Posted 5:27 PM by Floyd

Sportswriter Bruce Jenkins defends phrenology in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

. . . Not that Beane and his associates adhere strictly to the notion, but "Moneyball" suggests that quality players can be identified without actually seeing them play, or listening to them talk. That's a very dangerous road. Everyone raved about Todd Van Poppel's 95-mph fastball when the A's signed him out of high school, and he turned out to be a naive, clueless sort who threw it straight as a string -- for life. When Cuban pitcher Ariel Prieto first showed up in the A's clubhouse, we couldn't believe how soft he looked: up close (with braces, no less) and on the mound, with his ordinary motion and non-intimidating stuff. The good face, the good feel, the apparent strength of character -- those things still count, big-time. Look before you buy.

Jenkins isn't very clear on how a "good face" would have helped Poppel put his 95 MPH fastball to good use, or what the straightness of Prieto's teeth had to do with his pitching ability. Had Jenkins better reading comprehension, he would have learned from Moneyball that Beane has no use at all for the speed at which a pitcher throws, and the first thing the A's do when examining prospects is to weed out the assholes and the head cases.

Those who wonder how the Oakland A's can compete, and win, on such a small payroll need look no further than this nugget of conventional baseball wisdom. The only wonder is that some fair-minded and merciful authority has not handicapped them further.

Posted 6:22 PM by Floyd

I heard on the radio this morning that the U.S. Senate voted to allow the reimportation of drugs from Canada, where American drug companies sell them at lower prices.

The unintended consequences of this policy is that the drug companies will protect their prices by raising Canadian prices to or near the American level. What did Canada do to deserve such treatment from the Senate? (The bill's sponsor is North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan. North Dakota borders Canada. Thanks, neighbor!)

Shouldn't any moderately intelligent person come to the conclusion that this bill can only raise drug prices in Canada, not lower them in America? What does it say about CBS radio that their reporters didn't raise this issue with Dorgan?

Posted 9:47 PM by Floyd

The San Jose Mercury News has a columnist named Dan Gillmor who covers the technology business. For some reason Gillmor is thought of as one of the great bloggers. I've never understood this. I have nothing against him, but there's nothing particularly impressive about his business writing or political opinions or his writing.

When Gillmor writes about technology politics, he hews a pretty standard Valley line ("Mommy, Microsoft was mean to me again today!"). When he ventures into other politics, there's nothing to distinguish him from any other big city liberal boomer columnist ("FCC media ownership vote dealt blow to democracy").

Witness his latest effort, on Oracle's hostile bid for PeopleSoft: (Emphasis mine.)

How much of this is the bad blood between Ellison and Craig Conway, PeopleSoft's CEO? Conway does his cause no favors when he uses words like "diabolical" to describe Oracle's (Ellison's) motives, even if he means it, because shareholders care only about money, not motives -- one of the problems with our system.

When Gillmor is made king, only nice people will be allowed to buy stock.

Much worse, in my opinion, was this post:

OK, enough.

It's time for California legislators who favor financial privacy to do the right thing: admit that a majority of their colleagues are in the pockets of the financial giants, and stop trying to pass a law giving folks like us little chance to say whether we want our most personal information bartered around like a commodity.

California's much-abused initiative process is designed precisely for cases like this. The legislative process has failed, and it's time for the people to show who's in charge.

It shouldn't be Citicorp, or Wells Fargo, or Bank of America or State Farm orany of the other financial conglomerates that have bought off the lawmakers. Yet these mega-corporations have succeeded in thwarting the will of the people.

In coming weeks and months I plan to agitate -- loud and hard -- for the people's right to keep their information more private. I plan to tell you how you can help pass an initiative that should be on the March ballot.

...

There's another industry that makes lots of money by publishing facts about people that they would rather keep private.

It's called the media. And Gillmor works for a big media venture. I look forward to him admitting that when he talks about the First Amendment, he's really just in the pockets of big newspaper companies.

The issue isn't that I disagree with Gillmor. It's that if you want to be a technology writer, you have to look at the world the way the Valley does -- not Sacramento or Washington D.C. Trying to stuff the information genie back in the bottle is pointless. A technology columnist should know that.

I remember Jarvis saying that we could tell blogs had made it when, among other things, Gillmor featured bloggers in his print column. I think we can tell that blogs have made it when no one cares whether Gillmor writes about bloggers or not.

Posted 9:32 PM by Floyd

Drudge and later Instapundit linked to this case of censorship in France:

A Paris court last night halted publication of a book by a former investigating magistrate that claims France is institutionally corrupt.

The book by Eva Joly, who uncovered political and financial corruption at the Elf oil company, is the first by a judge to have been blocked by the French courts.

The court ruled that publication of Is This The World We Want To Live In? might prejudice the trial of former Elf executives, now in its third month, which has already revealed the extent of political and financial corruption in France.

