Odd Baseball Games i've Been At

So, spring training is nearing an end and the MLB season will start soon.  My local-ish team, the Seattle Mariners will still probably have many "valuable learning experiences this year".  i'm used to that, before 1995 there were tons of "valuable learning experiences".  Until 1991  (the Lefebvre Believer years) they never had a better than .500 record.  They haven't really been that interesting of a team to me since 2003.  Back when i was aging chronologically (not growing up) it was "You've Got to Love These Guys", now it is "Remind Me Again, Why Should i Care".  That is fine with me because i am more interested in what their AAA team does.

This got me thinking of "significant" Mariners game that i have been present at.  i thought there might have been more, but i can only think of two.

* Ken Griffey Sr and Ken Griffey Jr (first father and son game, 1990).  The father was ok, but i never liked Ken Griffey Jr (i always thought he was kind of an arrogant egomaniac).

* Ichiro breaks single season hits record (2004).  It was amazing how loud people were whenever Ichiro came up to the plate, everyone was standing up. i went to see my favorite player, Edgar Martinez, play in his last series (in his last at bat, he flew out to the track in left field).

Fractions Must Be Stopped Before It's Too Late

Continuing my recent post deluge (or is it rampage)....

i hate fractions. Yes i said it.

So what do i have against those numbers?  Fractions are artificial constructs that mean less than you think they do.  Look at life and ask yourself when was the last time you actually used a fraction.  Was it when you were measuring something (which i believe show how stupid the US system of measurements is, especially distance)?  Was it a serving size for a meal (again showing weaknesses in measuring systems)?  How many times in the real world have you actually multiplied (or divided) a fraction by a fraction?   Do you frequently add and subtract fractions?  Does anyone?

For me, there are three types of numbers that make sense.  The first are those behind a dollar sign (my personal favorite), the second are percentages (which are better than fractions) and finally there are decimal numbers.  Most fractions can better be described by percentages or decimals.  After all, you could think of a fraction as a lazy person's decimal

Look at, basically, any chart you can find.  Charts (or graphical representations of data) are based off of decimal numbers (even if the number is zero) or percentages (like a pie chart).  Fractions have limited usefulness and  should probably be left in elementary school where they belong.

If decimals are good enough for Excel to use, they are good enough for me.  

Even in the Future Everything's Broken

This post is brought to you by insomniac theater (it is 3:21 AM where i am when i started this).

i was wondering about the glorious tech filled future that we were willfully led to believe by popular culture.  Where is fully functional hoverboard, my Space Needle like house/apartment, my robot maid, etc.  Humans cannot even travel outside of the solar system yet (in any timely manner).   Where is the post apocalyptic annihilation of Earth that necessitates outer space colonization.

Take The Jetsons....  in the future we were supposed to have flying cars that could fold up to be the size of a briefcase.  We don't even have meal pellets yet (as far as i'm aware) or robot maid.  We don't even have odd creatures like Orbity or dogs with speech impediments.  Where are out treadmills on the outside of our domicile (suspended at least 20 feet off of the ground).  Weren't future jobs supposed to be the mundane task of pushing a button - and trying not to get fired every other week.  i guess they kind of underestimated population, the Jetsons seemed to live in a sparsely populated environment.  There aren't space colonies yet, i can't go to Las Venus.   One of the things i miss most is 3D holographic 3D televisions that the Jetsons had, you didn't even have to wear annoying glasses to fool your eyes into thinking it may be 3D.     

Now take Back to the Future series...  we can't even go to the local 7-11 to pick up plutonium, yet.  Where are our Flux Capacitors?  Where is almost everything seen in II?  We don't have hoverboards (or even Scooty Puff Jrs) or cafes operated by computers.  They seriously overstated what computer AIs are capable of.  We don't even have devices that tell us it will rain in one minute for 10 seconds.  We still have to rely on weathermen who can't successfully predict snow over 50% of the time. 

