises could bridge the gap between life on and off the stage.

Certainly, the people who've taken Stanislavski's Method and taught it, including Adler and those who followed her, have added their own twists, changed things, and otherwise put their own stamp on the original idea. Indeed, Lee Siegel wrote in Slate in March, 2004, that

there were two antagonistic versions of the Method: Strasberg's emphasis on how actors should draw from their own experience to inhabit a character; and Stella Adler's insistence that actors must pay closer attention to the play's circumstances than to their own memories and emotions.

I recently had a discussion with a "mainstream media" journalist (editor) whose main criticism of the blogosphere (with emphasis on political blogs) is that far too many bloggers are lazy and uninterested in doing the groundwork necessary to have a relevant and believable opinion. He's right, of course, but I might haul out this seeming industry-wide lack of understanding of an easily-researched issue as evidence that mainstream journalists aren't much better these days (or were they ever?).