So, a reporter investigates the government and finds corruption, which leads to a trial ... and any further findings of corruption cannot be published for several months, or longer. (And what about the pre-trial proceedings? Wouldn't publication of this book have been suppressed then, under the same logic?) Great system.

On Monday Jeff Jarvis smacked around the proposed Council of Europe doctrine mandating a right to reply on web pages. (I blogged about this two posts back; what I dislike most about Blogger is that I cannot get a link to an earlier post in the edit page.) Folks from France and Germany were right there to stand up for their right to have their browser space parcelled up and distributed to their opponents. One made sweet dewy eyes and asked in his best baby Jesus voice, "Is there a reason why you are opposed to the idea of media correcting their mistakes?"

I bet you can find plenty of people willing to defend France's right to sit on Joly's work for the rest of 2003. "Is there a reason why you are opposed to the idea of people getting a fair trial?"

Posted 12:00 AM by Floyd

This is pretty damn funny:

In New York, Scrappy Local Newspaper Struggles For Survival
By David Burge
CNSNews.com Satire
June 13, 2003

New York, N.Y. - Like the corpses that lazily bob along in the nearby East River, life obeys its own pace in this isolated island community of 8 million in southern New York State.

It is an ancient pace, its cadence dictated by the steady whirr and click-a-clack of word processors, plied by the gnarled hands of skilled opinion craftsmen who once supplied nearly eighty percent of the world's refined punditry output.

It would be even funnier in the right font, but, you know, those who can't write criticize and all that.

Posted 11:12 AM by Floyd

The "Council of Europe" is pushing a "Fairness Doctrine" for web pages. The original "Fairness Doctrine" was a FCC mandate: radio and TV stations which aired political opinions had to give equal time to opponents. This rule reified a two-party system -- if a Democrat advocates an income tax rate of 40%, "opponents" are Republicans who advocate a 39% tax rate, socialists who want 75%, and libertarians who want the income tax abolished, but only the Republican would get air time. The practical effect of the doctrine was to discourage radio and television political speech, and after the doctrine was repealed by Reagan there was a flowering of political speech, most notably talk radio.

Michael Peckham ably skewered this nonsense in a comment on Damian Penny's blog:

They should pass laws that would make it illegal to hold a protest unless the organizers can round up an equal number of counter-demonstrators. That's only fair, right?

Posted 10:58 PM by Floyd

Sherry and I just got back from the A's-Expos game. It was the first time I had seen a game at the Coliseum (and the first baseball game Sherry had ever seen). Yesterday for some reason I decided that I wanted to see the A's play, and found a couple of my friends who wanted to go. I called up an agent at tickets.com and requested four seats that were accessible to a person on crutches. The seating area I was aiming for was near first base, on the middle level.

The reason I wanted to be near first base was so I could sit behind Scott Hatteberg and yell "Pickin' Machine"! I have just read "Moneyball", Michael Lewis' latest book on the 2002 A's, and I had my eye out for the players described in the book.

The game started at 1:05. We planned to take the 11:51 BART subway train from Daly City (just south of San Francisco) and arrive at the Coliseum around 12:30. Unfortunately the direct train to the East Bay was cancelled, and we had to take another train and transfer. We got to the stadium around 12:40 and met up with our friends near the "will call" booths. I picked up tickets, and Mike and I ran interference for Scott as he hobbled his way through the corridors.

It was a fine day, around 75 and clear with a slight breeze. I enjoyed the atmosphere at the stadium, but ... $7 for a cup of beer?!

Unfortunately our seats, while convenient for Scott, were not near first. We were in right field next to the foul pole, and spent the game looking at Terrence Long. Long had little to do in the field, but Hatteberg did have a good day: two hits and one walk, and a great catch of a high line drive.

The game was close early on. Montreal scored in the first inning, but Tim Hudson was strong and the Expos could only muster a few hits and no more runs. Oakland catcher Hernandez had a two-run shot and that was all the scoring until the seventh inning.

Expos star Vladmir Guerrero was injured, but DH Edwards Guzman was hot. He had been brought up from the minors in April, and probably had seen action only in interleague play. A stastistical curiousity: His batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage were all the same. (So all his hits were singles, and he has no walks.)

The A's blew the game wide open in the seventh. CF Eric Byrne had a three-run shot, and the Expos appeared to give up. They did not pull the reliever, who had given up the home run and another run on a wild pitch to Hernandez; he did strike out Hernandez to close out the inning.

In the eighth I got to see Moneyball's other leading character, submariner Chad Bradford. Bradford does have a weird motion but it's not as extreme as Lewis described it; from reading the book you would think that Bradford has to dust himself off the ground after each pitch. Bradford retired the side and the next two half-innings were also unremarkable. The A's emerged with a 9-1 win, and finally had found an NL opponent they could beat.

Made a correction: Hatty had one walk, not two.