Galaxies a long time ago and far, far away seem to have better technology.  Where is my plasma sword or saber made of light.  i don't have access to any form of transportation that can make the Kessel run (or equivalent thereof), let alone in 10 parsecs.  There aren't even any flying RVs or military ships with bumper stickers saying "i brake for no one".   

i Love the 80s, the Later Decades Not So Much

Yes, it is true, i love the 1980s.  The 90s were worse and the less said about the new millennium the better.  i'm not religious, but if i was i would be praying (with a vengeance) for the end of the world.  C-c-c-c-come on.  Does anyone out there have a fully functional time machine - it could be Delorean, phone booth, etc?  Oh, yeah, do you also have a copy of a sports almanac or lottery results from the 80s or 90s that i could borrow?   

There is a better than non-zero chance i know something about 80s pop music and movies if anyone were inclined to ask and couldn't take the 10 seconds to find it on Bing (or that other search engine/portal, whatever it is called).  Just don't ask me to give you the lyrics to any Kesha songs - she does have lyrics, right? 

The 80s were an era of unbridled awesomeness.  It really wasn't the 80s for me before Ronald Wilson Reagan took office in 1981.  Conversely, the 80s ended in 1990 or 1991 when the good Bush was still in office.  It wasn't all Wham! and Back to the Future, i'm sure there must have been some bad things somewhere in the decade.  Life couldn't have been completely Wedding Singer-ish.  You took away the Reagan/Bush America and very,very, very bad things happened.

Johnny Hates Jazz saw it in the 80s - "Turn Back the Clock".  American cannot go forward with out going back - you could do a lot worse than going back to the 80s.   

i'm not apathetic, i just don't care

So, apparently there was an earthquake followed by a tsunami (an awesome word by the way) in a far away place called Japan.  Some people probably died and some nuclear reactors operated in a way contrary to what you would normally expect.  The media have covered it incessantly since - every once and a while interjecting "it could happen here" type lines into their coverage. 

The real question is - why should i care?  Is it really that big of deal?  Maybe i'll re-purpose the Ferris Bueller line - i'm not Japanese, i don't plan on being Japanese and who cares if they had a big wave, that still doesn't change the fact that i don't own a piece of tin.  Maybe life is just like the Truman Show where everything is in a controlled environment and nothing of the outside world really exists.  The media loves to play up these "disasters".  However, i have no stake (or am even remotely connected) in all of this.  Why should i care?  Isn't life a big enough pain in the whole lower back area as it is without trying to feel the unrealistic empathy for a people i know or care nothing about. 

Basically, it is if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound?  Why should i care i don't live in the forest or even plan to visit it?  Sure maybe the tree makes a sound, but that is largely irrelevant to my pathetic existence.       

Japan is this far off mythical island or island group that produces occasional major league baseball players and home electronics (it used to now it is made in China like pretty much everything else.  How can i be 100% sure that Japan really exists.  i'm still not totally sure New York city exists.  If i cared nothing about 9/11 why would i care about Japan? 

So, people there died, why should i care?  This just strikes me as a more extreme example of the Haiti quake (although this one wasn't in a third world cesspool).  This situation doesn't really effect me at all.  What is the big deal?  Why should i value human life in an overpopulated world, especially human life that it no way impacts my life?  It sucks for them, but there is really no meaning in it for me (it might as well be the movie 2012, the situation seems as real to me). 

There are very real economic consequences that could result from this that may actually be scary. 

Grammatically Incorrect for a Reason: "i"

Hey kids, do you want to recreate the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the ark is opened?  Ask your grammar/English teacher why the word "i" should be capitalized.  Do not accept answers like: because that is the way it is or because the books say so.  Follow up with the question if they think it should be capitalized based off of the available information (convention is not an acceptible answer here)

The fact is that all grammatical rules are kind of arbitrary.  They were instituted, in many cases, centuries ago - but does that make them right?  i say there should be some logical underpinning for grammatical rules and exceptions. 

i do not like to capitalize the word "i" but for different reasons.  What makes "i" so special?  Let's come up with a few semi-logical arguments why the word "i" should not be capitalized...

* "i" is a pronoun. Why aren't "me" and "myself" capitalized too - they refer to the same noun. 

* Outside of religious references "Him" (etc) other pronouns are not afforded this importance level. Are the grammar teachers trying to put me on the same elevated importance as a diety?  i know if anyone asks if i'm a god i should say yes (Ghostbusters taught me that).

* One of the reason i saw was that it prevented misreadings on early manuscripts - surely this primitive convention should not be taken as seriously in the modern age.  What next, are people still trying to convince me that "whom" is still a real word (especially in the modern lexicon)?


