Spice of the Day - Turmeric

Turmeric is a very potent colored spice. Used in Indian recipes, mainly curries, I am always amazed how brilliantly colored it is. A deep orange, the spice comes from a root which is then dried and then finally grounded up.

The plant is part of the ginger family. The active ingredient is curcumin. The ingredient is supposedly used to help with stomach problems but is also a main ingredient in leading radiator stop leak sealant mixtures!

Rox Talk

Link dump kind of week...hey this is the off season...simpler than doing my own calcs ;-)

Brad Hawpe...who knew he was such a terrible right fielder? I always thought he had at least a good arm (guess 2006 really stuck in my head). Time for him to move on. Mr DH

On to some positive things...the Rox were the best base running team in the league last year. The statistic is based on base running metrics developed by former Colorado resident Dan Fox. Dan has since moved on to the Pirates helping in their IT department and player development (as an aside we published this together back in 2007). Fowler's development and a full year of Cargo and EY should only increase possible mayhem on the bases next year.

OK here is another infamous Coors debacle...pre-humidor. Since 1954 there have been two games with 5 blown saves...guess where?

Song Memory - Kid Fears

In honor of Chabon's short, Radio Silence which was first published in Details Magazine, I am going to track songs I hear on the radio and the deep seated memory it conjures. My first song I heard that stirred a memory was Indigo Girls song Kid Fears. The album came out in February 1989. I was a freshman at the Academy and was having a not so enjoyable first year of college. Anyway I had received a mix tape from a girl I used to drive to high school with. She was still a Junior in High School and of course when I received the tape I had no way listening to it because at the time I had no Walkman (as a freshman at the Academy you have no "privileges", no TV, no music...note back then there was no such thing as an mp3! and to think CDs were just coming out!). Anyway you were allowed to leave as you has a certain amount of passes off the base so one Saturday I borrowed a car from one of the seniors and had a day out. Fortunately the car had a tape deck and I was finally able to listen to the music. In High School I was mix tape monster. I had ton of tapes and used to listen to them all the time! To have to go cold turkey on music for almost a year of my life was just torture! Anyway to drive and listen to tunes was just a cathartic experience. That day I choose to drive to Rocky Mountain Park and Trail Ridge road. Driving around and listening to the tape and Kid Fears was one of the songs. At the time I had no ideal who the Indigo Girls were although they were in Athens band so that is why my High School friend sent it along. The song does feature Michael Stipe at the end. It is has a nice ring to it and when I hear it, it immediately sweeps me to the mountain vistas on Trail Ridge road.

Astronaut James Voss

I attended a CU Alumni Engineering event tonight at the Science and Nature center in town. The speaker was former astronaut James Voss, who is now a professor in the CU Aerospace department. A veteran of five missions, he has spent over 200 days in space, which included a stint on the International Space Station. Very nice guy, enjoyed his little talk. Got to speak with him privately after the event (if you must know meeting and talking with an astronaut is like meeting a movie star for me!). I am such a geek ;-) I asked him about sleeping in space, asked him how living in Star City was, asked him if he and his fellow cosmonaut used to talk about space secrets? Sleeping is great he said. Thought there would be a huge market for older people to retire to space has he never slept better (think no pressure points!), enjoyed his time in Russia even though they were still sorting things out back in the 90s. And finally he and is fellow cosmonaut did talk about each others space program. Guess there was a mission to the Salyut one time and the thing had been totally turned off so the ship gets there to dock and nothing is on. Everything was iced...go figure. Gotta love those Soviets...

When I returned home I wikipedia'd him and discovered two of his missions were top secret military missions. I remember those days when the DoD just took over a mission. Wow that is an easy way to get two missions in the books. I wonder what they did back in the day to make it secret? He also did a lot of stuff in support of the space station...guess that was a pretty good gig.

Good stuff...

Haiku Wednesday

Film Two hour distraction Celluloid magic carpet Sweep us off our feet

Rox Talk

Minor League Effects (?)

OK for the most part the Rox have decided to become the NL version of the Minnesota Twins. That is, develop your minor league system, field the majority of your big league squad with that talent, and when they become free agents trade them away for more minor league stock. A decent model to follow since there will always be big money teams eager to throw big dollars at proven commodities while sending along unproven minor leaguers. So if this is the case and you have a loaded (or competitive?) minor league system, then shouldn't eventually your major league team see spikes in their winning percentage? If your loaded AA wins the Texas League championship, then shouldn't that same talent be fielded and face similar players in the big leagues, eventually? Of course if your AA team stinks perhaps you have no big league talent and thus they never reach the big leagues but then you would still have an age gap for a few years against those teams...Then of course there are those teams that develop talent but not enough at the right time and end of trading it away (think of the Pirates trades over the last few years, had they developed together who knows...)

So figure each year there are 8 playoff spots. Pencil in the big spenders...the Yanks, Red Sox, Angels, Mets, Cardinals, Cubs, Giants (?), and Dodgers as perennial playoff teams that take five or six of those spots. That leaves just two or three teams from the non-big spenders teams that have a chance to get to the dance. Now let's assume that those remaining 22 teams, about 8 are just plain poorly managed by the front office (i.e., Nats, Baltimore, Royals, and Reds for instance) and don't have a clear plan on how to win now or in the future so that leaves about 14 teams with some clue. Now if those 14 teams follow the model of raising good talent from within and having a competitive minor league system then don't you think that looking at the minor league records and tracking the success among those other teams would suggest that as this talent matures you should be competitive among those non big spenders and thus get that hand me down playoff spot? The graph above attempts to show some sort of correlation to a minor league record and major league output. Does minor league winning percentage in past lead to major league success in the future? All minor league percentage includes rookie ball and short season records and the A, A+, AA, AAA is the records of just the big 4 minor league clubs.

There does seem to be about a 3 - 4 year difference between a peak in the minors to a peak in the big leagues. The biggest example would be 2003 peak in the minors to the 2007 big league record. The 2003 had Holliday and Hawpe and a young Jimenez. If we assume that the 2007 big league squad overachieved then the next peak was in 2005 which again had Holliday, Hawpe, Jimenez, and added Tulo and then you have 2009 winning record.

Since 2003 - 2004, the Rox minor league system has consistently faired well. Depth in the minors can't be bad. Obvious alot of talent moves in and out of the minors...some of this talent succeeds, some fails, some remain in limbo, some are fast movers, others take time to develop. I think another problem is you need talent to mature together (think Pittsburgh) and for this success to continue then talent must come in waves. If you think Holliday, Hawpe, Atkins were Group 1, then this was followed by Tulo, Iannetta, Smith and then followed by Fowler and Young. As older talent moves on then good talent exists to take there place. I doubt whether one can truly quantify a correlation but for non big spenders it feels good to think that young talent will eventually mature and sneak into the playoff picture once in a while (and even win!).

Haruki Murakami - Dance Dance Dance

This is the third work of fiction that I have read from Murakami. I liked his short story collection and then with this other book...I can't even remember what is was about (obviously must have been either mentally on vacation or the book just didn't grab me!) I just can't remember if I liked it or not! I have also read his book about running. So with this new book I really didn't know what to expect. It is definitely a curious meandering of a story. Kind of reminded me of Japanese version of Twin Peaks. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. I liked how the writer in the book paid homage to himself. You know it is funny since the book is written by a Japanese author and takes place in Japan; when I form my visual image of the characters I think of them as Caucasian...is that weird? Would love to have met Mei but again I visualized her as totally like Swedish or something. Is something lost in translation (?) also I hated the references to Dunkin Donuts...I don't think they exist in Japan (?). Again not to repeat myself on this one but I would seriously like to be able to read Japanese and be able to read it in its native language.

One interesting thing is to go to the Japan wikipedia and do a translation from Japanese to English and you get this tidbit about the translated English version,

"English translation of this work, underage drinking and smoking scenes, the English-speaking people in the cultural areas difficult to understand, and describe various of Boy George has been cut from various reasons. "

And finally the book in Japanese characters...kind of beautiful
ダンス・ダンス・ダンス

Haiku Wednesday

Veterans

An oath to defend
Can willingly give their lives
They deserve our thanks

Magazine Stories

Wired - November 2009

Clive Thompson's Flight of Fancy column:

Clive's piece stresses the fact that a little day dreaming might actually be good for productivity. A 2007 study showed that minds drift away from our tasks one-third of the time. Daydreaming can be useful because when the mind drifts the temporal lobe, which processes long term memories become busy thus when you daydream your brain could be doing data storage work...writing to your hard drive! Also a wandering mind utilizes the prefrontal cortex which is involved in problem solving. Thus allowing your mind to wander from one problem to something else might help to highlight a solution to your original problem(?). In the end Clive stresses the possible importance of allowing this drift for increased productivity...heck considering how I work I do this anyway ;-)

Henri Poincaré once said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people "know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling."