The bottom line is that grammar matters a little in the real world.  However, for the most part it will be overlooked by everyone but professional editors - unless it is really bad (like text/im/online speak).  If you can get your point across without making the reader cringe, you did your job.  Even the biggest stickler for grammatical rules is typically not great at using them in their own writing/correspondence.  i guess they don't like to acknowledge that the vast majority of communication is done at the colloquial level (where different rules apply).

Random: My Messed Up Mind

So, my random post deluge (mini deluge, deluge-ette) has another post.  What have i been thinking about today?  i was thinking about stuff and junk (because both of those are among my favorite thing apparently.  Then i started thinking about a ton of random stuff.

Kids, stay in school.  The real world is much, much, much, much, much worse. 

i settled on my messed up mind.  Maybe it isn't that messed up.  See (or read), when i was in school i kind of optimized they way i recalled information to coincide with the world of multiple choice tests.  i didn't intentionally do this as far as i know, that is just the way it happened.  i optimized it for speed in these situations.  After all, would you rather be taking a test or not taking a test.  Incidentally, i suck at essay questions - i get the right answer, just not in the way the teacher/professor wanted it.  i was a horrible student who never actually studied for anything (because i never really had to) - though i did the homework, sometimes.    

There were plenty of test that i turned in first in school.  In fact, the first test i had in Econ 201 in college left the professor kind of impressed.  He mentioned something about incredible productivity or something.  You would think that he never saw anyone turn in one of his test in less than 5 minutes (i did get an A, by the way).  i think the best example was the Anthropology final i took in my freshman year of college.  i turned in the test (120 questions - multiple choice, true/false, matching, fill in the blank) in under 4 minutes (i know my math skills have faded, with my reliance on Excel, but that is something like under 2 second per question).  i only got an 88% on this one (92% adjusted for the curve, good for second in the class).  The glares from the other students were interesting (the next closest finisher was about 23 minutes later). 

So what is a trick to going fast on multiple choice tests...  active reading.  You know the thing where you underline key words and stuff.  What i found was that multiple choice tests, in particular, the questions had very similar sentence structures.  This basically meant that the nouns and verbs were usually in about the same place in every question.  You don't need to read the whole question - you just have to know the key words, from there it is a matter of matching key words with the available options (which can be done very quickly - as you end up scanning for keywords in the available options too).

i thought that this was just using short-term memory, but occasionally i have this stuff pop back in my mind at random times.  Most times, it seems to be useless stuff (but somewhat clearly). Why do i remember some of the stuff i do?  Why don't i remember some other stuff (outside a kind of hazy recollection).  That is the next question on my messed up mind.  i mean i don't want to know/remember information about an ex-girlfriend i haven't seen in over a decade.  Why should i care that her birthday is September 20th, that her parents (Jim and Jill) drove a maroon Ford Explorer or the names of her pets at the time, who cares if she likes the diverse musical duo of Aerosmith and Reba McEntire or her middle name is/was Ann.  i tried to block out memory that she ever existed (obviously not successfully).    

Random: Zune Random Playlist Tea Leaf?

So yesterday, i guess today, i was struggling to fall asleep (as i often do).  So i decided to try and relax a little by listening to my Zune (2nd generation, black), listening to random tracks. 

The first song that played was George Michael's "Praying for Time" - an always uplifting song.  The second song was "Falling for the First Time" = a song about failing.  The third song was "Candy" by Mandy Moore - the horror, the horror.  This caused me to think briefly of a girl named Candy who lived next door to me for a few months (that was kind of random).  Anyway, the random song generator was not doing a decent job of giving me uplifting songs - most of them had themes relating to failure in some way or another.  There was "Always Something" by Jon Secada, "Beautiful Disaster" and others.  The last song that played before i turned my Zune off was "All I Need is a Miracle" by Mike and the Mechanics.

Is my Zune trying to tell me something - in a mystic "is he seriously asking this" type of a way?  If it is, i don't think "Things Can Only Get Better".   2011 started off bad, i don't think i should get my hope up for a miraculous turnaround.  Then again, maybe "All I Need is a Miracle".  But miracles don't happen most every day to people like you and me.