Scientific America

Read some articles on the creation of the universe which made me wonder...

- Could we not be a universe created by someone's particle accelerator?

- If the universe expands and we are looking back into history with more powerful telescopes then why can we still look? doesn't it just disappear?

- And another thing why dinosaurs? In the evolutionary cycle why did we go towards these mammoth creatures?

New Yorker

Cocksure by Malcolm Gladwell

An interesting article about the fall of Bear Stearns (click here to see an even more over the top article in Rolling Stones). Malcolm restates the standard thoughts about the financial crisis that could have either been a structural failure meaning regulations didn't work or incompetence meaning investors had no clue in what they were doing with derivatives. Malcolm reviews his possible third reason which was more psychological.

"As novices, we don't trust our judgement. Then we have some success, and begin to feel a little surer of ourselves. Finally , we get to the top of our game and succumb to the trap of thinking that there's nothing we can't master. As we get older and more experienced, we overestimate the accuracy of our judgements, especially when the task before us is difficult and when we're involved with something of great personal importance."

Wall Streeet is a confidence game. Winners know how to bluff. And who bluffs the best? The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is. Malcolm rounds out his story with the tale of Bridge playing...indicating that although Bridge is similar to Wall Street is not quite the same because it is limited in scope with a definite winner and loser depending on how you play by the rules. Wall Street on the other hand is open ended and overconfidence can only take you so far before others see through the B.S.

Good article although in the big scheme of things it is amazing how confident we all need to be to keep this country's engine churning...how a very few egotistical maniacs control our well being...

Michael Chabon - Manhood for Amateurs

The opening page starts with this quote,

"Anything worth doing is worth doing badly."

Gotta love Chabon. His work has always enthralled me...this collection of true stories just made me laugh. It is very infrequently that I read a book and actually chuckle out loud. This one hit the spot in multiple occasions. To me the Legoland Station and The Wilderness of Childhood were right on. I disagree with his thought on buying a set and it being too rigid for children. I mean I loved following directions, building the set, playing with it as designed, then allowing entropy to take hold and have it slowly melt in to the rest of my legos. Months later some piece from that set would serve as a new centerpiece of some new finagled mashup that I made. Ultimately Chabon does get there with his essay saying essentially that is what happens with his kids creations but he was so harsh on the original model concept.

The Wilderness of Childhood served as a basis for my essay about risk aversion. Essentially when I grew up I had a huge (at least for me) forest right next to my house. Probably everyday I would venture into them. At first cautiously, then gradually with more confidence. I would venture further into them with less abandoned. Funny thing was there was this pseudo junk yard at the very end of it had that mysterious dog or you heard tales of being shot at. Well I never had the courage to venture too far into the junk yard, always staying at it fringes peering into the space wondering what could jump out and get me. Overtime in my mind a mental image of every nook and cranny in the forest became embedded in my mind and I would always know where I was. I truly believe the reason I have such a good sense of direction today was that I learn the ability to navigate those woods by looking for certain things and having that innate ability to always know where I was. Kids today have none of that. There are very few "voids" to travel and play in. Essentially they don't gain any confidence in their own abilities to manage their world. Going back to the Lego example we are managing their experiences to such an extent that their ability to "figure it out" becomes limiting. Yikes!

Being a fellow baseball lover, I loved this quote, "what's important was that baseball, after all these years of artificial turf and expansion and the DH and drugs and free agency and thousand dollar bubblegum cards, is still a gift given by fathers to sons."

Big Barda...who knew..

And finally in the short on Radio Silence he mentioned how certain songs can dredge up long forgotten memories of certain events. It is so true...in high school I used to listen to my Walkman continuously especially before track meets. Today when I hear a song, that was in vogue during that meet, it takes me back like a time machine and I can remember sights, sounds, smells...unbelievable

An in the end Chabon says, "life as a husband and father, those pursuits are no favorite subject to endless setbacks and the the stark exposure of shortcoming, weaknesses,and insufficiency - in particular in the raising of children." So true...